Assassin's Creed: Black Flag (14 page)

Night-time, and the walls of Torres’s mansion formed a black border beneath a grey, starless sky. The chirping insects were at their loudest, almost drowning out the trickle of running water and the soft rattle of the palm trees.

With a quick look left and right—my approach had been timed to make sure no sentries were present—I flexed my fingers and jumped, pulled myself up to the top of the wall, then lay there for a second to control my breathing and listen for running feet, cries of “hey!” or the swish of swords being drawn.

When there was nothing—nothing apart from the in-sects, the water, the whisper of night wind among the trees—I dropped down to the other side and into the grounds of the Havana governor’s mansion.

Like a ghost I made my way across the gardens and into the main building, where I hugged the walls along the perimeter of the courtyard. On my right forearm I felt the comforting presence of my hidden blade and strapped across my chest were my pistols. A short-sword hung from my belt beneath my robes and I wore my cowl over my head. I felt invisible. I felt lethal. I felt as though I was about to deliver a blow against the Templars and even though freeing The Sage wasn’t equal to the harm their brothers had done me and this wasn’t going to even the score, it was a start. It was a first strike.

What’s more, I’d have the location of The Observatory and could reach it before they did and that was a far, far bigger blow. That would hurt. I’d think of how much it would hurt them while I was counting my money.

I’d had to make an informed guess as to where the governor kept his state prisons, but I’m pleased to say I was right. It was a small compound, separate from the mansion, where I found a high wall and . . .

That’s odd. Why is the door hanging open?

I slid through. Flaming torches bracketed on the walls illuminated a scene of carnage. Four of five soldiers dead in the dirt, gaping holes at their throats, pulverized meat at their chests.

I had no idea where The Sage had been kept but one thing was beyond doubt: he wasn’t here any longer.

I heard a sound behind me too late to stop the blow but in time to prevent its knocking me out, and I pitched forward, landing badly on the dirt, but having the presence of mind to roll. A pikestaff with my name on it was driven into the ground where I’d been. At the other end of it was a surprised soldier. I kicked myself up, grabbed his shoulders and span. At the same time I kicked at the shaft of the pikestaff and snapped it, then rammed his body onto it.

He flopped like a landed fish, impaled on the snapped shaft of his own pikestaff, but I didn’t stick around to admire his death-throes. The second soldier was upon me, angry, the way you get when you see your friend die.

Now
, I thought,
let’s see if this works every time
.

Snick.

The hidden blade engaged and I met the steel of his blade with steel of my own, knocking his sword away and slashing open his throat with the backswipe. I drew the sword at my belt in time to meet a third attacker. Behind him were two soldiers with muskets. Close by was El Tiburón, his sword drawn but held at his hip as he watched the fight. I saw one of the soldiers grimace and it was a look I recognized, a look I’ve seen before from men on the deck of a ship lashed to mine.

He fired just as I drove both my sword and hidden blade into the soldier in front of me, pinning him with the blades and swinging him around at the same time. His body, already dead, jerked as the musket ball slammed into him.

I let my human shield go, plucking a dagger from his belt as he dropped and praying that my aim would be as good as it always had been, after countless hours at home spent tormenting the trunks of trees with throwing knives.

It was. I took out not the first musketeer—he was already making a panicky attempt to reload—but the second, who fell with the knife embedded between his ribs.

In a bound I was over to the first one and punched him in the stomach with my blade hand, so that he coughed and died on the shaft. Blood beads described an arc in the night as I pulled the blade free and span to meet the attack of El Tiburón.

There was no attack, though.

Instead El Tiburón calmed the tempo of the fight, and rather than begin his attack straight away, simply stood and very casually tossed his sword from one hand to the other before addressing me with it.

Fine. At least there wouldn’t be a lot of chat during this bout.

I snarled and came forward, blades cutting half circles in the air, hoping to daze or disorient him. His expression hardly changed, and with fast movements of his elbow and forearm he met my attack easily. He was concentrating on my left hand, the hand that held the sword, and before I even realized he was doing it, my cutlass went spinning from my bloody fingers to the dirt.

My hidden blade was all I had left now. He concentrated on it, knowing it was new to me. Behind him more guards had gathered in the courtyard, and though I couldn’t understand what they were saying, it was obvious: I was no match for El Tiburón; my end was but a heartbeat away.

