Red Sails

by Edward M. Erdelac

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Under the full moon, a pirate crew of werewolves and vampires gives chase on a cannibal isle.

When their ship is mercilessly sunk by pirates, British marine Jan and Dominican priest Timóteo are brought before the captain of the Trivia. Under its strange red sails, they hear the terrible tale of Captain Vigoreaux, a vampire captain with a crew of werewolves.

With the full moon rising, the men are put ashore on a remote cannibal island and turned loose—to be hunted for sport. But with the aid of Sampari, a native girl with a passionate desire to put an end to her tribe’s oppression, the three of them just might find a way.

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As Jan reached the bald, rocky top ringed by bushes like a monk’s tonsure, the highest point of the island, he could hear the tumble of the stones below him, and the heavy panting and barking of the wolfmen. He could not hear the little brook spilling from the stone, but he knew it was there, as were the last two powder kegs.

The wind kicked up, and he saw the flashing cloud sailing in across the night sky. It was fit to burst and nearly overhead. He dropped to his knees and struggled to light the powder trail in the moonlight, fumbling with the flintlock mechanism taken from one of the muskets. The light shifted, the air cooled. In less than a minute raindrops as big as gun-stones were plopping down in the earth and on his bare back. He tried to shield the powder, but it was no use. Soon he was in a downpour and powder was saturated. He flung the mechanism down and bellowed his frustration, drawing the stone axe as three great, shaggy heads thrust through the surrounding brush.

They leapt at him. If he was to die, he would make the best of it…

Red Sails
978-1-61650-133-4
Copyright © 2010, Edward M. Erdelac
Edited by Cynthia Brayden-Thomas
Book design by Brain Hunter
Cover Art by Renee Rocco
First Lyrical Press, Inc. electronic publication: April, 2010

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PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

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Published in the United States of America by Lyrical Press, Incorporated

Dedication

For Jeff, Ryan, and Elliott, in the spirit of REH

Chapter 1

The two men clinging to the broken capstan flinched as another pistol shot snapped out and another sailor bobbed face first in the waves, arms unfolding sleepily like blossoms in the gloaming. The raucous, sunburned men leaning over the rail of the outlaw sloop let out an appreciative cheer.

The sound was dull in Janek Puzan’s ears, muffled by the churning seawater and the thrumming of his own heart. Only his face, upturned to the blue ocean sky, broke the surface like a dozing crocodile. There was no hiding in open water, but he did his best to mimic the rest of the human debris. He wanted to live to see his father’s meager Virginia headright again. A year ago in Jamestown he had cursed it in a fit of young and idle impetuousness. It seemed like lost Elysium now.

On the other side of their makeshift buoy, Timóteo, a Dominican from Cordova similarly submerged to his ears, made his frightened voice a ragged whisper.

“Lord! Who are they, Jan?”

The blackfriar had befriended him, an enemy prisoner in the brig of a ship bound for New Spain. The brig, La Doña Marisol, was now somewhere far below. The crushing sea had been let into her timber belly by merciless blasts of cannonade from the sixth rate brigantine rigged sloop, with her queer sails the color of a cardinal’s vestments. It was from the deck of the same sloop the pirate muskets now chose from among the treading sailors like a fat lady making a show of picking chocolates, when it was inevitable the whole box was fated to be pillaged in one sitting.

“Pirates,” Jan said, “and as cruel as any I ever heard of. They aimed for the launches.”

So there’d be no escape. It’s as if they wanted no part of plunder.

In the brief moments before the destruction of La Doña, Jan had seen their colors hoist through the smoke, a stark white dog skull on a black field with a red dollop of blood. He hadn’t thought any pirates were left in these waters. Neither had the Spanish captain, else they would not have been so unprepared.

The attack had been swift and without quarter. The pirate sloop, running Portuguese colors, had simply come up alongside and lit into them without any warning. The second eighteen-gun broadside had ripped away La Doña’s wheel and her navigator with it, and brought the mizzenmast crashing down. She had spun slowly in stunned surrender as her severed rudder chain clattered free, offering up her defenseless flanks to be ravaged by the swivel guns. Those of her crew and passengers not killed in the initial onslaught dove like rats into the sea.

But even the waters held no solace.

Another discharge cracked from the sloop’s deck, and the top of another hapless sailor’s head popped off, spraying great red gouts, drawing the gulls to dive and catch the scattered fragments of matter and bone. To show his appreciation of the birds’ deftness, one of the pirates raised his musket and blew a gull apart in a burst of bloody feathers. His comrades roared with laughter, drowning out the entreaties of the dwindling sailors.

The Spanish hurled up their cries for mercy and clemència and pitié, but it seemed the only language the brigands knew were lead and black powder. Death was the sole answer they gave, between charging their pistols. One by one the Marisols released their driftwood and became driftwood themselves, until only Jan and Timóteo remained, hiding in a reddened sea of flotsam.

Jan saw the first of the corpses jerked down below the surface followed quickly by another. He gripped the wood tighter and drew up his legs, though it would do no good against the cold shadows moving beneath the waves. He clenched his eyes shut involuntarily, and in the next minute forced them open. He would not let himself die trembling like a fawn before the wolves. The pirates did not make sport of the killer fish as they did of the gulls. It was as if they acknowledged kinship.

Then a ball struck the wood very near Jan’s face, blasting off a scattering of fine splinters. They were sighted. They would surely die. Whether from above or below, death was here.

Timóteo rose up spluttering from the water and wrenched at the cross hanging from the chain around his neck. He brandished it at the leering buccaneers.

“Do you men not fear the Lord?” he called out in a surprisingly strong voice.

“We fear but one lord,” answered one of them, in rough, colonial-accented English, “and that is our master, Captain Vigoreaux! Ask the Devil about him when you see him!”

The man put musket to shoulder. Showing considerable skill, he blew the upraised cross out of Timóteo’s trembling fingers, sending fragments flying to the eight directions.

“You blaspheme and do murder?” Timóteo shouted. “I rebuke you and your captain, if man he is!”

“Strong words for a soft-bellied priest!” yelled the brigand, a broad shouldered, redheaded man with a chin of blazing orange beard. He stood out among the others like a flame in a benighted wood. “Would you like to come aboard, padre, and show us what puts such iron in your guts?”

“Kill us or leave us to the sharks, but be done with it!” Jan yelled, unable to hold his tongue. He hated to die for anyone’s sport and he’d damned if he was to sit by and allow his last moments to be made light of by some bloody-minded cutthroat.

The pirate laughed and folded his thick arms across his chest. “Here’s another boldly spoken piece of driftwood! And a countryman by the sound of him! Maybe I’ll content myself to blast your capstan away and watch you and your Spaniard boy sink to Davey Jones. Whatever I do, it’ll be because of my pleasure.” He slapped his broad breast. “Not because you demand it!”

The ship’s bell tolled. Every man aboard snapped his head around at the sound. The crew looked to the redhead, who scowled and moved away from the rail, answering its summons, chewing his beard as he went.

Jan watched and waited while Timóteo muttered prayers. There was a frothing of white water only a few yards away. It turned into a red spray as two blunt grey noses broke the surface. Jan saw black button eyes and distended pinkish gums for a moment, then a pair of sharp fins cut through the waters toward another cluster of corpses. Although the sharks sported the sharp-toothed jaws of ravenous monsters, no sound came from them but the snapping of bones. They emerged from deep nothing and returned there, only clouds of blood in the water to mark their passing.

The redhead returned to the side, propping his blue, tattooed elbows on the rail. He kept his voice amused, but he didn’t look altogether pleased.

“Your brave talk’s reached our captain’s ears, and he wants to match your faces with your sauce,” he called down. “But if you knew Captain Vigoreaux you’d not think this much of a respite.”

They cast a line out and called for Jan and Timóteo to take hold. Since disobeying would mean death in the fishes’ maws anyway, they did as they were told.

As they were drawn toward it, Jan saw the sloop’s figurehead; she was a bold eyed woman of imperious features, her long black hair swept back as though she faced a strong wind. Her painted, alabaster breasts appeared to heave against an immodest, wispy toga of black and orange.

Along her bow the letters of her name and port of origin painted in a flourished, sea-chapped script gave some explanation as to her strange, scarlet sails:

The Trivia—Hell.

As Jan and Timóteo were hoisted from the water, something cold and thick as a tree trunk brushed against their legs and was gone.

* * * *

They were surprised to find they were not the only survivors brought on board. A few of Timóteo’s brother Dominicans sprawled on their hands and knees under the weight of their dripping black mantles and blubbered fearful prayers on The Trivia’s deck. Jan saw too the boatswain’s mate, who had freed him from his cell and given him a pistol and a sword when they expected boarders. The man was badly beaten. He lay in a heap against a coil of rope, moaning and spitting teeth.

The priests were especially ill-treated by the Trivias, as if they were a greatly offending enemy the crew held in some special, mortal contempt. They were kicked and drubbed with belaying pins or musket butts. Some of the pirates lit cannon fuses and pressed them between their splayed fingers, or scourged the priests with leather flails. These last screamed and pleaded for clemency alternately from God and their tormentors. There was no obvious method or reason to it, only unbridled sadism that flecked the deck planks with blood.

“En El Nombre de Dios!” Timóteo said, his voice cracking at the sight of his brothers so mistreated. “Why do this? Leave them alone!”

He tried to push toward the offenders, but the big, redheaded man encircled his thin upper-arm with one fist and threw him back against Jan.

“You’ll be seeing the captain too, padre,” the man growled.

He was a full head taller than Jan, broad as a bull and densely freckled over every inch of flushed skin. His was a low, scowling forehead with hard, deep-set green eyes. His bulging arms were tattooed with three half-moons apiece.

“And now, Driftwood,” he said, addressing Jan, who made no move except to help Timóteo to his feet. “If you please, down to the captain’s quarters.”

“I know the way,” Jan said. He pulled Timóteo along with him.

“Is it a sailor you are, then?” the redhead queried, stalking behind them and scowling at Timóteo every time he looked back over his shoulder after his suffering brothers.

“No,” Jan answered. “Just a tobacco farmer.”

“A long way from your leaf fields, ain’t you?”

Jan said nothing, though inwardly he agreed.

The other pirates were almost entirely Indians, he noted. Not Lascars or South Sea natives, but red Indians like they had back home, with feathered Mohawks and crude jewelry crafted of tooth, claw, and bone.

Like her heathen children, the ship sported similar ornamentation. Her mainmast was savagely adorned with yellowed human skulls rising almost to the top, like a totem on a cannibal ship. Her yardarms tinkled in the sea breeze, strung with garlands of finger bones. The timber holes on the capstan were overlaid with four open-mouthed skulls, so when the handspikes were inserted through their grinning jaws, they turned, macabre faces on a hellish carousel.

It was a queer marriage of the modern and the prehistoric. She was a craft out of time, as if her savage crew had waylaid some luckless voyagers from the present and reasoned how to navigate the ship back into modern waters.

They were led to the captain’s quarters. The redhead drew the cutlass at his side and tapped the door with its edge. A low voice said “enter” and they did.

At first Jan saw only a semicircle of heavy black drapery strung as a partition before the door. The redhead closed the door behind them and drew back the curtain. The casements were draped in thick, blood-colored curtains, casting the cabin in red shadow. A table was set with pewter-ware and grey goblets, but the only bit of meat on it was the fat old Dominican abbot, Padre Ramón.

He would never see the missions of Mexico, as he was presently breathing his last. His pudgy fingers clawed at a swept-hilt rapier which was thrust through the center of his chest and pinning him to the table top. Blood bubbled from his grimacing lips. He turned his head to stare shakily at them as they entered.

Timóteo gasped the abbot’s name, and would have rushed to him if Jan hadn’t grabbed the collar of his mantle and drawn him back.

“He’s dying!” Timóteo stammered to Jan.

“He’s dead,” Jan replied simply, and gestured to the corner of the cabin, where a stooped figure stood in shadow, removing a crystal decanter from a cupboard on the wall.

