Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Read online

  Across the roadway, he risked a quick glance over his shoulder before placing both hands to the top of the stone wall and heaving himself over. Seeing me, he let out a small, frightened whimper and I had time to think that though he was sprightly for a man of his years—his speed aided by his fear, no doubt—I was catching up with him, and tossed the sword from one hand to the other in order to vault the wall, land on two feet on the other side and sprint off in pursuit.

  I was close enough to smell his stink, but he’d reached an outhouse, then disappeared from view. I heard the scrape of boot on stone from nearby, as though a third person was in the yard, and dimly wondered if it was Seth. Or perhaps the farm owner. Perhaps one of the drinkers from the Auld Shillelagh. Focused on finding Tom Cobleigh, I gave it no mind.

  By the wall of the outhouse I crouched, listening hard. Wherever Cobleigh was, he’d stopped moving. I glanced to my left and right, saw only farm buildings, black blocks against the grey night, heard only the occasional bleating of a goat and the sound of insects. On the other side of the highway lights burned at the window; but otherwise, the tavern was quiet.

  Then, in the almost oppressive quiet, I heard a crunch of gravel from the other side of the building. He was there, waiting for me, expecting me to come running recklessly from around that side of the outhouse.

  I thought about our positions. He’d be expecting me from that corner. So, very slowly and as quietly as I could, I crept towards the opposite corner. I winced as my boots disturbed the stones and hoped the noise wouldn’t carry. I edged quietly along the side of the building and at the end stopped and listened. If I was right, Tom Cobleigh would be lying in wait at the other side. If I was wrong, I could expect a knife in my belly.

  I held my breath, then risked a peek around the side of the outhouse.

  I’d judged right. There was Cobleigh at the far corner. His back was to me and in his fist was a raised knife. Waiting for me to appear, he was a sitting duck. I could have reached him in three quick strides and slipped my blade into his spine before he had a chance to fart.

  But no. I wanted him alive. I wanted to know who his companions had been. Who was the tall, ring-wearing man able to stop Julian from killing me?

  So instead I disarmed him. Literally. I darted forward and I cut his arm off.

  Or, that was the intention, at least. My inexperience as a swordsman was all too obvious, or was it simply because the sword was too blunt? Either way, as I brought it down two-handed on Tom Cobleigh’s forearm, it cut his sleeve and burrowed into the flesh, but didn’t sever the arm. At least he dropped the sword.

  Cobleigh screamed and pulled away. He grabbed at his wounded arm, which jetted blood across the wall of the outhouse and onto the dirt. At the same time I saw a movement in the darkness and remembered the noise I had heard, that possible other presence. Too late. The shadows delivered a figure into the moonlight, and I saw eyes blank behind the hood, work-clothes and boots that were somehow too clean.

  Poor Tom Cobleigh. He never saw it coming and virtually backed onto the stranger’s sword, pinned as the new arrival thrust his blade into his back and through the front of his rib-cage, so that it emerged dripping blood. He looked down at it, a grunt his final worldly utterance before the stranger flicked his sword to one side and his corpse span from the blade and thumped heavily to the dirt.

  There is a saying, isn’t there? My enemy’s enemy is my friend. Something like that. But there’s often an exception to the rule and in my case he was a man in a hood with a blood-stained sword. My neck was still stinging from the mark of his ring and my face still throbbed from his fists. Why he’d killed Tom Cobleigh, I had no idea and didn’t care; instead with a warrior’s roar I lunged forward and the shafts of our swords rang like bells in the quiet night.

  He parried easily. One. Two. From going forward I was already being driven back, forced to defend messily and sloppily. Inexperienced swordsman? I wasn’t a swordsman at all. I might as well have been wielding a club or a cosh for all the skill I had with the blade. With a swish of his sword-point he opened a gash in my arm and first I felt warm blood wash down my biceps and soak my sleeve, before feeling the strength seem to leak out of my sword-arm. We weren’t fighting. Not anymore. He was playing with me. Playing with me before he killed me

  “Show me your face,” I gasped, but he made no reply. The only sign he’d even heard was a slight smiling of the eyes behind the hood. The arc of his sword fooled my eyes and I was too slow—and not just a little too slow, but far too slow—to stop him from opening a second gash in my arm.

