Mistress of the Sea (14 page)

‘I hope they will,’ Drake said blithely. ‘But I would have no fear for them at all if
you
, Master Dennys, were to offer your brave protection.’

Will swallowed hard, bit back the urge to protest, and watched Dennys stroke his scented beard with hardly a suggestion of wavering. He had an urge to kick him.

‘Truly, to go with you and leave the lady without a fit champion to defend her would be both self-serving and ignoble. I shall stay,’ he concluded resolutely.

Drake bowed.

‘I am in your debt.’

Before Dennys could leave, Will took him to one side. He spoke under his breath.

‘Do you know how to discharge a firearm, Master Dennys?’

Dennys gripped the hilt of his rapier and gave a disdainful sneer.

‘A gentleman fights with his sword.’

Dennys moved to leave, but Will blocked his way.

‘If anyone threatens the Cooksleys, he will not be a gentleman, sir.’ Will’s response was deliberately muted. In a sudden fluid movement, Will pulled out his knife and threw it, turning, to stick blade-first in a barrel. Dennys jumped back. Propped against the
barrel
was a firearm: a caliver. Will paced over, retrieved his knife and shouldered the caliver along with the cartridge belt and powder horn that he had used earlier in the day for target practice.

Someone called out, but Drake’s voice silenced whoever it was.

Will pushed caliver, horn and belt hard against the merchant’s chest.

‘You had better learn,’ he said. He strode away. He would make the best of it. John Drake would keep Ellyn safe, and he trusted she had more intelligence than to be taken in by Richard Dennys; the man was patently a buffoon. She had shown selflessness in wanting to remain with her father (someone whom Will privately considered a cantankerous old bastard) and that had raised her in his esteem. The thought of leaving her made him feel uneasy, but at least he would have a chance to begin searching for Kit. That was why he had come.

Will looked out to sea, half closing his eyes against the sun. Perhaps Kit was hundreds of miles away, still near San Juan de Ulúa in the Gulf of Mexico – if he lived. Why should anyone in Panamá know anything about him? Will paced on along the shore.

But perhaps Kit was close.

What does a dying man see? He sees his past in vivid, bright passages: episodes that are portals to the whole of his best experience, but jumbled and filtered so that all the vile parts are faint, and all the goodness rises up. This is what Kit believed. It explained why he thought of his boyhood often, moved like a sleepwalker and remembered little from the time he had been held as a captive. He was sure he was dying, but that prospect no longer
frightened
him. He had witnessed enough in the last few years to no longer care about staying alive.

The river swirled around his legs. Through the vermillion surge he could see the pale suggestion of his feet, but they were so numb he could barely feel them. He knew his lips were chapped and his hair was lousy. Where his skin was bare it was blistered and scabbed. The rags that he wore gave scant protection from the sun; they held no warmth since they were soaking.

In a gleam of sunlight he looked up at the thunderclouds that threatened to drench him afresh, watching them thicken and darken, while steam rose from the river and the dense forest of the gorge. A fresh downpour stung him and, at almost the same moment, he was kicked in the side. Unbalanced by the chains round his ankles, the blow pitched him against planks. A shout followed that he ignored. He was bent double above a sluice, head close to slats, and he could see the glint of gold in amongst the grit that was trapped.

Kit picked out a tiny bead and put it in a pouch round his neck. This was the second place near the river’s source where the Spanish had found the ‘pleasure’ as they called it: the
placer
that produced gold, though it was no pleasure to him. He had been discovering the little nuggets all morning, but the finds had only inflamed the greed of Lázaro, the half-blood
mestizo
who had been left in charge. It was why the gang of slaves upstream were being whipped by the two native hirelings, made to dig out the river bank faster with their hoes, and shovel the grit into the feeder channels until they ran red with soil. It was why he could not gaze any more at the clouds, but had to sort through the stones with his thin, deadened fingers. So he listened to the river’s rush and tried
to
forget all the other sounds: the groans of the Negro on the gravel downstream, whose spirit was running out with the flux from his bowels, the cries and curses and the squawking of the parrot that Lázaro had netted and was plucking alive for his warped entertainment.

