Chapter 260: Celebrated Absentee

The Rose came alongside the docks just as the last light left the sky and the waterfront lamps began taking over. Ropes flew, pilings groaned, and not a single boat came out to check which ship had just arrived in this godforsaken island.

That was what unwatched meant, and Nassau seemed to wear the word with some pride.

James stopped at the head of the gangway with his merry band behind him. Wesley stood there like a door that figured it ought to grow legs, Tomás waited at his shoulder, calm as going to a christening, and Kwaku let his chain run loose until the iron weight hung beside his knee.

He let his gaze crawl over the crew on the deck. "Do you hear me, the whole drookit lot of ye? Not one foot ashore until I’ve had a good sniff about and know how this town lies."

The crew, who had spent days pricing Nassau’s pleasures down to the last shilling, replied with a groan loud enough to rattle the yards. Out of the rigging, hoarse as a rusted hinge, came a voice that had clearly been saving this up.

"An’ now ye’d ’ave us rot aboard like salt cod, ye miserable, prick-’earted tyrant!"

Cudjoe’s voice came from the quarterdeck, over all the ruckus. "Away wi’ ye, then. I’ll hold her. If ye’re nae back by the dawn, I’m comin’ tae fetch ye, and I’ll be in a mood."

He let that settle.

"A rich foul mood."

Below them, there were more pirates on the pier than the thing could reasonably support. These sailors crowded around the Rose by the cookfire light, palms flat against her hull, forehead pressed against planking like some ridiculous altar.

The cheery shouts broke over the gangway, hoarse and holy, sailors acting as though the ship might bless them.

"Forty-four guns, lads! Forty-four! I counted ’em meself, twice, an’ I wept like a bairn!"

"It’s him! El Azote! The Scourge! The captain wot sent a man o’ war tae the bottom off Havana! By Christ’s bleedin’ bollocks, the finest whoreson ever tae put a keel in salt water!"

Then the angry shouts came out of the dark beyond the cressets, where the lamplight gave up, and it had been left to sour like wine in a hot cellar.

"Oh, aye, look at ’im! The Big Boss ’imself!"

"Look at the coat on ’im! Worth more than this whole bleedin’ street!"

"Come down off ’is stone tae visit the poor, ’as ’e? Wi’ ’is Concordia, an’ ’is name carved in some rock out in the Bahamas! Ooh, ’ow kind! ’Ow very bloody kind!"

A bearded sailor shouldered through to the front and spat between James’s boots, close enough to be an insult, cautious enough to be a courtesy. He wiped his mouth on a forearm like a ham hock and squinted up at the Rose’s hull.

"That tub o’ yers, Cap’n."

He jerked his chin at her.

"She takin’ on hands? Or is she only fer lords an’ liars?"

James grinned through all of it. Celebrated on one side, absentee on the other, and neither accusation was entirely wrong.

Kwaku calmly observed. "There is two kinds of men on this pier, Captain. Them that wish to kiss you, and them that wish to kill you. They have been kind enough to inform us which."

From behind, Tomás had been studying the mob with sweet, bottomless melancholy.

He touched two fingers to his brow, half a blessing, half a habit. "Envy and worship, mi capitán, they are the same prayer, no? Only the mood is different."

James tipped his head at the din as if it were a hymn he’d half forgotten the words to, then sighed.

"Och, I’ve been away too long. Clean forgot how much this wee dungheap adores me."

He rolled his shoulders with a swaggering lean. "Jennings, lads. If there’s a captain in this midden who still knows which way the wind’s blowin’, it’s him. Up the crooked way to the Rat."

The merry band stepped into the crowd, which parted open for Kwaku’s chain considerably faster than for the captain.

Nassau reached his nose then, shite, rum, woodsmoke, tar, and beneath all of it the stench of fish left in the sun for far, far too long.

Burnt scaffolds leaned against half-raised walls and tents crawled up the hillside in every direction. Some rum shop was still roaring and a fiddle was still sawing away, which was probably the most offensive part of the whole business.

On their way, a pirate lay face-down in the road with his boots gone and his pockets turned out, while two passersby searched what remained of his coat. Then, a woman’s scream came tearing out of an alley and stopped abruptly.

A man’s scream took its place.

The woman came walking out, wiped her blade on her skirt, and looked at nobody. Two more pirates came down the road with knives drawn, and every other person stepped aside for them.

An open gutter emptied directly into a wellhead. James’s nose, which had survived every bilge in the Caribbean, finally started to feel sheer and simple regret.

