The King`s Commission

'Capitano, si.' The man swept off a battered cocked hat small enough to fit a child, dripping though it was with gold lace and feathers, and introduced himself with a deep congй. 'Capitano Manuel Antonio Lopez, Capitano de Las Nuestra Seсora de Compostela.'

'Lewrie,' Alan said bluffly as an Englishman should. 'Shrike,' he added, pointing back toward his ship. 'Royal Navy. Your sword, sir.'

All the man had to offer was a cutlass stuck into a sash, which Alan passed on to his man Cony. There was one passenger, a man of much more worth, by his clothing. He was tall and slim, partly Indian in his features, but adorned with a stiff waxed mustache. He, too, offered his sword, this one a slim smallsword awash in pearls and silver wire, damascened with gold around the hilt and guard. He was elegant, a dandy-prat in the height of Spanish fashion.

'Seсor, I must talk to your captain,' he began in passable English. 'It shall be of great value to him.'

'And what brings you aboard this voyage, sir?' Alan asked, fanning his face to push away the stinks.

'She carries my cargo, senor.'

'Slaves?'

'Si, seсor. Fifty prime blacks bought in Santo Domingo.'

Alan took a look about the deck. The ketch (and he could not even begin to remember her name, much less pronounce it) would have been a well-found vessel, if she received a thorough cleaning. The rigging was thin as a purser's charity, but that could be set right. There were only four carriage guns, bronze or brass three-pounders-no value there. Most of her armament, he noted with surprise, consisted of swivels and bell-mouthed fowling pieces aimed down at her hatches and waist, evidently to control the slaves should they get loose.

'I must speak to your captain, sir. You are?'

'Lewrie, Lieutenant.'

'Allow me to introduce myself, senor. I am Don Alonzo Victorio Garcia de Zaza y Turbide.' The man rushed through a formal introduction. 'I assure you, Teniente, it shall be most pleasing to your captain if I am allowed to speak to him.'

'Pleasing how?' Alan asked, getting rapidly fed up with the over-elegant posturing of this stiff-necked hidalgo.

'To his profit, senor,' the man beamed back with a sly smile.

'I think a well-found ketch and fifty prime blacks for resale in Kingston is profit enough, don't you?' Alan smirked.

'I do not care about the blacks, seсior. The world is full of slaves,' Don Miguel sneered. 'Nor do I much care about this little ship. But if I go to Kingston, then I am prisoner, si? And there is no profit for me in that. I ask, as a gentleman, as a knight of Spain, to be set ashore. I can pay well, seсior. In gold,' he added.

'By all means, Don Thingummy, talk to my captain. I'm sure he'll simply adore talking to you!' Alan laughed. 'Cony!'

Alan sent the aristocrat, the ship's captain, and her small crew over to Shrike for safe-keeping, while he and the rest of the boarding party sorted the freed lines out and got a way on the ketch, headed out to sea, with Shrike following in her wake. He had half a dozen hands, half a dozen Marines, and a bosun's mate, plus his man Cony to keep order aboard. Once he got his people apportioned at duty stations, he led the rest to search the ship.

'Godamercy, sir,' Cony gasped as they opened the hatch gratings.

Crammed in between bales and crates of cargo were fifty slaves, naked as the day they were born, chained together with ankle shackles into two rows on either side of the hold, their wrists also bound by cuffs and lighter chain. They were squatting or lying in their own filth that did not drain off into the bilges. They glared up at him angrily, some begging for water with cupping motions by their mouths, some rubbing their bellies for food and miming the motions of eating.

'Godamercy, sir!' Cony said again. 'Hit's devilish the way them Dagoes treat people. We oughter feed 'em, sir. Give 'em water an' some air. 'Tain't Christian ta do otherwise, sir.'

'Well, they don't look exactly glad to see us, Cony.'

''Course they ain't sir!' Cony burst out. 'I 'spect they thinks we're Dagoes, too, Mister Lewrie.'

'Corporal?'

'Sir!'

'Fetch 'em up, one coffle at a time. Use those swivels and such if they get out of hand. Cony, break out a butt of water and see if there's some food about,' Alan relented.

The slaves were fresh from Dahomey or some other port on the Ivory Coast, for they cringed away from their liberators just as they had from their captors. They drank the water, ate the cold mush and stale bread as if it was manna from heaven, but stayed in a tight clutch of flesh away from the muskets of the Marines and sailors who kept an eye on them. Easy bantering from sympathetic English humors did nothing to reassure them, even if they could have understood the words.

'Murray, take charge of the deck,' Alan told the bosun's mate, and went below to search the captain's quarters and those of the distinguished passenger, who was by now getting his ears roasted by Lieutenant Lilycrop for trying to bribe a Royal Navy officer.

He gathered up all the papers he could find, not able to read a word of them, hoping Lilycrop or one of the warrants had some Spanish for later scanning. The captain's quarters were spartan in the extreme, not from the usual sailor's suspicion of anyone given to too many airs and comforts as was rife in the Royal Navy, but from poverty, he assumed. Even the captain's wine cabinet could offer nothing better than a locally grown wine of dubious palate, and some fearsome rum. After one sip, he spat the mouthful on the canvas covered deck and put the bottle back in the rack.

Don Thingummy's cabins, though, were a different matter. Some attempt had been made to pack away valuables, for all the chests and trunks had been locked, and Alan was just about to search for a lever with which to pry the first of the locks and hasps off when the sound of gunfire erupted from the deck, forcing him to sprint back topsides.

'What the hell happened?' he demanded, sword in hand.

'This'un went for't' corpr'l's musket, sir.' Murray panted from excitement or sudden exertion. 'They wuz beginnin' t' smile'n all, sir, an' then, when we wuz gonna put 'em below once agin, this'n jumped us!'

One of the slaves lay stretched out and dead on the planks, bleeding like a spilled wine keg, another keened and rocked with agony after being shot in the shoulder; the others tried to draw back from the casualties to the full extent of their leg chains.

'Christ, what a muck-up!' Alan sighed, sheathing his sword. 'Pop him over the side, then. Corporal, can you get the shackles undone? And see if anything can be done for the one wounded.'

'Aye aye, sir.'

'I saw some keys in the captain's quarters. Try there. And I also saw some rum. He might feel like a drop. Fetch that, too.'

Cony knelt down next to the wounded slave and tried to staunch the flow of blood from the purple-plum entry wound, which was not bleeding all that badly. He gently pushed him down and rolled him a little so he could see the back, where the ball had exited high up.

'Shot clean through, sir,' Cony said with a grin. 'No ball in 'im ta fester, there's a blessin'. Easy now, bucko, lay easy. Rum's a'comin', cure for damn near ever'thin'. You'll be alright.'

The corporal came back with a huge ring of keys and fiddled at the shackles until he found one that unlocked the dead man from the coffle. He then knelt at the feet of the wounded slave and undid his ankle shackles.

'Stap me, sir!' Cony wailed in disappointment. ''E's dead!'

'Dead? Of that?' Alan asked, bewildered as the next man.

'Guns is magic, sir,' Murray the bosun's mate said softly. 'If'n 'e wuz island born an' used ta us'n, 'e'd a lived, but direck from 'is tribe not three month, if'n yer shot, yer killed, so 'e believed 'e wuz dead an' that's that.'

'Jesus, they believe that?'

'Aye, sir. Ask Andrews, sir, 'e were a slavey,' Murray insisted.

Andrews was one of their West Indian hands, signed aboard as a volunteer, an almost white-skinned Negro, like one of Hugh Beauman's favored bed-partners.

Alan turned to look at him, and Andrews shrank away, after glaring at Murray with alarm. Alan thought there