Полная версия
Pirate Blood
Original title: Sangue Pirata
Author: Eugenio Pochini
Translator: Valentina Giglio
Editing: Miriam Mastrovito
Cover illustration: Alessandro Cancian
Graphics: Paolo Martorano
Arti director: Valentina Cuomo
First edition © 2016 Eugenio Pochini
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission og the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidential.
To Chiara G.
I kept my promise
PROLOGUE
When you go through the entrance arch to the temple of dreams,
there, just there, you will find the sea…
LUIS SEPULVEDA
The rain was pelting down, hammering the ship deck and roaring against the sails, seeping then into the cracks in the hull. It was like that since they had doubled the coast of Florida.
Samuel Bellamy suddenly cursed. He started smoothing his black moustache, scanning out of the cabin window. He could hardly see the ocean, enveloped in a thick fog. That wasn’t what he had expected to find when Emanuel Wynne had gone and seen him, in that small inn in the port of Nassau. He had liked the French man’s determination and eccentricity, even when he had told the story about the island Blackbeard was looking for. They had laughed, drank a drop of rum… and he had almost dismissed him, when Wyatt had removed his hair from his forehead. His left eye had given a gloomy twinkle and Bellamy had got sure the pirate wasn’t as crazy as he looked.
They had organized the departure in ten days, thanks to the Jamaican governor’s financial aid. They hadn’t met bad weather conditions or rival ships which could be a risk for the crew along their course.
But now, that rain!
Eternal and never-ending.
Not to mention the fog. Everything was getting rough against him, as if the ocean wanted to warn him to go back.
“This story is making me nervous”, Bellamy said, turning to the boatswain.
“I can believe it”, the other man answered. He was checking some nautical maps with a greedy interest.
“The crew is starting to get nervous.”
The man lifted his eyes and looked at the bad weather raging outside. “You took the French man’s words too lightly. After all, he isn’t trustworthy. Traitors are never considered willingly, even among us.”
“Loyalty or not”, Bellamy replied, “we can’t go back.”
He then added in his mind: If you had seen his eye too, you would change your mind about Wynne’s intentions. I’ve sailed everywhere in the Caribbean and I’ve never met something so…
Extraordinary, he wished he could say, but he was interrupted by the shouts coming from the deck. They were so loud they covered the sounds of the storm.
“The watchman will tear his tongue”, the boatswain remarked, without paying too much attention to the mess.
“Shut up”, Bellamy warned him and opened the door wide. Heavy and big raindrops hit his head and shoulders. He closed his hands around his face, trying to stop them and focus on the situation: the crew had gathered next to the mainmast, looking up in agonizing wait.
“Land!”, the man on the maintop kept shouting. “Right at the bow!”
They all rushed forward, gathering at the bow like an army ready to attack. The bravest ones leant out from the ship’s sides, grasping strongly at the shrouds to avoid the danger of the wind and the ship rolling. Bellamy made his way, giving orders and pushing the men. When he arrived, he half-closed his eyes and covered his face again.
Nothing.
No land could be seen.
“I wonder how you can see with a weather like this.” The boatswain voice thundered phlegmatic behind him. He had followed him but he hadn’t realized it.
The captain tried to reply. The memory of his first meeting with Wynne was clear in his mind, like the sun reflecting on still water.
“You mustn’t tell anybody my secret”, he had explained. “Or you’ll end up like Edward Teach.”
“What happened to him?”, Bellamy had asked, much more than suspicious.
The answer had come in the shape of a single and simple word: mutiny. It was considered the worst of all crimes a buccaneer could make.
“Where?, Bellamy shouted turning to the watchman. “There’s nothing, Emanuel. Are you sure?”
The man on the maintop was waving and pointing straight ahead. His hair whipped by the wind and his excessive thinness made him look like a nightmare monster, like those populating the old mariners’ stories.
“Right at the bow”, Wynne repeated. “Look!”
