Assassin's creed : Black flag - Bowden Oliver - Страница 65

His men flooded the decks with tar and set flame to the Porcupine with the slaves still on board, chained in pairs below decks. Those who jumped overboard to escape the blaze were torn limb from limb by sharks, the rest burned alive or drowned. Horrible, horrible death.

By the time we arrived the sea was awash with debris. Vile black smoke shrouded the entire neighbourhood, and smouldering in the ocean, almost up to the water-line, was the burnt-out hull of the Porcupine.

Disgusted by what we’d seen, we followed Roberts’s trail south, then to Principe, where he’d anchored his ship in the bay and taken a party of men ashore to make camp and gather supplies.

We waited. Then, as night fell, I gave the Jackdaw orders to wait an hour before attacking The Royal Fortune. Next I took a row-boat to shore, pulled up the cowl of my robes and followed a path inland, led by the shouts and singing I could hear in the distance. As I grew closer, I smelled the tang of the campfire and then, as I crouched nearby, I could see its soft glow divided by the undergrowth.

I was in no mood to take prisoners, so I used grenadoes. Just as their captain was famous for saying he gave no quarter, neither did I, and as the camp erupted into explosions and screams and a choking cloud of thick black smoke, I strode to its centre with my blade and a pistol at the ready.

The battle was short because I was ruthless. It didn’t matter that some were asleep, some naked and most of them unarmed. Perhaps the men who poured tar on the decks of the Porcupine were among those who died at the point of my blade. I hoped so.

Roberts did not stand and fight. He grabbed a torch and ran. Behind us were the screams of my massacre at camp, but I left his crew to their dying as I gave chase, following him up—up a pathway to a guard tower on a promontory.

“Why, who chases me now?” he called. “Is it a spectre come to spook me? Or the gaunt remains of a man I sent to hell, now crawling back to pester me?”

“No, Black Bart Roberts,” I shouted back. “It’s I, Edward Kenway, come to call a halt to your reign of terror!”

He raced into the guard tower and climbed. I followed, emerging back into the night to see Roberts standing at the edge of the tower, a precipice behind him. I stopped. If he jumped, I lost the skull. I couldn’t afford to let him jump.

His arm holding the torch waved. He was signalling—but to what?

“I’ll not fight where you have the advantage, lad,” he said, breathing heavily.

He laid down the torch.

He was going to jump.

I started forward to try and catch him but he’d gone, and I scrambled to the edge on my belly and looked over, only now seeing what had been hidden from me; what Black Bart knew to be there, why he’d been signalling.

It was The Royal Fortune, and in the glow of her deck lamps I saw that Roberts had landed on deck and was already dusting himself off and peering up the rock-face to where I lay. Around him were his men, and in the next instant I was pulling back from the lip as muskets began popping and balls began smacking into the stone around me.

Not far away, I saw the Jackdaw, right on time. Good lads. I picked up the torch and began signalling to them, and soon they were close enough for me to see Anne at the tiller, her hair blowing in the wind as she brought the Jackdaw to bear by the cliff, close enough for me to . . .

Jump.

The chase was on.

We pursued him through the narrow rock passages of the coast-line, firing our carriage-guns when we were able. In return his men lobbed mortar shot at us and mine returned with musket fire and grenadoes whenever we were within range.

Then—Sail ho!—came the British naval warship the HMS Swallow, and with a lurch of horror I realized she was after Roberts. This heavily armed, determined warship was no doubt as sickened by the stories of his exploits as we had been. She was after Roberts too.

Leave them to it? No. I couldn’t allow them to sink the Fortune. Roberts had The Observatory Skull with him. I couldn’t risk its sinking to the bottom of the sea, never to be seen again.

“There is a device within that needs taking,” I told Anne. “I have to board her myself.”

Carriage-guns boomed in the morning, the three ships locked in combat now, the Jackdaw and Swallow with a common enemy but not allies. We came under fire from all sides, as British shot peppered our gunwales and shook our shrouds. I gave Anne the order to make haste away.

Me, I was going for a swim.

It isn’t easy to swim from one ship to another, especially if both are involved in battle. But then, most are not gifted with my determination. I had the cover of the half-light on my side, not to mention the fact that the crew of the Fortune already had enough to contend with. When I climbed aboard I found a ship in disarray. A ship I was able to pass through virtually undetected.

I took my fair share of scalps along the way, and I’d cut the throat of the first mate and killed the quartermaster before I found Black Bart, who turned to face me with his sword drawn. He had changed, I noted, almost with amusement. He had put on his best bib and tucker to meet the English: a crimson waistcoat and breeches, a hat with a red feather, a pair of pistols on silk slings over his shoulders. What hadn’t changed were those eyes of his. Those dark eyes that were surely a reflection of the blackened, corroded soul inside.

We fought, but it was not a fight of any distinction. Black Bart Roberts was a cruel man, a cunning man, a wise man if wisdom can exist in a man so devoid of humanity. But he was not a swordsman.

“By Jove,” he called as we fought, “Edward Kenway. How can I not be impressed by the attention you’ve paid me?”

I refused him the courtesy of a reply. I fought on, relentlessly, confident not in my skill—for that would have been arrogant, the Edward Kenway of old—but in a belief that I would emerge the victor. Which I did, and at last he fell to the deck with my blade embedded in him, pulling me into a crouch.

He smiled, his fingers going to where the blade was stuck in his chest. “A merry life and a short one, as promised,” he said. “How well I know myself.” He smirked a little. His eyes bored into me. “What of you, Edward? Have you found the peace you seek?”

“I’m not aiming so high as that,” I told him, “for what is peace but a confusion between two wars?”

He looked surprised for a second, as though thinking me incapable of anything other than grunts and demands for gold or another tankard. How pleasing it was that in his final moments, Bartholomew Roberts witnessed the change in me, knew that his death at my hands was not driven by greed but by something nobler.

“You’re a stoic then.” He laughed. “Perhaps I was wrong about you. She might have had some use for you after all.”

“She?” I said, puzzled. “Of whom do you speak?”

“Oh . . . She who lies in wait. Entombed. I had hoped to find her, to see her again. To open the door of the temple and hear her speak my name once more Aita . . .”

Mumbo jumbo. More bloody mumbo jumbo.

“Talk sense, man.”

“I was born too soon, like so many others before.”

“Where’s the device, Roberts?” I asked him, tired now—tired of his riddles, even at the end.

From his clothes he pulled the skull and offered it to me with fingers that shook.

“Destroy this body, Edward,” he said, as I took it and the last of the life seeped from him. “The Templars . . . If they take me . . .”

He died. It was not for him, nor for the peace of his soul, that I tossed his body overboard, consigning it to the depths. But so that the Templars would not have him. Whoever—whatever—this Sage had been, the safest place for his body was at the bottom of the sea.