It was some days before I saw my friend from Starkland again. By that time he had found his voice. At first it was weak and weary, and the initial words from his parched lips (yes, he spoke English, and was indeed an Englishman) were to ask after “the boy who rescued him.” I was brought before him, abed in the sick bay, and found the poor man much changed from when I last saw him, and all for the better. He remained unshaven, but his beard had been trimmed and his hair cut short (by Bloody Pete, who bloodied himself in the cutting). He had been washed in a hot bath with lye soap and vinegar, since these were the only solvents that would work their way through his grime (removing, I grant you, some skin in the process), and he was now much cleaner and dressed in Long Tom’s clothing with the cuffs rolled back to fit his limbs. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties, perhaps even younger. (This surprised me, for I had taken him to be a much older fellow when we met in the cave.) When I arrived at his bedside, he took my hand, again brought it to his lips, and kissed it. He kindly asked my name, and when I spoke it, I saw his eyes widen and felt his grip on me tighten. “What is it, sir?” I asked. “Later,” he replied, “I will explain later, boy. James, may I call you James?” “I wish you would, sir,” I answered, happy to hear my Christian name again, for all on board the Roger called me Cook, or Cookie, or Cap’n (mockingly, after Smee), or worse. He then turned his face to the wall, and within moments fell fast asleep.
A few days later he found the strength to tell his story to our captain. I heard it secondhand from Jukes (I was gutting fish in the galley), and what I learned nearly brought me to my knees.
His name was Arthur Raleigh. He had been midshipman on the Princess Alice, a merchant vessel sailing to India in the winter of 1860. Terrible storms had driven the ship off course, to a spot near the island of Bermuda, where an out-of-season hurricane descended on them late in the month of February. (“The very time we met our storm,” Jukes remarked, “and in the very place!”) The winds were ferocious, and all hands feared themselves lost until quite suddenly the storm ceased its awful blowing, and when the sun rose the next morn they found themselves in these tropical waters. (“Our very story,” Jukes marveled again, but already I had begun to suspect that all this was less than coincidence. I will soon tell you why, dear reader, but for now I beg your patience.)
Raleigh’s fellow crewmen were confused and restless, and soon forgot the horrors of the storm from which they had been delivered and became anxious to sail either onward to India or homeward to England. But try as they might to find their way out of this archipelago, they met only failure. (More of this too, patient reader, I promise.) They turned on their captain, at first in supplication and then in anger. He did what he could to quell their restlessness, but all for naught. The crew soon became a mob, led by Quartermaster Edward Teynte (the spelling of whose last name I later learned, but which I now heard as “Taint.” Indeed he was a “tainted” fellow, tainted with the blood of the assassin). Under Teynte’s command, the mob soon seized the captain, stripped him, whipped him, and tossed him overboard. The blood streaming from his shredded back drew sharks, and thus did their captain perish, torn to pieces before Raleigh’s horrified eyes.
There remained a handful of sailors loyal to this good man, Raleigh being one of them. As he watched the sharks do their bloody work, he made up his mind to escape the ship as soon as possible, for he feared that those still true to the late captain would, in a short time, be feeding sharks too. But before he could act, all seven of the faithful remainder were clapped in irons, and the next morn five were brought out to be hanged from the yardarm. The other two, who were scarcely more than boys, would be pardoned—or so Teynte swore—if they did the hanging themselves and disposed of the bodies. The five were delivered to their executioners, and nooses were looped around their necks. At gunpoint they were forced onto the yardarm, but before any could be pushed off to tread tropical air, Raleigh managed to free himself from his bonds, slip from the noose, and dive into the water below. He began swimming away from the ship as fast as he could. A few musket balls tore into the water as he swam, but none came close. He supposed that the mutineers believed the sharks would find him, and so they gave up on their quarry and turned their attention back to the remaining loyalists. In time Raleigh found a tree trunk floating in the salty brine, seized hold of it, and eventually kicked his way to Starkland.
