Текст книги "Assassin's creed : Black flag "

Автор книги: Oliver Bowden

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

PART II

TWENTY-TWO

JUNE 1715

There is nothing quite so loud as the sound of a carriage-gun blast. Especially when it goes off in your ear.

It’s like being pummelled by nothing. A nothing that seems to want to crush you, and you’re not sure whether it’s a trick of your eyesight, shocked and dazzled by the blast, or whether the world really is shaking. Probably it doesn’t even matter. Probably both. But the thing is, it’s shaking.

Somewhere the shot impacts. Boat planks splinter. Men with their arms and legs torn off and men who look down and in the few seconds they have before dying realize that half of their body has been shot away, begin screaming. All you hear in the immediate aftermath is the shrieking of the damaged hull, the screaming of the dying.

How close you are will determine how handsomely you react. I wouldn’t say you ever get used to the blast of a carriage-gun, the way it tears a hole in your world, but the trick is to recover swiftly and recover from it more swiftly than your enemy.

We’d been off the coast of the Cape Buena Vista in Cuba on a ship led by a man known as Captain Bramah when the English had attacked. We called those upon the brigantine the English even though English made up the core of our crew and I myself was English by birth, English in my heart. That counted for nothing as a pirate. You were an enemy of His Majesty (Queen Anne had been succeeded by King George), an enemy of the Crown, which made you an enemy of His Majesty’s Navy. So when we saw the Red Ensign on the horizon, the sight of a frigate foaming across the ocean towards us, figures running to and fro on her decks, what we said was, “Sail ho! The English are attacking! The English are attacking!” with no bother for the small details of our actual nationalities.

We were too busy trying to stay alive.

This one came at us fast. We were trying to turn and put distance between us and her six-pounders, but she bore down upon us, slicing across our bows, so close we could see the whites of the crew’s eyes, the flash of their gold teeth, the glint of sun on the steel in their hands.

Flame bloomed along her sides as her carriage-guns thundered. Steel tore the air. Our hull shrieked and cracked as the shot found their mark. The day had been full of rain but the powder-smoke turned it into a night full of rain. It filled our lungs and made us cough, choke and splutter, throwing us into even more disarray and panic.

Then that feeling of the world crashing in, that shock, and those moments of wondering if you’d been hit and if maybe you were dead, and perhaps this was what it felt like in heaven. Or most likely—in my case at least—in hell. Which, of course, it must be, because hell is smoke and fire and pain and screaming. So whether you were dead or not, it made no difference. Either way you were in hell.

At the first crash-bang I’d raised my arms to protect myself. Luckily. I felt shards of splintered wood that would otherwise have punctured my face and eyes embed themselves into my arm, and the force was enough to send me staggering back, tripping and falling.

They’d used bar-shot. Big iron bars that would blast a hole in virtually anything provided the distance was close enough. They’d done their job. The English had no interest in boarding us. As pirates we would inflict as little damage upon our target as possible. Our aim was to board and loot, over a period of days if needs be. It was difficult to loot a sinking ship. But the English—or this particular command, at least—either they knew we had no treasure aboard or they didn’t care—they simply wanted to destroy us and they were doing a bloody good job of it.

I dragged myself to my feet, felt something warm running down my arm and looked to see blood from a splinter blob to the planks of the deck. With a grimace I reached to tear the wood from my arm and tossed it to the deck, barely registering the pain as I squinted through a fog of powder-smoke and lashing weather.

A cheer went up from the crew of the English frigate as she churned past our starboard side. There was the pop and fizz of musket and flint-lock-pistol shot. Stink-pots and grenadoes came sailing over, exploding on deck and adding to the chaos, the damage, and the choking smoke that hung over us like a death shroud. The stink-pots in particular let out a vicious sulphur gas that sent men to their knees, making the air so dense and black that it became difficult to see, to judge distance.

Even so, I saw him, the hooded figure who stood on their forecastle deck. His arms were folded, and he stood still in his robes, his entire demeanour emanating unconcern at the events that were unfolding around him. I could tell all this from his posture and eyes, which gleamed from beneath the cowl of his robes. Eyes that, for a second, were fixed on me.

Then our attackers were swallowed up by smoke. A ghost ship amid a fog of powder belch, sizzling rain and choking stink-pot fumes.

All around me was the sound of shattering wood and screaming men. The dead were everywhere, littering torn planks awash with their blood. Through a gash in the main deck I saw water on the decks below, and from above heard the complaint of wood and the tearing of the shroud. I looked up to see our mainsail was half-destroyed by chain-shot. A dead lookout with most of his head shorn away hung by his feet from the crow’s nest and men were already scaling the rat-lines to try and cut the broken mast free, but they were too late. She was already listing, wallowing in the water like a fat woman taking a bath.

