Pirates of the Timestream (23 page)

“We will slaughter them when they advance beyond the mangroves into the open,” the castellan stated confidently. “The darkness won’t shield them—there’ll be enough of a moon, and as you can see we have an ample supply of torches prepared.” Then, with the barest hesitation: “Er,
Almirante
, it is of course unnecessary to point out that we now have no guns pointing seaward.”

“Nor do we need them. This is the one time when we can be absolutely certain that Morgan is
not
going to try to run the channel.” Don Alonzo waved in the direction of the mangroves. “Not even a godless pirate would sail away and leave the majority of his own men stranded.”

“Ah.” The castellan nodded. “I understand.”

* * *

Jason couldn’t decide which was more unpleasant: the brackish bilge-water in which he lay flat on his back, or the highly aromatic buccaneers pressed tightly against him, sardinelike, in the bottom of the canoe.

None too soon, the seemingly empty canoe scraped against the side of
Soledad—
the side hidden from the view of the fort, naturally. The concealed men in the canoe got stiffly up and climbed aboard using ropes hanging from the rail. They hastened below, out of sight.

The gun deck was crowded with other wet, tired but grinning men who had gone ashore sitting up in the canoes, fully armed and conspicuous, and then, concealed by the mangroves, laid down behind the gunwales and returned to the ships, supine and invisible. One of them was Mondrago.

“Well,” he greeted Jason, “yours was one of the last canoes. I heard Morgan say we mustn’t overdo it; the Spaniards will never believe that we’ve landed any more men than those that have already shuttled back and forth between ships and shore.” He gave his head an incredulous shake. He had still not gotten over his awe at Morgan’s preposterously simple but brilliant ploy.

Morgan came down the ladder, greeting men by name and cracking jokes. “When do you plan to set sail, Captain?” asked Jason.

“Oh, I don’t think I’ll set sail at all, at least at first. It would make us more conspicuous. No, I believe that after nightfall I’ll simply weigh anchor and let the ebbing tide carry us out of the channel. With all the sails furled, we’ll be almost invisible at night. When we draw level with the fort,
then
we’ll pile on all the canvas we’ve got.”

* * *

“Hasn’t the patrol been heard from yet?” demanded Don Alonzo irritably, staring into the darkness beyond the landward fortifications.

The sun had set and no attack had come. Finally, in a fit of impatience, he had ordered a patrol to be sent out to probe beyond the mangrove barrier and, perhaps, prick the pirates into some reaction—or at least find out what they were up to, and why the expected attack hadn’t materialized.

“No,
Almirante
,” the castellan reported. “They should have made some kind of contact with the pirates by now. But—”

“
Ships in the channel!
” screamed a lookout from the seaward battlements.

Don Alonzo and the castellan stared at each other wide-eyed. Then they ran along the ramparts to the seaward side, where they could gaze out over the channel. Even in the moonlight, Don Alonzo could see it was thick with pirate vessels. As he watched, their sails began to blossom out and catch the night breeze, and they swept ahead faster.

“Get the guns back up here!” he bellowed.

“Impossible,
Almirante
,” protested the castellan. And Don Alonzo knew he was right. Manhandling those guns to the landward side had been an afternoon’s work.

“
Almirante,
” someone else cried out, “the patrol is back.”

The young
teniente
in command of the patrol ran up and dropped to one knee, gasping for breath. “Your pardon,
Almirante
, but we advanced cautiously to the mangroves and beyond, and encountered no one. So we continued on, which is why I am so late in reporting.” He took another deep breath. “We found nothing, anywhere.”

“
What?
” Don Alonzo loomed over the young man, seething with fury. “Idiot! You must have missed them!”

“As God is my witness,
Almirante
, there is not a single pirate on this island!”

And as the pirate ships vanished into the dark of the Gulf of Venezuela, seven guns crashed out in a mocking farewell salute.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

When it came to weather, Henry Morgan’s luck had always been as legendary as it was with most other things. In all his expeditions he had never encountered a really dangerous storm at sea.