As for the other four, he could only assume that they were executed and disposed of. (Alas, I knew where those four lay buried, as well as the two boys who hanged their compatriots and dug their sandy grave. But why their bodies, gruesome as this is to think, were not thrown into the sea after their good captain was a mystery I could not explain. Nor did every detail of the execution, as I ruminated on its description, make perfect sense to me. In time I learned the truth.)
Raleigh lived on the island for many months, but for exactly how many he could not say. When he was told by Captain Starkey that it had been fourteen years since the Alice had gone missing, he could scarcely believe it. The remarkable thing was that, though he was a man now nearing fifty, he looked—as I said—no older than thirty-five.
I took all this in as I cleaned and gutted fish for Jukes. We had recently made a lucky catch—a netful of little pinkish denizens of these waters. (Their native name, I later learned, was pupu-pupu-hunu-hunu-a-pua’a.) Their skin was spotted in places by small dots of violet and green, and they were unlike any fish I had ever seen before. Their flesh was tender and their taste delightful, though, and they soon became a primary source of food for us. (Having eaten them for oh so long, I am now revolted by them.) At any rate, as soon as I had finished my chores—having heard the end of Raleigh’s story—I asked to be excused.
I went to my cot and lay down, not so much to think, but rather to quiet my thumping heart. For you see, dear reader, what no one but I knew was this: the Princess Alice had been my father’s ship, disappearing in the very month of my birth. Reflecting on this story, I could not stop my tears, and I resolved to visit Raleigh alone as soon as possible. I now understood his widening eyes and tightened grip on hearing my name; it was also the name of my father, his beloved captain.
* * *
Daisy had, by this time, been weaned of my finger and was dining on small bits of salt beef moistened by a drop or two of my blood. The odd thing was that, although she seemed quite healthy and possessed a ravenous appetite, she did not appear to grow. I increased her dinner portion, starving myself in order to give her the lion’s share of my ration (and a good deal of blood besides), but her size remained constant. I worried, as any parent would, hoping that perhaps she was a kind of pygmy croc, a species that might be common to these isles even though I had never heard of its like in all the reading I did of the South Seas (to which, I believed at the time, the gale had blown us). This was not the case, and I soon learned the reason why.
Meanwhile, since we had taken Raleigh on board and left Starkland, we continued sailing south. We passed between two other islands—little more than rocks with birds—which Captain Starkey named Scylla and Charybdis. (As I said, he was an educated man.) The other sailors took to calling them Silly and the Other One, and so they were named on our maps. We gathered birds’ eggs there, and dined on yolky custards for some days.
But on the fourth day of our leaving Starkland, a remarkable sight appeared before us. Noodler, who was in the crow’s nest, shouted, “Land ho!” and what should that land be but the island we had named Long Tom! In sailing in one direction (what we believed at the time was southerly), we had circled back to where we had begun. Curious indeed! We wondered at first if we had not somehow got turned around in the night. But since we had departed Long Tom heading south (as we supposed), and now approached Long Tom arriving from the north with the same sun daily moving east to west (as we supposed!), this theory was quickly discarded.
It was at this point that Captain Starkey confessed all that he had been holding back from us: our latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates remained unchanged no matter where we sailed, identical to the ones marked on my father’s map; not only were we lost at sea, but that very sea seemed to disobey the rules of astronomy, geography, and nautical science. It was as if, he said as he shook his head in disbelief, we were in another world.
For a day and a night we lay anchored again off Long Tom, and if ever the Roger did not deserve the adjective Jolly, that time was then. Our sailors were sunk in dark thought, remembering their loved ones, their homes, even dear England (against which they had mutinied, but this inconvenient fact seemed to have slipped their minds). Not a man (or boy) of us was not melancholy; a few wept; some prayed; Smee (who had a superstitious streak in him, being Irish) wondered if perhaps we had indeed perished in the gale, and that this was some form of hellish afterlife, a purgatory for pirates.
