On Stranger Tides (34 page)

The foremost Navy vessel tacked north, evidently intending to loop around and prevent any flight by Blackbeard to the east, but in a moment Blackbeard's sloop, the
Adventure,
was skating west before the wind across the smooth surface of Pamlico Sound, aiming straight as an arrow between the other Navy sloop and the Ocracoke Island shore, toward the inlet and the open sea beyond. Every man aboard the
Adventure
except Blackbeard was holding his breath, for the water was hardly more than six feet deep, and the tide was ebbing. Several even dug coins out of their pockets and flung them over the side—the sun hadn't yet cleared the hump of the island, and the coins fell lustreless into the smoke-gray water.

Richards was looking north, at the sloop that had hailed them. He laughed softly. “They're aground again!” he whispered.

Feeling suddenly very tired, Blackbeard drew one of his pistols and said, “Loose sails. We're going to pause to give these boys a broadside.”

Richards spun to face him. “
What?
We've
got
it right now, we can get away if we—”

Blackbeard raised the pistol and poked Richards in the mouth with the muzzle. “Loose sails and ready the starboard guns, damn you!”

“
Aye!
” said Richards in a voice that was nearly a sob, turning to relay the order. Most of the men gaped in surprise, but they could see the pistol, and Hands' retirement was still fresh in everyone's memory, and so they obeyed, and the
Adventure
slowed, sails fluttering loosely, and coasted up alongside the Navy sloop.

“Fire starboard guns!” Blackbeard roared, and the
Adventure
rocked as the guns went off, fouling the dawn air with billows of acrid smoke and raising a clamoring scatter of alarmed sea birds.

The smoke drifted away west, toward the inlet, and Blackbeard laughed to see the Navy vessel wallowing helplessly, her rigging blown to tatters and her rail and gunwales a ruin of torn wood.

“Set sail now?” pleaded Richards, eyeing the Ocracoke shore that was drawing slowly closer as the tide ebbed.

Blackbeard was looking at it too. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully after a moment, for it was too late.

The wind, fitful at best, had died, and though the pirates crowded on every square yard of canvas like starving fishers spreading nets, the
Adventure
was drifting.

The sloop to the north had got afloat again and the men aboard her had got their oars out and were rowing toward the
Adventure.

With the gentlest of jars, the
Adventure
went aground.

“Hurry up reloading the starboard guns!” called Blackbeard. “You lads,” he added to a gang of pirates who were desperately flinging barrels and lengths of chain over the side, “never mind that, you can't raise her faster than the tide's dropping her! Look to your pistols and cutlasses.”

The remaining Navy sloop was closing steadily. “Hold fire until I say,” said Blackbeard.

“Right,” said Richards, who had drawn his cutlass and was slowly whirling it at arm's length in a warm-up exercise. Now that there was no hope of avoiding the encounter, most of his anxiety had disappeared. He grinned at Blackbeard. “I hope this is the closest you ever do cut it.”

The giant pirate briefly squeezed Richards' shoulder. “Never this close again,” he said quietly. “I promise you.”

The Navy sloop was only a couple of dozen yards away now, and Blackbeard could even hear, over the knocking of the oars in the ports, grunts of effort from the rowers. He knew that the Navy captain must be considering when to discharge his own guns, and when things were a moment short of being lined up, Blackbeard called, “
Fire.
”

Again the Adventure's starboard guns boomed, lashing small-shot like a whistling scythe across the other vessel's deck. Bodies, punched off their feet, spun away like kicked debris in a spray of splinters and blood, and the pirates cheered—but Blackbeard, standing on the
Adventure'
s bowsprit, saw the young officer in charge hurriedly herding all his remaining ambulatory sailors belowdecks.

“Now the grenades!” Blackbeard yelled eagerly as soon as the last of the healthy Navy sailors had disappeared down the hatch.

The pirates happily got busy lighting the fuses protruding from the shot-and-powder-filled bottles, and, as soon as a sputtering fire was near a bottle's neck, pitching the thing across the gap onto the Navy vessel's deck. With a staccato series of bangs
the bottles exploded, flinging shot in all directions, ravaging the corpses on the deck and finishing off any Navy men who had been too badly hurt to get below.

