"I would call it blood money," said Dappa.
"It was always blood money," Jeronimo said.
"You told us, once, that the silver mines of Guanajuato were worked by free men," Dappa reminded him. "This, being gold, must come from the mines of Brazil—which are worked by slaves taken from Africa."
"I have watched you shoot a Spanish sailor not half an hour ago—where were all your scruples then?" Jack asked.
Dappa glared back at him. "Overcome by a desire not to see my comrade get shot in the face."
Jeronimo said, "The Plan does not allow for finding gold where we expected silver. It means we have thirteen times as much money as we reckoned. Most likely we will all end up killing each other—perhaps this very night!"
"Now your demon is talking," said al-Ghuráb.
"But my demon always speaks the truth."
"We will continue with the Plan as if this were silver," Moseh said nervously.
Jeronimo said, "You are all filthy liars, or imbeciles. Obviously there is no reason to go to Cairo!"
"On the contrary: There is an excellent reason, which is that the Investor expects to meet us there, to claim his rake-off."
"The investor himself!? Or did you mean to say, the Investor's agents?" Jack said sharply.
Moseh said, "It makes no difference," but exchanged a nervous look with Dappa.
"I heard one of the Pasha's officials joking that the Investor was going to Cairo to hunt for Ali Zaybak!" said the raïs, trying to inject a bit of levity. The attempt failed, leaving him bewildered, and Moseh on the verge of blacking out.
"Why do we waste breath speaking of the Frog?" Jeronimo demanded. "Let the whoreson chase phant'sies to the end of the earth for all we care."
"The answer is simple: He has a knife to our throats," said al-Ghuráb.
"What are you talking about?" Jack asked.
"That jacht did not sail down here only to provide a diversion," said the Corsair. "He could have dispatched any moldy old tub for that purpose."
"The Turk makes sense," Dappa said to Jack in English. "Jacht means ‘hunter,' and that is the swiftest-looking vessel I've ever seen. She could sail rings around us—firing broadsides all the while."
"So Météore is poised to kill us, if we play any tricks," Jack said, "but how will she know whether or not we need to be killed?"
"Before we row away tonight, we are to sound a certain bugle-call. If we fail—or if we sound the wrong one—she'll fall on the galleot at first light, like a lioness on a crate full of chickens," the Turk answered. "Likewise, we are to give certain signals to the Algerian ships that will escort us along the coast of Barbary, and to the French ones that will accompany us through the eastern Mediterranean."
"And you are the only man who knows these signals, I suppose," Dappa said, finding amusement here, as he did in many odd places.
"Hmph…what's the world coming to when a French Duke cannot bring himself to trust a merry crew such as ours?" Jack grumbled.
"I wonder if the Investor knew, all along, that the brig would contain gold?" Dappa said.
"I wonder if he will know tomorrow," said Jack, staring into the eyes of the raïs.
Al-Ghuráb grinned. "There is no signal for that information."
Moseh, clapping his hands together, now said, "I believe the larger point our captain is making is that even if some of us…" glancing towards Jeronimo, "are inclined to turn this unexpected good fortune into a pretext for intrigues and skullduggery, we'll not even have the opportunity to scheme against; betray; and/or murder one another unless we get the goods off this brig fast and commence rowing."
"This is merely a postponement," Jeronimo sighed. Obviously, it would take many days to cheer him up. "The inevitable result will be double-crossings and a general bloodbath." He reached down with both hands and heaved a gold bar off the top of the hoard with a grunt of effort.
"One," said Nasr al-Ghuráb.
Jeronimo began trudging up the stairs.
Moseh stepped forward and wrapped his fingers around a bar; bent his knees; and pulled it up off the stack. "It is not so different from pulling on a wooden oar," he said.
"Two," said the raïs.
Dappa hesitated, then forced himself to reach out and put his hands on a bar, as if it were red hot. "White men tell the lie that we are cannibals," he said, "and now I am become one."
"Three."
"Don't be gloomy, Dappa," Jack said. "Recall that I could've run away last night. Instead I listened to the Imp of the Perverse."
"What is your point?" Dappa muttered over his shoulder.
"Four," said al-Ghuráb, watching Jack grab a bar.
Jack began to mount the stairs behind Dappa. "I'm the only one of us who had a choice. And—never mind what the Calvinists say—no man is truly damned until he has damned himself. The rest of you are just like trapped animals gnawing your legs off."
What when we fled amain, pursu'd and strook
With Heav'ns afflicting Thunder, and besought
The Deep to shelter us? This Hell then seem'd
A refuge from those wounds: or when we lay
Chain'd on the burning Lake? that sure was worse.
—MILTON, Paradise Lost
They left the ram embedded in the brig's buttock and rowed off about an hour before dawn as one of the Corsairs played a heathen melody on a bugle. Most of their previous cargo and ballast had been thrown overboard as the gold bars had been passed from hand to hand up out of the brig's shot-locker and across the deck and slid down a plank into the galleot. As sunrise approached, the breeze off the ocean consolidated itself into a steady west wind. First light revealed a colossal wall of red clouds that began somewhere below the western horizon and reached halfway to the stars. It was a sight to make sailors scurry for safe harbor, even if they were not aboard an undecked, anchorless row-boat fleeing from the iniquity of Man and the wrath of God.
The distance to the Strait of Gibraltar was seventy or eighty miles. With no wind to fill their sails that would take longer than a day; in these circumstances, it could be done before nightfall.
Van Hoek payed no attention to those clouds, which were many hours in their future; he was gazing at the waves around them, which began to develop little white hats as the sun and the wind came up. "They will be able to make six knots," he said, referring to the Spanish ships that would be chasing them, "and that beauty will be able to make eight," nodding at Météore, which was becoming visible a few miles in the distance. Jack and everyone else knew perfectly well that in these circumstances—the hull recently scraped and waxed, and combining the use of sails and oars—the galleot could likewise sustain eight knots.
They might, in other words, have been able to flee from the jacht and make a run for freedom on this very day—but first they would have had to fight the Corsairs on board. And at the end of the day they'd have to rely on other Corsairs to protect them from Spanish vengeance. So they adhered to the Plan.
The first several miles, from Sanlúcar de Barrameda to Cadiz, might have been an ordinary morning cruise, no different from their training-voyages around Algiers. But Météore—now flying French colors—raised as much sail as she could, and began to shadow them, a mile or two off to the west. Perhaps she only wanted to observe, but perhaps she was waiting for an opportunity to board them, and seize all the proceeds, and send them back into slavery or to David Jones's Locker. So they made as much speed as they could, and were already running scared, and rowing hard, when they came in sight of Cadiz. Two frigates sailed out from there and challenged them with cannon-shots across the bows—evidently messengers had galloped down from Bonanza during the night.
The day then dissolved into a long sickening panic, a slow and stretched-out dying. Jack rowed, and was whipped, and other times he whipped other men who were rowing. He stood above men he loved and saw only livestock, and whipped skin off their backs to make them row infinitesimally harder, and later they did the same to him. The raïs himself rowed, and was whipped by his own slaves. Whips wore out and broke. The galleot became an open tray of blood, skin, and hair, a single living body cut open by some pitiless anatomist: the benches ribs, the oars digits, the men gristle, the drum a beating heart, the whips raw dissected nerves that spun and whorled and crackled through the viscera of the hull. This was the first hour of their day, and the last; it quickly became too terrible to imagine, and remained thus without letting up, forever, even though it was only a day—just as a short nightmare can seemingly encompass a century. It passed out of time, in other words, and so there was nothing to tell of it, as it was not a story.