  Again he struck. Again. I’ve since realized that he cut me with all the precision of a medical man, enough to hurt but not permanently injure me. Certainly enough to disarm me. In the end, I didn’t feel the sword drop from my fingertips. I just heard it hit the dirt and looked down to see it on the ground with blood from my wounded arm dripping onto the blade.

  Perhaps I expected him to remove his hood. But he did not. Instead he levelled the point of his sword just below my chin and with his other hand indicated for me to drop to my knees.

  “You don’t know me well enough if you think I’m going to meet my end on my knees, stranger,” I told him, feeling oddly calm in the face of defeat and death. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll stay standing.”

  He spoke in tones deep and flat, possibly disguised. “You’ll not meet your end tonight, Edward Kenway. More’s the pity. But I tell you this. Unless the Emperor sails with you on it tomorrow, this night is only the beginning for anyone bearing the Kenway name. Leave at first light and no more harm comes to your mother or father. But if that ship sails without you, they will suffer. You all will. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Do I get to know the identity of my gracious enemies?” I asked.

  “You do not. You know only that there are forces in this world more powerful than you could possibly comprehend, Edward Kenway. Tonight you have seen them in action. You have suffered at their hands. Let this be an end to it. Never return to these shores. Now, Edward Kenway, you will kneel.”

  His sword came up and the hilt smashed into my temple.

  When I woke up, I was on the Emperor.

  FIFTEEN

  At least I thought I was on the Emperor. I hoped so anyway. With my head throbbing, I pulled myself out of my hammock, put my boots to the deck and was sent flying forward.

  My fall was broken—by my face. I lay groaning on the planks for a moment or so, wondering why I felt so drunk when I didn’t remember doing any actual drinking. Except, of course, I wasn’t drunk.

  But if I wasn’t drunk, why was the floor moving? It tipped this way and that and I spent a moment or so waiting for it to settle until I realized that the constant rocking was exactly that. Constant. It wasn’t going to stop.

  On unsteady feet that shuffled and danced in the sawdust I straightened, hands out like a man trying to negotiate a balancing beam. My body still hurt from the beating I’d taken but I was on the mend, my wounds a day or so old.

  What hit me next was the air thick with a smell. No, not a smell. A stench.

  Oh my days, it stank. A mix of shit, piss, sweat and sea-water. A smell I came to learn was unique to the below decks of a ship. Just as every butcher’s shop, every tavern has its own smell, so does every below decks. The frightening thing was how quickly you got used to it.

  The smell was of men, and on the Emperor there were 150 of the blighters, who when they weren’t manning their positions, hanging from the rigging or crowded into the galleys, would sleep cuddled up to carriages on the gun-decks, or in hammocks much like the one I’d woken up in.

  I could hear one of the crew, sniggering in the shadows as the ship lurched and I was thrown against a wooden support then just as violently slammed into a column opposite. Sea legs. That was what they called it. I had to get my sea legs.

  “Is this the Emperor?” I said into the murk.

  The creak of the ship. Like the smell and the sea le
gs it was something I’d get used to.

  “Aye, you’re on the Emperor,” came the reply.

  “I’m new on the ship,” I called into the darkness, clinging on for dear life.

  There was a rasping chuckle. “You don’t say.”

  “How far are we from land?”

  “A day. You were brought on asleep or unconscious. Too much booze, I’d say.”

  “Something like that,” I replied, still hanging on to the support for dear life. My mind went to the events of the last day or so but it was like worrying at an open wound. Too soon, too painful. I’d need to try and make sense of what had happened. I’d need to face the guilt, and I’d have letters to write. (Letters I wouldn’t have been able to write without Caroline’s tuition, I reminded myself, with a fresh feeling of regret.) But all that would have to wait until later.