Captain Vigoreaux moved into the near light. They were granted the impression of a haggard, immeasurably old man, the flesh of his face melting from his skull. His forehead was as lined as a dry lakebed. What hair he had was dirty white, and retreated from the top of his skull like choking grass from salted earth. His expression was one of weary contempt for everything he saw. He gazed out at them through glassy, half-lidded eyes shot through with reddish lightning.

He wore a loose, dingy grey shirt, the lace like old cobwebs, and over that, like a dressing gown, a faded red cardinal’s cassock.

“Gentlemen,” came a deep, tired, French-accented voice from the shriveled lips of the old man. “I am Capitan Absolon Vigoreaux.”

“Monster!” Timóteo spat, eyes bulging in his outrage. “Have you no knowledge whatever of God?”

“I’ve accumulated much knowledge in my long years upon this Earth, Father,” answered Vigoreaux tiredly as he made his way to the largest chair at the table with the empty decanter in his spotted hands, “but of God I have seen nothing.”

He settled into his chair, and propped his elbow on the arm. Then he laid the side of his head on his bony fist and closed his eyes. For a moment they thought he’d fallen asleep. The only sound in the cabin was the rasp of the man dying on the table.

Jan’s eyes moved around the dim cabin, passing over a corner bunk, charts and a sextant on a bolted writing desk, sabers and pistols crossed on a wall. He was aware of Timóteo trembling at his side, and of the steady breathing of the huge redhead behind him. He wondered if he could reach one of the sabers in time to put it to use.

“What do you—” Timóteo began.

Vigoreaux held up one long, knobbed finger. He arched his bushy eyebrows and said, “A moment longer if you please, Father.” He inclined his head, like a man appreciating an especially fine concerto.

They waited, and when Padre Ramón gave a great shudder and gasped his very last, Vigoreaux opened his bloodshot eyes and regarded them again.

“There, you see? Do you know I am something of a student of expiration? I have sat and listened to the climactic breaths of so, so many, and they are like sunrises—or perhaps, it would be more appropriate to say, sunsets. No two are completely alike.” He stood slowly, and moved to stand over the dead man, looking down at him as he spoke. “You had a question, Father?”

Timóteo could summon no words.

Vigoreaux set the decanter on the table and drew out the rapier from the abbot’s chest. He tipped back the corpse’s chin with one hand. With the other, he placed the tip against Padre Ramón’s meaty throat. He pricked it swiftly and expertly in and out. Blood began to well up immediately from the puncture. Vigoreaux let the rapier clatter to the table, then tipped the body toward him, holding the decanter out of sight, in the posture of one milking a dairy cow.

Behind them, the redhead snickered at Timóteo’s horrified expression.

The priest began to pray rapidly.

“Ah!” Vigoreaux winced. “Mon Dieu, none of that Latin hog-speak, if you please.”

Timóteo stopped his praying. “What was that name you said?” There was fire in his voice. “Do not speak it before me, or by my oath to God I will tear your tongue out!”

A touch of amusement impressed upon Vigoreaux’s wizened face. He shared a look with the redhead behind him.

“You are a tiger, little padre,” Vigoreaux said. “What of you?” he said, fixing Jan with a watery gaze that made his body tense. It was as if a mad dog were regarding him. “Was it not your voice I heard demanding of my men that you be granted death?”

“It was death without their merriment I demanded,” Jan said. “Just as I would demand it now, did I think for a moment you’d grant it.”

“You do not think I would be so magnanimous?”

“I saw your magnanimousness on deck. I nearly slipped in it.”

“You see a lot for a piece of driftwood,” said the redhead.

“I see you dead at my hands,” Jan snarled over his shoulder, “you ginger-headed popinjay.”

The redhead’s pale face colored, but Vigoreaux put up a gnarled hand.

“Settle, Mr. Badham, settle,” he said. “He only wants to provoke a quick death for them both.”

“He’ll get no such thing from me,” Badham promised.

“But they both have spirit do they not?” said Vigoreaux. “Even this one, a priest and a Spaniard.”

“Even this one,” Badham agreed, looking at Timóteo briefly before settling his hard eyes on Jan once more.

“Do you want them, then?” Vigoreaux asked as he straightened from the crystal decanter, now brimming with the abbot’s blood.

“Aye, sir. They’ll do, though this skinny priest won’t make a mouthful, or last a mile, I’ll wager,” said Badham.

“I told you this would be a worthwhile dalliance,” Vigoreaux said, pouring the blood from the decanter into one of the pewter goblets before him. “Go and tell the men.”

“Aye, sir,” Badham said.

Vigoreaux blenched as the door opened, spilling a patch of sunlight across the floor, then settled into his chair as Badham closed it behind him, leaving the three of them alone.

Jan stared at the door, perplexed as to why they had been left alone. He saw Vigoreaux prop one booted leg on the table and unceremoniously toe the fat abbot’s corpse to the floor. Padre Ramón lay on his stomach, face turned toward them, palms to the ceiling, little fingers curling, eyes glazing in death.

“So many priests I’ve known come from academic stock. They know no greater hardship than a cramping hand born of long hours spent pinching a quill. You are slight, padre, but your hands and face are hard. You were a farmer.”

Timóteo said nothing in answer, but he knelt down at his abbot’s side, closing his eyes gently with his fingertips, and recited the Extreme Unction.

Vigoreaux rolled his eyes and sighed, picking up the goblet of blood, swirling it like vintage.

“Not much of a conversationalist, though. And you,” he said to Jan. “You are no certainly no priest. No Spaniard either. What were you doing on that ship?”

When Jan said nothing for a spell, the old man prompted, “Well?”

“I don’t fancy conversing with a madman.”

“You will come to wish you had fallen into the hands of a madman.” The old captain sighed. He put the goblet to his lips, just as Timóteo completed the Last Rites on the abbot and rose from the deck.

He imbibed in the manner of a thirsty drunkard at a public house, draining the goblet nearly to the dregs and with such an air of casual aplomb, Jan found his fists balling at his sides. When the cup came away, his shriveled lips were painted like a whore’s, and he dabbed the scarlet stains away with a stark white table napkin, the action almost courtly in its manner. The sight of the old murderer sipping the abbot’s blood threw the young monk into frenzy. He lunged across the table and sent the goblet crashing against the far wall with a backhanded swipe of his shaky hand.

The two glared at each other, Vigoreaux still seated, Timóteo half across the bloodstained table. With an alacrity unbefitting his extreme age, the captain stood and seized the Spaniard by the throat with both hands.

Timóteo gagged as the old man’s horny fingers clenched. Vigoreaux’s grimace exposed angry, needle-like little teeth, butter-yellow. They reminded Jan of the sharks’.

Jan moved swiftly to the wall and plucked off one of the swords. Vigoreaux watched him with a look barren of concern. His fingers opened and Timóteo fell with a bang to the table and then to the floor, gulping air.

In two steps, Jan was within stabbing reach. He thrust the single-edged sword midway up its blade into the captain’s side, a hand span beneath his left arm.

Jan made to withdraw the sword, but Vigoreaux’s left hand clamped over the hilt and trapped it there with a jarring finality.

Vigoreaux stared into Jan’s eyes. Jan gripped the sword now in both hands and sought to turn the blade and tear his innards. The sword would not budge. The old man’s rigorous grip did not for a moment slacken.

This close, he was pale as a powdered fop. His cracked lips glistened red with the abbot’s blood in the stymied glow through the curtains. A shiver went up the middle of Jan’s back.

He put a foot on the arm of the captain’s chair and threw his whole body into pulling the weapon free. It may well have been the sword in the stone.

Vigoreaux betrayed no hint of agony over the grievous wound, nor even a smidgeon of effort when he twisted his wrist sharply and snapped the steel like an icicle. The hilt came away and Jan’s effort sent him crashing against the writing desk, upsetting the waggoner and scattering the watermarked sea charts. The red point of the weapon clattered on the floor of the cabin as he regained his balance. Vigoreaux inspected the hole in his clothing with disdain.

“We were not always as you see us, this ship and I,” Vigoreaux said. He eyed Jan, and beneath the inexplicable heat of that gaze, sweat trickled behind Jan’s ears. Gone was the simple discomfort of conversing with a madman. His unease had been replaced with a wild hammering deep in his breast, by a gibbering in his mind that whispered to him in a voice on the edge of panic. No living man could have his innards parted by steel and then summon the strength to oppose another, or to snap a blade with such apparent ease. No living man. The goblins and night monsters of his boyhood reared briefly just beyond the light of his reason, and it was not without effort that he forced them back.

“Gather up your priest,” said Vigoreaux, “and be seated. I will tell you the tale if you would care to hear it.”

“Why?” Jan stammered. How could the old man speak so carelessly with such a wound as Jan had dealt him? He leaned back on the desk, lest the trembling in his knees be evident.

“Because there’s no greater injustice than a man dying without knowing why or by what means. Human existence entails a lengthy investment of time and effort. It is only proper that it be concluded to some semblance of satisfaction.” Vigoreaux glanced at the table, and reached once more for the decanter of blood. “And you look like you can appreciate a good story. I assure you, you will never hear another like mine.”

Jan went slowly and carefully to Timóteo and touched him. The priest’s neck bore purpling streaks from Vigoreaux’s fingers, though he had been in their grasp only a moment. He was in a swoon, and his eyes rolled beneath their lids, but he breathed steadily.

Jan stooped, pulled him away from the abbot’s body, and propped him in the corner. He let the broken sword fall.

Vigoreaux smiled and gestured for him to sit in a chair across the table.

“What are you?” Jan asked, not moving.

“There is no name I know for what I am,” Vigoreaux said. “I drink fresh blood to sustain my life, and I cannot be killed by any means I have yet found.”

Jan’s father once told him stories about such things. Wąpierz was the name he’d given them. “But were you born this way?”

“I cannot remember. Perhaps a man’s mind is too small a space to pack with the memories of too many years. Of my childhood, I have no recollection. My earliest memory is of sailing with Jacques de Sores, L'Ange Exterminateur. We burned Havana, and desecrated the church.” He smiled faintly, rubbing one of the buttons of his vestment between two fingers. “I slit a priest’s throat at the altar. That was a hundred and eighty- seven years ago.”

“Well, you look every day of it,” Jan admitted, endeavoring to maintain flippancy in spite of his dread. His bold tongue had saved them once. To crumble into weakness now would only bore the old tomcat and lay them out on his grisly supper table.

“As I said, I was not always thus.” Vigoreaux shrugged, laying the crystal stopper of the decanter aside and sniffing its contents. He tisked and shook his head. “Gone cold already.” He shrugged, and drank deeply.

Jan watched the monster consume. Monster he was, and one thing was certain, be it rational or no; no blade or ball would put this creature under. He tried to remember the stories of his boyhood. Maybe Vigoreaux would let something slip in his narrative; something to give Jan hope.

“Eight years ago I was marooned on an uninhabited isle by a mutinous crew of Huguenots,” he said, smacking his bloodied lips like a drunkard settling into a pot of rum and an old joke. “I slept beneath the sands, and I drank the blood of monkeys and gulls and crawling things, for there was no other to be had. I plotted to get another ship and swore I would trust no Christian again. You cannot imagine the thirst that came after I had wrung the blood from the last thing living on that little patch of land. I think that I lamented the tiny corpse of a millipede as I had no man before or since. You called me a madman…well, madman I was then. I do not know how many months or years I roved that island. I could not die, but I could not slake my thirst. Even birds came to shun the isle...and their blood is so very rank and thin. When I was marooned I was a young and virile man…well, young-looking, at any rate. As young as you are now. When I left, I was as you see me now. Perhaps without blood I should eventually have died. I certainly aged,” he said, holding up his crumpled hands, with their parchment skin like ill-fitting gloves.

“Then I sighted this ship.” Vigoreaux closed his eyes. “They had come to replace their foremast, split by lightning in a squall. Ah, the white sails full on the night wind, the heavy smell of men! They penetrated the brume about my brain. I was able to think clearly enough to wait as they hewed timber and worked through the day. At night I paddled out to the ship across the dark waters on a log. They took me up, good Christians that they were, thinking me a castaway. I killed the first man who offered me his hand. I could not help myself. I tore out his throat with my fingernails and I lapped at his blood like a dog…it was so warm and fresh, it was like coming up for air from cold fathoms. I had been run through and shot a dozen times before I even remembered where I was.

