The Best of Kage Baker

I Begyn as I Meane to Go On





They’d been five days adrift when they saw the sail on the horizon.

“Oughtn’t we to try and signal?” said young John, and rose in the canoe and was going to pluck off his red neckerchief and wave it, only he overbalanced and nearly capsized them again. Dooley cursed him, and Jessup took their one oar and hit him with it.

“Sit down, you mooncalf!”

It wasn’t an especially seaworthy canoe. They had made it themselves out of a fallen tree trunk, slipping out at night to work on it, with the idea that they might escape from Barbados and live as free men on some other island. The first time it had rolled over in the water, they’d lost all the victuals and drink they’d brought with them. The second time, they’d lost the other oar. So they were in a bad way now, and not disposed to be charitable.

John looked around at Jessup, rubbing the back of his head. “But it’s a ship,” he said. “How else will they see us?”

“They’re too far away to see the likes of us,” said Jessup. His voice was husky from thirst. “They’ll sail this way, or they won’t. It’s all down to luck.”

“We might pray to the Almighty,” said John.

“I’m done praying to the Almighty!” Dooley sat bolt upright and glared at them both. “Forty years I’ve prayed to Jesus! ‘Sweet Jesus, don’t let me be caught! Sweet Jesus, don’t let me be transported! Sweet Jesus, let that f*cking overseer drop dead where he’s standing!’ When has He ever answered me, I’d like to know?”

He had the red light in his eyes again, and John swallowed hard, but Jessup (perhaps because he had firm hold of the oar) said: “Belay that, you stupid bastard. Blaspheming don’t help at all.”

“Oh no?” screamed Dooley. He threw back his head. “You hear me, up there? You can kiss my red arse! Baisy-me-cu, Sir Almighty God, mercy beaucoups! I’m praying to the Devil from this day forward, You hear me? I be Satan’s very own! Huzzay, Satan! Praise Satan!”

Such was the force with which he threw himself about in this rant, that he lurched clean over the side and went in with scarcely a splash, and vanished. A moment later he came up again, a little way away on the other side of the canoe, spluttering and blowing. One big fin cut smooth through the limpid blue sea, and Dooley went down again with a shriek cut off in the middle. The rest was bubbles and bloody water.

The other two sat very still, as you might guess.


It was a long while before Jessup felt safe enough to start paddling again, but he did, ever so cautious, while John bailed with his cupped hands. In a couple more hours the sail tacked and made toward them, and John was quite careful to thank the Almighty.

Their rescuer was a brigantine with her aft decks cut down flush to the waist, long and low, and she had a dirty ragged look to her. She flew no colors. A few men leaned at the rail, watching incuriously as the canoe came alongside.

“What ship’s this?” called Jessup.

“The Martin Luther,” was the reply.

“Where d’you hail from?”

“From the sea.”

“Ah, Christ,” said Jessup quietly, and John looked at him, wondering what he meant. Jessup shrugged. “Well, needs must,” he said, and reached up for the line when it was thrown down to him.

The canoe rolled over one last time as he scrambled from it, as though out of spite, but John vaulted up and caught the rail. There he hung, draped down the tumblehome, until a couple of laughing men took his hands and hauled him aboard.

When John had his feet under him on deck he looked around, hoping to see a water butt. He’d never been on any ship except the one that had transported him to Barbados. The fact that the Martin Luther bristled with mismatched cannon, and that her rigging was in trim despite her dirtiness, told him nothing. A man came up on deck, and from the fanciness of his coat relative to the other men’s John assumed he was someone in authority.

“What’re these?” said the man.

“Shipwrecked mariners, Captain,” said one of the crew. The captain glanced over the rail at the canoe, which was already bobbing away in the wake. He laughed and spat.

“Mariners! In a piece of shite like that? Not likely; they’re redleg bond slaves. Escaped. Ain’t you?” He turned and looked hard at John and Jessup.

“Please, sir, we are,” said Jessup.

The captain walked round Jessup and John, looking them over as though they were horses he had a mind to buy. “Been out long?”

“Two years, sir,” said Jessup.

“And lived this long. Had the fever?”

“Yes, sir,” they said together, and John added, “Please, may we have some water?”

The captain grinned. He held out his hand; one of the crew went and fetched a mug of water, and gave it to him. He held the mug up before John.

“The water’s for the crew. We’re on the account; no purchase, no pay. You’ll sign articles and serve before the mast, and take your share, or you’ll go back in the sea. Which is it to be?”

John didn’t know what he meant, but Jessup said, “We’ll serve, sir,” and John nodded, thinking only of the water. So the captain laughed and gave him the mug, and he drank deep, and everyone became friendly after that.


There were articles to sign, which were read aloud to them. Jessup made his mark. John signed his name, which drew a whistle of admiration from the ship’s clerk. They were taken below and it was filthy there, but very free and easy; they were given clothing to replace the bleached and salt-caked rags they wore, and given sea-chests and hammocks of their own, which John thought was most generous. Later he found out they’d belonged to men who’d died of the fever, but it made no odds.

He felt some qualms at the prospect of being a pirate, wondering what his mother would have said. But if John was clumsy at first learning the ropes, and sick scared the first time he had to go aloft, why, it was better than cutting cane in the stinking heat of the fields, with the flies biting him, and the salt sweat running into his eyes. He liked the blue water. He liked the rum and tobacco and the sea air. He liked the freedom.

Though he learned, pretty quick, that freedom and dead men’s gear were all there was in abundance on the Martin Luther.

