The tall woman crossed the dirt toward them without hurrying.
She walked like someone who expected the ground to move out of her way.
Loose-shouldered.
Balanced on the balls of her feet.
One hand rested on the cutlass hilt, thumb idly rubbing the black rooster etched into the metal.
The smaller woman followed a step behind her, quiet as a cat, hands empty and loose at her sides.
Kofi noticed that.
Empty hands on a person who moved like that meant the weapons were somewhere he couldn’t see.
Yaw’s fingers were still clamped on Kofi’s arm.
Kofi could feel them shaking.
The tall woman stopped an arm’s length away.
She looked Kofi up and down, slowly, the way a buyer looks at a horse.
“You’re shorter than the song makes you.”
“You were in the alley,” Kofi said.
“In Nassau.”
“We were.”
“You dropped off a roof and broke Knowles’s crew in half and vanished before anyone could say thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” A crooked grin.
“Took you long enough to get here.”
Behind Kofi, Titus’s machete whispered out of its sheath.
“Who are you?” Titus’s voice came out flat and hard.
“And how did you know we were coming?”
The smaller woman’s eyes flicked to the blade and back to Titus’s face.
She didn’t move.
She didn’t need to.
Something in the stillness of her made the hair stand up on Kofi’s neck.
“Put it away, Titus,” Kofi said quietly.
“She hasn’t answered.”
“She will.”
The tall woman laughed.
It was a big laugh, too big for a village holding its breath.
“Anne,” she said, and jerked her chin at the smaller one.
“Mary.”
Theo made a sound like a man stepping on a nail.
Everyone turned to look at him.
“Anne,” he said faintly.
“And Mary. Anne Bonny? And Mary Read?” He looked from one to the other.
“The Anne Bonny and Mary Read? There are posters of you in Nassau. There are posters of you everywhere. A hundred thousand pounds. Each.” He pressed a hand to his chest.
“That’s more than all of us put together. That’s more than all of us put together several times.”
“Sounds about right,” Anne said.
Titus didn’t lower the machete.
“Then half the Navy’s looking for you.”
“The whole Navy’s looking for us.” Mary spoke for the first time.
Her voice was low and even.
“They’ve been looking for years.”
“And now you’ve brought them here?”
“We brought nobody.” Mary’s eyes didn’t leave his.
“We’ve been here a month. Nobody followed us.”
Kofi watched her face.
Then Anne’s.
Then the machete.
“Titus. Put it away. They saved your life in that alley.”
Titus’s jaw worked.
Slowly, he slid the blade back into its sheath.
He didn’t take his hand off the hilt.
They sat around a cook fire outside one of the terrace houses as the sun sank toward the plain.
A woman of the village brought a pot of boiled plantain and salt fish and set it down without a word.
The children ate like they hadn’t eaten in a week.
Cato shoveled plantain into his mouth with his fingers.
The twins shared a bowl, heads bent together.
Anne pulled a small stoppered bottle from her belt, uncorked it with her teeth, and took a long swallow.
The smell hit Kofi across the fire.
Rum.
And something sharp and hot underneath it that made his eyes water.
“Peppers,” Anne said, seeing his face.
She held out the bottle.
“Want some?”
“No.”
“Your loss.” She took another swallow and wiped her mouth on her wrist.
“Damn, that’s good.”
Theo was staring at her with the naked delight of a boy meeting a legend.
“Is it true,” he blurted, “that you once boarded a Navy cutter by yourself and made the whole crew jump overboard?”
“No.”
“Oh.” His face fell.
“There were two of us.” Anne jerked a thumb at Mary.
Theo lit up again.
“Where’d you get the name, Bonny?” Kofi asked.
Anne looked at the fire for a moment.
Something shifted in her face, just for a heartbeat.
Then the crooked grin came back.
“I ran off when I was young. Too young. With a sailor named James Bonny. Pretty. Charming. Said all the right things.” She turned the bottle in her hands.
“Turned out he was selling information to the Crown. Selling it about me, among other people. I found out the night the soldiers came.” She took a drink.
“I got out a window. He didn’t come after me.”
“And you kept his name.”
That part feels familiar to Kofi because he also stole Sterling Brook’s last name
“Every day, I hear it; I remember never to trust a pretty mouth.” She raised the bottle toward Theo.
“No offense.”
“None taken,” Theo said, then frowned.
“Wait.”
Kofi looked at Mary.
“And you?”
Mary didn’t answer right away.
