Pieces of Hate Page 8

  The crowd cheered, and bets were placed.

  Gabriel found his feet and drew his own cutlass. The pirate stood and was on him again, darting in with both hands. Gabriel parried the blows but received a gash to the back of his hand in the process. The watchers roared again at the sight of blood. The big pirate laughed, leaned back to revel in the attention, and Gabriel knelt and hacked at his leg. The tip of his cutlass sliced through the shin, splashing blood away to his left, and the pirate screamed. His tiara fell off and rolled into the harbour.

  “You lost my crown!” he shouted, and the crowd laughed at him.

  “Go fetch it,” Gabriel said. He ran at the pirate, knocking aside the clumsy cutlass blows and butting him in the chest. But he had misjudged the man’s weight. It was like running into a stone wall, and the pirate had him in his grasp now, hugging him close, squeezing, grinning down into his face, breathing rum and rot, dribbling from those sharpened teeth as his mouth came closer and closer, chomping, ready to bite into Gabriel’s face and suck out an eye for a trophy.

  Gabriel swung his cutlass and buried it in the man’s buttocks, but he seemed not to notice. He nudged up with his head, hard, and the pirate groaned as Gabriel’s skull connected with his mouth. He staggered away as the big man let him go, putting his hand to his head, feeling the horn of a tooth stuck in his scalp.

  “Bathtud!” the man gasped, and the crowd laughed even more.

  Gabriel had dropped his cutlass beyond reach. He grabbed two dirks from his belt, but they felt hopelessly ineffectual against this giant and his cutlasses. His thigh was still aching from the wound the captain had given him, and though he healed quickly he did not need any more cuts to slow him down. And besides, he had to gain face from this confrontation, not lose out.

  He suddenly wondered whether Temple was watching him even now, a leering face in the crowd, amused as he saw his old enemy embroiled in a street brawl. He scanned the audience, looking for those eyes that could never hide themselves from him, whatever face they sat within.

  “They won’t help you!” the pirate said. He moved in again, arms swinging in different directions, cutlasses swishing at the air.

  Gabriel dropped the knives, drew a pistol, clicked back the doghead and fired. The shot took the big pirate in the chest, and he staggered back several steps gasping for breath. The crowd fell silent, watching expectantly. Their faces were hungry, their hands filled with tankards or whores’ tits.

  The pirate coughed, spat blood and smiled.

  Gabriel pulled his other pistol, cocked, aimed at the pirate’s face and pulled the trigger. The man’s head snapped back and blood spattered the stone dock behind him, but he remained standing.

  Gabriel grinned at the crowd and welcomed their look of satisfaction. Already he was trying to spot who he could accompany for a celebratory drink, entertain and eventually ask about Morgan. And all the time he watched for Temple. His old wounds were making themselves known, but they weren’t yet burning as they usually did in the demon’s close presence.

  The big pirate shook his head, spilling blood around him in sprayed patterns. He put his hand to his ear, and when he found it missing he laughed out loud. “I’ll have yours in its place,” he shouted, spitting blood. Then he charged.

  Gabriel was completely unprepared, his hands filled with two useless pistols, and he started backing away. What saved him was the giant’s own blood. He was drunk, he was wounded, and more than anything he was raging bloody mad. With his first step he slipped and went tumbling to the ground.

  Gabriel dropped the pistols, snatched up the dirk and fell on the big man. Kneeling on the back of his head he reached underneath and slit the pirate’s throat. The man choked, gagged, blood bubbling out onto the stone, and the crowd watched in delight as he died beneath Gabriel’s knees.

  Gabriel stood, shaking. Every stain of blood on his hands took him back to the village, and he closed his eyes to try to banish the memories to their own place and time. His wife’s pale dead face watched him from the darkness of recollection, and his son’s bloody smile tried to lure him in.

  “Here,” a gruff voice said. “Don’t want to leave these lying around.” Gabriel opened his eyes to see a man offering him his two pistols.

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it. Nice pistols.”

  “Nicer if they shot straight.”