The following morning, however, Captain Starkey rallied us, saying that all hope was far from lost, and this time we set sail westward, or at least in the direction that we called “west.” Who knew what wonders we would find?
A few nights after we changed course, I was put on night watch, along with Sniffles (for we had doubled the men on watch now, ever since our encounter with the enemy ship). I was stationed high in the crow’s nest, while Sniffles stood at the ship’s prow. Daisy lay curled in my trouser pocket, sleeping (if that’s what crocodiles do) until her next meal. The night was clear, with not a ship in sight, and so I took this opportunity, knowing I risked severe punishment if I were caught, to descend to the sick bay, where Raleigh was sleeping.
I snuck into his tiny cabin and touched his shoulder. His hand darted out, grabbing me by the collar and slamming me against the wall, as if I were a would-be assassin. This was instinct surely, for as soon as he saw it was I he released his hold and apologized. I spoke to him in a whisper, and his reply was in kind. “You knew my father,” I said.
“You’re his spitting image,” he answered. “I sensed it even before I knew your name.”
“Alas, I never knew him,” I sighed. “He died bravely? I wish to hear it from your own lips.”
“I never met a braver man, nor a kinder one. I loved him as a brother, James.”
“And was he a good captain?” I asked, blinking back tears.
“Aye. The best.”
My heart, for a brief moment, swelled with pride. I took a breath before I asked the next question.
“He knew of a map with a cross in red, didn’t he? One with the precise latitude and longitude of your ship’s ‘disappearance.’ ”
“Aye, that he did. He shared his knowledge with me, for I was his good friend. He deliberately steered us off course. He sailed the Princess Alice to the coordinates marked on the map—I believe he thought he’d find treasure there, or something—and it was there the gale snatched us up and carried us to these waters.” Then he added, struck by a thought: “But how did you come here?”
“When my mother died—”
And here his face sank, and he sighed in sympathy. “Oh, James, I’m so sorry. What happened?”
“It’s too long a story to tell you now. Suffice it to say I ran away and was taken on board, against my will, by our good Captain Starkey. I had with me a book my father left for me, in the lining of which he had sewn the map. He must have memorized the coordinates before sailing.”
“Aye, of course.” Raleigh sighed. “Poor Jim. I think he hoped that, if anything went amiss, you might someday discover his whereabouts, or at least an explanation for his disappearance.”
“Did he tell you how he found this map?”
“A dying sailor, he said. He didn’t elaborate. I hoped to learn more from him one day but . . .” His voice trailed off.
I too thought of my father’s demise. “This man Edward Teynte—he led the mutiny against my father?”
He nodded. “His hand held the whip that scourged your father. His voice pronounced sentence, and at his command Captain Jim Cook was tossed into the sea.”
My heart swelled again, at the thought of my father’s brave death, but there were no tears; instead there was only bold determination.
“I will feed Teynte to the sharks myself, whenever I find him,” I answered. “What does he look like?”
“Like a man who fancies himself a magnet to the ladies. He wears bright dandyish colors, and is always careful not to stain his coat with the blood of his victims.”
“And the ship that attacked us—that was the Alice, yes?”
“Aye, that it was.”
“Is Teynte still aboard?”
“I have no idea. I imagine so.”
“Is that why it was near your island? Was Teynte still looking for you?”
His brow wrinkled. The very thought of Teynte made him uncomfortable. “I find that hard to fathom. It’s been some time since I was marooned, and Teynte must have thought me dead. He couldn’t hate me that much, could he, to pursue me for—what is it?—fourteen years? Perhaps they came to the island for provisions. There is fresh water if you know where to look, and crabs scuttling everywhere. I can’t believe they were looking for me.”
Another silence, and my heart spoke its need.
“Tell me more of him,” I asked. “Tell me more of my father. You called him Jim?”
“When we were alone, yes. He was a fine companion and a highly educated man.”
“He went to Eton, I know. He made quite an impression. They speak of him still. What do you know of his family?”
“You never met them?”
I shook my head.
