Making Waves (9 page)

This time, though, I didn’t take it personally. I was back in angel mode and I understood exactly where she was coming from. Reuben and I had once been slaves too in ancient Rome, but unlike Lola, we never forgot that we were undercover angels. If things had been different, who knows how we’d have behaved?

“I’m not angry, Lola,” Brice comforted her at once. “I was planning to tell my cousin everything anyway.”

And once we were back on the road to Port Royal, my angel buddy told me the whole crazy story.

Brice hadn’t bought a map from a pirate. He’d bought HALF a map. (Obviously that made me feel much better.)

Bermuda Jack had told Brice that if he reached Port Royal before the Christmas breeze stopped blowing, he’d find the owner of the map’s missing half staying at a certain tavern in Port Royal. “Jack said she’d give me hundreds of Spanish doubloons for my half,” he said eagerly.

“The other owner is a lady?” I said in surprise.

Brice grinned. “And a very beautiful lady, by all accounts.”

Lola made a noise that sounded exactly like ripping velcro.

“And is the Christmas breeze still blowing?“I asked him.

He gestured at the palm trees busily clicking their fronds. “It’ll blow for a few days yet.”

“I hate to be dense,” I said. “But why didn’t Jack sell his half of the map and pocket the doubloons.”

“Oh, he says it’s cursed. But that’s just superstition,” Brice said casually.

See what I mean about that boy? Just as I’m thinking things can’t get much crazier, he throws in a curse!

“Naturally, the Taino wanted to discourage Europeans from plundering their sacred golden city,” he explained, “so they spread all these stories to warn them off.”

“Wait - slow down! This city is SACRED?”

Brice looked shifty. “Allegedly.”

“Personally I’m wondering if this Indian city even existed,” I said. “Maybe the Taino were just having a laugh?”

“My map is genuine,” Brice said confidently.

“But how can you be sure?”

He pulled a crackly piece of parchment out of his shirt. The map fragment was badly scorched at the edges as if it had been rescued from a fire in the nick of time. And the sinister spattering of faded brownish splodges was almost certainly a trail of human bloodstains.

But at the top in shaky script was a name that set my heart racing.

Coyaba, City of the Gods
.

I’d never heard of this city before, yet when I saw the name, about a zillion angel volts went off inside my head and, like Brice, I knew this was the real thing.

But that just made it worse. Not for the first time, Heaven’s favourite bad boy was getting in way over his head. Someone had to make him see sense before he did something we’d all regret. Someone like me.

“Um, I hate to be a party pooper, but if this map is for real, it’s incredibly precious. What if this lady in Port Royal is just like all those other Europeans, purely out for herself. Don’t you think it’s a bit dodgy giving her directions to an ancient golden city? Do you really think the Taino would want her to have their gold?”

Loia gave me a poisonous look. “Massa don’ business wid dead people gold,” she flashed. “Massa just wan’ set wi free.”

“But it doesn’t belong to him, Lola! Hello! The City of the Gods? Trust me, if you let pirates loose on a sacred Taino city, that could have really dark consequences!”

Brice was glaring at me now. ” The Taino are dead. I’m more concerned with the sufferings of the living. Slavery also has dark consequences, don’t you agree, cousin? “

Lola gave me a triumphant smile.

I probably should have left it there, but something niggled at the edges of my mind.

“I don’t totally understand what you need all these doubloons for,” I said to Brice. “Why do you need so much cash?”

“Guns and ammunition are expensive,” he said coolly.

My jaw dropped. “Guns and—”

“The rebel slaves deserve all the help we can give,” he said in the same cool, reasonable voice.

No need to check Agency policy on this one. I opened my mouth twice then shut it again. I simply didn’t feel up to explaining to Brice why this was such a bad idea.

We rode on to Port Royal in strained silence. I tried reminding myself that I was an angel on a mission, but I felt more like a tin can that had accidentally got attached to a v. hyperactive dog. I was supposed to be working on a brilliant strategy to get my friends back to Heaven. Instead I was being dragged helplessly from one insanely complicated situation to the next.

We trotted along the bumpy potholed road, under palm trees waving graceful fronds in the tropical breeze. The sun was hot. The sky was blue. But my heart was as heavy as lead. I don’t know how far it was to Port Royal, but it felt like a long way in that atmosphere, believe me.

