Chapter 199: Blood-Bought

The galley’s aroma didn’t get far with them.

A few steps up the passage, the ship’s usual stink of tar, bilge, and old salt came back strong enough to remind a man where he was.

Then daylight poured down the ladderway as they climbed toward the open deck.

Both had gone perhaps twenty feet across the planks when another noise reached them. It was a flat crack, sharp enough to cut through the creaking rigging, followed a heartbeat later by the peculiar noise made by a crowd that cannot decide whether it is funny or painful.

James and Cudjoe needed no discussion. They went toward it.

A ring of men had formed on the main deck, Rose and Fortune sailors standing three deep, with every man protecting his place as if some bastard might steal it.

In the middle stood a man who was doing absolutely nothing, and doing it so completely that everyone else on deck seemed nervous by comparison.

He was lean, not broad, and stripped to the waist against the heat, with old scars on both forearms and one shoulder, the plain history of years that had never asked his permission. More marks spread out through his chest in neat symbols, those had been made by his own hand.

A length of chain was wound twice around one wrist and looped once more around his waist, with an iron weight fixed to the loose end. He wore the thing as naturally as one man might wear a belt.

He watched James come up without shifting an inch, sizing him up. Enzo had bowed low enough to nearly lose his hat when a stranger walked through his door.

This fellow did not even bother straightening his back.

"Captain."

Cudjoe came alongside, at ease.

"This here’s Kwaku. Crew’s taken tae callin’ him the Corsair, and he lets them."

"Kwaku, then."

Kwaku shot James one slow look from head to boots.

"Ah. So you’re the bastard everyone’s been making such a considerable fuss about."

His voice had more consonants than most of the crew bothered with.

"I had, for reasons I now find difficult to justify, imagined a considerably taller fellow."

"Aye, well. Disappointment’s a fine way to begin a friendship."

"We shall have to see whether the situation acquires any greater depth."

Then their little chat was interrupted by Kit, who shoved his way to the front. "I’ll go, Cap’n! I’ll wager I can put a mark on him before he puts one on me!"

"Very well. Do try not to make a complete spectacle of yourself."

The chain left Kwaku’s wrist and caught Kit around the ankle, and the boy went flat onto his back and lay there blinking up at the rigging as if the old lady had personally planned the whole affair.

"Remarkably poor showing"

Kit sat up, rubbing the back of his head.

Ezra and Silas Hollis came next, pushing one another aside while they fought over which of them had earned the next turn.

"It’s mine, ye great lump. I called it first."

"Ye called it after me, and ye know it."

Kwaku looked from one to the other. "I’ve endured nearly a week of this dispute and remain incapable of determining which of you is the greater debtor. Settle the matter yourselves, before I lose what little fucking patience remains to me. I shall officiate."

Mary Read called from atop a coil of rope, thoroughly delighted. "Whichever one loses, I’ll never have to remember which is which again, seeing as there’ll only be one left worth naming."

There was considerably more cries than the lesson required, and it ended with Kwaku lifting both brothers clean off the deck by their necks, one in each hand, and putting them down again.

Neither seemed to notice the fight was over. They still fought over the point that had started it.

"There. The matter is resolved."

Kwaku dusted his hands together.

"You’re both wrong, and, what is considerably worse, you’re both bloody slow."

Mackerel Jim came up last, ready to improve his afternoon. "Fought a Portuguese knife-man off Recife once. Three days drunk, one eye swelled shut, and I still put him down with a blade clean through the ribs, came out the other side without nickin’ a bone on the way."

Kwaku turned the weight on the end of the chain once in his palm. "A man cut through the belly does not come apart neatly, Mister Jim. He empties, and everyone within ten feet remembers the smell for a year. Yours sounds like a wound inflicted by a tailor."

Cudjoe made no effort to hide his grin.

"Aye, Jim, and I’m the Queen of bluidy Spain."

Jim lips parted open to dispute the finer points, reconsidered, and decided muttering was safer.

"Recife’s a hard town regardless."

Kwaku wound the chain back around his wrist.

Then he looked past the whole lot of them and straight at James. "You’ve had three men educated before you today. Do you mean to remain the sole exception?"

"Dinnae let him talk ye intae anything, Captain," Cudjoe warned. "That chain’s real enough."

James grinned, and his cutlass was already out of its sheath before he’d quite made up his mind to draw it.

The crowd erupted in cheers and ungodly levels of attention.

Both men met fast, chain against steel. Kwaku threw low first, with the sweep, and James jumped it, but landed badly, and for half a heartbeat he had a bad stance.

Kwaku was instantly on him.

James twisted his cutlass hard enough to keep the weighted end from catching his wrist.

"Looks like you fight with some point to prove."

"Everyone does, Captain."

Kwaku hadn’t even begun to sweat.

"I simply proved mine already."

One, twice, thrice, again and again the cutlass met the chain, until the iron weight found James’s throat in the same instant that cutlass’s blade found its place between two of Kwaku’s ribs.

Each man had landed the blow the other had been a fraction too slow to stop.

Kwaku dropped the chain first and slowly unwound it from his wrist.

"Well fought, Captain."

It was the first time he’d called him that.

James lowered his cutlass, breathing hard and with a grin broad enough than the fight had strictly earned. Whatever that single word had cost Kwaku, James reckoned it worth more than the bout.

"Where’d a man learn to fight like that?"

Kwaku finished winding the chain before answering.

He wasn’t going to let the question hurry him. "I was born Kwaku, in a village on what you people call the Gold Coast. I’ve stopped naming it for men who wouldn’t know it from any other. There, my own people put a spear in my hand before I was tall enough to support it."

There was no emotion in his voice. "I was eleven when they enslaved me. These men found what my people had taught me and felt it was a waste to let it sit idle. So they kept teaching me, right up until the lesson stopped to work for them."

He ended it plainly. "I put down enough of my teachers that the remainder developed a marked reluctance to continue the profession. That’s the whole of it. Freedom is merely the day your enemies discover they have no further volunteers."

James had no joke for that and didn’t go hunting for one.

He put a hand on Kwaku’s shoulder, though this time there was no laugh waiting behind it.

"Welcome aboard, Kwaku."

"Captain."

The second time, he said it easy.

James left him to his own deck and his new recruits, then fell back into step beside Cudjoe. His thoughts were already turning toward the wheel and the water ahead.

Whatever else stood between the Grand Dame and Port Royal now, it wasn’t going to wait around for them to come meet it.