He welcomed the rain. If the rain continued the river might flood. Let it rise and carry away all the boards, posts and tools, the canoes and flimsy fern-frond shelters, wipe out the trenches, and sweep away everyone, himself included. And he would drown, of course, since he could not swim with his feet dragging chains, but he accepted that prospect. He had seen worse deaths.

On the road from San Juan de Ulúa many of the injured had died slowly. They had been starved and stripped of most of their clothes, driven across deserts and forced to climb icy mountains, beaten for stumbling, half-strangled by ropes, unable even to scratch with their hands trussed behind their backs, those that had two hands left. Some had lost limbs or were badly burnt. He would have remembered them better, except for the blurring that settled like mist over his memory, pushing the worst thoughts further back. He thought of his own burnt hand after the skin had healed, and his pride in the scar that was proof, so his father said, that he was both brave and blessed.

‘Thou hast fortune’s mark, if e’er I seen it, and thou bist manful to have borne it well,’ his father had said while tracing the print of the horseshoe’s curve. Then he had made Kit raise his hand as if in a signal to stop. ‘Hold thy hand up so, and thy luck will ne’er run out.’

Ever afterwards Kit had used the gesture in the best of his games: the duels he had fought with Will in their make-believe
wars.
Though Will was bigger, Kit had rarely lost. If ever he came close to being forced to submit, the power of the mark would always protect him, or so he believed – but only Will knew its secret.

He raised his hand from the water and stretched it flat, the scar remained, a pearly white. Its shape was like a crescent moon, and twinkling near it was another gold nugget even bigger than the last. He placed the find in his neck pouch and held his hand before his face, thinking of all his luck that must have fallen out to leave him indifferent, even to gold.

He had tripped over Will – that was how the burn had been caused, and at first, to his shame, he had blamed his older brother. Will had been running about in the village, and he close behind. They had been chasing in and out of doorways on the way home from dame school, but Will had stopped inside the smithy, sensing the danger too late, and Kit had plunged on regardless and taken a tumble near the forge. He had fallen with his hand against a searing shoe, just as the blacksmith was about to hammer it to shape, and only narrowly had he escaped with his fingers still whole. That was his luck, and to be chided, not beaten; Will’s punishment had been worse. Then his pain had eased with his hand in a bucket, thrust under water, cooled just as now.

Kit bared his palm in the foaming stream. He was prodded with a stick, but did not react. He bent his head and stared down. The water was frothing like the flow in a leat, and rushing with it were memories of home: the smell of Orcheton coombe, its mud and grass, the heavy boughs of the walnut tree that skimmed the surface of the upper pool. And he imagined walking the worn-down drovers’ track, hearing the pounding against the
waterwheel,
and the muffled rumble of the grinding stones. His mother was there in the kitchen, offering him a taste of freshly made jam: raspberry and apple, tart and sweet. Then he was with his sisters, collecting eggs from the coop, and his hand was deep in the warmth under the breast of a hen.

If he shed a few tears, no one would have known; the rain was falling in torrents.

He glanced round and saw one of the hirelings furiously scrabbling around a sluice upstream.

‘
Oro, oro! Aqui!
. . .’

The man’s shouting was lost beneath a sharp clap of thunder that ripped loud and rolled on. The deluge increased until all Kit could see was rain-streaked and greyed. It was lunacy to continue, but the gold had overwhelmed Lázaro’s sense and his helpers’ as well.

The Negro slaves toiled, almost naked, hacking away at the riverbank, causing great sections of earth to fall into the flow. The channels overran as they shovelled in grit. Even Lázaro was madly searching, lank hair dripping, bent over a trap. But watching the frenzy, Kit felt at peace, and the Indian who struck him made little impression. Kit did not turn or try to move. If he did not struggle, the shackles hurt less. He knew who was beating him: a small, wizened hireling with a beaded collar of seeds and bones, whose smile revealed the blackened stumps of teeth. The smile was one he preferred not to see. There was a time when he had held the man’s whip, but such power as that had given him he had thrown away. He had lost his small liberties by trying to escape.