“But you have seen yourself what use steel is against me, and you may presume what good shot. I killed fifteen of them before they lay down their arms and begged mercy. I could not even see them for the blood running in my eyes. I was bloated as a tick, but my senses were reawakened.

“They were simple sailors, not fighting men. They soon balked at my ‘terrible aspect.’ I made them an ultimatum. I would spare them if they signed articles with me. Whoever refused, I would cast into the waters.

“Many of these professed their faith, and could no more follow me than they could walk to the moon. They threw themselves into the brine. I suppose our young Spaniard would call them brave. But many more said ‘aye’ to me. Of these, some saw a chance to get for themselves the power they had seen me wield. I suppose their souls meant little to them when weighed against that. Maybe a few had heavy chains about their consciences from all their sinning and were not ready to die so unprepared. They decided a little more of the same would be the better immediate choice. And for some, well, their oaths were as worthless as rotting skipjack. They thought to sail with me and find a method of doing me in later. Just as you are doing now, I suppose.”

The old man grinned at Jan slyly.

Jan said nothing, only listened. How many times had Vigoreaux told his tale? How many men had heard it?

“These last were the first to die, for all their cunning. It was a trifle to make the ones who coveted my power guard me against the rest. I hardly had to lift a finger. The blood of the liars went to my cups and their empty bodies made a stale supper for the sharks in our wake.

“The whole crew made a fine provision for the journey up the coast to America.”

He indicated the thick waggoner overturned on the writing desk, and wrinkled his nose at the mess.

“In the end of course, I killed them all. I could not hope to avenge myself on the Huguenots who marooned me, but the blood of four score men is much like any other.”

“And this crew?” Jan said. “They’re…like you?”

“These?” He shook his head, standing and replacing the crystal stopper. “No, they are what make my tale truly fascinating. In all the world, have you ever met a creature like me?” He waved a hand. “I know you haven’t, for in all the world and in all my years, I have not. Yet there are things on this Earth which astound even me. Piracy makes for disparate shipmates, and nowhere is that more evident than in the complement of The Trivia.”

He went to the desk and with much rustling, neatly rearranged the scattered sea charts. When they were orderly, he spoke again.

“Mr. Badham and his Indians, the Wampanoag. I encountered them when we reached Cape Cod. They were a gang of twenty moondoggers—wreckers—who picked among the hulls of ships that now and again broke themselves on the rocks of the cape, looking for timber and whatever else they might scavenge. They came selling wood and nails to our carpenter. Thomas—that is, Mr. Badham, had lived among the Wampanoag in Mashpee. I invited him to share a meal in my cabin.

“I was taken with him, you know. He claimed to have been a gunner under Edward Teach, and had served with Israel Hands. He told me Blackbeard’s blood spattered his face when the highlander’s sword knocked his smoking head from his shoulders. And well, when a man speaks of hot blood and killing, he has my attention, you must understand.

“The striking up of a friendship will make even an immortal overlook a man’s faults. Badham’s failing was that though a man in the light of day, he can choose to assume a wolf’s aspect. Under a full moon he does so instinctively. His Indian companions share his condition. Loups garoux, is the name we gave them in my country.”

Jan’s expression made Vigoreaux raise his eyebrows.

“Do you doubt my word?”

Jan thought momentarily, and shrugged. After what he’d already seen, he found he did not.

Vigoreaux chuckled, genuinely amused.

“You see, Badham and I both had the same idea in meeting for dinner. The moondoggers set upon the last of the crew outside, and Badham, as much a slave to his nature as I, became a wolf there and then. He tried to kill me, only to find himself in the grip of the lone Tartar, as it were.

“Mr. Badham is ferociously strong, but I am still stronger. After a few moments of rambunctiousness followed by a necessary awkwardness as I held him under the heel of my boot and barred my cabin door against his gang, he changed back into a man and offered, I believe, the only apology he has ever been compelled to give in his life.

“I decided to exercise mercy, for I knew this was too odd a chance meeting to simply let by. I will admit that for the first time in oh, I don’t know how many years, I felt reluctant to end the existence of so interesting a creature. I offered him terms, and impressed with my own fortitude as he was, he accepted.

“He relayed the proposal to his subordinates. He had only to kill two of them before they agreed to sign articles.”

“What about the rest?” Jan said quietly. “You said there were only twenty at first. Where did you happen to find more like them?”

“Well, we put to port at Mashpee for a month while Badham and his Indians marched into the woods and recruited more of their like. Loups garoux, like natural wolves, can use howls and markings to spread a message for miles with a swiftness surpassing the efficiency of the most reliable couriers.

“At the month’s end we had a full complement of white men and Indians, gathered from the countryside. The New World, I suppose, has become something of a haven for many, shall we say, libertine individuals seeking to escape the persecution of the Old. You must know of this, being a colonial yourself. My loups garoux are all pagans and child killers, convicted cannibals and kidnapers—pirates in short, but for the shortcoming of never having sailed. Sailed! Many of these had never lived under roofs, and were so feral they had to be taught to walk upright. Badham was a good teacher. Despite a few minor if bloody initial challenges to his authority and my own, eventually the crew became as efficient a pack of sea wolves, if you will pardon my usage, as there have ever been.”

Vigoreaux’s history called to mind a half-remembered tale a Welsh salt had told Jan one late night over a rum pot, of a cursed ship with red sails and a pale, strange-eyed old captain that frequently put to port at Tortuga, buying little in the way of provisions and selling off much ill-gotten bounty. No barnacles clung to her, and no rats traversed her lines.

Even the notorious folk of Tortuga barred her entry with torch and cannon one year, after several of the town’s whores gave birth to wolf pups. These were cast into the sea. The Welshman had held out the horns the whole time he related the tale.

“They are able enough, and they are unmatched fighters when their blood is up,” Vigoreaux continued, returning to his seat. “I ask only a captain’s share of gold and the blood of the enemy commander. The meat is their measure. The clean bones we cast into the sea.”

Jan wiped sweat from his eye with the back of his hand and was glad it did not tremble. It was hot in the cabin, and yet the casements were shuttered. Why did the old tick keep it so dark and close? It was stuffy as a smokehouse.

“Drink?” Vigoreaux asked. “Not my fare, of course. Rum, if you like.” He gestured to a pot on the table.

Jan went to it and took it up, biting out the cork. The pot left a ring on the table, a corona of the abbot’s blood. He thought better, and set it down, wiping his palm on the leg of his breeches.

“Now you’ve told me your story,” Jan mumbled. “What now? You’d have us join you?”

“No,” said Vigoreaux, shaking his head. “I’m afraid not. You see, except when the length of our voyage forbids it, once a month we weigh anchor at an isle in the tropics so les loups garoux may turn loose their moon madness on the tattooed aborigines that inhabit it. If, during the voyage, we turn up any stouthearted souls among the civilized world, we put them ashore as well. It’s good for the crew’s morale and constitution. They stretch their legs, howl, and bark, and they rend flesh…a sort of friendly competition with your flesh as the prize.”

“So you’ve saved us from the bellies of sharks for the bellies of your cannibal crew?” Jan said.

“On the merit of your spirit, yes.” Vigoreaux nodded. “Badham and the men are easily bored by the babbling natives. These aborigines have come to expect us now, you see. Like the gulls on my island. I don’t know the particulars of their religion, but it seems our monthly visitations have become a part of their culture. They beat a handful of men and women into the jungle for us, but these sacrifices have no mettle. A lot of weepers and bleeders. Do you know, some of them actually kneel and wait to be killed? Still, flesh is flesh, and blood, blood. And when the blood of les loups garoux boils, nothing can stay them.”

Jan retreated from the grisly table to the corner where Timóteo slept a restless, unnatural sleep.

“Well?” Vigoreaux said. “This may be your life’s final valediction. Come now, I would hear your story. Who are you? What have you been? Where have you come from?”

Jan stared at the sagging thing eying him hungrily from the chair at the bloodstained table. This thing was not content to suck him dry of his blood, but of all he was. It thirsted for life itself as a spinster hungers for news of the world. Blood was but a poor substitution. Vigoreaux drank life because he could have none of his own.

To this thing before him, what did it matter how he had come here from Jamestown? What good would it be to tell him of his conscription and his capture by the Spaniards at Cumberland Bay? The War of Jenkins Ear meant as little to Vigoreaux as it did to Jan himself now. Vigoreaux’s was a half-life of endless years untouched and without feeling. He was only curious about Jan in passing, as a diner wonders of the cook who labors to make his food, or the garnish beside his meat. His experiences, his life, were but a salt to make his death savory to this devil’s palate.

Well, he would not make his end a sweetmeat to slide down the bastard’s gullet. If die he must, then he swore then and there he would make this fiend choke as he went.

“My story’s one you won’t soon forget, Old Tick,” he said, lifting Timóteo to his feet. “It’s the end of your own. Now lock us in your hold, and bring us food and water.”

* * * *

Later, when Timóteo awoke, he told of terrible dreams, of his Dominican brothers being cooked upon a black iron spit turned by Captain Vigoreaux as the redhead Thomas Badham cut pieces from them with a long dirk.

The Dominicans were gone, as was the boatswain’s mate. Timóteo’s nightmare was but the attempt of his delirious mind to make sense of all he had seen as Badham led them across the feculent decks and down into the hold. They had slaughtered the priests, and set on them with hatchets. As he bore Timóteo, he had seen the Trivias heave bloody ended limbs onto stacks like kindling. Everything was uniformly divided: the naked torsos in one heap, the legs in a pile, arms in another. At the piles squatted a black-eyed Wampanoag butcher working with cleaver and filet knife, cutting the meat from the bones with the deftness of a practiced hand, tossing feet and hands over the side as if they were fish guts. Some of the idle sailors cracked open the clean bones and sucked the marrow, leering red and black grins at him as he passed, offering him to partake of their vicious meal.

“Your own carcass won’t be so neatly treated, Driftwood,” Badham promised him. “This’ll all be cured and salted for the stores. On you, we’ll feast in the old way. Raw.”

“May you choke upon our bones if you should fare so well as to taste them,” Jan spat.

He prayed he would have a chance to at least strike this villain if he never saw Vigoreaux again. But he doubted God was inclining an eye or an ear over The Trivia.

When Timóteo revived, Jan bade him eat the bread and water Badham had left them but steered him clear of the meat. He related Captain Vigoreaux’s tale and assured him of its veracity.

Timóteo was appalled, but strangely unsurprised. Instead, he grimaced over the tin dish of meat and kicked it violently, scattering its contents across the locked door.

“Loups garoux was the word Vigoreaux used,” Jan said. “Wilkołak, my father called them. Werewolves.”

“Yes.” Timóteo nodded. “Lobos hombres. In Cordova there was once such a beast, killing the children and stealing.”

“And the captain himself…,” Jan began.

Timóteo held up his hand. The priestly mildness was gone from him. His words hissed in the closeness like the rasp of steel from a scabbard. “These things are not unknown to the Church.” Timóteo sighed. “They are abomination, Jan, put upon the earth by the enemies of God. When we are put ashore, we must do all we can to kill them all.”

Chapter 2

Sampari parted the broad fronds with her fingers and the white sand beach and the blue sea stretched before her as though it were a thing contained within the green frame of the jungle.

She saw the sun glowing through the red sails of the big boat on the rolling waves and knew the khakhua would be on the island by nightfall.

They had been coming since she was a little girl. How many times had she snuck out to this same spot and watched the red sails bloom like a poisonous blossom on the horizon? She remembered when the laleo master and his animal men had come into their village one night. The big red-haired monster that plucked her from sleep and so too from the innocence and security of everything before still loomed terrible in her nightmares.

Her father was killed. The old white laleo sucked the blood from his neck like a stinging bat and threw his limp body to his khakhua, who tore it apart before her eyes. There had never been any shelter for her since, not beneath the sun, and never beneath the moon.

