The Buccaneers (4 page)

Butterfield put away his sextant and his almanacs. I watched Horn's shadow tilt across the table, his arm moving with the wheel as the
Dragon
slithered through the waves.

“What do
you
think he carries in his chest?” I asked.

“I neither know nor care,” said he. “Now that's enough of that. If there's anyone on this ship who means any harm, it's our blasted gunner for spreading this nonsense.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“It seems the only head he's turned is yours. Now go on. I have to get my socks lashed down before Mudge takes the wheel again.”

I left the cabin and climbed up the companion-way, two rungs at a time. At the top, I came face to face with Horn. He was looking at the sails, singing barely over his breath the song called “Heart of Oak,” the tune that navy drummers
beat as ships sail into battle:
“Cheer up, my lads, ‘tis to glory we steer—
“ Then he found me, with that quick turn of his head, and the song ended on the instant.

“You sing as well as you steer,” I said.

He didn't answer. The
Dragon
leaned to a puff of wind; her wheel turned, his arms cranked, and she steadied herself before it. He was a part of the ship; he
was
the ship, it seemed.

His eyes passed over me, his gaze running down the luff of the mainsail, past me—and through me—to the wind-swollen jibs at the bowsprit. He had no thought for anything but the passage of the ship. I stepped up to the deck, anxious to hurry past him.

“She talks, doesn't she, Mr. Spencer?”

It was only an idle phrase, surely, the old idea that a ship could speak to a helmsman through the sound of her wood and rope, and tell him what trim she liked. But I thought of Turner Crowe, who'd met his death swinging from her halyards on my first voyage aboard the
Dragon.
He'd believed the schooner had a soul trapped inside her, the spirit of his son, which spoke to him at times in the creak of the
Dragon’
s planks.

“What does she say?” I asked.

“Why, what every ship says,” said Horn. “Every ship and every sailor. That she'd like to run forever where the water's deep and blue. That she's scared of the land. And if she had her fancy, she'd never see it again.”

It was almost like poetry, coming from Horn. The Jonah talk seemed silly then, nothing more than the ranting of a half-mad gunner.

But not an hour later my doubts came rushing back.

It was Mudge who saw it. Horn had given up the wheel only moments before, and had gone forward to his spot at the mast. The captain was on deck, standing beside me at the stern. To leeward, Mr. Abbey was staring aft, down our broken and weaving path through the waves. I saw Mudge stiffen and point.

“Land!” he cried. “I think I see land.”

The captain groaned. “Good Lord. He'd have to be mighty farsighted for that. We've hundreds of miles to go.”

But it did look like land. I peered past the sails and past the men who rushed to the bow, and I saw a tiny island with three bare trees that were tossing in the wind. It slipped behind the swells, then rose again, and I saw a line of surf at its shore. It vanished again, reappeared, and there seemed to be children swinging from the trees.

Horn stood up, but he didn't go forward with the others. He looked ahead at that strange land, then turned and looked at
me.
In the whole ship he was the only soul looking back, and Abbey didn't fail to notice.

“You'd think he'd seen it before,” said the gunner.

The
Dragon
rushed along. Mudge steered us toward that land, and I saw that it wasn't land at all. It was a ship, or the hulk of a ship, her bare masts rooted in a waterlogged hull. The swells rolled over her rail and burst in white spray on her cabins. And what I'd thought were children were the corpses of her crew.

They were dead; all dead. The sun had dried them into mummies, into things that hardly looked like men. They dangled in nooses from the yards and the stays, some close to the deck and others high above it. They all
swung back and forth, round and round. They made me think of shriveled flies, of a spider's prey hanging from its web.

We sailed close along her side, and our wake—as she rolled—slurped through the ragged wounds of cannon shots. The swinging corpses seemed to turn and watch us, and the lowest ones danced on the water.

“I told you!” cried Abbey. “Look where your Jonah brought us now.”

“Be quiet, man,” said Butterfield. He was trembling; his lips were white.

“Didn't he steer us here?” shouted Abbey. “In all the ocean this is where he brought us, to see his Jonah's handiwork.”

“Silence, I told you!” snapped Butterfield. The gunner's voice was loud enough to carry right to the bowsprit, and the crew were looking back at us now. “Take in the sails,” the captain shouted down at them. “Mudge, bring us into the wind.”

