Chapter 273: Into the Hispaniola Jungle

The Fortune’s rowboat hung from her starboard with a witch in the bow, while every sailor who wouldn’t join had packed himself onto larboard like herring in a keg.

The crew was jammed belowdecks with their faces through the hatch, hanging in the canvas with their eyes squeezed shut, while one unfortunate soul had been rolled into the furled foretopsail like a bolt of cloth.

Eighty-odd pirates who had faced the Spanish armada were now frightened of one woman with shells in her hair.

James leaned on the aftermost rail with his hat pulled low and bit his cheek.

The charm had woken him in the black hour, and since then the Fortune had sailed across the French coast, found a mangrove inlet, and moored to the roots with a kedge astern.

A voice tore loose, cracked down the middle with terror, and above the crush of heads a fist came up strangling a shriveled scrap of leather on a thong.

"SPIT TO LEEWARD, ye gutless bastards, spit! Spit an’ cross yerselves, the lot o’ ye! I’ve me mam’s caul ’ere, blessed by a priest in Cork, an’ I swear on it I’ll not go down for the likes o’ her!"

At the rowboat, three sailors grinned. Dunk, a slab of a man, had three battered hats stacked on his head, Pike fought with a gull over whose boat it was, and Nub, who was short two fingers on his left hand, whistled a hornpipe through the gap in his teeth as though no one had ever told him what that could do to a gale.

The crew replied as one beast, eighty pairs of knuckles white on the timber.

"JONAH! Gag him, for the love o’ God! Gag that whistlin’ sod afore he whistles up a squall an’ drowns the whole bloody lot o’ us, witch or no witch!"

Dunk couldn’t care less and only nudged the top hat back with one thumb, and let the whole larboard get a good look at an utterly untroubled face. "Peace, lads, peace. ’Tis only a woman and an egg, and I’ve been wed to worse. Me Betsy took a cleaver to a bailiff once, and she weren’t even cross about it."

James figured that was enough spectacle and crossed to starboard.

The Madame sat in the bow in her indigo and smoke, a cord looped around one arm, her patched skirt hitched high on one bare leg, shells clicking in her hair, while a sling held an egg against her chest, about the size of a six-pounder cannonball.

Not a soul aboard could name the bird that had laid it, nor was eager to meet its mother.

"Afternoon, Zephy. We squared away, then?"

Her amber eyes narrowed as she tried the name. "Zephy! Mmm. The sibyl, she lets the customer choose, so Zephy it is, chéri. Voilà, all is ready. The egg, he has heard every name under heaven and been très polite about each one."

Then the smile came, dazzling, and one bangled arm swept the length of the bow. "Now! The swamp, to the firm ground. From there we walk, through the forest behind the fort in your little picture, and in the fold of the hills beyond, ah, there is the road to what you hunt. The cord, she will find it. Eh bien?"

Bonnet drew himself up in his shirtsleeves, dressed for the bath and introduced at court. He swept off a hat he wasn’t wearing and bowed to the sling from the waist, a flourish wide enough to take in the egg, the witch, and the swamp beyond.

"My dear egg! A most felicitous afternoon to you."

Mary thumbed powder into the pan with patience, and snapped the frizzen shut with a click that carried further than any threat. She spoke to Zephy, not the egg.

"If that bleedin’ thing hatches, I’m shootin’ it. Don’t care whose mum comes lookin’."

James looked at the pale, shining shell, then at the pistol, and found he had no quarrel with either arrangement.

"Right, enough standin’ about like mourners at a christenin’. We go."

The merry band prepared the rowboat, the three sailors took the oars, and the ropes sang as they dropped toward the water.

Crick hauled himself with gravity, one gnarled arm flung toward heaven. The screaming on deck shrank to a whimper. "Hark, lads, and hark well! The witch takes sailors by his breath, his breath, I say! Fill yer lungs when I drops me arm, and hold it like it’s yer last pint, till that boat’s away o’ the ship. A puff, a squeak, aye, even a fart, an’ she’ll follow it home an’ sit on yer chest. A witch can’t take what ain’t there, lads!"

His arm dropped, and eighty-odd pirates sucked in together. Their faces went purple, and a sailor in the rigging fainted into a coil of rope without giving up so much as a puff.

The rowboat slid away of the Fortune’s shadow, Crick raised both arms, and the crew replied with one enormous groan.

"She’s gone... Sweet Mary an’ Joseph, she’s gone! Fetch the rum, fetch all o’ the rum!"

