Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Read online

  I write with sad news of your father, who passed away one month ago, taken by pleurisy. His passing was not painful, and he died in my arms I am pleased to say. So at least we were together until the very end.

  We were poor at the time of his passing and so I have taken a job at a local tavern where you may reach me if you wish to correspond. News of your exploits has found my ears. They say you are a pirate of some infamy. I wish that you could write to me and allay my fears on this matter. I regret to say I have not seen Caroline since you left, and so I am unable to pass you any details regarding her health.

  Mother

  I looked at the return address. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

  FORTY-TWO

  Well, I know I was in Nassau during that early part of 1718—where else would I be, it was my home—but to be honest I remember only fragments. Why? That’s a question you need to direct to him in there. Him, that little voice inside who tells you you need one more drink when you know you’ve had enough. That was the little man who started hooting and wouldn’t let me pass The Old Avery without a trip inside to while away the day, then wake up the next, rough as arseholes, knowing there was only one thing that would make me feel better, and it was served by Anne Bonny, barmaid at The Old Avery. And then, what do you know? The whole circle—a vicious bloody circle—would begin again.

  Yes, I’ve since worked out I drank to drown my discontent, but that’s the thing with drinking, you often don’t know why at the time. You don’t realize that the drinking is a symptom, not a cure. So I sat and watched as Nassau fell to rack and ruin, and being so drunk, I forgot to feel disgusted about it. Instead I spent day after day at the same table of The Old Avery, either staring at my filched picture of The Observatory or attempting to etch out a letter to Mother or to Caroline. Thinking of Father. Wondering if the fire at the farmhouse had hastened his death. Wondering if I was to blame for that too and knowing the answer was the reason why my letters to Mother ended up crumpled bits of paper on the floor of the terrace.

  Mind you, I wasn’t so wrapped up in my problems that I forgot to eye up the delicious behind of Anne Bonny, even if she was forbidden to us. (Officially, that was. But Anne, let’s just say she liked the company of pirates, if you know what I mean.)

  Anne had arrived in Nassau with her husband, James, a buccaneer and lucky bleeder for being married to her. Having said that, she had a way about her, did Anne, like she wasn’t afraid to give a fellow the glad eye, which did make you wonder if old James Bonny had his hands full with that one. I’d wager that serving ales at The Old Avery wasn’t his idea.

  “There’s precious little in this town but piss and insects,” she used to complain, blowing strands of hair off her face. She was right, but still she stayed, fending off the advances of most, accepting the advances of a lucky few.

  It was around that time, as I wallowed in my own misery, days spent chasing away one hangover while working on new ones, that we first heard about The King’s Pardon.

  “It’s a bag of shite!”

  Charles Vane had said that. His words penetrating that midmorn booze buzz I’d been working on.

  What was?

  “It’s a ruse,” he thundered on. “One to keep us soft before they attack Nassau! You’ll see. Mark me.”

  What was a ruse?

  “It’s no ruse, Vane,” said Blackbeard, his voice betraying an unusual seriousness. “I heard it straight from the mouth of the greasy Bermudan captain. There’s a pardon on offer for any pirate who wants it.”

  A pardon. I let the words sink in.

  Hornigold was there too. “Ruse or not, I think it’s plain the British may return to Nassau,” he said. “With arms no doubt. In the absence of any clear ideas, I say we lay low. No piracy and no violence. Do nothing to ruffle the king’s feathers for now.”

  “Preserving the king’s plumage is no concern of mine, Ben,” Blackbeard rebuked him.

  Benjamin turned on him. “It will be when he sends his soldiers to scrub this island clean of our residue. Look around you, man. Is this cesspool worth dying for?”

  He was right, of course. It stank, and more so every day: a vomitous mixture of shit and bilge-water and rotting carcasses. But even so, difficult though it might be for you to believe, it was our vomitous mixture of shit and bilge-water and rotting carcasses, and we were prepared to fight for it. Besides, it didn’t smell so bad when you were drunk.