She held a small whetstone in her hands and ran it slowly along the edge of a knife that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.
Shhk.
Shhk.
A faint scent drifted off her, sweet and out of place amid the woodsmoke.
Orange blossom.
“My mother dressed me as a boy,” she said finally.
“From the time I could walk. It was easier to get work. Easier to stay safe.” Shhk.
“I spent years on ships as a boy. Then a man. Nobody looked twice. Nobody looks twice at a boy scrubbing a deck.”
“Years?” Theo stared at her.
“Nobody ever found out?”
“A few.” Shhk.
“They didn’t tell anyone.”
She didn’t explain why.
Nobody asked.
Kofi thought it was strange that both their stories were about wearing somebody else’s face.
Then Anne laughed at something Theo said, and the thought slid away.
Theo was laughing too, leaning in, asking another question.
Anne reached for the pot of plantain.
Her sleeve slid back.
For a moment, just above her wrist, Theo thought he saw a line.
A place where the dark of her skin seemed to stop and something paler began.
He blinked.
Firelight.
Smoke.
It was nothing.
He’d been walking all day.
He forgot about it before she’d finished chewing.
Grann Rose came down the slope as the sky turned the color of a bruise.
She walked slowly, staff striking the dirt, and stopped by the fire.
Her good eye moved over the circle.
The children.
The crew.
It lingered on Anne and Mary a beat too long.
Anne looked away first.
“These two,” Grann said, “they come here a long time. Years.” She lowered herself onto a stump with a crack of old knees.
“They fight the same people you fight, pitit. Maybe longer.”
“You trust them?” Titus asked.
“I trust what I see.” The good eye settled on him.
“And I see plenty.”
Nobody pushed her further.
She turned to Yaw.
He’d been sitting a little apart, knees drawn up, cleaning his pistols out of habit.
Mud still caked his legs.
He looked up when he felt her eyes.
“The old man,” she said.
“At the four roads. Tell me again.”
Yaw set down the rag.
“Small. Bent. A coat too big for him. Straw hat with a torn brim. A crooked cane.” He hesitated.
“And a dog. Yellow. One ear that flopped.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked why I opened a door for the children. And then he pointed the way the dogs wouldn’t go.” Yaw’s voice dropped.
“And then he was gone. And the dogs lay down.”
Grann was quiet for a long time.
The fire popped.
“You know him,” Yaw said.
“Don’t you?”
“I know plenty old men with canes.” She smiled faintly.
“And plenty yellow dogs.”
“Non. It’s not.” She leaned on her staff.
“Some old ones, pitit, you don’t go looking for. They find you. And nobody can tell you their name. Only they can tell you.” Her good eye glittered.
“If you earn it.”
Yaw stared at her.
His fingers found the blue cloth on his pistol grip and closed around it.
“Now.” Grann Rose straightened on her stump.
“Before the dark come. Who sit with the dead?”
The fire crackled.
Nobody spoke.
Down the slope, a goat bleated.
Somewhere in the village, a child laughed and was hushed.
Titus opened his mouth.
Closed it.
His jaw tightened, and he looked at the ground.
Theo stared at his own hands.
Clementine sat very still, one palm pressed flat over her heart, eyes half closed as if listening to something far away.
Anne and Mary said nothing.
It wasn’t their test to take.
Kofi felt the silence stretch.
Felt every eye in the circle slide past him, and past each other, and back to the fire.
Somebody who knows what it is to die and come back.
He looked up.
Yaw was already looking at him.
He didn’t say anything.
He didn’t have to.
His face said it all.
You know.
I know.
Nobody else here knows.
There was fear in it.
And love.
And something that looked almost like an apology, as if Yaw hated himself for being the one to look.
Kofi held his eyes.
Then he stood up.
“I’ll do it.”
Titus’s head snapped up.
“Kofi, no.”
“Somebody has to.”
“Then let it be me.” Titus stood too.
“I’m stronger. I don’t scare. What do you know about dying that I don’t?”
More than you’ll ever know, Kofi thought.
“It has to be me,” he said.
“Why?”
“It just does.”
“That’s not a reason!”
“It’s the only one I can give you.”
Titus stared at him.
His hands had curled into fists.
He looked at Yaw, who was studying the fire as if it held the answer to everything, and then back at Kofi.
“You’re keeping something,” Titus said quietly.
“You’ve been keeping something since the day we left Brook’s Reach.”
Kofi didn’t deny it.
Titus’s face did something complicated.