“You were fortunate, then. It was not a pleasant one. He was the second of three sons. His mother died in childbirth, so he barely knew her. His father was a merchant, relatively wealthy, but a strict religious man believing that all but a handful of mankind—himself excluded, of course—were doomed by destiny to the fires of hell. Jim told me this one night when we were both many sheets to the wind.” Raleigh smiled at the memory of that night. “He wouldn’t speak of them otherwise—never said an unkind word about anyone.” Raleigh’s wistful smile faded. “His older brother, the only member of his family he was fond of, was a wastrel who spent their father’s money, and spent, and spent, until he was disinherited. After which he drank himself into an early grave. His younger brother, Arthur, remained at home, taking after their father in his beliefs and joining the ministry. When Jim met your mother—” He paused here, as if wondering if he should continue.
“Please go on,” I begged, emotion rising in my throat.
“Because she was not of his father’s faith, his family instantly disapproved. He feared that if he died, or was lost at sea, they would leave her destitute.”
“They did not. They gave her a house to live in and me an education.”
“Sufficiently Christian of them, I suppose. I met your grandfather once, when your father brought me to his home for a brief visit between voyages. A hard man, and that’s the nicest thing I can say of him. And that was before your father chose a woman who did not meet their”—he searched for the phrase—“strict moral standards. She danced, she sang, she even dared in public to hold your father’s hand. I daresay the old man grew even harder then.”
“Did you ever meet my mother?”
A brief sigh. “He showed me her likeness, often. She was beautiful. I teased him that he was lucky I didn’t find her first.”
“And did he speak of her?”
“Constantly.” His face softened. “He loved her dearly, and once we were lost he agonized that he might never see her again. Or you. Your mother was soon to give birth, I believe, when we were transported here. He wanted a boy, I can say that much.”
And now my tears flowed freely. I wiped them away, but others followed quicker than I could dash them from my cheeks. Raleigh too became misty-eyed, and reached out an arm to pull me close. Now it was I who wept on his chest. And the more he pressed me to his bosom, the more I imagined that it was my father’s heart I felt beating there, my father’s love that enveloped me.
We remained thus for some time. When I was recovered I had one last question to put to him.
“All this happened,” I said, “in the winter of 1860, in the month I was born. Fourteen years have passed since then. How old were you when you took ship?”
He looked more than astonished. “I was thirty-four. It was my third voyage, the second with your father. I can’t believe so much time has passed!”
“So you’re forty-eight now?”
“Yes, I suppose so. Why?”
“You look thirty-four still.”
He was surprised. From a small table near the bed I took a mirror and held it to his face. He touched his cheeks, his eyes. “How remarkable,” he remarked.
* * *
The sun spinning backward, west to east. The shorter days and nights. The unfamiliar night sky. The rules—the laws of astronomy and geography and physics—even time—all broken. It is these, and perhaps other factors, that contribute to the Strange Phenomenon, I imagine, though there is little logic in this reasoning. But the effects cannot be denied: whoever lives in this archipelago, whether boy, man, or crocodile, does not age.
* * *
“ALL HANDS ON DECK!”
The cry interrupted Raleigh’s self-examination. Ah, God, I thought, paling. Has my absence been discovered? I raced out of the room, clambered up the ladder to the deck. Perhaps I could run to the mast and pretend I had just descended. If something had gone amiss, I might confess that I had fallen asleep—a forgivable sin, and one that might escape corporal punishment.
No such luck.
Sniffles himself had dozed off, and his snores and my absence allowed the enemy an opening. She had been following us, the Princess Alice, and with all lights on board her extinguished, she had crept closer and closer in the darkness. Peering through their spyglass, Edward Teynte (for it was he at the helm) spied our empty crow’s nest and the snoozing lookout, and in a trice they closed ranks. Grappling irons were cast onto our side rails and rigging, and we were under attack.
Reaching the top of the ladder and leaping onto the deck, I skidded in a puddle of blood.
