Casca 15: The Pirate Page 5

  Only trouble was, at the moment he wasn't in much of a position to do anything about it.

  The boat beached, and the pirates pulled it up just enough on the smooth sand to keep it from going back into the sea. In silence, which by now had begun to bother Casca, they pulled him from the longboat and dragged him up the beach, not too far out of reach of the water, and propped him up against a rock in the sun. The rock was hot against his back. He was facing seaward. He could see the pirate ship lying off the shoal water, and he thought he could make out the figure of Blackbeard holding a spyglass on him. "Let's get the hell out of here."

  The pirate who said it had a worried tone to his voice, and Casca could see that he didn't want to stay there a moment longer. It was the first words spoken by any of the pirates, and now they all hurried back to the longboat, pushed it into the water, jumped aboard, and began rowing quickly back toward the ship. They had, in fact, been in such a rush that when they dumped him on the sand one of the pirates had accidentally and unknowingly dropped a piece of eight he had apparently been carrying in one of his pistol holsters, and the coin had gone down into the folds of the cravat around Casca's neck.

  Now why are they in such a rush? Shit! I've got myself involved with madmen, he thought. Already the sun was beginning to make him uncomfortable. What Blackbeard had in mind, of course, was to have him broiled alive out here. However...They had tied him up with tarred ship's rope. The heat of the sun would soften the tar plus the pirates who had tied him, either by accident or design, had left some slight slack. He watched the longboat reach the ship and be taken aboard. The sails were unfurled. They caught the brief wind, and The Queen's Revenge stood out to sea. By the time she would be hull down on the horizon and beyond spyglass range he could have himself untied. No big damage done except for postponing his voyage to America a bit longer.

  He began flexing his wrists and felt the rope give slightly. There was still the problem of how to get off this damn island but, first things first. He worried slightly because of the pirate crew's apparent fear of the island. But only for a moment. After all, what could happen to him on a deserted island?

  What he didn't know was that the island wasn't deserted...

  Six pairs of very dark eyes were watching Casca. The eyes of six men. Spaniards.

  The island on which Blackbeard had marooned Casca happened to be one tiny spot of land in a wide area of the Caribbean. Actually it was the top of an extinct volcano but none of the men on it knew that. Not even Casca.

  It was not on the British Admiralty charts. Nor any other charts. But it was known by quite a few pirate captains, Spanish as well as those of Blackbeard's Brotherhood.

  And, over a period of time, Spanish pirate captains had marooned malefactors. Several dozen, as a matter of fact, but not more than a baker's dozen had survived.

  Brotherhood captains had also marooned men on the island. And, since they were enemies afloat, they remained enemies ashore. So, when Casca was put ashore there were thirteen Spanish maroons and fifteen Brotherhood maroons, organized loosely into two groups fighting each other. Since they had neither guns nor swords they had to fight with rocks and sticks. They also made crude bows from tropical trees that were really too soft for the purpose and wooden spears, points hopefully hardened in campfire flames. The lack of good weapons made killing each other off rather difficult, but, given enough time, both sides had managed. It was helpful to discover as in Casca's case a new maroon of the other side since it was much easier to kill him. The six Spaniards in the cover of the vegetation at the forest's edge were not in for a bit of fun. The Brotherhood maroons, they knew, were encamped on the other side of the island, held there by ineffective but intimidating archery fire from the other seven Spaniards. These six would have the pleasure of killing Casca. Since life on the island was boring there was enough fruit to eat, but nothing else to do killing was a nice break from the everyday routine.

  The Spanish leader – by temporary sufferance only; there was no discipline among the maroons – checked the horizon to be sure the ship was not coming back, and then signaled his men. They came out into the open, but then stopped when the leader held up his hand, then pointed at Casca.

  That one, unaware that he had company, was busily engaged in wriggling out of his ropes. He was making progress but it was going slow. Watching him provided some amusement for the Spaniards. They were going to kill him anyway. Might as well enjoy watching him struggle. So all six hunkered down, on the sand and, grinning, waited for him to either succeed or give up.

  It took him the better part of a quarter hour, but he succeeded. Finally free, he stood up, rubbed his wrists, stamped his feet to bring the circulation back, and removed the gag. Then he turned around. And, as he turned, the six Spaniards rose to their feet, clubs poised.

  Casca stared at them.

  "Bastard son of an English dog," the Spanish leader greeted him in Spanish. “Bastardo. Desecho. Lechon." The Spaniard was not very imaginative, and his remarks on Casca 's lineage were far from original. Casca had heard much better from amateur English whores. He smiled and that infuriated all six Spaniards who began shouting obscenities at him, clubs raised.

  Casca laughed. After Blackbeard and his twisted thinking it was such a pleasure to see normal men even if they were ready to kill him that Casca felt a warm glow of pleasure. “By the blood of the Virgin, Herself!" he exclaimed in Spanish. "You bastards are the best things I've seen in days."

  "Que? You speak Spanish, Englishman?" The Spanish leader looked confused.

  Spanish? Hell, it was only bastard Latin. Casca did not explain, but he did grin.

