“Cat, it’s not your watch for another couple of hours,” Ross said.
“I know, sir, but I thought you might be able to use this.” Cat showed the captain the wrinkled piece of leather that had once been a pouch.
Ross couldn’t believe his eyes. “Is this real?” he asked. Cat nodded.
“A map. You have a map to the Isle of Swords?!”
“How b’ that possible?” Stede gawked.
“My mother gave it to me. It was on the inside of my pouch.”
Cat bunched the leather together to show them. “I carried it around all along . . . I just didn’t know.”
Astonished and speechless, they stared until they heard bells from the rear of the ship. Two bells. Pause. Two bells. Pause. Two bells. Pause. And two more bells.
“That b’ morning watch, Declan. You got mayb’ an hour left to use the stars!”
“May I?” Ross asked, and Cat handed him the map. They both knew they had much more to discuss on this matter, but Ross couldn’t spare the time now. He scanned the map, noted the constellations and their positions. Then back to the sextant and then the logbook.
“I can’t believe it!” he shouted. “We’ve drifted too far to the south.”
“That cannot be,” grumbled Jules. “As I said before, I’ve been watching the compass.”
“No blame to you, Jules,” said Ross. “Padre Dominguez told us that’s what the strange current would do.” He went to the sea chart, scribbled a few figures from the logbook, and then drew a line. “Mister Stede, follow this course!”
“Aye, Cap’n!”
“You had better wake your men, Ramiro,” said Ross. “If what the monk told us is true, that swinging bowsprit will be needed like never before!”
Ramiro said, “We’ll be ready!”
But before the Portuguese shipwright could get down the ladder, Cat yelled, “May I go with you?” Ramiro looked at Ross, who nodded.
“Follow me,” he said. “I understand you are a quick study.” Cat grinned and leaped down the ladder.
“Jules, wake the crew—the whole crew!” Ross said, putting a hand on Jules’s massive shoulder. “The ship’s already locked up pretty tight, but make sure everything that can be tied down is— especially the barrel of monkey pee! This could be the roughest ride any of us have ever had.”
“There it is, sir,” said Jules. “We just changed direction. It’s slight, but it’s there.”
“Stede?”
“I’m correcting now, mon,” said the quartermaster.
“Again,” said Jules.
“I’m starting to feel what it’s doing,” said Stede.
Ross looked up at Midge in the crow’s-nest. “You see anything?”
“Nothing unusual, sir,” Midge called back.
Ross looked out on the dark sea. Nothing unusual. He scanned the skies, saw a faint glow in the east. Not much time before sunup.
Without the stars, how would they—then he felt it. Ever so gently, the ship rose. “Midge!”
“Swells comin’, Cap’n!” he cried. “Swells like mountains!”
“Tie yourself in, Midge!” The winds intensified as Ross yelled to the front of the ship. “Ramiro, be ready!” Ross heard no reply, but leaned over the rail of the quarterdeck and saw Ramiro nod and salute.
The Bruce rose up on a massive wall of black water, and from their perch, the entire crew witnessed what lay in wait for them. The ocean as far as they could see was a roiling, undulating cauldron.
And among the swells there appeared ominous patches of darkness and sudden eruptions of sea spray and foam.
Trying always to keep the ship firmly in the grasp of the steady wind, Stede guided them carefully among the swells. Just as they crested the top of a towering wave, Midge yelled, “Starboard!!”
Ross turned and saw the monster wave that was headed right for them. The Bruce was riding one wave right into another. “It’s coming across, Stede!”
Stede spun the wheel hard as they braced for impact.
It never came. The Bruce seemed to grab the wind and spin forty-five degrees to the left. It coasted down the back of the first wave and slid out of harm’s way before the two waves collided. The sound of that collision, like sudden thunder, jolted the crew. Spray rained down and blew horizontally across the deck.
“How did we . . . ?” Ross realized how. He looked across the deck, and there were Ramiro, Cat, and the others—all sopping wet, but grinning like mischievous kids.
