Pirate Wolf Trilogy (132 page)

This time Gabriel lifted his head.

Rowly opened his mouth to speak but used a
gnarled finger instead to point at the reddish-orange tint
spreading across the dark sky above.

Gabriel nodded and rested
his head back down on the blankets. Dawn was almost upon them. Dunn
and Betts had returned the previous day and reported the three
ships had made haste through the bight, showing no sign of slowing
or turning around. The two Spanish galleons had turned south,
toward Cubana. The
Cormorant
had turned north, moving too fast for the men to
follow.

Gabriel stretched just enough to work a kink
out of his leg, then wiggled his nose and blew out a puff of air to
dislodge a strand of blonde hair that had settled across his mouth.
Eva was using his arm as a pillow, something he was beginning to
find more and more pleasing. He enjoyed waking up to find her
curled up alongside him. He enjoyed having her hair spread across
his chest and shoulders like a silken blanket. For the most part
his past relationships had all been brief and intense, gratifying
physically, but lacking in any desire to prolong them past the
initial blaze of lust. His mother said it would strike him like a
thunderbolt one day that he was missing out on the best part of
love. He hadn’t quite understood what she meant until the night he
had slept beside Eva in the cavern, content to hold her and to feel
her breathing softly against his neck.

“I can hear you thinking,” she murmured.

Dante smiled and turned to
find those lovely big green eyes watching him. “Really. And can you
also hear
what
I
am thinking?”

She grinned until a dimple appeared in each
cheek. “I can’t hear your thoughts, no, but I can see them.”

He followed her glance to his groin and
chuckled. “Unfortunately, they’ll have to keep.”

“It isn’t even light yet.”

“It will be, soon. I can smell the cooking
fires already and suspect your father is hard at work making his
biscuits and boar fat.”

“Biscuits and boar fat,” she mused. “I
wonder if the king’s court has ever broken their fast on such
delicious fare.”

Gabriel laughed and slid his arm out from
under her head. “Up, Mermaid. We have a long march ahead and I want
to reach the coast before dark.”

Dante had informed Rowly of his intent to
leave camp at first light. He had already dispatched a party of
crewmen to retrace the route along the coastline and collect the
men who had been posted along the bight as lookouts. Chandler had
returned much of their unused stores of powder and shot to the cave
where he kept his supplies squirreled away. He had also insisted,
for the sake of their own souls, that the bodies on the beach have
a decent burial. The men had not objected, hoping that had their
fates been reversed, their remains would not have been left in the
hot sun for the carrion and flies to feast upon.

Eva yawned and rolled onto her back,
watching Dante gather up their clothing and shake the bits of moss
and grass out of the folds. As always she was struck by the
combination of power and beauty as his muscles rippled and bunched
across his chest and shoulders. His back was almost completely
healed and she reached out a hand, tenderly tracing a fingertip
down one of the raised pink scars. She felt his skin shiver and
relished the knowledge that it was her touch that caused the
reaction.

“The first time I saw you,” she said softly,
“I thought you were the ugliest man I had ever seen. Your face was
bloated and purple. Your eye was swollen shut with scabs. I could
scarcely bear to look at you, nevermind that I had to spend days
locked away with you in your cabin.”

Dante turned his head and gazed at her over
his shoulder. “Whereas I thought you a skinny, frail waif with big
green eyes, half-drowned and wholly incapable of speaking more than
a word or two at a time without tripping over your tongue. Now,
however—“ he leaned over and kissed her—“I find that same tongue
quite sweet and enchanting.”

She reached up and curled her arms around
his neck. “I’m sure you have found others just as sweet and
enchanting.”

“Hundreds,” he agreed blithely.

“Mmmm. No wonder, then, that you tire so
easily.”

The amber eyes narrowed and he studied the
lush pout of her mouth. “You will pay dearly for that remark,” he
promised.

“Eagerly so, my Captain,” she whispered.

