Assassin's Creed: Black Flag (24 page)

The snap of muskets from the
Jackdaw
began behind me as a one-sided battle between my ship and the crew of the beached
Benjamin
began. My senses had returned to normal, but Hornigold was doing me a favour, shouting encouragement and curses to his men.

“Some mighty poor sailing back there, lads, and if we live out this day, by God, I’m flaying every last bitch of you. Hold your ground and be ready for anything.”

I appeared from the mist on the bank nearby, and rather than heed his own words he took to his heels, scrambling along to the top of the incline, then across it.

My men had started to use mortars on the fleeing crew of the
Benjamin
, though, and I found myself placed in danger as they began raining onto the sand around me. Until one exploded near Benjamin and the next thing I knew he was disappearing out of sight over the other side of the sand-bank in a spray of blood and sand.

I scrambled over the top, made hasty by my desire to see his fate, and paid for it with a sword swipe across my arm, opening a cut that bled. In a single movement I span, engaged the blades and met his next attack, our steel sparking as it met. The force of his attack was enough to send me tumbling down the bank and he came after me, launching himself from the slope with his cutlass swinging. I caught him on my boots and kicked him away, his sword point parting the air before my nose. Rolling, I pulled myself to my feet and scrambled after him, and again our blades met. For some moments we traded blows, and he was good, but he was hurt and I was the younger man, and I was lit by vengeful fire. And so I cut his arm, his elbow, his shoulder—until he could hardly stand or raise his sword and I finished him.

“You could have been a man who stood for something true,” he said as he died. His lips worked over the words carefully. His teeth were blood-stained. “But you’ve a killer’s heart now.”

“Well it’s a damn sight better than what you have, Ben,” I told him. “The heart of a traitor, who thinks himself better than his mates.”

“Aye, and proven true. What have you done since Nassau fell? Nothing but murder and mayhem.”

I lost my temper, rounded on him. “You threw in with
the very kind we once hated!” I shouted.

“No,” he said. He reached to grab at me and make his point, but I angrily batted his hands away. “These Templars are different. I wish you could see that. But if you continue on your present course, you’ll find you’re the only one left walking it. With the gallows at the end.”

“That may be,” I said, “but now the world has one less snake in it and that’s enough for me.”

But he didn’t hear me. He was already dead.

“Is the pirate hunter dead?” said Bartholomew Roberts.

I looked at him, Bartholomew Roberts, this unknowable character, a Sage, a carpenter who had turned to a life of piracy. Was this the first time he’d visited The Observatory? Why did he need me here? So many questions—questions to which I knew I would never be given answers.

We were at Long Bay, on the northern shores of Jamaica. He had been loading his pistols as I arrived. Then he asked his question, to which I replied, “Aye, by my own hand.”

He nodded and went back to cleaning his pistols. I looked at him and found a sudden rage gripped me. “Why is it you alone can find what so many want?”

He chuckled. “I was born with memories of this place. Memories of another time entirely, I think. Like . . . Like another life I have already led.”

I shook my head and wondered whether I would ever be free of this mumbo jumbo.

“Curse you for a lurch, man, and speak some sense.”

“Not today.”

Nor any other day
, I thought angrily, but before I could find a reply there came a noise from the jungle.

Natives? Perhaps they had been disturbed by the battle between the
Jackdaw
and
Benjamin
that had ended. At the moment, what remained of Hornigold’s crew was being herded aboard the
Jackdaw
and I had left my men to it—
deal with the prisoners and await my return shortly
—and embarked on this meeting with Bartholomew Roberts alone.

He gestured to me. “After you, Captain. The path ahead is dangerous.”

With around a dozen of his men we began to move through the jungle, beating a path through the undergrowth as we began to head upwards. I wondered, should I be able to see it by now, this Observatory? Weren’t they great constructs, built on high peaks? All around us the hillsides waved greenery at us. Bushes and palm trees. Nothing made by man as far as the eye can see, unless you counted our ships in the bay.

We had been going only a few hundred yards when we heard a sound from the undergrowth. Something streaked from the bushes to one side of us and one of Roberts’s men fell with a glistening, gore-filled hole where the back of his head had been. I know a club strike when I see one. But whatever struck him was gone as quickly as it had come.

A tremor of fear ran through the crew, who drew their swords, pulled muskets from their backs and snatched pistols from their belts. Crouched. Ready.

“The men native to this land will put up a fight, Edward,” said Roberts quietly, eyes scanning the undergrowth, which was silent, keeping its secrets.