But in the Caribbean, no one’s weather-luck can last forever. Morgan’s chose to run out the day after their departure from the Laguna de Maracaibo, when they still had to worry about being driven back onto the shore.

“Is this technically a hurricane?” shouted Mondrago over the howling of the wind, the crashing of the thunder and the creaking and groaning of the ship’s frame as he and Jason clung to the shrouds and ratlines for dear life, lashed by rain and spray.

Jason was opening his mouth to reply when
Soledad
—Morgan hadn’t gotten around to renaming her—plunged down yet another mountainous wave into the trough below. A sheet of water roared the length of the ship, battering the wind from their lungs and almost knocking them off their feet. The ship struggled aright, wallowing, as water poured off the deck into the scuppers through the waterways along the bulwarks. Jason lost his grip but managed to grab a mainmast backstay before he could be swept overboard. He coughed out the salt water that had forced itself in before he had managed to close his mouth, and gasped for breath.

“This isn’t quite hurricane season,” he finally wheezed. “It generally begins in June. And the normal hurricane area is further north. But this is a damned serious tropical storm.” He’d barely finished the sentence before he had to duck to avoid being brained by a flying piece of broken tackle. The ropes of loose rigging were like whips in the wind.

Morgan, fearful of finding himself back ashore and at the highly problematical mercy of the Spaniards, had tried anchoring in five- or six-fathom water—about thirty to thirty-six feet deep—and riding out the storm. But the tempest had intensified, and he’d had no choice but to weigh anchor and face into the waves. Jason and Mondrago were part of the shift now laboring topside to keep the ship afloat. Nesbit and Grenfell were both below, manning the pumps. Jason tried to imagine what it must be like aboard the undecked boats.

“I tell you,” an older than-average buccaneer cried out a few feet from them, “this fleet is cursed! It’s
her!
” He pointed theatrically across the water. Even in the gloom,
Rolling-Calf
was close enough to be seen. “Everybody knows a woman at sea is bad luck. She’s bought it on all our ships.”

A brief lull in the wind allowed another man to make himself heard. “She’s not just a woman—she’s a witch! They can stir up hurricanes by tossing a pinch of sea sand into the air, or by stirring the water in a pot with their bare feet.”

“And who knows what a
black
witch can do?” jittered the first man. “That must be it. She wants to sink us all!”

“But,” Jason pointed out, “she’s caught in this storm with the rest of us.”

“Ah, have you no wit, mate? The Devil takes care of his own—he’ll pluck her out while the rest of us drown. I once knew a man who said he saw—”

“Belay that talk!” bellowed Henry Morgan, making his unsteady way toward them along the rolling, lurching deck. “What are you, seamen or frightened children? We’re all in this together—everyone in the fleet. Now put your backs into—”

Whatever else he was going to say vanished tracelessly in a shrieking roar of renewed wind, and
Soledad
breasted a wave even more titanic than the last one. This time the helmsman was unable to keep her bow-on, and as she came down she slewed to starboard. So the brutal onrush of foaming seawater went athwartships, causing her to heel over.

Jason, alongside the starboard rail, clung desperately to the backstay. But it snapped free, and he went over the side. Mondrago tried to grasp him by the arm, but failed. At that moment Morgan, who hadn’t been grasping anything secure, slid to starboard and his heavy body crashed into Mondrago’s.

The three of them hit the water almost together.

Jason, his lungs almost rupturing with the agony of suffocation, struggled up to the surface. Frantically treading water while sucking in wheezing gasps of breath, he saw that the sudden gust had subsided and they were again between waves. He also saw the bobbing heads of Morgan and Mondrago not far away. And he saw
Soledad
’s receding stern.

He knew that crying after her for help would be futile, even had his lungs been up to outshouting the wind. A hopelessness too leaden for panic suffused him.

Then a female voice came thinly through the wind, crying “Grab the lines!” He looked around and saw
Rolling-Calf
coming alongside in the relatively calm water. Crewmen were flinging out ropes, one of which splashed into the water nearby. With more strength than he’d thought he had left in him, he swam for it and clutched it, winding it around his midriff. A pair of Maroons hauled him aboard. As he collapsed on the deck and lay there drawing heaving, shuddering breaths, he watched Mondrago being likewise lifted of the gunwale, as was Morgan—with somewhat more difficulty—after another moment.

