Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Page 19

  At the port, Torres was greeted by Prins, who was old and overweight and sweating in the sun, and the two of them walked together, talking, with two bodyguards slightly in front of them, two behind.

  Would Torres raise the alarm? Perhaps. And if he did, then Prins surely had enough men at his command to overpower us easily. But if that happened, Torres knew that my first sword slash would be across his throat and if that happened, none of us would see The Sage again.

  The funny thing is, I didn’t see him. Not at first. Instead it was as though I sensed him or that I became aware of him. I found myself looking around, the way you do if you smell burning when you shouldn’t. What’s that smell? Where’s that coming from?

  Only then did I see him. A figure who loitered in a crowd at the other end of the pier, part of the background but visible to me. When he turned his face, I saw who it was. James Kidd. Not here to take the air and see the sights by the look of him. Here on Assassin business. Here to kill . . . who? Prins? Torres?

  Jaysus. We kept close to the harbour wall as I led Adewalé over, grabbed Kidd and dragged him into a narrow alleyway between two fishing huts.

  “Edward, what the hell are you doing here?” He writhed in my grip but I held him easily. (I’d think back to that later—how easily I was able to pin him to the hut wall.)

  “I’m tailing these men to The Sage,” I told him. “Can you hold off until he appears?”

  Kidd’s eyebrows shot up. “The Sage is here?”

  “Aye, mate, he is, and Prins is leading us straight to him.”

  “Jaysus.” He pulled a frustrated face but I wasn’t offering him a choice. “I’ll stay my blade for a time—but not long.”

  Torres and Prins had moved off by then and we had no choice but to follow. I followed Kidd’s lead, on-the-spot Assassin training in the art of stealth. It worked like a dream. By staying at a certain distance we were able to remain out of sight and pick up on snippets of conversation, like Torres’s getting peeved at being made to hang on.

  “I grow tired of this walk, Prins,” he was saying. “We must be close by now.”

  As it turned out, we were. But close to what? Not to Prins’s plantation, that much was certain. Ahead was the dilapidated wooden fencing and odd, incongruous arched entrance of what looked like a graveyard.

  “Yes, just here,” Prins answered him. “We must be on equal footing, you see? I’m afraid I don’t trust Templars any more than you must trust me.”

  They stepped inside and we loitered.

  “Well if I’d known you were so skittish, Prins, I’d have brought you a bouquet of flowers,” Torres said with forced humour, and with a last look around, he entered the graveyard.

  Prins laughed. “Ah, I don’t know why I bother . . . For the money, I suppose. Vast sums of money . . .” His voice had trailed off. With a nod we slipped inside the cemetery, keeping low and using the crooked markers as cover, one eye on the centre where Torres, Prins and his four minders had congregated.

  “Now is the time,” Kidd told me as we gathered.

  “No. Not until we see The Sage,” I replied firmly.

  By now the Templar and the slaver were doing their deal. From a pouch hanging at his waist, Torres produced a bag of gold and dropped it into Prins’s outstretched hand. Greasing his palm not with silver, but gold. Prins weighed it, his eyes never leaving Torres.

  “This is but a portion of the ransom,” said Torres. A twitch of his mouth was the only clue he was not his usual composed self. “The rest is close at hand.”

  By now the Dutchman had opened the bag. “It pains me to traffic someone of my own race for profit, Mr. Torres. Tell me again . . . What has this Roberts fellow done to upset you?”

  “Is this some form of Protestant piety I am not familiar with?”

  “Perhaps another day,” he said, then unexpectedly tossed the bag back to Torres, who caught it.

  “What?”

  But Prins was already beginning to walk away. He motioned to his guards at the same time, calling to Torres, “Next time, see that you are not followed!” and then to his men, “Deal with this.”

  But it wasn’t towards Torres that the men rushed. It was towards us.

  Blade engaged I stood from behind my grave marker, braced and met the first attack with a quick upwards slash across the flank of the first man. It was enough to stop him in his tracks, and I span around him and drove the blade’s edge into the other side of his neck, slicing the carotid artery, painting the day red.

