Voyage of Plunder (7 page)

I wondered why Josiah had told his crew that I had fallen asleep on duty when both he and I knew that I had, in fact, attempted to betray the pirates a second time. I wondered why he didn't, indeed, just toss me overboard as useless cargo. Part of
me wished he would, for then this nightmare would be ended. Tightening my belt around the mast, I slumped against it, unable to stop the heaviness of sleep.

The music continued, boisterous and merry.

I was dreaming of fresh bread, cider, and ham with beans when a hand clasped my ankle and yanked it roughly. Startled, I cried out.

Then, out of the darkness, an enormous, shadowy head loomed. Foul breath, rum, and armpit odor wafted over me as he snarled, “Hand over your locket, boy.” I heard the rasp of steel.

The shape lunged at me, but I dodged, horrified when my belt held me in place and I could scarcely move. I felt the slice of steel in my arm, cold and terrifying. He lunged at me again. “No!” I placed one foot squarely against his chest, meanwhile frantically trying to unlatch my belt. I heard breathing, ragged and desperate, vaguely realizing it was coming from me.

“Why, you—” the man started, but he said no more as I shoved his chest with all my might. I felt him slip, heard the whisper of metal as the dagger fell. He cursed, and I hoped for a brief moment that he might follow his dagger. But even as I thought it, he grabbed my ankle and climbed up my body as if he were climbing a rope.

My leg. My pants waist. My arm. My collar.

Me, fighting and struggling.

With a snarl, he wrenched my locket from my neck, then wrapped a giant hand about my throat and squeezed. “Foolish boy! You should have just given it to me!” My eyes bulged, and I couldn't breathe. I still fumbled with my belt, kicking him weakly. I felt myself fading.
No! Father, help me!

My belt snapped. Suddenly released, I fell. Away from the mast, away from the hand that crushed me. I screeched. I flailed through the air, reaching for something, anything.

I grazed the yard with my shoulder and bounced into the shrouds. It was like landing in a net, but a net set on its ear. I began to fall down the shrouds but grasped hold, nearly yanking my arms from their sockets. A body hurtled past me. A moment passed, no more, before there was a heavy thud below. Then came cries of surprise and an abrupt stop to the music.

The pirate—whoever he was—had fallen. From where I lay, clinging to the ratlines, I saw others gather around him, holding a lantern high.

“Dead,” said one, prodding the body with his foot. “Snapped his neck like a chicken.”

“Must've taken a bad step,” said another. “Always was a stupid oaf. Never liked him.”

“Owed me money, that one. Now he don't got to pay. Lucky bloke.”

They peered into the shrouds for a moment. “Oh, well,” one of them said, shrugging. “Maybe the kid did him in.” Everyone laughed as if it were a grand joke, the music started up again, and the pirates returned to their games of dice, to their dancing. The body lay crumpled on the deck, forgotten.

I crept down the ratlines, my legs like jelly. I could scarcely believe what had happened. Someone had almost killed me just to get his grimy hands on my locket! These men were beasts, all of them. I strode to the corpse. I pried open his fingers and yanked back my locket.

“Animal!” I screamed, kicking him. “Now you've done it! You've broken my chain!” I kicked him again and again, knowing he couldn't feel it, wishing he could. “Lay your filthy hands on me again, and I'll—I'll—kill you! A-again!”

“Daniel.” Josiah spoke from beside me, his voice silken. “Daniel, my boy, come with me.” He steered me away from the body. He steered me under the quarterdeck and into his cabin. I
let him steer me, for I did not care. I cared about nothing except my locket. No one, absolutely no one, was going to ever touch my locket again.

“Take this,” said Josiah. To my surprise, he handed me a sleek, polished dagger. It was eight inches long or thereabouts, slender, the steel engraved with a curled design. Its sheath was of mahogany, rich and red-grained.

I took the dagger, thinking,
The next man who touches me will feel this in his ribs.

“You're bleeding.” Josiah tossed me a rag, and I pressed it to my wound. I had forgotten I was wounded. I winced, suddenly feeling the pain.

“He attacked me.” My voice trembled with rage. “He had no right. He took my locket. He tried to stab me. He was strangling me. I couldn't breathe. He grabbed my locket and broke the chain. Next man who touches me gets it! I mean it! If anyone so much as …” I stopped talking because Josiah was looking at me strangely. “What?”

For a moment, Josiah said nothing. Then he uncorked a bottle of rum, filled two goblets, and handed one to me. “Odd how you would kill a man over a locket, don't you think, Daniel? Are we really so different?”

It was as if I'd been punched in the gut and all my air blown out. I sat staring at him, my mouth hanging open like the village dunce's. Then I hurled my goblet across the room. “We are nothing alike! My father was your friend, and I hate you!” I left the cabin, slamming the door behind me.

That night I slept in the hold, hand clamped around the hilt of my dagger. I tossed and mumbled in my sleep, seeing shadowy heads materialize in the darkness. The heads bobbed and whispered like goblins. But when I struggled awake with a gasp, there was nothing—only the taste of a nightmare in my mouth.

Throughout the night, the heads appeared. My father's— missing his jaw, trying to tell me something, his tongue flapping helplessly. Faith's—skin pasty white, eyes like boiled eggs. The minister's—pounding the pulpit, shouting, “Thou shalt not kill! Thou shalt not kill!” over and over until his skin blistered and horns popped out of his skull.

One head hovered over me. It danced goblin-like in the light of a lantern. Splotches of light streaked across its face with the motion of the ship. It stared at me, round-eyed, surprised. “Daniel?” it asked in a high, girlish voice. “Daniel?”

With the strength of a nightmare, I sprang from where I lay and pointed my dagger at its throat. “Get away from me!” I snarled.