At last, enough of the smoke cleared to see that the British frigate was coming round, describing a long circle in order to use its starboard guns. But then she ran into a spot of bad luck. Before the ship could be brought to bear, the same wind that had dispersed the smoke dropped, and her plump sails flattened and she slowed. We had been given our second chance.

“Man the guns!” I shouted.

Those members of our crew still on their feet were scrambling to the mounted guns. I manned a swivel gun and we delivered a broadside that the attacking frigate could do nothing about, our shot doing almost as much damage to them as they had to us. It was our turn to cheer. Defeat had turned, if not quite to victory, then at least to a lucky escape. Perhaps there were those of us who were even wondering what treasures might be on board the British vessel, and I saw one or two of our men, the optimistic few, with boarding hooks, axes and marlinspikes, ready to lash the ship close and take them man-on-man.

Their plans were dashed by what happened next.

“The magazine,” came the cry.

“She’s going up.”

The news was followed by screams and as I looked from my post at the swivel gun towards the bow, I saw flames around the breach in the hull. Meanwhile, from the stern came the cries of the captain, while on the poop-deck of the ship opposite, the man in the robes leapt into action. Literally. He unfolded his arms and in one short jump was on the rail of the deck, then in the next moment had jumped across.

For a moment the impression I had of him in the air was like an eagle, his robes spread out behind him, his arms outstretched like wings.

Next I saw Captain Bramah fall. Crouched over him, the hooded man’s arm pulled back and a hidden blade sprang from within his sleeve.

That blade. I was transfixed by it for a second. The flames from the burning deck made it alive. And then the hooded man drove it deep into Captain Bramah.

I stood and stared, my own cutlass in my hand. From behind I vaguely heard the cries of the crew as they tried in vain to stop the fire spreading to the magazine.

It will go up, I thought distractedly, envisioning the barrels of gunpowder stored there. The magazine will explode. The English ship was close enough so that the explosion would surely blast a hole in the hull of both ships. All of this I knew, but only as distant, distracted thoughts. I was spellbound by the hooded man at work. Mesmerized by this agent of death, who had ignored the carnage around him by biding his time and waiting to strike.

The kill was over, Captain Bramah dead. The assassin looked up from the dead body of the captain, and once again our eyes met, only this time something flared within his features and in the next instant he had bounded to his feet, a single lithe jump that took him over the corpse, and he was bearing down upon me.

I raised my cutlass, determined not to go easily into the great unknown. Then from the stern—from the magazine, where our men had obviously failed to douse the fire whose fingers had found the stores of gunpowder—came a great explosion.

I was blasted off the deck, flung in the air and finding a moment of perfect peace, not knowing whether I was alive or dead, whether I still had all of my limbs and in that moment not caring anyway. I didn’t know where I would come to rest: whether I’d slam to the deck of a ship and break my back or land impaled on a snapped mast or be tossed into the eye of the magazine inferno.

Or do what I did, which was slap into the sea.

Maybe alive, maybe dead, maybe conscious, maybe not. Either way I seemed to drift not far below the surface, watching the sea above, a shifting mottle of blacks, greys and the flaming orange of burning ships. Past me sank dead bodies, eyes wide open as though surprised in death. They discoloured the water in which they sank and trailed guts and stringy sinew string like tentacles. I saw a smashed mizen-mast twirling in the water, bodies snared in rigging dragged to the depths.

I thought of Caroline. Of my father. Then of my adventures on the Emperor. I thought about Nassau, where there was only one law: pirate law. And, of course, I thought about how I was mentored from privateer to pirate by Blackbeard—Edward Thatch.

TWENTY-THREE

All of this I thought as I sank, eyes open, aware of everything happening around me, the bodies, the wreckage . . . Aware of it, yet uncaring. As though it was happening to somebody else. Looking back, I know it for what it was, that brief moment—and it was brief—as I sank in the water. I had, in those moments, lost the will to live.

After all, this expedition—Thatch had warned against it. He’d told me not to go. “That Captain Bramah’s bad news,” he said. “You mark my words.”

He was right. And I was going to pay for my greed and stupidity with my life.

Then I found it again. The will to go on. I grasped it. I shook it. I held it close to my bosom from that moment to this and I’ll never let it go again. My legs kicked, my arms arrowed, and I streaked towards the surface, breaking the water and gasping—for air, and in shock at the carnage around me, watching as the last of the English frigate slipped below the water, still ablaze. All across the ocean were small blazes soon to be doused by the water, floating debris everywhere and men, of course: survivors.