As soon as the three great iron hooks had caught on our ship’s rail and drawn our vessels together, Sniffles awoke. He sounded the alarm, drew his sword, and attacked, but he could not move fast enough, and in a moment our ship was flooded with the enemy. There were probably no more than thirty of them, but they seemed three hundred, and the advantage was definitely running in their favor.
Sniffles thrust his saber through the neck of one unlucky raider and severed the arm of a second. Soon it was his own bloodcurdling death scream that rang from his lips, as a giant of a sailor buried a carpenter’s ax in Sniffles’s broad back. By now several of my crewmates had reached the deck, but many were still groggy with sleep, and so the enemy made quick work of them. Indeed, too many of us died before we could defend our vessel, and for more than a moment the battle seemed a losing one. It was Smee who made the difference.
When he woke from his bunk, the first weapon he seized was his sewing kit, and so it was with fists full of needles and pins that he entered the fray. Being very short and very round, you might imagine, would not be advantageous to a fighter, but it was quite the opposite: the enemy either overlooked him entirely or thought him not worth the effort, and turned their fury on larger, stronger, better-armed men, allowing Smee to take advantage of his insignificance. He leapt on backs and buried long metal straight pins into eyes; he punctured buttocks as though his needles were so many maddened bees on the loose, distracting swordsmen enough so that their opponents could stab them in the heart; one especially long darning needle he rammed deep into the chest of a Goliath of a man, toppling him instantly to the deck.
Starkey too was among us now, dancing from enemy to enemy as if he were at a public school ball. His talent with the dirk was renowned (bear witness to the unfortunate boy from his public school), and now he wielded two daggers as expertly as if he were carving meat, nimbly slicing here and dicing there, lopping off just enough of a nose, a thumb, an ear to send their owners howling back to their mother ship.
As soon as I recovered my legs, I seized a sword from a fallen enemy and looked for my quarry. The blood of revenge boiled in my heart, and I knew for whom I was searching: one Edward Teynte, my father’s murderer. I knew not what he looked like, but I was certain that as soon as I saw him I would recognize him, and indeed spotting him proved far easier than killing him. He was standing in the rear of the brutes like the coward he was, but his pride of fashion betrayed him: he wore a red sash around his middle and a yellow bandanna on his head, making him a man dashing enough to catch a lady’s eye, to be sure, but also an easily spotted target for an angry boy. I charged.
He saw me coming and smiled as he raised his cutlass to meet mine. He was a man of thirty-five or so, and his pearly teeth gleamed in the night. But I knew that his apparent age was false; he had been sailing these seas for fourteen years, which made him a man of fifty, and I hoped that, even though his visage was young and handsome, his constitution was ancient and failing. If so, I would be more than his match.
Our swords rang together once, twice, and the sparks flew. On the third clang of steel on steel his strength overpowered me and my weapon flew from my hand. His saber swished through the air and cut me; I felt my chest dripping warm and wet from what I knew was my own blood. Weaponless, I lowered my head and ran at him now, hoping to butt him off balance and perhaps gain the upper hand. He stepped aside and grabbed hold of my shirt collar, like a toreador neatly handling an angry calf. He threw me to the deck and pressed the tip of his blade to my throat. “I’ve never killed a child before,” he said with a grin.
“I’m not a child!” I shouted back. “I’m James Cook, and my father was your captain! He trusted you!” Quite suddenly he froze.
The melee continued starboard and port, fore and aft, but it was as if he and I were on an island alone with nothing but quiet sands and calm water surrounding us. “Your father?” he asked. And for a moment he grew pale. “I loved your father, once,” he lied, as he raised his sword above his head in preparation for dealing the fatal blow. “But he betrayed us all,” he said, then brought the steel down hard, hard enough to split me in twain. I had not a moment even to pray, but before his weapon cracked open my skull another weapon stopped it. It was a scythe, with a blade that seemed to be made of solid iron. Both Teynte and I looked to the man wielding it. It was Arthur Raleigh.