“It’s Captain Stalwin’s luck,” said Perkin, in a low voice. He spat wide, and some of it hissed and sputtered on the hood of the lamp. “No purchase, no pay indeed. We been out these two years, and all we took in that time is one cargo of sugar, and some slaves once, but they was mostly dead, and one ship with chinaware.”

“There was that one with the chest of plate,” Cullman reminded him.

“One chest of plate,” Perkin admitted, “As didn’t amount to much when it was divided up in shares, and mine was gone before the week was out once we went ashore in Port Royal.”

“There was the Brandywine,” said Cooper. There were growls and mutters.

“What was on the Brandywine?” asked John.

“She had a hold full of dried pease,” said Perkin.

“Time was when you’d been grateful for a handful of dried pease, George Perkin,” said Cooper. “And there was two sheep on board her, you’re forgetting.”

“Well, what I say is, if his luck doesn’t change soon, Captain Stalwin’s looking at being deposed,” said Perkin.


Captain Stalwin knew the peril in which his office stood, and stalked the deck with keen hunger, and scanned the horizon with a sunken eye. He could never keep to one course for long; for if they made south a week steady without sighting any vessel, there was sure to be complaint from the crew, and so to oblige them he’d give new orders and away they’d go to the west.

It was nothing like the iron discipline on the ship that had brought John out to Barbados, where a man must leap to obey the officers and keep his opinions to himself. It beat anything John had ever seen for pointlessness. And yet it pleased him, to see plain hands like himself having a say in their own affairs.


On the day they sighted the ship, Captain Stalwin saw it before the lookouts. John, who was idling at the rail, heard the glass being snapped shut a second before the cries sounded: “Sail ho! Two points off larboard bow!”

Now, they were lying off the False Cape, hoping some cargoes out of the Lake of Maracaibo or Rio de la Hacha might come within easy reach, to either side. And there, creeping into sight off Bahia Honda, was a galleon, as it might be a merchant, and she was flying Spanish colors. Captain Stalwin waited, and watched, though the crew were roaring in impatience to take her; and when he saw she wasn’t part of any fleet, he grinned and gave chase. A blood-red flag was brought out and run up, streaming out in the breeze.

The galleon, when she sighted them, was beating hard to windward; but she spread her sails and fled north, and aboard the Martin Luther men elbowed one another in glee.

“I reckon she’s out of Rio de la Hacha,” said Cooper, with a cackling laugh.

“Is that good?” said John.

“There’s pearl fisheries there!”

“Might be she’s only full of salt,” said Perkin, and everyone told him to hold his sorry tongue.

John was kept busy the next hour, running eager up the shrouds as though they were a flight of easy stairs now, letting out all the canvas the Martin Luther carried. She bowed and flew, with the white water hissing along her hull, and the white wake foaming behind.

Happy men primed her guns. Cutlasses and boarding axes were handed round. Some men ran to the galley and blacked their faces with soot and grease, to look the more fearsome. The galleon ran, but she was broad and ponderous, like a hen fluttering her wings as she went, and the Martin Luther closed on her, and closed on her, like a hawk stooping.

Soon the galleon was near enough to see the painted figure on her stern castle. It was the Virgin Mary in red and blue and gold, her eyes wide and staring, her one hand raised to bless, her other hand cradling a wee Christ who stared and blessed too. It gave John a qualm, at first; but then he recollected the things the Papists were said to do to captive English, which put a different color on the matter. He wondered, too, whether the haloes on the figures were only gold paint or set with disks of real gold.

In ten more minutes they were near enough to chance a shot, and Captain Stalwin ordered the bow guns loaded. Beason, the gunner, got the two shots off: larboard and starboard barked out smart and the one ball went high and fell short, in a spurt of white foam, while the other hit the galleon at the waterline, close in to her keel, and stuck there like a boss on a shield.

“Again!” cried Captain Stalwin, and Cooper and Jessup loaded and primed. Beason adjusted the range with a handspike. They could hear the crack-crack-crack of musket shots from the galleon now—she had no stern guns, evidently—but the musket balls fell short, and long before the gap had closed Beason had the range right. Fire kissed powder and the larboard shot struck something, to judge from the shatter and shudder that echoed over the water. The starboard shot did worse, to judge from the screams.

When the smoke cleared they saw that the galleon’s rudder was broke, in big splinters, though not shot away clean. Her tillerman was desperately trying to bring her about to broadside, with the little she was answering. Cooper and Jessup worked like madmen and Beason fired again, just the larboard gun this time, but that was enough; over the grinding of the rudder’s hinge they heard the shot strike, and the fragments showering into the water. The galleon was wallowing when they saw her again, in the red sunlight through the smoke.

But not helpless: she had made it around far enough for her larboard guns to begin firing with some hope of hurt, and what was more her musketmen were now within range. As the Martin Luther rose on the swell, a flight of musket balls peppered the men on her forward deck. John started as Cullman dropped beside him howling. To this moment he’d been smiling like a fool at a play, cheering each shot; now he woke sober and dropped flat on the deck, as an eight-pound ball whistled above his head and punched through the forecourse before sailing on out to drop in the sea.

“Keep her astern!” yelled Captain Stalwin, but the tillerman was already sending the Martin Luther slinking around under the galleon’s stern again. Close to now they could see what they hadn’t noticed before, that two of her stern cabin windows had been beaten into one jagged-edged hole by one of their shots. John thought they could look straight into her when they rose on the next swell, which they did. What came popping up to the window then but a Spaniard with a pistol? He was white and bloody as a ghost, with staring blank eyes. He aimed the pistol full into Captain Stalwin’s face, and fired.