  The Spanish maroons hesitated and got into an argument amongst themselves. The net result, though, was that since he had come from Blackbeard's ship he must be an enemy.

  It took a little while, but Casca convinced the Spaniards that he would make a better recruit than a target. That settled, there was one other problem.

  "You help us fight the English. Now we beat hell out of them bastards." The Spanish leader grinned.

  "English? What English?" Casca asked.

  "On the other side of the island."

  "You mean you aren't the only ones on this island?"

  "Pero, no, mi amigo." The Spaniard proceeded to explain to Casca about the marooned Brotherhood pirates and about the continuing war between the two groups. Casca looked at him and at the other five. They were all in rags, and they were all skinny. Casca didn't know too much about these little islands, but he guessed there was probably fruit to eat and not much else. Even if there were wild goats or such these maroons were too busy fighting each other to hunt.

  "How many?"

  “Que?”

  "You. Spaniards. And the others."

  "Ah..." The Spaniard started counting on his fingers.

  But another one of the pirates, a young fellow with a very skimpy beard, said: "Twenty-eight. You make twenty-nine."

  Twenty-nine men. Casca thought about that, his eyes watching the far horizon of the blue ocean.

  "What you see?" the Spaniard sounded suspicious.

  "How to get off this island," Casca growled.

  Twenty-nine men. That meant two things. One, a lot of pirate ships must stop here to maroon that many men, Brotherhood or Spanish. Two, twenty-nine men were a large enough crew to sail a captured ship...

  He turned back to the Spaniards and explained what he had in mind.

  "No! It would not work! We will not make peace with the English dogs!"

  "Suit yourself," Casca shrugged. "But I'm getting off."

  "No!" The clubs came up.

  "Oh, shit!" Casca grumbled, and made one quick movement forward and to the side. It was something he had learned long ago, taught by that old friend from the land of Chin. The next thing the Spanish leader knew there was a swift kick in his gut, low down, very low down, that temporarily interrupted his interest in the proceedings. There were other movements, too. A blow to the side of the throat of t
he oldest bearded Spaniard. A twisting motion here. Another there.

  They had the clubs, but Casca had the ability. Hell, not one of them could have lasted five minutes in a Roman arena. In half that time Casca had four Spaniards out and a fifth backing away. Only the young Spaniard with the skimpy beard still faced him, still holding a club, but not moving not scared, but with an appraising look in his young eyes.

  Casca had not bothered to pick up any of the clubs that now lay on the rocky ground on the border between underbrush and beach. He, too, had an appraising look in his eyes, studying the young Spaniard.

  "See what I mean?" Casca said in Spanish, not moving on the youngster.

  "Si."

  Casca looked down at the leader.

  "Have we got a deal?"

  "Ah...

  "Look, dammit, I could have ripped your face off and smashed what little brains you have if I had wanted to. And that goes for the rest of you bastards. I didn't, you sons of bitches, because we need each other if we're going to take the next damn ship that puts in here."

  "But we have no swords, no guns...”

  "So? With twenty nine men I can take any ship's boat that puts in here."

  Which really wasn't exactly true, but it sounded like it to them if not to Casca.

  Casca 's Spaniards – he was beginning to think of them as his own private squad – took him over the mountain to the other side of the island. It was a night's long march under a bright full moon, and the Spaniards apparently had no fear of being ambushed by the discarded members of the Brotherhood.

  "The fort," the young Spaniard explained when Casca asked him.

  "Fort?"

  "Si."

  They were walking a well-worn path under the trees surprisingly open for the tropics, and the silver moonlight dappled the way. Casca reflected upon other hills he had walked as a young boy, younger then than his erstwhile guide was now. But he liked the young man very much. There was a clean quality to him that was not found often in the world. He wondered what ‘crime’ had brought him to this sorry state. Of course there were times when the innocent passengers of ships taken by the pirates were not killed but left abandoned on deserted isles. This might have been the case with his young guide.

  Julio, the young Catalonian, explained about the fort and gave Casca a rundown on the relations between the English and the Spaniards. It was what was to be expected. They didn't get along worth a shit.

  As for the fort, none knew who had originally built it or why. They would have liked to have known because whoever it was had to have had an axe or at the very least some kind of adz to cut and shape the logs. Such a weapon in their hands now could mean control of the island. At any rate some long dead castaways had built a small fort of logs over a spring on the east side of the island. Whoever controlled the fort, with its continuous water supply, had the edge when the time of no rains came, which occurred with great frequency. As it was, the fort was now in the hands of the maroons left here by the Brotherhood.

  Dawn had just reddened the eastern sky when Casca and his group reached the fort. They hid themselves about a hundred yards from it. The fort itself was not a very prepossessing affair. Actually it looked more like a shack of weathered logs.

  Casca stepped out into the open. He was holding a white rag tom from his own cravat tied to a stick as a flag of truce.

  He was met by a barrage of stones thrown from the fort. Fortunately, the aim was not too good.

  "Knock that shit off!" he yelled, and kept going closer.

  The English words got him in. Inside proved to be little more than a stockade since there was no roof. The Brotherhood maroons were carbon copies of the Spanish except that they had a leader, a real leader, a big, dour, one armed Scot who must have been several inches over six feet tall.

