The Emerald Storm (34 page)

Lambeau, too, wanted to escape home before taken by fever.

That manipulation by my criminal ally was clever enough.

Even better was Astiza’s suggestion of a preliminary ruse, so calculated that I wished I’d thought of it myself. The same night we rowed to the rock, the ketch drifted between
Le Diamant
and Martinique to drop several half-filled kegs into the sea. By dawn they were bobbing past the rock opposite our hiding place. We heard excited cries when the garrison scrambled to salvage this flotsam. Everybody loves to beachcomb.

Even better, the kegs were half full of rum.

“Obviously you’ve studied the English navy,” I told Astiza.

“I’m a student of human nature and know how lonely and stupefyingly boring it must be to be stationed on that rock. Those half-full kegs will be a quarter full by the time they’re hoisted to where the commander can inspect them, and British aim will be degraded accordingly. Nor will their lookouts be as alert. The first goal in any battle is to help the enemy destroy itself.”

“You sound like Napoleon, my lovely.”

“I’ve studied with you, my devious electrician.”

So how could I get Martel to help destroy
himself
, when the time came?

It was hot and boring while we bobbed, waiting for the gunnery duel to begin. Orbiting birds, clearly annoyed by this human interest in their castle, occasionally spattered our boat with retaliatory guano. The sky turned grayer. As rum was sneaked, voices from the top of the rock increased in volume. Laughter, songs, angry commands, heated lectures . . . yes, the liquor had gone to work. Then more shouts when the bomb ketch was spotted bearing down on the rock opposite us, the mortar on its deck a gaping mouth.

Maybe this insanity would really work.

What if the treasure wasn’t here?

Then either Martel or I would never emerge from the cave alive, I guessed.

At two o’clock we heard the bang of the mortar and then a crash as a bomb erupted somewhere above. Fragments of stone and shell flew wide and pattered the sea around like a rain of gravel. Martel smiled. “It has begun. All eyes will be on the ketch.”

There was another thud, answering the first, and another, and another, as English guns replied. An artillery duel was soon fully under way. We expected that even drunken English gunnery would eventually drive away our ship, and I worried a lucky shot might hit my wife and son. We had to be quick.

Casting off from Diamond Rock, we swiftly pulled ourselves out to where Jubal had set the buoy and readied our makeshift diving bell. “The guess that we’re in the right place is mine, so the risk is, too,” I said manfully. I’m not really that brave, but I wanted as much control over our situation as I could manage.

So I slipped over the side holding our longboat by one hand and a sack of musket balls in the other. The leaded rum barrel was upended over my head, its leather harness keeping me in position when I let go the side of our boat. My head and shoulders were above water, my body immersed, and my only view was through the small glass we’d fashioned. The weight of lead and musket balls sank me like a sack of grain, and I plunged about fifteen feet before my feet landed on an underwater rock. I looked out at the sea. I was in a bubble of breathable air inside the diving bell. I swayed and steadied. A line led from our contraption to the buoy, through a ring, and on to the stern of our longboat. The leather air bags were tied behind me. My companions would pull themselves back out of sight while I explored, but in a quarter hour would haul back on the keg, whether I was attached or not.

If things were going well, I was to tack a white handkerchief, like the white cloths we’d tied onto the powder barrels on Saint-Domingue. It would be a sign I’d found the treasure. Then Martel could decide whether to follow me inside the Diamond.

I gave myself half odds, so I made Martel swear a promise. “If I drown, you must release my wife and son.”

“Agreed. They’ll then be of no use. See? I am a gentleman.”

“You’re a schemer.”

“Yes. We’re brothers, you and I.”

Now I took stock at the bottom of the sea. I could see, barely, the triangular opening of the cave and the glorious sea fans at its entrance that undulated as if waving encouragement.
Ethan, in here!
Was it Ezili speaking, or some other siren luring me to my death?

The thud of artillery carried through the water.

I spilled some of the musket balls to give myself more buoyancy. Trimming the diving bell was like operating the altitude of a balloon, and I hovered a few feet off the rock I’d initially landed on.

