Pirates of the Timestream (19 page)

“It’s a long story. We were blown free of the
Oxford
and got ashore. Some renegades who still have a grudge against Zenobia from her time here in Hispaniola have been chasing us. This was one of them. We’re in your debt.”

“Well, Captain Morgan will be glad to see you. Come along, we’ll be heading back to the beach as soon as we’ve finished whipping these dogs of Spaniards back to their kennels.” As he turned to go, he noticed—seemingly for the first time—the wrecked laser carbine on the ground. His scowl returned, and his pale-gray eyes blinked repeatedly as he gazed at something that had no business existing in his world. He gave a puzzled grunt. “Ah . . . what is . . . ?”

“Never mind,” said Zenobia, and Jason realized she had activated her vocal implant. “It’s nothing. Let’s go. Captain Morgan will want to see us.”

“Uh . . .
ja
,” grunted Roche Braziliano as the subsonic wave did its work. “You’re right. Let’s go.”

* * *

“We landed a party near here a few days ago,” explained Henry Morgan, leaning on the side of a beached boat as the returning pirates filed past. Zenobia had already returned to
Rolling-Calf
and a rapturous reception by her Maroons. “They gathered in a lot of good meat. The Dons took exception. They brought in three or four hundred men from Santo Domingo and gathered in all the animals from the farms we hadn’t raided, so when we landed again this morning we found nothing. So we sent fifty men further inland. The Dons thought they’d be clever. They left a great herd of cattle where it would be sure to be found, lying in wait nearby. After our men had killed a large number of the beasts and were starting to haul the meat away, they attacked from ambush. They probably thought we’d flee in disorder like they would. But our men know how to retreat in good order, pausing at every opportunity to take toll with their muskets. Eventually the Spaniards, being Spaniards, lost heart and started to retreat themselves. We pursued them and wiped out most of them, although we’d had to abandon all the meat. It was in the course of that pursuit that Roche ran into you.” He grinned. “What excellent fortune! Of course, it’s too bad about Henri; he was a good man, and it’s always a shame to lose a ship’s carpenter. And I gather Roderick isn’t quite himself—that sometimes happens to men who go through great hardship, but they often get over it. And it’s a pity about your mistress drowning, Jason. A good-looking piece, in a Portuguese sort of way.”

“Yes,” said Jason noncommittally. They hadn’t been forthcoming about Pauline Da Cunha’s death, merely saying that she as well as Boyer had gone down with the
Oxford.

“Still,” Morgan continued, “the rest of you had the luck of the Devil, being blown clear and then washing ashore and finding each other on the beach. And then you walked all the way here! That story ought to be good for free drinks for the rest of your lives! You must have made very good time.” Morgan’s dark eyes narrowed, and Jason reminded himself that, whatever else he was, this man was very shrewd. “You know, there’s one thing I still don’t quite understand. You headed east at best speed, toward the Spanish-settled region around here . . . like walking into the lion’s den, you might say.” Morgan’s eyes narrowed still further. “If one didn’t know better, it’s almost as though you knew I was going to be here.”

Very,
very
shrewd.
“It was just a lucky guess, Captain. I figured you’d need to raid the southern coast of Hispaniola to replenish your supplies, so I thought this offered the best chance of encountering you somewhere.”

“Hmm. It was still what people call a long chance. It’s almost enough to make you believe what fools say about Zenobia!” Morgan laughed, just a trifle uneasily, then abruptly dismissed the subject. “Anyway, as old Will Shakespeare said, all’s well that ends well. Tomorrow, I’m going to lead a couple of hundred men back here to finish off those Spaniards from Santo Domingo. Then we’ll start working our way east—damn these contrary winds!—toward Saona Island, off the southeast tip of Hispaniola, where I’ve called a second rendezvous.”

Nesbit’s curiosity seemed to overcome his hesitancy. “Er, Captain, didn’t the destruction of
Oxford
cause any of the Brotherhood any, well, misgivings about following you, for fear of bad luck?”

Morgan looked at him as though he considered the question an odd one. “Of course not. The fact that I survived it was a sign of excellent luck! Any pirate worth his salt would want to follow a captain who got out of
that
alive along with only ten others, when over two hundred went down!”

“But all those dead men!”

“Well, it helped that a lot of them were still floating the next day.”

“Ah,” Nesbit nodded. “You mean you were able to give them Christian burial.”

