Pirates of the Timestream (20 page)

“Oh, they always do that,” said Morgan, serenely unconcerned. “Starting tomorrow, we’ll start going out into the countryside to round people up. They’ll ransom themselves, after questioning with the usual ceremonies.” Nesbit, who now knew what that meant, blanched. “It ought to take us two or three weeks to clean out the region here around Maracaibo. Then we’ll sail south to Gibraltar, at the other end of the lake.”

As soon as Morgan had moved on, Nesbit turned to Jason anxiously. He had surprised Jason with his capacity to endure privations and hardships, but this was something else. “Commander, surely
we
are not going to be expected to . . . that is, actually participate in . . .”

“I’m going to do my best to arrange things so that we aren’t directly involved,” said Jason. It was an issue he had always hoped would not arise. He now saw that hope had been unrealistic. “But I’m afraid you may
see
some things that . . . well, we just have to stay in character.”

All at once, Grenfell spoke up. He had been walking as usual with Nesbit, who since their escape in Hispaniola had more and more become his caregiver. “Anyone who shies away, or questions the methods, is suspect.” His voice was hollow but alive.

“That’s right, Roderick,” Jason said immediately and enthusiastically, for he always tried to encourage the historian’s increasingly frequent awakenings into full awareness.

“Well,” Nesbit said, somewhat reassured, “however unpleasant our proximity to Morgan’s historically attested exploits may be, at least your theory about the Observer Effect seems to stand confirmed.”

“So it does,” Mondrago nodded. “Ever since we rejoined Morgan, the Transhumanists haven’t tried any funny business with us.”

“Yet.” Jason saw the dampening effect that one word had on his companions, but he had to be honest with them. “I didn’t tell you before. But as we were entering the channel, just before our landing at the fort at San Carlos, the gravitic sensor feature of my brain implant picked up something just north of us,”

“So Romain is shadowing us,” Mondrago stated rather than asked. “Have you picked it up since then?”

“No. They must have inadvertently strayed into the very short range of my sensor for that instant. So they’re biding their time, hovering over the Gulf of Venezuela in the Kestrel’s refraction field, totally undetectable in this era, awaiting an opportunity. We have to be on the alert for anything.”

It was a very subdued group that returned to the waterfront.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Don Alonzo de Campos y Espinosa was, for the first time in years, a happy man.

He was, after all, vice admiral in command of the Armada de Barlovento—the “Windward Fleet” which was permanently stationed at Havana for the protection of Spain’s colonies and the suppression of the heretic pirates. But for literally decades it had only been stationed there on paper, as was so often the case with things in the Spanish empire. The navy and the Council of the Indies had bickered endlessly while influential royal favorites had siphoned off one ship after another for their own use. Finally the depredations of the pirates—and especially that demon in human form, Henry Morgan—had grown to such proportions that the queen-regent Mariana and her regency council who governed for the mentally incompetent Carlos II had been forced to order the armada to actually set sail from Spain. But by then only five of its original dozen ships remained. That had been a year ago. Its arrival should have instantly tilted the balance of power in the Indies, for its powerfully armed ships could have obliterated the pirates’ small, lightly-armed vessels without breaking a sweat. But at once the deadening tentacles of the overcentralized Spanish bureaucracy had begun to close over him, limiting his freedom of action. As always, the protection of the treasure fleets had come first, for they carried the stream of silver that prevented—or at least postponed—yet another bankruptcy of the Spanish monarchy. He had been shackled to that task, gnashing his teeth with frustration, while that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Morgan had plundered Portobello and gotten away with his swag.

After six months of this, lack of results—although no fault of his—had caused the queen-regent to order two of his ships back to Spain. So his “fleet” was now down to three ships. Unable to effectively patrol the vast area for which he was responsible, he had come to depend more and more on a network of informers. They had reported tavern gossip of Morgan’s plans to descend on the Main. Reasoning that the pirates would head east in order to take advantage of the trade winds, he had set sail for Puerto Rico and then back to Hispaniola. There, in late March, he had learned of the repulse of Morgan’s men from Santo Domingo after their various cattle hunts. He had also been able to question a Dutch trader who had sold meat to pirates who had blabbed the word “Maracaibo.”

Afire with eagerness, he had immediately sent his ships racing south. And now he lay at anchor in the Gulf of Venezuela, and savored the knowledge that, at long last, Morgan lay inescapably in his grasp.

He stood on the quarterdeck of his flagship, the mighty forty-eight-gun galleon
Magdalena.
Looking out over the water, he surveyed his other two ships:
San Luis
and
Nuestra Señora de la Soledad
, with thirty-eight guns and twenty-four guns respectively. Even Morgan’s flagship was a mere fourteen-gun sloop. The rest of the pirate ships were little more than glorified ketches, not a real warship in the lot. In a sea-fight, Morgan would stand no chance at all.

And it now appeared that the only way Morgan would be able to avoid such a fight—and under the most unfavorable circumstances, at that—would be by surrendering. After which he would die.

