The Following Sea (The Pirate Wolf series) (35 page)

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.”

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.

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.”

Dante cursed and lowered his sword. “Next time, give a warning or you’ll find your heads cracked open as well.”

Still muttering at the lunacy, Gabriel turned to retrace his steps along the tunnel. Halfway back he realized he was no longer holding the gold ring Eva had found. It had either flown out of his grasp when he dove to shield her, or he had dropped it somewhere in the trampled dirt and mud on the floor of the tunnel.

For the first time in a life filled with adventure, danger, sea battles, violent encounters with pirates, cannibals and Spain’s elite soldiers… Gabriel experienced a clutch of genuine dread. He did not want to see the look in those huge emerald eyes when he had to confess that he had lost the ring. He backed away instead and climbed the rope ladder, wondering how long he could stay hidden behind trees and boulders.

~~

When Dante did not return, Eva carefully tucked the salamander back into the coral box and set it aside. She had heard some of the men laughing as they emerged from the tunnel and was relieved to know they were not being bombarded.

She returned to the task of sorting pearls and emeralds, but after two more hours, when there was still no sign of Gabriel, she wandered through the connecting tunnel to look for him. He was not the only one who was missing, for she heard her father shouting for Billy Crab and getting no response. He did, however, wave absently toward the ladder when she asked if he had seen Gabriel.

“If Billy is with him, tell the lad to skin his hide down here, we’ve work to do building more bells.”

Eva kissed her father’s cheek then climbed the rope ladder. As always she was surprised to realize she’d had no sense of time below; in the caverns there was no difference between day and night.

To judge by the purplish color of the sky, it was too late for a sunset, too early for more than a handful of stars to wink overhead. There was no private forest glade nearby, but she knew Dante liked to walk to the edge of a nearby escarpment that overlooked the bight. The path followed the stream uphill, twisting around and through a dark stretch of forest. She had never walked it alone before and had no intentions of doing so now. There were snakes in the underbrush, and spiders as big as her hand lurking in overhead branches waiting to fall on her head.

Not that she was ever completely alone, and she knew if she turned quickly and looked over her shoulder she would see Eduardo duck quickly behind a tree or rock. He took his duties seriously and one of them, delivered with severe threats from Gabriel, had been to keep Eva in sight at all times. Back in Spanish Wells, the lad had learned to follow at a discreet distance until he knew she was in safe hands. The fact she could not hear a bootstep or a rustle of leaves probably meant he was staying back deliberately in case she was bound for some private time with Gabriel. There had not been much of that since returning to the caverns. None at all, in fact.

Eva picked her way carefully over the rocky ground and descended the hill, searching out the same place beside the stream where she had sat, a fortnight ago, and dangled her aching feet. That was the night Gabriel had shown her the eerie green lights rising from the ground, and the same night they had fallen into the cavern and found her father.

So much had happened since then; enough to fill two years, let alone two weeks!

She was almost at the stream, passing through a small copse of fir trees, when a night bird whistled nearby and startled her heart up into her throat. Searching for the source, she saw the unmistakable silhouette of Billy Crab perched on a boulder.

“I’m to tell you that you are wanted down below,” she said, hailing him. “Father says that between you and Master Giddings, you have managed to blow up all the spare breathing bells and more are needed for the divers.”

When there was no response, she tramped through a patch of tangled weed and came up beside him. “By chance, have you seen the Captain? Did he happen to pass this way?”

There was still no answer and when she reached out to touch his shoulder, he swayed a moment then slowly started to pitch forward. His head tipped sideways at an odd angle and it was not until she saw the inky wetness gleaming down the front of his shirt that she saw his throat had been slashed clean through to his spine.

She stumbled back and drew a breath to scream but a hand came out of nowhere to clamp tightly over her mouth. She tried to twist away but a muscular arm grasped her around the waist, lifting her off her feet. Eva kicked and fought and struggled to break free but there were more figures stepping out of the shadows and surrounding her. The heel of her boot caught one of them on the shin and, cursing in Spanish, he raised the butt of his pistol and brought it down hard across her temple.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

“And so we meet again Senora Padilla… or would you prefer I call you by your proper name, Senorita
Chandler
?”

Eva’s head was throbbing. There was a Spanish soldier on either side holding her up by her arms. She tried to look around but saw nothing familiar and had no idea where she was. There were a lot of tall trees rising up to a pitch-dark night sky. A small fire crackled nearby, brushing the faintest hint of light across the features of the man who stood before her—features she recognized with a sharp stab of fear.

“Evangeline?” Estevan Muertraigo snapped his fingers to gain her attention. “Where is he? Where is Gabriel Dante?”

She fought to quell the panic rising in her chest and tried to stall. “Who?”

Muertraigo grasped a fistful of her hair and yanked her face up. “Do not play games with me, little
puta
. The man you were with on board the
Santa Maria
. Gabriel Dante. Where is he?”

“I… don’t know. And that is the truth, I swear it. He took his men to Spanish Wells two weeks ago. They have not come back.”

Muertraigo tightened his fist until it felt as if the roots of her hair were going to be torn from her scalp. “I think you do not lie very well, puta.”

“I am not lying. He went to Spanish Wells, I swear it on my mother’s grave.”

Muertraigo snarled and gave a final, cruel twist before releasing her hair. “Indeed. You do speak the truth about that. He did go to Spanish Wells. But I also think he has come back to claim his prize, yes?”

“I don’t know what prize you are talking about.”

The dark eyes glittered. He reached inside the collar of her shirt to withdraw the silver locket. Wrapping the chain around his fist he gave such a violent tug, the links cut into the back of her neck before they snapped apart. He opened the locket and removed the silver escudo, admiring it for a long moment before he held it up in front of her face. “The
Nuestro Santisimo Victorio
… where is it?”

Muertraigo stared into the blazing green of her eyes, then swung his open hand across her face, striking hard enough to split her lip.

Eva reared up and nearly managed to twist free of the two men holding her. She kicked out at Muertraigo, winning a moment of satisfaction when she felt her toe sink into the soft flesh between his thighs and heard him grunt. A third soldier stepped up to capture her wildly thrashing legs and it took all three men to subdue her long enough for Muertraigo to punch her twice… once in the belly and once across the jaw, the latter hard enough to render her insensible.