The face took shape. Frightened mouse-gray eyes. Skin smeared with bruises. Thin lips trembling. “Don't—don't hurt me, Daniel, please! It's me. Timothy Allsworth of Boston! You know, Timothy.”

or me, it was simple. I was no longer alone. Surrounded by murderers, thieves, and men of monstrous, sinful nature, I had found a friend.

Timothy and I had attended the same grammar school, taught by Master Noggin. Although Timothy was a year younger, we had sat together on the same hard, backless bench, reciting from the New England primer, “In Adam's fall, we sinned all.” We'd shivered in the frigid air, wishing we sat in the front row next to the stove where the smart boys sat, dreaming of the day when we were old enough to no longer attend school.

For Master Noggin had been frightful. He'd bellowed and bullied, and if we did not follow his directions (or even if we did), we
could be certain his ruler would soon descend to smack the backs of our hands. Or if we were terribly stupid, or worse, if we fell asleep with our noses pressed against the primer, we could be certain to feel his switch warming our backsides.

Timothy's chance to leave school had come early. At the age of eleven, he'd shipped aboard the
Mercury
as a cabin boy, and I hadn't seen him since.

Over the next few days, after the
Tempest Galley
finally finished despoiling the
Mercury
and shoved off, sails sheeted home once again, we huddled together, Timothy and I, recounting our lives since last we'd seen the other. Sometimes we crouched beside a cannon in the waist deck. Sometimes we ran to the fo'c'sle deck, where we gazed out over the bowsprit, where the noise of sea spray drowned out our words to all but us. Sometimes when it was my turn as lookout, we climbed to the masthead, gazing at the horizon, at the bubbling white of our wake. Or sometimes we met in the hold, slipping inside an enormous coil of rope to sit with our knees butted against our chins, scarce able to wag our tongues.

It was easy to slip inside the coil with Timothy Allsworth, for he was pencil-thin. In fact, everything about Timothy was thin— his nose, his lips, his twiglike arms, even his toes, which rather looked like earthworms. But he had a monstrous head of nut-brown hair, always seeming blown by the wind.

Of course I told him everything that had happened to me. About my father, and Faith. About Josiah, Will Putt, and the man who had tried to kill me. “They're murderers, you know. All of them. They killed your captain as well. Someday I will see them hang.”

“I'm glad they killed Captain Hewitt,” said Timothy. “He was worse than Master Noggin.”

“No one could be worse than Master Noggin.”

“I tell you, 'tis true. One time Captain Hewitt smacked me in the head with a bucket, and all because I didn't answer fast enough.”

“Master Noggin used to do that too.”

“With a bucket?”

“Well, with a ruler, anyway. Or a book.”

“Buckets hurt more. Besides, there was another time when Captain Hewitt hung a basket of grapeshot around some poor fellow's neck and tied his arms to the capstan bars until blood burst from his nose and mouth. The basket must've weighed two hundred pounds. Tis certain Master Noggin never did that.”

“But that's horrible!”

Timothy nodded. “Aye. The fellow up and died because of it, and all because he swiped two biscuits from the larder. The next day I peeked in Captain Hewitt's log and saw that he'd recorded the fellow had died of fever.”

“But such an entry was a lie!”

“Aye. But Captain Hewitt, he was like a king with his own country. Once he flogged a sailor so hard his skin flayed off. Then he ordered him soaked in a barrel of brine. Then once when I was sleeping, Captain Hewitt punched me for no reason, and then because I was protecting myself, he grabbed a marlinspike and beat me with it. I still have lumps.”

He pulled up his shirt, and I touched the knots of rib bone, my mouth agape.

“‘Twas a torture ship,” he added. “‘Twas a lucky day when the pirates came to save us.”

I shook my head in disbelief, running my fingers over the skin on his back, over welted scars from whippings, like the tangled branches of a tree, wondering.

“You see, Daniel,” he whispered, “I'll take freedom over torture any day.”

Was that why so many men willingly turned pirate? Was it more than just a thirst for blood or riches? Even to think such a thought seemed a betrayal of my father. And yet for the first time, I admit, I was uncertain of the answer.

A few days later as Timothy's bruises faded to yellow and green, I found him on the fo'c'sle deck, scrubbing out his laundry in a wooden tub, the tangy smell of soap sharp in the air. He sang, his voice like a Sabbath angel, soap suds up to his elbow. Over our heads, freshly laundered clothes hung from the rigging, flapping in the stiff breeze. Droplets spattered. A damp sleeve brushed across my face.

“That's a lot of laundry,” I said.

Timothy grinned. “Some of the fellows are paying me to wash their clothes. I really need the money, seeing as I'm not going to get paid for my two years aboard the
Mercury
and my mother's counting on me to bring something home. For all I know, she's in the poorhouse by now.”

His mother. Poor lady. I remembered the Widow Allsworth well—frail, bent, drenching a dozen handkerchiefs on the day her only son left for sea. I imagined her sitting alone in her house, waiting and waiting for Timothy to return, not knowing what had happened to him. I chewed my lip, wondering if I should tell Timothy that it was blood money he was earning.

“Need your clothes washed?” he asked, giving my clothing a close scrutiny. “I'll do it for free.”

I glanced down at myself. My clothes were grayed, rumpled, and beginning to look downright ragged. My trunk of nice clothing, which I'd taken with me from Boston, now lay at the bottom of the ocean. I was wearing all I owned—a pathetic wardrobe for the grandson of a governor. I sighed and looked away. “No.”

Timothy stood, soapy water sliding off his arms. “Look,
Daniel, if you're going to be sailing all the way to the Red Sea, you'll need more than just one set of clothes. Here, take these.” And, selecting from a pile beside him, he handed me several shirts, pants, vests, stockings, and drawers.