Assassin's creed : Black flag - Bowden Oliver - Страница 36

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The sky was a patchwork of black cloud that every now and then parted to allow rays of sunshine through, as if the sun were being kept prisoner behind them; as though the weather was taunting us. Still we kept going, with three men at the tiller and men hanging on to the rigging as though trying to fly a huge, abominable kite, desperately trying to keep us ahead of the storm. To slow down would be to surrender to it. To surrender to it would be to die.

But we didn’t die, not that day. Behind us the rest of the treasure fleet was smashed in port, but just the one ship containing us freed prisoners managed to escape and the men we had—a skeleton crew—pledged their allegiance to me and Adewale and agreed with my proposal that we set sail immediately for Nassau. At last, I was going back to Nassau, to see Edward and Benjamin, and rejoin the republic of pirates I had missed so much.

I was looking forward to showing them my ship. My new ship. I christened it the Jackdaw.

THIRTY-THREE

SEPTEMBER 1715

“You’ve named your new brig after a bird?”

Any other man and I would have drawn my pistol or perhaps engaged my hidden blade and made him eat his words. But this was Edward Thatch. Not Blackbeard yet, oh no. He had yet to grow the face fur, which would give him his more famous alias, but he still had all that braggadocio that was as much his trade-mark as his plaited beard and the lit fuses he would wear in it.

Benjamin was there too. He sat with Edward beneath the sailcloth awnings of The Old Avery, a tavern on the hill overlooking the harbour, one of my very favourite places in the world and my very first port of call on entering Nassau—a Nassau I was pleased to see had hardly changed: the stretch of purest blue ocean across the harbour, the captured ships that littered the shores, English flags flying from their masts, the palms, the shanty houses. The huge Fort Nassau towered above us, its death’s-head flag flapping in the easterly breeze. I tell a lie. It had changed. It was busier than it had been before. Some nine hundred men and women now made it their base, I discovered, seven hundred of them pirates.

Edward and Benjamin—planning raids and drinking, drinking and planning raids, six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Nearby was another pirate I recognized as James Kidd, who sat by himself. Some said he was the son of William Kidd. But for now my attention went to my old mates, who both rose to greet me. Here, there were none of the formalities, the insistence on politeness and decorum that shackles the rest of society. No, I was given a full, proper pirate greeting, embraced in huge bear-hugs by Benjamin and Edward, the pirate scourges of the Bahamas, but really soft old bears, with grateful tears in their eyes to see an old friend.

“By God, you’re a sight for salty eyes,” said Benjamin. “Come you in and have a drink.”

Edward gave Adewale a look. “Ahoy, Kenway. Who’s this?”

“Adewale, the Jackdaw’s quartermaster.”

That was when Edward made his crack about the Jackdaw’s name. Neither of them had yet made mention of the robes I wore, but perhaps I had that pleasure to come. Certainly there was a moment, after the greeting, when they both gave me long, hard looks and I wondered whether those looks were as much to gawp at my clothes as to see the change in me, because the fact was that I had been but a boy when I first met them, but I had grown from a feckless, arrogant teenager, an errant son, a love-lorn but unreliable husband into something else—a man scarred and made hard by battle, who was not quite so careless with his feelings, not so liberal with his emotions, a cold man in many respects, a man whose true passions were buried deep.

Perhaps they saw that, my two old friends. Perhaps they took note of that hardening of boy to a man.

I was looking for men to crew my ship, I told them.

“Well,” said Edward, “there’s scores of capable men about, but use caution. A shipload of the king’s sailors showed up a fortnight back, causing trouble and knocking about like they own the place.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. Was it Woodes Rogers’s work? Had he sent out an advance party? Or was there another explanation? The Templars. Looking for me, maybe? Looking for something else? The stakes were high then. I should know. I’d done more than my fair share to increase them.

While recruiting more men for my ship, I learned a little more about the presence of the English in the Bahamas. Men that Adewale and I spoke to talked of seeing soldiers prancing round in the king’s colours. The British wanted us out; well of course they did, we were a thorn in His Majesty’s side, a dirty great stain on the Red Ensign, but it felt as though there was, if anything, an increase in British interest. So it was that when I next met Edward, Ben and, joining us, James Kidd in The Old Avery, I was sure to speak out of earshot and extra wary of unfamiliar faces.

“Have you ever heard of a place called The Observatory?” I asked them.

I’d been thinking about it a lot. At its mention there was a flicker in James Kidd’s eyes. I shot him a glance. He was young—about nineteen or twenty years old, I’d say, so a bit younger than I was, and, just like me, a bit of a hothead. So as Thatch and Hornigold shook their heads, it was he who spoke up.

“Aye,” he said. “I’ve heard of The Observatory. An old legend, like Eldorado or The Fountain of Youth.”

I ushered them to the table where, with a look left and right to see if any of the king’s spies were in residence, I smoothed out the picture purloined from Torres’s mansion and placed it on the table. A bit dog-eared but still—there in front of us was an image of The Observatory and all three men looked at it, some with more interest than others and some who pretended they were less interested than they really were.

“What have you heard?” I asked James.

“It is meant to be a temple or a tomb. Hiding a treasure of some kind.”

“Ah, rocks,” bellowed Edward. “It’s fairy stories you prefer to gold, is it?”

Thatch—he’d have no part in trying to find The Observatory. I knew that from the start. Hell, I’d known that before I even opened my mouth. He wanted treasure he could weigh, on scales; chests filled with pieces of eight, rusted with the blood of their previous owners.

“It’s worth more than gold, Thatch. Ten thousand times above what we could pull off any Spanish ship.”

Ben was looking doubtful too—as a matter of fact, the only ear I seemed to have belonged to James Kidd.

“Robbing the king to pay his paupers is how we earn our keep here, lad,” said Ben with an admonishing tone. He jabbed a grimy, weather-beaten finger at my stolen picture. “That ain’t a fortune, it’s a fantasy.”

“But this is a prize that could set us up for life.”

My two old ship-mates, they were salt of the earth, the two very best men I’d ever sailed with, but I cursed their lack of vision. They spoke of two or three scores to set us up for months, but I had in mind a prize that would set us up for life! Not to mention making me a gentleman, a man of property and promise.

“Are you still dreaming on that strumpet back in Bristol?” jeered Ben when I mentioned Caroline. “Jaysus, let go, lad. Nassau is the place to be, not England.”

For a while I tried to convince myself that it was true, and they were right, and that I should set my sights on more tangible treasures. During days spent drinking, planning raids, then carrying out those raids, drinking to their success and planning more raids, I had plenty of time to reflect on the irony of it all, how standing around the table with my Templar “friends” I’d thought them deluded and silly and yearned for my pirate mates with their straight talking and free-thinking. Yet there on Nassau, I found men who had closed their minds, despite appearances to the contrary, despite what they said, and even the symbolism of the black flag, with which I was presented one afternoon when the sun beat down upon us.

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