  He sank and died. I wiped his blood from my face, then wheeled and punched through the breastplate of another. A third man I misdirected by leaping to a grave marker, then made him pay for his mistake with sharp steel. Adewalé’s pistol cracked, the fourth man fell and the attack was over. But Kidd had already taken to his heels in pursuit of Prins. With a final glance back at where Torres stood, dazed and unable to take in the sudden turn of events, I gave a yell to Adewalé, then set off in pursuit.

  “You lost your chance, Kenway,” called Kidd back over his shoulder as we both raced through the sun-bleached streets. “I’m going after Prins.”

  “Kidd, no. Come on, man, we can work this together.”

  “You had your chance.”

  By now Prins had worked out what had gone wrong: his four men, his best bodyguards, lay dead in a graveyard—how apt—and he was alone, pursued through the streets of Kingston by an Assassin.

  Little did he know it but his only chance of survival right now was me. You had to feel sorry for him. Nobody in his right mind wants Edward Kenway as his only chance of survival.

  I caught Kidd, grabbed him by the waist and pulled him to the ground.

  (And I swear to God—and I’m not just saying this because of what would happen later. But I thought to myself how light he was, how slender was the waist that I grabbed.)

  “I can’t let you kill him, Kidd,” I gasped. “Not until I’ve found The Sage.”

  “I’ve been stalking that pig for a week now, charting his moves,” said Kidd angrily. “And here I find not one, but two of my targets—and you rob me of both.”

  Our faces were so close together I could feel the heat of his rage.

  “Patience,” I said, “and you’ll have your kills.”

  Furious, he pulled away. “All right, then,” he agreed. “But when we locate The Sage, you’re going to help me take Prins. Got that?”

  We spat and shook. The volcano had erupted but seemed to settle, and we made our way to Prins’s plantation. So, we would have to break in after all. How’s about that for being made to eat your words?

  On a short hill overlooking the sugar plantation, we found a platform and sat awhile. I watched the work below. The male slaves sang sadly as they hacked at cane, the constant rustle of which seemed to float on the breeze, and the women stumbled past, bent double beneath heavy baskets of sugar harvest.

  Adewalé had told me about life on a plantation, how when the cane was cut and harvested it was run between two metal rollers, and how it was common for a man’s arm to be dragged into the rollers. When that happened, the only way “to separate the man from his plight” was to hack off the arm. He told of how after collecting the sugar juice it was time to boil away the waters from the sugar and how the boiling sugar would stick like bird-lime and burn on, leaving a terrible scar. “I had friends lose eyes,” he said, “and fingers, and arms. And being slaves, you can believe that we never heard a word of praise, nor an apology of any kind.”

  I thought of something else he’d told me: “With this skin and with this voice, where can I go in the world and feel at ease?”

  Men like Prins, I realized, were the architects of misery for his people, their ideology the opposite of everything I believed in and everything we stood for at Nassau. We believed in life and liberty. Not this . . . subjugation. This torture. This slow death.

  My fists clenched.

  Kidd took a pipe from his pocket and smoked a little as we observed the comi
ngs and goings below us.

  “There are guards patrolling that property from end to end,” he said. “Looks to me like they use the bells to signal trouble. See? There.”

  “We’ll want to disable those before pushing too far,” I said thoughtfully.

  From the corner of my eye I saw something odd. Kidd licking his thumbs then pressing it into the bowl of his pipe to put it out. Well, that wasn’t odd, but what he did next was odd. He began dabbing his thumb in the bowl and rubbing ash on his eyelids.

  “With so many men about we can’t rely on stealth alone,” he said, “so I’ll do what I can to distract and draw their attention, giving you a chance to cut them down.”

  I watched, wondering what the hell he was playing at, as he cut his finger with a tiny pocket knife, and then squeezed out a drop of blood, which he put to his lips. Next he removed his tricorn. He removed the tie from his hair, pulled at it and ruffled it so that it fell across his face. He licked the back of one thumb, then like a cat used it to clean his face. Then he pushed his fingers into his gums, removed bits of wet wadding that had fattened his cheeks and dropped them to the ground.

