Chapter 261: Compensation Declined

The streets went up like a powder magazine on fire.

James stepped over the leader’s twitching boots with both fists raised, Kwaku at his left shoulder, Tomás at his right, and Wesley behind him. The couple pirates who had flanked the leader came at James across the fallen body, one rangy, with a pitted cutlass at his belt, and one stocky, with a boarding axe through his. Neither weapon had time to come free.

[Verdict] stayed home, too.

The rangy pirate swung first, a long looping blow.

"Yer muvver was a pox-ridden quayside trull, Calloway, an’ I’ll shite on yer fancy rock!"

James stepped inside it and drove a short left under the ribs. His fist buried itself and tore the breath out of him, while the pirate folded like a struck topsail.

Behind him, the giant hit Wesley with a boom like a longboat dropped onto a pier. Wesley’s back slammed into James’s and sent him a full stride into the stocky man’s swing, and the fist caught him on [Discretion] and slid off the black wool as though the cloth had been greased.

The stocky man stared at his own knuckles.

He then bellowed at the leader slumped in the muck. "Look at ’im! Look wot ’ee’s gone an’ done to ’im, thee black-coated bastard! An’ you, baws! Layin’ in the shite like a drunkard’s cur, ye gutless, lily-livered sodomite. Git UP, damn thee!"

James’s right hand was split across the knuckles from the leader’s stumps, with blood slicking the broken skin. He opened it wider, closed it again, and kept the grin.

"Hush now, lad, hush. The poor lad havin’ a wee lie-down, and he’s earned it."

The stocky man threw one more punch, and James took it on the sleeve, where it slid away like the first, then stamped his boot into the his lead knee. The knee buckled with a wet crack, the leg twisting under him, and the stocky man crashed into the muck howling.

His words came up through the howling, wet and ragged. "I’ll... Jesus, me knee, me KNEE! I’ll dig up thy mother an’ bugger ’er bones in the churchyard, thee whoreson, an’ piss on the daisies after!"

By then, the rangy pirate was back on his feet and grabbed both of James’s lapels to haul him in for a headbutt. His brow struck the top of James’s skull hard enough to flatten a tailor.

James paid him back.

His own brow crashed into the pirate’s nose and crushed it flat, like a biscuit under a boot, blood dripping over his chin. James then drove a knee into his belly hard enough to fold him over it, then shoved him backward over the pirate leader legs.

He landed full length in the kennel on top of his leader, who hadn’t asked for company.

James caught a breath and looked left.

Kwaku had one man on his back, the chain looped around his ankle, while another swung a club in great stupid arcs. The master at arms turned the club aside with an open palm, then slapped its owner with the other hand.

The blow snapped the pirate’s head sideways and blood sprang from his split lip, while his eyes went loose.

Kwaku regarded the swaying pirate as a schoolmaster regards a pupil who has set the curtains alight, with sorrow rather than anger, and a certain weary relish for what must come next.

He told the swaying fool, "Is that how you hold it? A club is carried firmly and with some notion of where it is going. Do remain upright, I beg you, we are not finished, and I should hate to conduct the remainder of the lesson from the floor."

James returned his focus to his fight, just enough to insult his opponent.

"Oi, lad! Is that knee still yers, or has it gone on ahead without ye?"

Then he looked right.

Tomás was the more efficient of the bunch. There was one pirate dead at his boots, and the remaining opponent came in with a blade raised over his shoulder.

He knocked the blade aside with his own, stepped through the window of opportunity, and drove his sword into the pirate’s throat. The steel punched through flesh, and blood spilled hot down the blade as the man sagged.

"Dios te perdone." he murmured, then crossed himself over the body.

Not an emotion in his face moved.

At James’s back, the pressure hadn’t eased. A glance over his shoulder showed Wesley and the giant palm to palm like two masts lashed together, while his giant heels had been driven a hand’s width through the muck, and a scaffold post groaned beneath.

Downhill, the fiddle kept sawing away.

By then, and at last, the rangy pirate dragged himself from the filth with his nose spread across his face, blood dripping from it into the mud, and the stocky pirate hauled himself upright on his wrecked leg. For the first time since the leader hit the mud, they had room to draw steel.

[Verdict] hissed from the scabbard half a breath ahead of the others, and James turned the blade so the lamplight brushed down it like a slow, bright promise.