There was a click, but neither flash nor ball. The next moment the Martin Luther had dropped away and past, grinding into the other vessel, and her crew were yelling and swarming up the side. John looked curiously at Captain Stalwin, who had sagged against the foremast and was trembling. Then the jolt of the swell striking the two hulls together threw John to his knees. He remembered where he was and thought of the gold haloes on the images. Scrambling up he grabbed a cutlass and pulled himself aboard the galleon.

Then he was too scared to think about gold or anything else but fighting off the Spanish who came at him. John was a big fellow, with fists like round shot, and thick arms. He’d been transported for killing a man in a tavern fight, without meaning to; only the man had been snarling drunk and come at him with a blade. John had been fearful of his life and just whaled away at the bugger until he’d stopped moving. So you may guess that John, now armed and even more fearful, cut down the Spanish before him like summer corn.

He stumbled over bodies. A musket-ball creased his scalp and tore his hat away, and he scarcely noticed. His ears were ringing, all sound seemed muffled, and his right arm ached something fierce from beating, and beating, and beating down with the cutlass.

He reached the far rail at last, gasping, and turned to put it at his back—and saw, to his surprise, that there were no Spanish left standing.

There was fighting going on belowdecks. He went to the companionway and peered down cautiously. Blades ringing, kicking, scuffling—a shrieked curse and a shot, and then Beason was coming up the companionway toward him, laughing, wiping his blade.

“We got ’em all,” he said.


Captain Stalwin came aboard with the Martin Luther’s clerk to take inventory of the galleon’s cargo. It was rice and logwood and salt, and some crates of chinaware in a blue pattern of little heathen men and temples. Profitable enough, if you were of a mind to play the merchant and unload the stuff in certain quiet coves, waiting for the smugglers to turn up and have a good haggle.

Nothing a man could weight down a purse with, though, or spend in an hour on rum and sweet companionship; no good chinking coin. A certain sour reek of disappointment began to hang over the deck, above the smells of black powder and death. There were murmurings from the crew, as they set about pitching the dead and wounded overboard. Captain Stalwin emerged from the galleon’s hold with a disbelieving look.

“We’ll search again,” he said. “Tear out the bulkheads. There’ll be pearls here, or gold bars, or silver, only it’s hidden. It must be! My luck’s changed. I felt it spin round like a compass-needle, when that son of a whore’s pistol misfired. Ned Stalwin’s luck’s blowing out of a different quarter now, and our fortune’s on this damned ship!’

“It is, senor,” said a voice from somewhere down near his feet. “But not in the way you imagine.”

John looked down with the rest of them, to see one of the Spanish propping himself on his elbow, smiling a little as he peered up at Captain Stalwin. He had taken a stab in the gut, and was cut above his right eye, so that he smiled through a mask of blood, and his teeth were pink with it. He spat blood now, but politely, away from Captain Stalwin’s boots.

“I swear upon the Cross that I will make you a wealthy man. All I ask is a drink of water, and the grace of leisure to expire before you consign my body to the sea.”

Captain Stalwin fingered his beard, uncertainty in his eyes. Beason prodded the dying man with his boot, in case he should be hiding a dagger. “Liar,” he said.

“Senor, I am about to go before God. Would I lie and damn my mortal soul? What I said, I said in truth,” said the man. He reached into his shirt and dragged forth something that winked green and golden in the pitiless sunlight. He kissed it and then held it out to Captain Stalwin, snapping the chain on which it had been worn. The chain was soft gold, with the links curiously worked, and it trailed after his gift, which was a crucifix.

Beason whistled. He glanced over his shoulder at the others on deck. John leaned close to see. He took the cross to be made of green glass at first, a faceted rod and the two arms held together with gold work, and the little crucified Christ and the INRI sign in gold. Captain Stalwin seized it, his hand shaking.

“Emeralds,” he said.

“Very pretty,” said Beason. “But it won’t come to much when it’s divided up into shares, will it? Have you got any more?”

The man smiled again, and blood ran from the corner of his mouth. “I will tell you where to find them. Water first.”

So the Captain yelled for water. A cask was brought up and broached, with a drink dippered out for the dying man. He lay his head back and sighed, and asked for a chart. More yelling, then, and hasty searching in the galleon’s great cabin before a chart was found and brought up to them, with Captain Stalwin sweating all the while lest the bastard should die first.

When the chart was held before his eyes, the man peered at it a long moment. He looked about helplessly, as though searching for a pen; then giggled, and dabbed his finger in his own blood, and daubed a spot south of Tobago.

“There,” he said. “San Cucao. Two hills rising out of the sea. You will find there the mine from which these emeralds came, senor. Very rich mine. Emeralds green as the jungle.”

Captain Stalwin licked his lips. “And is it garrisoned?”

The Spaniard smiled again. “Only with the dead. The island was my brother’s, and mine; he died six weeks ago, and I was his heir. Now you are mine. All the island holds, I bequeath to you freely, God be my witness.”

“Lying bugger,” said Beason.

Captain Stalwin drew breath, and looked around. He gave sharp orders that the men should get busy moving the galleon’s cargo into the Martin Luther. John rose and labored with the rest of them, up and down, back and forth, hauling the kegs of salt and the sacks of rice, hefting the logwood. As he went to and fro he would glance over, now and then, at where Captain Stalwin crouched on the deck and conversed with the Spaniard. He only caught a few phrases of their speech together; but every other man of the crew was doing the same as John.

