And with much eager poking, prodding, and shoving, the prisoners were forced to the entry-port, to lower themselves into the centre of the launch, where extra hands with pistols and daggers waited to receive them. Balfa and his oarsmen got down into the boat with them and steered towards the shore.
"Stroke, stroke," Balfa chearily directed, tapping the time on the tiller-bar. "A little song, mes enfants!" he urged.
"Ah! Suzette, Suzette, to veux pas chere?
"Ah, Suzette, Chere amie, to pas Vaimin moin.
M'alle dans montagne, zamie,
M'alle coupe canne, chere amie,
M'alle fait l'argent, mo tresor,
Pour porter donne toi!"
"Bastards!" the oldest prisoner spat back. "Kindest to kill us now and have done, ye gotch-gut shit!"
"Dat can be arranged, cher," Balfa chuckled back.
"Don't!" the youngest pleaded, so agitated he looked as if he would fling himself over the side from fretting, with tears of relief in his eyes that their death was not to be immediate. "Like our vicar always said, Hope springs eternal, and-"
"Hope?" Balfa scoffed. "Dis de Dry Tortugas. Comprendre dry? Never know… might catch turtle. He blood you drink, he meat, and eggs you eat. Kill seabirds, aussi… same. Ah! Up oars! Bow men!"
The launch staggered through the last froth of surf and ground her bows into the raspy, pebbled grit of the beach. Bow men sprang to either side, thigh-deep in white-water spume, to steady the bows as a fresh wave lifted the boat a foot more ashore.
"Go over de bow, don't even get your feet wet, you. Out, vite! Hope… you like you' new home!" Balfa snickered as his oarsmen laid their blades in the bilges and waved their weapons at the captors to speed their departure. "You damn' Anglais! Dis pay you back for all I suffer. Prisoner, me. Kidnap, me, on your ships! Round us all up an' take us away from Acadia, an' don' let us take nozzing wit' us! Gaol us in England, firs'. We don' starve quick enough, us, don' get sick an' die, you damn Anglais ship us to Maryland! See how you like it dis time, by Gar! Damn' English!"
The prisoners were goaded at gun- or swordpoint at least twenty yards inland, past the overwash barrow full of wiregrass and deep, loose sand littered with feathers and shells.
"Oim Oirish!" one of the captives plaintively declared.
"All same, aussi," Balfa told him with almost a sympathetic air. "Dem bebes on de schooner, dey'd leave you nozzing, dem, 'cause dey all jus' crazy mean, but me, Boudreaux Balfa, I a sailor like you, I never let it be said I'm heartless, comprendre? So I give you a slim chance, me. Fetch it out de boat, men. You live, you remember, hein?"
Two crewmen trundled up a ten-gallon wooden barrico. Another slung a worn leather bag across the sand to land at their feet.
"Bonne chance, chers!" Balfa wished them all with a wide smile and a hearty laugh. "You stand where you are, now, 'til we get beyond de surf," he cautioned, wagging a finger in warning, "or we jus' have t'shoot, us. Adieu. Allez vite!"
As the pirates scrambled to shove off and leap into their boat, one of the captives dared kneel by the leather sack and peer inside it. He wonderingly drew out a rusting old kitchen knife, paper, and…
"Crikey, 'tis a quizzin' glass, and a tinder-box, too. We can light a fire, does a ship ever pass!" he whispered in surprise.
"Sweet merciful Jaysus in Heaven!" the Irish captive cried in sudden glee as he swiped his fingers over a damp spot on the barrico and sniffed at it. " 'Tis rum, by God! Ten bloody gallon o' rum!"
"What the Devil?" the oldest sailor puzzled, scratching at his grizzled scalp. He almost felt a twinge of hope, of gratitude to that…
The shot was inaudible over the loud swashing and raling of the surf, the wind that flapped their clothing, and the mewing cries of the seabirds that nested on the islet, flushed a'wing by their presence.
"Oh," the youngest lad said, as if he'd pricked his finger on a thorn, and clapped a hand to the inside of his right thigh. "Oh!" he reiterated, as if a wasp or bee had stung him, as he looked down at the blood on his white breeches. "Ah. Oh Lord!" as realisation came, as he fell to his knees and went as pale as the wave spume.
The other captives could see the tiniest wisp of spent powder smoke that blew westward from the schooner's small quarterdeck, ragging past the taffrails like the spirit of a hag that had ridden her mortal too long and must flee the coming of dawn.
"Oh, you bloody bastards! You goddamn' Frog sonsabitches!" the doughty older captive howled, shaking both fists at their tormentors. "We'll get ye, yet! We'll find ye, and cut yer damn' balls off, hear me? Ye'll all dance th' Tyburn Hornpipe 'fore we're done wi' ye!"
"Oh, poo," Don Rubio groaned, grimacing at his poor aim with a slim and expensive Jaeger rifle. "This boat's pitching, though." His compatriots cheered his expertise, even though he hadn't struck his mark in mid-chest.
"You said you wished to shoot just one, Rubio!" Hippolyte said in commiseration. "He'll die of that, right below his organes! What a bother he'll be for them, before he does. Ha ha!"
"Perhaps they'll eat him!" Helio quipped, eyes merrily alight.
De tit zozos-ye te assis,
De tit zozos si la barrier,
De tit zozos qui zabotte,
Qui ca ye di mo pas conne!
They sang as well, hooting and capering, even assaying a nautical, buccaneer's hornpipe, though they hadn't heard a word that their captives had yelled from shore.
Monzeur-poulet vini simin,
Croupe si ye et croque ye,
Personn pli tend ye zabotte,
De tit zozos si la barrier!
A Creole song, a slave song, one they'd all learned as children.
Two little birds were sitting,
Two little birds were sitting on the fence,
Two little birds were chattering,
What they were saying I do not know.
A chicken hawk came along the road,
Pounced on them and ate them up.
No one hears the chattering anymore,
The two little birds on the fence!
BOOK ONE
Gonzalo: I have great comfort from this fellow. Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him; his Complexion is perfect gallows. Stand fast, good Fate, to his hanging! Make the rope of his destiny Our cable, for our own doth little advantage.
If he be not born to be hanged, our case Is miserable.
– The Tempest, Act I, Scene 1
William Shakespeare
CHAPTER ONE
Hoy, the boat!" Mr. Midshipman Larkin cried his challenge to the approaching civilian cutter, though he had known who its passengers were as soon as they had stepped down into it on the distant quay ten minutes earlier; had been awaiting those passengers' return for at least the last two hours past.
"Proteus!" the Mulatto bow man shouted back, seated on the very tip of the cutter's bows, legs dangling to either side with a brass-fitted gaff staff across his lap with which to hook onto the chains. He shot one hand in the air for a moment, showing four fingers, proving that a captain was aboard.