Chapter 320: A Very Good First Night

Across the harbor, the Dame lay at her post, home from the pines, her bell striking six bells of the middle watch.

Don Rodrigo stood at the round table in the last of the lamplight, both gnarled hands planted on Vallon’s chart. Age had bent his back but left the rest of him alone, and he inspected the island with deep attention.

The Frenchman had drawn all of Andros in two miserable days, marking every reef with rows of tiny, precise waves and every channel with a thread of black ink. In the middle, small enough to fit beneath a thumb, lay the bay and the town.

The parrot on his shoulder saw no reason for all this seriousness.

"?Dos cebollas y un obispo! ?Y que pague el obispo, que yo ya pagué la última vez!"¹

Perhaps a surprise, the old conquistador hadn’t ordered onions or a bishop, and simply ignored the parrot. His eyes came to the eastern coast of the island, where an empire had shut a door and posted a blockade in front of it.

The man o’ war sat in the waters, a frigate on either side and sloops between them.

Behind her, tenders, supply ships, and transports crowded back toward the surf. The deep water permitted the big ship to come close enough to stare into the channels, while the reefs kept her from sailing any closer.

That was the trouble with a shut door, you could wait in front of it all day but no one got through, and the people on the other side had to make do with what they already owned.

Concordia had plenty to work with. Cane grew green in the drained marsh, the nets came up full, the cistern was brimming, and the town could feed itself for a good while yet, provided there was no interference with the farms.

That was why the enemy had built its camp on the shore beside the eastern entrance. Redcoats were cutting a track from there toward the jungle, in the hope to find the fields and the town beyond them.

The encampment, meanwhile, was having a miserable night, though Don Rodrigo hadn’t heard about it yet.

His eyes moved west, where Vallon had been generous with the ink. Three more frigates blockaded that entrance, along with most of the sloops, while a landing place was still under construction.

Between those two entrances lay the oldest fortress in the Bahamas, and no one had needed to build a single stone of it. The fortress was made of mangrove channels, reefs, and sand cays.

Three sloops tried their luck against it, and none had returned.

The Mouse and the Partridge lay hidden beneath the limestone. The King’s sloops they had captured lay in Sawyer’s shipyard, where carpenters were busy teaching them a better pedigree.

Across the jungle, in the ocean-side cove, three pirate ships sat at anchor, due at the eastern entrance by dawn.

On the headland, a dozen cannons waited behind brush mats, with Vallon’s wall and half a bastion to their rear, while across the banks, screens of cut brush concealed small groups of militiamen, each watching its stretch of water.

Messages passed between them by night bird calls, shuttered lanterns, and skiffs, faster than a horse could carry them in the jungle.

The thatched fishing villages nearest the channels and the pines stood empty. The nets had been rolled up, the boats dragged into the mangroves, and the people evacuated to town, leaving a keeper behind to watch the water.

"?Se vende mula, se?ores, se vende! ?Poco uso, mala memoria!"¹

No one in the room was looking for a mule, either.

Don Rodrigo’s eyes reached the green at last, where Vallon had drawn the jungle as a scattering of tiny trees. Out there, bands of hunters, fishermen, and ditch men waited in the dark, armed with bows they had made in two days.

By day, the pirate ships stung the eastern entrance, and by night, the bands attacked the camps, and at every hour, the channels swallowed whatever came into them.

The military name for this was attrition.

A mill would have called it grinding, with a fleet supplying the grain.

Eleven great ships waited outside, and the jungle track was the only road into town.

In the middle of all this, Concordia slept in shifts, an ember kept alive between hands. Roughly two thousand citizens awaited in tension, while the schoolhouse and chapel sheltered the village families.

The forges glowed orange on the workshop slope, the chapel bell hung silent, and a lamp burned in the Assembly Hall in case there was an urgent matter that required a vote.

"?Ay, la viuda del panadero! ?Qué piernas, Dios mío, qué piernas! ?Y el pan, ni mirarlo!"¹

Concordia had no baker’s widow. The bird was running through its old material again.

Then boots sounded on the ridge path.

