Captain shark, p.1
Captain Shark, page 1
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
GLOSSARY
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
CAPTAIN SHARK: BY PIRATE’S BLOOD...
Copyright © 1975 by Kenneth Bulmer (as Richard Silver)
Published by agreement with the Kenneth Bulmer literary estate.
All rights reserved
Edited by Dan Thompson
A Thunderchild eBook
Published by Thunderchild Publishing. Find us at http://www.ourworlds.net/thunderchild/
First Edition: May 1975
First Thunderchild eBook Edition: December 2016
CHAPTER ONE
Captain Shark’s cutlass spattered brilliant splashes of blood as he wrenched its blade from the Spanish don’s wrecked face.
“Up, you sea wolves!” he roared joyously, waving the reeking blade above his head. “Up! Slaughter every damned don aboard!”
“Aye, Cap’n!” his men bellowed, springing from their hiding places on the narrow, cramped deck of the sloop Draco. “Aye, Cap’n Shark! To hell with the Spanish dogs!”
Shark clamped the heavy cutlass between his strong yellow teeth and joined his men as they smashed their way up the ornately gilded quarter of the Spanish galleon. They pounded over the high bulwarks and down onto the decks in a mad welter of belching pistols and flashing blades. With their white-rimmed eyes blazing and their gap-toothed mouths yelling obscene promises, they struck mortal terror into the hearts of the Spaniards.
For a moment the Spanish stood, spellbound. Then a pistol cracked. Captain Shark’s broad-brimmed black hat flew from his head like a wide-winged raven.
“My oath, Cap’n!” bellowed Tom Bowling. He leveled his own piece. The priming took and the pistol cracked out. A richly attired Spanish grandee clutched his guts and toppled to the deck.
“Corbleu!” shouted Pierre Depoix, who had once been a marquis at the court of the Sun King. “We will feed the sharks’ bellies this day!”
The little gaff-rigged, single-masted sloop Draco rocked in the long swells of the blue Caribbean Sea. The sun poured molten gold upon the sea and etched in fire the brilliant gilding and precious ornamentation of the galleon. Away to the north slender, graceful palm trees drooped in the heat; they seemed to grow from the sea itself, so narrow was the yellow spit of land whereon they had taken root. The eternal trade winds blew soughingly from the northeast. All in all, Captain Shark reckoned as his black-booted feet hit the deck and he wrenched the cutlass from his jaws, this was a delightful day for teaching the dons a few hard lessons.
Shark belted into the grandees. He didn’t like them or their kind, and he had scars on his lean, whipcord-tough body to prove it. His cutlass flamed in that white-hot sunshine. His men roared into action at his back, but Shark was ever foremost in battle.
He took a grandee’s rapier on his blade, twisted, slid, and drove the steel just far enough into the man’s belly to do his business for him. With a twist he had his blade ready for the next Spanish devil.
Now the pistols had all been fired and it was cut and thrust. The sound of steel on steel rang and scraped all across the decks of the Spanisher. She was a fine large galleon, driven out of company of her escorts by the recent gale. She had appeared to Shark like the realization of a divine promise. She rode deeply in the water. The thought of that made Shark’s avaricious eyes gleam in anticipation as he fought.
“God’s curse on ye for black-poxed heathen papists!” screeched John Fakenham. His tall, thin, grotesquely jointed body jerked into the fray. His lined face, parched and gray and unlike the suntanned faces of his fellow buccaneers, displayed a ferocious and fanatical religious zeal. Fakenham was older than most of the buccaneers, and had served as a lad in Oliver Cromwell’s Ironsides. His Puritan ethic had been severely tested by the Inquisition. Now he shared his resolve to cleanse the seas of the murdering Spanish with Shark and the other Brethren of the Coast.
And the Spanish now realized they faced a dreaded band of men. They heard the yells of the buccaneers. They heard with horror the terrifying name.
Captain Shark!
They reeled back. Shark’s men knew exactly what they were doing. There was nothing fancy in their fighting — save when circumstances dictated a fancy stroke and they didn’t rush to haul down the arrogant red and gold flag of Spain, nor did they attempt to seize any particular part of the ship.