Bellamy remarked that the crew too was looking at the point shown by the French man. He tried to do the same and after a while he could see out of the storm, beyond the fog, the island jagged sides. But there was something else. Next to the first shape he saw a second one. He thought for a moment that was their destination.
“Here we are!”, he exclaimed, in an outburst of satisfaction. He had started gazing at the landscape again, wondering which heavenly wills made it unreal. He then turned his attention to Wynne once more. He was surprised when he realized he was coming down from the maintop in a hurry, grasping at the shrouds like a monkey running away from a predator. And he got still more surprised when he saw him running to the stern cabin, shouting like a crazy man.
“Captain!”
The boatswain shook him violently by his shoulders. He turned at once, more worried for the hesitation he had heard in his voice than for the action itself.
The shape he had seen was slipping through the foggy cover and seemed closer. Yet the ship wasn’t sailing full speed, because of the wind blowing in the opposite direction and the decks made heavy by the rain. Then something which left him astounded happened. The blurred image his eyes had detected dove into the dark depths of that stormy sea with a gloomy gurgling.
“At starboard!”, someone exclaimed.
Bellamy rushed where the man was pointing at, trying hard to understand what was going on. The water was boiling some miles away and underneath something undefined was moving straight towards the ship, leaving a long foamy trail behind.
“It’s coming on us!”, he screamed and he suddenly understood he had to get control of the ship, feeling sure that the boatswain wasn’t aware of anything. By such a bad weather he would defy anyone to see farther than his nose.
When he got to the top desk, he took the helm just before the Whydah Gally started trembling under the strokes of a violent shake. He tried to tack on the left, but he was flung against the gunwale and he stood there panting breathless. The rest of the crew was swarming on the ship, screaming and asking for mercy.
Samuel Bellamy got to his feet just as a huge wall of water rose along the right side, roaring and thundering like the storm they had got into. There was a new stroke and the keel creaked. The planks burst out. The mainmast bent aside. The ropes broke. With terror stirring his mind, he leant out from the bulwark: the ship was rising perpendicularly on its own axis, pushed by a huge force. The ocean under it was boiling and shaking in a never ending whirl.
All that happened later went very fast.
The Whydah Gally jolted before breaking into two blocks. The main desk opened wide like a huge mouth, its central body swallowing up all the unfortunate people around it. Afterwards, the prow section broke off from the central body and fell into the water once more. It was a single blow, muffled in part by a gloomy sound in the background. The stern started bending on the opposite side. Bellamy grasped at a rope and found himself dangling near the mizzen mast. He tried to climb till the observation mast. The rope was treacherous and slippery with rain and it scraped his hands. He didn’t care. When he came to the top, he had just enough time to consider whether to dive into the sea, as the jump could be deadly. What was worse, the whirlpool of the sinking vessel could drag him away. However, his wonderings had a short life: he opened his eyes wide while his heart had a sudden stop.
Through the watery wall towering above the ship a Cyclopean shape appeared, dominating over the remains of what once had been the Whydah Gally. The sound which had accompanied the bow fall got louder and he could identify the guttural noise of a threatening rumble. The rumble became then a grinding of teeth and that grinding became a roar. He could see an ochre eye clearly, with a blood-red pupil flashing in the middle.
It was staring at him.
It was huge.
In his last moment of life, Bellamy stopped to gaze at that horrible sight. The vessel was finally breaking to pieces under his feet, swollen forever by the mysteries inhabiting the abysses of the Devil’s Triangle.
PART ONE
We expect life to be meaningful: but life has exactly the meaning we are ready to give it ourselves.
HERMANN HESSE
CHAPTER ONE
PORT ROYAL
Jonathan Underwood opened his eyelids, in spite of the sleepiness making his body still numb. His thoughts started slipping slowly, like drops on an opaque glass surface. From the only window in the room, he could see the sun beams falling oblique on the floor planks, dragging dusty specks in their track.