“Captain Morgan!” said Zenobia, descending from the poop. “Thank God! And—” She turned to the other two rescued men, and halted as her eyes met Jason’s.

“Thank you,” he said, inadequately.

“Well, well!” Her mocking smile was back. “Who would ever have thought I’d save . . .” Her voice trailed off as she remembered Morgan was in earshot. He got laboriously to his feet.

“Aye, lass, thank you indeed!” Morgan looked at the sky. “What do you think? Is the worst past?”

“I fear not, Captain. This is just a lull. There’s more yet to come.” Zenobia stepped back up to the poop, and the three men joined her. She pointed over the taffrail. “Look back there. You see—”

A scream split the air. They whirled and saw one of the Maroons, standing amidships, pointing aloft. He fell to his knees, moaning. His crewmates followed suit.

Jason and the others looked up. Overhead, an arrowhead-shaped segment of the leaden sky was rippling and wavering in a way that was clearly unnatural. Still more unnatural was the sudden appearance, about midway along that region’s length, of a sharply defined rectangle of dim light seemingly suspended in midair.

Jason barely had time to recognize what he was seeing when his body was seized in an invisible, rubbery, unbreakable grip. He and the others on the poop began to float upward, toward the rectangle of light.

A roar of enraged incomprehension burst from Morgan’s lips as his feet lost contact with the deck. It subsided into inarticulate grunts as he struggled and thrashed in midair against the immaterial force holding him. The other three did nothing. They knew too well what was happening to them, and the uselessness of resistance.

They ascended more and more swiftly, borne aloft by that irresistible force, and the open rectangle—the Kestrel’s cargo hatch—engulfed them. A refraction field was carried by a grid in a vehicle’s surface, and formed mere millimeters from that surface, so that when the hatch slid aside it left a gap in the field. Once inside the partly empty space that was the cargo hold, they hung suspended just under the hemispherical device set in the overhead which projected the remotely focused gravitic effect known as a tractor beam. Then the hatch slid shut below them with a clang, forming a deck onto which they were unceremoniously dumped as the tractor beam was switched off. Through the bulkheads came the hum that told Jason that they were bound somewhere else on the wings of grav repulsion, leaving Morgan’s storm-tossed fleet behind.

For a moment, they simply lay there in silence. In that moment, Jason had time to stare at Morgan and think,
This can’t be right! What happened to the Observer Effect? We’ve been counting on it. Nothing is supposed to happen to Morgan at this point. Something should have prevented them from grabbing him! History says he got back from Maracaibo, pillaged Panama the following year, got knighted and made Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, and so forth.

He felt a sickening sensation of mental free fall as his accustomed structure of assumptions seemed to crumble away from beneath his feet, leaving him plunging into a chaos that did not bear contemplating.

So perhaps I know how Morgan feels right now.

But Morgan recovered before he did. The buccaneer admiral stood slowly up. He instinctively started to draw the cutlass at his side, but then dropped his hand as though recognizing the gesture’s futility. He looked around slowly in the dim electric light. He seemed to take in the background hum, a type of sound that had never been heard on Earth in 1669. His eyes—quite black in that illumination—were wide as they stared at surroundings that held not a single familiar or even comprehensible reference point. Those eyes took in the composite plasteel of the decks and bulkheads, which his world could never have cast in metal. They blinked at the lights that shone without fire. Then they finally came to rest on his three companions . . . and particularly on Zenobia.

I was wrong
, Jason decided.
I
can’t
know what he’s feeling. He’s a highly intelligent man—a bleeding genius in a low kind of way—but he’s still a product of a society that hasn’t entirely left the Middle Ages behind. His eyes—the eyes of a man who fears very little—hold a kind of fear I can never feel, because I grew up in a society that accepts rationalism as unquestioningly as the Middle Ages accepted the supernatural.

