The Buccaneers (3 page)

“It's more than many,” he said. “And farther than most. Why, I've seen men cross puddles in the street and look back to see what a voyage they've made.”

I grinned at the thought of that. But I didn't tell him that my first time at sea had ended in a wreck on the Tombstones, nor that my second had nearly led to the loss of a second ship—the
Dragon
herself.

“Well, you're lucky, Mr. Spencer,” said Horn. “You've got a lively ship, and a pleasant captain, too. He seems kindly.”

“He is,” I said.

“Have you known him long?”

“All my life,” said I. “When I was a boy, I—”

“Why, you're still a boy,” said Horn.

“When I was a
child
, then, I called him Uncle Stanley.”

“Did you?” Horn smiled, his blue eyes as bright as the sea.

“He's not my real uncle,” I said. “He was a partner in my father's business. But he didn't care for the office and the books, so he went to sail the ships instead.” It pleased me that Horn wanted me there, where he always stood alone. “When I was a
child
, I wished that he were my father, or that my father were more like him.”

“And that's how you come to be sailing on his ship?”

“It's how
he
comes to be with
me,”
I said. “My father owns the
Dragon.
I chose the captain, and together we chose the crew. They've all been hands on my father's ships.”

“Except the gunner.”

“Yes,” I said. “Except for him.”

The wheel turned and his arms moved, and I thought that if a ship could love, the
Dragon
loved Horn. She fairly flew with him at the helm.

“He's scared of the sea,” said Horn.

“Mr. Abbey?” I asked.

“Your captain.”

“He is not,” I said.

“He keeps his cabin darkened, his curtains drawn.”

“He's
always
been a sailor.”

“A coastwise sailor,” said Horn.

He was right. Stanley Butterfield had done all his sailing close to land. “But he's not afraid,” I said.

“We'll see, Mr. Spencer,” said Horn.

He turned his face up to the sails, and it was clear that he meant to say no more. I made my way forward and sat at the bow, my favorite spot on the ship. The enormous carved dragon that once had plucked me from the sea chewed the waves in wooden teeth, and spat out foam and spray.

I loved the fury of it, the smash of water breaking in the open mouth. The secret hatch in that dragon's throat was sealed forever now, the compartment behind it reached only from inside the hull. That space, a relic from the
Dragons
smuggling past, was so dark and cramped that we called it the Cave. But it still echoed all the thunder of the sea and gave a voice to the
Dragon
, a deep and constant roar. I settled there at the bow, to watch and listen, and the last person I wanted beside me was Roland Abbey. But he sat at my side. “You were talking to Horn,” he said.

“What of it?” I asked.

“Oh, it's nothing to me,” said the gunner. “Myself, I'd rather talk to the fish. I'd get more answers from them.”

“You don't like him,” I said.

“I don't trust him,” said Abbey. “Do you know what he's called in the fo'c's'le?”

“No,” I said.

“Spinner. He'll spin you a fine little yarn any moment you please.” Abbey bared his teeth in something less than a smile. “He spins lies into truth, that Horn. He weaves whole pictures from lies, until you'd swear what you see is the truth.”

“What lies has he told?” I asked.

“What truths has he told?” countered Abbey.

The sea frothed toward our feet as the
Dragon
met a wave. The great carved head disappeared, then rose again in a churn of froth.

“Did he tell you why he turned away when he saw us?” asked Abbey. “Eh, Mr. Spencer? Did he tell you that? Or how he fled from a packet in a boat that was built by the navy? Or who it was that took a lash to his back?”

“I didn't know that anyone did,” I said. I hadn't seen the man without a shirt.

“If he says it was the cat, he's lying.” The sun gleamed in Abbey's glass eye. “The cat-o-nine-tails doesn't do a thing like that to a man.”

“A thing like what?” I asked.

“Butchery.” He spat the word. “It's something Henry Morgan might have done. Or Captain Kidd, to while away a Sunday.”

“The buccaneers?” I said.

“Aye. It's their sort of work.”

“But they're dead.”

Abbey cocked his head. “Are they?” he asked mysteriously.

“Well,
aren't
they?” I snapped.

