False Colors (19 page)

Otter
slipped silently around the rocky point. Sun beat on her decks and melting tar dripped in heavy splashes from the rigging. Captain Smith, agleam in his best uniform, stood on the quarterdeck with his spyglass under his arm. His cabin had been dismantled and cleared away, all his possessions moved down to the hold. The decks were swept bare, fore and aft, sprinkled with wet sand to douse any accidental fire. Splinter-netting hung overhead like the work of massive spiders, and around the quarterdeck, walls of rolled up hammocks gave an illusion of protection. Cannons run out, the silent crew stood waiting, watching for the first sign of sail.

John walked the length of the deck, checking each gun and crew, conferring with the midshipmen in charge of the divisions. Slow matches smoldered in their tubs, thin plumes of brimstonescented smoke blowing away forward from each one. A sense of poise, the moment of peace before a duel, the knife edge between life and death, lay over the ship as the wind drove her steadily onward. To her weather side lay wild, rocky coves tipped with palms and purple hills beyond, swathed in impenetrable jungle. It could have been a hundred years ago, and himself part of Maynard’s crew, tracking down the infamous Blackbeard. An unsettling thought; that time could mean so little—that enlightenment and modernity might be a fleeting thing in the face of these mountains, these coves.
All man’s concerns and his philosophies ephemeral as the smoke….

“Helm two points a larboard!”
“Aye aye, sir!”
The rudder answering, she turned in a long sweep about the

point and began to sail into the island’s great deep water bay, bracing round the sails to catch the wind. The distant breeze filled with the throb of drums and a thin high pipe of reedy music, disquietingly alien.

“Sail ho!” The lookout’s voice quavered as he yelled. John felt the poised world plummet from waiting readiness into panic. “Sir! Sir! Fuck it! There’s a fucking fleet! A cutter, four ketches, couple of brigs and a fucking two decker with French colors sir! It’s a
trap!
”

The color drained from Captain Smith’s ruddy cheeks. “All hands to tack ship! Ready about! Stations for stays!”
Dropping rammers and spongers on the deck, the gun crews raced to the rigging as the helmsmen spun the wheel hard to starboard. “Helm’s a lee!”
Jib and flying jib fluttered, canvas snapped with a sound like immense wings beating. “Brace to! Rise tacks and sheets!” Flinging the fore sails aback, they came up into the wind, slowed, the way falling off her, edged inch by inch past the eye of the wind.
“Haul taut! Mainsail haul!” She began to fill again, a whisper of life, of forward motion, and as she struggled out of the tack the brigs, sailing large, surged out from the huge bay, hemming her between them.
Pirates jeered and laughed from the rigging. Tanned men weathered by the sea, in a motley of stolen clothes. Their voices rang metallic as they carried over the water, but their branded faces were bestial, grinning like hyenas.
There were officers among them. Officers clad in blue, red and gold, with the bold, self satisfied expressions of French nobility. “The French navy would never ally themselves with pirates!” John exclaimed, despite all the evidence, his indignation just keeping the top on fear. “They’re honorable opponents, they wouldn’t….”
“Not unless they were desperate.” Smith’s voice held something of the same tightness. “Britain is winning this war, after all. If the circumstances were reversed I too might do something this…
rash
in an attempt to turn the tide.” He clasped his hands together in front of himself, his shoulders hunching as if with cold. “Still, at present the presence of the French is our best hope for humane treatment. They are gentlemen at least, and we must rely on them to keep their allies in order. I don’t like our prospects otherwise.”
The other craft had followed the brigs out from the bay now, and
Otter
was surrounded by bristling cannon. Smith nodded, and John called out “Lower our colors!” even as one of the brigs opened fire, shooting out
Otter
’s sails.
The air fell still, dampened by smoke. That, or John forgot how to breathe.

“D’you see anything?” shouted Farrant to the lookout, after the shadow of cliffs had lain on the water long enough for the man to become accustomed to the change of light. Like the ship, Farrant had stripped away his finery and dressed for the occasion. No one who knew the strutting popinjay ashore would have recognized him now.