He lived with his mother in a room on the second floor of a crumbling building, like many others downtown. The Pàssaro do Mar inn below had welcomed its customers till late at night, so he had fallen asleep lulled by laughs and screams. However, as it often happened to him when he found himself in the middle stage between sleep and wake, he was wondering about the fact that those noises weren’t keeping him awake more than his curiosity about the stories told by the customers.
He was born and had grown up in the town that many people considered as the wealthiest and most ill-famed in the world. Anne always kept telling him. He had never got into serious trouble. Some acts of bravado… very usual for a boy of his age. But according to his mother, the world was dangerous and Port Royal above all.
Civilization is also that, his father had explained him once. Only it is lived differently here. And you will have to do the same, Johnny.
He decided to get up. He moved to the window, stopping for a moment in the middle of the room to fix the leotard slipping on his naked legs. He opened the shutters, encrusted with salt. A wave of light hit his face. He lifted a hand instinctively to protect himself and waited patiently for the nuisance to pass by. When he got used to it, he let himself be charmed by the wonderful landscape.
The bay was lapped by a large stretch of crystal water. Rocky walls, their tops covered in vegetation, surrounded it in a messy semicircle. Foaming waves were breaking softly against the coast, pushed by the wind running into the straight connecting the inlet to the open sea. The western part of the beach grew thin into a sandy string in the shape of a horseshoe, where Fort Charles stood. On the fortress’s main tower the English flag was waving proudly.
Johnny kept gazing at that wonder. He could distinguish the houses, the stores and the docks where the ships were laying at anchor to let the crews get down. Flocks of seagulls were flying among the masts, croaking in a choir.
“Johnny, are you awake?” His mother’s voice reached him behind the door.
“Yes”, he answered. “I’m coming.”
He was used to sleeping with Anne, also because they couldn’t do otherwise. With the little money they earned, it was a miracle if they could afford paying a rent to Bartolomeu, the innkeeper. Anne worked for him.
“Hurry up!”, she shouted once more, on the other side of the door. “Avery is waiting for you. You’ll be late as usual.”
Johnny could hear the typical reproaching tone he knew so well, followed by a cough soon after. He rolled his eyes. She had been ill for some days. And there had been no need of consulting a doctor to understand. He had tried to talk about that just once, but she had warned him, adding she was just tired.
“You’re just like your father”, the woman ended, trying hard to stop the spasms.
Always with my head in the clouds, Johnny thought.
The reason of Anne’s continual reproaches were about Stephen Underwood himself. She had never forgiven him for bringing her to Port Royal.
Thanks to the trade company he had founded, Stephen had been able to credit himself with a small part of the transport of the goods coming from England to the Caribbean Sea. It all had gone very well at first. The situation had come to a head later, because of the Indies Company monopoly. As if that wasn’t enough, some creditors the man had addressed to, had forced him to close his activity and declare bankruptcy. He had answered his wife’s never ending requests telling her he would leave as soon as possible to balance his debts. Anne had wanted to trust him, as usual. She surely couldn’t imagine she wouldn’t see him anymore in a few days.
Stephen Underwood had left on a ship flying the Dutch flag. Many rumours had started going around after his disappearance. Some people said he had been attacked by pirates and some others had seen the ship sinking off the Aruba coast, at the mercy of a storm. In spite of that, Anne had lost everything and had been forced to turn her well-to-do life habits upside down: she had had to find a job in the place she hated the most in the world.
The place which had taken her husband away from her.
And her dreams.
Every time his mother tormented him with this story, Johnny kept listening to her in silence. He didn’t dare contradict her, fearing to make her suffer. He had heard her crying next to himself at night and he had wondered why the Davies family hadn’t come to Port Royal to help them.
He came to know the truth once he reached adolescence. William Joseph Davies had never accepted his daughter’s departure to a part of the world where the idea of civilization was relative. By the way, Anne had kept in touch with her family, at least till her husband’s disappearance. She had then stopped replying to the letters coming from London. Johnny had thought that would last for a while, waiting for better times. But when he had found her burning the letters, he had understood that any link with the past was broken.
