So far I had been lucky. My face was streaming with perspiration. Twice he glanced at my eyes. Was he trying to find fear there? Believe me, there was enough of that, for the man was good, and it had been long since I had fenced enough to matter.
Around us men crowded, gold gleaming from their ears. One huge bearded man had a heavy gold necklace that must have come from looted Inca treasure. They watched, intent, and I was conscious of them only as a backdrop to what happened here. The gleaming blades, the movement in and out, the circling, the darting steel, as in some weird ballet of death where I was at once the participant and the observer. The tricks I knew seemed to find no place here, for the man left no chance. For all his strength, he moved lightly, easily, and with confidence. My arm would grow weary; my strength would go.
He was smiling now, his eyes bright with purpose. He feinted a head cut and then thrust at my ribs. My parry was quick, but I was too far from him for a good thrust at the body, so with a flick of the wrist I cut him along the inner sword arm with the back of the blade.
It sliced, and deep. I saw him wince, saw him start to step back, and attacked instantly. His parry was slow.
There was blood on his sleeve now. Somebody gasped and pointed. There was a splash of blood on the floor. I feinted for the head; he tried to parry, and I thrust hard for the ribs. He stepped back quickly, and I moved in.
He was a swordsman. Even now, his arm badly cut, he fought beautifully. Yet there was death in his face. I could see it, and he knew it. I feinted, held my thrust, then, on the instant, followed through. His parry was started too soon; my point slipped past it, and his recovery was slow. The blade slid ever so neatly along his ribs, through the hide and between the bones, and withdrew almost as if there had been nothing but a shadow there.
Bogardus missed a step, his whole side now stained with blood, red blood in a widening blotch on the side of his shirt.
My point lowered a little. "I have no wish to kill you."
"I am dead. Finish what you have begun."
"Have done. You have chosen a poor profession. If you live, choose another."
"I took money to kill you."
"Keep the money. You tried."
Taking up my coat with my left hand, I turned my back on him and went into the crowd, and with my naked blade still in my hand it opened before me.
When I was on the street again, I looked carefully about. This was no time to be careless, but of one thing I was sure. My sightseeing in Jamaica as well as my business were over.
Tomorrow I would find John Tilly, and tomorrow I would take Diana Macklin home.
Chapter XVIII
Strong blew the wind, dark the angry clouds, vivid the lightning. Upon the deck, near the mainmast shrouds I stood, one hand upon them to steady me, my eyes out upon the sea, its dark, huge waves lifting like great upthrusts of black glass, ragged along the breaking edge. My father had gone to sea in his time, but I had no love for it. He had bred a landsman, whether he preferred it or not.
There was a challenge in the storm, a magnificence in the power of the sea, and I rode the deck like a gull upon the wind and confessed inside me that while afraid, I was also drunk with it. Salt spray stung my face; my tongue licked it, tasted it, loved it. She put her bows down and took a great sea over them, and the water came thundering back, the decks awash, the scuppers sucking and gasping.
John Tilly came down upon the deck and stood beside me. " 'Tis a raw night, lad, a raw night! We be sailing north with the coast out yonder, and many a proud ship gone down in weather no worse than this!"
"I'll be glad when I'm ashore," I told him frankly. "I want my feet upon solid earth."
"Aye!" he said grimly. "So think we all. We think ofttimes in the night that once the storm is over and the storm gone, we will go ashore and stay there. We'll tell ourselves that in the night watches, but when the day has come, and our money is spent ashore, then we go seeking a berth again, and off to sea it is."
"I am a man of the hills and forest."
"It may be so. Your father made a good seafaring man, though, and belike you could do the same, given time. You are a strong one and active, and you've a cool head about you. I saw that ashore there."
"Ashore?"
"In the fight with Bogardus. Ah, lad, I feared for you! I've seen him with a blade before, but you had him bested--"
"My father taught me, and the others."
"It showed. I could see your father's hand there, but you've the greater reach and height. He never beat a better man than Bogardus. But you did not kill him."
"I have no wish to kill. A man's life is a precious thing, though he waste it. A life is greater than gold and better than all else, so who am I to take it unless need be?"
"He intended to take yours."
"He has not my thoughts, nor my wishes nor my desires, and if he lives, life may bring him wisdom. Who knows? It is a good thing to live, to walk out upon such a deck as this and feel the wind, to walk in the forest on a moonlit night or out upon some great plateau and look westward--"
"You, too?"
"What do you mean?"
"Ah, you are your father's son! He looked to the westward, too! To his far blue mountains. But was it the mountains? Or was it that something beyond? We need such men, lad, men who can look to the beyond, to ever strive for something out there beyond the stars. It is man's destiny, I think, to go forward, ever forward. We are of the breed, you and I, the breed who venture always toward what lies out there--westward, onward, everward."
We were silent then, riding the deck as it tipped and slanted. She was a good ship, even as she had been in my father's time, and she bore a good name.
"I wonder if I shall ever see her again?"
"Who, lad?"
"My mother. She went to England, you know, so that Noelle would not grow up in the forest among wild men. My father sorely missed her."
"Aye, he did that. But she was wise, lad, wiser than all, and you'll be proud of the lass when you see her. A fine lady she is, although but a girl yet, and Brian! What a gentleman! They tell me at the Inns of Court that he has a rare way with words."
"It is the Welsh in him. When did they not?"
"And Jeremy, lad? And Lila? Fare they well?"
"How else? Athough it be months since I have seen them. When I go south again, I shall go calling. Jeremy is a fine woodsman now and an owner of wide lands, and Lila serves no longer but is mistress of her own estate."
"What of the lass below there?" Tilly asked. "She has eyes for you, lad."
I felt wary and uncomfortable. "It may be. We have talked a bit."
"She's a fine lass, a brave, tall girl. You'd be wise to take her, lad, if that is the way you both feel. I deem there's been trouble behind you?"
"She comes from Cape Ann ... on the coast of what they are calling New England. They thought her a witch there, and she was twice taken by slavers, the last time through sheer vengeance, dropping down of a sudden, knocking her father about and carrying her off. It was Pittingel. He wished me to see her with him, for to kill is not enough. He wanted me to suffer in my mind as well."
"And now?"
"To her father again if he lives. What else will come we shall talk of then, but if I take her home with me, it is a far travel for a lass, far through woods and the places where savages are."
"She'll stand to it. There's a likely craft, lad, and one to sail any sea. You can see it in the clear eyes of her and the way she carries her head. Give me always a woman with pride, and pride of being a woman. She's such a one."
We talked then of ships and the sea and of the old ways of men upon the water, of how men measured the altitude of a star by the span of a wrist or a hand outstretched before them and how they guided themselves by the flight of birds, the fish they saw, and the way water curls around an island or a cape and shows itself as a special current in the sea. "Ferns will fly far out to sea and rest upon the water when they wish, but the herring gulls never get more than seventy-five or eighty miles from land, and at eventide they fly toward shore to roost. When you see them winging all one way toward evening, there's land there, son, land. It has saved many a seafaring man, knowing that. Men steered by the flight of birds and found their way by the stars for these thousand years or more."