Captain Adam (39 page)

"And mine, sir."

Two minutes later Admiral Benbow was telling an astonished sergeant of marines:

"Please escort this desperate character out. And see that he don't get hurt. I need him."

t f^ Not only was the sail painted black but sometimes, it seemed,

*-^ ^ so was the shore. Providence by ordinary was a light-colored island, humped with rolypoly hills but not in a proper sense mountainous, indeed little more than a glorified atoll. It had not been hard to pick up; but it was proving to be singularly hard to hold, on this night of no moon.

This was eight days after Adam had talked with the admiral, and he had been at sea virtually all of this time. John Benbow, when he made up his mind about anything, didn't dillydally. There was a real need for speed in this case anyway, he'd pointed out. The more time spent on preparations, the greater the chance that some spies from Providence would get wind of the scheme and send a fast sailing craft to warn van Bramm.

Adam had been careful. He had not even gone near Walter's saloon, the innocent-seeming pirate headquarters in Kingston. Except for the captain, nobody aboard the warship on which he sailed the very next morning after his talk with the admiral, knew who he was or where he was bound—or why.

The haste had another good feature. It shortened to a matter of min-

utes Adam's time for saying farewell to Maisie Treadway. He was grateful for this. It was hard for him to face Maisie now. It hurt him, inside.

"That sounds madness, Adam."

" 'Tis risky but not mad. There'll be no moon. I know the very beach where I'll land, the far side of the bay from the fort. From there it's only a short walk around to Sharpy Boardman's and you don't have to pass any other huts on the way. He's the one with the tops of his ears torn off. He'd do anything for me."

"And then what?"

"I don't know. But it shouldn't take long to find out."

"What if van Bramm hears you're coming?"

"He won't."

The skipper of the warship, too, voiced this concern: what if van Bramm had heard? Again Adam expressed assurance that van Bramm wouldn't. This was when they were swinging Adam's sloop overside, on a night of long dark rolling seas.

"They could've sailed circles around us. You know how it is in a convoy—you've got to stay back with the slowest vessel."

"He won't hear. He wouldn't believe it if he did."

"Never dreamed anybody'd be such a fool maybe," the skipper had muttered. "Well, good luck to you. Thank God all I have to worry about is hurricanes and the French and the Spaniards."

Adam made the last part of the outside trip as much as anything by ear, by the sound of breakers slamming against the rocks of the Point just below the fort. They'd be coming in big tonight, making a heap of noise. He couldn't see them.

Once inside the pass, however, things were quiet. No light showed. Vessels, clustered as though for protection, creaked and squealed as they rocked at anchor. Adam avoided them. His was an inconspicuous, small ratty craft. He might have been anybody from the settlement, fishing. Nevertheless he didn't care to be hailed. He had never seriously considered John Benbow's perhaps jocular suggestion that he grow a beard. Beards weren't fashionable, even on Providence, where one would stand only for slovenliness. Nor had Adam gone in for any sort of disguise. That would be sneaky, the way he looked at it.

He wore his sword, and he carried also a sheath knife. He had no other arms.

It was extremely dark, almost -malevolently dark, with the sky showing not the smallest hint of dawn, when Adam rode the sloop ashore.

This was a desolate spot, albeit within the half-circle of the bay. The beach, shardy, was not deep. Palmetto scrub grew close to the shore, along a reaching ridge. Crabs scuttled clumsily for the sea. Each time a 242

wave receded the little stones clicked anxiously together and the water gurgled, a throaty sound.

Adam hauled the boat in, dropped the sail, unstepped the mast. The tide was high.

He froze.

He had heard a sound above the soughing of the wind, the hiss and gurgle of water, the clack the stones made.

It was the sound of muffled laughter, a giggling, a snickering.

He looked up.

A skyline that had been all palmetto now showed jagged with men's heads. There must have been a dozen of them, rising in twos and threes, utterly black against the almost-black of the sky. They came toward Adam.

He drew.

A light showed suddenly. A man had unwrapped a lanthorn, and he held it high, and then Adam could see the fat greasy smiling face of Everard van Bramm.