He got dressed very fast that morning. He tidied his dark locks up in front of a mirror whose borders were oxidized, then he opened and closed his mouth a couple of times. The scar on his left cheek got thinner till it became quite an invisible line. Some black and dirty spots had appeared on his teeth: he put a finger into a small basin next to him and brushed them with force.
When he had finished, he went down the stairs like his mother had done just a moment before; he believed he would find her on the landing coinciding with the back of the Pàssaro do mar, doing the tiding up. She was there in fact. She was singing a song. He greeted her quickly; Bartolomeu’s voice called her after a while.
“Anne, come here”, he said, in his strange Portuguese accent. Even if he was a very odd man, he was the only one who had offered her a place where to live and something similar to a job. He had also tried hard to convince Bennet Avery to hire an apprentice at his workshop.
Johnny opened the door and ran into the alley stretching outside the inn, getting deep into Port Royal’s frantic life.
***
A crowd was assembled in the streets. They were walking among the junk stalks of sellers or they were chatting lively under the house windows. There were every kind of people, from prostitutes blinking in front of the inns, to the sea wolves guffawing between them, to the British navy soldiers pushing carelessly every people coming in front of them.
Wiping his forehead beaded with sweat, Johnny turned into a side street getting down to the port. In that way he would avoid the messy crowd of the people going to the market. He had just to get over the ancient Spanish area, then…
Damn it!, he thought. He bit his lips without realizing it.
Alejandro Naranjo Blanco was the last person he wished to meet. He had made up a gang with some other boys, tormenting everyone passing through that area. They didn’t look favourably on anyone. The English people above all. That was because Port Royal had been a Spanish fortress before the British conquest.
Their frictions had started when a sword had been ordered to Avery. He was a very good carpenter, but also a very capable and known blacksmith. He had appointed Johnny to deliver it and the boy had entered into the Spanish area, without even thinking about it. Alejandro’s gang had immediately assaulted him. The boy had tried to defend himself, but Alejandro had jumped on him, taking out a knife and leaving a memory of their meeting on his left cheek.
When he stopped in the middle of the street, Johnny felt again the burning sensation of liquid warmth he had had soon after the cut. He touched his scar, starting from the cheekbone and going down to his lips. He could hear his mother then: This place is dangerous, that’s why I keep worrying about you! And are you fighting against people of your age, now?
“Shut up”, he muttered to himself.
“Who are you talking to, amigo?” Alejandro was waiting for him a few steps behind. He hadn’t entered the area yet and the boy had already found him.
“Let me go, gordo”, Johnny replied. He knew that calling Alejandro a fat boy wasn’t a good idea.
Yet just meeting him made his blood boil into his veins. “This is not your neighbourhood yet. I can come back from where I came from and take another way.”
“Of course.” The Spanish boy didn’t seem to react to the offense. “But you were always getting through this area.”
“Are you looking for a pretext to quarrel?”
“Maybe.”
Johnny moved forward cautiously. “That’s just what I dislike about you. Don’t provoke me.”
Alejandro’s smile widened into a much deeper line, parting his fatty face in two.
“How is your father?”, he asked.
Johnny’s feet refused to go on. He clenched his fists. That bastard knew exactly where to hit.
“Have they searched into any shark’s stomach?”, he went on. “Or he might have run away with a bitch he met anywhere. He had perhaps got bored of your mother. And of you. What do you think about it, pendejo?”
He wished he could jump on him and settle the question all at once. But he forced every nerve of his body to let go.
“I’ll tell you again for the last time”, he cut it short. “I don’t feel like…”
He could hardly finish the sentence. Something flew next to him. It was a stone. He turned his eyes behind his shoulders, even if his brain answered faster. Taking him by surprise had been just an excuse to let the other members of the gang catch him on the wrong foot. Johnny saw three guys running to him.
