Alias Hook (13 page)

Proserpina gave a careless shrug. “She breathes, she feeds, she spins in the normal way. One day, she will return to the current of time. By this service, her spirit will find honor and peace in the time beyond.”

The witch returned to coaxing her websilk appliance along the length of my wound, her fingertips soft and tender against my skin. Only a bit of the gash was still visible when she lowered her head and pressed warm, full lips to my thigh. All but scuppered in an answering wave of desire, I could only stare as she lifted her head and spit into the clamshell dish, stippling its pale surface with my blood.

“The
loas
must have something in return,” she said, when she saw my face. “Is a delicate thing, the balance between their world and ours.”

I was not overfond of the notion of my blood in possession of her spirit familiars, if indeed such things were not a fantasy of my own delirium. But Proserpina healed my injury so completely that I didn’t complain. It had been years since anyone had touched me with tenderness for any reason, and the respite I found in that fragrant, ramshackle hut was worth an army of immortal spiders and muttering ghosts.

As I grew stronger, and her ministrations turned more frankly erotic, I was less and less inclined to discourage any of her whims and fancies. She was on intimate terms with my body by then, and she undertook to rouse and pleasure me with the same skill. It was sweet and easy at first. She wanted nothing, and I had nothing to prove to her. Her body and her mercy, even more than her potions and balms, began to heal the misery that had driven my life for so long. Often on those languid island nights, after we had sated each other, I boasted I would compose a rhapsody in her honor, or at least play her something to make her weep with joy.

But my men had had their fill at last of gluttony and drink and idleness, and voted to resume our voyage of terror. Proserpina offered me the protection of her hidden village and the sanctuary of her bed would I but stay with her.

“Give up your roving,
Capitaine,
” she crooned. “Let me be your world.”

I laughed her off, perhaps too harshly. By now, the men suspected me of weakness for the time I’d spent with her. I had to act boldly to restore myself as leader in their eyes. I knew all too well what mob rule was like, and I dared not let the men see how tempted I was by Proserpina’s invitation, lest they turn on me, on us both. “You deserve better, Pina,” I amended, more gently.

In truth, recovered health and more time spent among the men as they made the
Rouge
seaworthy once more had rekindled my old bloodlust for revenge against the world. Believing I’d had my fill of tenderness, I reminded myself there were still those at liberty who had not yet tasted my blade nor yielded to my power. I would not be satisfied until the name of Hook was regarded with the same terror as Blackbeard and Morgan along the length and breadth of all the world’s oceans.

I was forty-three years old, and that was all the more life meant to me.

She came to the beach with a basket of fruits for our voyage. When they rowed her aboard, she asked me to play. The men were already testy and sniggering to have her there, waiting to see how much power she yet wielded over me. She seated herself on the bunk in my cabin, the men craning to watch from the doorway, Bill Jukes squatting in the forefront, eyes narrow and appraising in his decorated face. I made a great show of seating myself at my harpsichord, stretching my fingers. I ran up the scales in a lively
arpeggio,
paused for effect, then commenced, with salacious gusto,

“A ship must have a buntline to haul up her bunt

And a maid must have a youngman to tickle her—”

The men hooted and cheered, but Proserpina stalked off in silence. No word was spoken between us all the way back in the boat, nor any leave taken when she stormed up the beach, back into her jungle.

“You insult me. You insult yourself,” she rebuked me when I went to see her later and collect the rest of my things. “This is not you. You are better than this.”

“I am no better than I should be,” I barked. Could she not see I was trying to protect her?

“How much gold will satisfy you?”

“Gold!” I laughed bitterly. I had seen enough in the mines of Cape Coast to last a lifetime.

“How much blood?” she countered. “How many more must die? How long can you stay angry at the world?”

“The world made me, and now it must reckon with me,” I exclaimed. Bloodrage alone could purge the cruel memories of all I had lost, revenge on the world that had taken it all from me. It was all I had left to believe in.

“You better reckon with yourself! Do you want to be a child all your life?”

Stung in earnest, I barely stopped myself striking her. “It’s my life to live as I damn well please,” I spat back.

“You destroy who you are under the angry scar of what you become,” she said.

