Chapter 318: Hog Pits Are for Hogs, Mostly

In a hollow of coral beneath the pines, a crowd of people lay in the dark without a fire or lantern.

A mangrove channel sucked at its roots nearby, and skiffs lay under the trees with rags wrapped around their oars. Above the treetops, a red glow stained the stars where the King’s fires burned, and nearby a drum kept beating without much enthusiasm, and now and then a sentry’s call spread flat across the water.

Mateo knelt beside the channel, his rope-raw palm laying on a wet root. A fisherman could tell from that root which way the tide would run and when it intended to change its mind.

Behind him, a hunter hissed. "Carajo, Mateo! The mosquitos, they eat me neck like is Santiago and me the pig on the spit, hombre. I wear a hat of teeth, me."

"Then wear mud, Beto."

The root had his palm and most of his attention, and he spared Beto the rest.

"Neck, face, the man beside you. When all of us look like the swamp, the swamp got less to complain about."

Mateo stood, wiped his palm on his breeches, and went to tally heads.

Isaiah emerged from the pines without a sound, carrying a hatchet from the forges as though he meant to return it when he was done. They walked through the hollow from opposite ends, touching each shoulder as they counted, Mateo under his breath in Spanish and Isaiah in English.

Pip, the smith’s boy, had climbed the tallest pine at dusk, so they added him by the boots hanging from a branch.

Then they met in the middle, with no one left to touch.

"Thirty, near enough." Mateo nodded.

Isaiah sighed. "I do not hold with ’near enough’ in a tally, Mateo. A count is exact, or it is a tale, and tales do not answer when you call them."

"It’s a fisherman’s count, compadre. The fish move too, and by the time you reach the beach, it’s a different net."

Out the thirty, near enough, was what Concordia had to offer.

Hog hunters in hide jerkins stiff enough to stand on their own, Paco the fisherman with a boat hook, Brian the woodcutter turning his cap in hands big enough to shovel grain, Carbón the charcoal burner, black to the elbows and with no need of mud, Quaco with a pike.

Then there was Remy the Frenchman, who brought a kitchen cleaver that still smelled of its last fish, while Dickon the ditch man held his bow as carefully as a hunter might hold a snake he was assured it was dead.

Then there was Tib, wearing a linen shirt, with a knife at her hip and a scowl for the whole world. She was the only woman among them, and no one was foolish enough to mention why.

As for how this merry band conversed, the island’s speech was English in the bones, Spanish in the muscles, French at the skin, and a few words from the far side of the sea that no one could pronounce but everyone used.

Up in the pine, the boots began to move.

Pip came rushing down the trunk and landed among the roots with a grunt and a face full of resin. "Is big, Mateo. Big, big like Concordia, I swear it on me mother’s pots. Big like the whole town, tents an’ all."

Brian turned his cap over once. "Market. Market day, that."

The boy scowled at him. "Then big like the market, awright. Fires low, low, boats on the water, an’ a cook sittin’ by the big pot all night long. Stirrin’, stirrin’, an’ the stew come up grey..."

Remy sniffed and hefted his cleaver. "Gris? Salt beef, in zis heat? Mon Dieu! Zat is a crime, a crime against ze belly, against ze God himself."

The report continued. "And the bells, Mateo, the bells all afternoon. Redcoats runnin’ out, runnin’ in, runnin’ out again like ants when you kick the hill, an’ the cook kickin’ his own fire so many times he cryin’, real tears, an’ now the sentries callin’ so much they hoarse as crows."

Beto spat into the roots.

He, who trusted bread only when half his courage was involved, dug a cloth bundle from his shirt.

"Eat, Frenchman, an’ stop cryin’ over the beef. Cassava, from Do?a Elena."

Mateo intercepted the bread and took a piece, smiling at it as if it were a letter from home.

From the other side of his shirt, Beto took out a stone jar.

"An’ this, from Doyle’s still. For the other half! The half that don’t pray."

"Not me, compadre. Sober, I fish. Drunk, I swim, and no’s paying me to swim."

Isaiah examined the jar with great care, which was all the attention it received from him. Dickon took it instead, swallowed a long pull, and promptly lost half his face.

"Me cheek’s gone! Has any o’ you lot seen me cheek? Happen I left it in t’ jar!"

The bow chose that moment to bite him. He drew it, the string snapped across his thumb, and he stared at the injured digit as though it belonged to his neighbor.

The bows had been little more than staves two days earlier, then Hagar’s forge had supplied the arrowheads, gulls had supplied the feathers, and most of the finished weapons shot about as well as a drunk throwing plates.

"No, no, not like that, English! Madre de Dios, you hold it like a washerwoman holds a stick!"

Beto took the bow and turned it over in his hands. "An’ the heads, listen to me. Never, never touch the heads with bare finger, you hear? Or you go to Dios before the hog do!"