“You willing to push back as is necessary? To kill, if needed?”

I engaged my hidden blade.

“You’ll hear from me soon.”

And then I crouched, rolled sideways into the jungle and became a part of it.

The natives knew their land well, but I was doing something they simply would not expect. I was taking the fight to them. The first man I came across was surprised to see me, and that surprise was his undoing. He wore nothing but a breech-clout, his black hair tied up on his head, a club still gleaming with the blood of a buccaneer upon it, and eyes wide with shock. The natives were only protecting what was theirs. It gave me no pleasure to slide my blade between his ribs and I hoped his end was quick, but I did it anyway, then moved on. The jungle began to resound with the noise of screams and gunshots, but I found more natives and dealt more death until at last the battle was over and I returned to the main party.

Eight had been killed in the battle. Most of the natives had fallen under my blade.

“The guardians of The Observatory,” Bartholomew Roberts told me.

“How long have their kind been here?” I asked him.

“Oh . . . at least a thousand years or more. Very dedicated men. Very deadly.”

I looked around at what remained of his group, his terrified men, who had watched their ship-mates picked off one by one. Then we continued our journey, climbing still, going up and up until we came upon it, grey-stone walls a dark contrast with the vibrant jungle colours, a massive building rising way, way above us.

The Observatory.

How had it not been seen?
I wondered.
How had it remained invisible?

“This is it, then?”

“Aye, an almost sacred place. All it needs is a drop of my blood . . .”

In his hand appeared a small dagger and he never took his eyes from mine as he used it to make his thumb bleed, then placed the red-beaded finger into a tiny recess by the side of the door. It began to open.

All six of us looked at one another. Only Bart Roberts seemed to be enjoying himself.

“And the door opens,” he said with the voice of a showman, “after almost eighty thousand years.”

He stepped to one side and ushered his men through. The nervous crew members looked at one another, then did as their captain ordered and began to move towards the door . . .

Then, for some reason known only to himself, Roberts killed them, all four of them. With one hand he buried his dagger in the eye of the leading man and pushed his body aside at the same time he drew his pistol and fired into the face of the second man. The last two crew members had no time to react as Black Bart drew his second pistol and fired point-blank into the chest of a third man, pulled his sword and ran the final man through.

It was the same man who had brought the chest on deck, who’d looked to Roberts for some words of praise. He made an odd, choking sound and Roberts held him there a second, then slid the cutlass home to the hilt and twisted it. The body on his blade went taut and the deck-hand looked at his captain with imploring, uncomprehending eyes until his body relaxed, slid off the steel and thumped to the ground, chest rising once, twice, then staying still.

So much death.
So much death
.

“Jesus, Roberts, have you gone mad?”

He shook blood from his cutlass then fussily cleaned it with a handkerchief.

“Quite the contrary, Edward. These wags would have gone mad at seeing what lies beyond this gate. But you, I suspect, are made of sterner stuff. Now, pick up that chest and carry it hither.”

I did as he asked, knowing that to follow Roberts was a bad idea.
A terrible, bloody idea
. But I was unable to prevent myself from doing it. I’d come too far to back out.

Inside it was like an ancient temple. “Dirty and decrepit,” said Roberts, “not quite as I remember. But it has been over eighty millennia.”

I shot him a glare.
More mumbo jumbo
. “Oh rot, that’s impossible.”

His look in return was unknowable. “Step as if on thin ice, Captain.”

On stone steps we descended through the centre of The Observatory, moving into a large bridge chamber. All my senses were alive as I looked around and took in the vast openness of the space.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said Roberts in a hushed voice.

“Aye,” I replied and found I was whispering, “like something out of a fairy-tale, one of them old poems.”

“There were many stories about this place once. Tales that turned into rumours, and again into legend. The inevitable process of facts becoming fictions, before fading away entirely.”

We entered a new room altogether, what could only be described as an archive, a huge space lined with low shelves on which were stacked hundreds of small vials of blood, just like the ones in the coffer—just like the one I had seen Torres use on Bartholomew Roberts.

“More blood vials.”

“Yes. These cubes contain the blood of an old and ancient people. A wonderful race, in their time.”

“The more you talk, man, the less I understand,” I said irritably.

“Only remember this; the blood in these vials is not worth a single reale to anyone anymore. It may be again, one day. But not in this epoch.”

We were deep within the bowels of the Earth by then, and walked through the archives into what was the main theatre of The Observatory. Again it was astounding and we stood for a second, craning our necks to gaze from one side of the vast domed chamber to the other.