Then the current caught me, and I was pulled toward the dark opening. The barrel scraped a side, caromed toward the other, bounced again, and slid into blackness. It was like falling into a hole, with no way to climb back out.

But what was inside might change the world.

Chapter 38

I
was briefly in utter blackness. There was a quick blue glow, as if a crevice was letting in light from above—was that where Jubal had taken breath?—and then darkness again, as forbidding as a sewer. On I swirled, bobbing in my barrel. I’d gambled that the rock was only a few hundred yards wide and that the cave couldn’t go far, but what if the ocean descended to the very bowels of the earth?

Only the need to bargain for my family kept me from panicking and signaling to be pulled back out.

Suddenly I yanked to a stop, and at first I thought my companions
were
trying to reverse me. I looked out my porthole for a landmark, but all was dark outside the little window. I had a faint glow inside my contraption from the bottle of fox fire, but it illuminated little but my own hands. Then I realized the trailing line must have snagged. I loosened my harness, plunged my head down into the sea, and reached outside the barrel with my arm to jerk. The line finally freed, and the barrel floated forward once more.

I hurriedly rose back into its air space and continued like a leaf in a drain, blind and stuffy. Then I slammed rock and could feel, with my feet, a cliff face. I was at a dead end, pinned by current. Darkness like pitch, my breath going stale.

I refreshed my air first, hauling in one of Astiza’s leather bags and bringing its stopper into my little air space inside the diving bell. I released the plug and felt my head clear.

And now, time to explore.

I released myself from the harness, took a breath, and swam out and upward, feeling for the cave ceiling.

Instead, I broke clear of the surface. I was in a grotto.

I sucked in air. I could breathe! The cliff where the diving bell had grounded was wet, rough, and silent. There was no sound of guns or sea. I felt until I found a ledge above water. I dared go no farther lest I lose the position of the diving bell, so I calculated the few feet I’d come, carefully worked my way that distance back, and felt the barrel with my feet. I reached inside my shirt for the white cloth, dove, and pushed its tack into the barrel’s soft lead. This would signal it was safe to enter the cave. Just as I did so the bell jerked as if with a life of its own and began to be hauled in by my companions. The quarter hour was up.

I swam to the ledge and hauled myself out. Let there be light.

Having learned my lesson at the battle of Vertières, I unwrapped an oilskin parcel with flint, steel, tinder, candle, and a phosphor bottle. I carefully uncorked the latter invention and withdrew a splinter. It flared just enough to light my fuzz of oiled cotton and wood shavings. Then I lit the candlewick, and shadows retreated even more. I put the wax taper in a crevice, seeming bright as a chandelier after utter blackness. The pool I’d emerged from glittered.

Finally I looked about.

I was sitting below a rock dome that peaked fifteen feet above the surface of the sea. There was a crevice above, an old volcanic vent that must be providing distant air. Everywhere but where I sat the dome plunged sheer into the sea. But behind . . .

I turned and jumped. An alligator crouched, giving me a toothy grin as if it had been waiting patiently for dinner to crawl out of the sea. Its teeth gleamed.

But this monster was golden, I realized, its eyes great emeralds and its rows of teeth quartz crystals. It was long as my arm. Behind, receding into the shadows, was a reef of gold and silver. I’d found a dragon’s hoard of necklaces and crowns, great silver wheels with mysterious writing, and sculpted animals studded with gems. On some the turquoise and jade was bright as the sunny Caribbean, and the workmanship as exquisite as anything in Nitot’s jewelry shop. There were also little hillocks of loose emeralds, green as a model of Ireland.

I’d found Montezuma’s lost treasure, or at least what was left of it. This remnant equaled the wealth of a thousand kings. Whole armadas could be financed, I calculated. Palaces erected, armies recruited, cathedrals built. How had the salvagers been persuaded to leave it here?

As if in answer, I realized there were adjacent piles of white, and I looked more closely. Bones, lots of them. Skeletons clustered around the hoard like soldiers at a campfire. Their skulls looked at the treasure as if in reproach, flesh and clothing long rotted away.

The Maroons had apparently never reemerged. Killed to keep a secret? Trapped by the current? Or sacrificing themselves to bury a discovery too dangerous to harness, as Astiza suggested?