So it proved. The last of his attacks ended with a smash of the knuckle guard across my chin, and I felt teeth loosen and my head spin as I sank, first to my knees, before pitching forward. Beneath my robes, blood sluiced down my sides like sweat, and what little fight was left in me was leached away by the pain.

El Tiburón came forward. A boot stepped onto my blade and held my arm in place, and dimly I wondered if the blade had a quick-release buckle even though it would do me no good, as the tip of his sword nudged my neck, ready for the final lethal strike . . .

“
Enough
,” came the cry from the compound door. Squinting through a veil of blood I saw the guards part and Torres step through, followed closely by DuCasse. The two Templars shouldered El Tiburón aside, and with the merest flicker of irritation in his eyes—the hunter denied his kill—the enforcer stepped away. I wasn’t sad to see him go.

I gasped ragged breath. My mouth filled with blood and I spat as Torres and DuCasse crouched, studying me like two medical men examining a patient. When the Frenchman reached for my forearm I half expected him to feel for my pulse but instead he disengaged the hidden blade, unclipped it with practised fingers, then tossed it away. Torres looked at me, and I wondered if he really was as disappointed as he looked, or whether it was theatrics. He took hold of my other hand, removed my Templar ring and pocketed it.

“What is your true name, rogue?” said Torres.

Disarmed as I was, they let me pull myself to a sitting position. “It’s, ah . . . Captain Pissoff.”

Again I spat close to DuCasse’s shoe, and he looked from the gobbet of blood to me with a sneer. “Nothing but a filthy peasant.” He moved to strike me, but Torres held him back. Torres had been looking around the courtyard at the bodies, as though trying to assess the situation.

“Where is The Sage?” he asked. “Did you set him free?”

“I had nothing to do with that, much as I wish I did,” I managed.

As far as I was concerned The Sage had either been sprung by Assassin friends or staged an escape himself. Either way, he was out—out of harm’s way and in possession of the one secret we all wanted: The Observatory location. My trip was a wasted one.

Torres looked at me and must have seen the truth in my eyes. His Templar affiliations made him my enemy, but there was something in the old man I liked, or respected, at least. Perhaps he saw something in me, a sense that maybe we weren’t so different. One thing I knew for certain was that if the decision had been left to DuCasse, I’d have been watching my guts drop to the compound floor; instead, Torres stood up and signalled to his men.

“Take him to the ports. Send him to Seville with the treasure fleet.”

“To Seville?” queried DuCasse.

“Yes,” replied Torres.

“But we can interrogate him ourselves,” said DuCasse. I heard the cruel smile in his voice. “Indeed . . . it would be a pleasure.”

“Which is
exactly
why I intend to entrust the job to our colleagues in Spain,” said Torres firmly. “I hope this is not a problem for you, Julien?”

Even fogged by pain I could hear the irritation in the Frenchman’s voice.

“Non, monsieur,”
he replied.

Still, he took a great pleasure in knocking my lights out.

When I awoke I was on the floor of what looked like the lower deck of a galleon. A large galleon, it was, the kind that looked like it was used to transport . . . people. My legs were gripped by iron bilboes—big, immovable manacles that were scattered all around the deck, some empty, some not.

Not far away I could make out more bodies in the gloom of the deck. More men back there, at a guess maybe a dozen or so, shackled just as I was, but in what sort of shape it was difficult to tell from the low groans and mumblings that reached my ears. At the other end of the deck was piled what I took to be the captives’ possessions—clothes, boots, hats, leather belts, packs and chests. In among them, I thought I saw my robes, still dirty and bloody from the fight in the prison compound.

You remember my saying how lower decks had their own smell? Well, this one had a different smell altogether. The smell of misery. The smell of fear.

A voice said, “Eat it fast,” and a wooden bowl landed with a dull thump by my bare feet before the black-leather boots of a guard retreated. I saw sunlight from a hatch and heard the clip-clop of a ladder being climbed.

Inside the bowl sat a dry flour biscuit and a splodge of oatmeal. Not far away sat a black man, and, like me, he was eyeing the food dubiously.

“You hungry?” I asked him.

He said nothing, made no move to reach for the food. Instead he reached to the manacles at his feet and began to work at them, on his face an expression of profound concentration.

