Mad Morgan (32 page)

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Authors: Kerry Newcomb

BOOK: Mad Morgan
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The Spaniards were bound to outnumber them two to one, perhaps three to one. The renegade army had no cannons, only the
small-bore handheld mortars, the
patareros.
How were they to storm the walls? The closer they came to Panama City, the more daunting the task that lay before them.
Morgan continued to stare into the blaze …
“Captain?”
… drawn to the fire, to the heart of perdition …
“Captain? Can we do this?” Nell repeated.
This time he heard. He blinked and looked away from the bloodred coals and the dancing flames. And found his voice: Morgan was coming, with fire and sword, with justice in one hand and judgment in the other.
“Trust me,” he replied.
M
organ was one of the first to rise, and in the gray hours before the sun announced the new day. He lay with Nell nestled against him on the blankets, his steel-gray eyes searching the dimly seen canopy of branches overhead, catching a glimmer of color, the plumage of birds soaring and diving among the branches. His thoughts were not of nature, however, but human nature, the order of things, the tricks he must try, the lies, the patience, and the men he must face down, bend to his will—bend, but not break. Had he planned for every possible occurrence? No. But he was ready and willing to adapt. He'd have to.
The Spaniards were a tough and formidable foe. They would fight for their city. He would have to be ruthless to prevail. Put the fear of God into them. Break their spirit, and the entire garrison would surrender.
It was simple.
Send Hastiler and his marines, along with the Kingston boys, around the left flank. Depend on Calico Jack, Thomas LeBishop, and another third of his force to clear the right flank and turn any resistance back toward the waterfront. Morgan, Tom Penmerry, and Six Toes Yaquereño, the Portugee Devil, the remaining freebooters and the Maroons, along with the Kuna scouts, would cut straight through town, destroy the barracks and reach the waterfront where the pirates
intended to free the prisoners, recruit as many as they could to serve the Black Flag, and drive the rest into the streets to cause havoc.
The lure of treasure and the force of his personality had held this diverse army together. They were so close now, and each man knew what was expected of him once they breached the walls: to fight, and die if need be, gain control of the battlements facing the bay, and be prepared fire upon any of the longboats coming over from the forts. Once the city had fallen and its battlements were under Morgan's command, the forts guarding the seaward approach would either surrender or witness the looting, but be unable to act.
For now, the buccaneers had the element of surprise. Once that was gone Henry Morgan and his men would have to rely on their boldness, their ruthless skills, and Morgan's luck to conquer the city.
“Morgan's luck”—so it was now and had always been. He believed in it, and in himself and his destiny …
Morgan sensed the woman alongside him was awake. He glanced down and met Nell's gaze. For a brief moment he succumbed to emotions he dare not encourage.
Love her now, then put love aside
. Fear for her safety for one brief moment; but, with the dawn, he must set aside his concerns. When the shooting started, he'd need a heart of iron.
“What are you thinking?” she whispered.
“I think you know,” he said. Then he patted her arm, leaned down and kissed her forehead with all tenderness, then he stole away from the remains of his fire.
He moved carefully past the huddled forms of sleeping men, chose his path wisely, and made his way back to the pool. Morgan stripped away his clothes, set his pistols and cutlass aside, and walked out into the shallows to stand beneath the waterfall. It was an invigorating experience. The cascading waters pounded his flesh and set the blood flowing through his limbs.
He emerged a quarter of an hour later, gingerly stepped across a shelf of table rock and returned to edge of the pool where he had left his clothes. As he dressed there beneath the cliff, Morgan noticed for the first time a faded display of petroglyphs, images drawn upon the rust-colored stone face in black and faded chalk-white clay. Some of the images had been etched into the surface and then filled in with tints from a variety of pastes made from minerals and jungle plants.
He recognized one image which appeared to be a man standing near the falls; there was the depiction of game, symbols he did not recognize. Other scenarios showed men locked in mortal combat,
wielding axes or crude bows; there were severed limbs and headless torsos. Morgan was drawn to the images, reached up, placed his hand upon them, as if attempting to make a connection with an ancient past.