In the days afterward they talked it over amongst themselves, in the night watches or belowdecks, and put together enough scraps of what each man had heard to flesh out the Spaniard’s story, which was:

That he and his brother were somebodies in Cartagena, rich in land and Indian slaves, but poor otherwise in their generation. That some ten years since his brother, Don Emidio, having had occasion to travel, was shipwrecked on this little island of San Cucao. It had a spring of fresh water, and enough of the wreck landed for this Don Emidio to live on some few preserved stores while he built himself a raft. When he wasn’t working on the raft he would explore the island; and there he found emeralds sticking out of a bluff where the earth had fallen away.

He carried some with him when he put off from the island. When he got home, he took his brother into his confidence. They resolved to go back to the island and mine the emeralds.

Being Spaniards as they were, they did it in proper Spanish fashion, with servants to wait on them and a friar to say the Mass for them, and Indian slaves to labor for them. The overseers cracked their whips, the Indians set to work with picks and mattocks, and soon the brothers had a prince’s ransom in fine emeralds, with plenty more still winking out of the earth.

But then, the Indians had all taken sick with the Black Pox. The brothers were supping on board their ship when they heard the news, shouted from the shore. They resolved to flee, leaving the workers there, taking only those servants on board when the news came. They’d a coffer full of emeralds to console them. Only their friar objected; he took a boat and rowed himself ashore, that he might tend the dying and harvest their souls for God.

The brothers agreed to wait seven years before returning to the island, by which time the contagion might reasonably be supposed to have blown away. This was, the Spaniard had said, the seventh year, and the wealth from the emeralds they had carried away with them was now long gone. His brother being dead, he had planned to find a patron to fund his journey back.

Well, as the only patron he found rode a pale horse, he bought him another journey entirely. With the story told, the Spaniard murmured an Act of Contrition and died grinning. Captain Stalwin relieved him of his rings and a fine pearl that had dangled from his ear, and ordered him pitched into the sea.


“They say Drake brought back such emeralds,” said Perkin, as he gazed up at the stars. “Like big sticks of sugar candy, and green as…as the green in a church window.”

“I seen some like that, once,” said Collyer. “I was with Mansvelt when he took the Santa Cruz. There was a statue of one of their saints, all painted like, and stuck all over with precious stones. The emeralds was the biggest. I remember, there was one big as a medlar.”

“Liar,” said Beason. “And that Spaniard was a liar, too. We’re sailing straight for some Spanish garrison with big guns, you mark me.”

Jessup only shook his head, but John said: “Why would the fellow lie, with him dying?”

“Because we sliced his liver,” said Beason. “Wouldn’t you be spiteful, if it was you?”

“I’d fret more about the Black Pox,” said Cooper. “Belike he was hoping we’d catch it. It’s fearful way to die.”

“I had the smallpox,” said John. “Is it like that?”

“The same, only worse. Your skin turns black and bursts.”

“No fear,” said Collyer. “There’s a keg of vinegar below, and a chest of sweet herbs, taken off that galleon; lavender-flowers and such, that the dons use to perfume their beards. We mix them up with the vinegar and make us pomanders to smell, and we’ll keep hale and sound on that island.”

“Captain’s on deck,” muttered Perkin. They fell silent, as Captain Stalwin came up the companionway. He looked at the stars, and drew a deep breath. Then he went to the rail and watched south a while. The green phosphorescence foamed and boiled in the bow-wake, and reflected in his glittering eyes.


San Cucao was just as the Spaniard had said it was, two hills in the sea, poking up steep. It was cliffs most of the way around, with only one bit of shingle beach for a landing. They were able to moor the Martin Luther quite close, and from her deck could see the signs that men had been there once; a bit of an overgrown trail leading into the interior, and some stone huts or walls.

Captain Stalwin gave orders that arms should be served out, so the crew grabbed up cutlasses and muskets readily enough. Collyer ran below and fetched up the preventative he’d mixed from the vinegar, and made each man take a strip of sailcloth and dip it in the reeking stuff. They tied them round their wrists, or stuck them under their hats, muttering about the smell.

All this while there wasn’t a sound from the island, baking in the bright sun of noonday; not the cry of a bird, not the call of a monkey, not the drone of a single cicada in its long grass. Its green trees drooped as though asleep.

Silent too the Martin Luther’s crew went ashore, with Captain Stalwin leading them, and only a couple of men left on board. No breath of wind, either; John was soaked with sweat by the time they had walked up the beach, and come to the verge where the jungle began, a sort of overgrown meadow. He looked around him uneasily, thinking that all the quiet reminded him of a churchyard. Then he caught sight of a stone cross.

“It is a churchyard,” he blurted out.

“What?” Captain Stalwin turned. John pointed at the cross. They all stood staring, and now they saw that the humps and hummocks in the vines and long grass were gravestones, grown over here and there, and knew the roofless ruin at the far end must be a chapel.

Jessup reached out and pulled the creepers back from the stone cross. It had a long inscription on it. Jessup, who knew some Spanish, read out: “‘Sacred to the memory of Alessandro, born a pagan, in his extremity embraced Christ. A better Christian than his masters.’”