The men returned to their work, but Horn came aft. Walking at first, then running, he climbed to the quarterdeck with his hands in fists. Butterfield moved forward, stepping between him and Abbey.

“Cast him adrift,” cried the gunner to the captain. Abbey seemed quite pleased to have Butterfield where he was. “Give him command of his Jonah's ship and let him sail wherever he pleases.”

“I'm not a Jonah,” said Horn.

Abbey cackled. “You tell us, Spinner.”

“Sir,” said Horn, the first time I'd heard him use that word. “I'm blessed, I truly am. I'm the most blessedest man that ever was.”

“Oh, there's a fine yarn,” cried Abbey.

“I can prove it.”

“Give us another!” shouted the gunner.

“That's enough!” said Butterfield. “Mr. Abbey, you will please attend to your duties.”

The gunner tipped his head. “What duties?”

“Surely there's
something
you can do.”

“I could sink her,” said Abbey hopefully. “I could send her down where she belongs.”

“Very well.” The captain nodded. “Take the boat across and bring back those bodies. Get them ready for burial, then see to your guns.” He turned to Horn. “Now, what proof do you have?”

“Come below and I'll show you,” said Horn.

I
followed the captain, who followed Horn, from the quarterdeck to the bow, and down to the fo'c's'le. There the three of us stood at the foot of the ladder, in a space even darker than the captain's cabin, looking down at Horn's mysterious box.

There it sat, wedged beside the ladder, gleaming in the light from the scuttle. The beautiful beckets hung at the ends, lifting and falling with the roll of the ship, tapping at the wood. The skulls or the shaman's bones—or
whatever
was in there— seemed to answer with their own rattles and taps.

Horn reached inside his shirt. He pulled out a key that hung on a loop of sailmaker's twine. He dropped to his knees and bent over the chest, feeling along its front. Wood rasped against wood; Horn groped with the key still on his neck, and a hidden latch sprang open. He came up on his haunches and lifted the lid a fraction.

“What do they think I've got in here?” He looked up, and I was afraid to see those eyes of his, such a bright and honest blue. “Eh? What do they think is so important that it can sink ships and steer us to their wrecks like a witch's
compass?” He spoke like a schoolmaster to a pair of naughty children.

I could scarcely wait to see inside the box, and his delay annoyed me. “Well, what's so important,” I asked, “that you keep it under lock and key?”

“Privacy,” he said simply. “Respect.”

He threw the lid wide open and we leaned forward—the captain and I—and stared down at nothing but clothes. Duck trousers neatly folded, a shirt like the one he wore, a shore-going pair of shoes—all a bitter disappointment. He took them out, and underneath were bottles. A dozen or more were nested there, each covered to its shoulders in a thick woolen sock.

Butterfield laughed. I knew he was looking at me, but I didn't look back.

Horn put his hands into the box and took up one of the bottles. He held it as tenderly as the captain had held his sextant. Then he peeled back the cover. And I gasped.

There was a ship in his bottle. There was a beautiful, three-masted ship sailing on a sea painted with whitecaps. She flew a cloud of little sails, all cut from cloth and lashed to the yards in the proper way. The courses billowed, the topsails above them, studding sails set on mere slivers of wood. There was a curl of foam at her bow, a wake at her stern, and the tiny flags reached to the very top of the bottle.

Horn pulled the others out, one by one, and I gazed at miniature brigs and men-of-war, at frigates two to a bottle. Each was perfect. All were captured in their little worlds, granted by Horn the wish he believed they wanted, to run forever before winds that were fair.

“They were mine,” said Horn. “At any rate, I sailed on them.”

“They're wonderful,” said Butterfield.

Horn passed a bottle to him and another to me. Mine held a brigantine that tore through a stormy sea. Warped by the glass, the ship seemed to tilt and move, the little waves to break in streaks of foam.

“It's my life in these bottles,” said Horn. He began to put the others back, each in its sock, each in the chest. “If I lost one, I would lose everything that went with her, I think.”

The tiny ship was rigged with shrouds and stays, with topping lifts and sheets. I marveled as I examined her from every angle, even through the bottom of the bottle, where the glass was like a magnifier. I couldn't imagine how Horn had squeezed that model through the neck.