At first I thought he was wasting his time, but as his fingers worked, sliding between his feet and the irons, his eyes went to me. Though he said nothing, I thought I saw in them the ghost of painful experience. His hands went to his mouth and for a moment he looked like a cat cleaning itself, until the same hand dipped into the oatmeal, mixing the goo inside with saliva and then using it to lubricate his foot in the manacle.

Then I knew what he was doing and could only watch in admiration and hope as he continued to do it, greasing the foot more and more until it was slippery enough to . . .

Try
. He looked at me, silenced any encouragement before it even left my lips, then twisted and pulled at the same time.

He would have yelled in pain if he wasn’t concentrating on keeping so quiet, and his foot, when it came free of the leg-iron, was covered in a revolting mixture of blood and spit and oatmeal. But it was free and neither of us wanted to eat the oatmeal anyway.

He glanced back up the deck towards the ladder and both of us steeled ourselves against the appearance of a guard, then he began working at the other foot and was soon free. Crouched on the wood with his head cocked, he listened as footsteps from above us seemed to move towards the hatch, then, thankfully, moved away again.

There was a moment in which I wondered if he might simply leave me there. After all, we were strangers, he owed me nothing. Why should he waste time and endanger his own bid for freedom by helping me?

But I’d been about to let him eat the oatmeal and apparently that counted for something, because in the next instant, after a moment’s hesitation—perhaps he wondered himself about the wisdom of helping me—he scrambled over towards me, checked the shackles, then hurried over to an unseen section of the deck behind me, returning with keys.

His name was Adewalé he told me as he opened the shackles. I thanked him quietly, rubbing my ankles and whispering, “Now, what’s your plan, mate?”

“Steal a ship,” he said simply.

I liked the sound of that. First, though, I retrieved my robes and hidden blade and added a pair of leather braces and a leather jacket to my ensemble.

Meanwhile my new friend Adewalé was using the keys to release the prisoners. I snatched another set from a nail on the wall and joined him.

“There’s a catch to this favour,” I told the first man I came to, as my fingers worked the key in his restraints. “You’re sailing with me.”

“I’d follow you to hell for this, mate . . .”

Now there were more men standing on the deck and free of shackles than there were still restrained, and perhaps those above had heard something, because suddenly the hatch was flung open and the first of the guards thundered down the steps with his sword drawn.

“Hey,” he said, but “hey” turned out to be his final word. I’d already fitted my hidden blade (and had a moment’s reflection that though I had only been wearing it for such a short space of time, it still felt somehow familiar to me, as though I had been wearing it for years) and with a flick of my forearm engaged the blade, then stepped forward and introduced the blade to the guard, driving it deep into his sternum.

It wasn’t exactly stealthy or subtle. I stabbed him so hard that the blade punctured his back and pinned him to the steps until I wrenched him free. Now I saw the boots of a second soldier and the tip of his sword as reinforcements arrived. Back-handed, I sliced the blade just below his knees and he screamed and toppled, losing his sword and his balance, one of his lower legs cut to the bone and pumping blood to the deck as he joined his mate on the wood.

By now it was a full-scale mutiny, and the freed men ran to the piles of confiscated goods and reclaimed their own gear, arming themselves with cutlasses and pistols, pulling boots on. I saw squabbles breaking out—already!—over whose items were whose, but there was no time to play arbitrator. A clip around the ear was what it took and our new team was ready to go into action. Above us we heard the sounds of rushing feet and panicked shouting in Spanish as the guards prepared themselves for the uprising.

Just then the ship was suddenly rocked by what I knew was a gust of wind. Across the deck I caught Adewalé’s eye and he mouthed something to me. One word: “Hurricane.”

Again it was as though the ship had been rammed as a second gust of wind hit us. Now time was against us and the battle needed to be won fast. We had to take our own ship, because these winds, furious as they were, were nothing—
nothing
—compared to the force of a full-scale hurricane.

You could time its arrival by counting the delay between the first gusts. You could see the direction the hurricane was coming from. And if you were an experienced seaman, which I was by now, then you could use the hurricane to your advantage. So as long as we set sail soon, we could outrun any pursuers.

Yes, that was it.
The terror of the hurricane had been replaced by the notion that we could make it work in our favour. Use the hurricane, outrun the Spanish. A few words in Adewalé’s ear and my new friend nodded and began to spread news of the plan among the rest of the men.

They would be expecting an uncoordinated, haphazard attack through the main hatch of the quarter-deck.