Whitlock tipped the slate toward the light, brushed the chalk down its rows, and counted heads, lips moving. "Eighty-four, all breathing. And I’ll be having the sailor in the foretopsail unrolled afore supper, if it’s the same to ye, for he’s still on the books."

As for the merry band, the mangroves swallowed the rowboat, the sun disappearing as neatly as a snuffed lamp. Roots rose from the mud like knuckles and knees, the canopy shut overhead, and afternoon turned to a green dusk.

The channel was dark as strong tea and warm enough to send damp heat into James’s face, while the whole place stank of sulphur and rot. The oars creaked as Nub whistled, gulls crying behind them until it faded, while parrots screamed overhead, frogs bellowed from the banks, and hundreds of land crabs clicked through the leaves.

Sweat started to drip into James’s eyes as the flies appeared. Zephy simply pointed out the forks without saying a word.

Dunk, rowing at the bow, leaned over the side, dipped his palm into the dark water, and brought it toward his lips, but Zephy caught his wrist before he could drink.

"Non, non, non, chéri, put it down. This water, she is warm, she ends one right here."

Then the hush came.

The parrots grew fewer and stopped screeching, the insects winding down, while the frogs fell silent from bow to stern. Soon there was only the crabs clicking in the leaves, fewer and fewer, until one clicked once more and stopped.

Nub’s whistle vanished as James raised two fingers. The oars came up dripping, every drop as loud as a pistol shot in a church, while Zephy’s shells fell silent one by one.

So this was the hush.

A voice drifted out of the roots, thin and fond and perfectly ordinary, like a neighbor leaning over a garden fence with her sleeves rolled to the elbow.

"Ooh, now, Annie Pike. Annie Pike, she makes a lovely loaf, don’t she, Pike? Lovely. Still burnin’ the crust, though, is she, love? Black as a sin, and you eat it all up regardless, don’t ye, duck?"

Pike swelled like a toad in a hailstorm, outraged, his face the red of a boiled lobster, lips already open on the next word.

"Burned a crust? Here now, me maw never burned a crust in her whole bloody..."

Mary’s palm closed over the rest of it like a lid on a pot.

Zephy shook her head, and the voice waited. It clicked its tongue after a dozen heartbeats, like a man whose friend had just refused a drink, and the jungle released it.

Back in the hut, her rule about voices felt like theatre. Out here, no one was laughing.

The channel ended at a bank of hard earth where the mangroves stopped, the keel grating against the bottom as the sailors hauled the boat high onto the bank. Ahead, the forest stood with trunks as thick as masts and light the color of bottle glass.

James went through his gear one piece at a time, drawing [Verdict] halfway from her scabbard to make sure the damp hadn’t swollen the leather, wrapping [Counterargument]’s four barrels in oilcloth against the wet, while [Discretion] hung across his shoulders, slick with sweat, and the charm still rested on his left wrist.

Bonnet looked at the black wool with an expression of pure grievance.

Mary counted heads off the barrel of her pistol, as flat and exact as a purser. She ran the muzzle of her pistol across the merry band, tapping over each head.

"Seven. Captain, the gentleman, the witch and her egg, three bleedin’ idiots, an’ me."

Zephy let the cord uncoil in one unhurried loop and lifted her chin.

She explained gravely. "The cord first, chéri, and the sibyl with it. Then the Scourge, then the rest, in a line, heads down. And last, last, the guardian of the door. Listen now, all of you, for I say it once. Touch nothing the green offers, drink nothing it pours. And answer no voice, no voice, you understand? Even when it is familiar, especially when it is familiar."

James hitched [Discretion] higher on his shoulders, dragged a sleeve across a face slick with the swamp’s breath, and shot the merry band a look that could have stripped paint off a hull.

"Boots on the line, lads, and mouths shut tighter than a miser’s purse."

"Aye, Cap’n." Dunk rumbled.

"Not a peep, Cap’n." Pike squeaked.

"Aye." Nub breathed through the gap in his teeth.

The cord had been slack all the way up the channel, but now it lifted from Zephy’s palm as though the far end had taken hold of it. It drew tight toward the darkness between great trunks and hummed like a plucked string.

"The road, she is awake, mon capitaine. Come, she does not like to be kept waiting."

She walked, James following, and the jungle took them one at a time. Bonnet in his shirtsleeves, the three brave ones with Dunk’s hats bobbing above them, and Mary last.

The cord hummed ahead, cheerful as ever.