"Welcome back, Captain."

The pirate ran the tip of a pink tongue lightly over his lower lip. His earrings, rubies and diamonds set in rings, swung on either side of his face.

"We have been waiting for you," he added, "for two nights and two days."

The men edged closer. He could not make out individual faces, nor indeed details of any sort, though he noted that there were muskets among them.

He touched the Book in his pocket.

"May I pray?" he asked.

"By all means pray. Captain."

Adam knelt, facing the men, the dim figures, and placed his sword on the sand before him.

He did not bring out the Book.

He prayed briefly, asking nothing for himself. He asked for Maisie, and for Deborah Selden, and Jethro Gardner, for little Lillian Bingham in London and her mother and father, the proprietors of the Hearth Cricket. He prayed, in fact, for quite a few folks. He said "Amen" aloud, and picked up his sword, and rose.

"Might we have that blade, please. Captain?"

"Whv don't vou come and get it?" Adam said.

PART TEN

God and How to Get Water

C^f\ This was where he was to die. He looked around. It was not \jyj much of an island—a blip, a blop, a nub of rotten rock and sere sun-scorched grass, merely a brown-and-yellow wart on the blue serene far-stretching surface of the sea.

It was his impulse, when he had waded ashore, to drop to his knees in prayer; but he resisted this, knowing that the men in the boat would take it as a sign of weakness. There was no slight trace of pity in the faces of those men, who, though they were impressed by the dignity of the occasion—for death deliberately dealt out is always dignified, even to such riffraff—remained stern. Captain Long had violated one of their few laws, so he merited their only punishment. He had gone on the account —hadn't Captain van Bramm assured them of this?—and then, immediately afterward, trusted, he had cut out the schooner, which was communal property. He had, that is, deserted. Worse, he had stolen. These men were thieves of the sea, who spent all their days stealing or seeking to steal; but perhaps for this reason they were horrified when one among them stole from the rest. They were infatuated with the notion that there is honor among outlaws.

Van Bramm had seen to it that the warmest of Adam's admirers, Sharpy Boardman and such, were at sea when Adam arrived. They had not been present at the trial, where Adam was heard in silence. Van Bramm's hold on these rascals was none too secure; but just at the moment van Bramm had been dramatically right. That Adam had killed Cark and badly wounded another man, before being brought down at long distance by realtas against which he couldn't possibly fight, told rather for than against him with the Providencers. But the fact that he had declared himself one of the Brethren of the Coast and then had cut out the schooner—this was unforgivable. He had been tried promptly, in a glinting bright dawn, and soon sentenced to be marooned. The pirates for once were efficient. Within a few hours of the time when he had so confidently stepped ashore on Providence he was being shoved aboard a 244

barcolongo which presently put forth for this marine flyspeck of no name.

When he had asked if he couldn't at least retain his sheath knife, they told him no.

"You'd cut your wrists inside two days," they had said. "We want you to last longer than that."

They did allow him, however, to keep his Book. This was tight in a pocket of his coat when in a time of tawny sunset he waded ashore. He scorned to ask for further favors.

He did not wave and didn't even look back. Nobody shouted a goodbye.

Adam walked clear around the island, keeping to the shore. He might as well have crossed the center. It was much the same everywhere—sand and rubble, soft rock, chipped shell fragments, no trees. It was utterly dreary, bleak. The only vegetation was grass, and there was precious little of that. No birds flew overhead.

The island was roughly round and about a quarter-mile across. From almost any part of it you could see any other part. Similarly from almost any part of it, the center being only slightly higher than the shore, you could see if not immediately at least soon the sea in any direction. Nevertheless Adam determined that he would force himself to walk clear around the island like this at least four times each day, conscientiously checking the horizon.

"At least four times," he said aloud.

By the time he came back to where he had started from, the barcolongo was almost out of sight. He got down on his knees.

He prayed for a long time, and it was dark when he rose. He was already thirsty. He tried not to think about this. He made a pillow of his hat, snuggled out a soft sandy spot in which to rest his hip, closed his eyes, and after a while fell asleep.