“Here’s another one,” said Cooper, clearing another stone. This was a cross surmounted by a skull, cut rudely. Jessup leaned down and read:

“‘Diego, who became a faithful Christian. Suffered the torments of Hell on this earth, now in glorious repose in Paradise. When all are judged, his cruel masters will beg for a drop of water from his hand, in the flames where they burn.’”

They moved slowly across the meadow, reading carefully, and every few paces uncovered another gravestone. John noticed that they got bigger, the farther down the row they went, and more crudely cut. Jessup read them out, one after another:

“‘Baltasar, obedient Christian, betrayed and left to die by Christians who do not deserve the name. Departed this vale of sorrow aged no more than 11 years. Angels carried him up. Devils will drag his masters down.’

“‘Juan, humblest of Christians, endured the scourge and lash without complaint, and who for his obedience was left for dead in his hour of affliction. God sees! All the horrors of the Pit will be inflicted on the brothers Claveria.’

“‘Narciso, exchanged the sweat and toil of this world for the heavenly kingdom after taking the Blessed Sacrament. He suffered greatly before he died. I had nothing left with which to comfort him. They are damned, both of them, for false and heartless vipers.’

“‘Francisco lies here. God be thanked he went quickly and could not see at the end. His soul is with God. Whose ways cannot be comprehended.’

“‘Timoteo, Christian. Why was this permitted, O Lord?’”

As they went to look at the last stone, a great rough slab on which the writing was chiseled carelessly, John put his foot down and felt nothing there to support him. He yelled as he toppled over, dropping his cutlass. Jessup and Beason caught him, and set him on his feet again, pulling him clear of the open grave: for that was what it was, screened over with gourd vines.

Perkin meanwhile had stepped carefully across and pulled the creepers back from the headstone.

“What’s this one say?”

Jessup turned and peered at it. “‘Brother Casildo Fernandez Molina. Traveler, have the kindness to cover my bones with earth, as you would hope your bones will rest. I bear witness to the perfidy of Don Emidio Claveria Martinez and Don Benecio Claveria Martinez. They are traitors to God. They will suffer and die cruelly, as they left us to die. I bear witness. I am God’s hand in—’”

The letters, big angry block capitals, ran right off the edge of the stone.

“But the grave’s empty,” said Perkin, looking in.

There was an uneasy silence while they all considered that.

“Maybe he got rescued before he died,” said John. Captain Stalwin shrugged.

“Dead or alive, he’s no enemy of ours. Didn’t we do for one of ’em? It’s a judgment of God, ain’t it?” He raised his voice. “Don Benecio, he es muerto! Savvy?”

Nobody answered him.

“We cut his liver open!” shouted Collyer.

“Threw his body in the sea without one prayer!” shouted Cooper.

“Bugger this,” said Beason, and stepped warily past the grave to the ruins beyond. “Look! This was his chapel.”

It had been a building of unmortared stone, thatched with palm leaves, but they had fallen in years since and were scattered everywhere. A rough-hewn wooden cross had fallen too, and lay worm-riddled at the far end. Maybe the place had served as Brother Casildo’s workshop too; broken iron tools lay rusting where they had been dropped, and fragments of cut stone.

When they had poked about long enough to learn there was nothing useful for them there, they came out, and Captain Stalwin spotted the track that led away from the beach into the jungle. It was swift vanishing in green, but it was there.

“I’d reckon the mines’d be this way,” he said. “Perkin, go before. Cut the creepers back as we go.”

“And be mindful of that friar,” said Cooper, looking uneasily over his shoulder.

So they followed the track, and the sun beat down, and the sound of the sea grew fainter. John was looking all around as he walked, with his cutlass held up before him, and sniffing now and then at his little strip of sailcloth. His mother had told him once that if you got the smallpox and didn’t die of it, you need never fear it again; but that had been in Hackney. Out here, the old rules never seemed to apply.

It was all silent now on the path, but for the ring and hiss of Perkin’s cutlass slicing through the overgrowth. The noise had taken on a comfortable sort of rhythm like music, so they were taken by surprise rather when Perkin suddenly yelled and toppled backward into Jessup.

“What is it?”

“Is it a snake?”

“Back! Back!” said Perkin, who had gone white. “Trap!”

They all staggered back a few paces, and spread out on the path to get a look at what they had narrowly missed walking into. There were creepers dragged craftily across the path. When they’d been green and fresh with the broad leaves spread out they might indeed have concealed what lay below; but they were long dead and withered, and showed clear that someone had dug a little pit in the midst of the track.

“That ain’t enough to hurt anybody,” said Cooper in scorn, but Perkin pointed a shaking finger at the beam that was laid to one side, with one end projecting out across the pit. He’d come close to putting his foot down on the end of the beam. If he had, his foot had pushed the end on the beam down into the pit, levering up the beam’s other end. And the beam’s other end—

They followed it with their eyes, silent to a man. The long beam was arranged over a fulcrum of cut stone. If its seesaw had gone up, it would have smacked away a bit of wood above it…which was supporting another bit of wood…which was supporting another…and so on, up the steep hillside to the great pile of stones carefully arranged to thunder down on the path if they were dislodged.

“Jesus Bleeding Christ,” said Cooper.

“He was a good stonecutter, that friar,” said Jessup, with a sick kind

of laugh.

“But he didn’t catch us. Didn’t I tell you my luck had changed?” said Captain Stalwin. “Two shares to you, Perkin, for sharp eyes. We’ll go on, and every man minds his God-damned feet, and watch close lest there’s anything else.”