Sooner than Jason would have thought possible, Morgan found his voice. “So,” he said slowly to Zenobia, “you really
are
a—”

Zenobia shook her head. “No, Captain Morgan. It’s not what you think. This has nothing to do with the powers of darkness. We’re in a vessel that can fly through the air—but not by sorcery. The people who command it are very evil, but they’re not witches or warlocks. Their evil is of the ordinary human sort—and we all know the kinds of things we’re capable of doing to each other without any help from Satan.”

“And these people who’ve captured us are our enemies,” Jason put in. “Actually, some of them
aren’t
human. But even those are not demons, even though Zenobia’s Maroon followers believe they are.”

“And the Maroons really aren’t all that far wrong,” Mondrago muttered. Jason reflected that it was just as well that Irving Nesbit was still aboard
Soledad
. He probably would have been going into cardiac arrest at this point, listening to the frankness with which they were speaking to Morgan, who had no right to be here at all.

Once again, Morgan stared at the three of them in turn. An average human of this century would, Jason thought, have been gibbering by now, or else too deeply in shock even to gibber. But if there was one adjective which did
not
describe Henry Morgan, it was “average.” He drew himself up into an unconscious stance of command, and his features hardened into a mask of iron.

“Who are you three?” he demanded. “
What
are you?”

For a moment, Jason considered telling him they were from the Moon. That was something the seventeenth-century mind could at least fantasize about—Cyrano de Bergerac was currently fourteen years in his grave—whereas time travel didn’t yet exist even as a fictional device. But he considered it only to reject it. The time for game-playing was past. He met Zenobia’s eyes; she nodded, and he proceeded.

“We’re from the future, Captain. A little over seven hundred years in the future, to be exact. I don’t ask you to understand it. Just take my word that we can, within limits, voyage on the stream of time—as can the evil men who now have us imprisoned in their flying ship.”

“‘Flying ship’? Yes, so Zenobia said. But . . . but I saw no ‘ship.’ Only a square hole in the sky, in a part of the sky that seemed to flicker, or . . .” Morgan trailed to a bewildered halt.

“This ship can make itself invisible. And,” Jason continued hastily as Morgan’s jaw dropped, “this also has nothing to do with any black arts. Zenobia has told you the truth: these enemies of ours are very powerful, but their power is only that of mechanical and warlike skills that your world doesn’t yet possess, just as . . .” Jason sought for an example Morgan would understand, for the concept of technological advancement did not come naturally in a world where the way things were done never changed noticeably over the course of any one individual’s lifetime. “Just as your own ancestors in the days of Richard the Lionhearted didn’t have guns, or astrolabe and sextant for navigating their ships.”

They didn’t?
said Morgan’s expression. With what seemed almost a physical effort, he sought to come to terms with all of this. “If you haven’t been born yet, and won’t be born for seven centuries, then how can you be here now? By God, time isn’t a sea to be voyaged on! It just . . .
is.
Once a moment has passed, it’s over and done with. This is madness! It would make a chaos of all creation!”

“Believe me, you’re not the only one to have thought that,” said Jason with a smile. “But you know I must be speaking the truth, for you know that no one of your time could build this flying ship.”

“Flying . . . But this deck is steady under my feet.”

How do you explain inertial compensators?
thought Jason with an inner groan.
Or grav repulsion? When Isaac Newton is twenty-seven and only just becoming a professor at Cambridge!
“The lack of a sensation of motion has to do with the same force that allows the ship to fly, and which brought us up through the air,” was the best he could manage. “And remember, it’s not magic. Nor is . . . that which allows us to leave our own time and visit other times.”

“Hmm . . .” With a swiftness Jason knew he shouldn’t find surprising, Morgan accepted the situation and began to think out its implications. “If you came from your own time, then surely you can return to it.” The dark eyes gleamed with sudden avidity. “And perhaps take me with you? By God, I think I might like to see a world that builds invisible flying ships! I can imagine many possible uses for them.”

I’ll just bet you can
. “I’m sorry, Captain. It doesn’t work that way. We are all . . . anchored to the times we are born into. You are of this time, and must remain in it. We are in it for a set period, and must remain until a prearranged date only a couple of weeks from now.”