  Next he pulled up his shirt and began unlacing a corset that he pulled out from beneath his shirt and tossed to the ground, revealing, as he then opened the top buttons of his shirt and pulled the collar wider, what were, unmistakably, his tits.

  My head span. His tits? No. Her tits. Because when I eventually tore my eyes off the tits and to his face—no, her face—I could see that this man was not a man at all.

  “Your name is not James, is it?” I said, slightly unnecessarily.

  She smiled. “Not most days. Come on.”

  When she stood, her posture had changed so that where before she’d walked and moved like a man, now there was no doubt. It was as plain as the tits on her chest. She was a woman.

  Already beginning to clamber down the hill towards the plantation fence, I skidded to catch up with her.

  “Damn it, man. How is it you’re a woman?”

  “Christ, Edward, is it something that needs explaining? Now, I’m here to do a job. I’ll let you be amused later.”

  In the end, though, I wasn’t really amused. To tell the truth, it made perfect sense that she should resort to dressing like a man. Sailors hated having a woman aboard ship. They were superstitious about it. If the mystery woman wanted to live the life of a seaman, then that’s what she had to be—a seaman.

  When I thought about it I goggled at the sheer bloody guts of it. The courage it must have taken for her to do what she did. And I tell you, my sweet, I’ve met a lot of extraordinary people. Some bad. Some good. Most a mix of good and bad, because that’s the way most people are. Of all of them the example I’d most like you to follow is hers. Her name was Mary Read. I know you won’t forget it. Bravest woman I ever met, bar none.

  FORTY

  As I waited for Mary by the gates I overheard guards chatting. Torres had managed to slip away. Interesting. Prins was holed up in his plantation in fear of his life. Good. I hope the fear gripped icy hands at his stomach. I hope the terror kept him awake at nights. I’d look forward to seeing it in his eyes when I killed him.

  First, though, to gain entry. And for that I needed . . .

  There she was. You had to hand it to her, she was a superb actor. For God knows how long she’d convinced all of us that she was a man, and now here she was in a new role, not changing sex this time but convincing the guards she was ill. And yes, doing a bloody good job of it.

  “Stand your ground!” ordered a soldier at the gate.

  “Please, I’ve been shot,” she rasped. “I need aid.”

  “Christ, Phillips, look at her. She’s hurt.”

  The more sympathetic of the two soldiers stepped forward and the gate to the plantation opened in front of her.

  “Sir,” she said weakly, “I’m poorly and faint.”

  Sympathetic Soldier offered her his arm to help her inside.

  “Bless you, lads,” she said and limped through the gate, which closed behind them. I didn’t see it from my vantage point, of course, but I heard it: the swish of a blade, the muffled punching sound it made as she drove it into them, the low moan as the last of life escaped them, then the thump of their bodies on the dirt.

  Now we were both inside and darting across the compound towards his manor. Probably we were seen by slaves, but we had to hope they wouldn’t raise the alarm. Our prayers were answered because moments after that we were creeping into the manor, using hand signals to move stealthily around the rooms—until we came across him standing in a gazebo in a rear yard of the house. Crouched on either side of an archway, we peeked around the frame and saw him there, standing with his back to us, his hands across his stomach looking out over his grounds, pleased with his lot in life, a fat slaver, his fortune built on the suffering of others. You remember me saying I’d met some who were all bad? Laurens Prins was top of that list.

  We looked at one another. The kill belonged to her and yet, for some reason (because they were trying to recruit me?), she waved me onward. I stood, went through to the yard, crept beneath the gazebo and stood behind Laurens Prins.

  And engaged my blade.

  Oh, I kept it well greased; the one thing you can be sure of when it comes to pirates is that while we may not be a particularly domesticated breed, we kept our weapons in good condition. It was the same philosophy as keeping the galleon ship-shape. A question of need, of survival.