Gradually the lush vegetation of inland Jamaica was replaced with dry-looking scrub and cacti. By late afternoon I smelted salt on the breeze. Minutes later we rode into a little settlement known as Passage Fort, where we were to get the ferry to Port Royal. We had to leave the horses at the town’s one tavern.

“No horses, mules or horse-drawn carriages are allowed in Port Royal,” Brice told us. “The city is barely half a mile wide and extremely densely populated. You will notice the buildings are unusually tall. The city folk soon ran out of building land, and since they couldn’t build outwards, they built upwards instead!”

We hurried down to the harbour just as the sun was starting to set. Besides us, there were two other passengers, a nervous white merchant and his very handsome male slave. The slave was hopefully checking Lola out, but she only had eyes for the young Massa.

I really enjoyed that boat trip actually. We passed tiny uninhabited islands looking exactly like tropical islands you see in cartoons.

We were halfway to Port Royal when we heard an appalling ruckus floating across the water. Pistols firing, bells ringing, drunken voices singing and squabbling in every language under the sun, drums beating, whistles blowing. I thought some mad carnival was going on, but Brice said this was normal for Port Royal. With a flash of fear I remembered that Lola had called it the “wickedest city on Earth”.

The dock was unbelievably crowded. The moment we got off the boat there was this stampede. Rough humans of both sexes rushed at us, yelling threateningly in our faces, poking and prodding at us, mostly trying to sell us stuff we didn’t want.

This was a city where pirates basically ruled. Its lanes and alleyways swarmed with buccaneers of all colours and nationalities. It even
smelled
wicked. The streets literally stank like they’d been marinated in Jamaican rum! Just about every other building was a pirate tavern, a gambling den, or a “punch-house”. Lola looked disturbed when she saw the punch-house girls with their plunging bodices and crudely made-up faces.

In a street behind the Turtle Market, we passed a gun shop, where pistols were laid out on black velvet like a lady’s jewels. A drunken pirate suddenly pushed his face into mine, making kissing noises. He was quite old and his leathery face was seamed with scars.

Lola flew between us and gave him a massive thump in the chest.

“G’way, you boldface devil, you!” she said fiercely. “You tink dis nice girl business wid you! Tcha!”

He slunk away mumbling apologies. “Thanks, Lola,” I said gratefully.

Lola just gave me one of her looks. Like, “You think I want to be your babysitter?”

“Do try to look as if you know where you’re going, cousin,” Brice sighed.

On the other side of the street, a pirate dressed in silks and velvets, was stopping passers-by at gunpoint, challenging them to a drinking contest from a barrel of Jamaican rum!

I scurried after Lola and Brice. “And do we? Know where we’re going?” I asked nervously.

Brice said we were looking for a tavern called Diego’s Whiskers. Naturally, I thought he was kidding. But Brice assured me the name was for real; Diego had been a notorious Spanish pirate who finally got blown to pieces by English buccaneers.

“What was so special about Diego’s whiskers?” I asked. “Did they glow in the dark or something?”

Brice grinned. “English seamen are always boasting about singeing their enemies’ facial hair,” he said. “It’s the ultimate insult!”

He seemed more like the old Brice now we’d left the plantation. He seemed thrilled with himself, to be honest: setting off to do a nefarious deal with a mysterious lady, a bloodstained treasure map in his pocket, and an adoring slave-girl by his side.

However, I was getting twitchy. I reckoned it would be dark in about five minutes max. We’re talking Jamaican darkness, right? Five short minutes before the streets of dilapidated high-rise tenements turned into inky black canyons. This thought seemed to occur to my friends at approximately the same moment. No one actually mentioned lurking robbers or cutthroats but everyone suddenly picked up the pace.

Brice led us down an extremely evil-smelling alley, running parallel to the waterfront. I could hear the hollow sloshing of waves against wooden piers and the rhythmic creaking of ships’ timbers.

We hurried along, scattering pigs and chickens in our haste to get under a roof before nightfall. Brice peered at an inn sign in the gathering dusk. It was peppered with bullet holes and totally impossible to read, but he strode through the door of the tavern without a second’s hesitation. Amnesia or no amnesia, Brice’s bad-boy radar was functioning as well as ever!