He looked at me with his blind eye open, his good one closed, and I didn't know if he meant to squint at me or wink. “It's not so long ago that Kidd went to the gallows. Why, the last of his shipmates died not six months ago.”

“He must have been more than a hundred years old,” I said.

“Aye, he looked it, all right,” said Abbey. “He died hard, ranting away about blood and bones and buried treasure. Died at low water, the old parrot he had squawking like a dervish, a parade of fools come to learn the secret of Captain Kidd's treasure.”

“Where is it?”

“In the Indies, of course.”

I felt a twinge of excitement, a tingling in my breast. From the tales I had read of the buccaneers I imagined the
islands were riddled with treasure pits. “Where in the Indies?” I asked.

“Maybe Spinner can tell you.”

I turned toward the wheel, leaning sideways to see round the masts. The sails cast big, square shadows on the deck, but a shaft of sunlight fell on Horn where he stood on the quarterdeck, more like a god than ever.

“Look at him,” said Abbey. “Thinking he's better than anyone else. Telling me how to care for my guns.”

“Ah,” I said softly. I understood then why the man disliked Horn so much. Nothing would anger the gunner more than being told how to look after his cannons.

“He told me to load them with chain,” said Abbey. “Chain! When it's roundshot that you-want against pirates.”

His fierceness alarmed me. “What makes you think we'll be fighting pirates?”

“Well, there's always a chance,” he said, and looked down at the sea. “My guns are getting hungry.”

I nearly laughed at the tone of his voice. It was all he wanted, I could see—to get a crack at a pirate ship, to relive a bit of the glory from his years long past. I remembered the day he'd come aboard, wrapped in his tattered cloak, a beggar boy at his heels to carry his canvas duffel. “Who's that old blind man?” I'd asked my father, and he'd laughed an embarrassed sort of laugh. “Why, that's your gunner,” he'd said.

I looked at Abbey now, and had to squint against the glare in his glass eye.
“Are
there still pirates?” I asked.

“Picaroons!” he said, using an ancient word as though that alone diminished them. “It's all that's left, and not many of them. Keep clear of Hispaniola, stay away from Cuba
and New Orleans, and you'd find a kangaroo before you'd see a picaroon.”

It was hard to tell if he saw this scarcity of pirates as a pleasure or a disappointment. But then his rage at Horn bubbled again to the surface. “Chain!” he said. “If you're close enough for
that
, the battle's lost.”

He knocked his fist on the deck and cursed. “It will be a grand day when we fetch Jamaica and Horn goes ashore for good.”

“He's not going ashore,” I said.

The gunner looked up. “You didn't sign him aboard, did you?”

“Yes,” said I. “He made his mark, an albatross.”

“The
man's
an albatross.” Abbey grunted. “Never touches land. Watches everything and seldom speaks. Listen, Mr. Spencer: no good has ever come from an albatross. No good at all. And ill befall the one who harms him.”

T
he stories of Horn and his sea chest flew round and round the ship like birds through a house of glass. I heard from George Betts that the box was full of pistols, and from Harry Freeman that it was shaman's bones that rattled in there. But in the end, the story that Abbey told was the one that came to be seen as the truth, though neither he nor anyone else had ever lifted the lid of that strange and wonderful chest.

“I don't
need
to see inside it,” Abbey told me one day. By his own account, he was the expert on Jonahs. “I
know
what's in there.”

“Then tell me,” I said. And I listened to his story, then went below to tell it again to the captain.

It was just after noon on Horn's twelfth day aboard, and we sat in the shadows of the curtained cabin while Butter-field worked out his sextant sights.

“Abbey says he knows what Horn keeps in his chest,” I said.

“Does he?” Butterfield was thumbing through his almanac. “And what does he say, exactly?”

“That it's full of bits of ships,” I said. “That Horn travels from one to another and takes something from each.”

The captain sniffed. “What a strange pastime. Why would he want to do that?”

I tried to tell him in the same words that I'd heard from Abbey. I remembered how the sun had glinted in the glass eye, and how that wizened head with its helmet of gray hair had turned up toward me. “All those pieces of wood, those bits of metal, they're his Jonah charms. He uses them in voodoo magic,” I said.

The captain laughed wholeheartedly. “Jonah charms! You don't believe that rubbish, do you?”