So her fat uncle, a selfish and plotting shaman who used talk of the spirits to get what he wanted, made a bargain that spared them, but kept the khakhua returning. Two of the men and boys of the tribe who were his enemies were given to the khakhua as tribute. He also gave them two of the women, one of these his own wife.

The best warriors of the village came under his sway somehow. The weak and fearful thereafter worked to cultivate her uncle’s favor, lest they be given over to the khakhua to be eaten on their return at the new moon. Her uncle took her mother and forced himself upon her, and she bore a fat and spoiled daughter named Mivai who was as much a little bully as his fat and spoiled son, Kilikili.

This was the world in which Sampari lived. Her people had once been honorable and intrepid. They had left the island of skulls, the island of monsters, long ago and come to live in this peaceful place, braving a long, storied voyage over the turbulent sea. Now they were like idle berries waiting to be picked.

In time her uncle taught the people to believe the khakhua were not men at all but angry monsters who had followed them from their ancient home and must be appeased. They ate away the evil from the village so the field would grow and the piglets and the children would not be born dead. He turned them from the worship of their hero ancestors, and kept them fearful. They built their huts in the trees like cowering monkeys, and he lived in the tallest branches, an overripe fruit dangling above them.

Then Kilikili came of age and began to eye Sampari as a blood-relation should not. A few times he tried to corner her as she gathered food, and finally she cut off two of his groping fingers with a boar-bone knife.

Her uncle’s men caught her, and her uncle told her she must marry Kilikili or he would kill her mother, his own wife. Being the lecherous old frog he was, he had begun to tire of her just as he had the first.

For his part, Kilikili did not seem quite so anxious for the coupling as before, but his father insisted.

When her mother learned of this ultimatum, she stepped out of the doorway of the tall tree house she shared with Sampari’s uncle and plummeted, breaking her body on the jungle floor.

Her meaning could not have been more plain had she spoken it into Sampari’s ears, “Run, daughter! Run!”

That very morning her uncle proclaimed her a witch and demanded she be bound to be given over to the khakhua.

So she escaped into the jungle.

She had been on her own for a week, living off the fruit of the trees and stealing cassowary eggs, sucking water from the vines as her mother had taught her, and waiting. Waiting for the coming of the khakhua.

She knew the khakhua sometimes brought other men to hunt down for their own enjoyment, men from islands beyond the sea.

And there they were. Two. Only two. All this waiting and planning, and only two this time.

She saw them in the back of the little boat coming down from the great mother boat, tied and hunched over behind two of the khakhua. One was large and sandy-haired, the other smallish, bearded, and dark.

She hoped they were brave. They must be, if they were to help her free her people from her uncle and the worship of the khakhua.

* * * *

As soon as the launch ground against the bottom, Jan and Timóteo were pushed over the edge to splash in the surf. Their hands had been tied behind them and they fell beneath the few feet of seawater, unable to catch themselves. As they struggled to rise, Badham put a foot on each of their backs and held them there until they came up gasping, lungs searing from the inrush of air.

The big man took hold of their collars and dragged them to the white sand like a pair of wayward kittens. They fell, spluttering, and he took out a dirk and neatly cut their bonds.

He flung the knife down between them and it stuck in the sand.

“I’ll be coming back for this,” he said, straightening.

Jan turned on his side and spat out the dry sand grinding between his teeth. Badham was a bulky silhouette against the sun—a colossus limned in fire he had to squint to make out.

“It’ll be waiting for you.”

Timóteo rose to his hands and knees and vomited the seawater he’d inhaled. Badham put his boot to his hind-end and the coughing Dominican chased the sea with a mouthful of beach sand.

Jan kicked at his ankle, but only succeeded in covering the leg of Badham’s boots with mud.

“See you tonight, Driftwood,” he said, and waded through the surf back to the waiting launch, gesturing for the oarsmen to shove off.

Jan did not watch the little boat contend against the waves as it returned to its whorishly festooned mother, though he heard the oars groan in the locks and the sailors begin a light-hearted chantey as they commenced. He stood and helped Timóteo to his feet, then stooped and got the knife.

“You’ve got to be able to run,” he said, handing him the knife.

“I know.” Timóteo nodded, shrugging out of the heavy black cappa and cutting away his habit at the knees. “Let’s go.”

They’d spoken of what they would do during the voyage to the island, but it was a vague plan. They knew the jungle could provide them with food, and probably water, possibly the means to fashion rude weapons. They’d not hoped for much. The knife was an unexpected boon. With it, they could make spears at least, maybe rig some rudimentary snares to harry the chase. Jan had seen an old pathfinder named Etienne rig a bow and arrows from scratch once, but he doubted he could replicate the process in time.

Now they fled the warm beach. The setting, idyllic in any other time, was only a naked killing ground now. They ran like animals for the shade of the green jungle, and went crashing through the raking fronds and over the twisting roots until the sounds of insects and cawing birds fleeing their loud approach drowned out the surf and the fading song of the Trivias.

After running deep into the jungle for they knew not how long, they slowed to a stop. Each man stood panting with their hands on their knees.

“All right?” Jan asked.

Timóteo nodded.

Jan’s head snapped aright and the two held their breath.

Timóteo questioned him with a look. After a moment, Jan shrugged.

“Some animal, probably,” he said. Then he held his finger to his lips and listened. They heard the chattering of birds, and far off to the right, something else faint and constant.

“We’re in luck,” he said. “Do you hear that? Water. Let’s go.”

They proceeded toward the sound, Jan in the lead, stepping more cautiously this time, and Timóteo being careful to follow in his footsteps.

They walked, stopping now and again to listen and get their bearings, until the sound became a familiar rush and they came through the trees to a place where water fell into a good-sized, marshy pond from a series of rocks. A creek trickled down from a single high, leaf-covered point. The island was formed like a wide-brimmed, peaked hat.

Jan studied the area for a moment, then trudged straight into the water and waded across to the other side. Timóteo followed, and they rushed into the jungle for thirty paces and stopped.

“All right,” Jan said then. “We go back. Step only in the places you stepped before. Careful.”

They began walking backward until they reached the water again, and waded back into the pool, stopping at a point in the center where it was belly deep.

“Take off your shoes,” Jan said, and he reached down and pulled off his marine boots. It was a shame to lose them, but they were in need of a cobbler anyhow. “They won’t be looking for bare feet straight off. Maybe they’ll think our prints belong to natives. It could give us an hour or so.”

“If they’re truly wolves,” Timóteo said, “they may hunt by smell.”

“You’re right,” Jan agreed, taking off his shirt and trousers. “We should climb up there and walk through the stream. If they can smell us, it’ll throw them off.”

“Will we make our stand up there? We might see them all coming from that peak.”

“I don’t think so. No place to go.”

They balled up their clothes around their footwear and Jan went to the little waterfall. He jammed the bundle down beneath the rocks, then started climbing up the slick stones through the rushing water. The handholds were smooth and tricky.

Jan had just reached the edge of the waterfall and pulled himself over when he heard the splash.

Timóteo had slipped and fallen.

His black hair surfaced in a moment, and Jan cursed. The priest’s face was drawn in pain.

“Are you all right?”

“My elbow is hurt,” Timóteo gasped. He raised it from the water. A ragged gash from the joint to the middle of the forearm leaked blood freely. “I can climb, though.”

“Be careful,” Jan said. He lay on his stomach in the stream and extended his arms to help the priest. In the back of his mind, he knew they were finished if it was true about the werewolves’ sense of smell. His own experience hunting taught him there was no richer smell than blood to an animal. They could only bind the cut with their clothing, and that made doing away with it useless.

“Bring a scrap of cloth to wrap around your arm,” he muttered.

Timóteo stopped climbing and looked back the way they’d come.

“Just do it,” Jan groaned. “Don’t worry about it.” He knew the blackfriar guessed his thoughts, knew his priestly martyrdom would soon show its face. “By myself I’ve got no chance. We’ll think of something else,” he added.

Timóteo did not look at him. He pointed a skinny arm across the pool.

Jan looked over, suddenly alert and rigid. Had they come already? The sun was hours from falling! Had Badham ordered the boat turned around at the last minute and decided to hoard their carcasses for himself?

But no. No men or beast-men came out of the jungle.

Framed in the leaning branches and drooping vines was a half-naked girl.

She was small, yet not a child. Her skin was coffee-colored, and there was a sheen to it. Her short, tightly curled hair framed a pretty face, but her wide, dark eyes regarded them with open mistrust. She was slightly hunched, one slender leg poised to propel her back into the foliage. She wore a low slung, short skirt of dry grasses, a few strings of teeth and shells, and a single rattan hoop through her right ear. In her hand she held a crude, dark, stone axe.

Jan touched one of the smooth stones nearest him. The girl raised her axe in warning and took a wary step back into the brush.

Jan released the stone and showed her the heels of his hands.

Timóteo did the same, then hastily covered his own nakedness as an afterthought. Jan thought he saw the priest’s pallid cheeks redden and allowed himself half of a grin.

“What do you think she intends?” he whispered.

“Maybe she’s one of the ones the villagers turn over to them,” Jan said.

“You told me Vigoreaux said they went willingly.”

“He said some of them did,” Jan said.

“Peace, child,” Timóteo ventured, speaking soothingly.

The girl lowered her weapon and worked her jowls, looking from first one of them and then to the other and back.

She said something. It was not anything either of them could understand.

They shook their heads.

She quickly got down on all fours and gnashed her teeth.

“What the hell. She’s mad,” said Jan.

“No, no,” said Timóteo. “I don’t think so.”

Timóteo looked to Jan and then to the girl, and having the more prodigious hair between the two of them, he gripped tufts of first his dark beard and then his chest hairs and made growling noises, pantomiming an animal.

“Khakhua!” she said, nodding her head. “Khakhua!”

“Khakhua,” Timóteo repeated, and then said, “Devils! Ah…beast men! No—werewolves,” he said to the girl. “Khakhua! Werewolves!” It was best they settled on a single term if they were to communicate.

She nodded vigorously and straightened. Then she pointed to the sun and slowly predicted its passage across the sky, until her finger indicated west.

She spoke as she did so, her musical language tumbling out like the water over the nearby rocks. The only word they caught was ‘khakhua,’ in finality at the end.

They nodded. At night they would come.

She pointed in the direction of the creek and made a swiftly moving gesture with her hand. Then she started along the bank of the pond, gesturing for them to follow.

“She’s going to help us, praise God,” Timóteo said, lumbering out of the pond.

“Hang on, girl!” Jan called.

The girl stopped and stared.

Jan came to stand beside Timóteo and pointed out his bloody arm, saying, “Your khakhua are going to smell his blood, you see?” He pointed to his nose and sniffed. He pointed up the creek. “We can try to lose the scent in the water.”

She shook her head and pointed off in a different direction, and motioned for them to wait. She went into the jungle again without waiting for an answer, the fronds closing around her bare back like emerald lips.

By the time they waded to the edge of the pond, she returned with a bundle of leaves and other things tucked into the crook of her arm.

She set aside her axe and motioned for Timóteo to sit down on a nearby rock. He did so. She set to plastering a broad leaf with mud from the banks, along with a handful of some plant matter she chewed to a pulp before applying to the wound.

Jan sat on his heels and watched her apply the poultice, briefly admiring her lithe form. He hadn’t seen a woman in months. This one’s limbs bore the faint crisscrossed scars of jungle life, and her hands and feet were hard as shoe leather. There were a series of ornamental circular scars down both arms and across her flat belly. Her skin looked to be smeared in what smelled like animal fat to keep the insects from knotting her up. She was a full-bloomed woman nonetheless, and he was conscious of his own nakedness for the first time. He turned away his body and his thoughts, his eyes falling on her axe, lain aside. It was nothing more than a heavy stone wedge lashed with vines to a wood haft, but it could kill.

He picked it up.

Suddenly her fist darted out from behind her back with a sharp bone awl knife. She pressed its point beneath his chin.

