Meanwhile Mall systematically beat me black and blue. Did I land any back? Don’t ask. At the end of a long day’s swordplay I felt almost too stiff to walk. Not that I was complaining. If she was taking the time to give me a crash course in staying alive it was because she was afraid I’d need it. And I knew how lucky I was to have such a exciting hellion of a teacher, able to make the air crackle yet never forgetting what it was like to be an awkward beginner. I remembered reading once that was a mark of true greatness in almost any field. When in our third day’s lessons she suddenly started leaving delicate slices like paper cuts, that itched rather than hurt – at least till the sweat got at them – I began to feel like some kind of fighting man.
Also like some kind of masochist. But at least she knew where to stop. Just.
One bright noon – it might have been the fourth – the mastheads hailed their warnings, and we dropped everything and ran to the railings. But it was not black sails that lifted above the horizon. It was the jagged green fangs of a mountainous island, and for us they were emblems of failure. If Hispaniola was in sight, the chances were that we’d missed our foes, and that they were already there.
‘And Clare –’ I couldn’t finish.
Jyp shook his head. ‘Easy, man. Whatever they mean with her, it’s some kind of … of ritual; and they have their appointed places and times, all. Chances are it’s not yet, they could hardly time their arrival so close – not after their little brush with us. And if they hadn’t harmed her already, chances are they won’t till then.’
‘If the whole bloody business hasn’t frightened her out of her mind already!’
‘I doubt that,’ said Mall, draping an amiable arm about my shoulder. ‘We’re harder than you’d gauge us, Stephen, our sex. She’ll think herself snared in a nightmare, sure; but she’s had a glimpse of hope. Not to lose heart, and fulfil it – that’s your part. Play it to the hilts!’
On the last long tack south into Port-au-Prince the atmosphere aboard was electric. An unpleasant surprise could very well be waiting. Soon after sunrise we came sweeping into the mountain-ringed bay under full sail, guns primed and crews crouched ready behind closed ports, eyeing with deep suspicion every little isle and inlet big enough to mask a ship. But as the island’s main port rose – or rather sprawled – ahead of us at bay’s end, it was immediately obvious that no ship remotely large enough to be our Wolfish quarry was docked there.
In a spirit of glum anticlimax we brought the
It didn’t look it. It was nothing like approaching New Orleans up the dark Mississippi, night-bound and mysterious. The air was clear, cool, transparent, the freshening light striking every detail with stinging clarity. Not dangerous, or sinister – lazy, if anything, stretched out like a drowsy slut all across the flat shoreline, straggling back up the forested mountain slopes behind. Even along the seafront patches of untamed trees appeared between walls of white stone and sun – bleached planking, warped and salt – whitened, between elegant old villas in French or Spanish styles and dilapidated docks. In places the trees thinned out into patches of scrubby wasteland where yellowish oxen browsed, shaking their heads at the first flies. On the higher slopes clumps of the same thick greenery mingled randomly among clutches of sun – bleached buildings. Which was encroaching on which, the houses or the jungle? I couldn’t say for sure. The twentieth century hadn’t touched this place. There was no hum of motor traffic to be heard. Belated cockcrows drifted out to us, among the screams of flocking parrots; otherwise it was very quiet nearby. I couldn’t even hear children’s voices, about the most universal sound there is. All I could make out now and again was a constant dull pulsing, and chanting, perhaps, or wailing. It was the only unsettling note in the whole placid scene. Nothing dangerous about it; and yet the longer I watched and listened, the more the feeling grew on me that there was something wrong, something hellishly wrong.
The twentieth century …
