Chapter 294: Heave, Ye Lazy Dogs

Before the sun appeared above the mangroves, the boats slipped into the water while the squadron lay in the green darkness of the creek, bound to the trees astern.

James, Jim, Bert, Kit, Tomás, Black Sam with his ponytail, Anne with a cutlass on her hip and a kerchief over her copper hair, and a couple dozen sailors from the Rose and the Whydah went into the boats.

They had all volunteered for the honor of being bitten.

The merry band crossed the river above the bar, keeping to the shadow across the far bank and out of sight of the three picket sloops, then they waded through the last stretch of muck to a screen of leaves.

The man o’ war lay off the coast with her ports shut. Across the shore, tents climbed away from a timber jetty in neat rows, the swallow-tailed pennant flew from its pole, and the fever tents stood apart downwind.

Redcoats swarmed every yard, far too many of them.

A trampled route run from the camp into the jungle, while all the sentries faced the sea, which the party considered a little insulting, seeing as they had come the hard way. Still, the camp was none of their business

The merry band left it to its flies and sneaked into the route inland.

The road was cut for soldiers marching two ranks abreast, with stumps knee-high, their bark stripped white by the axes. Cask poles had gouged twin furrows through the middle, boots had churned the leaf mold into black soup, and the cut-palm corduroy sank deeper into the bog with every load.

The canopy let the sunlight through as bottle glass. Heat weighed on every shoulder, steam rose from the ground, mosquitoes swarmed around every eye, and howlers bawled out of sight, making for an all-around joyful expedition.

Within a hundred paces, the leeches had found every ankle.

James raised a hand, and the file stopped behind him.

"Single file, me lovelies, and not a peep out of any of you."

He breathed. "This here’s the commodore’s route, which, by the ancient and honorable law of thievery, makes it our road, and it’ll lead us right to whatever the bastards come to dig up."

The orders were accepted, and forward they walked, when strangler figs crowded the furrows and Bert’s shoulder tore a strip of bark from its trunk. He stood holding it in both enormous hands, looking at the damage.

"Madam, I do most abjectly beg your pardon."

He whispered, and put the bark back into place, only for it to drop into the furrow with a small, final slap.

"Oh, dear me, no, the fault is entirely mine, madam, entirely, I do assure you."

Meanwhile Kit went flat in the ditch.

A long, scaled beast lay among the weeds, big as a longboat, and his knife came out with the eagerness. He crawled over, stabbed it twice, and crawled back with moss on his elbows.

The boy hissed. "It were a bleedin’ log, Cap’n, a rotten, hollow, bleedin’ log, and me knife in it up to the hilt... mind, I’ll be tellin’ Agnes it were a caiman. Twelve foot if it were an inch, and me wrestlin’ it barehanded in the mud, reckon that tale’s worthy a pie, Cap’n, or two pies, if the gravy’s good."

Beyond a bend, they found a shallow grave beneath a cross of sticks bound with red wool, with flies over the mound.

Anne looked at it, clicking her tongue. "And look what they’ve done to him, shallow as a christenin’ font, so it is, and not a prayer said over that I can see. The hogs’ll have him out afore the rains, and what them leave behind the crows’ll finish."

Tomás crossed himself slowly, while his lips moved gently.

"Descansen en paz. No name, so it is God Himself who must read the prayers."

Then some leech fell down and bit on his wrist, fat as a thumb. Tomás pinched it off and held it up to the light, regarding it with weary tenderness.

"Ay, qué glotón. Dios te perdone, hermanito, I am not so generous."

And he flicked it into the ferns.

Sam tipped his head back as they walked on, and a shaft of sunlight brightened his face as if the Almighty had spotted him from above.

"Will ye look at it, Calloway."

He whispered with a cheeky smile. "A whole ass cathedral, all nave and no altar, and leeches for a congregation, so God help the donations plate. But if there’s gold at the heart of it, then ’tis the hungry o’ Nassau it feeds, and not a shilling goes back to the crown."

The jokes grew scarce as the route climbed out of the bog onto a low ridge, where the trunks stood farther apart and as the sun climbed, while the shafts crept higher up the bark until the light fell straight from overhead.

The merry band crossed a brown stream up to their belts, pistols held high in oilcloth.

At the first break, Anne dug the bloodsuckers off Kit’s neck with the point of her knife, grunting in Irish that was no prayer. At the second, the sailors sat on roots with sweat dripping off their chins, and not a man could remember being dry.

Yet eventually, at last, James raised his fist and the merry band froze.

Ahead, an axe crashed once through the trees, drums answered with a steady rhythm, distant voices rose and fell, too far away to make out the words. The woodsmoke drifted down the route, carrying the smell of rot with it.

Beneath it lurked a sweet and sour stank that made them breathe through their teeth.