The blue duck trousers and before-the-mast look suited him better, in Alfie’s opinion, than the splendor of his normal uniform. He was not a tall man, and the effect of breeches and long skirted coat was to make him look shorter. Now clad for battle in a sailor’s jacket and trousers, with his shorn silver hair uncovered, he looked formidable—small but fierce.

“There is a ship, sir, but she looks unmanned. No, wait, they’re struggling to let down sail now.”
Continuing her stately glide, primed for immediate battle,
Britannia
’s shadow swept over white cliffs shaggy with peppery smelling flowers. A rank, acrid smell hovered over the jungle, and even here on the water the incessant chirping of small frogs filled the head with irritation. Alfie adjusted his sword and savored the privilege of being invited to stand by the captain on the quarterdeck, rather than banished to a gun-deck below, like Bert. It said something, he believed, that Farrant had arranged it so that Alfie would be at his back, would be the one who protected him; his right hand and shield.
As the moments went by he began to discern the shape of a hull ahead. Taking out his own glass, he saw it was a two decker, a little worse for wear, with her masts fished and several of her spars broken. She swung about, held by a single anchor, and he read her name,
Arc-en-Ciel
on her stern. Beyond her, on the sloping beach, were heavy tracks, broken trees and the scars of several fires. As he watched, several of her port lids went up with a rattle, and the guns ran out. Shots pocked the smooth surface of the bay a hundred feet in front of the
Britannia.
“Give them a warning,” Farrant called. “Upper deck only, aim at the rigging.”
A bundled flag, on the main mast of the anchored vessel, reached the top of its transom and broke out into French colors, the defiant gesture bringing a smile to Alfie’s face. Someone on the
Arc-en-Ciel
was having a very bad day, but handling it in style.
Britannia
’s broadside severed painters and stays, knocked splinters from the mainmast and burst the end of the mizzen boom into a firework of falling shrapnel. Farrant held out a hand, and Alfie handed him a speaking trumpet.
“
Arc-en-Ciel,
you are unprepared and outgunned. You have taken hostile action against a British ship in a British protectorate. Surrender now and you will be well treated. If you do not, we will blow you out of the water.”
There was a lieutenant left in charge. Alfie could see him engaged in heated argument with one of the warrant officers. Soon afterwards another couple of men joined in, gesticulating and shouting, even the common sailors contributing their opinion. “I sometimes wonder how they sail them at all, sir,” he said, watching Farrant’s amusement at this with a swell of affection. They were going into battle; it was no time to bear grudges.
“Indeed.” The captain’s mouth twitched with sympathy. “And yet they do, and they rule half of the world with it. A very civilized people, I’ve often thought.”
On the decks of the
Arc-en-Ciel
the lieutenant won the argument, the colors lowered in jerky, resentful bursts of movement, and Farrant sent the boat crew out, with Lt. Nyman to take possession.

“Glad to be home?” Alfie asked the slight, half-naked man at his side. The
Britannias
had confined the French in their own hold and sailed the
Arc-en-Ciel
out into the deep water with a skeleton crew of British seamen aboard to prevent any attempt at escape. The rest of the men had built a rough stockade on the shore of King’s Bay, and were enjoying the delights of fresh water, firm ground underfoot, and a profusion of greenstuff to eat. Now night came down on them like a flannel pressed over the face. The sky went from astonishing multicolored radiance to blackness like the blowing out of a candle.

“It is very strange,” said Tamane. “I am gone so short a time, and I fear all is changed.”
“You can find your own people though?”
Tamane smiled, the freshly painted streaks of white writhing over his face like adders. He gave Alfie the look an adult reserves for speaking with a curious child. “Oh yes.”
Alfie looked and saw darkness, trees, tangled bushes and trailing lianas. Something gibbered in the air by his ear and he managed not to jump merely because Tamane was looking at him. An insect the size of a fingernail was crawling up his calf, and his polished buckled shoes were already clogged with mud to the ankle. Tamane had seemed merely annoyed by the crew’s jokes about cannibals, but to Alfie, in this place anything seemed possible. “I’ll look forward to it then,” he said, and went back to sit next to Farrant.
Farrant was taking tea, polished as a diamond on this mudheap, and Alfie felt a tug pulling him towards the man as to an anchor in a storm. When the captain touched his face he forgot all about onlookers and smiled.
“I’ll need to discuss tomorrow’s plans with you in my tent, Mr. Donwell.”
“Yes sir, at once.”