Her eyes were imposing, her lower lip tucked behind her teeth, drawing her face into a serious scowl.

“Hold on, girl,” Jan said, chuckling despite his predicament.

He didn’t relinquish the axe immediately, but reached down and traced a crude stick figure with a dog’s head in the mud.

He drew another figure. A figure with a human head, wrinkled lines about the empty circle face.

At first she drew her eyebrows together, but then her eyes widened. She met his look and nodded.

“Laleo,” she said, using her hands to pull at her cheeks until the skin seemed to drag on her skull and the red rims beneath her eyes were exposed. “Laleo.”

“Laleo,” he said, smiling now. She had put up her knife and he could relax. “Vigoreaux.”

“Vee-ga-ro,” she agreed. She pointed to Timóteo’s bloody arm and pantomimed drinking from her cupped hand. “Laleo.”

He pointed first to the Vigoreaux drawing. “Vigoreaux–laleo,” he said. Then he indicated the dog-headed drawing, in his mind, the red headed blackguard, Badham. “Werewolf–khakhua.” He sunk the stone axe in the midst of the mud scrawls and scattered the drawing. He looked at her.

She smiled, gleefully as a child on Christmas morning.

* * * *

It was noon when Sampari stepped once more into the village. She had known what she would find even before she saw it, for the booming voice of her uncle and the wailing chants of the women to the tune of the rhythmic pounding on the tree trunks had told her.

At the sight of her, the singing stopped and her uncle’s followers gave a great cry. She was seized roughly by the arms. She kept a look of half-lidded indifference as they dragged her to him.

One of the village women, Maja, barred their way for a moment, and thanked her for returning.

“Now that you are back, they will not give my son to the khakhua,” Maja blubbered, her old cheeks wet with tears.

She was shoved aside, and Sampari saw three of her people, a girl her age, an old man, and Maja’s strong son, Bunop, kneeling in the clearing, bound.

Then she too was driven to her knees. Her fat uncle loomed over her, his son Kilikili peering like a trained monkey over his greasy shoulder. At his left, Yakor, the khen-mengga-abül, regarded her from his bloodshot eyes. Those who did not bow to her uncle’s gods still feared Yakor, The Fierce Man’s strength and arrows.

“You came back, once-my-daughter,” her uncle said.

“Never your daughter!” she snarled.

“No,” he agreed. “Never. You’re a witch, sired by an evil black boar that mounted your slut mother in the forest. She told me this, before she jumped from my house in shame.”

There were awed sounds from some of the gathered under his spell. Others said nothing.

Sampari only glared, then smiled and pointed to the tree line.

“If I was a witch I would not need them.”

Sampari’s entrance into the clearing had shocked the village, but the emergence of the two laleos so terrorized them, a handful of men and women dropped their things and ran headlong into the jungle.

Those dull-witted ones who accepted her uncle’s new religion thought they were monsters, and fell to their faces. They were puzzled when her uncle and Kilikili and Yakor did not do the same, although Kilikili stumbled a few uncertain steps backward.

Those who lived her uncle’s way only because they feared Yakor and the khakhua milled uncertainly.

* * * *

Timóteo muttered the Psalm of David in Latin as he and Jan entered the clearing. The village was encircled by a dozen or so rattan huts on platforms situated precariously high in the slim, green trees. There were families of pigs tethered to the vast roots, and wide-eyed children scattered like crows.

Neither Jan nor the priest had ever seen such people. The small, dark men were well-muscled and garbed even more immodestly than Sampari, whose name at least they had come to know. Their naked unmentionables were ridiculously sheathed in outrageously displayed rolled palm leaves. String belts hung with stone knives, and similar necklaces of bead and bone were their only other coverings.

Yet there was nothing exaggerated about the bows and the fistfuls of yard-long arrows some carried.

Jan observed the varied reactions of the natives to their appearance. He immediately assessed the dark, lean figure who glared at them beside the two fat men standing over the kneeling Sampari as the greatest danger. This one was a killer, not so cowed by Vigoreaux’s men as the bloodsucker perhaps believed. He held an ash black bow and a clutch of wicked barb-headed arrows, one of which he surreptitiously nocked but did not aim at them. There were others here too who did not avert their gaze as fearful supplicants should, but still remained wary at the strange sight of two naked, seemingly unarmed white men in their midst. Good. If their plan were to succeed, they needed fighters, not cowering devotees.

He turned his attention to the fat pair. One was a soft-looking boy, and he stood a little behind his elder, a silver-flecked, pot-bellied devil with an overabundance of savage finery—a resplendent headdress of bright parrot feathers, clanking anklets and an ugly, fat face fully riddled with native beads, bones, and studs.

“The headman?” Timóteo ventured, after he finished his prayer.

“I’d wager.” Jan nodded. “Let’s go parley.”

They renewed their approach, being careful not to meet any other of the curious looks.

The fat old chief glanced down at Sampari and spat angry words at her, gesturing forcefully at them.

“I don’t like his tone,” Jan whispered.

“Nor do I,” Timóteo agreed.

The air was tense as a line pulled to the breaking.

The chief seemed to grow angrier, and thrust accusatory gestures at Sampari, who argued shrilly with him in their tongue.

Jan glanced at the dark bowman. The arrow was fitted to the bow, but still pointed downward. The warrior’s deep set eyes went from Jan and Timóteo to the headman, as though awaiting an order.

“I don’t know what’s happening, but I think it’s only going to go one way, padre,” Jan mumbled over his shoulder. “Stay low.”

Timóteo nodded.

Jan let the native girl’s stone axe slide down from where he had concealed it behind his forearm. Now he understood why she’d insisted on pressing it into his hand before they reached her village.

“God help us,” Timóteo muttered.

When they were within a few yards the argument between Sampari and the headman ended with a dismissive flip of the fat chief’s hand, directed at them offhandedly as he turned fully toward her.

The archer’s bow came up to his shoulder and the string went taut in the same instant.

Jan dropped to his knee and Timóteo to his belly. The arrow hissed over their heads and clattered into the trees behind them. At the same time, Jan drew back the axe and sent it flying end over end at his attacker. His aim was off, and instead of the imposing warrior, the fat youth at the chief’s side screamed and fell dead, his head split to the bridge of his nose.

Well, he hadn’t thrown a tomahawk since Virginia, after all.

Jan still had Badham’s dirk, and he scrambled to his feet and charged, flipping the blade across his chest into his left hand.

The warrior managed another flight. The arrow tore the skin over Jan’s collarbone before they were upon each other, crashing to the ground. They rolled there, a furious tumult of kicking legs, thrashing limbs and biting teeth, contending with the maddened ferocity of dueling tigers for control of Badham’s flashing blade.

Jan assumed he was on his own. He did not trust Timóteo to come readily to his aide in a fight, did not know if the native girl Sampari was alive, and expected the other armed aborigines would intervene any moment and he would feel their groping hands jerk him away from his opponent.

Instead, the other warriors stood back, giving the fighting pair ample room to decide their contest. He gave the whole of his concentration to the matter at hand.

The native was smaller, but tougher. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him, whereas Jan had spent months lazing in a Guantanamo dungeon and then sitting in chains in the bowels of first La Doña and then The Trivia. He was winded, but his blood was up, the blood of his grandfather, a winged Hussar who’d fought at Kircholm.

It was a weird and twisting path, Jan’s life, from wood cradle to this patch of itching grass on some unnamed isle fighting naked with a man as alien to him as the far heavens to the earth. He saw, as he at last pressed the point of Badham’s blade between the native’s first and second ribs, this dark-skinned man felt the same.

Jan didn’t know what roads this fellow had taken, but in the instant of his death, with both their eyes suddenly slipping from anxious desperation to slackening blue relief and fading brown acceptance, it seemed he acknowledged Jan, as if they were a pair of laced gentlemen wearing the same hat, stopping in the lane to remark mirthfully on each other’s good taste before parting ways.

The knife sunk to the hilt, the native’s grip on his wrists eased, and his head fell back into the grass peacefully as Jan smelled his last, stale breath blow out from his quivering lips. Jan closed the hunter’s eyes with two bloody fingers and stood, bringing the knife with him, feeling the warm redness drip on his thigh as he drew it out.

The gathered tribesmen weren’t even paying attention to him.

They were staring at Sampari. The fat chieftain kneeled before her now, hunched over. As Jan watched, she lifted the fat man’s chin with the point of her jagged bone knife. As coolly as if she were slaughtering a pig for the table, she swept it across his throat. The blood splashed across her heaving belly.

She turned to the others and held the knife high over her head, the red running in a stream down her trembling arm, over the swell of one breast to drip like red milk from the purple nipple. She didn’t even watch her victim fall to his side, clutching at the semicircle of swiftly growing red she had cut into his belly during their struggle. His glistening entrails spilled over her bare feet like fish from a net as the wound parted.

She addressed the shock-still people gathered about, and she went on for a long time in their musical language.

Timóteo knelt beside each of the men they’d killed and spoke benedictions in turn. Sampari went to a trio of people he hadn’t noticed before, bound and kneeling nearby. She cut them free, one at a time.

A group of the villagers began to shake their heads and cry out, but she silenced them with a flourish of her bloodied knife.

It wasn’t difficult to understand what was happening. Vigoreaux had spoken of the aborigines’ primitive adoration, but he obviously hadn’t taken into account the subtleties of native politics. Not everyone here gave their allegiance to the invading “gods,” at least, not without cajoling from the fat headman and his enforcer. Sampari had staged a coup with Jan as her main insurgent. Yet as he watched this feral, beautiful girl arguing with the people, he could see she’d not yet won them over.

Timóteo was of the same mind.

“They’re not all of them going to help us, are they?”

“They’re scared, some of them,” said Jan. “The rest don’t trust us.”

“I don’t blame them. They’ve never seen men like us, except for Vigoreaux’s crew.”

“No,” Jan said. “Never men like us.”

* * * *

Sampari was aghast at the indecision of her people. Her hated uncle lay dead at her feet, as was Yokar, The Fierce Man. Who stood now to foster this shameful practice of appeasing the khakhua at every moon? She cut loose the victims her uncle had selected, but even they seemed hesitant to join her and the two laleo in killing the beast men.

“Is there not a man left in this village?” she chided, flicking the knife clean of her uncle’s blood so it scattered across the faces of the onlookers. “I have avenged my mother and all who have been fed to the khakhua. Now I say we will honor our ancestors and return to the old ways. We should fight the khakhua tonight and purge our clan of the evil as we did in the days before they came!”

“Who are you to do this?” screamed one of the women. “Your uncle spared us the wrath of the khakhua. Now you will bring it down on us again. Maybe you were too little to remember how it was? Do you forget your own father—”

“I will never forget my father!” Sampari declared. “Have you all forgotten your own families who were killed and eaten on the first night? Have you forgotten the ones who were killed and eaten every moon since? This is not our way!”

“Who are they?” shouted one old man, shaking a knotted hand at the two laleo. “That is what I want to know.”

“They are nemayokh. Friends. They will be killed tonight along with our own if we let this moon pass again. They offer help.”

“What do they offer,” said the old man, “except two more bodies for the khakhua? We should drive these back into the jungle or the khakhua will come here tonight and kill every one of us!”

There was agreement among some in the crowd, fidgeting silence from others.

“We will not bring the khakhua here unless they are dead,” Sampari shouted above the mumblers. “I ask one last time. Will none of you come along and help us?”

Bunop stepped away from his mother’s side. She wailed her protest, but he shook his head and pushed her away. He came to stand by Sampari.

“Take Yokar’s bow and arrows, Bunop,” Sampari said. “The rest of you stay here and suckle the pigs.”

* * * *

“Just one,” Jan said, when Sampari and one of the men she had freed turned away and came to stand in front of them.

“It’s better than nothing,” Timóteo offered.

“Not by much.”

“Bunop,” said the girl, indicating the youth. “Bunop.”

They went the round of introductions.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Timóteo, then. “Despite his madness, our monster is a practical creature. He comes to this isle to appease his crew, he says. But why this particular island? There must be dozens of inhabited islands in the Pacific. Yet by his own admission he stays within little more than a month’s journey of this island if he can help it.”