  “Aye, it’s our republic. Our idea,” insisted Blackbeard. “A free land for free men, remember? So maybe it’s filthy to look at. But ain’t it still an idea worth fighting for?”

  Benjamin averted his eyes. Had he already decided? Had he made his choice?

  “I can’t be sure,” he said. “For when I look on the fruits of our years of labour, all I see is sickness . . . idleness . . . idiocy.”

  Remember what I said about Benjamin? How he dressed differently, had a more military bearing. Looking back now, I think he never really wanted to be a pirate, that his ambitions lay on the other side, with His Majesty’s Navy. He was never especially keen on attacking ships, for one thing, which was a rarity among us. Blackbeard told the story of how a vessel under his command had once laid siege to a sloop, only for Benjamin to steal the passengers’ hats. That’s all, just their hats. And yes, you might think it was because he was an old softy and didn’t want to terrorize the passengers too much, and maybe you’d be right. But the fact is, out of all of us, Benjamin Hornigold was the least like a pirate, almost as though he wasn’t willing to accept that he was one.

  All that being the case, I don’t suppose I should have been surprised by what happened next.

  FORTY-THREE

  JULY 1718

  “Dearest Caroline . . .”

  And that, on that particular occasion (location: The Old Avery, as if you needed telling), was as far as I got.

  “Putting some shape to your sentiments?” Anne stood over me, brown and beautiful. A treat for the eyes.

  “Just a short letter home. I reckon she’s past caring anyway.”

  I crumpled up the letter and tossed it away.

  “Ah, you’ve got a hard heart,” said Anne as she moved off behind the bar. “It should be softer.”

  Aye, I thought. Yer right, lass. That soft heart felt like it was melting. In the months since we’d heard about The King’s Pardon, Nassau was riven, divided into those who took the Pardon, those who planned to take the Pardon (after one final score), and those who were dead against the Pardon and cursed all others, led by Charles Vane, and . . .

  Blackbeard? My old friend was keeping his powder dry, but looking back I think he’d decided that a life of piracy was no longer for him. He was away from Nassau on the lookout for prizes. News of big scores and strange allegiances were reaching our ears. I began to think that when Blackbeard had left Nassau, he’d never had any intention of returning. (And he never did, as far as I know.)

  And me? Well, on the one hand I was wary of being mates with Vane. On the other, I didn’t want to take the Pardon, which made me mates with Vane whether I liked it or not. Vane had been waiting for Jacobite reinforcements to arrive but they never had. Instead he began making plans to leave, maybe establish another pirate republic elsewhere. I would take the Jackdaw and leave with him. What other choice did I have?

  Then came that morning, a few days before we were due to depart, as I sat on the terrace of The Old Avery, trying to write my letter to Caroline and passing the time of day with Anne Bonny, when we heard the sound of carriage-gun fire from the harbour. An eleven-gun salute, it was, and we knew exactly what was up. We’d been forewarned about it. The British were coming to take control of the island.

  And here they were with a blockade that bottled up both entrances to the harbour. HMS Milford and HMS Rose were the muscle. Two warships escorting a fleet of five other vessels, on which were soldiers, craftsmen, supplies, building materials, an entire colony come to flush out the pirates, drag Nassau up by its boo
tstraps and return it to respectability.

  They were led by the flagship Delicia, which despatched row-boats to negotiate the graveyard of ships and land on our beach. As we arrived there, along with every other jack-tar in Nassau, its occupants were just landing, led by none other than my old friend Woodes Rogers. He was helped out of his row-boat looking as tanned and well-kept as ever, though more worn. You remember his promise to be governor of Havana? He’d delivered on that. Remember him telling me how he planned to rout the pirates from Nassau? It looked as though he planned on delivering on that one too.

  Never had I longed for Blackbeard more. One thing I knew was that my old friend Edward Thatch would have known which way to turn. A mix of instinct and cunning would have powered him like the wind.

  “Well I’ll be hanged,” Calico Jack said by my side (tempting fate there, Jack). “King George has grown tired of our devilry. Who’s the grim fellow?”

