Cross of Fire (15 page)

‘
Hoy, lá. Quais são as notícias do dia, Capitão? De onde você é?
’ Mateo called over, and waited with Devlin crouched beside him.

‘From the Holy,’ the call came back in English and Mateo did not understand but no matter, the ships were close enough. Devlin stood to the falconet at his rail and Peter Sam stood with him and gave his order to the men low on the deck.

‘Sling your hooks!’

Grappling irons were hurled at the prey’s gunwale and into the rigging, should someone have the mind to wield an axe to cut them.

The hooks bit, more men ran to the ropes to haul as the snow groaned and Devlin fired the flintlock on his falconet.

It was only filled with powder, just a startling warning like the stinkpots that flew over now before the ship could react.

The clay-pots smashed and the fuse crawled over the brimstone, char-cloth and tar inside and a cloud of foulness spread around the deck.

These were the harmless weapons, less than the ‘fireworks’ to follow with the grenadoes of glass and nails and musket balls. Give them first a chance to surrender. Let them mark the next part.

Nothing. No boarding pikes or muskets, no shouts or screams. Devlin’s smoke cleared and he looked down onto the deck below.

Half a dozen men in black robes wiping their streaming eyes, pouring water from the gourds around the mainmast on the ticklish fires from the pots or stamping them out with sandalled feet.

No weapons met them and Devlin’s men stood up from the nettings and pointed their pistols and musketoons at a deck ignoring their presence.

They looked back to Peter Sam to direct them. He held his Sibley gun against his hip and watched the robed men mill about as if the fires were grapes to be picked and the pirate ship just a light disagreeable rain. He turned to Devlin, who had pulled his pistol and looked back just as baffled.

‘Priests?’ Devlin said. ‘It’s a ship of priests?’

A bearded tall man span against the rail and shouted up in a scornful Irish voice which instantly took Devlin back to his boyhood.

‘Of course we’re bloody priests, you shite! Now come and put out these bloody fires, damn you! Do you not hear a Father when he calls you!’

Chapter Ten

Another hour and into darkness. The snow, the
Santa Rosa
it transpired, now ran consort to the
Shadow
,
a pirate crew upon her.

The priests walked to the
Shadow
over boarding planks under pistol and lantern. The pirates were pleased, for although Whitehall would have laughed at the thought, pirates held priests and tracts in high regard. The pirate Roberts even kept the sabbath and others had begged clergymen to join them as they burnt their ship around their feet.

Perhaps it was still due to the ingrained Bible of their youth and service and the sailor’s wont to respect anything supernatural, knowing how thin the border lay between life and death.

They swore on the Bible as much as pistols.

Seeing his men’s joy at them Devlin gave the priests freedom upon the ship. He ordered them to be fed, to have a table made up for them below; but the pirate ship was sparse of furniture. Their attitude was more to remove wood and bulkheads. Remove to clear more space for more men, for lading, for fighting. But the men adapted well for their guests. A couple of hogsheads and boarding planks for a table, some carpenter’s half-barrels for seats.

Devlin at least had real chairs and a table in his cabin and he invited the Irish priest to join him and Dandon once the heat of the evening had died down.

The priest carried aboard with him a sailcloth packet and Devlin recognised the shape and the fondness for books and so let them be.

They would raid the ship in the dawn.

They broke a bottle together, beginning as all introductions should begin. The priest, to Devlin’s mind, acted uncomfortably too genial for a man who had just lost his ship.

‘Hugh O’Neill, Captain,’ he sent out his hand and Devlin took it.

‘Ah, I discern that there is still enough of your home in you to recognise that name.’ He swept his hand on to Dandon who reached over and took it warmly; for so long had such a conviviality been absent from his day.

Devlin let the priest sit and wanted more on the name.

‘You take your name from Irish kings, Father?’

‘And why not that for a Donegal man, Captain? And where are you back home?’

The question was the same from all Irishmen who meet for the first time no matter where they have ended up or how dubious their social standing. For Devlin however this was the time for interrogation not banter, Irish or not. He had played the same scene with dozens of captains before this one.

The pirate would want to know where the ship was coursing for and from and the nature of her passengers.

Was she expecting to meet anybody? Was she already a part of a convoy that might lead to more riches? And what was the news of the world as the captain knew it?

News was paramount. The pirate spent most of his life at sea. He could often be the last to know of a new war. It could be fortuitous to know which kings and queens were at each other’s throats if only to draw new lines of where the best-laden would be sailing.

‘I’m a Kilkenny man, Father. But that was too long ago. What’s a Donegal priest doing out here? A snow with six priests coursing against Africa. What’s the game of it?’

‘So it’s definitely the pirate I am meeting? Not a chance to let us on our way?’