“Nothing changes,” a voice said behind him.
Morgan, startled, turned, ready to fight, only his weapons were on the ground out of reach. The same could not be said for the Black Cleric's. Thomas LeBishop grinned and held out the cutlass in his hand and jabbed at the pistols and cutlass Morgan had left on the ground.
“You should be more careful.”
“Why? I am among friends, am I not? Look, even you have come to protect me while I bathe.”
“And yet, the great
Tigre del Caribe
would be a tempting prize for most men.”
“Not as tempting as the riches that await us in Panama City.”
“Hmm, you have a point.” LeBishop flashed a devilish grin. He walked past Morgan and exaimined the petroglyphs on the cliff face. Behind him, Morgan finished dressing, pulled on his boots and then tucked his pistols in his belt and draped his cutlass and baldric across his shoulder. “It never changes,” LeBishop said, his sunken features looking ashen in the gray dawn.
It had begun to rain, a fine, faint shower that spattered off his black cloak until he moved beneath an overhanging ledge that protected the ancient-looking depictions. He indicated the artfully rendered carnage with the point of his cutlass.
“Men struggle, men die. ‘The Lord is a man of war,'” LeBishop solemnly intoned.
“Exodus,” said Morgan, identifying the quote as he joined LeBishop beneath the ledge. “Don't look surprised. I had parents, before the Spaniards came.”
“Indeed. But did their lessons take?”
“I follow my own charts,” Morgan said. “Always have. Always will.”
“Of course, of course,” LeBishop replied, dragging the tip of his blade across one of the drawings, leaving his own mark upon the work of ancient hands. Morgan reached up and batted the blade away.
“Don't.”
“And a man of sentiment. Most impressive. Laudable. But it can get you killed.” LeBishop returned the cutlass to his belt. “How much farther?”
“We'll be at the gates of Panama sometime tonight.”
“Then we'll unleash the dogs of war, eh? Well then, let us spend this last moment in truth.”
“I would have it no other way.”
The Black Cleric stroked his bony chin, his tapered fingers looking pale and bloodless. He fixed his cold blue eyes upon the younger man. “We must be ruthless if we are to carry the day. And even then, many of us may fall—I think, perhaps, even you.”
Is this a veiled threat? And poorly concealed at that. A man should expect no less when he makes a pact with perdition. But LeBishop and his men will fight like berserkers, and if we are not to perish in the streets of Panama, then I must give the devil his due.
“It may be as you say.” Morgan studied the petroglyphs, these ancient drawings of men in battle. Whose hand had left such a legacy for an age-old curse, that men must wage war, must struggle and die for game or gold? He felt a connection with those who had come before, who had left their mark as tribute or warning. “I may fall, or you, Thomas, or the both of us. But no matter. Men like us are destined for the same place.”
“And where's that?” LeBishop warily asked.
Morgan flashed a wicked smile. “Upon the wall.”
“W
hat day is it?” Morgan whispered, standing in the darkness at the edge of the Darien swamp, from which he had recently emerged along with the hungry, bone-tired army of rogues and adventurers who had followed him into this green hell. Only now, among this dissimilar collection of pirates and soldiers, noblemen and Indians, only now with the walls of Panama City a bold slash of shadow against the night, did the enormity of their undertaking strike home. The stygian reaches of the swamp offered a perilous route of escape at best. The words
Conquer or Die
began to mean something more than a brave man's rhetoric.
“It is the twenty-ninth day of January in the year 1671,” said Nell, touching his hand. She could see his face, with its growth of beard, the grime-stained purple coat he wore, the linen shirt stained from swamp water, his mudspattered breeches and boots. She knew even in the darkness, his weapons were clean, from musket and pistols to the blade of his cutlass, the tools of his bloody trade. This was not a man to take lightly.
“The Dons will talk about this day,” he muttered, wearing the burden of command as lightly as the scarlet scarf about his head that was holding back his unruly hair and keeping the sweat from his eyes.