“Ease?” Jan ventured.

“I don’t think so,” Timóteo said, shaking his head. “Remember the tale you told me that Welsh sailor told you about the ship that was driven out of Tortuga? About the wolf pups?”

“I’m sure he was talking about The Trivia.”

“As am I. But a ship can’t remain seaworthy without stopping for provisions. There are things a ship needs even with a crew that eschews typical nourishment for blood and flesh. Particularly a fighting vessel. Things need to be replenished, there are repairs. Timber, rope, fresh water, canvas, iron, ballast…”

“Cannon,” Jan agreed. “And powder. They weren’t scanting on the powder when they sunk La Doña Marisol. Shooting all the sailors…You think they have a cache here somewhere?”

“I would think they must keep an abundance of lead somewhere, by the frivolous way they spent it. If a port such as Tortuga will not have them, they must stockpile it. Why not here, where the inhabitants are too cowed and too primitive to know what to do with their supplies even if they happened to find them?”

“It seems Vigoreaux would have another purpose other than simply letting his crew run loose…” said Jan, letting his eyes rove over the dead chieftain.

“But how to find it?” Timóteo wondered aloud. “We ask if one of them has seen such a thing somewhere on the island?”

Jan smiled.

“I’m sure at least one of them has,” he said excitedly, going to the ruinous carcass of the fat headman. He swept up the fallen headdress and held it out to Timóteo. Dangling amid the various small animal skulls and gewgaws was a horn such as could not have come from any animal likely to be on the island. It was the horn of a cow—the kind that might have toiled in the harness of a Cordovan plough, cutting furrows and upturning worms to the delight of attendant seagulls. Its tip was fitted with a greenish copper butt-plug, and the faint scrimshaw design of a hart hunt was etched all over it. To a primitive, this was a relic of the gods, the fantastic remnant of some demon spirit or mythic monster. To a Marine of the 61st Foot, to a Spaniard raised in a countryside abounding with rampaging harts where such implements were commonplace, it was clearly a powderhorn.

It was empty of propellant, but a sniff inside the hollow container caught acrid traces of gunpowder.

Bunop visibly flinched when Jan popped the stopper.

He at least knew something of its purpose.

Now, how to find out where the headman had gotten it? Had Vigoreaux given it to him as a present? Somehow he doubted the pirates would play at Prometheus with their commissary.

* * * *

Sampari saw the cowed look Bunop got when Jan broke open the strange horn he had taken from her uncle’s headdress. She’d seen the garish headdress before. Her uncle always brought it out when the people who were to be given over were bound. She’d never even noticed the strange horn before.

“Bunop,” she said. “What is that thing?”

“The thunder tooth,” he whispered reverently. “Early on, your uncle took Yokar and the other hunters out into the jungle and told them if they didn’t help him he would destroy them with magic the laleo had given him. I was a boy learning to hunt with my father then. I saw your uncle take fire and thunder from the tooth. He put a hole in the hillside with it. Yokar and the others never opposed him again. Your uncle made them swear never to tell about the thunder tooth while he lived.”

Sampari nodded. She knew the laleo would never have given any power to her uncle. He had been a trickster and a liar, as were his children.

Then she knew how to find out where this “thunder tooth” had come from.

* * * *

Jan and Timóteo were still puzzling over how to ask about the powderhorn when Sampari abruptly walked away into the village. They glanced querulously at the equally perplexed Bunop, then fell in line behind her.

Small faces peered down at them from the platforms of the treehouses and ducked out of sight. Piglets tethered to the bases of the trees squealed at their strange smell as they passed. Behind them, the villagers followed at a safe distance, not daring to even speak to one another.

The procession came to a halt before the tallest, most opulent-looking dwelling.

Sampari said nothing, but began scaling the trunk of one of the support trees, nimble as a gibbon.

In another minute she pulled herself onto the platform and was out of sight somewhere in the headman’s house.

Jan and Timóteo looked at each other. They looked at Bunop. He shrugged.

They heard muffled voices coming down to them. Then, a young girl’s cry made them jump.

The girl who had cried out, a pudgy girl of about seven, was there suddenly, hanging fully over the edge of the platform, eyes bulging, mouth agape and shrieking as Sampari dangled her by both ankles.

“My God!” Timóteo gaped. “Stop it! Stop!”

Jan didn’t know quite what to do. Obviously this was the headman’s young daughter. He wondered if he could catch her without seriously injuring both of them.

The young girl screamed and cried, and somewhere in her terror, formed words.

Sampari hoisted her back up onto the platform.

In another minute she descended with the fat little girl clinging to her back, and stood before them once more, setting the wailing child down and silencing her with a sharp swat to the top of her head.

She pointed to the horn in Jan’s hands.

She squatted quickly and sketched the pictograms of Vigoreaux and Badham into the dirt.

Then she straightened and drove her bare foot into the drawing and smiled at Jan.

“Werewolf–khakhua!” she said, and pointed out into the jungle.

“Amen, daughter,” said Timóteo.

* * * *

In the cache they found a greater treasure than any mountain of pirated gold. The headman’s sniffling little daughter guided them to a wide pit dug on the north side of the island, covered with bamboo and palm. It was loaded with coils of hemp, bolts of canvas, a half dozen barrels of gunpowder, one of which, Jan noticed, had a tiny hole cut in its base, stacks of iron and lead bars, only a handful forged into balls, two drums of whale oil, a crate of British naval uniforms, all of them bearing the holes and tears that had paid for their relinquishment, a case of rifles and spike bayonets, and a pair of rusty spades. The headman had shown cunning to purloin only one of the carved horns and sift a small amount of powder. This was not the sort of treasure whose outright theft would have gone unnoticed.

“With this, these people could have fought off those creatures at any time,” Timóteo remarked. “If the headman would’ve shared his knowledge…”

“All we’ve got is us against forty men, remember,” Jan said, cracking open the rifle case and inspecting one of the muzzleloaders. “And no time to make ammunition.”

Timóteo pulled on a pair of breeches and fastened them, staring up at the sky.

“We are running short of time.”

Fishing among the cache, Jan found a brass and leather spyglass with a cracked lens and tested it, spotting a bright, nesting bird high in a cocoanut tree. It leapt into the open air as a breeze from the sea kicked up, stirring the palms, and he thought once more of his Hussar grandfather.

How many nights had his father told him the wild stories of his grandfather? Of the thunderous charges and rattling szable, until he, as a wide-eyed boy with his chin in his hands and his small heart thudding against the floor, felt sure he could hear the booming of the antique bandolet gathering dust over the mantle like the beckoning echoes of a destiny narrowly missed? He’d followed the same faint echo into service with The Old Americans of the 61st Foot. He’d followed it with Captain Washington and Old Grog Vernon across the sea on the Princess Caroline, and seen the Caribbean night sky lit with the fire of cannon, smelled it heavy with the reek of powder and heard it cacophonous with the crash of iron shot on wood and stone.

Finally, it had led him here, pitted him against a savage, unthinkable enemy with two islanders and a Catholic priest at his side.

“Let’s make do with what we have,” he said. “Padre, have you ever heard of a fladdermine?”

“I know what a mine is,” the priest admitted.

“A Hessian I served with showed me how to make them. We can bury them on the beach where they land. It could account for some of them if we’re lucky.”

“We have the powder, but do we have sufficient shot?” Timóteo mused.

“We can use seashells, set our man here to gathering them. Plenty of bones lying around the village too.”

“Won’t they be watching the beach through their spyglasses?”

“Well, we shall have to pray they are not. If they’re planning a night hunt, it may be that they’ll be dozing throughout the day. The only one among them with an eye to the glass would be the captain.”

“If he is as you told me, and what I have seen leads me to believe it is so, then we need not worry that he will be on deck during the light of day,” Timóteo said. “Sunlight is the bane of his kind.”

“That’s good to know,” Jan said. “From the beach, we can try to split them up in the jungle. I could lead them into the hills, leave some loaded muskets and the rest of the powder up there to use. I’m a fair shot. You and the girl could set some snares in the jungle.”

“But how to entice them?”

“I’ve hunted wolves in my day,” Jan said. “If they don’t follow our scent, maybe we could fool them with some of the village pigs. Slaughter a few, put them in those uniforms.”

“It may work.”

But when they had taken the time to sign their plan to Sampari and Bunop, there was much shaking of the heads and drawing back and forth.

Sampari, for her part, thought the Trivias would smell the powder buried in the sand. Even she could smell it just being close to it.

“We’ll need to put some bait there at the tree line to distract them then, and hope that the wind is with us, or that blood smells stronger than powder in their noses.”

“What will be the bait? Pigs might be too suspicious. Although if they are succumbed to a kind of feral madness they may not notice,” Timóteo reasoned.

Jan shrugged and hastily scrawled the crude but unmistakable shape of a pig in the sand, near where he’d previously drawn the powder barrels and the shoreline and the wolfmen for their benefit. He looked at Sampari and Bunop and snorted once or twice for further emphasis.

Sampari shook her head again and leaned forward, blotting out the pig with her hand.

“Well what then, goddammit?” Jan snapped, throwing up his hands in exasperation. He glanced sideways at Timóteo. “Your pardon, Padre.”

Timóteo waved him off.

Sampari smiled, ignoring his outburst. She pointed to the little girl, who was sitting on the edge of the cache pit, kicking her legs and rubbing her red eyes.

“She can’t be serious!” Timóteo scoffed. “It’s unthinkable! She’s a child!”

Jan shrugged.

“But then again, she might be too tempting for them to pass up, Father.”

Jan caught Timóteo’s glare and grinned reassuringly.

“I’ll not truss her up from a tree to be sure, but perhaps…” Thoughtfully, he found himself gazing up at the trees just then. “Perhaps there is another way.”

* * * *

The clouds parted from the gibbous moon and sent silvery, mystic light down through the palms and over the stones and the waters. It brought too the sounds of baying. This drove the villagers to their knees in their huts. Out in the dark jungle each of the four who dared to face the source of that hellish noise quivered slightly and readied themselves.

The only other sound was the crying of the little girl who stood at the point where beach became the jungle, staring out at the dark ship in the distance as it lowered its launches and then at the boats as they cut across the crashing waves to shore.

Everyone on the island knew the portent of the howling.

The crew hit the surf running, stripping off their clothes, shredding them, stumbling to their hands in their eagerness, splashing beneath the surf, trampled by their blood-mad fellows, arising from beneath the water furred and sharp eared, fanged and long snouted, neither wolves nor men, but things somewhere between, coursing swiftly on bent haunches and ape-like arms strung with powerful sinew, ending in terrible claws.

The little girl felt the beating of their charge across the sand beneath her feet. The warm breeze blew into the jungle. She could smell their animal musk, tinted with the sweet stench of rum. She shuddered uncontrollably in her fright, her fat cheeks splashed with tears, her face red, no sound coming from her gaping mouth, only strands of saliva and a sort of hissing.

She perceived them through slitted, watery eyes, great bristling forms mostly animal, tapering, upthrust ears spangled with glinting pirate gold, hulking shoulders draped with scraps of garish fabric and tinkling necklaces of human bone. Carnivorous teeth snapped in long jaws, eager to crack her little bones.

Even if she were not bound she did not think she could move.

The wind was at their backs, rolling in from the sea to stir the jungle. They could smell her fear like a fragrant meal. But they did not smell the powder.

The wave of bounding, slavering creatures was only paces away when a knuckled paw touched off the improvised fladdermine Jan had buried there. The flintlock mechanism clicked, there was a spark, and then the fougasse blew open, sending its makeshift cocoanut shrapnel spilling up out of the earth, each packed with its own volatile charge.

The huge explosion lit up the werewolves before blowing them to pieces. Cluster bombs bounced through their midst, sending fragments of hard nuts, small stones, fistfuls of animal teeth and broken shells gathered from the beach tearing through their flesh.

When the smoke billowed into the jungle, fifteen lay still and smoking in the sand, and another four kicked and yelped about, whining like chastised dogs.