“No, sir,” I said, though in truth I had started to wonder. “But I'm afraid others might. I'm afraid Abbey will turn their heads.”

Butterfield jotted numbers on a bit of paper. “What would you do about it, John?”

“We could have Horn open the chest and show us what he keeps in there.”

“And lose his trust?” said Butterfield. He turned to his reduction tables, to such long columns of numbers that I felt dizzy to see them. “No, it's best to let this run its course.”

“But where will it end?”

“It will just peter out, I should think.” He ran his finger down the columns. “Our Mister Abbey's got his nose out of joint. The crew have never looked up to
him
, much to his dismay. It's no wonder he doesn't like Horn.”

The captain got down to his business then, his strange mathematics. He turned his sextant angles into a real place
on earth, and
that
—to me—was voodoo magic. Every day for twenty days I had listened as he'd tried to teach me. But I'd never had a head for numbers, and hadn't learned a thing. So we had both given it up as a hopeless task, and this was the first time that I'd seen him do the sights in all the time that Horn had been aboard.

Now I watched as he worked out his time and his distance, and I waited for the moment when he would take up his pencil, make a mark on the chart, and tell me, “Handy-dandy, here's where we be.” Twenty times I had heard him tell me that. And at last he said it again.

But this time there was a terrible doubt in his voice. And he added, “Or it's fairly close, I hope.”

I looked at the chart and saw that his crosses didn't line up. They marched in a nearly perfect line out of the Channel, south to the trades, and west across the ocean. But then they took a dogleg, a sudden bend that seemed very odd to me, and carried on with greater space between them. I counted back along the crosses, and saw that the break in the line marked the day that Mudge had sent the sextant flying from the locker.

“You don't know where we are,” I said. “Do you?”

“Not exactly,” he admitted. “Mudge has made a liar of the sextant.” Butterfield tapped his pencil on the last of his crosses. “You see? It's telling me we're here, but I know we're not.”

“Then where are we?” I asked.

He sketched a large circle around the cross. “Somewhere in here, I suppose. But it doesn't matter, really. We can only carry on and find out where we are when we get there.”

I shook my head, the dizzy feeling coming back. “But why are they farther apart?”

“Why do you think?” asked Butterfield.

“The
Dragons
going faster now?”

“Exactly,” he said.

“Then we're running with our eyes closed.”

He smiled. “Yes, in a manner of speaking. But if the wind stays steady we're bound to hit the Indies, just not at the point we were aiming for.”

“You'll get a new sextant in Kingston?” I asked.

The captain gaped at me. “I most certainly will not. Sextants aren't like oranges, John. You don't pick a new one from a basket.” He shook his head. “I've had mine for longer than you've been alive, and I'd like to keep it, thank you very much. When I learn the error, I'll know what correction to make. There's no danger then, once we know where we are.”

I was barely listening. As Butterfield spoke I'd been staring at the crosses, counting them again. And now I thought that what they really marked was Horn's first morning aboard. It seemed that he had brought a new strength to the
Dragon
, and was sending her rushing along toward a place that was known only to her. Or only to her and Horn.

“Oh, blast that Mudge!” Butterfield threw his pencil down. It landed on the chart, but moved no farther. Nothing moved: not the lamp or the curtains or the pistol on its peg. Horn was steering, and his shadow fell through the skylight and lay on the table. “Ah, Horn,” said Butterfield.

“You don't think he's a Jonah, do you?” I asked.

“Of course not,” said the captain. “It's a travesty to ask me that.”

“Why?”

“Read your Bible, John. Jonah the prophet was trying to flee from God when the storm came up that nearly sank his ship. Yes, God made the storm and, yes, He calmed the seas when Jonah was pitched over the side. But why? To save the ship? Not on your life! To save the prophet, John. God would never let the prophet drown.”

I couldn't argue with Butterfield when it came to the Bible. He knew it back to front. Yet I could see that things had changed in the days that Horn had been aboard. Dana Mudge had become a pariah for his part in breaking the sextant. Mr. Abbey was still wallowing in gloom, and the captain was beset with worries. And now the winds were blowing harder, driving the
Dragon
on her secret course.