  “That’s Captain Woodes Rogers,” I replied, and as I was in no hurry to reacquaint myself with him, I shrank into the crowd, but still close enough to hear as Rogers was handed a roll of parchment that he consulted, before saying, “We desire a parley with the men who call themselves governors of this island. Charles Vane, Ben Hornigold and Edward Thatch. Come forth, if you please?”

  Benjamin stepped forward.

  “Lily-livered punk,” cursed Jack and never were truer words spoken. For if there was a moment that Nassau came to an end and our hopes for the republic were dashed, then that was it.

  FORTY-FOUR

  NOVEMBER 1718

  It wasn’t until I found him that I really realized how much I had missed him.

  Little did I know I was soon to lose him for good.

  It was on a North Carolina beach, Ocracoke Bay, just before dawn and he was having a party—of course—and had been up all night—of course.

  There were campfires dotted all over the beach, men dancing a jig to the sound of a fiddle further along, other men passing a black-jack of rum between them and guffawing loudly. Wild boar cooked on a spit and the delicious scent of it made my stomach do hungry flips. Perhaps here, on Ocracoke Beach, Blackbeard had established his own pirate republic. Perhaps he had no interest whatsoever in returning to Nassau and making things right.

  Charles Vane was already there, and as I approached, trudging up the sand towards them and already anticipating the liquor on my lips and the wild boar in my belly, he was standing, his conversation with Blackbeard evidently just ending.

  “A great disappointment you are, Thatch!” he bellowed nastily, then on seeing me, said, “His mind is made up to stay here, he says. So sod him and hang all you that follow this sorry bastard into obscurity.”

  Anybody else but Blackbeard, and Vane would have slit his throat for being a traitor to the cause. But he didn’t because it was Blackbeard.

  Anybody else but Vane, and Blackbeard would have had him put in leg-irons for his insolence. But he didn’t. Why? Maybe out of guilt because Blackbeard had turned his back on piracy. Maybe because no matter what you thought of Charles, you had to admire his guts, his devotion to the cause. None had fought harder against the Pardon than Charles. None had been a bigger thorn in Rogers’s side than he. He’d launched a fire-ship against their blockade and escaped, then continued to orchestrate raids on New Providence, doing anything he could to disrupt Rogers’s governorship while he waited for reinforcements to arrive. The particular reinforcements he hoped for wore black in battle and went by the name Blackbeard. But as I arrived on the beach that balmy morning, it looked as though the last of Charles Vane’s hopes had been dashed.

  He left, his feet kicking up clouds of sand as he stomped back along the beach, away from the flickering warmth of the campfires, shaking with rage.

  We watched him go. I looked down at Blackbeard. His belts were unbuckled, his coat unbuttoned and his newly acquired belly thrust at the buttons of his shirt. He said nothing, simply ushered me to take a seat on the sand beside him, handed me a bottle of wine and waited for me to take a drink.

  “That man is a prick,” he said, slightly drunkenly, waving a hand in the direction of where Charles Vane had been.

  Ah, I thought, but the irony is your old mucker Edward Kenway wants the same thing as the prick.

  Vane might have been devoted to the cause, but he didn’t have the faith of the brethren. Always a cruel man, he’d lately become even more ruthless and savage. I’d been told that his new trick was to torture captives by tying them to the bowsprit, inserting matches beneath their eyelids—and then lighting them. Even the men who followed him had begun to question him. Perhaps Vane knew it as well as I did—that Nassau needed a leader who could inspire the men. Nassau needed Blackbeard.

  He stood now, Blackbeard, Charles Vane a distant dot on the horizon, and beckoned me to follow.

  “I know you’ve come to call me home, Kenway.” He looked touched. “Your faith in me is kind. But with Nassau done in, I feel I’m finished.”

  I was telling the truth when I said, “I’m not of the same mind, mate. But I won’t begrudge you the state of yours.”

  He nodded. “Jaysus, Edward. Living like this is like living with a large hole in your gut, and every time your innards spill over the ground, you’re obliged to scoop ’em up and shove ’em back in. When Ben and me first set down in Nassau, I undervalued the needs for folks of character to shape and guide the place to its full purpose. But I was not wrong about the corruption that comes with that course.”

