Captain Adam (15 page)

With a sword he was lithe and precise, grace's very epitome combined with strength, brain running into muscle running into steel, so that no man could say where one left off and the other began. Let him scabbard that blade, however, and Carse became what he customarily was—a fellow with a slouch, a leer, shifty eyes. There was no spring in his step. Indeed he shambled. True, he avoided bluster, a negative virtue which yet in itself marked him off in Providence, a place where loudmouthed-ness was the rule, where men seemed to feel an obligation to wallop themselves on the chest, bellowing about their unbeatableness, and where a stranger might have assumed, with reason, that courage was measured exactly by the volume of the voice. When he spoke at all Carse spoke low. There were times when he even lisped.

Except for those hands, then—long, slim, exquisitely tapered—he was, when not fencing, a singularly repulsive person. Though long, he looked squat. You believed that beneath his clothes, in little crevices of his body, in his armpits, in his crotch, there were pockets of stale air. He was not more than twenty-five or -six, but he looked overripe, prematurely rotten. His hair, his eyes, held no color: his face was a watery pink. He looked as though he couldn't grow a beard. He is best described, if it be description at all, by a sound: he looked like the noise that your heel makes when you draw it up out of the mud.

"Now this is what Marcelli used to call a mezza cavazione. You're resting too much weight on your left leg. Captain. Now watch. I'll disengage from above down, in either line. And keep that foot pointed this way."

"I feel like a fool, holding a position like this!"

"Very well. Stand any way you wish."

Adam hunched his shoulders. He took a stronger grip on the rapier, easing his forearm by not being so careful to keep the palm up. He let his left foot get further back. He left his right toe steal inward.

"Now," he cried. "Now I can fightl"

"Good—we'll fight."

Emotionless, saving his breath, the Englishman called the touches. He came back into guard position and saluted after each. Tlien he'd say "Now!" and attack again. He did not press. He moved with a sweet smooth supple regularity, perfectly in control of himself.

"Now—tot*c/i/" The blades were buttoned, but nevertheless they were stiff steel—not just foils from an academy—and when they hit they hurt. Carse did not seem intent upon what he was doing, but casual, almost negligent; and surely he didn't bunch his puny muscles, or pant, or roll his eyes; yet each touch was the apogee of carefully collected, inswept strength, and it stung.

"Now—towch/"

Adam Long tried every engagement he knew—not many, truly—but he could not catch the other's steel. He even tried, in desperation, what Carse had called the "universal parry," a heavy sweep in seconde, from a high quarte, executed at full arm's length as he retreated. He swished only air; and then Carse's padded point rammed his x\hs—"Touchl" and Carse dropped back into guard position, saluted, and began to attack again.

Panic slipped its hot fingers over the man from Newport. He had already learned that you cannot depend on your eyes—that a great deal of your awareness of combat with rapiers lay in the way you felt your opponent's steel against your own, whether you pressed or he did, or whether the contact was so light and silvery as never to be noticed by an onlooker. That tingle of touch that passed between the blades and into your arm and all down and up your body, was an absolute requisite. Without it you were lost—as Adam was lost now. Was this a wraith he faced? He couldn't catch Carse's weapon, even for a brief click, much less parry it.

"Novj—Unichl"

Adam was getting more and more up on the balls of his feet, a natural nervous reaction Carse had warned him against. He was gripping his weapon with a fury of intensity, as a man might grip a club. He leaned forward, his face streaked with sweat.

Then it happened. He never did learn how. He did not feel the other's steel, yet without being conscious of it he must have answered with his eyes and immediately afterward with his weapon a false lunge, a feint. He was wild, of course, by this time. He tried to recover, and teetered. He

waved his arms. He sat down—sat with a resounding thump on the hard sandy earth of Providence—he could even feel the sharp small chunks of coral dig through his breeches and gleefully get at his skin.

"Touch," said Carse quietly, without touching. He regarded a puffing opponent for a moment, then helped him to his feet. "And do you still fear to look like a fool, Captain?"

"All right," said Adam, who ached in every joint. "After this I'll keep my palm up, I'll keep my toe out."

"And that left hand—high, high."

"All right, I'll even do that. Now let's have that mezza cavazione again."

When he put his sword aside, Carse became not merely a different man but a different sort of man. It was a re-transformation not at all comparable to that of coach-and-four back into mice-and-pumpkin, since pumpkins, mice, too, are homely, familiar things; whereas Carse the bladeless would have repelled a jakes-farmer.