“They're all dead, except three or four,” Blackbeard yelled, drawing his cutlass. “Let's board and cut 'em to pieces!”

Boarding proved easy, for the tide was pulling the Navy sloop toward them, and Blackbeard was able to leap across the gap onto the shot-raked deck; at the same instant the hatch cover was flung back and the officer in charge of the Navy sloop, a lieutenant by his uniform, scrambled up to the deck. Blackbeard bared his teeth in a grin so full of recognition and welcome that the lieutenant actually glanced behind himself to see what old friend the pirate-king had spied.

But behind him was nothing but a crowd of his own men scrambling up the ladder, the eighteen—of the original thirty-five—who could still wield a sword or fire a pistol. The pirates were leaping and clambering aboard right behind their chief, and the lieutenant and his men scarcely had time to draw their rapiers before the yelling pirates were upon them.

For the first few moments the deck was a chaotic riot of howling, clanging, stamping, chopping savagery, punctuated by the occasional bang of a pistol shot, as the pirates used their heavy cutlasses to hatchet through the line of Navy men and then turn back upon them again, and many of the Navy men's rapiers were broken in attempting to parry the sledge-hammer blows of weapons that caused nearly as much damage striking flat as they did striking edge on. The deck was soon slippery with the blood that spouted from wrist-stumps, undone bellies and opened throats, and the air that shook with yelling and clanking was foul with the hot iron smell of fresh blood.

But the Navy men had all along been trying simply to evade the ponderous swings of the cutlasses rather than oppose their
own fragile blades to them, and, after the first brutal couple of minutes, the panting, sweating pirates worked their ten-pound chunks of steel with less quickness and force, and the light rapier blades were able to dart in around the slow strokes, and puncture throats and eyes and chests. Though damaged less spectacularly, as many pirates were falling now as Navy men.

Blackbeard had wound up fighting by the mast, back to back with one of his men, but when a rapier point spun around the other pirate's descending cutlass and sprang in to transfix his heart, and he tumbled instantly limp to the deck, Blackbeard stepped away from the mast and with his left hand drew his last pistol.

The Navy lieutenant, standing in front of him, drew one of his own.

The two shots were nearly simultaneous, but while Blackbeard's ball missed and went skipping away across the shoals, the lieutenant's ball punched straight into the giant pirate's abdomen.

It rocked him back, but a moment later Blackbeard roared and leaped forward, whirling his cutlass in a chop that broke off the lieutenant's rapier blade an inch from the hilt; Blackbeard raised the cutlass again to split the man's head—but another Navy man stepped up behind the pirate and, with a full over-the-head swing like someone driving a stake, brought the heavy axe-like blade of a pike down onto Blackbeard's left shoulder, barely missing his ear. The collarbone snapped audibly and the pirate was slammed down onto one knee. He raised his head and then, incredibly, straightened his massive legs and stood up, swaying back just as the pike came whistling down again, so that it tore open his forehead and cheek instead of crushing his skull.

Blackbeard had dropped the fired pistol, but his good right hand still gripped the cutlass, and he swung it around in a horizontal arc that sent the pike-wielder's head and body tumbling, separately, across the deck.

Another pistol was fired directly into Blackbeard's chest, and as he staggered back, blood spattering onto the deck all around him, two rapiers were driven deep into his back; he whirled so quickly that one of them broke off in him, and his outflung cutlass broke the arm of the man who held the broken sword. Two more shots hammered into him and another blade chugged deeply into his side.

Finally he got his feet solidly under him and straightened to his full height—the Navy men drew back fearfully—and then, straight as a felled tree, he toppled forward, and the wet deck shook when he hit it.

“Jesus Christ,” exhaled the lieutenant, sitting down abruptly, his exhaustion-tense hands still locked around the fired pistol and the broken sword.

After a pause, one of the Navy men picked up Blackbeard's cutlass, knelt by the corpse and raised the heavy blade over his head, obviously trying to guess where, under the tumble of tangled black hair, the pirate-king's neck was. A moment later he made up his mind and swung the blade down; it crunched through Blackbeard's spine and into the deck and Blackbeard's severed head rolled over to stare at the sky with a strained but sardonic grin.