Just as I had feared, the sharks began to attack, and the screams began—screams of terror at first; and then, as the sharks first circled then began to investigate more insistently, screams of agony that only intensified as more predators gathered and began to feed. The screams I’d heard during the battle, agonized as they were, were nothing compared to the shrieks that tore that soot-filled afternoon apart.

I was one of the lucky ones, whose wounds were not enough to attract their attention, and I swam for shore. At one point I was knocked by a shark gliding past, thankfully too concerned with joining the feeding frenzy to stop. My foot seemed to snag what felt like a fin in the water and I prayed that whatever blood I was leaking was not enough to tempt the shark away from the more plentiful chum elsewhere. It was a cruel irony that those more heavily wounded were the ones who were attacked first.

I say “attacked.” You know what I mean. They were eaten. Devoured. How many survivors there were from the battle, I have no way of knowing. All I can say is that I saw most survivors end up as food for the sharks. Me, I swam to the safety of the beach at Cape Buena Vista, where I collapsed with sheer relief and exhaustion, and if the dry land wasn’t made up entirely of sand, I probably would have kissed it.

My hat was gone. My beloved three-pointer that had sat upon my head as man and boy. What I didn’t know at the time, of course, was that it was the first step in my shedding the past, saying good-bye to my old life. What’s more, I still had my cutlass, and given the choice between losing my hat and cutlass . . .

So, after some time thanking my lucky stars and hearing faint screams in the distance, I rolled onto my back, then heard something from my left.

It was a groan. Looking over I saw that its owner was the robed assassin. He’d come to rest just a short distance away from me and he was lucky, very lucky not to be eaten by the sharks, because when he rolled over to his back he left behind a patch of crimson-stained sand. As he lay on his back with his chest rising and falling, his breath coming in short, jagged gasps, his hands went to his stomach. His obviously wounded stomach.

“Was it good for you as well?” I asked, laughing. Something about the situation struck me as funny. Even after these few years at sea, there was still something of the Bristol brawler about me, who couldn’t help but make light of the situation, no matter how dark it seemed. He ignored me. Or ignored the quip at least.

“Havana,” he groaned. “I must get to Havana.”

That produced another smile from me. “Well, I’ll just build us another ship, will I?”

“I can pay you,” he said through gritted teeth. “Isn’t that the sound you pirates like best? A thousand reales.”

That had aroused my interest. “Keep talking.”

“Will you, or won’t you?” he demanded to know.

One of us was badly wounded, and it wasn’t me. I stood to look him over, seeing the robes, in which, presumably, was hidden his blade. I liked the look of that hidden blade. I had the feeling that the man in possession of that particular blade might go far, especially in my chosen trade. Let’s not forget that before my ship’s magazine had exploded, this very man was about to use that very blade on me. You may think me callous. You may think me cruel and ruthless. But please understand, in such situations a man must do what is necessary to survive, and a good lesson to learn if you’re standing on the deck of a burning ship about to move in for the kill: finish the job.

Lesson two: if you don’t manage to finish the job, it’s probably best not to expect help from your intended target.

And lesson three: if you ask your intended target for help anyway, it’s probably best not to start getting angry with him.

For all those reasons I ask you not to judge me. I ask you to understand why I gazed down at him so dispassionately.

“You don’t have that gold on you now, do you?”

He looked back at me, and his eyes blazed briefly. Then, in a second, more quickly than I could possibly have anticipated—imagined, even—he’d drawn a pocket pistol and shoved the barrel into my stomach. The shock more than the impact of the gun-barrel sent me staggering back, only to fall on my behind some feet away. With one hand clutching at his wound, the other with the pistol trained on me, he pulled himself to his feet.

“Bloody pirates,” he snarled through clenched teeth.

I saw his finger whiten on the trigger. I heard the hammer on the pistol snap forward and closed my eyes expecting the shot to come.

But it never did. Of course it didn’t. There was indeed something unearthly about this man—his grace, his speed, his garb, his choice of weaponry—but he was still just a man, and no man can command the sea. Even this man couldn’t prevent his powder getting wet.

Lesson four: if you’re going to ignore lessons one, two and three, it’s probably best not to pull out a gun filled with wet powder.

His advantage lost, the killer turned and headed straight for the tree line, one arm still clutching his wounded stomach and the other warding off undergrowth as he crashed into it and out of sight. For a second I simply sat there, unable to believe my luck: if I were a cat, then I’d have used up at least three of my nine lives, just on that day.