"Come and meet her proper, she’s been dyin’ to be introduced. Fair’s fair, so it is."

The pitted cutlass and boarding axe came free in answer, and the rangy pirate spat red.

"I’ll ’ave the lot off yer corpse, Calloway! Coat, pistol, ’at, an’ that fancy bleedin’ sword! I’ll wear the coat to yer ’angin’ an’ dance a jig on yer bones in it. ’Oo’s laughin’ then, eh? ’OO’S LAUGHIN’ THEN?"

The axe came down from high over the stocky pirate’s head. James slid left, and the weapon bit deep into the mud with a heavy thud, where his shoulder had been.

The rangy man’s cutlass was already coming low across him. It struck James across the ribs and screeched flat across the black wool in a long trail of sparks.

His voice cracked up half an octave. "Christ on a crutch, mother o’ God, ’e’s got the Devil in ’is coat! He’s wearin’ the Devil’s bleedin’ ’ide, I’m tellin’ yer, the Devil’s got ’im!"

James let him stare.

[Verdict] came across and through the pitted steel like a razor through wet canvas. The cutlass snapped in two, but the stroke kept going, biting through the shoulder and into the chest, enough for blood to burst across the shirt and spray through the lamp and cookfire light.

He toppled backward, and James watched him go without a word.

The stocky pirate chopped again, screaming. James stepped aside, and [Verdict] came back across his forearm with enough force to split it open to the bone, dragging blood out in sheets down his wrist.

The axe fell into the mud.

The stocky man clutched his arm to his chest and hopped uphill into the dark on his bad leg, leaving dark drops behind him, bawling for his mother.

"Tell the lads compensation’s closed for the night!" James shouted after him.

A snap and a scream at his left made James turn in time to see Kwaku’s iron weight come around and fold the snared pirate’s knee the backwards direction, like a spar broken across a gunwale. The leg snapped with a hideous crack, and his scream tore up the lane.

The pirate he had slapped was seized by the collar and driven face-first into the ruts. His mouth struck first and his teeth burst from his gums and scattered across the mud, while blood dripped from his lips into the grooves beneath his face.

Kwaku brushed a fleck of mud from his sleeve with fastidious air. "Both will live, Captain, though one of them will sup through a quill until Michaelmas. I consider that a courtesy, and I should like it noted that it was freely extended."

Tomás stood among his fallen with his blade clean, finishing his prayer and watching Wesley without hurry.

James wheeled toward the last fight.

The giant’s roars had dwindled to wheezes. Wesley planted his heels, shifted his grip, and lifted.

The bald pirate left the ground, all hogshead and boot soles, and Wesley hurled him the width of the streets into the wall of the burnt shack. The charred timbers burst and the whole gutted front crumbled with a cloud of ash over their boots.

The bald brute lay in the wreckage with blood pouring from the scalp wound and streaking down the side of his face.

Wesley dusted the soot from his cuffs.

"Certainly," he said.

The fiddle downhill never missed a note.

Spectators vanished back into the doorways, and not a soul in Nassau came out to look. Four men from four corners of the world occupied an alley no watch would ever walk, while the leader lay senseless in the kennel beneath a dead man.

James found his hat face down in the mud, knocked it clean against his thigh, and put it back on his head. He flexed his split right hand once, fresh blood glistening across the knuckles, then let it hang.

He tapped each in turn, chest, shoulders, head, hip. "Pistol, aye. Coat, aye, and not a scratch on her. Hat, a wee bit muddier, but aye. Sword, God love her."

Then he wiped [Verdict] on the rangy pirate’s coat and sheathed it.

Kwaku surveyed the wreckage with contempt. "I believe I have my answer to my earlier inquiry, Captain. The town is extremely confident, and it is, as of this evening, three men poorer for its confidence. I shall not be sending flowers."

Tomás crossed himself over the dead. His hand rose to brow, breast, shoulder, shoulder once more, slower this time, as if he were tucking the dead man in.

"Descansen en paz."

"Right then, lads, enough of the dancin’.

James looked up the slope toward the crooked way and the Rat.

"Jennings. Now, afore the next lot hears tell of this and comes lookin’ for their share."

He had taken two strides when the stocky pirate cries, still carrying down the hill, were answered from higher up. More voices joined them, and every one of them was coming down.

It was indeed, time to leave.