The great red-haired monster Thomas Badham was not one of these. His fangs bared, he raged and howled, tearing through the fading smoke to find the little village girl gone without a trace. There was no rustling ahead in the underbrush, no miserable mewling, no scent of fear or sweat on the ground. He growled, perplexed, then saw the stamped down grasses leading northwest and crashed into the forest with the remainder of his pack whining and howling at his haunches.

None of them noticed the girl high in the interlocking branches where she had been hoisted by the length of rope. Bunop held her tightly, one hand clamped across her working lips, watching the khakhua tear across the floor of the jungle below. He silently blessed the fortunate wind hissing through the trees, waited till the barking of the wolfmen was distant, and only then lowered Sampari’s trembling half-sister Mivai back down and cut her free.

Chapter 3

On the deck of The Trivia, Captain Absolon Vigoreaux watched the fire burning on the shore and gripped the rail, deliberating. Obviously they had found the stores, and Badham had taken the launches. It was a wetting or a gamble. He peered down at the inky water, saw the moon lying there like a china plate. The moondoggers had their hunts to keep the fires stoked in their hearts. After so many years, what did he have?

He smiled to himself and lit his pipe.

* * * *

Timóteo thanked the Lord for the wind. His calves ached and his bladder was heavy, but he had heard the tremendous explosion from the beach and knew the Trivias were coming. He knew it was sinful to pray for vengeance, but he thought of poor Abbot Ramón breathing his last on a heathen table, and he thought of his brothers’ suffering, and he did so anyway. He prayed too for resolve. He had never killed a man before. He held his musket close.

He thought of the woman somewhere to his left in the dark watching the same path for signs of the creatures. She would kill without hesitation. He had seen her. Poor, savage little thing with no knowledge of God’s love, no regard for her fellow creations. Yet another feeling rose in him, one long buried in incense and abstinence; the exercise of manhood. Neither he nor his father, nor even his grandfather had ever been soldiers, but as a boy he had thrilled to the exploits of Ambrosio and Olivares, and sometimes wondered had he been born into another life, if he should have been able to fight. He supposed this was a musing common to boys, and he felt it in his breast again now, like the discovery of a fond and forgotten plaything.

But this was not boyhood play, it was the everlasting game of God and the Devil, and immortal souls were the wager at stake. This was the work to which he had sworn himself, the eternal conflict, stripped down to a literal, elemental level. He prayed he had prepared Jan enough.

An animal noise came to his ears, as of a pack of hunting dogs. Then the signal fire lit up high on the point above the waterfall, and was met by primeval howls from below.

A great snarling went up among the milling creatures, which he could only perceive by their sound, too far away to see them. It reached a ferocious crescendo and then one of the things let out a bloodcurdling sound somewhere between a canine yowl and the shriek of a man in agony. The sound dwindled, and the pack of beasts set up a terrible baying, drowning out the lone casualty entirely. A great body of them tore across the jungle toward the far off firelight, and the remainder came in their direction.

Timóteo steeled himself, then saw the dark shadows rushing low ahead like Satan’s dogs come to hound the damned. There were six crashing through the bushes. More than they had hoped would come after the fire.

To his left, Sampari yelled a strange, keening sort of cry. The creatures instantly veered toward her position, jaws snapping in anticipation.

Two were caught up by the snares and launched into the trees with a whipping sound of the ropes drawing tight. He saw their shaggy bodies rise suddenly from the underbrush, moonlight shining through the long hair on their flailing limbs. They struck the trees and hung suspended.

The other four only began to take notice of their fellows’ fate when they crashed into the concealed pit and onto the bed of muskets with their spike-tipped socket bayonets.

Timóteo broke from his concealment and ran toward the pit. He saw Sampari do the same, and they met on opposite ends.

He could see them down below, writhing in the moonlight. Some of them were transfixed, and these howled insanely and thrashed, clawing at the earth and their own brethren, trying to escape.

Some broke free and leapt, gripping the edge of the pit. Timóteo and Sampari drove them back, Sampari sticking them with the spike bayonet in the face and hands until they let go, Timóteo savagely bashing their misshapen heads and long, clawed hands, giving the bayonets below a second chance.

It was bloody work, and ten minutes passed before the terrible shriek-howling from the pit ceased. When it was done, four naked men lay speared to death in the hole. Timóteo made the sign of the cross swiftly over their bodies.

Then they marched to where the two werewolves still hung thrashing upside down in the snares. Sampari ran the first through with her musket-spear, jabbing it repeatedly as it whined pitiably.

Timóteo muttered a Psalm as he approached the second, and nearly bit his own tongue as it suddenly dropped from its rope and flopped on the ground, then turned and scrabbled at him.

He drew the musket over his head like a club and brought it down with a crack on the thing’s head, but it managed to hook its claws into his leg and shred his calf, dragging him to the ground. He pummeled it ferociously, but it crawled up his torso, weathering the blows, hooking and digging its nails in his flesh like an inexpert climber’s pitons and working its way up to his throat.

He could see its black eyes shining, see the white of its teeth, and feel its hot breath puffing up at him.

Sampari straddled it then, the added weight driving the breath from his lungs. She reached around and put her bone knife under its chin. She plunged its point up several times, each withdrawal vomiting splashes of thick, hot blood down on Timóteo. The wolf gave up trying to dig into his throat and desperately tried to twist and deal with the girl on its back, but its efforts soon waned. It fell heavily against him and slid off.

Timóteo lay gasping as Sampari stabbed the werewolf a few more times for certainty’s sake and then stooped over him to inspect his many wounds.

How had it gotten down from the snare? How?

As she prodded his punctured torso, Timóteo turned his head and looked at the thing. Like an expression slackening in death, the thing changed, softened before his eyes. Its hair fell away from its skin, its terrible dog face shrank back into manly proportions, and the coal black eyes dilated until Timóteo stared into the face of a dead, naked white man, curled up in an aura of shaggy, blood-soaked hairs.

He whispered a prayer and lay back as Sampari attended him. He saw the snare rope still swinging from the branch, and the pale human foot, raggedly torn—no, chewed—at the ankle twisting, still securely bound, in the slipknot.

* * * *

Jan laid aside the spyglass and rubbed his eyes. He didn’t know how many of the werewolves were making their way up the hillside now, or how many the fladdermine had gotten rid of, if any. He had seen the things stop and bustle about down below before splitting up. There had been some altercation and the creatures had actually torn apart one of their number. Apparently a minor mutiny had been quelled.

So Badham was still alive. But had he veered off toward Sampari and Timóteo, or was he coming up to the high ground with the others to investigate his bonfire? Vigoreaux had said the werewolves were in a maddened state under the full moon. He hoped their reasoning was sufficiently clouded, if it survived their transformations at all. That, and the direction of the wind were his only hope now.

But as he sighted the first of the creatures bounding up to the fire on all fours, he felt the wind suddenly blow hard at the backs of his ears. He could smell the hint of tropic rain.

The black-haired thing crouching in the firelight perked up immediately, just as Jan fired his musket and put a ball in its head, knocking it dead.

He cursed. No more would come into the light. He let the musket drop and clambered further up the rocky ground, putting his face to the wind now blowing his scent and the scent of the powder down the hillside. He could reload and discharge a musket in a little over half a minute, but at the rate the things were nimbly scaling the hill, they would be on him in less time. Anyway, muskets were in more abundance than ammunition.

Breathless, he gained the higher position where he’d left a second charged musket. He turned, dropping flat on his belly and resting the long barrel on a stone.

Eight of the werewolves spilled over the lip of the hill and pounced, tearing into flesh and cloth, each of them fighting amongst the others to sink their snuffling muzzles in blood and gorge themselves on flesh. It reminded Jan once again of the feeding of sharks as he watched from his vantage above. Using Timóteo’s black cappa and white habit, which he had wrapped around a slaughtered village pig as both bait and marker, he sighted the unseen mound he knew to be inches away and fired.

The bullet pierced the powder keg concealed there, blowing the Trivias in every direction. They tumbled down the hillside in flaming fragments, or spiraled through the air to crash howling into the treetops far below.

He dropped the second rifle and stumbled for the crest, not pausing to watch the flames lick the night, nor the inky smoke drifting across the face of the waxing moon.

As he reached the bald, rocky top ringed by bushes like a monk’s tonsure, the highest point of the island, he could hear the tumble of the stones below him, and the heavy panting and barking of the wolfmen. He could not hear the frigid little brook spilling from the blocky stone, but he knew it was there, as were the last two powder kegs he and Bunop had lugged up here.

The wind kicked up again, and he saw the flashing cloud sailing on it across the night sky. It was fit to burst and nearly overhead. He dropped to his knees and struggled to light the powder trail in the moonlight, fumbling with the flintlock mechanism taken from one of the muskets. The light shifted, the air cooled, and in less than a minute raindrops as big as gun-stones were plopping down in the earth and on his bare back. He tried to shield the powder with his body, but it was no use. Soon he was in a flash downpour and the trail of powder was saturated. He flung the mechanism down and bellowed his frustration, drawing the stone axe and Badham’s knife as three great, shaggy heads thrust through the surrounding brush. One of them, he noticed, bore a jagged iron harpoon head instead of a left paw.

They leapt at him. If he was to die, he would make the best of it.

He brought the axe down hard on the snout of the first of them, hard enough to tear through muzzle and jaw and split the horrid face asunder. The werewolf released a terrible, gurgling howl and tumbled to the ground. Jan stabbed it with the dirk once in the base of the neck as it fell, hoping it was enough to keep it down. He kicked his foot into the second one’s chest, stopping its charge, but as it fell back its serrated harpoon claw raked a ragged furrow in his outstretched leg. He screamed and fell.

The third overshot him and landed on the ground just past where he fell, its hind claws tearing his cheek. He stabbed wildly at its leg and heard the beast whine like a dog in pain.

The harpoon-handed werewolf scrabbled up the length of his body, but Jan stopped it cold with the axe, sinking it deep in the creature’s head—too deep, for as it fell he could not withdraw it and had to leave it, rolling out from under its twitching bulk, the hot, metallic taste of its blood on his lips, and its rank, wet musk in his nostrils.

He jumped to his feet and ran for the brush, right past two more of the things. He went slipping and sliding down the now muddy slope, lost his balance, fell through free air, smashed through clawing brush, finally bashed his shoulder on slick stone and rolled into the creek with a splash. He came up spluttering. Somehow the knife was still in his fist.

He turned to glance up the hill. Lightning flashed briefly, silhouetting for an instant a terrible, misshapen body hurling at him through the air, simian arms outstretched, satanic ears laid back against its feral head.

He dove back to the bottom of the cold creek. The creature smashed into him, driving his back and head into the cutting stones. He slashed with the knife, and reached for the thick-furred neck with his free hand. To his amazement, the hard-muscled body gave way easily to his struggles. He shoved it into the water and rolled out.

Staring, he saw the yard long shaft of one of the native arrows protruding from the thing’s neck.

Bunop gave a warning shout from the bank of the creek. He was crouched there, fitting another arrow to his bow when four more came bounding down the hillside. Bunop got one flight off and missed before they were upon them again, baying and slavering.

The fight was fast and intense. Jan glimpsed Bunop in the lightning, sounding like a wolf himself and chopping at the hairy forms swarming over him with a hatchet. Jan felt the sharp piercing teeth in his side and the animal claws shredding his back. He bit back, clamping his jaws on furred limbs and twisting his head to tear flesh as he never had in his life. He felt the gush of coppery blood over his gums and over his knife hand. Furred hide came away in his teeth. He spat it out and sought more, balling up his other hand or clawing desperately at the things, fighting with fist and foot and tooth and elbows and knees, like a child almost. Howling, cursing and screaming, splashing water and the crash of lightning in his ears.