He gave a swift glance around the crowded bar, nodded at the landlord and, without breaking stride, ducked through a door marked PRIVATE.

Lola and I both beetled after him, not wanting to be left alone with the pervy old sea dogs who formed Diego’s select clientele.

We found ourselves in a long, low room with dark wooden beams. The air was thick with rum and tobacco fumes. A dozen ferocious seafaring-types were yelling at each other through the fog. They’d obviously been drinking for hours, if not days. Every person in this room had an opinion and every person was bellowing his opinion at the top of his lungs, backing it up by hammering his fist or the barrel of his pistol on the table.

But the most opinionated person in that room was actually a girl. A booze-swilling, pistol-toting girl, it’s true, but still a girl, no more than sixteen years old.

She had her back partly turned to me, so I couldn’t tell if she was really beautiful, like people said, but she obviously had great style. Her rustling skirts of crimson silk were looped up to reveal creamy lace petticoats and boots of gorgeous Spanish leather. The pirate girl’s shiny black hair had been oiled like a flamenco dancer’s, and swept up with combs. Rubies and sapphires twinkled on her fingers and swung sparkling from her ears.

Brice coughed. “Sirs, madam?” he said politely. “May I enquire - if this is the right place?”

Ten pirates’ hands drew ten swords with a thrilling clash of steel. The eleventh pirate snatched up a chair, aiming it menacingly at Brice’s head. He was growling, literally growling like a dog.

The girl started to laugh, a wild tipsy laugh. “You’ve come to the right place, sir - for a fight!”

She swung to face us, still laughing.

My heart almost stopped. I knew this girl!

“Cat!” I breathed. “Cat Darcy?”

But that was impossible. Shakespeare’s girlfriend would have to be over a hundred and twenty years old by now!

“I am Mariah Darcy,” the pirate girl said haughtily. “Catherine Darcy was my grandmother. Who are you, miss? And why do you burst in on our private
soiree
?”

Brice stepped forward. “I have something in my possession that I was told would interest you.”

Mariah gave one of her wild laughs. “Oho! You’ve been speaking to Bermuda Jack!” She gestured imperiously to her men. “Sheathe your swords! Caleb, stop that ridiculous growling, put down the chair and tell the landlord to bring more rum! These people are our guests.”

I was still reeling from the bizarre cosmic coincidence. I could NOT believe we’d bumped into Cat’s granddaughter! She could almost be Cat’s double, I thought wonderingly.

Angels aren’t meant to get involved with their humans, but on our mission to Elizabethan England, Lola and I had developed a genuine affection for Cat Darcy. It was a relief to know she’d eventually found love and had a family. No guy could have measured up to Will Shakespeare obviously, but she’d survived their break-up, and made a new life for herself and that was really good news.

But as I gazed at Cat’s seventeenth-century descendant, I started to wonder if I was seeing things. I was picking up tiny lightning flashes every time Mariah laughed. Lola seemed equally baffled.

Finally I caught on. At one stage in her pirate career Mariah had lost an eye-tooth, and a diamond had been wired into the gap. The piracy bizz must be paying pretty well, I thought.

I thought Cat’s pirate dad would probably be really proud if he could see his stylish great-granddaughter carrying on the family tradition.

These are the kinds of moments I usually share with Lola, and I instinctively turned to smile at her, but she just blanked me and turned away.

I bravely pulled myself together. One day we’ll laugh at this, angel girl, I told my friend silently. And that’s a promise.

It was past three in the morning and the candles at Diego’s had almost burned down to tiny stumps.

The remains of a huge pirate feast were scattered over the table. Oyster shells, gnawed pork ribs, the heads of giant prawns. But the drinking went on and on. And Beau Bexford and Mariah found more and more in common.

“Each of us is a freedom fighter in our different ways! Freedom is the most important thing in life, don’t you agree?” The pirate girl had been licking pork grease from her fingers, but she stopped to give Brice an intimate smile.

Brice threw down a shot of rum and yelled, “To freedom!”

Mariah let out a wild yodel. “Aye! To freedom!”

Those pirates who could still stand, jumped to their feet and knocked back more slugs of fiery white rum. “To freedom!” they roared.

The pirate girl sat back down, in a flounce of lacy petticoats. “Only the souls of outlaws are truly free,” she announced. “That’s why the world hates us! Isn’t that true, men?”