On the bow, Ramiro’s head went back and forth, watching for rogue waves and looking to see which direction Stede was steering.
Cat, holding on to the rail—and the ropes—for dear life, felt his stomach drop. The Bruce abruptly rose up. They were cresting a gigantic wave as if it had grown up beneath them.
Ramiro barked out orders with zeal. “Claudio, pull the fore halyard, now!” And Claudio, a man with forearms like tree boughs, yanked a line, and the sail on the bowsprit fell limp.
“Enrique, pull both pins!” With two men keeping the bowsprit from swinging wildly, Enrique pulled the pins out of the gooseneck and waited.
Ramiro looked back to see what Stede would do. He watched until he saw the wheel spin rapidly to starboard. “Starboard!!” Ramiro yelled, and Enrique dropped the pins into two different holes.
“Now, Claudio—” Ramiro started to say. His mouth remained wide open, but his voice failed. He heard a sound like the echo of a thousand cannons. And off the starboard rail, the ocean fell away.
Down it went as if sucked into the depths by some gigantic beast.
A hundred-foot chasm opened up, and Ramiro could not see the bottom. A monstrous shadow fell over the ship. And dead ahead, another wave had gathered strength and height. It towered thirty feet above the Bruce’s highest mast and threatened to slam them into the chasm that yawned open beside them. Ramiro didn’t need to see what Stede was doing.
“Port! Port! Port!” he screamed. Enrique pulled the pins out of the gooseneck. But as he jammed one into its appropriate spot, the other pin slipped out of his hand. It flew backward and rolled along the deck. The ship started to turn. Stede was doing his job, but it was not enough. The Bruce was sliding over the edge. It began to lean toward the roaring gulf.
The pin bounced around on the deck until Cat dove on it. He snatched it up and clawed against the slippery deck. Finally, he slammed the pin into the gooseneck in exactly the right hole.
“Now, Claudio!!” Ramiro screeched. Claudio pulled a different halyard, and the huge triangular sail rose from the bowsprit to the mast and snapped full of wind. The Bruce hugged the edge of the wave upon which it rode. The wind held it up and began to push the ship to port. But the oncoming wave curled and came smashing down. It clipped the highest spar on the foremast, but that was all.
The Bruce sailed safely behind the monster wave, which crashed over the chasm like a gigantic lid.
The sun rose over the Bruce and found the ship’s deck teeming with activity. They’d survived seven miles of the most unimaginable peril.
Sails had been torn, spars cracked, and a few barrels had broken loose and gone overboard. But no lives had been lost. The crew took turns working on repairs and running to the rails to be sick.
Even Ross, who had spent most of his life at sea, felt a little queasy. “We’re through,” he said to Stede. “That’s another lifetime of friendship I owe you.”
“Six now, and countin’!” Stede replied.
“What are the shards?” Cat asked, looking at the map.
“In about sixty miles you’ll see them for yourself,” said the captain. “But Padre Dominguez described them as hundreds and hundreds of sharp rocks and coral thrust up through the surface like blades—hence the name, Isle of Swords. This waits for us at the bay and is the only access to the island.”
“It’s a good thing we have the map,” Cat said.
“Yes, my lad, it is.”
42
THE ISLE OF SWORDS
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nbsp; Thorne pointed over the bow. “What do you think of that?” he asked.
Anne squinted, still adjusting to the morning sun after long captivity in darkness. Then she gasped. In the distance, not more than a few miles away, a massive plume of cloud shimmered in an otherwise cloudless sky. Like a fountain, this mist ascended from some unseen central point and arced down toward the water below. Like a curtain, it undulated and made brief, curving shadows from the sunlight. And like a mountain it loomed before them, dwarfing all other sights that could be beheld.
“A curtain of mist and ash that surrounds the island,” Thorne explained just as a deep rumble emanated from the scene before them.
“Thunder?”
“Yes,” said Thorne. “But thunder churning in the molten belly of a volcano. Arrojar del Fuego, he called it. We will soon walk at its feet.”
