Assassin's creed : Black flag - Bowden Oliver - Страница 50
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“You’ll regret this day, Rackham,” I hissed.
“I regret most of them already.” The mutineer Calico Jack sighed. His colourful Indian shirt was the last thing I saw as another man came forward clutching a black bag that he pulled over my head.
FORTY-SEVEN
That was how we found ourselves marooned on Providencia. After a month adrift on the damaged Ranger, that was.
Jack had left us food and weapons but we had no means of steering or sailing the ship, so it was a month at sea in which we tried and failed to repair the broken rigging and masts and spent most of the day manning the pumps in order to stay afloat; a month in which I’d had to listen to Vane ranting and raving all hours of the day and night. Shaking his fist at thin air, he was. “I’ll get ya, Jack Rackham! I’ll open y’up. I’ll tear out your organs and string a bloody lute with them.”
We spent Christmas 1718 on the Ranger, bobbing around like a discarded liquor bottle on the waves, praying for mercy from the weather. Just me and him. Of course, we had no calendars or such, so it was impossible to say when Christmas fell or on which day 1718 became 1719, but I’m prepared to wager I spent them listening to Charles Vane rage at the sea, at the sky, at me, and especially at his old mucker, Calico Jack Rackham.
“I’ll get ya! You see if I don’t, y’scurvy bastid!”
When I tried to remonstrate with him, hinting that perhaps his constant shouting was doing more harm to our morale than good, he turned on me.
“Well, well, the fearsome Edward Kenway speaks!” he’d bawl. “Pray tell us, Cap’n, how to quit this predicament and tell us what genius you have for sailing a boat with no sails and no rudder.”
How we didn’t kill each other during that time, I’ll never know, but, by God, we were glad to see land. We hooted with pleasure, clasped each other, jumped up and down. We launched a yawl from the stricken Ranger, and as night fell we rowed ashore, then collapsed on the beach, exhausted but ecstatic that after a month drifting at sea we’d finally found land.
The next morning we awoke to find the Ranger wrecked against the beach and cursed one another for failing to drop anchor.
And then cursed our luck as we realized just how small it was, the island on which we were now marooned.
Providencia, it was called, a small island with its fair share of history. A bloody history, at that. English colonists, pirates and the Spanish had done nothing but fight over it for the best part of a century. Squabbling over it. Forty years ago, the great pirate Captain Henry Morgan had set his cap at it, recaptured it from the Spanish and used it as his base for a while.
By the time Vane and I set down upon the island, it was home to a few colonists, escaped slaves and convicts and the remnants of the Mosquito Indians, who were native to it. You could explore the abandoned fort, but there was nothing much left. Nothing you could eat or drink anyway. You could swim across to Santa Catalina, but then, that was even smaller, so mainly we spent the days fishing and finding frond oysters in small pools, and occasionally having a kind of snarling confrontation with groups of passing natives, ragged, wandering colonists or turtle fishermen. The colonists, in particular, always wore a wild, frightened look, as though they weren’t sure whether to attack or run away, and could just as well do either. Their eyes seemed to swivel in their sockets in different directions at once and they made odd, twitchy movements with dry, sun-parched lips.
I turned to Charles Vane after one particular encounter, about to comment, and saw that he too was wearing a wild look, and his eyes seemed to swivel in their sockets, and he made odd, twitchy movements with his dry, sun-parched lips.
Until whatever fragile cord holding Charles Vane together snapped one day, and off he went to start a new Providencia tribe. A tribe of one. I should have tried to talk him out of it. “Charles, we must stick together.” But I was sick to the back teeth of Charles Vane, and anyway, it wasn’t like I’d seen the last of him. He took to stealing my oysters for a start, scuttling out of the jungle, hairy and unshaven, his clothes ragged and with the look of a madman in his eyes. He’d scoop up my just-caught frond oysters, curse me for a bastard then scuttle back into the undergrowth from which he would curse me some more. My days were spent on the beach, swimming, fishing or scanning the horizon for vessels, all the time knowing full well he was tracking me from within the undergrowth.
On one occasion I tried to remonstrate with him. “Will you talk with me, Vane? Are you fixed on this madness?”
“Madness?” he responded. “Ain’t nothing mad about a man fighting to survive, is there?”
“I mean you no harm, you corker. Let’s work this out like gentlemen.”
“Ah. God I’ve a bloody headache on account of our jabbering. Now stay back and let me live in peace!”
“I would if you’d stop filching the food I gather, and the water I find.”
“I’ll stop nothing till you’ve paid me back in blood. You was the reason we were out looking for slavers. You was the reason Jack Rackham took my ship!”
You see what I had to contend with? He was losing his mind. He blamed me for things that were plainly his own fault. It was he who had suggested we go after The Observatory. It was he who’d caused our current predicament by killing the slaver captain. I had as much reason to hate him as he had to despise me. The difference between us was that I hadn’t lost my mind. At least not yet, anyway. He was doing his best to remedy that, it seemed. He got crazier and crazier.
“You and your fairy tales got us into this mess, Kenway!”
He stayed in the bushes, like a rodent in the darkened undergrowth, curled up in roots, crouched with his arms around the trunks of trees, crouched in his own stink and watching me with craven eyes. It began to occur to me that Vane might try to kill me. I kept my blades clean and though I didn’t wear them—I’d become accustomed to wearing very little—I kept them close at hand.
Before I knew it he graduated from being a madman ranting at me from within the undergrowth to leaving traps for me.
Until one day I decided I’d enough. I had to kill Charles Vane.
• • •
The morning that I set out to do it was with a heavy heart. I wondered whether it was better to have a madman as a companion than no companion at all. But he was a madman who hated me, and who probably wanted to kill me. It was either me or him.
I found him in a water hole, sitting crouched with his hands between his legs trying to make a fire and singing to himself, some nonsense song.
His back was offered to me, an easy kill, and I tried to tell myself I was being humane by putting him out of his misery as I approached stealthily and activated my blades.
But I couldn’t help myself. I hesitated, and in that moment he sprung his trap, flinging out one arm and tossing hot ashes into my face. As I reeled back he jumped to his feet, cutlass in hand, and the battle was on.
Attack. Parry. Attack. I used my blades as a sword, meeting his steel and replying with my own.
I wondered: did he think of me as betraying him? Probably. His hatred gave him strength and for some moment he was no longer the pathetic troglodyte. But weeks spent crouching in the undergrowth and feeding off what he could steal had weakened him and I disarmed him easily. Instead of killing him then I sheathed my blades, unstrapped them and tossed them away, tearing off my shirt at the same time, and we fought with fists, stripped to the waist.
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