Pieces of Eight. John Drake
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see this.”
Selena, horrified and fascinated, remained where she was.
Cowdray sighed and shook his head. “On your own head be it!” he said, and vanished down the quarterdeck hatchway.
“Brothers!” cried Flint. “Those who know me will recall some of my merry games–Flint’s games!”
“Aye!” they roared, nodding at one another in glee. There was one that they knew all too well, played atop an overturned tub with a belaying pin, where all the player had to do was move faster than Flint to avoid getting his fingers broken. They laughed and laughed, even those whose fingertips had been smashed. Indeed, some now displayed their scars with pride, and laughed louder than all the rest.
“But this is a new game,” said Flint, lowering his voice like a conspirator. “And this the first time it’s been tried. So watch me, shipmates. Watch and learn!”
With that, Flint picked up a boarding pike and began to sing his song again:
“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest…” He cocked an ear to the audience.
“Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!” they cried, and burst into laughter as–on the word rum–Flint pricked the victim’s side with the sharp point of the pike.
“Aaah!” cried the man.
“Drink and the devil had done for the rest…”
“Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”
Flint jabbed again, sharp on cue, and blood flowed. Selena, sobbing, finally took Cowdray’s advice and ran below.
“Aaah!” cried the victim.
And so it went on. Since the plank led out over the side, even the dullest spectator knew how the game must end, and any fool could simply have driven someone off its end with prods of a pike. But Flint was an artist. He worked to music and to rhythm, constantly leading his man to the end of the plank, then allowing him to stagger to safety, only to drive him back again or push him to one side, then to the other, with a dozen wounds oozing blood and the poor devil deranged with horror and begging in his own language for mercy.
The special horror of it was any man’s innate fear of falling, especially from a wobbling plank run out over the ocean, so the victim collaborated in the entertainment, even torturing himself by fighting to keep his footing, leaning against the sharp point that was driving him into the sea in a desperate attempt to resist the final plunge, hands-bound, into the hungry waters below. And Flint’s evil genius–his unique gift–was to make this funny.
Finally, when Flint judged the time was ripe, he paused proceedings for conversation with the victim.
“My dear fellow,” he said, “King Richard of England was ransomed with one hundred thousand marks. What will your nation pay for you?”
This brought howls of laughter from the crew, and desperate pleas–understood by nobody–from the victim.
“What will you give me then for your life?” said Flint, snarling and vicious now, rousing the blood lust of his crew. “Nothing?” said Flint. “Then take this…” Slowly and deliberately he pushed the steel pike-head into the man’s flesh, forcing him agonisingly backward, resisting all the way and spattering blood and sweat, shaking his head and grinding his teeth.
“Goodbye!” said Flint, and pushed him off the edge with a final thrust.
The crew shrieked in delight and Walrus rolled heavily as they rushed to the side to see him drown.
The game wasn’t over yet, though. It was time for the second Dutch prisoner to be brought up, the man in the grey coat who’d led the fight by Christiaan Hugens’s people. He was fit and muscular with sandy hair, a beard and moustache, and high, slanted cheekbones that made him look more Slav than Hollander. He struggled cunningly as he was dragged forward, being particularly nasty in the way he kicked: cracking sharply into shins and stamping a heel sideways into one man’s kneecap such that he limped ever after. But finally he was heaved up on the plank and menaced by blades so he couldn’t jump off.
The game proceeded as before; the crew, deeper in drink by this time, were bellowing Flint’s song, while their captain danced and spun and switched hands on the pike-staff, all the while jabbing and jabbing and jabbing. As before, it ended with the prisoner, dripping blood, at the end of the plank with the pike’s tip in his guts and Flint demanding a ransom. The only difference was that this man spoke English. He spoke it well enough to curse Flint–which Flint played upon with cruel skill to make the game even more entertaining. His men were near paralysed with laughter and begging for him to stop.
“King Richard of England was ransomed with one hundred thousand marks…” said Flint.
“You go fuck your mother!” cried the man.
“Sadly she is deceased so I cannot,” said Flint. “But what will your nation pay to ransom you?”
“Damn you to hell!”
“Where else? But how much?”
“Bastard!”
“Perhaps,” said Flint. “But how much?”
Finally, judging his moment, Flint turned nasty, spitting out his words in anger.
“I say, for the last time, what will you give me for your life?” He twisted the pikehead into flesh.
“Argh!” gasped the man on the plank.
“Nothing?” said Flint. “You have nothing for me? Then over you go!” And he readied the pike for a long, slow thrust.
“Longitude!” cried the man.
“What?” said Flint, lowering the pike.
“I give you longitude. I find it at sea.”
“Nonsense,” said Flint, “that’s impossible!”
“No! I do it by lunar observation.”
Flint blinked, and his heart began to thump as he realised what quality of man he was about to push into the sea: a man who offered longitude in the face of death. Flint thought of every year’s crop of shipwrecks and the thousands drowned, the rich cargoes lost through ignorance of a ship’s true position. Fine navigator that he was, he was limited like all others to working by latitude. If he could find longitude at sea, it would give him the most colossal advantage over the rest of seafaring mankind…It was an undreamed of prize. It was magnificent. It was priceless. Flint made another quick decision, this time an easy and obvious one.
“Take him down!” he said. “You! Allardyce and Morton! Take him down and free his hands.”
The crew didn’t like it. They didn’t know longitude from a loblolly boy. They wanted their fun, and they bellowed in anger at being deprived of it. Allardyce and Morton worked fast. They hauled the man off the plank and dragged him aft, followed by Flint.
“Get him below, quick!” said Flint.
“No!” said the man. “I am Cornelius Van Oosterhout. I am a Christian and I do not move from here.”
“What?” said Flint. “Are you mad? Get down to my cabin this instant, before they turn ugly.” He looked at the crew, muttering and scowling.
“You want longitude, yes?” said Van Oosterhout.
“Yes,” said Flint. He wanted it like all the jewels of Arabia.
“Then you save the man below. He is from my crew. If you put him there–” he looked at the plank “–I tell you nothing. I jump in the sea. You don’t need to push!”
“Poppycock!” said Flint, sneering. “Do as I say, or I shall put you back on the plank, and you’ll sing any tune I choose!”
“No,” said Van Oosterhout firmly. “One day I stand before God. I am