At one side of the chamber was what looked like a pit, with just a sloshing sound from far below to indicate water somewhere, while in the middle of the chamber was a raised dais with what looked like a complicated pattern carved into the stone. As Roberts bade me put the chest down a low noise began. A low, humming sound that was intriguing at first but began to build . . .

“What’s that?” I felt as though I was having to shout to make myself heard although I wasn’t.

“Ah yes,” said Roberts, “a security measure. Just a moment.”

Around us the walls had begun to glow, letting off a pulsing white light that was as beautiful as it was unsettling. The Sage walked across the floor to the raised platform in the middle and put his hand to a carved indent in the centre. Straight away the sound receded and the room around us was silent again though the walls still glowed.

“So what is this place?” I said to Roberts.

“Think of it as like a large spyglass. A device capable of seeing great distances.”

The glow. The blood. This “device.” My head was beginning to spin, and all I could do was stand and watch open-mouthed as Roberts reached into the coffer with practised fingers, as though it was something he’d done dozens of times before, then pulled out a vial and held it up to the light, just as he had on the day we took possession of the chest.

Satisfied, he bent to the raised dais in front of him and placed the crystal inside. Something happened then—something I still can’t quite believe—the glow on the walls seemed to ripple like mist, coalescing, not into fog but into images, a series of opaque pictures, as though I were looking through a window at something, at . . .

Calico Jack Rackham, as I live and breathe.

But I wasn’t looking
at
him. No. It was as though I
was
him. As though I were looking through his eyes. In fact, the only reason I knew it was Calico Jack was the Indian fabric of his coat sleeve.

He was walking up the steps towards The Old Avery. My heart leapt to see the old place, even more careworn and dilapidated than ever before . . .

Which meant that this wasn’t an image from the past. It wasn’t an image I had ever experienced myself because I’d never seen The Old Avery in its current state of disrepair. I hadn’t visited Nassau since the true rot set in.

And yet . . . And yet . . . I was seeing it.

“This is bloody witchcraft,”
I spluttered.

“No. This is Calico Jack Rackham . . . Somewhere in the world at this moment.”

“Nassau,” I said, as much to him as to myself. “This is happening right now? We’re seeing through his eyes?”

“Aye,” said Roberts

It wasn’t as though I returned my attention to the image. It was simply there in front of me. As if I were part of it, inside it. Which in a way I was, because when Calico Jack turned his head the image moved with him. I watched as he looked towards a table where Anne Bonny sat with James Kidd.

A long, lingering glance over Anne Bonny. Over certain
parts
of Anne Bonny. The dirty bastard. But then, oh my God, she looked over from the table where she sat with James Kidd and returned his look. And I mean a real proper, lascivious look. That roving eye I told you about? She was giving old Calico Jack the full benefit.

Bloody hell. They’re having an affair
.

Despite everything—despite the wonders of The Observatory—I found myself suppressing a chuckle to think of James Bonny, that treacherous turncoat, wearing the horns. Calico Jack? Well, the poxy git had marooned me, hadn’t he? So there was no love lost there. But he did give us our weapons, ammunition and grub and, well, he did have Anne warming his bed, so you had to hand it to him.

Now, Calico Jack was listening to Anne and James chatting.

“I don’t know, Jim,” Anne was saying, “I haven’t the faintest idea how to pilot a ship. That ain’t work a woman does.”

What on earth were they cooking up
?

“Tosh. I’ve seen a score of ladies who can reef a sail and spin a capstan.”

“Would you teach me to fight? With a cutlass, like? And how maybe to handle a pistol?”

“All that and more. But you have to want it and work for it. There’s no stumbling into true success.”

Now Calico Jack confirmed what I thought. His disembodied voice seemed to echo off the stone. “Oi, lad, that’s my lass yer making love to. Lay off or I’ll cut ya.”

“Up your arse, Rackham. ‘Lad’ is the last thing you should be calling me . . .”

Oh yes?
I thought.
Was James Kidd about to reveal her disguise?

James was reaching beneath his/her shirt. Calico Jack was blustering, “Oh, is that right . . . Lad?”

Roberts removed the cube from the Observatory controls and the image evaporated.

I bit my lip and thought of the
Jackdaw
. Ade didn’t like our current situation. He was dying to make sail.

But he wouldn’t do it without me.

Would he?

