Chapter 11: Pride Leadeth to Downfall

We were all surprised when, after we’d been there for ten days or so, we looked up at the headland one morning and saw a black flag. We had talked it over, I liked to talk everything over, and everyone knew what to do. Frankly, that was one of the differences between ‘civilization’ and ‘wilderness’. Civilized people tried to educate everyone so that everyone knew their jobs as well as someone else’s.

If you or your buddy got injured or killed, the job would still get done since you both knew each others’ jobs. That was the first step toward becoming a supervisor, too, being able to do all the jobs and organize a crew to get them all done at once.

Cookie, the lookouts, a five-man team of Guards and another of archers all stayed behind to keep Jayport safe. They would warp Vengeance upriver as far as they could, to keep it out of sight of anyone who sailed by the coast. Everyone else piled onto Wrong Place and we set out as quickly as we could.

Our lookout could see nothing from the mainmast, but the people up on the headland were moving around and they knew I could see them in my telescope. They were pointing to the southwest, upwind along the coast. Good enough. As soon as we were in the little bay and could turn around, we set all sails, got through the opening in the sandbar, and tacked in that direction.

Before long we could see the ship, too. It was another cog, running downwind along the coast. Hmmm. If we scare them, they will beach their ship and run inland. They may all starve, but if they find some farmers they will gain food, shelter, tools, and slaves, and it will take forever to root them out. Better to give them a ship to chase. Assuming they are pirates, of course.

We continued out to sea, and they changed course to intercept us. Well, good. We shifted upwind until we were barely making headway to make it easier for them to catch us. When it became clear that we ‘couldn’t escape’ we dropped the jib and furled the sails and started rowing away from them, but kept the topmen up in the yards to show the sails quickly if we needed them.

If we were ready, we could set sail within seconds. The topmen would simply hold the ties instead of tying them fast, and they could let them go while the deck seamen pulled the sheets tight. We kept adjusting the jack-lines to keep the yards at the angle we wanted, and by the time the other ship was close enough to hail we were ready to run straight down the wind.

They were the Shark, out of Mountain Isle, and they would allow us to live if we surrendered. I think it must be a standard speech. Yeah, we would all be allowed to live as their slaves. No thanks. I nodded to Jono. We were the Wrong Place, out of Widemouth, and we were there to capture pirate ships. We would allow them to live, etc, etc.

Since they were behind us, we massed all of our archers on the quarterdeck behind our Guards facing their bow. They didn’t want to ram us, though. They wanted to come alongside and board us, so they stayed to one side as they got closer. I had Jono hail them again, saying that unless they surrendered they would all die.

They were yelling a lot of things, but they didn’t yell anything I could hear that sounded like ‘we surrender’. I could hear threats to kill us and offers to use us as their women, though. After a few seconds I had the Guards kneel out of the way and the archers raise their bows and fire. This time we were almost matched in speed, so they fired five volleys before I told them to stop and called out to “Show all sails”.

They got two boarding-grapples into us, but our sailors cut their lines immediately and our archers shot everyone else trying to throw more. We gathered speed and were well clear before they could recover from the sudden rain of arrows.

Once we were clear we tacked to the south and got behind them, then reached back to where they were rowing towards shore. When we were close enough, I told the Commander to keep firing until we heard a surrender, or the archers could no longer find someone to shoot. That was just a slaughter. They didn’t want to surrender and they couldn’t hide or run away.

Within minutes their ship was just drifting, with no one at the oars or on the quarterdeck. This time I remembered ahead of time, and had one of the boats launched to collect all the loose oars and other things before we tied up to the Shark’s stern and boarded it to take possession. There weren’t many still alive to argue with the Guards.

This ship was very nice. Whoever had outfitted it had put some money into it. In fact, it was even larger and nicer than Wrong Place. Maybe I should take it over as my flagship!

“Whoever” turned out to be Willem, Lord of North Harbor on Mountain Isle and something like the third most powerful man on the island. He had heard that some of the pirate ships weren’t coming back, even more than the usual occasional lost ship, and he had set out in his personal ship to prove that he and his crew weren’t afraid of anyone. Most of the crew were personally loyal to him and surrender to a bunch of mainland pussies just wasn’t going to happen. They’d rather die.

This time we had Vera and Tina to help Gina with the prisoners. There weren’t very many. Only five of the crew were still alive by the time the Guards were done with their sweep, and they were all wounded. And we found three more women in the cabins.

Vera and Tina didn’t know anyone on this ship, but they had heard of Lord Willem and could agree with just about everything that the surviving crew said. One of the women was beautiful, rivaling Tina and the Cassandran women I’d met. The other two were at least pretty, on the scale of Gina or Ceecee. All three were dressed and comported themselves to please men.

The three women were slaves, brought along to service Willem and his officers. Great. In that case, we were supposed to free them and let them go home, but they had no homes to return to. They had all three either been born on Mountain Isle into slavery or been captured as children.

I looked at Gina, and she looked at me. “They are no longer slaves. They are free. We will put them to work if they stay with us, but they aren’t slaves. We’ll find someplace for them. They may want to stay at Jayport, or they may want to live in one of the villages. They will not work as whores unless they choose to.”