Liking the sound of that, he made a low
sound in his throat before reaching up, reluctantly, to ease her
arms from around him. Her eyes, her lips, the pebble-hard peaks of
her nipples all beckoned him back onto the blankets, but he could
hear voices moving through the woods and knew they would not have
privacy much longer.

He stood and pulled on his breeches, turning
his back so she did not see how he had to struggle to lace them
closed.

When he thought it safe to look again, she
was dressed, tightening her belt, cinching the bulk of her shirt
around her waist.

They returned to the main camp together and
were handed hot, flat biscuits dripping with fat, and a cup of weak
ale. Even William Chandler’s supplies were not endless and they
were on the last dregs of the last cask of ale and in serious
danger of having to drink straight water.

When they were finished eating, Chandler
buried the big black kettle at the base of a tree and took a long,
satisfied look around before setting off down the forest path with
Eva by his side. Gabriel was the last to leave, joining the two men
who waited on the path and fell into step behind him, their
arquebuses slung over their shoulders.

~~

The trek back to the east
coast of Espiritu Santu took them through the long hot day into
dusk. When they arrived at the location of the underground caverns,
Rowly posted a dozen lookouts on the surrounding hills while the
main body of men shinnied down the knotted rope, eager and curious
to see the wreck of the infamous ghost ship. To a man, having been
told what they could expect to see, they stood around the edge of
the underground lake and stared in silence as Billy Crab went on
board and lit the lamps that hung over the submerged wreck of
the
Nuestro Santisimo
Victorio
.

Chandler, under no illusion that he could
possibly spend as much gold as was in her holds, announced that at
the end of the salvage, each man could take away whatever he could
carry, stuff into his pockets, or sling in sacks over his
shoulders.

Hearing the words echo around the chamber,
no one moved or made a sound for a full minute. One by one the men
turned and looked at their mates standing on either side, then with
multiple reverberating hoops, they all dove fully clothed into the
water and cavorted like fools.

CHAPTER THIRTY

It took a full week to empty the first cargo
bay. The men, split into divers and sorters, worked day and night
in enthusiastic shifts, making Rowly’s head spin trying to keep
track of how much treasure came up in the buckets. A stronger rope
ladder replaced the knotted cable, which made it easier to climb up
and down into the open air. The caverns, for all the beauty of the
glowing walls and peaked stalagmites, were perpetually damp and
smelled of decay. Many of the men ignored the discomfort, claiming
it smelled better than the decks of some ships they’d served on.
Others established a small camp by the river and chose to spend
their free time topside.

Each day Gabriel climbed to the top of a
distant hill where he had a breathtaking view of the surrounding
land. Eva accompanied him twice, returning each time by different
routes thereby discovering groves of banana trees, mangos,
pineapple, and cacao. There was no shortage of fish, fowl, or meat
and foraging parties kept the men well-fed and burping contentedly
in their sleep.

One of the
Victorio’s
holds
relinquished a treasure almost as valuable as gold. When the
timbers were pried loose, the divers found forty large sealed
barrels of island rumbustion. They were winched to the surface
along with other barrels filled with pearls and emeralds the size
of small fists.

Here and there scattered in the silt at the
bottom, were more of the king’s coins, the specially marked
escudos. The royal storage trove had not been found or accessed yet
but the coins suggested the compartment where the king’s wealth was
kept had been damaged. The silt could not be sifted or searched
without raising huge clouds of fine particles that took several
hours to settle again. Divers tried to find the hold by following
the broken ladderways down through the decks but there were no
creatures twinkling on the timber walls to provide light. Gabriel
made several attempts himself but found the utter blackness
disorientating and caused unexpected panic, making him feel as if
his lungs were about to burst.

Once again it was Giddings who proposed a
solution. He had become fascinated with the canvas breathing bells
Chandler had devised. In the adjacent cavern, he tested one of the
smaller bells, placing a powder-filled coconut inside. With Dante
and Chandler watching from the rocky ledge, he lit the fuse on the
coconut, placed the canvas bell into the shallow green water, then
hastily ran back to shore.