When the tide rose again in the early evening, the four battered sloops filed past Beacon Island and out through the Ocracoke Inlet. The surviving pirates were under armed guard aboard the
Adventure,
and Blackbeard's head swung from the Navy sloop's bowsprit. Blood had stopped dripping from the grisly trophy hours ago, and most of it had long since threaded away in the cold salt water to feed tiny fishes, but one clot had remained solid, and clung now to the hull of the sloop just below the water line.

It was, very gently, pulsing.

THE BANG of the pistol shot rolled away across the long harbor of New Providence Island, and though a glint showed on the deck of the
Delicia
as one of the Navy officers aboard her turned a glass on the shore, no one leaped up in fear of being murdered, or anticipation of seeing someone else be, as would have been the case six months ago, and Jack Shandy plodded barefoot across the hot sand to the chicken he'd beheaded with the pistol ball. It was evidently too early in the day for drink to have impaired his aim.

He picked up the head. As he'd feared, the beak had letters inked on it, and he let it drop.

Damn, he thought. So much for grilled chicken. I'm glad old Sawney hasn't started magicking the fever into lobsters yet.

He tucked the pistol into his sash and walked toward the fort. The darker-colored masonry of the new sections of wall gave the whole edifice a pied look, and Shandy thought it was probably the physical improvements, even more than the British flag and the presence of Woodes Rogers, the official governor, that had made mad old Governor Sawney move out of the place.

As he trudged toward the cluster of tents he glanced to his left at the harbor. There were fewer boats these days than there'd been before Rogers' arrival, and it was easy to spot the old
Jenny.
Shandy had abandoned his captaincy when he took the pardon three months ago, and Venner had stepped in and
declared himself captain. By that time, though, everybody had taken the pardon, and it was clear to most that the days of piracy were dead, and nobody felt that the issue of who might be captain of one battered old sloop was important enough to dispute, and so Venner's claim had stood. He had careened the vessel, cleaned her up and rerigged her, and it was obvious that he intended to violate his pardon and go back on the account. Shandy had heard that he was furtively recruiting a crew from among the segment of the island's population that missed the bad old days—he hadn't asked Shandy, and Shandy wasn't interested anyway.

The Navy brigantine he'd seen wending its way in among the shoals this morning was moored now, but though supplies were being unloaded and taken ashore, there was none of the festive atmosphere he would have expected—men were standing around in little groups on the beach, talking quietly and shaking their heads, and one of the prostitutes was sobbing theatrically.

“Jack!” someone called. Shandy turned and saw Skank hurrying toward him.

“Mornin', Skank,” he said when the young man stopped, panting, in front of him.

“Did you hear the
news
?”

“Probably not,” said Shandy. “If I did, I forgot it.”

“Blackbeard's dead!”

Shandy smiled reminiscently, as one might at learning that a game remembered from long-ago childhood is still being played by children today. “Ah.” He kept walking, and Skank trotted along beside him. “Pretty sure, this news is?” Shandy asked, pausing at the tent that served as a sort of open-air pub.

“Oh, aye, couldn't be surer. It was in North Carolina, a month ago. Half his men were captured, and old Thatch's head was brought right to the governor.”

“He died on the water, I daresay,” remarked Shandy, accepting the cup of rum he didn't even have to bother specifying any more.

Skank nodded. “Aye. He was in the Ocracoke Inlet, in a sloop called the
Adventure.
He'd hid the
Queen Anne's Revenge
somewhere, and all his lucre too, they say. They claim he didn't have a single
reale
aboard. That weren't like him, though—probably the Navy men took all the money.”

“No—I'll bet—” Shandy paused to take a long sip of the rum. “I'll bet he had hid it all.
Adventure,
eh? An apt name—it was
his
great adventure, I guess.”

Skank looked around at the tents and the beach and the half-sunk hulks of abandoned ships that Governor Rogers was already getting people to break up and carry away. “I guess this really isn't a pirate island any more.”