“I’m ready this time.” His voice revealed a certain amount of confidence, as Alejandro changed his expression. His smile had turned into a grimace of gloomy hesitation. He then took out a flat-top knife, reminding a bit a barber’s razor.
One of the boys tried to hit him with a stick. Johnny heard it hissing near his ears. The boy tried to come close to him, wanting to make a lunge. He couldn’t. His rival was punching faster and faster. Suddenly Alejandro pushed him from behind, making him hit the boy who had attacked him first.
“ Hijo de puta!”, the boy shouted and hit him with his elbow on the face.
Johnny wasn’t surprised. He instinctively plunged the sword into the thigh. The boy fell to the ground, writhing in pain. Alejandro on his side started attacking him again: he took out the knife and tried to hurt him. He was aware of that and could move away just in time. The stroke hit the boy who had thrown the stone, hurting his shoulder. The two guys started to insult each other at once, giving up the fight. The last member of the gang kept looking at them apart, as if stupefied.
And then Johnny suddenly understood.
The time of revenge had come.
“I’ll return the favour, gordo”, he sentenced and hurt the Spanish boy in his eyebrow. He saw a stream of blood dripping from his eye, dimming his sight. He decided to take advantage of it and beat a retreat.
He turned on his heels and rushed to the direction he had come from, leaving behind him the very rancorous shouts of his aggressors.
***
“I’m late”, he apologized, opening the shop door suddenly. He was panting, his chest was dancing under his clothes. The elbow stroke he had got gave him a strange nose accent.
“I know”, Avery agreed. He was sitting on a stool, in a shadowy corner. Puffs of light blue smoke where coming out of the pipe sloping three quarters from his lips. They whirled sleepily to the ceiling planks, where they lay stagnant in a dim cloud. The wrinkled face didn’t show any kind of feeling. He got up slowly and passed by the stone arch dividing the shop into two separate areas. He got to the forge. He started observing the anvil absent-mindedly.
It looked as if he hadn’t seen it before.
“Let me explain…”, Johnny tried to say.
Avery moved with an incredible dart for a man of his age. He stretched his wrinkled hand and caught the boy’s forearm, grasping him tight. “I don’t know what to do with you!” Splashes of saliva were spurting from his toothless mouth. “You are always late and you go home when you like. You’re an irresponsible! I wouldn’t have hired you if Bartolomeu hadn’t asked me.” He then changed expression. “What happened to you?”
Johnny hesitated. He saw an indefinite sense of bewilderment into his interlocutor’s blazing eyes. Or was it mercy? He would rather get his usual scolding than discuss about his meeting with Alejandro.
“It’s not your business, old man”, he addressed him.
Avery’s wrinkled face seemed to relax. He let him go and scratched his bald head, crossed by just two wisps of grey hair on his ears.
“It was the fat Spanish, wasn’t it?”, he asked.
The boy turned his eyes away.
“Ok”, Avery went on. “Do as you like. You don’t need adding anything else. Let’s try to understand whether your nose is broken. Then we’ll find an excuse for your mother. We could tell her you got hurt here. That woman is always worrying too much about you. You’ll break her heart one day.”
“How do you know?”, Johnny replied.
“There are lots of things you don’t know about me.”
And that was true.
He knew almost nothing about Bennet Avery.
Some rumours depicted him as the protagonist of raids made on board the Queen Anne’s Revenge, pirate Blackbeard’s vessel. Obviously, according to the old man that was only nonsense spread to give him problems. But Johnny had still some doubts. He had often wondered if it was his fancy speaking: maybe he had better not let it so free. However, the uncertainties about the old man past had stirred his curiosity. He had heard him talk on different occasions about pieces of his life, accompanied very often by a couple of glasses of rum. Being Bartolomeu’s friend, he was constantly present at the Pàssaro do Mar. Nevertheless, his stories had always something which didn’t fit. He even seemed to avoid some details willingly.