Devlin noticed he had cruel black eyes to match his thinning hair and close-cut beard greying on the jowls. A thin face and frame but his gown was tight and showed muscle more than bone.

An Irish priest shaping a course on the Atlantic showing no fear of the pirate in front of him. Devlin could change that. The look of confidence never lasted long.

Dandon spotted the next thoughts and interceded as he often did when he could feel the air warming.

‘Father,’ he said. ‘It would only be considered as prudent that you avail us of any information. In the first instance – over drink and pleasant company – it would be considered polite. In the second instance it would be simply . . .
unwise
to not do so.’

Dandon anticipated the open mouth about to object and raised his hand.

‘It has nothing to do with fear. I’m sure your faith in Your Lord is ample enough that you’re little afraid of any villainy. But perhaps consider that it will be better for other souls. That is to say should we come across other ships who might be attached to yourself.’

O’Neill cocked his chin to Devlin.

‘He goes on a bit, this one.’

‘I don’t,’ Devlin said coldly. ‘He means that you can’t be out here by yourself. By dawn the others will show themselves. That might go hard for them. Hard for you. If you don’t tell what I want to know.’

‘And who says I won’t tell? I’ve been hoping for the opportunity. Waiting for it. You’re just what I was looking for, so you are!’

‘And how is that now?’ Devlin watched him stand and pour them all more wine.

‘Captain,’ he watched his pour and spoke slowly. ‘I’ve not been back home for a long time. Maybe as long as you, my son. I come from Lisboa with my brothers. Before that, I served in Goa and left that place with my archbishop and the viceroy in January.’

He sat and looked mournfully into his mug.

‘You may have heard something of that, being pirate yourself? A viceroy’s ship taken, that is.’

Dandon saw Devlin glow and hold his breath, and O’Neill had seen it also.

‘Ah, now, so that would be of interest to you?’ He drank long, savouring his power over the cabin.

‘Aye. I was on the
Virgin of the Cape
when the pirates took her. A carrack of gold with the departing viceroy.’ He drank and gasped at the fullness of the wine.

‘Would some of that story be the kind of thing you were after?’

Dom Luiz de Menezes was the departing viceroy, he explained, and it would take almost five months to return to Lisboa from Goa.

Accompanying him aboard the
Nossa Senhora do Cabo
was Sebastiao de Pessanha, the archbishop, and several millions in gold, rubies, diamonds and emeralds for their king, for India was the birthplace of gems. But the most precious tribute, the greatest symbol of the Christian over the Hindu, was the solid gold Flaming Cross.

Crosses of fire represent the Son and the Father. God the Word revealed himself to Moses through a burning bush foretelling his coming incarnation. But the bush was not consumed by the fire. This God, over the old, had no desire to punish man. His power would be to save.

The bush is not consumed.

When the Messiah is consumed by the cross the unification of the Father and the Son becomes complete. That was the prophecy of the burning bush.

See the Son in the cross, in the flames, and see the Father.

The Flaming Cross of Goa held this tradition. It was from the Se Cathedral of Santa Catarina and destined for the cathedral of the same name in Lisboa.

Gold mined by slaves and moulded by priests into a seven-foot cross adorned with rubies and mounted on diamonds and emeralds, the rubies emulating the fire of the burning bush, the incorruptible fire. The Cross of Fire.

Recently removed from the heart of a smaller cross, and placed within its heart as it cooled was a small gold box no larger than a forefinger. It had been brought from Lisboa by a group of priests to be conjoined with the new cross under the blessing of King João of Portugal. Its destiny was to return home to the king, to show the world Portugal’s wealth in India and to demonstrate the conquest of Christian over Hindu.

It was the incarnation of the Word and the Son, and that part O’Neill hoped Devlin still had soul for.

‘You see, Captain, my name is no coincidence. I am descended from
the
Hugh O’Neill. I am an heir of Tyrone, if you would believe it.’

Dandon looked to his captain. He knew nothing of the relevance of O’Neill’s words but Devlin was listening and so Dandon would also, but not dry. He reached for the bottle but kept quiet, even polite enough to draw directly from the bottle lest his pouring disturbed the story.

O’Neill accepted that the bottle would not be returning to him.

‘I, in my journey, at least made it to Spain, Captain. I had more luck than Earl O’Neill. And on to Portugal and so to India. A pilgrimage.’

‘For what?’ Devlin asked.

O’Neill took a breath and sent the pirate a look of pity.

‘Do you remember your Sunday education, Captain? The Irish kings leaving us to the English. Leaving to raise a Spanish army in 1607, a Catholic army that never arrived. The end of our country?’

Devlin did not share that his school had been books that servants had stolen from their masters to pay for meat.

His father had sold him to be a butcher’s boy far from home. His mother had left, for whatever reason. That was done. Him his father’s only child. Guineas for a boy. That all done now. He had shot enough pistols to make peace with it.