Anne wrinkled her nose.

"The bloody flux, so it is. God between us and all harm now."

James jerked his chin toward the undergrowth. "Off the road, lads, and sharpish. They’ll have eyes on it from here on in, , so into the jungle, the lot of you, and keep yer arses low and yer mouths shut."

The merry band slipped off one at a time and crawled across a ridge of roots until the trees thinned. James parted a curtain of vines and peaked through.

There it was, some ancient city knee-deep in the swamp.

Its courtyards lay flooded and black as pewter, while terraces of fitted stone rose from the moss in broad steps, and stairways descended into the water to never emerge again. Roots thick as ropes had crawled over the roofs and pried slabs loose, and wherever an upper balcony remained standing, it leaned out of the mud like a drowned giant coming ashore.

The place could have housed a whole harbor town.

The Royal Navy had set up camp on the dry hillside, and there tents rose in neat rows while sentries watched from the terrace with muskets. A drummer kept count of the crews out and back from the expedition, and pioneers hacked vines from a carved stone statue.

Beneath a tarpaulin sat a stack of iron-bound boxes, their lids gaping open, and downwind, the fever tents had a bedridden soldier showing at every flap.

The whole expedition hummed over the rise, and redcoats labored in the heat with scarcely a drop of water left.

James searched for a tall grey man in a dark coat and for the swallow-tailed pennant.

He found neither.

Sam let out a slow breath beside him. "God in heaven, Calloway, a whole city, and the redcoats rootin’ through it like a thief through a bishop’s wardrobe, turnin’ out every pocket and leavin’ not a drawer shut."

By their side, Anne kept her eyes on the flooded courts. "I’d not have set foot in the last pile o’ old stone for all the gold, but this one’s thick with redcoats, an’ I’ll walk into any place that’s got redcoats in it."

James’s grin had narrowed to a line.

A wall of fitted stone spread across the exterior of the ruins, slick with moss. James pressed his palm against the cold, wet stone, and the party gathered close behind him.

He and Sam crouched beside a crack at one end, with Bert standing tall behind them.

Kit climbed a root for a better look, Tomás watched their rear, and the sailors spread across the stones, Anne in the middle with her cutlass loose in her fist.

Through the crack, they could see axe parties clearing vines, while redcoats carrying poles and lanterns went into every dark passage behind it.

Kit’s whisper came down from his root, quivering. "Cap’n! Cap’n, there’s a little fella down there at a table wi’ a great fat book, scratchin’ away like a hen at a dung-heap."

Bert cleared his throat. "Forgive me, I cannot help but observe, and I do so with the greatest reluctance, that the crews do appear to emerge in a most considerably worse condition than that in which they entered. Quite markedly so."

James watched for the commodore, the man whose mind he had come to read, but all he saw was soldiers toiling among the ruins. From the other side of their wall came a single groan of rope under strain, and the drum covered it.

"HEAVE! HEAVE, I say, ye wretched, sniveling lubbers! HEAVE!"

The shout came from beyond the stones, and the wall shuddered. "HEAVE, ye lazy, lollygagging dogs! Does His Majesty pay you, sirs, to HOLD the rope or to PULL it? Put your backs into it, PULL!"

The rope sang, the stone crashed down with a roar, black water leapt upwards, and a grey cloud of dust washed over the party and every mouth.

Out of the fog the voice swelled to its full size. "THERE! Down she comes, on the third heave! Precisely, PRECISELY as I ordained! As I FORETOLD! Write it in your book, clerk, write it large, the wall fell upon my WORD!"

A sentry muttered into his collar. "’Ordained,’ my backside. That weren’t sergeant’s notion, that, third heave, he said, and not a word from his lordship till it were done. Ordained."

The voice drowned him out. "YOU there! Aye, YOU, sir, with the bucket! A man who can retch can PULL! Back to the rope, I say, back to the ROPE! And if you cannot stand, sir, then pull from your KNEES, for His Majesty has sent no cushions!"

The fog began to tear apart, and through it the plume could be seen trembling, and a fist struck the lace at his breast with a thump like a drum.

"I did not cross an OCEAN, gentlemen to be remembered as the man who held the LADDER!"

The fist rose, and the voice rose with it. "When the Gazette prints the lifting of this city out of the swamp, it shall say that ONE man’s vision did it, ONE, and that man shall sit upon the finest stone in the place! And when the Commodore comes in search of me, he shall find me upon a THRONE, gentlemen, a THRONE, and he shall BOW!"

Then the voice dropped, and cracked, for the last charge.

"And those boxes! Those boxes! Heave, ye lazy dogs, heave, and FILL me those boxes!"

The dust thinned, like a curtain being drawn back, and the sun shone through the hole where the wall had stood.

It fell on every one of them.

James stood in the open, his grin still on his face.