  From behind me came a grating, wrenching sound. I swung round and squinted in the half-light, and when my eyes adjusted I could see a capstan. From above I could hear feet and the raised voices of men at work on the deck above. The capstan groaned and creaked and turned.

  “Heave,” came the shout from above. “Heave.” Despite everything the sound of it made me a wide-eyed little boy again.

  I cast my gaze around. Either side were the rounded shapes of the carriage-guns. Their barrels shone dully in the dark. At the other end of the deck I could see where a rope ladder hung from a square of daylight. I headed there and climbed to the quarter-deck above.

  I soon discovered how my ship-mates had earned their sea legs. Not only did they sport a different style of dress from men of the land—short jackets, checked shirts, long, canvas breeches—but they had a different style of walking too. Their entire bodies seemed to move with the ship, something that happened entirely by instinct. I spent my first couple of days on board being tossed from pillar to post by the heaving waves beneath us, and had to grow accustomed to the sound of laughter as I sprawled yet again to the deck, time after time. But soon, just as I got used to the smell below decks, the constant creak of the hull, and the sense that the whole sea was kept at bay by a few puny planks of wood and coats of caulking, I also learnt to move with the motion of the water and with the Emperor. Soon I too walked like every other man on board.

  My shipmates were nut-brown, every single one of them. Their faces were lined and weathered and some of the older men had skin like melted candles. The older ones were quiet, mainly, their eyes hooded and cautious.

  Most wore scarves or handkerchiefs tied loosely around the neck, had tattoos, beards and wore gold earrings. There were older crewmates aboard, their brown, weather-worn faces like melted candles, but most were about ten years older than I was. They came from all over, I soon discovered: London, Scotland, Wales, the West Country. Many of our number were black, around a third of them, some of whom were runaway slaves who’d found freedom on the seas, treated as an equal by their captain and ship-mates—or should that be, treated as the same level of scum by their captain and ship-mates. There were also men from the American colonies, from Boston, Charleston, Newport, New York and Salem. Most seemed to wear weapons constantly: cutlasses, daggers, flint-lock pistols. Always more than one pistol, it seemed, which I soon found out was due to the danger of the first one failing to fire because of a damp charge.

  They liked to drink rum, were almost unbelievably coarse in their language and the way they spoke about women, and liked nothing better than a roaring argument. But what bonded them all were the captain’s articles.

  He was a Scotsman. Captain Alexander Dolzell. A big man, he rarely smiled. He liked to adhere to the articles of the ship and liked nothing more than reminding us of them. Standing on the sterncastle deck, his hands on the rail as we stood assembled on the quarter-deck, main deck and forecastle, warning us that any man who fell asleep on duty would be tarred and feathered. Any man found with another man would be punished with castration. No smoking below decks. No pissing in the ballast. (Of course, as I’ve already told you, that particular article was something I carried over to my own commands.)

  I was fresh, though, and new on board ship. At that stage of my career I don’t think it would even have occurred to me to break the rules.

  I soon began to settle into the rhythm of life at sea. I found my sea legs, learnt which side of the ship to use depending on the wind and to eat with my elbows on the table to stop my plate from sliding away. My days consisted of being posted as lookout, or on watch. I learnt how to take soundings in shallow waters and picked up the basics of the navigation. I learnt from listening to the crew, who when not exaggerating tales of going into battle against the Spanish, liked nothing better than to impart nuggets of nautical wisdom: “Red at night, sailor’s delight. Red in the morning, sailors take warning.”

  The weather. The winds. What slaves we were to it. When it was bad the usual cheery atmosphere would be replaced by one of grim industry as the day-to-day business of keeping the ship afloat in hurricane winds became a matter of simple survival, when we would snatch food in between maintaining sail, patching the hull and pumping out. All done with the quiet, concentrated desperation of men working to save their own lives.

  Those times were exhausting, physically draining. I’d be kept awake, told to climb the rat-lines or man pumps below decks, and any sleep would be snatched below decks, curled up against the hull.