They went hunting dons.
The Spanish soldiers firing from the close-houses had to be dealt with first. The little round houses, cunningly looped for harquebus fire, always presented a problem. Situated at the break of the quarterdeck and the forecastle, sometimes even at the break of the poop, they commanded the decks and were difficult to assault. Captain Shark’s men had developed their own particularly nasty way of getting at the soldiers within.
Here came Long Ned, his bronze face alight with the frenzy of battle, a broad-bladed knife jammed between his lips. He was swinging a length of burning match in his left hand and clutching a canvas-wrapped bundle in his right.
“Up with you, Long Ned!” roared Shark.
“Corbleu, mon capitaine!” yelled Pierre Depoix. “Smoke them out so they may spit their bellies on my point!”
“There’ll be plenty for you, Pierre! Watch that snake under your feet!”
Pierre Depoix laughed in his reckless Gascon way and leaped aside at Shark’s yell. A Spaniard who had been shamming unconsciousness had tried to thrust his blade upward into the Gascon. But Depoix’s long rapier slashed down in a crimson-flecked silver blur and the Spaniard shrieked — then he could shriek no more as the rapier sliced out his throat.
“My thanks, mon capitaine!”
“Up with Ned, now, Pierre! Tom, Harry — with me!”
The band rushed across the deck as Long Ned lit his evil concoction and looped it through the opening. Smoke gushed out from the round, cone-topped close-house. Soon the bolt screeched and the door bashed open. A Spanish soldier reeled out, coughing and choking, his face scarlet. He went down asprawl on the deck and the sea wolves howled on to their next encounter.
The buccaneers ran wild about the Spanisher as they chased the dons. Not until the last don was dead and the last Spanish seamen and soldiers had thrown down their arms and surrendered would Captain Shark and his men be satisfied.
As Shark had said before and as he bellowed now: “Our quarrel is with the grandees! Give the poor devils of sailors a chance!”
“‘Od’s life, Cap’n!” said John Fakenham, his lined gray face grim and skull-like. “They be papists all, God rot ‘em!”
“Aye, good John! And there are good papists and bad papists, as there are good Englishmen and bad Englishmen. I would I could cleanse the seas of the dons and let an honest sailorman breathe fresh life, stab me!”
“When the Lord’s will is done, Cap’n!”
And John Fakenham, that tall and thin man of great religious conviction, went about his appointed business of exterminating the grandees of Spain.
Over the blue sea the horrible sounds drifted on the eternal trades. Gradually the clang of steel and the chopped-off screams, the grunting shrieks of mortal agony, faded and died. The Spanish galleon drifted in the sea, her canvas clewed up, her main topsail to the mast, rolling and yawing and uselessly idle. After a time the sounds of battle faded completely and only the tuneful bellow of a rollicking song from Barbados Ben lifted to show the Spaniard was any different from the ship she had been an hour before, when the big galleon had dropped insolently down onto Captain Shark’s little sloop.
At first, while his men were hidden about his tiny command, Shark had spoken very humbly to the arrogant Spanish captain. But that had not saved him, and the Spaniard sent down an officer and a few men to turn over what might be found in this suspicious sloop. Then, when Shark had slammed his heavy cutlass into the don’s face and hallooed his sea wolves into action, he revealed to the Spanish just what manner of horror they had unleashed upon themselves.
The Spanisher was called the Doña Rosaria and as Captain Shark made his way about her capacious gun deck, looked down the opened hatches onto the orlop, and had his first appraising look into the hold, she appeared to him to be a very great prize indeed. The Spanish had suffered a hundred years of raids and ship losses in the Caribbean and along the Spanish Main, and these days they tended to sail in convoys, heavily escorted. The pirate trade — although Shark was never a pirate — was becoming ever more risky. Doña Rosaria had been delivered up to Shark by the chance of a gale, and he was more than half inclined to favor John Fakenham’s view that the storm was divinely inspired.
“However it be,” he said to Simon de Rycke, his Flemish lieutenant, “someone up there smiled on us this day.”