Teynte turned to face him, and the duel now truly began. Both were exquisite swordsmen, and their weapons were sharp and deadly. A misstep on either side would have been a fatal one. Teynte thrust, Raleigh parried, metal gleamed, sparks flew, and I lay on the deck transfixed by the ballet danced above me. Raleigh wielded the scythe as if he were Death personified, but he was still weak from his ordeal and he was losing ground. It wasn’t long before it dawned on me: I had the advantage; with but a slight interference I could turn the battle in Raleigh’s favor. I waited for an opening and dove forward to wrap myself around Teynte’s velvet boot; I cared little if a swishing cutlass caught me in the back, I was so determined to avenge my father. Thrust off balance, Teynte toppled to his side, and Raleigh’s scythe pressed against his throat. Blood ran. “No!” I shouted up at my defender. “Don’t kill him!” Raleigh paused, and in that pause I finished my thought: “Let me do it.”
But by then the battle had turned; we were winning, and on seeing their commander fallen and about to lose his life, the raiders threw down their weapons and begged for mercy like the yellow cowards they were. A few of them died in that moment of surrender, struck down by my impatient shipmates, but Gentleman Starkey quickly established order and commanded his men to put up arms and treat the enemy as prisoners, not assassins. It was Bad Form to fell an unarmed fellow pirate, or so he believed, even though that fellow pirate may have been bent on decapitating you but moments before. So before I could see his blood staining our decks, Edward Teynte was bound in ropes together with his shipmates, and led below to the hold.
* * *
The rest of the night was spent in quiet mourning. Too many of our dear friends had died. Too many ragged wounds needed patching. Too many brave sailors perished of these wounds before dawn. And when the sun rose at last, both dead friends and enemy were cast into the sea together, and the sharks had a filling repast.
The deck was scrubbed; buckets of sea water mixed with oceans of blood. I worked side by side with Raleigh, who mopped and rinsed and polished as hard as anyone. I thanked him for saving my life. “My pleasure, James,” was all he said. “I owed it to your father.”
“Your weapon—” I continued, my curiosity near-killing me. “The—scythe?”
“Yes?”
“Was that what was in your burlap bag?”
He smiled. “You’re a clever lad. I feared if I pulled it out too readily, one of your mates would have my head.”
“It looked frightfully heavy. Is it iron?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“Where did you find it?”
“Ah, that’s a long story.” He sighed, then decided to continue. “I took it off a man who subsequently died. We were having a race of sorts. He won.”
“You killed him?”
He hesitated. “I cut off his hand. He bled to death.”
“Why’d you cut off his hand?”
“To save him. He asked me to. If I hadn’t cut it off, he would have died anyway, only more slowly and in a great deal more pain.”
“I don’t understand. You mean the two of you were racing—”
“—and if I had won I would have died instead. The prize was a box, you see, and inside the box, though neither of us knew it, was Certain Death. So he won, and opened the box, and died, and I got his weapon. It looks very old, so I suspect it is. Possibly snatched from the clutches of Death Itself.” He was joking, I was sure. “Do you think it holds a curse? Most old things do.”
“I’m terribly confused, sir. What did you think was in the box?”
He waved a hand in front of his face, as if the memory was a fly on his nose and he wished to chase it away. “I can’t explain it now, James. Someday, perhaps, I will. Now would you be so kind as to refill this bucket?”
While we mopped, the enemy ship, still coupled to us, was boarded and explored. The remainder of its crew, some wounded and all hiding below the decks of the Alice, were found and forced to join the rest of our captives. Their storehouse was raided, and anything of value was brought on board the Roger. The Alice itself, being in poor condition after fourteen years at sea, was no better than a leaky tub and would do no one any good for very much longer, so it was decided that she would burn, a pyre warning any other ships (if there were any) that we were not to be tampered with. The day ended with Starkey announcing that the morrow would commence with a series of trials—of the criminals who attacked us, yes, but also of the traitor on board our own ship who through his negligence had allowed the Roger’s near capture.
Since Sniffles was dead, I assumed he meant me.