  Then the weather would abate and life would resume. I watched the activities of the older crewmates, their drinking, gambling and womanizing, understanding how relatively tame my own exploits in Bristol had been. I thought of those I used to encounter in the taverns of the West Country, how they considered themselves to be hardened drinkers and brawlers, if only they could have been here to see my ship-mates in action. Fights would break out over nothing. At the drop of a hat. Knives pulled. Blood drawn. In my first month at sea I heard more bones crunch than I had in the previous seventeen years of my life. And don’t forget, I grew up in Swansea and Bristol.

  Yet, for all of the violence, it would seem to dissipate as quickly as it flared up. Men who moments before had been holding blades to each other’s throats would make up in a round of backslapping that looked almost as painful as the fighting but seemed to have the desired effect. The articles stated that any man’s quarrels should be ended on shore by sword or pistol in a duel. Nobody really wanted that, of course. A quarrel was one thing, possibility of death quite another. So fights tended to be over as quickly as they’d begun. Tempers would flare, then die down.

  Because of this, genuine grievances on board were few and far between. So it was just my luck to be on the receiving end of one.

  I first became aware of it on my second or third day on board because I turned, feeling a penetrating stare upon me, and returned it with a smile. A friendly smile, or so I thought. But one man’s friendly smile is another man’s cocky grin and all it seemed to do was infuriate him even more. Back came a glare.

  The next day, as I made my way along the quarter-deck, I was struck by an elbow so hard that I fell to my knees, and when I looked up, expecting to see a grinning face—“gotcha!”—I saw only the smirking face of the same man as he glanced over his shoulder on his way to his station. He was a big man. Not the sort you’d want to be on the wrong side of. Looked like I was on the wrong side of him, though.

  Later, I spoke to Friday, a black deck-hand who often had the hammock near mine. Describing the man who had knocked me down, he knew who I was talking about straight away.

  “That’ll be Blaney.”

  Blaney. That was all I ever heard anybody call him. Unfortunately—by which I mean, unfortunately for me—Blaney hated me. He hated the guts of me.

  There was probably a reason. Since we’d never spoken, it couldn’t have been an especially good reason; the important thing was, it existed in Blaney’s head, which at the end of the day was all that mattered. That and the fact that Blaney was big and according to Friday skilled with a sword.

  Blaney, you mig
ht have guessed by now, was one of the gentlemen I first met the evening that I arrived early for the departure of the Emperor. Now, I know what you’re thinking; he was the one to whom I’d spoken, who was all ready to teach me a lesson or two for my impudence.

  Well, no, if you thought that, you’d be wrong. Blaney was one of the other men sitting at the cask playing cards. A simple, brutish man, with what you might call a prominent forehead, thick eyebrows that were permanently bunched together as though he was always confused about something. I hardly noticed him on that night, and thinking about it now, perhaps that was why he was so infuriated; perhaps that’s why the grudge was born: he’d felt ignored by me and that had annoyed him enough to nurture this hatred of me.

  “Why might he have taken against me?” I asked, to which Friday could only reply with a shrug and a mumble of “Ignore him.” Then he closed his eyes to indicate our conversation was at an end.

  So I did. I ignored him.

  This—obviously—infuriated Blaney even more. Blaney didn’t want to be ignored; he wanted to be noticed. He wanted to be feared. My failure to be frightened of Blaney—yes, it stoked his hatred of me.

  SIXTEEN

  Meantime, there were other things to think about. For example, a rumour going round the crew that the captain was feeling left out of spoils. There had been no raids for two months; we’d not earned so much as a halfpenny and there were rumblings of discontent, most of which were coming from his cabin. It became common knowledge that our captain felt as though he was holding up his end of the bargain but getting little in return.

  What bargain, you might ask? Well, as privateers, we provided a presence for Her Majesty; it was as though we were unenlisted soldiers in her war against the Spanish. In return, of course, we were allowed to raid Spanish ships with impunity, which means as much as we bloody well wanted, and for as long as anyone could remember that’s exactly what had happened.