Everyone in town must be standing on the docks watching the ships burn. There are hundreds of people.
At the front of the crowd, a platoon of Spanish soldiers guards three men, all of them bound. The prisoners are wrestled into a rowboat and taken to the second ship. One soldier, who looks to be in command, addresses the crowd. Because we’re at the back of the throng, we can’t hear a word.
“My kingdom for a megaphone,” Nico says, looking out over the crowd.
Soon enough, the commander’s words drift back to us in a series of comments passed from congregants nearest the action to the rows behind them. By the time the content of the speech reaches our section of the crowd, I’m left wondering if this is just a high-stakes version of the telephone game.
“What news, sir?” Nico asks one man dressed in a mishmash of clothing styles. I’ve seen frontiersmen before and with his eclectic style choices of buckskins and furs, he certainly fits the bill.
He also smells like he’s been camping for the last millennia and is dire need of a good washing.
“Pirates.” The man replies, in Spanish, as he jerks a thumb at the burning ship. “Them and the sorry fuckers in Dante’s Inferno.”
“How many people were saved from the ship before it caught fire?” I ask. My stomach knots. Papa didn’t talk about it in front of me, but I’d once overheard his account of being a helpless eyewitness to another ship burning into the sea. He talked of men screaming and jumping overboard hoping to escape death, but instead were swamped by a churning sea that swallowed them down.
Memories of losing Maman at sea wash over me. I feel the swell of the waves battering the ship’s hull and the biting cold of the North Atlantic sea. I shudder.
The frontiersman laughs like I’ve asked the most ridiculous question. “Saved? That’s the punishment for their crimes: burning with their ships. ’Tis a warning for all pirates that may follow that their brand of skullduggery will meet swift and merciless justice in Saint John. There are handsome rewards when scum like them are brought to the garrison. I’d wager whoever turned them in can now feed their family like kings for at least the next month.”
Given that my current profession is a peg leg and pet parrot away from those miserable bastards—though it’s a few hundred light years ahead of these wood vessels, I’ve got a ship, too—my heart skips a beat in terrified empathy.
“Is everyone in town here?” Nico asks. “This is the largest crowd at an execution I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s obligatory,” Frontiersman says with a grim smile. He nods toward the sentries posted behind us. A line of soldiers stretches from one end of the docks to the other. “The garrison commanders like to remind us regular folk not to put a toe very far outside the lines.”
We watch as the dinghy reaches the second ship and they haul the men up on deck. Within minutes, the executioners return to their boat and begin the journey back to shore, leaving me to wonder how the condemned are kept from jumping over the rails on the other side of the ship. Are they in the cargo hold or tied to the masts? I can’t see them from where I stand.
From a third boat, archers shoot flaming arrows onto the deck of what is about to become their funeral pyre.
I’ve learned that public execution is a better window into a human soul than most anything else. Read the bystanders’ faces and three types of people will stand out in the crowd: the Morbidly Curious, the Sports Fans, the Justice Seekers.
The Morbidly Curious seem to be the most benign. They’re not rowdy or conspicuous; they’re the ones closest to the action, watching every detail from beginning to end, with ghoulish fascination.
Sports Fans are the bloodsport spectators; the celebratory mood can usually be traced to these people. For them, executions provide a release from the soul-sucking grind of daily life. They’re the party-goers out to have a have a good time, and they usually bring picnic lunches.
Then, there are the Justice Seekers; these are the ones who unnerve me. They watch death with cold, holy judgment, certain they’ve helped mete out the Lord’s justice for that day simply by bearing witness. Exacting payment for sins is their highest concern.
I have no illusions about who and what I am. I steal things and do my best to survive when the universe pitches me, headfirst, into purgatory. This alternate reality version of what I hoped would still be home is looking more like purgatory every minute.
A dark-haired man standing fifty feet away catches my attention; in this sea of strangers, there’s something familiar about him. The build of his body. The slope of his nose and strong jawline as he stands in profile. His dark hair. He reminds me of...
What did Papa look like?
My breath catches in my chest. I grab Nico’s arm and point in the direction of the hooded figure. “Nico, that man. I think it’s...he looks like Papa.”
“You know this is a needle and haystack situation, right? I think you see what you want to see, cariña.”
The dark-haired man elbows past a group of women huddled together against the cold; space between one body and the next seems to be little more than the width of a hairline crack. I can measure his progress through the crowd in inches, not feet, as the gargantuan physical effort to maintain forward momentum slows his advancement to a crawl.
My gaze snaps from the retreating figure to Nico and back again. I must look more desperate with each repeated glance because Nico sighs and waves a hand, conceding defeat.
“Fine. Let’s go,” he says. “You stay right behind me and, I swear, if you take
