Chapter 206: Show Me the Galleon

Bonnet had himself a crew of muscle now, while Enzo had found some dozen gunners.

It made James wonder whether the two men had divided the city’s trades between them on purpose, or whether fortune had simply dealt the cards that way.

He got no farther with the thought.

A hand caught his sleeve from behind, and there stood Tomás, who had been gone from the floor for near an hour on business of his own.

His face wore an expression almost like a smile, though James didn’t trust it.

Tomás stepped aside and let the man behind him come into the light.

The fellow who appeared looked like he was dug up from the cemetery. His skin had gone thin and blotched, stretched tight over knucklebones that looked liable to fall loose if he took one step too quickly.

His robe was mostly rope and patches, with a little cloth mixed in to keep up appearances, while his eyes sat so deep in his head that the lantern glow seemed to have trouble finding them.

The stink of medicine and old sickness came in with him, and he leaned his whole weight upon Tomás’s arm. Without it, James was not at all sure the old fellow would have remained upright.

"Sure, and what in God’s name is this supposed to be?"

Tomás put it as plainly as he could. "This was once Don Rodrigo Alonso de Villalobos y Cárdenas, captain of one of the Crown’s galleons, the Nuestra Señora de las Angustias, and a conquistador long before he took that command."

Whatever Tomás meant by ’once’, Rodrigo himself appeared to have taken no notice of it.

He continued. "As a young man, he marched deep into the green interior of the Yucatán and stood among the Spaniards who broke the last kingdom the natives of this new world managed to keep for themselves. They burned it, then put what remained of its people to the sword or sent them down into the mines, all in the Crown’s name."

Tomás lowered his voice. "Whatever he did there, and whatever else followed in the years of service, it has worked its way into him like rust in an old blade."

James shot the old man another look. "And why in the devil’s name would we want a man like that anywhere near a captain’s articles?"

Tomás had no answer.

Don Rodrigo had one.

He delivered it with a force that such a body had no earthly business possessing, as if his voice belonged on a quarterdeck in the middle of a gale.

"I have commanded ships since before your father drew his first breath, muchacho."

James had expected a cough after that. Perhaps two. Instead, Rodrigo’s voice came across the floor hard enough to make him reconsider every assumption he had made about the old fellow strength.

Rodrigo’s fingers closed around his wrist, and the grip was strong enough to make the hand holding it seem like an especially bad joke. "A man who has buried an entire kingdom does not stand about answering a stranger’s questions. He asks his own."

The bones showing through the skin had seemed almost ready to fall apart a moment ago. They didn’t seem so now.

"Have you ever stood near enough to death to smell it on your own skin, Capitán Alvarez?"

He didn’t wait for an answer. "Dios mío, the things that jungle took from the men who marched beside me. I wrestled a jaguar bare-handed with these hands. I stood before a savage army with nothing but a broken blade and a crucifix held high. Neither one was enough to finish what God Himself seems in no hurry to collect."

There was no right answer to a man who could move from introductions to wrestling jaguars without stopping to breathe.

James gave him the only one he had that didn’t require lying.

"More than that, and more than you old timer. Death is a curious companion of mine."

The old man’s sunken eyes narrowed.

Rodrigo seemed to study him rather than merely challenge him. His fingers remained around the wrist, but the grip no longer felt like a threat so much as a test.

"You are not Alvarez."

He said it as calmly as if James had simply given the wrong name. "Alvarez has been dead thirty years, longer, perhaps. Forgive an old soldier his memory, it keeps worse company these days than it once did."

His free hand lifted and brushed the air, a motion so worn by habit that it seemed to have survived without waiting for the man’s permission.

"And God, Capitán, what do you make of Him?"

Those deep-set eyes stopped on James again. "Santiago Himself rode at the head of every army that ever marched for Spain, and I called upon Him more times than I could count, in that jungle and on every deck afterward. Do you fear His judgment, or only the dying that comes before it?"

James stared back, the situation more tense than the question warranted.

"I fear no judgment, Don Rodrigo."

He clicked his tongue with a carefree smile. "If my life is to be weighed when my time comes, then let it be weighed. I have no complaint against the scale."

Rodrigo’s grip finally loosened.

His attention sharpened, and the next question came without any ornament at all.

"How do you rule the men under you, Capitán? With the lash? With fear of the lash?"

Tomás was the one who replied. "There’s a town, Don Rodrigo. Built from nothing on a coast most charts cannot be bothered to mark. Not long ago, farmers, cooks, and carpenters discussed for the town’s future."

James laughed. "Nice wee democracy, if I may say myself. Even though I was the one to set it up, and the vote is made with pebbles and jars."

Don Rodrigo froze like a corpse. Literally. One could even be tricked he had, in fact, died.

"Say that again. The part about the jars."

Tomás repeated it, word for word.

The old man said nothing for a moment, or as close to nothing as a man of his temperament was likely to manage.

When he spoke again, the parade-ground iron had gone out of his voice. "I have served the Crown and the Cross both my whole life, hijo, and I have watched what that service does to men who serve it too well."

There was no self-pity in the words. "Some scheme where common men vote on their own future, with no throne handing that future down from some distant place none of them will ever see. That is new enough. Mad enough. Worth one look before God calls in whatever debt I still owe."

He drew a breath, and it rattled. "I am dying soon regardless, so may as well spend what remains on one more grand adventure instead of another dull week fading in a room that smells of candle wax and pity."

Tomás bowed his head.

"Vaya con Dios, then, Don Rodrigo. Whatever is left of it."

James found his own voice and did his best to keep Flynn steady beneath it.

"Sure, and any crew willing to have you is welcome to whatever fight you’ve got left in you."

He meant it more than he had expected to.

Don Rodrigo lost all interest in the two of them the moment the matter was settled. He turned on Tomás instead, impatient enough that James almost admired it.

"The galleon, hijo. You promised me the galleon."

He rapped three sharp times against Tomás’s arm with his knuckles. "I have not laid eyes on a Spanish ship in years, and I do not intend to die in this miserable English city without seeing one again."

Tomás took him by the elbow and steered him away with patience. He murmured about the ship waiting in the harbor and there being no need to hurry.

James watched them disappear, then turned back toward the noise of the floor.

Two fools were still left to find, and God alone knew what sort of person either one had managed to find by now.