“No! We were able to get their rings and other jewelry off.” Morgan roared with laughter. “Oh, yes, a few of the Frogs crawled away, but only the ones who’d been looking for an excuse to do so anyway. As far as the others are concerned, I lead a charmed life!”

Jason nodded to himself, recalling that Grenfell had said much the same thing about the seemingly paradoxical effect of the
Oxford
disaster on Morgan’s reputation. Now the historian was only fitfully able to supply such insights. Their reunion with Morgan’s company had seemed to rekindle his awareness of—and interest in—his surroundings, which gave Jason cause for cautious hope. But for now, at least, they were going to have to get along without the foreknowledge of events that he had provided.

“But,” continued Morgan, his mood visibly darkening, “there’s no denying that the loss of
Oxford
is a heavy blow. Without her, I suppose we’ll have to pick a destination less tough than Cartagena.” He shook his head sadly, then stood up straight. “Well, we’ll deal with that at Saona Island. For now, let’s get back to Dick Norman’s
Lilly
, my new flagship, where a man can get a drink!”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The next day, Morgan’s landing party found no Spanish troops and had to content itself with some random vandalism in the region. It proved a harbinger of frustrations to come.

Behind schedule and seething with impatience, Morgan set his course for Saona Island. It took weeks, tacking and beating against particularly foul contrary trade winds. It was hellish aboard the small ships, rolling and pitching and exposed to the whipping spray. Jason could only give thanks that all members of his party were, like himself, not susceptible to motion sickness. He had insisted on it as a special qualification for this particular mission, hoping (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to exclude Nesbit.

Finally arriving at Saona Island, they found that none of the other ships Morgan had summoned from Port Royal and the other buccaneer centers had arrived yet. Those had also had to sail to windward, and they had further to come. As they began to straggle in, word came that some had simply given up.

So Morgan, lest his fleet run low on supplies again, had sent an expedition of a hundred and fifty men back to Hispaniola, to pillage the rich environs of Santo Domingo itself. But the Spaniards were forewarned as they so often were—it was a chronic problem, with coastal settlers and fishermen and Indians eager to report sightings of pirate ships in hope of reward. And by now Morgan’s diabolical reputation as the nemesis of the Spanish empire was such as to make him a particular target. So the party found well-prepared troops in a strong defensive position, and returned empty-handed.

At last, all the ships that were going to come were assembled at Saona Island. Morgan received reports that three of them had turned back, unable to make further headway against the trade winds because of stress to their hulls or exhaustion of their crews. He also learned that the Spaniards of Cartagena had rejoiced at the news of the
Oxford
disaster.

“The silly papist fools claim their city’s patron saint, Nuestra Señora de Popa, set off the explosion,” one of the captains told the council Morgan had called aboard
Lilly.
“They even say she was seen emerging from the water, her clothes all wet, after swimming back from Cow Island!” Jason, who knew the real cause, dutifully joined in the chuckles.

Morgan was not amused. He looked out over the rail at the other ships. “Well, it’s clear we can’t expect any more ships to come. So we’re only nine ships and less than six hundred men. And this one, with only fourteen light guns, is the most heavily armed ship we’ve got. We all know we can’t attempt Cartagena without
Oxford
. I say, let’s set our course for Caracas and the towns along the coast of the Spanish Main to the east of it.”

“But,” someone objected, “that’s to the southeast of here. It would be a long haul to windward. And after the beating our ships have already taken . . . !” A murmur of weary agreement arose. The accented voice of one of the French buccaneers who had stuck with Morgan interrupted it.

“There’s another possibility,
mes amis
. I was with L’Ollonais when he sacked Maracaibo. True, the approaches are treacherous, but I know them well. And small, shallow-draft ships like ours will be ideal for them.”

“But L’Ollonais picked it clean!” Zenobia objected.

“Ah, but that was more than two years ago,
non
?”

“That’s right!” said Morgan, suddenly charged with the predatory eagerness he knew so well how to instill in others. “You know how it is with Spanish cities. Even after we pillage them, the ruling groups are still stuck there—they need the king’s permission to relocate somewhere else. So they build their wealth back up, which doesn’t take long. There’s always a new mule train coming in with more silver. Maracaibo will be a fat prize again.” Jason, from his experiences in the twentieth century, recalled that burglars who had robbed an affluent house would often hit the same house again after giving the insurance company time to restock it.