  “Maybe it’s the shooter,” the man said. He smiled, and Gabriel could not help warming to him. He was as ugly and scarred as everyone else in the crowd—just another murderer—but there was an unusual humour and intelligence about him.

  “Damn, I need a drink,” Gabriel said. He stepped away from the dead man, turned his back, desperate to find a breath that did not taste of blood.

  “I was just heading to Papa’s. Best tavern in this hellhole, though that’s not saying much. They serve the strongest kill-devil you’ll find. Join me?”

  “If that’s good with you.”

  “O’Grady,” the man said, holding out his hand. It was missing two fingers and blackened with powder burns.

  “Gabriel.” They shook and headed off along the harbour.

  “So do you really not know who that was you just killed?” O’Grady asked.

  “I’m not well versed with cutthroats,” Gabriel said. Damn, was that too much?

  But O’Grady laughed and punched him on the shoulder. “Well, maybe that’s fortunate for you, otherwise you might have been frozen with fright. That was Mad Bastard.”

  “Did his mother name him that?”

  “Aye, but only after he killed her. So it’s said, he slaughtered his family while they all slept—mother, father and three sisters—raped his sisters’ corpses, cut off his father’s head, then went to Portsmouth and signed up with the first privateer he found. He’s been out here four years—I’ve been here longer, so I know that’s true—and I’ve seen him take on three men in a fight and win. He spends most of his time in Port Royal, there not being many crews that would welcome his company aboard ship. So he waits for ships to come in, then steals booty from their sailors. There’s always a body or two floating in the harbour with Mad Bastard’s name on it.”

  “Well, I’ve renamed him Dead Bastard. Will you drink to that with me?”

  “That I will!” O’Grady said. “And many more with me. Here we are, Papa’s. I’ll introduce you. One of the oldest pirates I know, and most don’t have the luxury of old age.”

  “A pirate serving ale?” Gabriel was intrigued, and could not help being carried along by O’Grady’s good humour.

  “Well, it’s not so easy for him at sea anymore.” O’Grady’s eyes sparkled as he smiled, and there was a flash of gold from his mouth. Gold teeth! Gabriel thought. This must be a hard one, to keep his head on his shoulders.

  Papa had no legs, and only one arm. He sat on a barrel behind a long wooden table, dipping tankards into a huge vat of kill-devil and swapping them for pieces of eight. The tavern was filled with men, and there was the air of business being done amid the drunken shouting and wild storytelling. There were a few whores as well, mostly older women, and Gabriel was surprised that most of them looked relatively healthy.

  “Papa likes his women,” O’Grady said, “and he looks after them too. It’s said he has a fortune stashed somewhere, and there are a hundred stories about him . . . all strange tales. He does nothing to dispel them, and they serve him well. No one picks a fight with Papa.”

  “Not even Dead Bastard?”

  O’Grady shook his head. “Not even him.”

  The two of them stood before Papa and bought tankards of kill-devil, a foul, potent rum punch that had scorched the insides of the tankards to a reflective sheen.

  “Papa, this is Gabriel,” O’Grady said.

  Papa nodded a greeting without meeting Gabriel’s eyes. “Nice pistols,” he growled.

  O’Grady leaned across the table, and Papa paused and stared at the man invading his space. “I just saw this one cut Ma
d Bastard’s throat.”

  Papa nodded his head slightly at such a feat. “’Bout time someone killed that cur. This one’s for free.” He scooped another tankard of punch and handed it to Gabriel.

  They found a free table in the corner of the tavern, sat, drank in silence. Gabriel felt the punch burning his insides as if someone had lit a fire in his guts, but O’Grady seemed unconcerned. Gabriel watched the man drink, swill the concoction around his mouth as if to clean his gold teeth, then swallow it with a satisfied sigh every time.

  “So you just sailed in with Parker?” O’Grady asked at last.

  “This afternoon.” Gabriel was not surprised that O’Grady knew which ship he had arrived on.

  “Straight from England.”

  Gabriel nodded.

  “You’re no privateer.”

  “No.”