I was fair shaking with rage. Who was she to hound me with her tedious expectations? But in fact, I could not bear to see myself as she saw me, a diminished echo of the man I ought to be.

“I see into your future,” she hissed at me, “a violent end without remorse or pity, unloved, unmourned. Dying brings you no peace, your spirit forced to wander without refuge in misery for all that might have been.”

I recoiled in horror that she would curse me so cruelly, she who professed to love me. Gone were all the pretty phrases with which I’d meant to extricate myself; now I longed only to retaliate in kind. My rage needed someone to blame. It was easier than facing the truth about myself. “I can’t expect an ignorant, barefoot female to understand,” I shouted.

“I understand you must go where you belong.” Her voice was low and terse, unmuddied by the emotion in mine, her dark eyes unnerving now in their resolve. “I will give you time. All the time you need. Play well, and think of me.”

But I lurched aside with the bundle of my things, tossed it over her doorsill to the sand below, and clambered down after it.

“Capitaine,”
she called after me. “Play for your life.”

Outside, where my men were waiting, I glanced back to see Proserpina in her doorway. “Your spells don’t work on me any more, Witch!” I cried.

Or so I thought.

We sailed with the tide that very evening. At first only small things plagued us—a leaky water cask, a runaway boom, a freak wind that gusted up out of nowhere and carried off a spar. Our lookout sighted warships, devil ships, that seemed to bear down on us out of the mists, then disappeared on the next roll of the sea. We tried to put into trading ports, but found them burned out by raiders or stinking with pestilence. We captured no more prizes, and our supplies ran low. We could not eat the rich plunder stowed in our hold, nor trade it away for supplies at any port. There might have been a mutiny had anyone wanted to captain so unfortunate a ship in my stead. No, that they left to me, and I drove them the harder for it. If the Caribbees were so inhospitable, I vowed, there was plenty of plunder in Africa, and there we would change our luck.

But once we made the Atlantic, we hit a freakish squall. It raged with the fury of a hurricane, blowing us far off course and out to sea. When it finally spat us out, crippled and disoriented, we found ourselves in a dense fog. We could take no bearings. Our lead showed that we were in very deep water, our compass reeled about like a drunken man. We saw neither sun nor stars to steer by, nor the lights of any other vessel or coastal settlement. Nothing penetrated that damn fog. We drifted for days, thirsting, ravenous, hopeless. My men were dying of sickness, or their wounds, or murdering each other over nothing at all. They were the lucky ones.

Then one morning the fog lifted, and a current carried us toward an island of unparalleled beauty. A wide strip of soft, white sandy beach welcomed us, in the natural shelter of a deep bay. The beach was shaded by green foliage, palm groves and ferns and fruit trees, with blue, terraced hills rising majestically behind. At one end of the beach, sheer cliffs rose away to a densely forested plateau that promised game and tinder. Far in the distance at the other end of the island, an elegant green volcanic cone rose into a coronet of pink clouds, above lush tropical jungle. And nowhere was there any sign of habitation—no battery, no warehouse, no ships in the bay. The place was ours alone. We made for the mouth of a pretty little creek protected by windswept arching palms and dropped anchor at long last, certain our torment was finally over.

Of course, it had only just begun.

Chapter Eleven

ROSES

One chance,
Proserpina’s shade had taunted me in the Fairy Dell. A capricious sort of chance it must be to lie fallow for two centuries before it can be taken. The imp queen too chided me about a last chance; the very wind breathes it at me. And why should I believe any of them in this place, where every other word is cozenage and moonshine? The fairy queen spoke too of a red moon, a Blood Moon, twice risen. Once when I did for old Bill Jukes, centuries ago. When was the other time? Only in my dreams.

But something is afoot in the Neverland, something the boy can’t control, and if some way exists to end his tyranny, by God I will seize my chance.

We call it Long Tom, our murdering piece, the swivel gun mounted on the rail in the starboard bows, trained on the northwest quarter of the island, from which the boys usually launch their attacks. We’ve a moldering armory of useless cannon on the gun deck below, but the swivel is our principal means of long-range defense, the only gun that can be aimed high enough for flying boys and low enough for war canoes. The agile boys can dance above the half-pound shot it was built to fire, but a peppering of grapeshot will sometimes chase them off, or at least buy my men time to get their shields up.