The first attempt failed before he reached
the ledge, as the bell was too light and upended with a loud burble
of air, dousing the fuse. A second attempt, with a stone placed on
the bell to weight it down did not have any better success; the
fuse was too long, took too much time to burn and used up all the
air before it reached the coconut.

“A grand idea, mate,” Chandler pronounced,
“but you need a larger bell or a shorter fuse.”

That required a further hour of testing how
short a fuse could be to allow for placement in the water without
blowing the diver to pieces.

The crowd of interested watchers slowly
dispersed after the next four attempts failed to ignite. Undaunted
but wary of losing more fingers, Gidding vanished topside to ponder
the problem with his new devotee, Billy Crab.

Meanwhile, the piles of salvaged treasure
were growing and spreading. There were dozens upon dozens of gold
chains in various lengths and thicknesses winched up along with
several hundred bars of silver bullion. Eva was given the task of
sorting through the buckets and designating which niche for coins,
bars, jewels, swords. Now and then a bucket came up containing
something exquisite—a chalice of solid gold with a rim encrusted
with cabochon emeralds, a statue of a sun god, or a medallion heavy
enough it required two men to carry it ashore.

Chandler, for the most part, had become
immune to the beauty and value of the treasures being salvaged, but
now and then he laid claim to a particularly intriguing piece. One
such item was an ornately carved coral box which contained an
exquisite gold salamander. The curved body was set in rubies with
two large emeralds for eyes. He immediately presented it to Eva
along with a pair of jewelled combs and a silver hairbrush with the
bristles remarkably still intact.

“Salamanders are favored by the Spanish
nobility,” Dante said when she showed him the glittering gifts.
“The larger the creature, the more important the hidalgo. This
fellow—“ he leaned over and took the ruby brooch from her
hand—“must have belonged to someone pretty damned important. Now
that I think on it, there was a rumor that the king’s favorite
bastard son was on board. He had been sent to the Indies in
disgrace after declaring his love and intent to marry a peasant
girl.”

Eva tipped her head and looked at Gabriel
with a strange light in her eyes.

“What? You think the English king would
react any differently if one of his by-blows wanted to marry a
milkmaid?”

“No. No it isn’t that. It’s just… I found
this hidden behind a little panel in the coral box.”

She held up a gold band,
thin and plain. “It has an inscription inside.
Esto es todo lo que tengo para darte
.” She paused and looked at Dante. “’This is all I have to
give thee.’”

He took the ring and studied it for a
moment.

“Do you suppose it could be true?” she asked
in a whisper. “Do you suppose a peasant girl might have given
something like this to the king’s son? If so they must have loved
each other very much for him to have kept it hidden away with his
most prized possession.”

Dante almost smiled, for he could see the
entire tragically romantic tale glistening softly in Eva’s eyes.
Before he could comment, an enormous muffled explosion shook the
ground they were seated on. A hailstorm of glitter-coated pebbles
rained down from the arched ceiling of the cavern, some of them
large enough to make Gabriel push Eva flat and shield her with his
body.

When the splatters and plops stopped, he sat
up and ran his hands down her arms. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, yes. Wh-what happened?”

But he was already on his feet, snatching a
sword off the pile of booty, and running through the tunnel to the
adjacent cavern.

There he found Giddings and Billy Crab
grinning and clapping each other on the back, both of them drenched
and dripping mud.

The crystal clear waters of the pool were
milky white with sediment, the surface still dimpled from the
disturbance. The ceiling of the cavern now had a wide dark patch
where the live mud had been blasted off by the spouting water.

“What the devil happened here? It sounded
like we took a full broadside.”

Giddings chuckled and wiped a glob of
luminous mud off his brow. “We worked out the length of fuse and
how to set the powder off. We’ll have that hull cracked open like a
pea pod before you can piss your name in the sand.”