  For a moment or so as we walked we listened to the tide on the sand, the soft rushing, receding noise of the sea. Perhaps he, like me, when he thought of corruption, thought of Benjamin.

  “Once a man gets a taste of leadership, it’s hard for him not to wonder why he ain’t in charge of the whole world.”

  He gestured behind. “I know these men think me a fine captain, but I bloody hate the taste of it. I’m arrogant. I lack the balance needed to lead from behind the crowd.”

  I thought I knew what he meant. I thought I understood. But I didn’t like it—I didn’t like the fact that Blackbeard was drifting away from us.

  We walked.

  “You still looking for that Sage fellow?” he asked me. I told him I was, but said nothing of how the search for The Sage had consisted mainly of sitting in The Old Avery drinking and thinking of Caroline.

  “Ah, well, taking a prize a month back I heard that a man named Roberts was working a slave ship called the Princess. Might want to see about it?”

  So—the carpenter with the dead eyes, the man with the ageless knowledge, had moved on from plantations to slave ships. That made sense.

  “The Princess. Cheers, Thatch.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  The British were coming after Blackbeard, of course. I later found out it was a force led by Lieutenant Maynard of HMS Pearl. A reward had been put on Blackbeard’s head by the governor of Virginia after merchants made a noise about Blackbeard’s habit of sailing from Ocracoke Bay and taking the odd prize here and there; the governor worried that Ocracoke inlet would soon become another Nassau. The governor didn’t like having the world’s most infamous pirate in his back-yard. So he put a bounty on his head and so they came, the British did.

  • • •

  The first we heard of it was a whispered alarm. “The English are coming. The English are coming,” and looking through the gun hatches of Blackbeard’s sloop the Adventure, we saw that they’d launched a small boat and were trying to sneak up on us. We would have completely destroyed them, of course, but for one crucial thing. You know that party I was talking about? The wine and the wild boar? It had gone on. And on.

  We were very, very catastrophically hung-over.

  The best response we could manage was warning the row-boat off with some shot.

  There were very few of us aboard Blackbeard’s ship that morning, perhaps twenty at the most. But I was one of them, little knowing I was about to have a part in the ultimate fate of the world’s
most famous pirate.

  And give him his due, he might have been hung-over—just as we all were—but Blackbeard knew the water-ways around Ocracoke Bay and so off we went, weighing anchor and making haste for the sand-banks.

  Behind us came Maynard’s men. They flew the Red Ensign and left us in no doubt as to what they intended. I saw it in Blackbeard’s eyes. My old friend Edward Thatch. All of us aboard the Adventure that day knew the English were after him and him alone. The governor of Virginia’s declaration had named only one pirate, and that pirate was Edward Thatch. I think we all knew we weren’t the real targets of these dogged English; it was Blackbeard. Nevertheless, not one man gave himself up or threw himself overboard. There was not a man among us who was not willing to die for him—that was the devotion and loyalty he inspired. If only he could have used those qualities in service of Nassau.

  The day was calm, there was no wind in our sails and we had to use our sweepers to make progress. We could see the whites of our pursuers’ eyes, and they could see ours. Blackbeard ran to our stern, where he leaned over the gunwale and shouted across the still channel at Maynard.

  “Damn you, villains, who are you? Where did you come from?”

  Those on the ship behind gave no answer, just stared at us blank-eyed. Probably they wanted to unsettle us.

  “You may see by our colours we are no pirates,” bellowed Blackbeard, waving around himself, his voice echoing strangely from the steep sand-banks on both sides of the narrow channel. “Launch a boat to board us. You’ll see we are no pirates.”

  “I cannot spare a boat to launch,” called Maynard back. There was a pause. “I’ll board you with my sloop soon enough.”

  Blackbeard cursed and raised a glass of rum to toast him. “I drink damnation to you and your men who are cowardly, dog! I shall give nor take any quarter.”