Without a second thought—well, maybe perhaps a single second thought, because, after all, I’d seen him in action and, wound or no wound, he was dangerous—I took off in pursuit. He had something I wanted. That hidden blade.

I heard him crashing through the jungle ahead of me and so, heedless of the branches whipping my face and dancing over roots underfoot, I gave chase. I reached to prevent myself being slapped in the face by a thick green leaf the size of a banjo and saw a bloody handprint on it. Good. I was on the right track. From further ahead came the sound of disturbed birds crashing through the canopy of trees above. I hardly needed to worry about losing him: the whole jungle shook to the sound of his clumsy progress. His grace, it seemed, was no more, lost in the blundering fight for survival.

“Follow me, and I’ll kill you,” I heard from ahead of me.

I doubted that. As far as I could see, his killing days were over.

So it proved. I reached a clearing where he stood, half bent over with the pain of his stomach wound. He’d been trying to decide which route to take but at the sound of me crashing out of the undergrowth, turned to face me. A slow, painful turn, like an old man crippled with belly-ache.

Something of his old pride returned, and a little fight crept into his eyes as there was a sliding noise, and from his right sleeve sprouted the blade, which gleamed in the dusk of the clearing.

It struck me that the blade must have inspired fear in his enemies, and that to inspire fear in your enemy was half the battle won. Make someone frightened of you, that was the key. Unfortunately, just as his killing days were over, so too was his ability to inspire dread in his foes. His robes, hood and even the blade. With him exhausted and hunched over with pain, they looked like the trinkets they were. I took no pleasure in killing him, and possibly he didn’t even deserve to die. Our captain had been a cruel, ruthless man, fond of a flogging. So fond, in fact, that he was apt to administer them himself. He’d enjoyed doing what he called “making a man a governor of his own island,” which, in other words, was marooning him. Nobody but his own mother was going to mourn our captain’s passing. To all intents and purposes, the man with the robes had done us a favour.

But the man with the robes had been about to kill me as well. The first lesson was that if you set out to kill someone, you’d better finish the job.

He knew that, I’m sure, as he died.

Afterwards I rifled through his things, and yes, the body was still warm. And no, I’m not proud of it, but please don’t forget, I was—I am—a pirate. So I rifled through his things. From inside his robes I retrieved a satchel.

Hmm, I thought. Hidden treasure.

But when I upended it onto the ground so the sun could dry the contents, what I saw was . . . well, not treasure. There was an odd cube made of crystal, with an opening on one side, an ornament, perhaps? (Later I’d find out what it was, of course, when I’d laugh at myself for ever thinking it a mere ornament.) Some maps I laid to one side, as well as a letter with a broken seal that, as I began reading, I realized held the key to everything I wanted from this mysterious killer . . .

Señor Duncan Walpole,

I accept your most generous offer and await your arrival with eagerness.

If you truly possess the information we desire, we have the means to reward you handsomely.

Though I do not know your face by sight, I believe I can recognize the costume made infamous by your secret Order.

Therefore, come to Havana in haste and trust that you shall be welcomed as a Brother. It will be a great honour to meet you at last, Señor; to put a face to your name and shake your hand as I call you friend. Your support for our secret and most noble cause is warming.

Your most humble servant,

Governor Laureano Torres y Ayala

I read the letter twice. Then a third time for good measure.

Governor Torres, of Havana, eh? I thought.

“Reward you handsomely,” eh?

A plan had begun to form.

I buried Señor Duncan Walpole. I owed him that much at least. He went out of this world the way he’d arrived—naked—because I needed his clothes in order to begin my deception and, though I do say so myself, I looked good in his robes. They were a perfect fit and I looked the part.

Acting the part, though, would be another matter entirely. The man I was impersonating? Well, I’ve already told you of the aura that seemed to surround him. When I secured his hidden blade to my own forearm and tried to eject it as he had, well—it just wasn’t happening. I cast my mind back to seeing him do it and tried to impersonate him. A flick of the wrist. Something special, obviously, to stop the blade’s engaging by accident. I flicked my wrist. I twisted my arm. I wriggled my fingers. All to no avail. The blade sat stubbornly in its housing. It looked both beautiful and fearsome but if it wouldn’t engage, it was no good to man or beast.

What was I to do? Carry it around and keep trying? Hope I’d eventually chance upon its secret? Somehow I thought not. I had the feeling there was arcane knowledge attached to this blade. Found upon me, it could betray me.

With a heavy heart I cast it away, then addressed the grave-side I had prepared for my victim.

“Mr. Walpole . . .” I said, “let’s collect your reward.”