The first half-dozen lessons did not include any bouts but were devoted to posture, irking Adam, who cried that what he sought to learn was how to fight with a rapier, not how to strike poses with one. Carse paid no heed to this. He must have heard it before, often. "I don't think it will be necessary to teach you to fight, Captain," was as near as he came to comment. "I think you know too well already. Rage and a rapier don't go together."

More recently they had been having bouts, and for these they wore plastrons. Carse always laced his plastron carefully. Once, with some bitterness, Adam said that for the life of him he couldn't see why.

"The best swordsman in the world is not afraid of the second best swordsman," Carse replied gravely. "Nor is the sixteenth best afraid of the seventeenth. But any one of them would be frightened to face a man who'd had only a few lessons."

They practiced under a sizzling sun, some distance inland and blocked from prying eyes and the jeers of the camp by dunes. Now Carse as they sat down for a rest untrussed himself, for he was sweating. Not that it made much difference. He stank anyway.

"Beats me how a man like you is in a place like this, with all your skill," Adam said.

Carse shrugged.

"I am not so skillful as you think. I only seem so, here. I lack the most important quality of all."

"What's that?"

"Courage."

Adam stared at the man in amazement. Carse, forearms on knees, was gazing quietly at the ground. He waggled his long, beautifully kept hands in a gesture of hopelessness. 96

"That's a strange thing for a man to confess," Adam said slowly. "And to hear it from a Brother of the Coast—"

"Rapier fighting is lonely fighting," Carse said. "You are on your own. And I have always been afraid of my own company. I embarrass myself, and sometimes frighten myself. You think a pirate needs to be courageous? Not at all. Truly, Captain, not the way we of Providence here practice piracy anyway—and it's the only kind I know."

"But you board!"

"It's usually all over by that time. We've won before we started—or if we weren't going to, we wouldn't start. Let us get a sign of real resistance and we shy away. And even when we do board, we're shoulder-to-shoulder, all waving out weapons and yelling bloody murder. It's part of our technique. And I don't mind it, because there's a crowd. Then it's all over. And we're busy stealing everything we can lay hands on and telling each other what brave lads we are. Besides, I'm usually drunk then. That helps. But when you fight with a rapier you fight alone."

There was some silence.

Then: "Yet you like it well enough to teach bunglers like me."

"I like it well enough to teach bunglers like you, yes. It —It reminds me of certain other times."

"Where'd you come from, Carse?"

The pirate did not answer immediately, and this pause, though his face was expressionless, in itself was a rebuke.

"On Providence, Captain, we do not ordinarily ask such questions," he said at last.

"I'm sorry."

"It's forgotten. And my faith, I have to ask you a question—though it's about the future, not the past. I must know in what way to teach you. Now I take it that you are doing all this work for two reasons—correct me if I'm wrong. One reason is not because you are bored. We are seldom that here, eh?"

Adam grinned. This sink Providence, into which had been poured halt the human garbage of the Caribbean, this crowded hot rat-hole, where escaped slaves jostled deserters, where pimps wheedled, corsairs swaggered, whether English, French, Dutch, Danish or what, and the purveyors of rum and the purchasers of fine silks plied a noisy trade night and day, where every man carried at least a dagger, which he was embarrassingly eager to use—this place Providence might do many things to a visitor but it was not likely to bore him.

"Seldom," Adam agreed.

"I take it then that the two reasons are, first, that you want to be a gentleman—"

"My blood, sir, is every bit as—"

"Now don't be touchy! Nobody's questioning your pedigree! But you know as well as I know, Captain, that a man who carries a sword and knows how to use it is far more likely to be accepted as a gentleman than one who might boast a whole bushel basket full of certified quarterlings."

"Go on," said Adam.

"The second reason—and this is the one I'm interested in—is because there is a man you want to meet some day with no buttons, right?"

Adam nodded.

"He's not here in the camp, that I know. Excepting me, nobody here can fight with a rapier at all. They esteem it silly. When they brawl here they use whatever's handy, and when they duel it's with pistol and cutlass. What I am teaching you won't help you a bit with a cutlass, Captain. You know that."

"He's not here," Adam said.

"I won't ask you his name. I don't care. But this I should know—is he a good swordsman?"

"I don't know. I've never even seen him."

Carse rose.