John thought about the friar, left all alone here after the last of the Indians died, and how he must have wandered around in the jungle getting crazier and crazier, setting traps for the two brothers, babbling Latin-talk, nothing left for him but the thirst for vengeance. Was he watching them even now? He’d be emaciated, his priestly robe in rags. Maybe he was lying in wait just around the next bend in the trail, eager to garrote somebody with his rosary beads…

“There’s broken tools up here,” said Perkin. “And the track’s getting wider.”

“Are we getting near the mine?” said Captain Stalwin.

“Maybe,” said Perkin. He hacked away a few palm-fronds and stared hard through the gloom. “There’s something like a shaft. Phew!” He shook his head. “Something stinks.”

He hurriedly took his strip of sailcloth and tied it across his face, maskwise, and the others all did likewise except for John, whose strip wasn’t long enough. He pressed it to his nose, praying the smell was only a dead pig somewhere. They proceeded with care and in a moment came out in the clearing where the mine-shaft was.

There were no footprints visible; the open sand had long ago been smoothed flat by wind and rain. There were a couple of broken barrels and some baskets, falling to pieces, that the Indians had used to carry dirt. And something in the mouth of the shaft…

Captain Stalwin paced forward warily, his cutlass up, looking from side to side. He got as far as the mouth of the shaft, and no rosary beads came snaking out of anywhere to strangle him. He looked down at what was in the mouth of the shaft—it was a basket, John could see that now—and began to laugh.

“Now, by God!” he cried. “Has my luck changed, or hasn’t it?” He bent to the basket and dipped up a big rock that had emeralds sprouting from it like fingers from a hand. The rest of them rushed forward at that, and saw the basket full of rough emeralds, poking out where the sides of the basket had rotted away. Nor was it the only basket; there were others lined up beside it, going back into the shaft, brimful of rough green gems under a thin layer of dead leaves and dust.

John’s eyes went wide. He grabbed with all the rest, stuffing emeralds in his pocket, shoving others aside who got in his way. Jessup tried to pick up a basket and it came apart, spilling emeralds across the floor, and Perkin dropped to his knees and snatched them where they scattered. “Look!” he said, pointing down the shaft.

There, just beyond some piled debris, lay another basket. It seemed this was where the choicest stones had been sorted; they were a richer green, they were bigger, and something about the way the dim light glinted on them promised clarity and perfection beyond anything John had yet seen.

Perkin scrambled forward on hands and knees. Cooper vaulted over him so as to get to them first, and in his haste tumbled against the debris that was piled in the way. His knee struck one end of a beam, concealed there. The beam swiveled. Its other end struck smartly on one of the timber baulks that held up the roof of the mine, and knocked it out of true. There was a creak, and dirt and stones fell from above as the baulk tottered—

What happened next John didn’t see, for he was running for daylight as hard as he could. He made it, and so did Captain Stalwin, and so did Jessup. Here came Beason and Collyer, sprinting just ahead of the roiling cloud of dirt that belched from the mine shaft, and the muffled roar as the roof fell in.

John was just thinking that Perkin wouldn’t get his two shares after all when he and Cooper came staggering from the mouth of the shaft, choking and coughing, brown all over as though they’d rolled in mud. When they had been properly laughed at, there was a general idea of gutting Cooper, for being so stupid as to spring another trap and lose them the best of the emeralds. Captain Stalwin, though, lifted his cutlass between Cooper and the rest.

“Belay that. We’ve filled our pockets, ain’t we? And not a man lost when that roof fell in. It’s my luck, plain as plain!” He pointed with the tip of the blade at the emeralds lying all about, that they’d dropped in their flight. “Now pick them up, and it’s back to the ship with us. We’ll come back tomorrow with a shovel or two and see if we can’t dig out some more.”

John obeyed like the rest, crouching over to collect the scattered emeralds. He was just reflecting on what a pleasant thing it was to be a pirate, picking jewels as though they were strawberries in a meadow, when he saw a bonny green gem lying amidst what he took to be little dry sticks. He reached for the emerald and that was when he saw the arm-bones. He looked along them to the blind gaping skull beyond.

“Here’s a dead man!” he cried.

Captain Stalwin and the others came to see. “Why, it’s the priest,” said Captain Stalwin, pointing at the shreds of brown robe. “Look here, here’s his beads. Ha! He died before he could go lie down in his grave. Well, there’s an end to the mystery.”

“No,” said Jessup, almost whispering. “Who shot him?”

They all fell silent then, staring at the skull, which did indeed have a round hole in it. Beason reached with the tip of his cutlass and tilted it, and a musket-ball rolled out of one of the eye sockets.

“And another thing,” Jessup went on, keeping his voice low. “He’s rotted away long since. What is it that stinks so now?”

Now, for all the sweat and heat of the day, John felt cold. Beason wetted a finger and held it up, and turned to look at the bit of jungle from which the wind was blowing.

“Don’t smell like carrion by itself, though,” he murmured.

“Carrion or cabbage, I’ve no wish to meet it any closer,” said Captain Stalwin. “We’ll just creep off the way we came, shall we? Quick march, boys, and quiet. My luck will get us back safe.”

So saying, he turned; and the shot rang out and dropped him in his tracks, with a little explosion of blood at his buttonhole like a red rose worn there.

John just had a glimpse of someone ducking down, before he threw himself flat. More shots came, as it seemed from some three or four snipers, and all of them in the jungle through which they had just come. Beason yelled some orders, and John dodged through the jungle back of the friar’s bones and fell flat behind a log, where Beason had already taken shelter. Jessup and Perkin were behind a log a few feet away, and Collyer came running, clutching his arm where a musket-ball had stuck. They didn’t see Cooper again.