Don Alonzo turned back to the mestizo, a corporal in the local militia, who had just finished relating to him the tale of Morgan’s capture of Maracaibo. “And so you say that the people here ran away and made no resistance?”

“That is true,
Almirante
,” the mestizo stammered, fidgeting and wringing his hat in his hands as he addressed a man so many strata above himself in the social hierarchy of the Spanish empire as to seem almost an angelic being. “The pirates are more like ferocious beasts than men! They can appear from nowhere by sorcery! They would have devoured us all! They—”

Don Alonzo waved the wretch to silence, disgusted. His position required him to be diplomatic, whether dealing with colonial governors or cultivating informers, but privately he despised everyone in the New World. Corruption and rot were everywhere. The administrators sent out from Spain were bad enough: they bought their positions and then recouped their investment by graft and bribe-taking. Still worse were the Creoles, Spanish-descended but born in the colonies and unworthy of the blood in their veins. They had sunk into a sensual tropical torpor, devoid of ideals or honor and utterly lost to the stern crusading spirit that had swept the Moors back into Africa and conquered whole heathen empires in Mexico and Peru. Instead of laying down their lives for their king and their faith, they preferred to grovel in the mud and let the pirates walk over them in the hope (usually vain) of preserving their material possessions. Yes, they were beneath contempt. And mestizos like this one were simply beneath notice. Not to mention Indian
peons
and black slaves and the
zambos
that resulted from mixing the two.

“And afterwards,” he resumed, “Morgan sailed on down the lake to Gibraltar, and is there now?”

“Yes,
Almirante
. He has been there for weeks, torturing and pillaging.”

“Ah.” Don Alonzo turned away, for it would not do to let this lowborn lout see eagerness trembling on the chiseled features of an
hidalgo
of Spain. Behind him, he heard
Magdalena
’s captain hustle the corporal off the quarterdeck.

“Have the local pilots been brought aboard?” he demanded after a few moments.

“They have,
Almirante
,” reported the flag captain. “They assure me that they can guide our ships through the hazards of the Gulf. But,” he cautioned, “they tell me our ships are so deep-drafted that they cannot promise to bring us safely past the Bar of Maracaibo into the channel.”

“Nor will they need to do so.” Don Alonzo swung around, and now he could let his avidity show. “Don’t you see? We don’t need to proceed on down into the Laguna de Maracaibo and seek Morgan out.
He
must come to
us!
There’s no way out of the lake except through the one eight-hundred-yard-wide channel. All we have to do is wait for him there. Any one of our three ships could blow his entire fleet out of the water.”

The captain’s eyes lit up. “So Morgan is trapped! He’s in a bottle and we’ll be the cork.”

“Yes. This time we have him—he can’t possibly get away.” The thought energized Don Alonzo and he began rapping out orders. “We’ll leave nothing to chance—remember, this is Morgan we’re dealing with. Put couriers ashore with letters for the governors of Mérida and other towns requesting whatever ships and men they can send. And as soon as we arrive at the channel-mouth, we’ll reoccupy the fort on San Carlos—it will be like an unsinkable fourth ship for us.”

“Yes,
Almirante.
” The flag captain hastened to obey.

Don Alonzo looked out over the water and sighed with contentment. The hour of divine justice had arrived for the diabolical Henry Morgan, and he himself was going to have the honor of being God’s instrument.

He set himself a penance for reflecting that it also wouldn’t do his career a bit of harm.

* * *

It was now mid-April. After raking over Maracaibo and the area thirty miles around it, Morgan’s fleet had set sail down the lake. Following a token cannonade from Gibraltar’s fort, the people of that town had fled like those of Maracaibo. Here again, the buccaneers had spent weeks scouring the surrounding countryside for prisoners. Now the fleet—grown to fourteen vessels as a result of captures, including a merchantman from Cuba that was larger than anything else Morgan had—was preparing to depart, groaning with loot.

That loot included more than the expected gold, silver and other valuables. The holds also contained slaves stolen from the local planters, who could be sold in Jamaica to feed the voracious demands of the burgeoning sugar plantations. Jason had noted that Zenobia’s crew had no more trouble with this than any of the other pirates. No one in this century had any moral objection to slavery as an institution, as opposed to objecting to
being
a slave. But it was something with which Jason and his companions were less than comfortable.

Nor was that all. There had been worse. Much worse.

They sat at a rough table outside a dockside tavern, drinking plundered Spanish wine, as some last remaining cargo was loaded aboard. No one was much more talkative than Grenfell. Even Mondrago, who was hardened to battlefield behavior in many eras, stared into his wine-cup moodily. “Now I understand why pirates get drunk so much.”

Nesbit, who was not so hardened, wore a haunted look. “One time,” he said to no one in particular, “I saw burning matches tied between a prisoner’s fingers. I saw men racked until their joints popped out. I saw a man’s wrists tied together behind his back and his arms lifted straight up over his head so they broke behind the shoulders. I saw another man’s face scorched with burning palm leaves until skin was hanging off in strips. I saw—”

“We all saw this stuff, Irving,” said Jason. “I witnessed a woolding.” It had taken all his gift of gab to avoid having to actually participate without incurring suspicion. He turned to Zenobia, who looked less affected than any of them . . . but then, she was accustomed to it. “At least your Maroons weren’t as bad as some.”

