'Bastards!' the oldest prisoner spat back. 'Kindest to kill us now and have done, ye gotch-gut shit!'
'Dat can be arranged,
'Don't!' the youngest pleaded, so agitated he looked as if he would fling himself over the side from fretting, with tears of relief in his eyes that their death was not to be
'Hope?' Balfa scoffed. 'Dis de Dry Tortugas.
The launch staggered through the last froth of surf and ground her bows into the raspy, pebbled grit of the beach. Bow men sprang to either side, thigh-deep in white-water spume, to steady the bows as a fresh wave lifted the boat a foot more ashore.
'Go over de bow, don't even get your feet wet, you. Out,
The prisoners were goaded at gun- or swordpoint at least twenty yards inland, past the overwash barrow full of wiregrass and deep, loose sand littered with feathers and shells.
'Oim Oirish!' one of the captives plaintively declared.
'All same,
Two crewmen trundled up a ten-gallon wooden barrico. Another slung a worn leather bag across the sand to land at their feet.
As the pirates scrambled to shove off and leap into their boat, one of the captives dared kneel by the leather sack and peer inside it. He wonderingly drew out a rusting old kitchen knife, paper, and…
'Crikey, 'tis a quizzin' glass, and a tinder-box, too. We can light a fire, does a ship ever pass!' he whispered in surprise.
'Sweet merciful Jaysus in Heaven!' the Irish captive cried in sudden glee as he swiped his fingers over a damp spot on the barrico and sniffed at it. ' 'Tis rum, by God! Ten bloody gallon o'
'What the Devil?' the oldest sailor puzzled, scratching at his grizzled scalp. He almost felt a twinge of hope, of gratitude to that…
The shot was inaudible over the loud swashing and raling of the surf, the wind that flapped their clothing, and the mewing cries of the seabirds that nested on the islet, flushed a'wing by their presence.
'Oh,' the youngest lad said, as if he'd pricked his finger on a thorn, and clapped a hand to the inside of his right thigh. 'Oh!' he reiterated, as if a wasp or bee had stung him, as he looked down at the blood on his white breeches. 'Ah. Oh Lord!' as realisation came, as he fell to his knees and went as pale as the wave spume.
The other captives could see the tiniest wisp of spent powder smoke that blew westward from the schooner's small quarterdeck, ragging past the taffrails like the spirit of a hag that had ridden her mortal too long and must flee the coming of dawn.
'Oh, poo,' Don Rubio groaned, grimacing at his poor aim with a slim and expensive Jaeger rifle. 'This boat's pitching, though.' His compatriots cheered his expertise, even though he hadn't struck his mark in mid-chest.
'You said you wished to shoot just one, Rubio!' Hippolyte said in commiseration. 'He'll die of that, right below his
'Perhaps they'll
They sang as well, hooting and capering, even assaying a nautical, buccaneer's hornpipe, though they hadn't heard a word that their captives had yelled from shore.
A Creole song, a slave song, one they'd all learned as children.
Two little birds were sitting,
Two little birds were sitting on the fence,
Two little birds were chattering,
What they were saying I do not know.
A chicken hawk came along the road,
Pounced on them and ate them up.
No one hears the chattering anymore,
The two little birds on the fence!
BOOK ONE
If he be not born to be hanged, our case Is miserable.
William Shakespeare
CHAPTER ONE