“They also send messages to Madrid asking for money and engineers to build new fortifications,” said Roche Braziliano in the lugubrious tone for which his face was so well suited.

“But that takes time! What could they have done in two years?” Morgan’s eyes twinkled with his infectious pleasure at his own cleverness. “And besides . . . getting there will mean dropping due south, with the trade winds to port. An easy voyage.”

Summoning up his map display and enlarging its scale to include the entire Caribbean, Jason saw that Morgan was right. The proposed target lay across the Caribbean on the northern coast of South America. There, the great Gulf of Venezuela was connected by a narrow channel to the almost equally large Laguna de Maracaibo, a lake—actually a fresh-water lagoon—measuring eighty-six miles from north to south and sixty miles east to west. He zoomed the map in on the lake and saw that the town of Maracaibo was situated near the southern end of the channel. On the southeastern shore of the lake was another substantial town, called Gibraltar. The surrounding country was a fertile lowland plain, encircled by mountains.

The lake, he thought, bore a striking resemblance to a bottle.
What happens
, he wondered,
if somebody plugs it while we’re inside?

But he could see that Morgan’s last point had swayed the doubters. There was little further discussion.

* * *

The southward voyage was almost as uneventful as Morgan had promised. They stopped at the island of Ruba, the future Aruba—a Spanish possession whose Indian inhabitants nevertheless habitually did business with passing buccaneers. They did so now, and after buying supplies from them Morgan continued on to the Gulf of Venezuela, sailing at night, keeping to the middle of the entrance to stay out of sight of Spanish watchtowers. The French pirate guided them through the shallow, sandbar-laced waters of the gulf, and on the night of March 8 they anchored outside the narrow twelve-foot-deep channel that gave entry to the lake.

At first light, they began to cautiously negotiate the entrance to the channel, working their way between the two small islands of San Carlos and Zapara. It was tricky navigation. But the morning light revealed that that was the least of their problems.

“Well-positioned fortress,” Mondrago commented dispassionately, studying the battlements on the eastern shore of San Carlos, looming over a sandy beach, barely three hundred yards from the channel.

“And one which the Spaniards have evidently built since L’Ollonais was here,” said Jason, glancing at
Lilly
’s quarterdeck where the Frenchman was making embarrassed excuses to Morgan.

“Here’s where we could have used
Oxford
’s thirty-four guns,” he heard Morgan rumble. “As it is, there’s only one way. We’ll have to land on that beach and take it by storm.”

Jason didn’t listen to whatever else Morgan said, for at that moment his attention was distracted by a blue dot at the edge of his field of vision. He activated his map display to confirm something he decided to keep to himself for the present.

* * *

Half of the company went ashore that afternoon, in a stiff breeze which gradually developed into something resembling a squall. The boat carrying Jason and Mondrago capsized, and they splashed through the surf with viciously blowing sand stinging their eyes and Spanish cannonballs, fired from above, kicking up sprays of sand and water around them.

But not many balls. Mondrago had counted eleven cannon muzzles protruding from the crenels above, but they were being fired slowly, one at a time. That, and supporting fire from the ships, enabled the buccaneers to fight their way to the ridge of sand that provided the only cover available.

“What’s wrong with them?” Mondrago wondered aloud as they hugged the sand. “They could murder us, given a decent rate of fire. Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”

“I suspect that fort is seriously undermanned—a typical result of the Spanish crown’s peso-pinching, as Roderick once mentioned. They haven’t got enough men to serve all the guns. And the ones they have got probably aren’t all that well-trained.”

Morgan, who believed in leading from the front, had come ashore. “All right,” he called out. “We wait here until dusk. Then we’ll rush for the walls. We won’t be able to run very fast, uphill in the sand, but under cover of dark we ought to be able to cross the open space. Make sure of your weapons.”

Jason and Mondrago complied. Their wonderful muskets, of course, lay at the bottom of the sea off Cow Island with HMS
Oxford
—Mondrago had never entirely gotten over that—but Morgan had given them flintlock pistols from a common store of surplus equipment. Not that they could have used the muskets at the moment, for the battlements were beyond effective range. Everyone had to lie low and take it. So when the abrupt tropical darkness fell, just after a final volley from the fort’s guns, it was a very frustrated line of buccaneers that rose from behind the sand ridge on Morgan’s command and surged forward.

Strangely, there was no fire from the fort. They reached the base of the rough stone wall and hugged it, staring at each other in the moonlight, bewildered.