Beason already had his musket loaded by the time John rolled over. He laid the barrel of it against the log and fired across the clearing. John loaded his own musket and did the same, as did Collyer and Perkin, and for some few minutes it was hot work there. Musket balls tore through the green leaves all around them.

“That f*cking Spaniard was a liar,” said Beason, as he reloaded. “Didn’t I say it? Who’d listen to me, eh?”

Jessup crawled over and jerked his thumb at the trees behind them. “We retreat through that, we can get to the other side of the island! Make our way around to the anchorage again!”

Beason aimed, fired, and then looked where Jessup was pointing. “Ay,” he said. So they retreated, firing as they went. In a moment they came out of the jungle on the other side and there was the blue sea, all right, but before them was a sheer drop down a cliff. Beason looked to and fro distractedly, as a shot or two came zipping out of the jungle behind them; then John spotted a little track that ran across the cliff’s edge.

“Where’s that go?” he cried.

“But that was where—” said Beason, before a musket ball cracked into a boulder and sent rock shards flying in every direction. He ducked and they ran, with Collyer cursing because one of the shards had hit his thigh, along the little track. It did get them out of the line of fire from the jungle pretty quick, putting the shoulder of the hill between them, but it rose, too. In another moment they were climbing, all exposed, where the trail switchbacked

up the flank of the hill and vanished over a ridge.

By great good fortune their pursuers did not follow to pick them off like flies on a wall. Over the top of the ridge they hurtled, all together, and down through a little maze of bushes and then—

John halted, and the others ran into him as into a wall.

They had emerged into a clearing, and here was the source of the smell. Three or four huts stood around a central fire-pit. The stink was compounded of smoke, and the camp’s latrine, which was brimful noisome, and a mountain of clam and mussel shells and fish bones; all that, and the crucified man that dried in the sun at the cliff’s edge.

Even so, the place had a peaceful air. The sea-wind blew through the dead man’s hair, and the sea broke softly on the rocks below, and a little stream bubbled down to one side…and there was a rhythmic thump-thump-thump that suggested someone in no particular hurry. An Indian woman sat at the door of one of the huts, pounding roots in a mortar.

John and the rest stood petrified, for it was surely only a matter of seconds before she looked up and saw them. Now, she raised her head…

And did not see them. She had no eyes. She had barely any face.

“Jesus,” said Jessup faintly. “The Black Pox.”

John groped for his bit of vinegar-soaked rag, and plastered it over his nose and mouth. Another woman came out of one of the huts. Maybe she’d been beautiful once, with her hair black as a raven’s wing and lustrous; but she groped her way by touch along the side of the hut to the stream, for where her eyes had been were two pink masses of scars. As she bent—quite close to them—to fill her gourd with water, John saw that her nose and lips had been eaten off by the smallpox too, as though she’d been in a fire.

John looked away, and as quickly looked for somewhere else to look; but he’d seen enough of the poor crucified bugger to tell that he’d been a black-bearded fellow, and that they’d stripped him down to a loin-rag before they’d stuck him up there. A gull had been busy pecking at the face…

He ain’t been up there any seven years, John realized. The friar had been dry bones long since picked clean, but this was fresher meat.

“They can’t see us,” said Beason, no louder than a breath. “We can walk through. Come on. Quick and quiet.”

They stepped forward, walking soft as they could, and must pass one by one under the cross, stepping gingerly around the bits and odds that lay there. John spotted a glint of gold and green; Beason noticed it too, and dove on it quicker than John could. He held it up on its bit of broken chain to stare. It was a crucifix, as might be twin to the one they’d taken off the Spaniard on the galleon.

“Now I’ll tell you what,” Beason whispered, “This will be that bastard’s own brother, and they did come back, but they was caught—”

A dog leaped up from where it had been sleeping, and barked furiously at them. The woman pounding roots took no notice, seemingly deaf as well as blind, but the woman with the water-gourd turned inquiringly, and two other women came to the doormouths. They too were blind, were horribly disfigured. They caught up sticks and came forward tentatively, waving them, groping with their free hands outstretched. The dog growled and leaped, running from the women to the Martin Luther’s men and back, trying to guide them. It ought to have been funny but it wasn’t; John’s hair was fair standing up, and he was more afraid of the blind women than of anything he’d seen since he’d been transported.

“Oh Christ,” said Beason, and shot the dog. “Run for it.”

John ran, out in front of the others. He bounded like a goat along the track, that continued on the other side of the village, in its narrow way between the clifftops and the hillside. He could hear the panting breaths of the others as they followed him, knocking pebbles that clattered down the cliff to the shingle-beaches below. Soon he could hear shots as well, though they came from ahead and not behind. Then there was the echoing roar of one of the Martin Luther’s guns.

“Those sons of bitches!” yelled Beason, panting. “Move, you great ox!”

He pushed past John. They rounded the side of the hill where it came down and found themselves looking into the anchorage from the other side. There was the back of the ruined chapel; there was their longboat, halfway to the Martin Luther and full of armed men. There was only Cullman and Jobson on deck to fight them off, and Cullman’s left arm had been no use since taking the galleon. They were crouched behind the great gun in the waist, trying to get off another shot at the longboat without catching any musket-balls.