It had felt like flying: that moment of running, tearing through the jungle. Though he had known the risk, there had been joy in
his
blundering. His downfall had been the freeing of the slaves, and that was not from any noble motive – he was honest with himself – but because he recognised he could never last alone, and then he had wanted to live. Lázaro had been alerted by the smashing of the chains; noise carried far along the river valley. There had been no way to soften the sound, and Lázaro’s dogs had soon hunted him down. Only one man managed to evade recapture for a while, and then the search had become a game, deliberately prolonged, while the Indians made sport with their tracking skills, driving the man down the valley, hemming him in against the river, until exhaustion overcame his will and eventually he dropped.

Kit hung his head. Lázaro made no secret of what had happened to his quarry; he wanted everyone to know, and to know the fault was Kit’s. The man had been bound with vines, dragged bleeding to the water’s edge, weighted with rocks and abandoned for the lizards to find: the alligators and caimans. Days later, all the slaves had been taken to see the little that was left, and Kit had shuffled with them, his ankles in fetters. But he did not remember
what
he had seen, the mist settled over that. Instead he thought of friends he had known much longer ago.

Why had he not been executed in Mexico? He should have died then. Some things were clearer, looking back. There were too many English prisoners to put to death all at once. The sanction of the Inquisition would have been needed for that, and the Inquisition was in Spain. Had anyone been taken there? He did not know. He remembered the crush of men in the Viceroy’s dungeon, the last Englishmen he had seen. What had happened to them? Maybe they, too, had been auctioned off in the Viceroy’s
Palace,
then taken to places far away. The Spaniards probably thought that they would be no threat, scattered wide, and worked like slaves.

He had heard of no Englishman since the day he was sold, bought for his strength to row in a galley. And perhaps, afterwards, the Spaniards had supposed his spirit would be broken, and that was why he had been freed from his bonds, and sent out with Lázaro to find river gold in Panamá. Kit knew the way the Spaniards thought; it was beneath their dignity to be seen to work, and every settler needed overseers for his slaves. What better job for an Englishman to do? They believed he would not bolt because he was alone in a strange land, with no possible sanctuary and nothing to gain by running away, so why would he try?

But he could not live the Spanish way, he could not forget his English tongue, worship the saints in Latin and defer to peasants who had won titles through murder and pillage. He had been captured but not tamed. And now he understood why some of those Negroes that General Hawkins had taken had died on the
Jesus
for no clear reason. He was dying, just the same.

The lash struck him again but he did not care. The river was rising and he did not move. He stared at the commotion around the upper sluice.

Through the driving rain, beyond Lázaro and the slaves, he could see earth sliding fast down the side of the valley; it fell in scarlet streams. Cloudbursts sometimes caused the land to slip, and Kit imagined that might be happening, except that a man dropped down behind the tumbling dirt, and he was armed with a bow. Kit saw him clearly, and another, and another, some with clubs. The men crept closer, in the shallows, along the river’s
course.
Who were they? Kit stood and watched, waiting to be shot by one of the archers. They were all African blacks and daubed with dyes, half-armoured and clothed in strange trappings and rags. Those without helmets had locks like manes or heads that were shaved. He had heard of bands of escaped slaves who lived wild in the mountains:
cimarrones
, the Spaniards called them – ‘mountain-top dirt’, the name implied. He supposed the marauders were
cimarrones
but no one else appeared to notice, until Lázaro turned and pelted screaming downstream.

The screaming ended as Lázaro was struck: a blow to the head made by a giant with a cudgel. The crack echoed once above the river’s roar. The mess was like the spurting earth, and then Lázaro was gone beneath the bubbling flow. The slaves scrabbled round, dragging their chains. They lifted stones, and hurled them on top. Nothing remained visible beyond the water spouting up. But Kit saw one of the hirelings. The river carried him bobbing near the bank, banging against the boards not far from Kit’s feet, turning the water even redder with the blood from his throat.

Kit looked up to see an invader drawing a bow, taking aim at his chest. He stood where he was and the ending was silent, drowned beneath the water’s rush. He was surprised to still be standing. Then he looked round. A canoe was drifting away downriver, but rocking, unbalanced and half-hanging from it was the other Indian hireling. Everything paled. He did not want to die with his brains smashed out, or his neck half severed. He had hoped for an arrow clean through the heart. But another of the
cimarrones
was charging straight for him, wielding a sword. Kit seized the pouch from the cord around his neck and held it out, palm flat.