  Casca had to look up to him, and that didn't do his disposition any good. "Don't you know what a flag of truce is?" he demanded.

  "Aye"

  "Then, why–"

  Casca did not get to finish the sentence. He had gotten too damn confident. Whatever it was that now hit him on the back of the neck took care of that. The last thing he saw was the smile on the face of the one armed giant.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  When Casca came to, he found he had been tied up with vines and thrown against the wall of the fort. He looked down at the vines holding his feet. They didn't seem too tough. He ought to be out of them in no time. His hands were tied behind him. He tried stretching his arms to pull the lashing apart.

  "Damn!" The vines were tougher than they looked. No luck at all. Behind him he could feel an opening in the wall, a wide space between the logs, and he tried to feel if there was a sharp edge he might cut the vines with. No. The logs were smooth as polished marble.

  The Brotherhood castaways had not bothered to gag him. As a matter of fact they seemed to have forgotten him entirely; tied him up, thrown him against the wall, and left him alone. That was a hell of a note. Casca had been in tight spots before plenty of them but he couldn't remember when he had been completely ignored.

  He looked at the pirates, trying to decide which ones might have hit him, but there was really no way of telling. Oh, hell, he would just give it to all of them.

  The big one armed Scotsman was gone. So were half a dozen of the others – the ones who had been there when he came in with his flag of truce. The fort had been relatively crowded then with all fifteen men. Now he counted only eight. Had they made some kind of deal with the Spaniards? But just when he had the thought there came a shouted curse in Spanish from somewhere outside the walls, followed by a small shower of stones. The Brotherhood men paid no attention. They were hunkered down in a rough semicircle, and Casca saw one of them pound a large object on a stone. Coconuts! It must be breakfast time.

  But where had the others gone? And how had they gotten past the Spaniards outside?

  He looked around the fort. Actually it was simply an area enclosed by crudely stacked trees with the smaller limbs broken off where possible and the open spaces filled in with brush and stones – evidence that the men who built it had no tools, no axe, hatchet, or saw. In fact, Casca could see that the ends of the logs were burned. So that was the way the men who had built the structure had downed the trees: built a fire around the base and burned them down. To Casca it seemed like an awful lot of unnecessary trouble. But if the predecessors of these men had the patience to go through all that trouble, maybe he could get these to storm the first ship that landed.

  But he had to get loose first.

  He still had not figured out how the others had left. But suddenly old memories came back into his brain, memories of the lands where he had first served, memories of shepherd camps he had seen in the past...

  There ought to be – Ah! There was.

  The spring was not in the center of the stockade, but over to one side, and there were a couple of rough lean-to’s against the stockade walls. The spring came out of rock, out of a kind of hillock that rose up there, and the wall on that side was built up over a spur of rock laid down by some long dead volcano, and Casca had known about volcanic rock since his childhood. He didn't really expect to find a cave here on this Caribbean island, but –

  "Hell!" It wasn't much of a cave, just a small tunnel in the rock only a little larger than it took for a man to wriggle into. And it was partially hidden by trash, branches and rocks the pirates had pulled over it. But the ground showed that the brush had been moved repeatedly. And if this was like the ones Casca had known elsewhere the passageway would get wider inside. A "blowhole" would have formed in the molten lava when the volcano had last erupted a long, long time ago. And somewhere out in the forest, up on the side of the hill, probably now hidden by trees, there would be an opening where the earth had fallen through. An easy way out. Now, why hadn't the Spaniards known about that? It bothered Casca. He had been counting on the Spaniards to be smart. But, then, he hadn't been too smart himself, getting taken by the big one armed Scot.
<
br />   "Captain Long..."

  The voice behind Casca, outside the wall, was so soft he barely heard it. But the words were in Spanish.

  Julio!

  All Casca could do was rub his bound wrists against the log behind him.

  "Silencio, senor." This time the whisper was little more than a breath.

  Casca could feel the fingers of the young Spanish boy probing gently into the open space between the logs, touching his wrists and exploring the knotted vine. Casca considered the logs he could see opposite him. They were crudely stacked, yes, and there was space between them, but he doubted that the boy would have room enough to untie the vines. The probing stopped.

  "Un momento." This time the whisper was louder, and Casca worried that the youngster would get too loud, loud enough for the pirates to hear. Besides that, how had the boy, in broad daylight, gotten to the wall in the first place? And how had he known where to find Casca?

  Casca began to sweat.

  Then he felt the fingers back in the log opening, and something cold and hard touched his bound wrists. A knife? Did any of these men have knives? The glint of metal he thought he had seen on the one armed man's chest, was it a hidden knife?

  There was a sawing motion on the vines holding his wrists. Evidently Julio was trying to cut him loose. At that moment one of the pirates in the group opposite looked straight at Casca, and Casca felt instinctively that the man knew something was going on. He tried to return the pirate’s gaze with a non-commital look of his own, and he saw that the pirate was holding a broken shard of the black volcanic rock, the stuff that looked like glass, obsidian. As Casca watched, the pirate used the rock flake like a knife to cut off a slice of the white coconut meat and stuff it into his mouth.