Beason ran close enough for range, reloading as he went. As one fellow went up on one knee in the bow to aim at Jobson, Beason dropped him with the sweetest shot John had ever seen. John attempted to load on the run but made a mess of it, spilling black powder everywhere. By this time Jessup and Perkin had reached them, with Collyer limping close behind. They took positions behind the gravestones and commenced firing at the longboat’s crew, only praying that Cullman and Jobson had the sense not to sink the longboat with an eight-pound ball.

It was over in a minute more, for the men in the longboat had to cover two targets at once, and couldn’t do it. When the shooting stopped, there was no more damage to the Martin Luther’s crew than Collyer’s right ear, which was mainly clipped away by a ball from the longboat. He crouched, bleeding like a stuck pig and swearing most vile, as John peered out from behind Brother Casildo’s gravestone.

“There’s nobody moving on the longboat,” he said.

“What about that bugger hanging over the gunwale?”

“I see three shot-holes in him,” John replied. He got up cautiously and walked out on the beach. One by one the others rose and followed him. Cullman and Jobson hallooed from the ship, waving their hats.

“How do we get the boat back?” said Perkin.

“Anyone know how to swim?”

“Me,” said John, and regretted it at once, thinking of Dooley’s sorry end.

“Out you go, then,” said Beason.

So John prayed as though it was a Sunday, and for all he knew it might have been, as he stripped off his coat and hat, and kicked off his shoes. The water was bright and clear as he waded out, nothing like sorry old Hackney Brook, and a beautiful blue except for the crimson place where the dead man hanging over the gunwale had bled into the water. And the Lord must have listened to John’s prayers and nodded approvingly, for John made the side of the boat in safety, pocked up in splinters and musket-balls as it was, though he had to haul the dead man out as he scrambled in.

Now he saw that there were two other dead men floating a little ways off, face down. Three more were lying in the bottom of the boat, all shot to pieces except for one pockfaced lout who was lolling back with open eyes and bared teeth and a knife clenched in his fist—

With a scream the fellow sat up, and John screamed too and caught him by the wrist, and they struggled together a long moment, with the thwart cutting into John’s shins something cruel. Shots rang out from the beach, but hummed past like bees; at last John broke the bugger’s arm. He got the knife away from him and ran it into him twice, just where he supposed the heart might be, and the man gasped once and died. John pitched him out of the boat and sat there shivering, for all the heat of the sun.

When he’d done puking over the side, he rowed back to shore.


John did wonder what had become of Captain Stalwin’s luck, that was supposed to have changed. They all puzzled over it, after they’d elected Beason captain and were sailing away from there; and Perkin’s idea made the most sense, which was that the luck under consideration was their luck, which was to say the whole crew’s. Changing for the better, therefore, had included getting rid of a sorry bastard like Stalwin.

The other tale was what had really happened on the island, and they worked out several different stories for that, sitting under the stars as they drank their rum. Captain Beason’s story seemed the likeliest, viz.: that the overseers had been left on the island with the Indians, but, being hardier, had survived the disease; and that they’d taken the Indian women, foul-faced or no, and murdered Brother Casildo. So they lived until the brothers Claveria Martinez came back, in seven years’ time.

The brothers must have come ashore armed, not expecting anyone to have survived. One of the brothers must have been taken alive, with all he brought ashore, including fresh arms and ammunition. The other must have gotten away, back to Cartagena, and in course of time took passage on the galleon that ran afoul of the Martin Luther.


The Martin Luther’s crew debated what they ought to do next. There was some talk of going to Port Royal, but that was a chancy business; if the wind of diplomacy was blowing the wrong way, a poor hard-working captain might find a lot of Royal Marines demanding to see his privateer’s commission, and confiscating his spoils, and indeed he might just be hanged to soothe Spanish feelings.

So in the end they went to Tortuga, where there were always folk willing to do business. The galleon’s cargo was disposed of, a buyer found for the emeralds, and every last penny of the profits counted out and divided up in fair shares amongst the crew. John and Jessup walked away from the Martin Luther rich men, at least as far as John was concerned. His pockets were like to burst for the weight of his money.

“What’ll you do with your share?” he asked Jessup, as they walked along. There were yellow lights beckoning through the trees, and a smell of good food and drink, and music. Jessup shook his head.

“Get myself a new name, and put this business as far behind me as ever I can,” he said. “Go somewhere no one knows my face. Set up in business, live quiet and die rich in my bed. You’ll do the same, boy, if you’ve any wit.”

“I reckon I will, ay,” said John.

They parted. John considered Jessup’s advice, and knew it was good advice, and heard the voice of his mother in his ear telling him it was good advice too. He fully intended to follow it; but the yellow lights beckoned so, and he could hear women laughing, and he thought he’d just go celebrate his good fortune first.

He met a pretty French whore, who showed him where the best turtle stew was to be had, and where the best rum was served. They had a pleasant evening indeed, or at least what John could remember of it afterward, and she showed him a great many other things too.

Next morning the sun was too bright, and John wandered queasy and penniless along the waterfront, squinting at all the sleek rakish craft moored there. He was hoping to find some of the Martin Luther’s crew, as might be willing to oblige an old shipmate with a loan. He didn’t; but before long he came to a ship taking on kegs of powder, and some men were talking there, with a look about them of cutlasses, and smoke, and easy money.

John listened to them chatting a while before dropping a friendly remark or two. By and by he joined the conversation, and pretty soon one of them asked him if he cared to go on the account.

John, ever so grateful, said he’d like that very much indeed.

They sailed next day, and had taken a galleon full of wine and silk before the week was out.