"In that case we had best assume that he is." He laced his plastron. "Now I'm going to teach you how to riposte. And I don't mean parry and then half a minute later lunge. I mean tic-a-tac! right away! at what Marcelli used to call the tempo indivisihile, you see?"

"No," said Adam.

"Well, get up there and I'll show you."

It was his custom after a lesson to saunter around the camp, stopping for a jaw here, a drink there, nodding, sometimes spinning yarn, now and then putting a discreet question about followers of the late Captain Thomas Hart. He'd check a few prices. He'd look over, from the beach, any craft that had recently arrived, being careful not to seem to study Goodwill to Men with any special attention. And at last, almost as though by chance, he would find himself back at the shack he shared with the Honorable Maisie de Lynn Treadway-Paul. Tarpaulin Hall they called it.

In truth it was not as fortuitous as all this, his walk. He was careful never to leave Maisie alone for long.

There was this to be said about the camp: no matter what its population—which indeed might shift from three hundred to three thousand and back again within a few hours—it must have been the noisiest place, per capita, on earth. It suggested an enormous turbulent outdoor tavern, where somebody was always drunk, and there was ever present, if not a brawl, then at least the boisterous beginnings of one. Night and day made no difference. The bay could be silent at night, and usually was, no matter how many the vessels there; for the Brethren of the Coast preferred to quit their ships as soon as possible and go ashore, where there was life and movement—and rum—and by habit they left not even watchmen, excepting always half a dozen cannoneers stationed at the fort overlooking the entrance of the bay. But among the tents and huts and in the marketplace there was an unceasing hubbub which knew no clock. Wine and bumboo flowed pauselessly; women wailed or shrieked in rage; men cursed their luck at the dice games and card games, bellowing, snorting like porpoises. The auction in the marketplace never faltered. Always somewhere somebody was singing, while somewhere else men quarreled.

There were no streets in the camp, which was a heterogeneous and messy agglomeration of tents made of sail and houses fashioned from odd ship parts—spars, planks, sections of mast—lashed together with tarred rope. There was no beginning or end, no set boundary. Even the platform that made up the marketplace, the community's only semi-stable structure, from which all sorts of articles were raucously offered for sale, was moved three times, and twice because of carelessness was partly burned, in the four weeks Captain Long and the Honorable Maisie Treadway had spent on Providence.

Nature alone was orderly there, and gentle. The bay, wide, deep, glittered a glorious blue. The sand, though so light and bright as to sting the eyes, was smooth, and it sloped and rolled languidly. There wasn't much vegetation—clumps of dry juiceless sun-scorched grass that clittered anxiously in the breeze, and everywhere, as trees and as scrub, the flashy twittering palmetto. There were no hills, but neither were there any low spots. The air was dry. The sky, kindly, leaned close. A breeze was always blowing, carrying away the stench of the camp.

So Nature was good, Man bad.

Woman was even worse.

It had astonished the Goodwill prisoners to find women at this outlaws' retreat, and for an hour Adam had fondly supposed that this might make the place safer for and more acceptable to Maisie. He was soon disillusioned. The women of the camp were all shrill, all thoroughly vicious. Not many belonged to pirates, though a few were pirates themselves, who went to sea in search of prizes. Most of the women were there for business —of one sort or another—and were attached not to buccaneers but rather to hangers-on, men who bought and sold, who haggled and cheated, the furtive men of labored jocularity, parasites, but astute in a low way.

There was an amazingly large number of these commercial-fringe men— fully half the camp, not counting their trulls, Adam had estimated.

It was these same trollops, indeed, who caused so much of the clamor, all out of keeping with their numbers. It is true that there was always a squabble somewhere, always a fight about to well up; but though the pirates were a touchy lot, unless they were too drunk to know or too angry to care, they ordinarily ceased to shout curses after a certain stage in any quarrel, and adjourned to another place, another island, from which at least one of the disputants never would return. Whether this was done out of respect for the women in the camp or whether it was because the pirates truly fancied themselves as something akin to quality folks after all, as they consistently pretended to do, and so aped their betters' ways, Adam Long did not learn—and didn't care. The women, on the other hand, wasted no time in cartels, challenges, seconds, least of all fair play, but were wont to fly at one another with teeth and nails bared, soon to be rolling, kicking, on the ground. Some pirates deplored this practice, though they did not venture to break up such fights—he'd be a stouthearted man who tried that!—hut others enjoyed them, and ran to it when they heard one making up, and watched, cheering, while they offered bets on first blood, first fall, final outcome.