Chapter Twenty-Six
The descendents of the crew of the Dutch sailing ship Mariabelle crouched in silence in the jungle, all of them staring at the mansion, all of them filled with dread. Willem’s stomach was an empty pit in him, hollowed out with fear. His fingers, slick with sweat, wrapped around his spear. Thijmen knelt alongside him, holding one of the few remaining serviceable cutlasses, a blade used for slicing heads off large fish and cutting coconuts, not opening a man’s body.
Pieter crept through the underbrush and stopped, putting his hand on Thijmen’s shoulder. “Tonight is the night. He won’t be expecting it.”
Thijmen looked into Pieter’s face, saw the grim determination in the straight line of Pieter’s mouth, and doubted.
“He will be expecting it after what you did to Nereika and the stranger on the beach yesterday,” Thijmen said. “We should never have let you try it.”
“The Sparkle Spell? It’s just a cantrip, it’s next-to-harmless,” Pieter said. “He’ll figure we were just trying to capture the stranger. He’ll never think we’re coming.”
“But he took Dedrick,” Thijmen said, turning his attention back to the mansion. “That must mean something is going on.”
“It does,” Pieter said. “It means we must get Dedrick back. We can’t let the white-haired man just pluck us from our homes, steal us from the jungle, make us disappear. This has gone on too long, Thijmen. We must make a stand. We cannot just live here on this island in constant fear of when he will take another one of us.”
Pieter squeezed Thijmen’s shoulder. “It is better to die trying to free ourselves than to continue to live like this, knowing our children or grandchildren might someday be taken by him.”
Thijmen nodded. “What about the stranger?”
Pieter let loose of Thijmen’s shoulder and twisted his spear in his hands. “If he gets in the way, we kill him. We know nothing of him; he may be with the white-haired man.”
“And Nereika?” Thijmen asked. “She will fight for him.”
The two stared at each other for a moment.
“Yes, she will,” Pieter said softly.
“Do we kill her, too?”
“If we must,” Pieter said. “But she didn’t kill us yesterday, and she could have.”
“Do you think she understood?”
“She didn’t kill us.”
They were quiet for another moment, each regarding the other. The Sparkle Spell was one of two cantrips passed down from the elders, a simple incantation much like The Red Lights that, when spoken, could create a brief sensation of the essence of the words. They were just simple tricks nobody knew the origin of, magic acts done for the children, a simple thread in the fabric of life to which nobody had ever given much thought, two simple tricks that a handful of people in the crew could perform, and Pieter was one of them. As had been Nereika, before she had been taken.
For a while, now, The Sparkle Spell was supposed to be the warning, the sign that the rest of the crew was coming. But Nereika had fought back on the beach, fought against them instead of joining them and returning to camp. And the younger white man had been almost dazed and confused by what happened, crouching over on the beach and covering his head as the air had erupted with harmless sparkles of light.
At that moment Pieter had wished The Sparkle Spell could do some damage, cause some harm, because it so evidently discombobulated the new white man. Add a little pain to it, and it could work wonders, Pieter had thought in the moment before he realized Nereika was almost upon him, red-tinted tendrils of lightning snaking through the underbrush, looking for him and the others with him. Whatever the white-haired man had done to her, he had done it completely; she was no longer one of the crew.
And then in the near-panic to escape Nereika and remain hidden from the new white man, Dedrick had disappeared into the jungle in the direction of the mansion and become captured by the white-haired man. A stupid mistake and now another one of them was gone, dressed in the uniform of the mansion.
Captain Aald crept up to Thijmen and Pieter, his hand gripping a rapier more accustomed to gutting fish than men. Aald surveyed the leaders of the two landing parties quietly, searching their eyes for any last minute doubts. He saw nothing but grim determination in both of the young men.
“Okay, so we go in through the main door and The Dead Calm,” Aald said. “We don’t know anything about how it looks inside, but we know it’s got to be big, filled with hallways and rooms. The women will go in right behind us and act as guides, standing in the hallways and providing us with directions to where we’ve come from and where others have gone.
“We’ll go in quiet if we can, but if we have to, we break through whatever doors and windows we need to. Move quickly once you’re in; kill the white-haired man, find Nereika and Dedrick, and then we meet back on the main beach. Let’s get going.”
Aald nodded to Pieter and disappeared into the darkness of the jungle, the soft sound of other footfalls joining his as Pieter’s party moved off with the captain. Pieter looked at Willem, tried to give him an uplifting smile, to boost the man’s flagging spirits, and then turned and patted Thijmen’s shoulder with the palm of his hand.
“I’ll see you on the inside, Thijmen, and when I do, we shall be free men,” Pieter said, turning and taking up the trail position on his landing party as it snaked through the underbrush toward the edge of the yard near The Dead Calm.
Thijmen turned and stared at the main door, a hundred yards away, across perfectly manicured grass, fringed by perfectly trimmed shrubbery. Right there, just a few dozen yards on the other side of the bushes behind which he now knelt, had been the spot where Geert had transformed from life to ash, dust blown on the wind. How? And, yet, it had been so, become an irreversible fact of life, something nobody could understand.
Thijmen turned to the eight men who were his landing party, each armed with a spear. “When the captain sends up the purple smoke, it’s time to go.”
Every man turned his eyes to the section of jungle near where Pieter and Captain Aald would soon be emerging, signaling the beginning of the raid.