Superstition.

All I knew is I didn’t want to join them.

I crawled to the booty for inspection. There were hideously beautiful metal masks, jade-tipped swords, and golden necklaces as heavy as slave collars. Golden toys rolled on tiny wheels, and simple cast bars of precious metal were stacked like bricks. I suspected the conquistadors had melted some of the Aztec art down for transit.

Finally there were curious triangular objects I didn’t recognize at all: sausage-shaped machines with delta wings and helmeted riders. They were contraptions different than anything I’d ever seen, except that they reminded me of the reckless canvas goose at Fort de Joux that madman George Cayley had launched into the air.

They were, in short, flying machines, or at least representations of one.

Maybe Martel was more than just a lunatic. Was there really enough detail to allow French savants to devise something to fly the English Channel?

I knelt as if before saints, overcome by the fabulousness of the find and bewilderment at its meaning. How and why had escaped slaves salvaged this from some storm-washed reef and carried it here for hiding? They’d avoided the temptation of spiriting it away and spending. Why? Had they no greed? Or had the treasure tricked and trapped them here?

There was a splash behind, and I jumped again. But it was only Martel, surfacing from the diving bell as lithe as a seal. He hauled himself up beside me, shook water from his thick hair like a dog (me quickly shielding the candle from this idiocy), and then gaped at the wealth of an empire. For a moment, even he was at a loss for words.

Eventually he crawled to one of the peculiar birdlike toys, gingerly holding it as if it were magic and might fly away on its own. He had an almost boyish look of wonder and triumph.

“I told you so, Gage.”

Chapter 39

I
realized why no one had ever retrieved the treasure of Montezuma when I attempted to exit with a handful. The seawater didn’t dead-end in the cavern; it found another underwater crack and continued, possibly all the way through Diamond Rock. This meant there was a constant tide running into this cave, and none out. Without help, it was a tunnel of no return. No wonder it contained bones of the dead!

I plunged into the pool, strapped inside the diving bell, and jerked the rope for Jubal to pull me out, and that’s the only way I emerged alive. Escape was like trying to breast a river while encased in a sausage. My black friend had returned the longboat to its hiding place and swum to a perch above the cave entrance to handle the towline, but even with that platform he had to haul like a longshoreman.

His reward was when I unstrapped myself, surfaced, and held up a golden necklace heavy enough to make its wearer stoop from the weight.

“It’s really there, Jubal!”

“By Damballah’s scales, that collar alone is enough to start rebuilding my country.”

“Ezili favors us, I think.”

“Ezili favors herself, as our French partner favors himself. Everyone has their own dreams.”

Yes. Once we got the treasure out we’d have more temptation than schoolboys at a brothel. In the meantime, we all had to work on trust.

“I’ll swim this underwater to the buoy anchor, drop it on the bottom, and go get more.”

He pointed toward the sky. “Hurry. The weather’s getting worse.”

I looked. The sea was grayer, waves higher. I could still hear the artillery duel, but it was beginning to be muted by the drum pound of surf. I hoped our bomb ketch would pull away soon, before my family got hurt. “Maybe that will make it easier to sneak under the noses of the British.”

“Agwe, the sea
loa
, is restless. Something’s wrong, Ethan.”

“Jubal, if you saw the wonders of that cave, you’d realize that everything is finally very right.”

His nod conveyed doubt. “Why did the Maroons bring and hide it here? Why did they never come back for it?”

“They left their bones. We won’t.”

“Maybe we should just leave Martel now, and go, with the necklace and the longboat.”

“No, his men have my family. And there’s an entire treasury down there. This is payback for all you’ve suffered, Jubal: years of war, the loss of your lover.”

“I don’t think life balances its ledger.” He sighed. “How many trips to carry it all out?”

“Dozens.”

“I can’t pull that long.” The black glanced upward. There were flashes like thunder against the clouds, the crash of British artillery. “It’s too hard to pull you or Monsieur Martel through the tunnel so many times. You send him out next to help me. Then you fill a sack, tie it to the barrel, and we just pull that. We empty the treasure, you pull back this line, and together we transfer all the gold and jewels to the anchor. The last time you come out with the diving bell.”