“That's the
Pointer Star,”
he said. “My first ship.” He reached up and tapped my bottle with his finger. “I took a shaving from her ribs to make the model. I took shavings from them all.”

Bits of ships.
So Abbey had come close to the truth, yet got it all wrong. For every real ship Horn had fashioned an offspring, a child identical to its mother.

I was touched by that. “You've made children of them all?”

“Children?” He smiled, his blue eyes glinting. “Yes, they're that,” he said. “But more like orphans, really.”

“What do you mean?” asked the captain.

Horn took the bottle from me. “What you see in here, it's all that's left. The
Pointer Star
lies fathoms down off the Fastnet rock.”

The
Dragon
rolled and the bottles shivered. Horn's voice dropped to a whisper. “It's the same with all the others. Their mothers are gone, every one of them. Some by cannon shot, some by storms. Some just disappeared.”

There was a creak of wood, a tremble of the hull, as the
Dragon
battered through a wave.

“Every one?” asked Butterfield.

“Every blessed one,” said Horn, and shook his head as though bemused. “It's the strangest, damnedest thing.”

I shared none of his humor. I felt icy cold to think that every ship he'd sailed upon had come to ruin. As he laid my bottle down among the others, I looked at his chest with its lid swung open, and a tingle went racing through my spine. It was a wooden coffin that Horn had built, a tomb for lost ships.

“So it's true,” I said. “You
are
a Jonah.”

“Not at all.” He seemed surprised that I would think it. “I'm blessed, as I told you. There's no one as blessed as me.”

“How?” I asked.

“Didn't you listen?” His eyes turned toward me, bright in the shadows. “The fates had it in for those ships; I don't know why. But they don't have it in for me, do they? Not a one of those ships perished while I was aboard.”

I looked at the captain, and he looked at me. Then he pointed at the chest. “Is your last ship in there?”

“No,” said Horn. “She'll be the next one.”

It sounded ominous the way he said it. “You mean the
Meridian Passage?”
I asked.

He frowned, then shook his head. “Packets don't count. Nor lighters and wherries. I only care about the ships I work, the ones I sign aboard.”

“Like the
Dragon, “
I said, with a shiver.

“Aye.” He fixed me in the stare of those blue eyes. “But don't worry, Mr. Spencer. There's no vessel as safe as the one that has old Horn aboard.” He winked, and it was like a lantern briefly shuttered. “As long as she keeps him there, you see.”

Ill befall the one who harms him.
I remembered Abbey's words.

“So now you know,” said Horn. The lock clicked into place as he closed the lid. “And now you can tell your gunner and all the others. You can tell them there's nothing but bottles in here.”

We all went up to the deck, where the crew of the wretched ship now lay in a row, wrapped in shrouds of canvas wrappings. They looked small, like children again.

Horn went off to help with the burial, the captain to fetch his Bible. I helped Abbey ready the guns and told him everything that we had seen and heard in the fo'c's'le.

“Only bottles?” he said as I finished. “They're a damn sight more than that. They're his Jonah charms, just as I told you.”

Indeed, he
had
come very close to the truth. But in
his
mind Horn was malicious, while in mine and Butterfield's he was merely dogged by bad luck. And I could see that nothing would change the gunner's mind.

We held a service in the sunshine for the poor souls whose names we never knew. We sent them below, where the sea was so deep that it was measured in miles and not fathoms. On the quarterdeck, Butterfield led us through a solemn hymn. He rattled off whole verses from the Bible, word for word, without once looking down at the book in
his hands. Then he said a little prayer and nodded to Mr. Abbey.

“Very well. You may commence firing,” he said.

It seemed odd to go straight from prayers to guns. But Roland Abbey at last seemed free of his gloom. His gray head bound in a scarlet neckerchief, he ordered us about as though the
Dragon
were a ship of the line. He did none of the shooting himself, but stood aside and shouted commands at the top of his voice.

My father, of course, had not bought the best of powder and shot. The guns sometimes fizzled, and a few of the shots soared off in curves, like errant cricket bowls. But that was no excuse for our dreadful gunnery; we didn't score a single hit until the ships drifted so close together that we might have bowled the balls across by hand.