“Aye, Cap’n,” said de Rycke in his accented English. “And the damned dons have felt the shadow of a frown.”
They prowled with Long Ned, the boatswain, with Pierre Depoix, and with Patch to hold a lantern, from the gundeck up to the waist and so via the ladder — with a smoke-blackened close-house to bear eloquent testimony to the effectiv eness of the evil compound used to smoke out the Spanish soldier — up on to the quarterdeck. That deck stretched wide and fair under the sun. The crucifix was displayed, the arms racks were broken open, and the Spanish blood was still rich and red upon the planks.
“Mother of God, entirely!” said Patrick Murphy, as he straightened up from the body of a buccaneer. Shark looked quickly at the corpse. It was John Fairbanks, a fair-haired man from Cornwall. Now his lifeblood, too, stained the Spanish planks.
“I couldna save him, Cap’n. The ball tore out his guts — as ye can see.”
Captain Shark nodded.
He hated to see his own men die thus. He knew that the Irish surgeon could have done nothing for John Fairbanks. Shark himself, through his knowledge of Arabic medical skill, was only too well aware that once a pistol ball ripped a man’s guts out he stood no chance at all of surviving.
“Are there any more, Patrick?”
“Two have gone over the side, Cap’n, and young Andy Perkins has a slashed face.”
“That’ll make a man of him,” said Samuel Percy, appearing from the waist of the ship. The red kerchief tied around his black hair and the gold ring in his ear gave him a rascally appearance that he thoroughly deserved. Captain Shark called Sam Percy his honest rascal. As first lieutenant he served well and faithfully, and Shark knew with a wonder that dimmed each day that Sam Percy would unhesitatingly give his own life for his captain’s.
Now Percy bellowed his laughter. He had already found a flagon of wine and he upended it so that the bright drops splattered down his white shirt, a joyful surrogate for the grim blood drops already staining the garment.
“Faith, Sam Percy,” said the surgeon, standing up and putting his hand to his back. “You’ll drink the very waters of hell dry.”
“An they taste as sweet as this, aye, sawbones, aye!”
“Is there aught of interest forward, Sam?” Shark knew that Percy would know exactly what he meant.
Percy took the flagon from his lips for a moment, just long enough to bellow: “Nothing, Cap’n! Gewgaws and Spanish sailors’ trash. It’s all here, in the staterooms, I’ll wager!”
They all laughed at this.
Shark maintained a strict and ruthless discipline at sea, in battle, during maneuvers. But once the fighting was done and the buccaneers could get down to the pleasurable task of sorting through the loot, every man had a right to speak his mind. Now they went aft through the ornately carved doors and into the cabins beneath the poop.
“She lies low in the water, mon capitaine,” said Pierre Depoix with a huge smile, his black mustaches lifting in glee. “Corbleu! How they will fight for her treasures when we take her into Port Royal!”
“We might do better to patronize your fellows, and make for the Tortugas,” said Sam Percy. “The old ways are dying along the Spanish Main.”
“Wherever we take her we’ll make such a fortune —” began Captain Shark as he stepped into the great aft cabin with its serried rank of stern windows. He stopped speaking. He stopped dead in his tracks so that Percy bumped into his broad, cambric-shirted back, and Depoix bumped into Percy.
Captain Shark stood there on the threshold of that luxurious stateroom. He stood tall and limber, wide-shouldered, his hands on his hips and the heavy bloodied cutlass dangling by its swordknot from his wrist. A full-lipped smile curved his mouth. He threw back his head so that his shoulder-length brown hair rippled. And he laughed. The long tanned line of his throat bubbled with that laughter. The others crowded past and halted and then burst into reciprocal laughter, so that the tears flowed from their rascally eyes.
“By thunder!” roared Samuel Percy, that honest rascal. “Wenches! All laced and powdered and perfumed and lined up for us. By God, lads! It’s a sight for sore eyes, God’s truth on’t!”
“Women bring evil and God’s wrath upon the evil doer!” intoned John Fakenham.
“Parbleu! God’s wrath has touched me thrice already and I look forward with horror to the next time!” Pierre Depoix swaggered into the cabin and swept his feathered hat off his curly hair and across his body in a deep bow. “Mesdemoiselles! I am at your service.”