  O’Grady turned to face him across the table. “And no pirate either. You’ve a look in your eye . . . cold, like a snake . . . but you’re not here for the same reason as most of us. You’re not scared, but you’re not free, neither.”

  “I’m here to kill a man, and until he’s dead I’ll never be free.” Gabriel silently cursed himself for rushing in with his story. He had to be cautious about this if he had any hope of gaining information as to Morgan’s whereabouts. Cutthroats and killers they might be, but most pirates were said to be a tight bunch, defending loyalties viciously if they were brought into question, protecting whatever friends they did make.

  “You don’t have the air of a hired killer. So . . . revenge?”

  Gabriel nodded. “Partly. And partly just because he’s . . . a bad man.”

  O’Grady laughed. It started as a rumble that Gabriel actually felt through the wooden table, and ended in a raucous belly laugh that earned them a few stares, most of them amused. “Hell! Hell, you Bastard-killer, if your aim is to kill bad men, you’ll be here a long, long time!” He calmed a little, took a drink and spluttered it across the floor as he guffawed once again.

  These pirates laugh a lot, Gabriel thought. Laughing was not something he did very often, and he felt a foolish jealousy. Their lives were rough, brutal and short, yet they seemed to love their existence so much.

  “So what’s this bad man’s name?”

  “Temple.”

  O’Grady’s laugh subsided quickly and he took a long, deep drink from his tankard. He coughed and gasped as he swallowed. Looked away. Scratched his head.

  “You know him,” Gabriel said.

  “I met him, aye.”

  “He’s here to kill Henry Morgan.”

  O’Grady leaned in closer to Gabriel. His mouth hung open, gold teeth catching yellow light from the candles set around the tavern. The background noise seemed to recede, but Gabriel realised it was O’Grady’s intense expression drawing him in. “Henry?”

  “You know Morgan?”

  “Aye, he’s a friend. Temple . . . he’s come to kill him?”

  “He’s a hired killer. Someone in England wants Morgan dead, and they sent Temple to do their calling.”

  “Who?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  “The King?”

  Gabriel shrugged. That was none of his concern, but he did his best to hide his disinterest. “I’m here to hunt and kill Temple, and I have the means. He’s no normal man, O’Grady. And he’s tenacious. Tell me where Morgan is, and I’ll go to him, and there I’ll find my man. I need to stop Temple.”

  “You said he’s a bad man,” O’Grady said. “You speak the truth.” He picked up his tankard, his hand shaking. “He was in this very tavern. He killed two men in here, then vanished . . . we chased him outside and he’d gone.”

  “He can change,” Gabriel said, then shook his head. How do I explain? But Sparks’s words came to him again, about how he had seen demons, and perhaps this pirate had as well.

  “I told him where Morgan had gone,” O’Grady whispered. “I couldn’t help it!” His hands were shaking so much now that he dropped his tankard, spilling punch across the floor. He put his hands to his face so that the others in the saloon could not see his tears. “He showed me things . . . things that . . .”

  “He uses your fears,” Gabriel said. “O’Grady, you need to tell me where Morgan is. Now. And then you need to help me get there.”

  O’Grady rubbed his face. His wet eyes reflected candlelight like distant memories, and even when he looked at Gabriel he seemed to see for miles, for years. Whatever he had seen in Temple’s hand had marked him forever.

  “I can do that,” O’Grady said. “You sailed in with Parker; he’s a friend of Morgan’s too, and he’ll believe me, and he’ll help. Cow Island is where Morgan went, six weeks ago. He’s planning a big sortie against the Spaniards. He has a Navy ship in his fleet, the HMS Oxford, a thirty-four-gunner.”

  “How long ago did Temple sail that way?”

  “Two days.”

  Two days! Morgan was as good as dead. But Gabriel had not come all this way to give up so easily.

  Besides, giving up was not in his nature. And the man with the snake in his eye would never have permitted that.

  Gabriel left Port Royal the same day that he’d sailed in, and for that he felt no regret. Never had he been so eager to see a place shrinking behind him. It stank of evil and it had made him kill, and much as his past held many deaths in its strange history, he resented that still.

