Madshaka frowned, shook his head. “I told them. I told them many time, like you say. They go crazy.”
“You led them. You led them and you started them on this!”
Madshaka took a step forward so he was looking down at James, his voice low, little more than a growl. “Look here, King James. You been too long with the white men. You don’t remember how much these people hate. Maybe I go crazy too. I just get stolen from my home, remember. I just come across the ocean on the death ship. You just try to remember how you feel, twenty years ago.”
The two men stood, eyes locked. Madshaka said, “When you kill the captain of that slave ship, I think then you remember.” He turned quickly away, moved down the deck, shouting orders in one language then another.
James stared out over the ocean. Madshaka was right, of course. Twenty years before there would have been no stopping him until every white man before him was dead. It was that same rage that had driven him to stick a knife in the slaver’s captain, to make them all outlaws, pirates.
Here he was cursing Madshaka when it was his own lack of control, his own fury, that had led to their being at that place, adrift on the trackless sea.
He would not have balked at slaughtering slavers, plantation overseers. Was it because these men were sailors, merchant sailors, that he felt differently?
He shook his head. So much to do, so many consideration still before him. So much blood on his hands already. How he longed for the Northumberland, his little crew, the simple freedom of plying the Chesapeake Bay.
I am getting old, he thought.
Madshaka was rounding the men up, gathering them together aft. There was talk now, quite a lot of talk, vigorous arguments with hands waving and fingers pointing around, men shouting back and forth, heads nodding in agreement, faces screwed up in expressions of incomprehension.
James felt like he had no part of it, like he was not a part of the crew. But that was not right, he goaded himself. He was in charge, he was their leader, and until he had taken them to safety he could not abandon that.
He walked aft, stepped up on the carriage of a small gun, and shouted, “Quiet, quiet!” Held his hands up over his head, and even though they could not understand him, the power of his voice, the commanding presence of a Malinke prince, brought the discussions to a halt.
“Madshaka, here.” The big man ambled over. “Tell them they fought well, they should be proud.”
Madshaka translated and heads nodded, faces looking not joyful but satisfied.
“We have done what we needed. We have food now, and water, enough to get us home.” There was no need to mention the pointless slaughter. It was done, there was no changing that, and they would not be attacking any other ships.
“We have work to do now-” James continued, but one of the men cut him off, shouting out a question that met with murmured concurrence from several others.
James turned to Madshaka. “He say, ‘Why don’t we take this ship now? Why we go back in the death ship?’ ”
Why indeed? Before James could formulate a response that might make sense to that man, Madshaka translated the question to the others, and James could see more nodding heads, more agreement.
Why not? It was piracy, robbery on the high seas. But what would that mean to these people, who had been stolen from their homes and sold into bondage? They were victims of the most depraved kind of robbery. They were Africans, what did they know or care of the Europeans’ customs and uses of the sea? Why should they ever think it was wrong to take a ship from white men, most of whom were dead?
Now Madshaka was talking again, addressing the assembled men. “Madshaka!” James cut him off. “What you telling them?”
“I telling them what you said.”
“No you ain’t. What you telling them?” His fury was met by Madshaka’s defiant eyes.
“I telling them they can vote. They can, can’t they, or you calling yourself king now? King James?”
James held his eyes, did not let his expression waver, did not let his face reflect the raging inside. They could vote, he had agreed to it. In a moment of weakness he had said they would run things in the way of a pirate ship, and for his sins that was what they were doing.
Madshaka turned back to the men, delivered a few quick, clipped sentences; heads nodded all around, and then every man on the deck raised his hand.
Madshaka turned to James, gave him a hint of a smile. There was no need to translate the results.
“Very well. Tell them to go collect the women and children and whatever they want from the old ship. But first we throw these dead ones over.”
Madshaka gave the orders, pointed here and there, and men lifted corpses out of the sticky puddles of blood and carried them to the leeward rail and heaved them over the side. A dozen white men, slaughtered.
James closed his eyes. His head sunk to his chest. The nightmare went on and on and on.
It was with a great sense of relief that Thomas Marlowe stared through the glass at the ship, the battered wreck of a ship, drifting a cable length away. Relief, tempered with anger, regret, self-loathing, self-pity. A mixed brew, a rumfustian of emotion.
She was a mess, her spritsail yard broken, just the courses and fore topsail set. The smell told him she was a slaver. Reasonable deduction told him it was King James’s.
She was flying her ensign upside down, was firing guns to leeward as a signal of distress, but Marlowe was not buying it. It was just what he would expect James to do, to lure them in. But he would not be fooled.
Now there would be an end to it, one way or another.
He could hear the muttering. The men at the great guns and the men at sail trimming stations and the men with pistols and cutlasses at their sides, ready to board, all murmuring, all expressing that discontent for which sailors were deservedly famous.
“What’s the good of taking yon wreck, then? Bloody risk our necks for flotsam, not worth a sou.”
“It’s them niggers, and Marlowe using us for his own good.”
“Ain’t what I signed on for.”
“Nor me. Signed aboard a privateer, and Marlowe leaving off whatever he thinks looks like a man-of-war, and attacking some hulk.”
“It was Billy Hood was aloft then, said it didn’t look like no man-ofwar to him.”
They had too much time to think. Sailors would always get into trouble if they were given time to think. But in ten minutes’ time they would be into it, some bloody work, and then it would be over.
The Elizabeth Galley had come up with the ship that morning, closed with her. Now she was hove to a cable length to windward. Marlowe would beat King James into submission and be done with it.
“We will not board?” Bickerstaff asked.
“We will not. Those freed slaves could be the death of us, fighting hand to hand. They understand there is no quarter for them. Fight to the last man. But I reckon they know little of fighting with great guns. We’ll stand off, give them a cannonading, hope they see fit to surrender.”
“You just said they would not call for quarter in fighting hand to hand. Do you think they will surrender under cannon fire?”
“No.”
“I do not see any but two men aboard, and they look to be white men.”
They did look to be white men, and the view through the glass only strengthened that impression. They waved, beckoned, but Marlowe stood firm, did not make a move one way or another. He could picture the hordes of armed black men crouching behind the bulwark, waiting for them to board.
He would let King James take the first shot, and then he would decimate them.
Ten minutes passed, and no one other than the two white men appeared on the deck. At last they seemed to realize that Marlowe would not be sending any aid, or laying his ship alongside. They disappeared down the leeward side of the blackbirder, and a moment later came pulling under her counter in a yawl boat, making for the Elizabeth Galley.
“Some of you men with small arms, come with me.” Marlowe stomped forward to the gangway, armed members of the boarding party behind him. He could not imagine how the two men in the yawl boat were part of some trick, but he would never, never be caught unawares.
The yawl boat pulled up below the boarding steps and the two men scrambled up the side, not asking