A cool wind blew from behind, and the Raven’s sails filled. Anne shuddered. As the ship moved ahead, she looked in its wake. “What happened to your fleet?” She had no idea how many ships there had been, but whatever the number, there were far less now.
“During the first watch of the night, we entered a calamitous rolling sea. I warned all my ships’ captains how to navigate those treacherous waves. Some clearly did not listen and so were overwhelmed. But others—their ships—simply could not handle the strain. Eighteen ships survived. The loss is grievous, but expected. I still have what I need.”
Wavering shadows fell on the Raven as it passed under the canopy of mist. And then, all was gray and wet. Tiny droplets of water clung to Anne’s skin. She put her fingers to her face. When she drew them away and looked at her fingertips, they were smudged a murky white. She looked at Thorne, and upon his dark coat there were innumerable flecks, like snowflakes—only these were gray and left ugly trails as they ran.
The shadow lifted, and some sunlight returned. The gray curtain parted, and they looked upon the Isle of Swords for the first time. The island looked as if it had once been a huge mountainous mass of earth and stone, but all of its gentle slopes had been cut away by a great and terrible blade, leaving a high sheer wall of unassailable rock.
Anne searched the contours of the crescent-shaped island from right to left, beginning with its inhospitable rocky tail. These twisting slate-gray clumps formed a series of high coves and rested on a scarce bed of sand, the only shore Anne could see. Beyond the sand and rocks rose a massive cathedral of dark stone, pitted and crevassed, reminding Anne of a certain type of coral she’d once carved. A thin tree line gradually thickened into dense forest as it curled left, almost to the base of a pyramidlike mountain. No . . . Anne realized. A volcano, not a mountain. Gray vaporous smoke puffed out from its mouth and rose high in the sky. There, sheered by wind, the ashen mist spread outward like the spokes of a wheel, feeding the curtain that enveloped the island.
The volcano sloped into an unseen valley. And a menacing cliff rose up on the left side of the island. “There is our destination,” said Thorne lustily. He pointed with the bleeding stick, and Anne saw a stone castle at the cliff’s edge. It was spare in its design. Three towers, a gabled roof over a square keep, and only one window that looked out over the sea from its blank wall.
But before it all, guarding the mouth of the island’s bay, jagged blades of glistening stone thrust up out of the water. How many there were, Anne could not tell, but it was as perilous a gauntlet as any ship-killing reef in the world.
“The shards,” Thorne muttered. “The stone blades that you see are only a tenth of the danger. Beneath the surface, sharp ridges of hull-splitting coral wait for careless captains and their crews. We shall be anything but careless.” He turned and called, “Mister Skellick, raise the death’s-head!”
Anne watched the dark flag rise high on the Raven’s mainmast. Following the signal of their commander, the captains of the rest of Thorne’s fleet began to sail into the shards. The first ship, a schooner with one tall mast and one short, slipped between the rocky blades with little difficulty. A larger galleon went slowly next. Both navigated with no incident.
“Padre Dominguez charted this peril for us well,” said Thorne. “Honest fool. He could have misled us. It might have cost me half my fleet to figure out the safe passage through.” He laughed.
“I’d have sent your ships into the teeth of that coral,” Anne whispered.
“Would you?” Thorne asked. He smiled. “So would have I.” His smile faded as, within the shards, one of his ships drew too close to another. This large brigantine could not stop—not without plowing into the galleon in front of it or turning. Its captain chose to turn.
The ship went left when, according to the map, it should have remained straight.
“Idiot, what is he doing?” Thorne croaked. But to everyone’s astonishment, nothing happened to the brigantine. The captain had seemingly found another route through. Several of the other ships’ captains, tired of waiting in line on the approved paths, veered off in the direction the brigantine had taken. Some even turned to strike new ways themselves.
Thorne was beside himself with wrath. He slammed his bleeding stick against the rail and tore out a chunk of wood. Then they heard a tremendous crack! The brigantine had struck something. Anne watched in horror as the waves and current drove the impaled ship into the unseen fang below. Its bow began to crumble, and the foremast toppled into the water. Men began to dive overboard. Some of these never returned to the surface. Others were smashed against the rocks.