“Where the devil’s a gate?” demanded Morgan.

They soon found one. “We need a ram,” someone said.

“Faugh!” Morgan reared back and, with all the force of his large body, kicked the gate with his sea-booted foot. It swung open. After an instant of stunned immobility, the buccaneers swarmed in with a roar.

The fort was deserted. They all burst out laughing.

“The buggers must have slipped away just before dark, after firing that last volley!” someone crowed, slapping Jason on the back.

“After the visit by L’Ollonais, they were probably pissing in their pants with fear,” opined the Frenchman. “Now the way to Maracaibo is open!”

“Wait!” thundered Morgan. “Wait, you swabs! I don’t like this—it’s too easy. I want every inch of this fort searched.”

The buccaneers began to fan out across the courtyard into the buildings, where they struck flints to light torches. Jason and Mondrago attached themselves to a group that Morgan led into the largest structure, which they began to search room by room.

It was then that Jason smelled an acrid aroma.

Mondrago must have detected it at the same instant. “Isn’t that—?” he began.

But Jason had already locked eyes with Morgan . . . and Morgan had broken into a run. They followed him down a short stony corridor into the chamber at the far end, where they stopped, paralyzed.

It was the fort’s powder magazine. A long, slow-burning fuse led straight to a mountain of piled gunpowder barrels. The flame was just short of them.

For an eternal instant, Jason knew himself to be a dead man. It was the same knowledge that held them all immobilized.

All but one. Henry Morgan didn’t really look like he was built for speed, but he sprang forward without a second’s hesitation, straight for the powder barrels, and stamped a foot down on the fuse. The flame went out.

In dead silence, the rest of them shuffled forward. Another smell was now added to that of smoke. Someone had had a little accident.

They all looked down. There was no more than an inch of fuse left. With a collective
whoosh
, everyone breathed again.

“
Huzza for Captain Morgan!
” somebody shouted in an unsteady voice. The rest of the buccaneers whose lives had just been saved came running to see what the cheering was about.

* * *

In addition to the huge store of powder that was to have been their death, the abandoned fort proved to contain a wealth of weapons. Jason and Mondrago got new muskets—not as good as the ones they’d lost, of course, and they would have to get along without laser target designators.

The next morning Morgan ordered the cannons spiked and, for good measure, buried in the sand. He had no intention of leaving any of his small force behind to garrison the fort, and he didn’t want any Spanish reoccupiers to be able to contest his fleet’s departure when they came back through this channel. The supplies of arms and ammunition were then loaded aboard the ships and they set sail. But then they came up against what was known as the Maracaibo Bar: a shallow bank of quicksand around which the ships couldn’t find a way without spending more time than Morgan wanted to waste.

So they fell back on a Morgan hallmark: the forty-foot, single-sail canoes that his ships always towed or carried. They were able to inconspicuously go places the seagoing ships couldn’t. In Morgan’s epic two-year ravaging of Central America, and in his taking of Portobello the year before, they had been his secret weapons. And so they proved now, as the men crowded aboard, sat at their benches and manned the paddles. Despite the handicap of paddling into the wind, they soon reached the shore at the foot of Maracaibo’s Fort de la Barra. It turned out to be another empty fort, but this time without any traps.

“I’ve got to give that crazy bastard L’Ollonais credit,” Morgan admitted as they walked down the deserted main street of Maracaibo. “Thanks to him, most Spaniards are so terrified of us they don’t even try to resist. The more we have a reputation for doing the kind of things he did, the less we have to actually do them.” He laughed. “They even make up stories about us, and come to believe the stories. I’ve heard that some of them even expect us to
eat
them!”

Jason and Mondrago exchanged an uneasy glance.

“According to one of our few prisoners,” Morgan went on, “the captain of the garrison here called a muster of all able-bodied men. He had drums beaten, flags flown and bells rung. The poor sod found himself standing all alone in the square, looking stupid.”

As they walked on, buccaneers were searching the houses on either side, alert for ambushes. But the houses were empty, their doors ajar. Just off the town square they passed a Catholic church where the buccaneers were amusing themselves by smashing crucifixes, desecrating icons and urinating into fonts like the good Protestants they were. A musket-shot rang out and the head of a saint’s statue exploded. “Belay that!” Morgan shouted. “You might hit somebody.”

Nesbit spoke up timidly. “Ah, Captain, how will you obtain any, well, loot now that the inhabitants have fled and hidden their valuables?”