  So it was with my blade. When it got wet I cleaned it thoroughly, and I kept it greased to within an inch of its life, and so these days it barely made a noise when I ejected it. It was so quiet, in fact, that Prins didn’t hear it.

  I cursed, and at last he turned in surprise, perhaps expecting to see one of his guards there, about to shout at the man for his impudence, creeping up on him like that. Instead I thrust the blade into him and his eyes opened wide in surprise, frozen like that as I let him down to the floor, keeping the blade in him, holding him there as blood filled his lungs and the life began to leave him.

  “Why hang over me like a leering crow?” he coughed. “To see an old man suffer?”

  “You’ve caused no small portion of suffering yourself, Mr. Prins,” I told him dispassionately. “This is retribution, I suppose.”

  “You absurd cut-throats and your precious philosophy,” he jeered, the final pathetic contempt of a dying man. “You live in the world, but you cannot make it move.”

  I smiled down at him. “You mistake my motive, old man. I’m only after a bit of coin.”

  “As was I, lad,” he said. “As was I . . .”

  He died.

  I stepped out of the gazebo, leaving his body behind, when I heard a noise from above me. Looking up, I saw on a balcony The Sage, Roberts, just as I remembered him. He held Mary hostage, with a flint-lock pistol aimed at the side of her head and—clever lad—he held her wrist to stop her engaging her blade.

  “I found your man,” she called down, seemingly unconcerned about the pistol at her forehead. He’d use it too. The heat in his eyes said so. They blazed. Remember me, do you, mate? I thought. The man who stood by while they took your blood?

  He did. “The Templar from Havana,” he said, nodding.

  “I’m no Templar, mate,” I called back, “that was just a ruse. We’ve come here to save your arse.”

  (By which, of course, I meant, “Torture you until you tell us where The Observatory is.”)

  “Save me? I work for Mr. Prins.”

  “Well then he’s a poor man to call master. He meant to sell you out to the Templars.”

  He rolled his eyes. “You can’t trust anyone, it seems.”

  Perhaps he relaxed, for Mary chose that moment to make her move. She dragged the heel of her boot down his shin and he cried out in pain as she twisted to one side and from underneath his grasp. She flailed for his gun arm but he whipped it away, aimed and fired but missed. Now she was off balance and he saw his chance, p
ivoting on the rail of the balcony and kicking her with both feet. With a yell she flipped over the rail and I was already starting forward to try and catch her when she caught herself and swung into the balcony below.

  Meanwhile, The Sage had drawn another pistol, but guards were arriving, alerted by the gunfire.

  “Roberts,” I shouted, but instead of shooting at the guards he aimed his second shot at the bell.

  Clang.

  He couldn’t miss, and it had the desired effect: as Mary dropped lithely down from the second balcony to join me, engaging her blade at the same time, guards came pouring from the archways into the courtyard. Back-to-back we stood but there was no time to appraise our enemy at leisure. Muskets and pistols were being produced, so into action we sprang.

  Six each, I think, was the tally. Twelve men who died with varying degrees of bravery and skill, and at least one case of dubious suitability for any kind of combat. It was the way he screwed up his eyes and whimpered as he came running into battle.

  We heard the running feet of more men arriving and knew that was our cue to escape, dashing from the courtyard, then across the compound, urging the slaves to run, run, free themselves, as we went. If there had not been scores of soldiers on our tails, then we would have stopped and forced them to escape. As it was, I don’t know whether they pressed home the advantage we’d given them.

  • • •

  Later, when we stopped and I was done cursing my luck at losing Roberts, I asked her real name.

  “Mary Read to my mum,” she answered, and at the same time I felt something press into my crotch and when I looked down, saw that it was the point of Mary’s hidden blade.

  She was smiling, thank God.

  “But not a word of it to anyone,” she said. “Or I’ll unman you as well.”

  I never did tell anyone. After all, this was a woman who knew how to piss standing up. I wasn’t about to underestimate her.

  FORTY-ONE

  JANUARY 1718

  Dear Edward,