“Leave them!” Thorne ordered.
Within moments, the brigantine had split apart and sunk. The other ships that had gone off course met the same fate. Any sign of the men or the ships having existed now rested deep below the surface.
“Fools,” Thorne muttered.
“You heartless beast!” Anne yelled.
“Save your energy for the swim,” he said.
At the same time, still fifty miles from the island, the Bruce, with
Stede and Ramiro at the helm, gathered speed and sailed north.
Declan Ross was at a desk in his quarters. He held a large magnifying glass over the map.
Cat rapped softly on the already open door.
“Ah, I wondered if you’d come.”
“There was a bit of repair work to do,” Cat said, “after the ride we had last night.”
Ross nodded. They stared at each other in silence for a moment.
“Sit,” said the captain.
Cat did as he was told and looked down at his hands in his lap.
“I wish I’d realized sooner,” he said. “Might have saved us all a lot of trouble . . . and time.”
“Has it all come back?” Ross asked.
Cat shook his head. “No. Just bits and pieces. And it’s still not my own. It’s still like I’m watching scenes from someone else’s life.”
Ross leaned forward, his hands clasped on the desk. “Padre Dominguez told us there might be another map. He told us who might have it.”
“Captain Ross, I can explain—”
Ross held up his hand. “You don’t have to say another thing.
You are a member of my crew. I trust you.”
Cat stood to leave, but Ross urged him to wait. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how we came to have you with us.”
Cat nodded. “I guess . . . I’m just lucky.”
“Are you?” Ross asked. “I wonder about that. I’m beginning to wonder about a lot of things. See, I used to hold to luck. We pirates are a superstitious lot.” He laughed. “Never set sail on Friday, don’t bring a woman aboard—why, I bet old Ramiro has a gold coin in the keel and a silver coin under the mainmast.”
Cat smiled but didn’t know what the captain was trying to tell him.
Ross went on. “But luck doesn’t weave together the kind of intricate strands I’m beginning to see. I’m beginning to feel like maybe we were meant to find you . . . that we were meant to be mixed up in the search for Constantine’s Treasure.”
Ross got up, wal
ked quickly behind Cat, and closed and locked his cabin door.
“Before he died, Padre Dominguez told me something,” said Ross quietly as he sat back behind his desk. “I’ve shared this with no man, not even Stede, whom I’d trust with my life a hundred times and one. You see, along with the gold, silver, and jewels, there is one other treasure. It is the treasure that Padre Dominguez feared losing the most.” Cat leaned forward, and Ross explained. “Somewhere in the castle on the Isle of Swords, there is a small wooden chest. And in that chest, there are three long nails.”
Ross waited a long moment for that to sink in. Cat squinted.
“Nails?”
“Not just any nails, lad,” said Ross gravely. “These are the nails— the very three nails—used to crucify Christ.”
The Raven dropped anchor in the main cove. The water there was deep blue and fairly shallow but not transparent like the waters of the Caribbean. “If the priest’s message to you is to be believed,” said Thorne, “then something lives in these waters. Sharks, more than likely. He claims that only one of pure intentions can make this dive and return with the key. We’ll just see if he told us the truth.”
Thorne gestured, and a man with long, straight black hair, deeply browned skin, and dark paint beneath his eyes came forward.
“Arturo here,” said Thorne, “was once a champion cliff diver on his little island. He can hold his breath for a very long time. He will make the first attempt to retrieve the key.”
Arturo smiled, climbed up on the rail, and speared into the water.
Thorne, Anne, and many of the crew went to the rail. They saw Arturo’s brown legs kicking away for a moment, and then he was gone. Several seconds passed. Then they all felt something. A small jolt to the bottom of the ship. Thorne scanned the water. A strange ripple spread out from the hull. Everyone at the rail jumped back.
They’d seen something moving in the depths. It was just a fleeting glimpse—something long and dark. If it had indeed been a shark, it would have to have been one of the largest ever seen.