“And frighten their children to sleep,” Nell said. “‘The day Mad Morgan came to play.'”
“From your lips to God's ears,” Morgan replied, his gray eyes burning. “Israel Goodenough …”
“Aye sir,” a voice called from farther down the column.
“If you and Mister Kogi will be so kind as to bring your powder monkeys along with me.”
“As you wish, Captain,” Israel called back, and softly issued orders to half a dozen men to join him.
“Mahali gani,
my captain,” said Rafiki Kogi. “What sort of place is this?” The deep-set eyes in his coal-black face peered at the walled city a few hundred yards from them.
“It is the place of blood and thunder,” Morgan told him, but his voice carried along the line of men, from Sergeant McCready to Calico Jack and past him; Morgan's words were repeated the length of the column, by the Duchess and the Portugee Devil, Kintana and Captain Hastiler and his marines, to the end of the line and the crew of the
Jericho
, who owed allegiance to only one man here, the Black Cleric. “Screw your hearts to your backbones, lads, for I am taking you in harm's way.” Morgan started forward, leading the powder crew away from the column. The rest of the men would pursue them from a distance. Morgan sensed Nell walking at his side.
“I thought you would remain with Pierre and the others.”
“My place is with you.”
“Toto, I would not have you take undue risk.”
“I chanced worse than this when I took you to my bed,” she scoffed.
“It was my bed,” Morgan reminded her. “My house.”
“So you say. That only proves you are not as clever as you think.”
“I had better be,” Morgan grimly reminded her as they neared the main gate.
Nell sensed his change of mood. She had her own worries. “And what will you do when you find her? For no doubt Elena Maria de Saucedo awaits within.” She was under no illusions concerning the hold the Doña had on him, Morgan with his dreams of nobility and his weakness for a pretty face and the sultry wiles of a sensuous woman.
Her question was fairly put. And Morgan wasn't sure he had the answer, at least not at first. Elena had used him in an attempt to free herself from the grasp of her new husband, to win his name and title but not his hand. But for all Elena's pretenses, their passion had been real. Of that he was certain. But it was Nell who had come to him and
walked in his soul and saved him, Nell Jolly, his friend, his consort, his woman.
“I am for you,” he whispered.
But that was the last endearment. Talk was at an end. It was time to get down to business. Gold and glory would not be won by romance, but with cold steel and hot lead.
 
 
By dawn's first blush, Major Gilberto Barba led a column of sixty-four mounted dragoons along the Via España toward the front gate of the city. Barba noticed at a glance the empty walkways stretching off to either side of the main gate. El gobernador had left strict orders that the sentries were to be posted on those walls both day and night. But from the look of the huddled shapes clustered around their cookfire beneath the thatch-roofed lean-to, the soldiers were lax in caring out the orders of issued by Don Alonso. Then again, these same men had once been loyal to Barba, whose own fortune had suffered since Don Alonso's arrival.
The major halted his mount, a gray charger he had raised from a colt and gentled to the sound of his voice. The men behind him also reined in their mounts as a small herd of goats followed by a pair of
criollo
goatherds and their dogs guided the animals down the thoroughfare. One of the lads walked beside a mule-drawn pushcart loaded with clay jugs of goat's milk. He called out, “Fresh milk. Fresh milk today!” in a reed-thin voice that carried along the street and soon brought a variety of inhabitants out from their adobe houses to wave him down and purchase his wares. Other carts were loaded with caged birds, poultices, woven baskets, trinkets, and fresh eggs.
Barba ordered his men to continue on without him while he delayed his own progress by a small but well-kept house and front garden protected by a low wall barely a foot high. Barba straightened his uniform, sucked in his bay window of a gut, and tried to look as if he had arrived at the house by accident. He dismounted and began to check his mount's leg for a nonexistent injury. As his men filed past, the owner of the house, a comely widow by the name of Mimi Sanchez, emerged and hurried out to greet the goatherds as they passed. The wooden wheels of the milk wagon creaked and groaned like a pair of chained banshees.