Now the glow that hung in the chamber before us became something else again, and all thoughts of the
Jackdaw
’s intentions were forgotten, as Roberts said, “Let’s try another. Governor Woodes Rogers,” and placed another crystal cube into the console and new images formed.

We were seeing through the eyes of Woodes Rogers. Standing with him was Torres and not far away was El Tiburón. Suddenly the vision was filled with the image of a blood vial being held up for examination by Rogers.

He was speaking. “You have a bold idea. But I must think it through carefully.”

The Observatory chamber room filled with the sound of Torres’s reply.

“A simple pledge of loyalty is all you need suggest to the House of Commons. An oath, a gesture, and a simple ceremonial dram of blood taken from the finger. That’s all.”

Christ
. Whatever Anne and Mary had been cooking up, it was nothing compared to this lot. Still trying to control the bleeding world—
bleeding
being the operative word. And doing it how? The English Parliament.

Now Rogers was speaking. “The ministers may give me trouble, but it should be easy enough to convince the House of Lords. They do adore an excess of pomp and circumstance.”

“Exactly. Tell them it’s a show of fealty to the king . . . Against those revolting Jacobites.”

“Yes, indeed,” replied Rogers.

“The crucial detail is the blood. You must get a sample from each man. We want to be ready when we find The Observatory.”

“Agreed.”

Roberts removed the cube from the console and looked at me, triumph in his eyes. Now we knew what the Templars were plotting. Not only that, but we were one step ahead of them.

The images had gone, the strange glow had returned to the walls and I was left wondering if I’d imagined the whole thing. Meantime, Roberts pulled something from the console and held it aloft. A skull. The skull in which he’d placed the vials of blood.

“A precious tool, you see?”

“Sorcery, that’s what it is,” I said.

“Not so. Every mechanism that gives this device its light is a true and physical thing. Ancient, yes, but nothing supernatural or strange.”

I looked doubtfully at him, thinking,
You’re kidding yourself, mate
. But decided not to pursue it.

“We’ll be masters of the ocean with that,” I said. Wanting to hold the skull, reaching out to take it from him, overcome with the desire to feel the weight of it in my palm. I felt a tremble as he came forward with it, his hand outstretched. And then, instead of giving it to me, he whipped it around and struck me in the face with it, knocking me across the floor of The Observatory, then over the precipice of the pit.

I fell, slamming into the stone on the way down, whipped by the vegetation that clung to the rock face but unable to get a grip on it and stop my fall. I felt a searing pain in my side, then smacked into the water below, thanking God I had the presence of mind to turn my fall into the semblance of a dive. From that height, that instinct might have saved my life.

Even so, my entrance into the water was a messy one. I crashed into it and floundered, swallowing water, trying not to let the pain in my side drag me under. As I broke the surface and gasped for breath I looked up, only to see Roberts gazing down upon me.

“There’s nothing in my code about loyalty, young man.” He taunted me, his voice echoing in the distance between us. “You played your role, but our partnership is done.”

“You’re a dead man, Roberts,” I roared back, only I couldn’t quite manage a roar. My voice was weak and, anyway, he’d left, and I was too busy trying to tend to the flaming pain in my side and pull myself to safety.

When I pulled myself to the side what I found was a branch sticking from my side, the wound colouring my robes red. I yanked it out with a scream, tossed the stick away and clenched my teeth as I held the wound, feeling blood seep through my fingers.
Roberts, you bastard.
You bastard
.

With the wound still held closed, I climbed back to The Observatory, then limped out and back down to the beach, pain-sweat pouring off me. But as I stumbled out of the long grass and onto the beach what I saw filled me with anguish. The
Jackdaw
, my beloved
Jackdaw,
had left. There was just the
Rover
anchored off shore.

There, where the beach met the sea, was moored a yawl, the coxswain and rowers silent sentinels with the sea at their backs as they awaited their captain—Captain Bartholomew Roberts, who stood before me at the entrance to the beach.

He crouched. His eyes flashed and he smiled that peculiar joyless smile of his. “Oh . . . your
Jackdaw
has flown, Edward, eh? That’s the beauty of a democracy . . . The many outvote the one. Aye, you could sail with me, but with a temper as hot as yours I fear you’d burn us all to cinders. Luckily I know the King’s bounty on your head is a large one and I intend to collect.”

The pain was too much. I could hold it together no more and felt myself passing out. The last thing I heard as the darkness claimed me was Bartholomew Roberts, softly taunting me.

“Have you ever seen the inside of a Jamaican prison, boy? Have you?”