He pulled a small clay pot from his shirt, its lid covered with a leaf. "Manzanillo. The little apple that kill, the Spanish say. La manzanita de la muerte! A hog, he take a day an’ a night to die from it. Use the leaf, not the finger, entiendes?"

While he watched from afar, Isaiah lay the hatchet across his knee. "Hear me once, so every man is aware of our sin. Whatever is on those arrowheads will not kill quick, brother, it is no mercy. And you shall understand, you shall understand in your fingers, the moment you draw."

Dickon flexed his sore hand. "Aye, Isaiah. I’ll understand."

"Speakin’ o’ hogs, no?"

Paco leaned on his boat hook.

"Y quién remembers where the pits are? Because me, I know the sea. The dirt, I do not know."

Beto flicked his hand at the dark, dismissing the whole subject and the pits with it. "I put them, hombre. Dickon dig them. An’ remembering is nobody’s job, or a pit, she does the remembering herself, when somebody fall in."

Dickon brightened. "Oh aye, I remember mine, I do! I fell in it! Right up to t’ armpits!"

"A pit. Is. For. A hog, Dickon. A hog!"

"Mostly," Mateo allowed, softly. "Mostly, hermano. Mostly."

Dickon glanced at the poison pot, then at his bow. "Mostly’s what fair worries me, Mateo. I’ll tell thee that for nowt."

"Me too..." Pip whispered.

His new arrowheads chattered in the quiver at his hip, rattled by hands that wouldn’t keep still, so that every word came with a small tin applause.

"I’m frightened, Isaiah. Me knees, they talkin’ to each other."

"Good. Hold that fear, boy, hold it close. It is the men who are not frightened who walk into the pits."

Mateo clapped his hands once, soft, and began pairing them off with the flick of a fisherman’s finger, tossing each pair into the dark.

"Which is why no one goes alone, me entienden? Partners. Beto wi’ Pip. Tib wi’ Remy..."

Beto grunted in the dark, low and sour.

"Ay, but in my village, the women, they don’t go. They stay, is how it is."

Tib drew her knife an inch, let the steel wink once in the starlight, and slid it home with a click that said all her mouth hadn’t yet. "Women don’t, no. Women sit on the step and get told after whose fault it were. Every night I sat up with this under me pillow, waitin’ on the bill, and well, bill’s come due, ain’t it? And the knife’s leavin’ the pillow."

No one would argue with the knife.

"An’ Paco wi’ Dickon, bueno?"

"Por qué? Why am I with the Englishman? What have I done to God, Mateo?"

"Because you tie knots, viejo, and this one, he is needing about a hundred."

Paco folded his arms. "Y yo, I am to trust his navy... with my bay? Mi bahía!"

Dickon’s good cheek turned red. "My navy? MY navy?! Tha means t’ same Navy that took skin off me back for droppin’ a bucket? A bucket! I’d march up that track wi’ a spoon, I would, an’ glad on it!"

The Spaniard let that sit for a moment, then shrugged. "Pues... my Crown sank my father’s boat for fishin’ too near a rock the King said was his. A rock! A piece o’ rock in the middle o’ the sea! English crown, Spanish crown, they all draw the line round the same rock, hombre. An’ they all draw it wi’ a poor man’s boat."

"Well, then, looks like we agree on summat, eh? Kings is all t’ same wi’ their rocks."

Paco took it, bound a fisherman’s knot in the string with three quick pulls, and handed it back.

"There. Now it bites only what you aim at, Inglés."

"Ta, Paco. Reet grateful."

Dickon plucked the string once, then again, and looked at the bow with the damp-eyed wonder.

From there, the remaining partners were settled, and Mateo held up two fingers.

"If you must call, the little owl. Twice, sí?"

Dickon pursed his lips and blew a note like a rusty hinge.

Beto winced. "Madre mía! That is a pig bein’ stepped on! A fat pig, hombre, with the gout!"

The stars wheeled overhead.

A land crab crossed Quaco’s foot, who thanked it for its patience, while Dickon’s cheek had returned, and beyond the reef, the whole Atlantic breathed against the coral. The sentries’ calls had dwindled to croaks, while the red glow above the trees sank lower as the fire ran out of things to burn.

Mateo kept his palm on the root.

The water had stopped drifting one way and was considering the other.

"It has turned." He informed the band.

Isaiah looked up at the glow.

"And the fires have gone low."

Mateo wiped his palm on his breeches one last time.

"Then... ay. Then..."

"Then it is time." Isaiah finished for him.

They tallied once more while the boat-keepers lay beside the skiffs with their rags. One by one, the militiamen climbed out of the hollow and disappeared into the jungle.

Beto went first, with Pip behind him and his quiver clinking, then Dickon and Paco followed shoulder to shoulder, still quarrelling about knots. Remy brought the cleaver, and Tib walked beside him with her scowl held out in front like a lantern. Carbón simply ceased to be visible.

Mateo, who had never learned to go last, went with Isaiah, who had.

The pines closed behind them, one at a time.