Starkey nodded in my direction, and Cecco seized hold of me to lead me below. Confused, frightened, I did not struggle. I was clapped into irons in the hold, and forced to spend the long night near my fiercest enemy.
* * *
The hold was overcrowded, and I shared leg irons with a man I later came to know as Charles Turley. “Why did you attack us?” I asked him in all innocence. “We meant you no harm.”
He curled his lip at my naïve question, spitting a reply at me as if I should know better. “You’re pirates,” he said.
“As are you,” I answered, and his eyes widened in surprise.
“How dare you?” he gasped. “We are the Queen’s men, loyal and true.” And then he turned his back on me, and said not a word further. No one else would speak either—they would have strangled me that very night, if they weren’t certain that my own captain would perform that worthy service on the morrow.
* * *
The following morning I was hauled onto deck, hands bound behind me, to stand before Captain Starkey, who, being a Gentleman, always loved a good trial. (And because he was a Gentleman, he always knew the trial’s outcome ahead of time; Gentlemen are quite sure of themselves when it comes to matters of Guilt and Innocence.) I was surrounded by my crewmates, who eyed me with a mixture of pity and scorn. I was a boy soon to die, and thus the pity. I had allowed the enemy their surprise attack, and therefore the scorn.
Raleigh was nowhere in sight.
“You left your post, Cook,” Starkey stated in a voice loud enough for all to hear. “As a result, many of our crew were killed or wounded. What have you to say for yourself?”
“I—I fell asleep, sir,” I lied. Perhaps, if he believed me, he would be lenient.
“Then what were you doing belowdecks?” came his sharp reply. Someone had seen me there, and tattled.
I did not know what to say.
“Guilty, then,” he announced with proper hauteur. “Twenty lashes, and then the rope.”
I felt sick. The twenty lashes alone would kill me. Cecco tore open my shirt and pulled it to my hips, baring my back. Then he turned to fetch the nine-clawed cat.
There was a stir among the crew. Some had grown fond of me, and regretted the merciless verdict. It was Smee who spoke up.
“Cap’n,” he squeaked, “would not the rope be sufficient? There’s no point in hanging a dead man.”
I know he meant to spare me unnecessary pain, but his plea for mercy did not go as far as I had hoped it would.
“True, true,” mused Starkey, ever fair. “Very well. String him up and be done with it.”
A rope, its noose knotted in anticipation of the inevitable, was thrown over the mainmast’s lowest arm. My blood ran cold, and though I wished to beg for my life, my tongue dried against the roof of my mouth and my words were blocked. I was led by Cecco toward the dangling strangler, his arm gently slung around my shoulders. He said a few words to me, but whether they were words of kindness or cruelty I could not tell, his accent was so d—mnably thick.
“Not so fast!” a voice called out, and I turned to see Raleigh emerging from below. He was pale; it was clear that the sword fight with Teynte had exhausted him, using up any reserve of energy he might have accumulated since his rescue. He had been resting in the sick bay when he heard of my sentence. “He was with me, Captain. He left his post to visit me.”
“Is that true, Cook?” Starkey asked me sternly.
“Aye, Captain,” I answered.
“Why? What was so urgent that you needed to abandon your watch at such a critical hour?”
I did not want to tell my father’s sad story; at best it would elicit sympathy, but would it be enough to commute my sentence?
“I asked him to come,” Raleigh replied before I could speak. “I wanted to thank him once again for saving my life. I wished to give him my blessing.”
Starkey took this in, and considered. “Nevertheless, the boy should not have left his post,” he concluded. “Proceed.” He nodded in Cecco’s direction.
Cecco looped the noose around my neck.
“Please, sir, one word more!” Raleigh called out, and once again the proceedings were halted.
I waited for him to find something eloquent to say, a heartrending plea that would spare my young life.
“Why not burn the boy?” he finally said.
Even the hardened mutineers around me let out a gasp of horror. Cecco muttered an oath (in Italian, of course). (At least I assume it was in Italian.) (And an oath.)