“One jug!” the widow called out, her plump womanly shape wrapped in a shawl and cotton smock. It seemed as if her bedclothes
were always in danger of falling off her body. Especially whenever Major Barba was nearby. As per the woman's instructions, the young
criollo
left his cart and started to carry a jug of milk up to the widow's house. Barba intercepted the younger man at the gate. He had been planning this move for several days now, ever since the widow had flashed him a smile in church and sat by his side on the wooden bench nearest the statue of Our Lady during the mysteries of consecration. Whatever guilt he felt for such sacrilege paled at the prospect of having a relationship with such a delightful creature as the widow Sanchez.
“I will take that from here,” Barba told the younger man. “If it is your pleasure, Señora.”
“By all means, you are too kind, Señor Barba,” Mimi said, flashing a toothsome smile. Her dark hair was gathered back from her features by a scarf. Her round cheeks seemed to have a natural blush. The aroma of woodsmoke and flour and roasted coffee beans clung to her like a warm invitation for a man to abandon his solitary life and enjoy the pleasures of domesticity. A man had to wonder, just who was baiting whom?
The jug was heavier than it looked and Barba almost regretted his decision to meet her this way. Plus it was difficult to keep from spilling the contents of the jug as he made his way through the garden. And the saber in its scabbard seemed to have a mind of its own this morning and tried to tangle itself about his ankles. Barba gave a kick and almost lost his hold on the jug, clutched at it and splashed the front of his uniform, soaking the green tunic. Barba cursed and then noticed the señora was none too pleased to see her goat's milk wasted on the ground and the soldier's coat. The major flashed her an innocent grin and shrugged his shoulders.
“It is not the weight of this clay jug but the proximity to such beauty as yours that makes me awkward, Señora Sanchez.” Barba knew he had salvaged the situation the minute the words left his lips. The widow beamed and motioned for him to watch his step and follow her.
“You are most gallant,” she said. “Such conduct deserves a reward.”
“Alas, I must not tarry,” the major said. “My men await.”
“It would be a shame to hurry things along, Señor. After all, I fear you will be gone all day. It will be a lonely time for us both. But we could have something warm to remember,” the widow suggested. She peered through the burgeoning light at the column that had
begun to bunch in the middle of the street in front of the gate. “They are grown men. Let them wait. What harm can they come to?”
Before Barba could answer, the gate and a portion of the surrounding wall exploded with a deafening boom that obliterated the wooden panels, sent a column of dust and mortar billowing into the air, collapsed the front walls of the nearby houses and storefronts, buried the sentries in the lean-to beneath a mound of rubble, and knocked Barba and the widow to the ground. The air was filled with jagged splinters and fist-sized chunks of stone that sprayed the dragoons and their mounts and felled almost every man.
Barba gasped and cried out for God's mercy as he felt a warm liquid spread across his chest.
Madre de Dios!
His chest had been blown open and he was bleeding to death! He rolled over on his side and winced as jagged shards of pottery dug into his side. He had landed on the jug of goat's milk. It was this liquid he had felt, not blood.
“Señora Sanchez!” he gasped, spitting out the name as he crawled to his feet. The widow was lying right where a projectile of brick-and-mortar had clipped her temple, giving her a mottled purple bruise and knocking her unconcious. One look over the low wall and Major Barba envied the woman. His blood turned to ice and his grimy features could not mask his astonishment as a lone figure, an image of terrible dread, materialized out of the swirling gray smoke and white dust, came like a wraith on the wings of the wind to blot out the sun and all hope.
“No,” the major groaned, momentarily transfixed by the horror. Cringing behind the wall, Barba watched the scattered remnants of his patrol gamely try to repel the howling brigands hurtling through the shattered entrance. Barba blessed himself with the sign of the cross, and crept away. He had to save himself. The major had to reach Doña Elena and warn her of what he had seen.
It was the devil at dawn.
It was Morgan!

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