The buccaneers rushed eagerly into the cabin, bellowing their delight at the Gascon’s jest. As Shark’s merry eyes surveyed the scene, he stopped laughing. He looked at the five girls and their elderly companion and chaperon. He marked them all as high-spirited and arrogant, Spanish to the core. The girl in the center was slender and narrow-waisted, and her small high breasts were confined in an elaborate bodice. Her creamy complexion was ablaze with the passions of horror and pride. He saw that she held her right hand behind the skirts of her emerald green gown.
“Hold, Pierre!” bellowed Shark.
The Gascon jumped at the crisp bark of command in his captain’s voice, and Shark leaped forward. He reached the girl even as she whipped the little pistol up. The thing exploded almost by his ear so that the world rang with the fizz and bang of exploding gunpowder, but he had caught her wrist and directed the ball aloft. It cracked into the decking overhead. She wrestled with him for a space, her eyes blazing, her slender form struggling and writhing. Shark held her as he would a fractious filly, too young yet for the rein or harness.
At last she quieted. She remained perfectly still except for the creamy expanse of her bosom above the bodice, which moved betrayingly. Her cheeks were flushed.
“By the gout-ridden foot of Saint Bartholomew!” Sam Percy tumbled the nearest girl to the deck, kicking her hands away, and other buccaneers similarly investigated the other girls.
There were no more pistols.
“For me, señorita, or yourself?”
Shark’s lean face, hard with the years of toil and struggle, bore down on the girl. His brown eyes bored hypnotically into her black eyes. She lowered her gaze. His face, his voice, his eyes! They cowed her. And she, the daughter of a grandee of Spain! It was intolerable. Señorita Isabella Urraca Castileja de la Cuerva had lived in fear of this long journey from Spain to the New World and back again. Even when she had trodden the decks of this fine galleon, the Doña Rosaria, the dread had not left her. The seas swarmed with pirates. Their names were accursed in the sight of God. And now — now she had fallen into the clutches of the arch-scoundrel, the black, the infamous, the monstrous, the villainous Captain Sebastian Shark!
Yet — yet she could not rightly say if she had intended the pistol ball for this monster or for herself.
She struggled to find her voice, to compose herself, to stand defiantly before the rough hands and lecherous eyes of these pirates. She had no illusions about what would follow.
In a clear voice Isabella Urraca said: “You may do what the devil commands you to do, Captain Shark, and you will answer for your crimes at the bar of heaven —”
“God’s tooth! The wench speaks passable English!” exclaimed Sam Percy. He was busily ripping the jewels from the gown of the girl he had tripped and throwing them into a spread-open kerchief on the deck.
“English!” cried Isabella Castileja in a voice of scorn and loathing. “I speak your foul clog’s tongue, to my shame!”
“A spritely wench,” observed Torn Bowling, looking up from the open chest whose iron bands had been savagely ripped off. He lifted out a gilt-on-silver cup and laughed. “Give me gold and a drop o’ rum any day, Cap’n — and you can keep all the wenches in Christendom for me!”
“But assuredly, mon ami Tom,” said Pierre Depoix as the buccaneers set about the cabin, “you do not understan’ the finer t’ings of life...”
“What!” bellowed Tom Bowling. “What’s finer than a bracer o’ rum and a sack o’ ducats, eh, Pierre? Answer me that, if’n you can!”
“Ducats, is it, Tom!” cat-called Long Ned as he rummaged. “Pieces o’ eight not good enough for you, eh, my finicky lad?”
As the rummaging and the badinage went on, the Spanish ladies stood together, white-faced, staring, bosoms heaving, filled with the most dreadful imaginings of their eventual fate. Isabella Castileja tried to remain calm, tried to calm the fears of her compatriots; but the fierce aspect of these sea rovers, the glint of gold rings in their ears, the scarlet kerchiefs wound about their hair, the clatter of their weapons as they moved, the jovial promising gleam of their eyes — all, all drove a deep shuddering terror deep into her heart.