On the fo’c’sle deck nearby, Sticks is progressing on the first of the barricades we designed, the scent of spicy cut wood rising on the tangy salt air. The triangular side frames are already built, and he’s begun nailing the long timbers across the front, canted sightly backward to conceal a man standing behind from airborne boys and their arrows. Shorter timbers used in the middle will provide an aiming port, and the side frames are hinged so we might transport the entire contraption flat, when the time comes to move it aft to the quarterdeck.

The men were so relieved to have me back, they made up a hunting party into the wood to harvest our traps without complaint, while I saw Parrish fed and stowed in her cabin below. I sent Gato aloft with the others to try the standing rigging—there is always climbing involved in a fight with flying boys—while I stole an hour of sleep below, for once untroubled by either nightmare or the mockery of my phantom ship dream. Filcher reports that all was calm in my absence last night, but whatever is upsetting Pan, he will take it out on us soon enough. Now, as I prod about Long Tom’s hinges and carriage, I see that Nutter has proven equal to the daunting task of maintaining it in this damp and salty clime. I was right to give him charge of the gun; he’s no marksman, but his raving is an ornament to any battle, even if he never fires a shot. And an excellent decoy.

“They tell me you felled a duck today, Jesse.”

I find him oiling and cleaning the brace of pistols I gave him in a quiet corner of the gun deck, his swabbing tools laid out neatly beside him on a cloth. A boyish flush of exertion stains his pale neck under his short brown hair as he bends over his work under the skylight, but by the sobriety of his concentration suggests he is nearer thirty than twenty.

He glances up at me. “The lads startled him out of the bushes. He was probably hurt already,” he adds modestly, extracting a little brush from the bore of one pistol to inspect its blackened contents.

“Nonetheless.” I nod my approval. A moving target, if not yet a flying one.

With a self-effacing shrug, Jesse returns to his weapon. I watch him covertly, lean against one of our useless cannon, edge the tip of my hook into the thick patina of grime and rust that fouls the muzzle, gaze out the gun port at the distant strip of Pirates Beach.

“Were you ever a soldier, Jesse?”

“Not me, Cap’n,” he chuckles, but I notice he surreptitiously slides his deformed foot further into the shadows, out of long habit. “The Army wasn’t that desperate, not even for the war.”

I nod at the pistol in his hands. “I just thought, your training—”

He bends to his work again, applying cloth to muzzle for a long, thoughtful interval. “Me dad it was taught me to shoot,” he says at last, as if the idea surprises him. He lays aside his cloth, his brown eyes intent at the effort to draw out the furtive memory. “He was a gamekeeper. At the Trundell place. When the Depression hit, he was let go. We had to move to town.” He frowns, lifts the pistol, sights down the barrel. “It wasn’t reckoned much good among the other lads, shooting. Nobody there had guns.”

How his life must have changed in town, a country lad with a club-foot, who couldn’t run with the other boys. But I’ll wager he could fly as well as any of them when he dreamed himself into Pan’s tribe. No wonder the buried memory of this place called him back.

“I reckon it very highly indeed,” I tell him.

He glances at me briefly, and I glimpse in his eyes the pleasure of a man not accustomed to praise. These men do not expect intimacies; they want only commands from me, the more horrible the better, but I would inspire his confidence.

“Julius Caesar was an epileptic, you know,” I observe. “Given to fits. One of the greatest generals who ever lived.”

“Yeah?” Jesse eyes me again. “Fancy that.”

“I’m shifting your battle station to the quarterdeck,” I tell him, nodding at his pistols. “You’ve earned it.”

“Aye, aye, Cap’n,” he grins.

“Hey, lads, look at me, I’m an Indian!” Flax cries, holding up a fistful of black and blue-green duck feathers behind his blond head.

Sticks lent them a makeshift worktable of spare planks set up amidships, near the deckhouse, and the men are happily plucking and skinning their two coneys and Jesse’s fat duck in the open air, where the stench of flesh and blood is not so burdensome.