Vera and Tina were outraged that the three slaves would not be joining them as ship’s whores. Tough. I wanted the three to go out and live among the locals, describing what life was like for a Pirate Isle slave. I wanted every man, woman, and child on Hunter Island to know that it was better to fight and maybe die than surrender to the pirates.

Two of the wounded would not make it. We cut their suffering short and bandaged up the three that might recover. This time we had no prisoners to strip all the dead and we had to do it ourselves. All of the women helped, though, wife and whores and ex-slaves alike.

Shark was a very rich ship. There was no confusion over which body was Willem’s. He had rich clothing which looked very nice but hadn’t done much to stop the three arrows which hit him. He had an absurdly gaudy jeweled sword in a beautiful silver-chased scabbard. I might wear that sword if I was a king, accepting the ceremonial surrender of another king to end a long war. I had no idea if it was actually usable as a weapon, though. I was almost afraid to swing it.

Willem’s cabin was even more richly appointed than Queen Eleanor’s apartments. Lord Willem was clearly rich with a lot of disposable income. His cabin had two beds, a table, and a row of chests. None were locked, and all had valuables in them. Every surface was covered in rich fabrics, and both of the beds were far more comfortable than mine on Wrong Place was.

The value of the jewelry, trinkets, and money in those chests right there would allow me to buy Shark and Vengeance and pay the crew their share even without access to a bank. I should distribute some of that money, too. While it was all ‘mine’ as it was captured under my command by my ship and by men I had trained and paid for this task, they would be happier if I spread some of the loot.

We needed more warships. Shark and Vengeance could be refitted to meet our needs, but they had to be escorted to Widemouth. Wrong Place was the only ship that could do that, though. If we did that we had to abandon Jayport, as we could not defend it with the ships and most of the men gone.

Maybe if Filo came by with Thunder and Dolphin we could leave them here, but who knew when that would happen? I was talking with Elder Simmon one day about this and he offered to send some runners to Widemouth if I wanted to send messages. It would take the runners a day to reach the road at Cowford, it was that far inland, and another two or three days to reach Widemouth.

Now, that was a solution that would work! I wrote an open letter to the Widemouth City Council, the Commander of the Guard, Captain Filo, and the shipyard people explaining what was going on. We had found a good site on the south coast where our ships could stay in safety while lookouts watched for pirate ships, and we were building a base there. We had already captured two pirate ships and I wanted to send them to Widemouth for conversion to warships but they needed an escort and I didn’t want to leave this station as if I did more pirates would go safely by. What should I do? What could they do to help?

It went on to ask, When would Thunder and Dolphin be leaving Widemouth? If they came here soon, they could watch for pirates while I delivered Shark and Vengeance and returned. When they left Widemouth, could they bring anyone interested in helping build a new port town and ship base? We especially needed blacksmiths, stone-masons, farmers, at least one small fishing boat and some smaller boats. Could the messengers who brought this letter bring back some horses so that we would have faster communications?

I also wrote a private letter to Millie and Ceecee, asking them to come visit if they were able as I did not know when I would be home again and home was wherever they were; if they were here then I would be at home. I read that to Aldo and Gina before sending it off with the other one.

After his runners had left with my two letters I thanked Elder Simmon repeatedly for his insight and help. To him, it was nothing next to all the food, weapons, tools, and labor we had given his people, but to me it was an immense help. Messengers were a great idea! I had thought of sending someone, but none of us knew the way and short of an absolute disaster I wasn’t going to send men out on a vague ‘try to find Widemouth’.

That took a huge load off my mind, and I could go back to building Jayport. The watchtower was done; the cook-house was at least under a roof even if it didn’t have walls yet. We needed storage sheds for cargo and supplies unloaded from ships, and we needed bunkhouses before winter. We needed a solid quay so that we could load and unload ships and do some repairs.

Major repairs and conversions would be done at Widemouth, though. I needed to seriously think about Shark. It was large and solid enough to add both a foremast and a mizzen mast and make it a fully ship-rigged three-masted ‘ship’, but was that worth the trouble? It would be faster and, with the foresail jacked one way and the mizzen-sail jacked the other way, it would almost spin on a dime. Well, a Pinch. Add a spinnaker or ‘spanker’ to the mizzen and it would turn faster than a rowboat.

It would also require a much larger crew, just to manage all the jacks, sheets, and sails. We would need such a ship when we started running into enemy brigs, but until then I was pretty sure that it would just be a waste of manpower. And a maintenance nightmare. Unless conditions changed, Shark would be converted to a larger duplicate of Wrong Place, with two square-rigged masts and a pair of cruise missile launchers in the waist.

Meanwhile, we inventoried all the things we’d captured in Shark and warped it upriver some out of the way with Vengeance so we could moor Wrong Place to our temporary rickety pier and man it quickly the next time we saw a black flag.

The ‘wimmin’ problem slowly eased. Gina kept taking care of me, of course, and the two pirate princesses kept their jobs as ship’s whores. After that first run-through of the lottery basket, after everyone on the crew had gotten their rocks off once, we had eased the rules for the next run through.