Kwaku’s eyes swept the black doorways and empty windows.

"This town is awfully confident, Captain, or awfully dead."

A pause, dry as ship’s biscuit.

"I have not seen a watch."

By their side Wesley turned the thought over, the way a glacier considers a valley, and delivered the only verdict he had ever needed.

"Certainly."

It was the obvious reality, and James flung an arm at the whole stinking panorama.

He clucked his tongue. "Every corner’s a fresh chance to die, Kwaku, and not one of them’s tried to charge me a shilling, you can’t fault the hospitality."

The road narrowed where a burnt shack and a stalled scaffold squeezed it down to the width of a cart. The people ahead disappeared into doorways.

Then the pirates came out of the dark.

James watched them as they appeared, because a captain who cannot observe eventually dies of stupidity. Three stood across the lane, the middle one with a cropped ear and teeth blackened down to stumps, while two came from the left and two more came from the right.

Then came a heavy tread from behind, some bald giant with a neck like a mainmast.

Eight.

They cursed each other in four different tongues, and not one of them smelled of rum.

Kwaku closed his hand around the chain, Tomás rested a hand on his hilt, Wesley turned his back to James and faced the giant, largest man against largest man, then flexed one fist.

The man in the middle hawked a brown gob into the mud and swaggered out ahead of the others, cropped ear twitching like a stray dog that has just smelled a bone.

"Well, bugger me blind an’ paint me pink, lads! Lookit wot the tide’s dragged in!"

He flung both arms wide, playing to his crew like a barker at a fair.

"Big Boss Calloway ’imself, come crawlin’ back to the shithole wot spawned ’im!"

The pirate, who by then was evidently the leader of this disciplined group of gentlemen, rounded on James, finger levelled like a musket.

His voice came rough and unstable

"Sat on ’is fancy rock in ’is fancy coat, ’e did, while Nassau went to shite round our bleedin’ ears!"

And his expression snarled in genuine rage. "An’ where were you, eh? Where the fuckin’ ’ell were you, Calloway? Fattenin’ yerself on yer stone an’ yer lovely rules in some sandspit nobody’s good enough ter see!"

Even enough that spittle flew from his lips. "You fink you’re better than the rest o’ us, but you crawled out o’ the same filth! Same bloody cloth, mate! Same! Bloody! Cloth!"

His finger shook with hunger as much as anger, and ribs showed through a shirt that had more holes than fabric, while his grin stayed on his face just enough to dislike it.

"Thank you kindly for the welcome, lads. Truly, I’m touched."

James hooked his thumbs into his belt, easy as a man at a fair. "Same cloth, aye, though mine’s had a wee bittie better tailorin’. And if Nassau’s gone to the dogs, she managed it fine without me. I was busy bein’ fat."

"Enough o’ yer bleedin’ jawin’, ye jumped-up sack o’ shite!"

The leader ran a grey tongue across his ruined teeth, and the grin came back thin and starving.

"Compensation, Calloway. That’s wot we’re ’ere for."

He ticked each item off on grimy fingers. "Yer fancy pistol. Yer fine coat. That pretty ’at. An’ that sword on yer ’ip. ’And ’em over, nice an’ sweet, an’ we’ll let you an’ yer three nursemaids toddle back to yer boat."

James weighed the demand with grave attention, one finger tapping his chin, brow furrowed as if the fate of nations hung on the cut of a hat.

"The hat first, is it? Aye, very sensible. Start at the top and work your way down."

He stepped forward with his hands open and a smile on his face, close enough to smell whatever had crawled into the pirate’s breath and died there.

The leader still had his filthy palm held out when James’s right hand came up from his hip and drove straight into his face, shoulder behind it. The nose flattened with a wet crunch that carried to the back of the lane while the split lip burst across the remaining stumps, and two teeth flew into the darkness like dice.

The pirate head snapped back and his knees gave way, then he landed in the kennel senseless, one boot twitching while blood dripped from his beard in a bright rope.

The seven pirates left standing stared at the leader who had asked for a coat and received a nap instead. Then the lane filled with curses in a dozen accents.

The giant behind them roared like a bull with its bollocks caught in a vise.

Kwaku’s chain began to sing, Tomás murmured a prayer, Wesley rolled his neck until it cracked.

James straightened his lapels and grinned at the lot of them.

"Well now, Nassau’s hardly changed at all."

He sighed, almost fondly.

"Still not a scrap of discretion in the whole bloody place."