Roberts came up in the dark, stepping around the eighteen-pounder that propped open the door. He brought a tin cup in each hand, and mud reached his ankles.

The tea had been hot when it left the Dame’s galley, but by now, it had given up the business entirely.

"Duw, Admiral, still on your pins, are you? A man of your years, at this hour?"

"Ah, Se?or Roberts. It is my years, precisely, that keeps me awake."

The old man kept his eyes on the chart. "Soon, if God is courteous, I shall take up sleeping, and for a very long time. Until that day, the night is better company than any bed I have been offered, and I have been offered many, believe me, a few of them even comfortable."

Two fingers waved at the tin cups.

"And you English, you drink tea as though the plants have insulted your mother."

Roberts shifted both cups into one hand. "Welsh, Admiral, mind. There’s a whole mountain range between us and that lot, and we’ve been lobbing rocks over it a thousand years."

"Pues, Se?or Roberts, to a Spaniard you are all English, and all bastards."

The parrot swung round, puffed its chest, and recreated Roberts’s voice so exactly, the lilt and the sing-song climb at the end, that the man glanced down to make sure his own mouth was shut.

"Two shillings fine for the onion, see! And a shilling more for the bishop, mind!"

"Never in my life I have fined an onion. I’ll thank you, feathered gutter-sweep, to note that."

He put one cup on the corner of the chart, well away from the ink.

"I’ve news, Admiral, and it won’t keep."

At last, the old man turned his head, his attention on Roberts with unmistakable precision.

"Habla, hombre. Plainly, and in order."

Roberts gave him the news as it had reached him, which meant most of the details had been lost along the way while the important bits had survived.

"The east camp’s landward wall, burned from end to end, and dozens of casualties."

The old man’s finger slid across the chart to the western landing.

"Y el oeste? The west. what of the west?"

"Fire there too, Admiral, at the landing."

Roberts held up a cautioning hand. "No one lost that I’ve heard, mind, not one of ours. But there’s bands not come in yet, see, and I’ll not swear to more than I know."

The lamp hissed in the silence that followed.

"How many of theirs?"

"The Crown has paid for it, Admiral, and dear. Three sloops, and every sailor aboard her, the walls burned from end to end, and tonight, mark me, there’s not a soul on that shore will sleep a wink, nor tomorrow either, if the Lord is kind."

He drank off the last of the cold tea, winced as though it had bitten him, and set the cup down.

"A very good first night, Admiral. A grand one. Tidy work, I call it."

Don Rodrigo then straightened away from the chart.

His back creaked, and he stood at his full height, the lamp flame leaning toward him. He put one finger on the burned camp, then moved it to the surrounding jungle, where Vallon had marked no landmarks at all.

"Surprise, Se?or Roberts, is a coin. A single coin. You spend it once, and then you are a beggar."

His voice stayed low, but it was bright clear regardless. "Tonight the dark was ours, tomorrow they will know. They will dig the ditch deeper, set the pickets in threes, send scouts before the jungle, and turn their guns on the trees, to shoot at leaves like children shooting at the moon."

The parrot, which had plenty to say about onions and bishops, decided to keep silent.

As for the old conquistador, he continued. "The King, he can lose a fleet and send for another, no? It is a rich man’s tragedy. But this town, Se?or, this town cannot lose a cook, a ditch man, a hunter, because behind them there is only women and children. Attrition loves the side with more to spend, while every bite costs him a little, and every bite costs us a name."

Roberts looked into his empty cup. "Ah, but the treasury’s important too, Admiral. Put the figures on a clerk’s desk, see, showing what that fleet spends every blessed day, and sooner or later some little man in a wig will ask what in God’s name they’re paying for. And clerks, Admiral, they do love to ask."

The old man sighed. "Slowly, Se?or Roberts. The bureaucracy is slow, and it sits in London, with its feet on the fender. This town sits here, in the mud, with the fire at its door. Tonight the navy was surprised, very good, we enjoyed it. Tomorrow the navy learns."

Across the harbor, the Dame’s bell struck again. Don Rodrigo looked back to the eastern edge of the chart, knowing the empire’s lamps were still burning beyond the reef.