Then, as if God had tired of the scene, there was no sound. The flash storm passed off to the south. There was only the trickling of the creek and his own breathing. He lay beneath two dead Indians, their flesh marked by the violence of their deaths. He pulled himself out from underneath them slowly and painfully, for he shared their wounds if not their fate. He washed the bloody taste from his mouth in the creek, and saw another dead man face down there. Bunop sprawled on his back half out of the water, his chest rising and falling much too rapidly, marred by a great open gash exposing his ribs and behind them, what looked like the glistening sac of his lung peering out like a wary prisoner.

Jan crawled over to him, but by the time he reached his side, the man was dead.

Another pale, naked form lay on its face nearby.

Jan sat on the bank and heard a low, threatening growl.

He looked up and saw the gigantic beast perched like a gargoyle on a stone overhead, its long red hair hanging in sopping strings from its colossal shoulders.

He got to his feet and held up the bloodstained knife.

“Come for this at last?” he said.

Badham sprung.

* * * *

Sampari did not know if the dark man T’motayo would live or die. The khakhua had badly maimed him and his breath rattled in his chest. She did not know if any of them would live or die. She had brought him at last to the village, knowing not where else to turn. Though her people had pleaded with her to go elsewhere, she had spat at them and brought him into her uncle’s tree house and salved his terrible wounds.

She waited through the night, hearing the booming of the thunder powder and stepping out into the flashing storm to wash the blood from her body. She had lain with T’motayo then to keep him warm through the cool storm, feeling his torn body shivering against her own.

The rain came and went, and she dozed where she lay, snapping awake when she saw the great red-haired khakhua looming in the firelight. But it was only a ghost behind her drooping eyelids.

Below, Mivai wailed and cried to come up. She had found her way back to the village. Sampari hoisted her up and learned from her how the thunder powder had killed many khakhua on the beach, and how Bunop had followed the rest up the big hill where Jan waited.

Mivai took Sampari’s place at T’motayo’s side and pushed her face into the crook of his neck, falling fast asleep, despite his ragged breathing and wounded state. She accepted her new role and the death of her father and brother admirably, and sleeping so innocently against T’motayo, seemed almost tolerable. Maybe Sampari would not kill her after all.

Sampari stood then on the platform and waited awhile before going down to the forest floor to light the village fire. She did not know why she did this. If Jan did not kill the khakhua, it was not as if they did not know where the village was. She supposed she had lit it in case the impossible happened. The white man, not knowing the island, would see the fire and find his way back. But she supposed he was dead, and Bunop too. She did not know which saddened her more.

Then the edge of the jungle rustled. She picked up her axe and the heavy laleo spear, and lowered it when she saw it was Jan.

He was in as bad a state as T’motayo, cut and battered, his strange clothing in tatters. He dragged something behind him and she sucked in her breath.

It was the red khakhua.

The creature was limping along on all fours behind Jan, bleeding from countless wounds. Both its eyes had been put out and blood streamed from the ruined sockets like demon tears. It was like a great tame boar behind him. He led it on a length of rope like a pig to the slaughter.

When Jan reached the fire, he jerked the line and forced the stumbling, whining thing to its rear haunches. It towered over them both, but he held the rope out to her, with something else.

It was a long laleo knife.

She took them, and it was as though she held fear itself in her sway.

“Look!” she called out, and the khakhua flinched at the sound and bared its teeth but did nothing. “Look, people! See what has been done this night! What still may be done! Come out and see!”

Drawn faces poked out of the huts warily, and there was much whispering and muttered talk. She coaxed them out and slowly they came into the firelight, timid yet curious and disbelieving of the sight.

She forced the creature down to her level and held the knife so they would see. She cut its throat, saying, “I banish forever these demons from our people! We do away with the evil in the old way!”

* * * *

Jan watched her slit Badham’s throat, the blood spurting out to hiss in the fire.

He put his foot to the thing’s hairy back and sent it head first into the flames. It whined and kicked feebly, but Sampari held it by the rope until the rope smoked and disintegrated. The smell of burning hair and cooking flesh hung heavy. He stumbled away from the fire and put his back to a tree, slowly sliding to the ground, not caring what happened next, but sleepily observing as if in a waking dream.

The villagers took up spears and fished the burning carcass from the fire. The women set upon it with bone knives. It was barely blackened, and in death had returned to the natural form of Badham, but they didn’t seem to notice or care. They hacked at the body, lopping off ears, nose, fingers, sawing away great hunks of flesh.

They huddled over the body, feasting like wolves themselves and he jerked from his dozing state, thinking for a minute none of his memories of the night were true and the werewolves were in the village.

Then he remembered, and allowed himself to sleep.

He dreamt of Vigoreaux, standing on the deck of The Trivia in the moonlight, alone.

He did not know for how long he dozed. The next moment Sampari was shaking him awake. It was still night, so he could not judge the time.

Her face was splattered with blood and she was saying words and gesturing to the ground.

“Laleo!” she said. “Laleo! Vee-ga-row!”

He nodded, and got to his feet, not needing to see the scrawled picture in the mud.

* * * *

Vigoreaux had hardly moved through the night. He had marked each far off explosion, and every howl and yelp had danced across the waters into his keen ears. He had stood motionless through the tropic storm and heard the last howl of Thomas Badham, the dolorso climax of the night’s deadly symphony. He had heard the death cries forty-one times this night.

Now, they were coming.

He saw the torch lights like fireflies around the peninsula, where he knew the village to be. The little fishing boats were out and every savage with a bow or a spear was coming across the waters to kill him.

He chuckled.

The farmer had been right. What a story this was! What an end, should he choose to make it here. To die at long last at the hands of these savages, having lost his singular crew at the hands of their would-be messiah!

He stepped lightly in anticipation of the waning night’s pleasures, pausing to scoop up a cannonball and knock one of the brass skull plugs from the barrel of a swivel gun.

* * * *

Jan wavered from where he sat in the bow of the canoe, and from behind, Sampari steadied him. The night wasn’t over, though he felt like one who had come to the end of a long series of labors. The hardest was yet to come.

They were flanked on either side by canoes. All the men of the village, with their bellies full of Badham, were at his beck. He was in command of a company of savage but willful marines, demanding blood for long years of the same. He was struck again by how odd his life was.

Then one of The Trivia’s guns boomed and the water just in front of them exploded, sending a cool rain of seawater down their backs.

Some of the men tried to jump ship, but others held them fast and struck bravery back into them with the backs of their hands.

Vigoreaux’s voice came across the water as they paddled on over the waves.

“Avast! Turn back! You’ve made a good showing this night, but don’t tempt my wrath.”

“Your dogs are dead, Old Tick!” Jan shouted back, surprised he could muster the voice.

“Yes. Thomas and One-Handed Nan, Hobomock and the rest, all dead. I should squeeze your skull until you scream their names through your own blood. You’ve cost me much. But where’s your priest?” he called, mockingly.

“A sight better off than your Mr. Badham.”

“But touch a spar of The Trivia and I’ll make an island of your dead to stand on,” Vigoreaux warned.

“The better to reach your deck. I told you I was your end, Captain.”

“Rather, you could be a new beginning. I’ll need a crew, and a good first mate to keep them in line. Say the word, and I’ll enslave these brown rats and make you my man. We’ll sail to Cartagena and build us a fleet worth our salt. You’ve a strong heart. Don’t pump your blood down my gullet.”

“This night’s your last, Old Tick.”

“Very well, then.” He sighed. “Come aboard and die, the lot of you.”

The pale old man left the gunwales and could be seen intermittently in the lantern lights, striding leisurely to the quarterdeck as though inspecting the knots.

Their canoes thumped hollowly against The Trivia’s hull and they streamed up the sides of the ship like the rats Vigoreaux had named them. One crew scaled the port side. Another sullied the figurehead’s pale face with their muddy hands and feet, slithering up comically through the beakhead toilet holes and swinging up onto the forecastle with bone knives in their teeth. Jan’s own bunch mounted the starboard rigging and clambered over the rails as though assaulting a castle, Sampari struggling to help him at his side.

The master of The Trivia stood at ease with his hands clasped behind his back. Barbed arrows flew down the length of the ship at him. These he batted aside with astounding swiftness, as though they were nothing more than mosquitoes or slow-moving beanbags pitched at a faire.

The villagers charged aft, howling a primeval cry, spears and bayonets poised. They leapt over barrels and capstan, swarming around the skull adorned masts in a brown tide.

Jan limped in their midst with Sampari supporting him. He stopped only to take one of the oars from the launch oarlocks and smash it against the foremast until the paddle end broke off.

The attackers reached Vigoreaux then, and the old man waded through them like a catamount, backhanding some with such force they left the deck and arced far out over the dark sea. Half a dozen spears pierced his body when he laughed and drew his heavy cutlass, chopping away the hafts and in some cases the arms that held them with single sweeps. Blood splashed into the air. The two dozen men who had manned the canoes were swiftly whittled down to ten, and these, to give them credit, backed away from the diabolical captain, but did not turn and run.

Vigoreaux was a shambles, but retained his strange poise, an ancient gentleman whose officer’s fineries were unfortunately torn and blood soaked but would surely be mended. The broken spears protruded from every angle of him like quills. Yet he laughed, and his teeth were fangs to rival that of the werewolves’. His eyes were wide and dilated as he called out, turning in place, peering through the terrified native faces for the one he sought.

“Where are you? Where are you?”

The only one who could answer, did.

“Here, Old Tick.”

And then the splintered end of the oar was in Vigoreaux’s chest, propelled by a two-fisted lunge by Jan which drove the old man against the mainmast.

The two stood face to face now, and Jan stared into the soundless, working animal jaws and the gaping, bloodshot eyes, so full of confusion.

Vigoreaux’s hands hung loose at his sides, and his head lolled on his neck.

Jan squeezed the captain’s chin in his fist so he could look in his blinking, darting eyes.

“You may have never met another like yourself, but Padre Timóteo’s heard of your kind through the Church. You might do all right with steel and lead shot, but a good length of wood through your little black heart takes all the fight out of you, apparently.”

Jan gestured for two of the spearmen to come forward. They gingerly lifted the old captain up between them. He was as docile as a dead doe, but his eyes worked frantically in his head.

They dragged him to one of the launches at Jan’s lead, and dumped him inside. Then Jan swung the launch out and had the two men man the block and tackle.

“There’s one more thing you don’t fare well against, which you know well since you decorated your quarters with all that drapery and cringed at the letting in of the light the day you took us aboard.”

He stepped back from the side and nodded to the two men, who began lowering the launch into the water.

“So I say good morning to you, Old Captain Tick,” he said, offering a weary marine’s salute.

He watched the paralyzed captain’s flitting eyes as the launch descended until he could make out their detail no longer in the dim light, and turned away when he heard the splash. He cut the lines himself with Badham’s knife.

He stood at the quarterdeck rail until the first light of dawn as Sampari dabbed at his torn body with scraps of Vigoreuax’s good table linens and the men arranged the dead to bear them back to the island. He thought of his friend Timóteo, hoping he would find him awake when they returned to the village.

They had a ship they could man with the natives if they chose to leave and there were men or women willing, or they could use the remaining launch and Vigoreaux’s charts to make for civilization.

He supposed Sampari would urge them to stay; she would surely not want to weaken the village by allowing enough men to crew the ship to leave now. He might tarry awhile, but his boyhood Virginia was still home, and the headright and the old bandolet over the mantle called to him.

The sun rose in an orange so brilliant even the fire of the burning launch rising and falling on the swells could not match it.

About Edward M. Erdelac

http://www.lyricalpress.com/edward_m_erdelac

Edward M. Erdelac is an independent filmmaker and has written fiction for Starwars.com. Indiana born and Chicago bred, he lives in the Los Angeles area with his family. Write what you know you love is the best advice he’s ever taken or given.

Inspired in part by an upbringing of Errol Flynn/Tyrone Powers Jr. movies and a young adulthood packed with Robert E. Howard and Frank Frazetta, Red Sails began as a hypothetical question put forth on the long drive back from San Diego one summer; ‘if you could write a story that featured vampires, werewolves, and zombies, what would it be?’ The zombies shuffled off to another story.

Edward’s Website:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Edward-M-Erdelac/112183918691

Reader eMail:

EMErdelac@gmail.com

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3