Click! Click! Click! And silence.
A firelock needs a good pinch of powder in the pan to feel the sparks from the steel, and so to explode, sending a flash through the touch-hole and into the barrel to explode the main charge and drive the ball thundering on its way. In her ignorance, Selena hadn't put in that pinch of powder, nor loaded the ball.
But she had poured most of three cartridge-loads of powder into the bottom of the barrel, where it accumulated in a pile, of which just a very few grains — what with Parson Smith's shoulders heaving with laughter and shaking the barrel — just a few adventurous grains decided to make their way out through the touch-hole, and into the pan, where they lay waiting for the next time that Selena pulled the trigger.
"Click!" said the lock.
"Scrape!" said the flint.
"Fizz!" said the sparks.
"Whoof!" said the grains.
And…
"BOOM/" said the powder in the barrel. There was plenty of it, and there wasn't the least need for a ball.
Parson's face tore wide open, jagged and bloodied and raw.
His tongue and cheeks spattered in fragments round the cabin, while white-hot flame blasted down his throat, bursting lungs and windpipe, stomach and gullet, pallet and eardrums. Smoke poured from his nose and ears and from the hideous, blackened cavity that had been his mouth. Roast flesh sizzled and crackled and split.
But he didn't fall. He staggered and swayed and lived. He raised hooked fingers to the monstrosity that was his face. His eyes stared. His ruined lungs drew agonising breath, and spat out a hissing stream of blood and mucus in the attempt to force a scream from the incinerated apparatus that had once delivered Smith's voice. And then he was crashing on to his back, kicking and twitching and frothing and bubbling. He'd only stood a few seconds, but it was a miracle he'd stood at all.
Selena's stomach heaved up its contents at the sight of him. She retched and groaned and crawled into a corner as Smith drummed the deck with his heels and elbows. He was a long time dying: a long, hard time. He made enough noise that someone came to see what was happening.
"Parson?" said a voice. "That you? What you doing? Was that a shot?" The door rattled and shook. "Selena?" said the voice. "You got Parson in there?"
"Get a crowbar," said another voice. "She's done for him, or he's done for her. Get this bloody hatchway open!"
As the door shivered and splintered, Selena did what she wished she'd done when Long John called her to his boat. She jumped from the stern windows and swam.
Chapter 46
"Fox's Book of Martyrs," said Flint. "It was the constant companion of my youth." He sighed and shook his head. "Given to me by my father on my thirteenth birthday — which birthday, by Mosaic Law, made me a man, and which book, my father said, was 'the bastion of our Protestant religion against the Anti-Christ Bishop of Rome'!" He turned to his audience. "Those were his very words, lads. What do you think of that?"
"Mm," they said.
"He was a man of powerful views," said Flint, which was true. The Reverend Mordecai Flint, Presbyter-General of the Revelationary Evangelist Church, had held opinions that were rooted like mountains. Flint smiled. "And yet, he was hated by all who knew him. Hated… but feared!"
"Mm."
Flint dug into the rich, black soil of memory, and turned up a thing that smelt bad, even to him. He paused. He gathered himself. He spoke.
"Do you know, lads, he… my father… he had a particular disgust for the physical act of procreation. D'you know that? And he never ceased to punish me for my own conception." Flint raised a warning hand. "Not that he beat me! No. He never touched me. Not once, not ever. Indeed, he never touched anyone. But he had the most wonderful ability to inspire guilt."
"Mm."
"And so I took refuge in that beloved old book. It was the London edition of 1701, in two folio volumes with hundreds of wood-cut illustrations, most lavishly and beautifully worked. What do you think of that?"
"Mm."
"We had two other books in the house: the Bible, of course, and Pilgrim's Progress." He frowned. "But I could never take to them. It was always Fox's for me, and many's the happy hour I spent in study of it." He chuckled confidentially. "Well, lads," he admitted, "if the truth be known, it wasn't so much the text I studied, for I mainly looked at the pictures."
"Mm."
Flint shook his head.
"You wouldn't believe the things I saw, and the lessons I learned. You wouldn't believe the ingenious cruelties inflicted by one man upon another in the name of faith, and the agonies suffered by the blessed martyrs. And you wouldn't believe the artistic skill — and the precision of detail — with which those horrors were depicted: the rack and strappado, the stake and the thumbscrew; decapitation, immuration, ex-sanguination, and the winding-out of the gut…" He mused a while, savouring the memory. "Have you ever seen that, lads? The winding-out of the gut… with a windlass"
But his audience said nothing. They'd said little enough before, had Rob Taylor and Henry Howard, because each had a ball of cloth jammed into his mouth, secured in place by a strip of the same cloth knotted firmly at the back of the head. And now they said even less because they were tied hand and foot, sat together propped up against a tree looking at the iron windlass that Flint had brought ashore with him, and which they'd all supposed was to be used for the burial of the goods. But though they'd laboured to carry the thing round the island, it had not been used — until now.
"Fox's Book says there's over five fathoms of guts inside a man," said Flint. "I've often wondered if that really is the case."
Silence.
Flint got up from the rock on which he'd been sitting and took a turn around the little camp: the camp where Rob and Henry had — with a little encouragement — got so profoundly drunk that morning, and fallen so very deeply asleep in the midday sun.
"Here we are, then, at Haulbowline Head," said Flint. "Named and mapped by myself, these three years since." He waved a hand, as if to introduce it to them. "And d'you know, lads, I can't even remember why I gave it that name!" He laughed and looked around. It was a fine place, bracing and fresh. The view over the sea was magnificent. Like Spy-glass Hill, Haulbowline Head had a small number of big trees — not enough to constitute a forest, not enough to obscure the view, but tall and old and gnarled, for these weren't pines but something more tropical.
Flint marvelled at the variety of the island, for here was another little world within itself, as different as could be from the jungles of the southern anchorage, or the Alpine heights of Spy-glass Hill. The surf thundered even louder here than anywhere else, for the sea was ever beating at the foot of the massive cliffs, with tumbled rocks and seething white water at the base. A strong wind blew inward off the South Atlantic, driving into the wet cliffs and broken waters, and swirling up with steaming wetness that kept Haulbowline Head forever damp.
It was a fine and noble place. It was also the most dangerous place on the island, for the cliffs fell sheer as a right-angle, such that no man who went over them need ever have the least fear of being hurt. The drop was three hundred feet, straight down on to jagged rocks, and certain, instant death.
The drop was only about twenty yards away from where Taylor and Howard sat by their tree.
"Now, where's that bird of mine?" said Flint to himself, and he looked up into the branches of that very tree. "Ah! There you are." The bird squawked as he looked at it. It swayed and bobbed its head. It was peering steadily back at him, meeting his eye with an insolence that he'd never have tolerated from a man.