Chapter 257: A Wee Lie-Down

The display winked out, and the black went with it.

Sound came back first, like hail through fog, one voice, then another, until the words stopped sliding off him and began to stick. Then hard flagstone bit into his shoulder blades and the four barrels of his pistol dug into his ribs.

The key was still clenched in his fist, cold as a coin pulled from a drowned man’s pocket.

A palm cracked across his cheek like a plank slapped flat on water, and the voice came in right behind it, all Welsh thunder and no patience.

"Up wi’ ye, ye great twp lump o’ a man! Wake up, mun!"

A second slap rang out, then a wild gust as a hat flogged the air above his face, swung with far more terror than sense.

"Cap’n, oi! Cap’n!"

Kit’s voice cracked in half. "Please, sweet Christ, wake the fuck up! ’Cause if ye don’t, I’m Cap’n, see? Bein’ Conqueror o’ bleedin’ Havana, that’s rank enough for any man, an’ I’ll ’ave yer cabin an’ all!"

"Over my corpse, ye cheeky little limpet, an’ it’ll be a long while rottin’!"

Jim’s voice floated down from above the flapping hat, slow and solemn. "What’s wanted here is a priest, so it is. A Portuguese one, mind, wi’ good Latin lungs on him, an’ a length o’ rope, same as we managed at Recife. God rest the poor bastard."

"Where d’ye think ye’ll find a Portuguese priest, ye ghoul? Down a bloody hole in a swamp?"

"Ah, think o’ the saving, Bran, it comes cheaper than a funeral, an’ there’s no catering."

Barrel’s voice rolled out of him like a cask down a cellar stair.

"Cart him out, then, will we? Save on the fuss."

Ox nodded once, the way a mountain might nod, and the word dropped like an anchor.

"Aye. Up he goes."

Two fingers stayed pressed to James’s wrist, steady as a rock in a tide, while beside his ear a flintlock ratcheted back to full cock.

Mary demanded as a knife leaving its sheath, "Lay one hand on hi, an’ I’ll put a ball through the pair o’ ye. He’s breathin’, so leave him be."

Not a soul moved.

Even the hat stopped.

Then Bran jabbed a finger at his white knuckles. "It’s the stone, see! That cursed stone’s got its claws in him. Get it out of his fist, quick, before it drinks the rest o’ him!"

Kit desperately snapped.

"But Cap’n said don’t touch, Bran! Eyes only, he said, on account of the shiny things!"

Jim stroked his chin in ponder. "Now there’s a fine question, so there is. Does a fist count as touching? Or is it only... clutchin’?"

"It’s a hand, that. Hands touch. It’s what they’re for."

Kit’s voice went thin. "So... so is the Cap’n a shiny thing now, then? Ain’t we s’posed to leave him be, if he’s gone shiny?"

"Shiny enough, aye, gleamin’ like a fresh-minted sovereign, an’ twice as unnatural."

Jim cleared his throat like a parson climbing into a pulpit. "There he lay, dearly beloved, cut down in the very prime an’ pride o’ life, like a daffodil in a hailstorm..."

Bran wheeled on him, teeth bared.

"He is not dead, ye carrion-crowin’ buzzard! Shut that hole in yer face afore I shut it for ye!"

Jim shrugged. "And I doubt he will die either."

A fingernail scratched the flagstone by James’s ear.

Kit dropped to his knees and dragged a fingernail through the dust by James’s ear, lip wobbling, mouthing each letter as he made it.

"Here lies the Cap’n, who... who touched... a bleedin’ shiny thing."

"Enough."

The word dropped from Mary into the hall like a cold stone down a well, and every mouth closed round it.

James pulled his eyes open.

Kit’s upside-down face hung over him, cheeks streaked wet.

"Oi." James said.

The boy shrieked loud enough to wake every coffin in the hall.

Bran’s third slap cracked home, open-handed and full of fright, and she hauled James upright by the collar and shook him until his teeth clacked.

"I’d picked out yer boots! Duw, I’d picked out yer boots, ye bastard!"

Kit threw himself into the shaking and crushed James’s ribs, sobbing and swearing into his coat.

"Yer face ’as stopped bein’ a sovereign, Cap’n! It’s gone back to bein’ ugly!

"Alive." Barrel rumbled. "Well, I’ll be. Alive an’ all."

"Aye." came Ox.

Mary’s fingers left his wrist, though they had lingered there a good deal longer than any pulse needed.

"About bloody time, another minute, an’ I’d have let Kit have yer cabin."

James got his boots under him.

Barrel’s fist closed around his arm and hauled him upright like a mast and brushed the dust from his coat.

The crew stepped back a pace together.

All round the hall, the cresset flames burned straight up, as though nobody had disturbed them at all. Kit swiped his nose on his sleeve and stared up at James, hiccupping through the tail end of his sobs.