Raleigh continued: “If you are bent on killing the lad, give him the nobility of death by fire. I know you intend to torch the Princess Alice. Why not bind the boy to the mast and let him go down with that ship? A fitting end, perhaps, and a nobler one. He did, after all, fight on our side once he realized his error. Besides, many of the crew, as I can clearly see, are fond of him, and it would spare them the emotional trauma of seeing a child’s neck cruelly snapped and his poor emaciated body picked clean by gulls until what remained rotted to bones.”
His vivid description disturbed me, of course, but was he truly suggesting a substitute death by fire? I could not fathom why the man would turn so cruel, after I had saved his life.
“A Viking death,” Starkey remarked, being an overeducated man, “yes, I like that. Let’s do it.”
And so it was done. I was hauled by Cecco onto the Alice and bound fast to the mast. Pitch was poured over the vessel’s deck, torches were fetched, and a few of my crewmates were allowed to say their farewells to me. “I’ll miss you, Cap’n,” Smee said to me as tears dripped down his ruddy round cheeks. Cecco muttered something in his native tongue, whether a curse or a blessing I could not tell. Starkey told me to die like a Gentleman and make Eton proud. Raleigh was the last, and he kissed me gently on each cheek, and it was while bussing the port-side one that he whispered in my ear, “There’s an island to the northwest. Lower the longboat and make your way there.” He then embraced me tight, his shoulders heaving with seeming emotion as he slipped a knife into my bound hands.
Bloody Pete lit a torch and tossed it onto the pitchy deck, burning his fingers in the process. Black Murphy lit and tossed a second one. As the pitch on the foredeck caught fire and black smoke rose like a dark prayer to heaven, all returned to the Roger. Black Murphy severed the grappling ropes that held the two ships together, and the Roger pushed off.
I began sawing through the ties that bound me to the mast. It was clumsy work, and somewhat bloody, for I sliced my fingers more than once in the process. The fire spread quickly and I had little time. When I finally severed the ropes (and foolishly dropped the knife among them as they fell to my feet), I could see that the Roger remained barely a hundred yards off the Alice’s starboard rail, and so I held back from stepping away from the mast for fear that someone with a spyglass might see me and report my escape to Starkey. Knowing that he would consider my actions a far cry from Fair Play, I was certain he would then aim Long Tom at me and fire away. But as the flames burned higher and closer, I could hold back no longer. I ran to port, where a longboat was kept. Looking over the rail, I beheld with horror that its bottom was stove full of holes—Starkey (or someone) had anticipated Raleigh’s intent, and cut short any possible escape route with a few well-aimed blows. I ran to starboard, concealed as I was now by roiling clouds of black smoke, and found the second longboat in the same condition. I was lost.
To escape the flames I began to climb. As I scampered up ropes toward the crow’s nest, I considered my chances as a swimmer. No land was in sight—Raleigh’s whispered island may have been days away, for all I knew—and my prowess in the water, though quite remarkable for an Englishman, would never keep me afloat for more than several hours. I would be sharks’ food before noon. Still, drowning is a merciful death, or so I’d been told. I decided to cast myself into my salty grave with a last cry of “Floreat Etona!” as my epitaph. I said a prayer: “One moment more, dear Lord, of life and breath and air and hope, before I take the plunge.” I reached the crow’s nest and climbed inside. I prayed to God and to my dear mother, asking both for mercy, for forgiveness. I heard a creak of wood, and looking down I saw that the flames were licking their way through the mast. I prayed to my father, whose spirit was set free in the bloody waters of this ocean’s tide, to cradle me in his arms and make my death a pleasant one. Black smoke rose like the hand of the Reaper, wrapping its fingers around my neck and choking the life from me. The noose, perhaps, would have been swifter, kinder; I could no longer breathe, and as I filled my lungs with the noxious poison, I began to hallucinate. I heard a cock crow, signaling Death, the final hour, the dawn of my New Life. And the next thing I knew, I was in the arms of an angel, and we were flying over the water to heaven.