James Nelson - The Blackbirder

The man gaped at her, shocked that she had eluded his thrust, surprised to find that it was he who was going to die, and then she pulled the trigger and the face was lost in the smoke and when the smoke blew away the man was gone.

She tossed that gun aside. One of the pistols she had thrust in her waistcoat was slipping out through the gash cut in the brocade cloth, and she grabbed the barrel and pulled it out all the way, felt the flint scrape painfully across her breast, and then some great hulk of a man slammed into her, knocking her to the deck.

Her shoulder banged into a hatch combing and a shock of pain radiated through her neck and back. She rolled over; the gun was still in her hand.

The man who had run her down was fighting with one of the Revenges-the boatswain, she recognized him, he had been kind to her in pointing out the various aspects of the vessel’s rig-and Elizabeth lifted the gun in her hand, pointed it at the center of the other man’s massive back, and pulled the trigger.

The man pitched forward and behind him stood the boatswain, shocked, his adversary seemingly struck down by the hand of God. Then he saw Elizabeth lying on the deck. Their eyes met, he nodded to her, then turned and flung himself back into the fight.

Billy Bird was still there, still making his stand on the main hatch, sword and dirk working together, but there were two men on him now, and he was breathing hard and there was a heaviness in the way he wielded his weapons.

The enormity of the scene, growing more real by the second, was working on her head, and the noise and the shouting and the flash of guns were making it hard for her to think. She saw one of the men lunge at Billy, saw his sword catch Billy’s shoulder, saw Billy twist in pain even as he used his dirk to knock the blade away.

Shoot them, Billy, just shoot them, she thought, and could not fathom why Billy did not do as she wished. She rolled over on her hands and knees and crawled forward, through pools of blood, warm and sticky on her palms. There were men looming over her, swords clashing in the air above her head, but she crawled on.

She came at last to the main hatch and sat up on her knees, pulled the pistol from her belt, cocked the lock, fired into one of the men fighting Billy Bird, and as he crumpled she thought, there, just shoot him.

She tossed the gun aside and pulled her last firelock from her waistcoat and cocked it and looked over the barrel. The man she intended to shoot had seen her and now he was turning from Billy and coming at her, his cutlass over his head.

Elizabeth ’s sense of reality began to waver. The man swam toward her. She could see his crooked and rotten teeth, his stained, filthy shirt, ripped from the neck down, broadcloth coat, his battered cocked hat, dirty red sash around his waist, all of that she took in in the fraction of a second it took for him to close with her and for her to discharge her pistol right into his stomach.

His cutlass came down as he pitched forward, and Elizabeth dodged to one side as the man fell past, the cutlass hitting the deck and the man falling on it. She felt the deck shudder as he hit and he made a gasping sound as the breath was knocked from his lungs and then he was groaning, gasping, gurgling blood.

“Bastard!” Elizabeth screamed, and then stopped screaming, and in the odd quiet that came with her stopping she realized that she must have been screaming continuously, for how long she could not recall.

She pushed herself to her feet, swiped the hair from her face, stepped away from the horrible dying man. She saw figures going over the rail, as if they were abandoning the ship, but it was quieter now; the guns had stopped firing, she could not hear the clash of edged weapons, and when she looked again she saw that the fight was over, and she recognized the men on deck so she assumed that the Revenges had won.

And now Billy Bird was looking at her, his eyes wide, and she smiled at him.

“William, dear William, well done,” Billy said, stepped toward her quickly, dropping his weapons to the deck rather than taking the time to sheathe them. She saw his eyes dart down toward her chest.

She looked down. Her long blond hair was loose and hanging over her shoulders like she often wore it. Through the rent in her waistcoat and shirt she could feel the warm, moist night air on her breasts, but looking down she could not tell if they were visible through the tear.

Still, she grabbed the cloth and held it together as Billy stepped up to her, saying, “William, bully for you, now let us go to the cabin and have a look at that famous wound you have suffered.” He spun her around and all but shoved her aft and through the door to the privacy of the great cabin.

Marlowe had thought they were right behind King James and company, had thought they would run them down easily, but after taking the Spaniard they had failed to raise those new-fledged pirates, or any other vessel for that matter.

For three weeks they searched, through more than sixty degrees of longitude, following roughly the fortieth parallel until dropping south of that and raising the Azores. Marlowe had come on deck every morning before dawn, expecting to see the French merchantman, and each time he was greeted with empty seas all around.

Finally they had dropped the hook in Ponta Delgada on the Portuguese island of Sao Miguel. There Marlowe was able to sell, discreetly, some of the vast bounty taken from the Spaniard, since there were few among the Portuguese who worried overmuch about anything plundered from the Spanish.

That done, he was able to distribute some small amount of specie to the men, who were given leave to spend it all in as short a time as they could manage. That they did, with the famed abandon of sailors ashore, drinking to insensibility, fighting, whoring, venting all the pent-up aggression and passion that is by necessity held in check while aboard a tight-packed ship, the survival of which depends upon mutual effort.

Two days of that and the Elizabeth Galleys were sated, their money gone, their heads pounding, their cocks limp, and they were more than happy to lay into the capstan and drag the anchor up from the mud, cat it, let fall the topsails, and head off to the forced sobriety of the sea. As they staggered about the deck, some were moved so far as to claim they would never do the like again, some even to the point of believing it.

Four days after the Azores had dipped below the horizon, Noah Fleming approached Marlowe on the quarterdeck, fidgeting. “Sir, beg your pardon, but some of the men, they wanted me to ask you…”

“Yes?”

“I know you don’t countenance such things as secret meetings and votes and such things as the pirates are wont to do, and this is none of that…”

“I understand.” The Elizabeth Galleys were becoming quite the cooperative and unassuming bunch, now with gold in their pockets and Griffin dead. It was the singular bright spot in Marlowe’s heaven.

“Well, sir, the lads was wondering about them black pirates. We’re still after them, are we not?”

“Do the men wish to be after them?”

“Oh, yes, sir! And the prodigious treasure they have. Yes, sir, the men would like very much to pursue them.”

Ah, tales have been told belowdecks! Marlowe thought. “Well, I had thought to give that up, Mr. Fleming. It will be a hell of a task, finding them. I reckon they are heading for the coast of Africa.”

“I understand, sir. And, of course, this ain’t no pirate ship. What you say is law, and no arguments. But the men would just like you to know, sir, if you was to pursue those men, well, that would be fine with them.”

Marlowe pretended to think about that. “Very well, then,” he said at last. “We shall start at Sierra Leone and run south. If need be we shall seek them out right around the entire Bight of Benin.”