  Captain Parker seemed perturbed at having Gabriel back aboard his ship, but O’Grady’s presence went some way to placating him. Their obvious concern for the fate of Henry Morgan kept them together for most of the first day in the captain’s cabin, calling on Gabriel often to extract more information from him. The more they asked, the less he felt like talking. Just a few details of his centuries-long pursuit would be enough to convince the pirates that he was more dangerous than Temple, were they to believe him. And Gabriel thought that though these men were killers and thieves, they also bore imaginations that would allow them to believe. He would be thrown overboard tied to a rigging block, and that would be that.

  But ignoring them would end in the same result. So over the course of their journey to Cow Island, he created his own story about how he had heard of Temple, the plan to kill Morgan, and how Temple had slaughtered Gabriel’s family on a farm in Wales. A farmer? Parker said, disbelieving. But then both he and O’Grady had emitted their familiar bellows of laughter, and O’Grady said, Aye, from what I saw of you with Mad Bastard, ye be used to slaughter.

  Gabriel hated talking of his family in front of these men, but at least they saw the raw emotion in his eyes—still, after so long—which aided their belief. He was surprised when they offered him a one-and-a-half share of whatever booty they gained on this trip. He accepted, knowing that being so involved would place him better to call on their help, if needed. That he had no intention of staying aboard this vessel of cutthroats any longer than was necessary, he kept to himself.

  Another surprise was that Sparks had remained aboard as the ship’s chaplain. “They give me some respect, at least,” he said. “More than where I came from. They stand for what they believe in, and live life as they see fit, and I find more spiritual honesty among these murderers than among many of the people I used to call my friends and flock back home.”

  “But you’ll die,” Gabriel said. “Maybe not this week or this month, but soon. Men like this rarely live for long.”

  Sparks smiled sadly, and his eyes showed the pain of whatever he had been through before they had crossed paths. And Gabriel would never know what that was. Some things are best kept secret, some stories best untold. “You know what that big pirate Perry said to me?” Sparks said. “‘A short life, but sweet.’ That’s the motto they live by. Does that not sound fair? Better that than a long life, but sour.”

  Gabriel left him then, walked on deck, considering what the young clergyman had said. And yes, it sounded fair. His own life had once had its brief moments of sweetness, but they had been soured by the
long centuries of pain and rage that had followed, and were yet to follow should he fail to kill Temple this time.

  That man with a snake in his eye, he has as much to answer for as Temple, Gabriel thought, and it was a familiar sentiment. He wondered whether one day they would cross paths again. The more time went by, the less real he believed the man to be. Unreality had a habit of accompanying Gabriel everywhere.

  The closer they came to Cow Island, the more Gabriel’s scars hurt. He was drawing nearer to Temple with every rise and dip of the boat. He spent longer and longer in his cabin, alone, preparing mentally and physically for the confrontation to come. Sparks would bring him food and water and leave, respecting his privacy. Gabriel thought of the clergyman more and more as a friend, and this made him uncomfortable.

  For the final days of the journey he nursed his old wounds, kneaded them, trying to squeeze out the growing discomfort lest they hamper him in his fight. Fear grew inside, a natural and familiar terror of something so vile and violent as Temple. Every time he faced his nemesis he believed it would be the final time; there was no other way to think. Temple was a monster and a demon, but he was also keen to perpetuate his own amusement. His defeats of Gabriel had been vicious and violent, but also cause for great delight. Gabriel dreamed of slicing the smile from his face. As yet, however, he had never found the way to do that. Knives would cut Temple, but that only made him smile more.

  And Gabriel’s left eye gave him more and more pain. There were moments when it clouded so much that he believed he was going blind. He lost his depth of vision . . . and wondered whether this was a hint as to how he could finally kill Temple. Perhaps if he approached the fight the same way as the Twin—merciless, casual, without any depth of conviction—it would present him with a fresh advantage.

  Gabriel mused on this, slept, dreamed of how the fight would go. And as ever in these moments, his family visited him with snakes in their eyes.