“My apologies, gentlemen,” said Captain Babineaux of the French two decker
Achille
as one of his crew hammered the spike of John’s irons into a tree at the center of the camp. The short chain that joined the two manacles around his wrists passed through the hole in the pin, and as they nailed the pin up high his arms were raised almost straight above his head. If he pulled down on one wrist to ease that shoulder, the chain slid through the pin and dragged the other taut. John tried to sidle to one side, to give the similarly confined Captain Smith a little more breathing space, but was shoved back as Lt. Collins was nailed up next to him.

“But do not have any anxieties. Whatever our colleagues,
we
are not scum. You will be treated well, I assure you.”
Behind his back, behind the two marines who flanked him, the cluster of
Otter
’s seamen huddled, bound, in a stockade of thick wooden stakes, deeply entrenched, their ends pointed and angled inwards. The men had been given no bedding, no food or water. John’s shoulders already throbbed, and he would have been inclined to question the French captain’s definition of “well treated”, if it had not been for the expression on the faces of the watching pirates. At the word “scum” a lounging man in a red cap had looked up and sneered, revealing a mouth full of gold and brown teeth. Twists of fuse paper were wound into the man’s beard, and he wore his hair long and curled like a sultan on a Persian frieze. Turning away, he joined his own knot of followers, speaking to some urgently before wandering away, apparently aimlessly, to join men at another fire. John watched, unhappily, as a few minutes later the men to whom he had spoken also got up, going each to a separate fire themselves, sitting down with intent looks and gestures that spoke of violence.
“Sir,” he whispered, “something’s afoot.”
“I know.” Smith gave an experimental tug at his irons, then planted his feet and tugged with all his might—to no effect. “Can you get your hands out?”
John had tried the experiment already, his wrists rubbed sore with the attempt, but the cuffs were snug. Even with blood making them slippery it was simply not possible to shift them. “No sir.”
“Ne parle pas!
Silence!”
“They might have let us sit down.” Smith glared at the officious marine. John shifted from foot to foot and agreed. The short evening snuffed into darkness, but the heat did not abate, and sweat ran down his upraised arms, down his back. His hands crawled with pins and needles, his arms cramping, and if he tried to relieve his tired legs and feet by leaning on the bole of the tree, his weight pulled at aching shoulders, ribs, and his abraded wrists.
“It could be worse,” he said, after a while.
Smith’s wisps of receding gray hair clung to the sweat on his forehead. He had still not entirely lost the kindly, apple-faced look of a favorite grandfather, but his voice was bleak. “Oh, I’m afraid it will be.”
“Do you think we should warn the French that their allies are planning something?”
The cane sliced out of darkness, smacking into John’s face before he even registered the movement to his left. He jerked against his chains in shock, pain bright and all consuming as lightning for a flash.
“Silence!”

It kicked off at midnight.
Having fallen asleep on his feet, John jerked awake at the sound of shots. The night still pressed, smothering as a blanket, over his face. He could barely see the white blur of Smith next to him. The cooking fires of earlier had died down, and in the sullen glow around the base of the trees he could guess at moving feet. Then a tent went up in flames and he caught a glimpse of pirates running full pelt towards the harbor. Sprawled bodies, leaking black fluid in the red light, showed that the French had quietly had their throats slit while they slept.

Flame from the tent crept across a liana into the branches of a nearby palm, smoldering up its trunk and roaring out in its umbrella of leaves. With surprise lost, the running shapes gave tongue, yelling curses and obscenities, hooting with laughter as they chased after the few remaining Frenchmen, who had escaped the massacre and fled for their ships.

The palm burnt like a torch. Fire spread, creeping down the cables towards the stockade in which
Otter
’s crew were imprisoned. Watching it, John pulled in panic against his chains, scanned the ground and saw—
there
—a dead French officer, face down.