"But wot ’appened, Cap’n? One minute ye’re standin’ there, next ye’re gone. Wot did it do to ye?"

"Nothin’. A wee lie-down."

"Half a glass ye were down, mun! Dropped like a sack o’ wet flour!"

"It’ll be the heat, no doubt. Fierce warm in here, is it not?"

"Cold as a banker’s heart, this hall, Cap’n."

"Then it’ll be the company, Jim. You’d sour milk at fifty paces away."

"Was it another dream, Cap’n? Like with ye had wi’ the bird-snake?"

"Aye, a long one, a very long one."

Bran spat over her shoulder.

Jim crossed himself with the wrong hand, then, in his haste to mend it, with the wrong hand again, and hauled the crew into a huddle by the elbows. "She’s hexed him, lads. Hexed him, or claimed him, or, God help us, the both. Twenty-seven brushes wi’ death, an’ I swear on me mother’s grave that pit were a stroll next to this!"

Mary’s eyes were on his hand where it had risen toward his brow and stopped halfway. James turned the gesture into a lazy salute and let the grin come out to cover it.

James only shrugged. "Never better, Mark. Never felt finer since I was a born."

He walked toward the dais while the muttering behind him thinned out.

For half a breath he turned it over. None of them had checked the air in this hall, and some hallucination gas could very much make him dream a whole goddess on just like that.

"Right joke, that," he muttered. "Gassed."

The mask sat in its hollow, its gold gone dull as old brass.

He wiped his brow with the back of his hand. It came away cool and wet, river-cool, with none of the heat of sweat.

Inside his own head, a long, magnificent, theatrical sigh rolled through.

"Aye, aye, lass. I hear you, no need to sulk."

Behind him Kit whispered. "Is he talkin’ to her?"

Jim caught the boy by the scruff and turned his face to the wall with a trembling, fatherly hand.

"Don’t look, lad, less you want to get hexed as well."

Meanwhile, James climbed the dais steps and, without any ceremony, set the toothed end of the key into the middle socket.

It went home flush with a small, dry sound.

The crew hit the floor as though a broadside had gone off.

Bran cursed in Welsh and Kit in English on the way down. Jim bellowed from behind a pillar, while the giants vanished behind the nearest coffin.

Mary alone kept her feet, pistol loose in her hand, eyes on the unmoving key.

"James."

The key sat in its socket, unmoving.

Voices floated out from behind pillars and coffins, thin and muffled as prayers through a wall.

"Are we dead? Someone tell me if we’re dead! Bran? Bran, are we dead?"

"I can’t feel me legs! Sweet Mother of God, they’ve taken me legs!"

"Ye’re sittin’ on them, ye great pillock."

Heads rose one at a time from behind the pillars, like moles after rain.

James clapped his hands together hard enough to make every flame shiver, plucked the torch from its crack in the dais, and came down the steps already halfway to being captain again.

He put discipline in the crew. "Right, you rogues! The ruins are safe. Ox, Barrel, back down to the first chamber with you, tell the diggers to bring up the rest, and we’ll divide it as agreed. Fair shares, mind."

He swept an arm across the tiers of coffins.

Kit’s voice shot up and cracked on the high note.

"But it’s cursed, Cap’n! Cursed!"

"Aye, and now I’m sayin’ is fine."

"The last thing lifted in this hole very near killed ye, Cap’n."

"I’ve the lady of the house leave, Bran. Gave it freely, a right gracious hostess."

"The who, is it?"

"The bonny lass on the lid."

From there, it would take dozens of minutes to convince the crew the place wasn’t exactly cursed, or at least with no spirits that would harm them.

While that happened, the gift Chally had pressed into him appeared like a chart drawn inside his eyelids.

First it came high as a gull riding the wind.

A pale, hard sky. Water clear and green as a bottle, its salt heavy with cane smoke and a great curved harbor below a fort with star-shaped bastions, the white ensign of the French crown snapping above it. Cane plantation climbed behind the town, gangs bent over the rows while a driver walked at their backs. Beyond them stood a long blue wall of mountains.

Inland, tucked into a fold of those hills, the picture warmed and throbbed faintly, just as the key had in his fist.

Saint-Domingue, he would have sworn, unless he had never seen sugar.

Second, a low bruise-grey sky and brown water like strong tea where a great river spilled into the sea. The salt was thick with wet earth and pitch.

A raw new jetty of unbaked timber spread from a low green coast. A King’s ship and a fat transport lay tied alongside, the Union flag above them and a broad pennant at the nearest masthead.

There, redcoats drilled on a parade scraped out of the mud, the formation carrying axes and spades while cutting a track into a wall of jungle.

At the edge of the clearing stood a row of fresh graves and a line of fever tents.

Deep in that jungle, the picture warmed and throbbed.

The pennant stayed with him longest, swallow-tailed, a commodore’s cut. From that height there was no telling whose it was.