“Even though, as escaped slaves, they have reason to have a lot of resentment stored up,” Mondrago added.

“I do my best,” she said shortly and tossed off some wine. When she next spoke, it was with a note of defensiveness. “You can’t view all this in isolation. Do you have any conception of the things the Spaniards do to prisoners? When they take a crew of ‘heretics’ in what they consider their waters, they cut off their hands, feet, noses and ears, and then smear them with honey, tie them to trees and leave them for the insects. Have you heard the story of what happened after the Spanish reconquest of Providence Island from the buccaneers in 1666? Under the terms of surrender, the prisoners were supposed to be returned to Jamaica. In fact they were taken to Portobello and worked to death in an enclosure knee-deep in water and exposed to the sun, packed together and chained to the floor, subjected to constant beatings. When Morgan took Portobello, he and his men liberated the few survivors . . . or what was left of them. They weren’t likely to forget those men’s stories.” She took another swig of wine. “You just can’t apply your standards here.”

All at once, Roderick Grenfell spoke, so crisply that at first they didn’t even recognize his voice. “At the same time, the more lurid stories—crucifixions, and sexual mutilation of female prisoners, and deliberate starvation of women and children—have proven to be exaggerations by Esquemeling, as has long been suspected. Doubtless his publishers wanted such sensational embellishments.” Then, just as abruptly, he fell silent.

They all stared at him. It was the longest and most articulate statement they had heard out of him since that night in the hills north of the Bahia de Neiba. Eagerly, but keeping his voice calm, Jason spoke.

“That’s very interesting, Roderick. Can you tell us more? Can you tell us what’s going to happen to Morgan and his fleet next, after they leave Gibraltar?”

“What?” Grenfell blinked several times and met Jason’s eyes . . . but only briefly. His eyes slid away and he fell silent as the shadows settled over his mind again.

Jason let out his breath. The historian was improving, and Jason had no doubt that twenty-fourth-century therapists would be able to bring him around after their retrieval. But he was nowhere near fully functional now, so the group was going to have to continue to get along without detailed foreknowledge of events.

They saw Morgan advancing along the quay, ordering the last men aboard. “So, Captain,” Zenobia called out, “we’re off to Maracaibo and the open sea?”

“Yes, and not a minute too soon,” Morgan replied, looking preoccupied. “We don’t know what’s going on up there . . . surely the Spaniards sent messengers to Cartagena or even Panama. We need to
move.
I’ve released all the prisoners who’ve already paid their ransoms, keeping only four as security for the money still owed us.” He scowled. “The freed prisoners wanted me to turn that slave over to them—the one who gave us so much valuable information on them.”

If it had been possible, Zenobia would have paled. “They’d burn him alive!”

Jason knew what she meant. The buccaneers had forced the slave to kill some of the Spanish captives—a kind of initiation. He had cooperated with no noticeable hesitancy.
I wonder why?
Jason thought ironically.

“I know,” said Morgan grimly. “Well, to hell with them. He was a help to us. He comes with us, and goes free. I pay my debts.” Morgan moved on.

“Well,” said Mondrago, quaffing the last of his wine, “we’ll find out soon enough what comes next, with or without Roderick’s help.”

* * *

Don Alonzo de Campos y Espinosa nodded in satisfaction as the flag captain concluded his report.

“So,
Almirante,
those seventy local militiamen are now at the fort on San Carlos, to reinforce the forty of our own troops already there. And they are fully provisioned.”

“Good. This time Morgan won’t encounter a token garrison, as he did when he first arrived. Nine men, to serve eleven cannon!” Don Alonzo muttered with disgust.

Finding the fort deserted had been an unanticipated stroke of luck, for he had expected to have to overcome a pirate garrison. But Morgan must have gotten too greedy, wanting every available man for ransacking the coastal towns. He would live to regret his greed . . . but not for long. The Spaniards had unburied the fort’s cannons and gotten six of them back in working order, and provided others from the ships.

“Send another twenty-four of our musketeers to reinforce the fort,” he ordered. “We have more than enough aboard our ships.”

“Yes,
Almirante.
” The flag captain hurried off.

Don Alonzo walked to the quarterdeck rail and surveyed the other two ships of his command. It had not been easy, getting them all on station and holding that station, for gales from the north had threatened to blow them onto the reefs. He had ordered ballast thrown overboard to lighten ship, and the crisis had passed.
Not surprisingly
, he thought with a touch of pride in the Armada Barlovento. These were not the fat galleons of the treasure fleets, stuffed with cargo and passengers and meddling royal notaries, and captained by time-servers who had bought their lucrative commissions. No, these were fighting ships manned by trained soldiers. And now they were in position across the narrow channel that was Morgan’s only escape route. The bottle was corked.