So let’s make them pay for underestimating us.

Directing some of the men to stay near the foot of the steps and make the noise of men preparing to attack, I led the rest to the stern, where we broke through into the sick bay, then stealthily climbed steps to the galley.

In the next instant we poured out onto the main deck, and sure enough the Spanish soldiers stood unawares, their backs turned and their muskets trained on the quarter-deck hatch.

They were careless idiots who had not only turned their backs on us but brought muskets to a sword-fight, and they paid for it with steel in their guts and across their throats. For a moment the quarter-deck was a battlefield as we ruthlessly pressed home the advantage our surprise attack gave us, until at our feet lay dead or dying Spaniards, while the last of them threw themselves overboard in panic, and we stood and caught our breath.

Though the sails were furled, the ship rocked as it was punched by another gust of wind. The hurricane would be upon us any minute. From other ships along the harbour belonging to the treasure fleet, we saw soldiers handing out pikes and muskets as they began to prepare themselves for our attack.

We needed a faster ship and Adewalé had his eye on one, already leading a group of our men across the gang-board and to the quay. Soldiers on the harbour died by their blades. There was a crack of muskets and some of our men fell, but already we were rushing the next galleon beside us, a beautiful-looking ship—the ship I was soon to make my own.

Then we were up on it, just as the sky darkened, a suitable backdrop for the battle and a terrifying augury of what was to come.

Wind whipped at us, growing stronger, hammering us in repeated gusts. You could see the Spanish soldiers were in disarray, as terrified of the approaching storm as they were of the escaped prisoners, unable to avoid the onslaught of either.

The battle was bloody and vicious, but over quickly and the galleon was ours. For a moment I wondered if Adewalé would want to assume command; indeed he had every right to do so—this man had not only set me free but led the charge that helped win us the boat. If he did decide to captain his own ship, I would have to respect that, find my own command and go my own way.

But no. Adewalé wanted to sail with me as my quartermaster.

I was more than grateful. Not only that he was willing to serve with me, but that he chose not to take his skills elsewhere. In Adewalé I had a loyal quartermaster, a man who would never rise up against me in mutiny, provided I was a just and fair captain.

I knew that then, at the beginning of our friendship, just as I know it now with all those years of comradeship between us.

(Ah, but The Observatory. The Observatory came between us.)

We set sail just as the masts unfurled and the first tendrils of the coming storm fattened our sails. Cross-winds battered us as we left the harbour and I glanced behind from my place at the tiller to see the remaining ships of the treasure fleet being assaulted by wind and rain. At first their masts swung crazily from side to side like uncontrolled pendulums, then they were clashing as the storm hit. Without ready sails they were sitting ducks and it gladdened my heart to see them knocked into matchwood by the arriving hurricane.

The air seemed to grow colder and colder around us. Above I saw clouds gathering, scudding fast across the sky and blocking out the sun. Next we were lashed with wind and rain and sea-spray. Around us the waves seemed to grow and grow, towering mountains of water with foaming peaks, every one of them about to drown us, tossing us from one huge canyon of sea to another.

The poultry were washed overboard. Men hung on to cabin doors. I heard screams as unlucky deck-hands were snatched off the ship. The galley fire was extinguished. All hatches and cabin doors battened down. Only the bravest and most skilful men dared scale the rat-lines to try and manage the canvas.

The foremast snapped and I feared for the mainmast and mizzen, but they held, thank God, and I gave silent praise for this fast, plucky ship that had been brought to us by fate.

The sky was a patchwork of black cloud that every now and then parted to allow rays of sunshine through, as if the sun were being kept prisoner behind them; as though the weather was taunting us. Still we kept going, with three men at the tiller and men hanging on to the rigging as though trying to fly a huge, abominable kite, desperately trying to keep us ahead of the storm. To slow down would be to surrender to it. To surrender to it would be to die.

But we didn’t die, not that day. Behind us the rest of the treasure fleet was smashed in port, but just the one ship containing us freed prisoners managed to escape and the men we had—a skeleton crew—pledged their allegiance to me and Adewalé and agreed with my proposal that we set sail immediately for Nassau. At last, I was going back to Nassau, to see Edward and Benjamin, and rejoin the republic of pirates I had missed so much.

I was looking forward to showing them my ship. My new ship. I christened it the
Jackdaw
.