He was astir before dawn, feeling chill, his clothes clammy. His thirst was urgent, and anything he did, any way he moved, seemed to make it worse. He walked slowly around the island. He had waited until first light in order to do this, but he seldom scanned the sea, which anyway was as bare as a baby's bottom; for the most part he regarded the rocks and sand.

These were sufficiently monotonous. The sand would make a good abrasive—but, to abrade what? The stone was soft, nothing flinty. The whole island indeed had about it a feeling of softness, of chalkiness, a feeling, too, of uncertainty, as though held above the surface by no sure shoring and Hkely at any moment to collapse, so that when Adam walked it he felt as more than once he'd felt in the boatyard when he walked a rickety structure of sticks, a set of scaffolding designed to endure only

for a day. The very breeze, feeble though it was, seemed able to shake this key. The slow-paced wavelets, patient, unimpassioned, appeared to cause it to shiver.

He could find no stone sufficiently hard to give him any hope of using it, together with his belt buckle, to get a spark. The buckle, to be sure, was not steel but brass—it had been given to him by the Binghams of London and had been overlooked by the pirates—but it might be made to serve as steel if only a suitable flint could be found.

But the stuff underfoot might have been breadcrumbs. Cretaceous, it crumpled at a push of the thumb.

It was like this from the beginning. One of the first things he had told himself when dumped ashore—at first inwardly, later aloud—was that he would resolutely refrain from thinking of anything that would cause his heart to ache or even divert his mind from its proper channel. He had made a vow of it: "I'll think only about God and how to get water." Yet here he was already, striving to find not water but fire.

He retired to the middle of the island, where with steady fingernails he unwove part of his shirt, saving the threads in a small hollow box of rocks where they wouldn't blow away. He put a flat stone over this to keep out rain—if there should be any rain. He tore out some of the dry brittle juiceless grass which grew reluctantly here and there, in bunches, and put this, too, into the enclosure, weighting it with stones.

If he did manage to make a spark he wanted to be prepared with tinder.

After that he made another trip around the island, most of the time paddling in the shallows, stooped far over, searching for mussels or cockles or shrimps, finding none.

He scooped up some seaweed and carried this to the center of the island, where he laid it out to dry in the sun. Conceivably it, too, might be used as fuel. He wondered if he could eat it.

He prayed for a while and then tried to sleep, but he couldn't sleep.

The day was long. He was hungry, but so thirsty that he forgot his hunger. He didn't move about much. He soon came to see that the sun was going to prove perhaps his worst enemy here. He decided to try to sleep as much as possible in the daytime, prowling at night.

Since there was no scrap of shade, he was hot; and after a while, too, he was dizzy and felt sick to his stomach, which was not usual with him. He took off his clothes and waded into the water, hoping to soak some of it through his skin, at the same time cooling himself.

This gave him no relief; and indeed it made matters worse, for when the salt water dried, it left his skin itchy, so that he was forever twisting this way and that, and scratching himself.

To get his mind on something else he took to making a search for the hardest, most-nearly-flint stone available, and when he'd found one he 246

squatted in the middle of the island, a fluffy pile of shirt threads before him, and chipp>ed with the belt buckle.

Three times he got a small faint spick of a spark, but he could not ignite the threads. By using a page of the Book he might have been able to do this, but fire didn't mean that much to him. He wondered, truly, why he thought of fire at all. He was far from any sailing route and it could well be that the only persons who even knew of the existence of this island were the Providence pirates. They wouldn't rescue him unless either there was a revolution among them, in which victory went to the party headed by Adam's friends, or else Everard van Bramm, whether because of pressure or some bribe, officially called off the punishment. This latter possibility Adam considered even slighter than the former.

But there was perhaps a thousand-in-one chance of some lost sail stumbling within sight of this island, and if this should happen Adam wanted to be ready with a signal.

He worked for a long while, slowly, steadily, with vast patience, but without success. His hands became slippery with sweat.