Anger.
Hurt.
Then, slowly, something that might have been trust, or might have been only exhaustion.
“You’d better come back down that hill,” he said.
“Or I’m coming up to drag you down myself. Dead or not.”
“Deal.”
Grann Rose watched the whole thing without a word.
When it was done, she nodded once, as if something had been settled that she’d already known.
Nell screamed an hour before dark.
She’d been curled against Titus’s side, half asleep, when her body jerked like she’d been struck.
Her hand flew to her shoulder.
Through her fingers, the iron ring glowed red, then brighter, then a deep, angry orange that lit her fingers from inside.
“Auntie!” Mingo was on his knees beside his sister, grabbing at her.
“Auntie, it’s burning!”
Clementine was already moving.
She dropped to the ground, dug the little cloth pouch out of her apron, tore it open.
A few crumbs of dark leaf fell into her palm.
Barely a pinch.
She stared at them.
“That’s all,” she whispered.
“That’s all there is.”
“Use it,” Kofi said.
She struck a spark from Titus’s flint.
The crumbs caught.
A thin thread of grey smoke curled up, far thinner than before.
Clementine cupped her hands around it and blew it gently over Nell’s shoulder.
“Sae-mora kel ashi. Sae-mora kel ashi. Dun veyo, dun veyo…”
Her voice shook on every word.
The glow dimmed.
Slowly.
Too slowly.
From orange to red.
From red to a sullen, smoldering brown.
Then, finally, dark.
Nell went limp and sobbed.
Clementine turned the empty pouch inside out.
Nothing fell.
Not a crumb.
She looked up at Grann Rose.
Her face was grey.
“If it comes again tonight—”
“Then it come.” Grann’s voice was flat.
She was looking at Kofi.
“And he better be sitting at that cross when it do.”
The fishing boat came around the point just as the light went gold over the cove.
Obi saw it first.
He was up in the crow’s nest with Pockets, supposed to be watching the jungle, and instead watching a heron walk stiff-legged through the shallows.
He glanced out to sea and went cold.
“Boat! Boat coming round the point!”
Toby straightened up from the galley hatch.
Bess dropped the hen she was holding.
Ezinne set down her fiddle.
It was small.
A single-masted fishing boat, patched sail, three men aboard with nets heaped in the bottom.
It came around the headland slowly, nosing along the shore the way fishermen do when they’re looking for a good spot.
It saw the Morning Star.
It stopped.
The three men stood up in the boat.
They stared across the water.
At the ship’s hull.
At her flag, furled and tied, but still clearly not French.
At the four people standing on her deck.
Four Black people.
With no white captain in sight.
One of the men pointed.
Another shaded his eyes.
They put their heads together and talked, fast, in French.
Toby couldn’t catch the words, but he didn’t need to.
“Wave,” Ezinne whispered.
“What?”
“Wave. Like we belong here. Like we’re waiting for our master.”
Toby swallowed his pride and raised one big hand.
He smiled wide.
The fishermen didn’t wave back.
They sat down.
They took up their oars.
And they turned the little boat around and rowed, hard, back around the point toward Léogâne.
Nobody on the Morning Star spoke until the boat disappeared.
“They’re not going fishing,” Bess said.
“No.” Toby lowered his hand.
His smile was gone.
“They’re going for somebody.”
Ezinne looked up at the mountain, where the smoke of a village she couldn’t see rose thin into the evening sky.
“Then they’d better come down soon.”
The two sloops came in on the evening breeze.
Bell watched them from the quarterdeck of the Vigilant.
Small ships, low and quick, built to run in the shallows where a frigate couldn’t follow.
Their decks were crowded with men.
Forty, as he’d asked.
And in their holds, as the first longboat came alongside and a sailor pulled back the canvas cover, Bell saw iron.
Chain.
Coils of it, thick and black and cold.
Two hundred fathoms.
Sterling limped up beside him. This story is hosted at novelping.com.
His scalded foot had healed badly, and he leaned hard on his cane.
“Wraythe sent them.”
“He did.”
“Then we go now.”
“Soon.” Bell drew the tally ring from his coat and held it up on its black thread.
It swung.
Slowed.
Settled, the way it always did, pointing north across the dark water.
Faint.
Steady.
Patient.
“Still there,” he murmured.
“How can you be sure he’s still there?”
“I’m not sure he’s there.” Bell watched the ring.
“I’m sure something he loves is.”
He tucked the ring back into his coat.
“We sail within the week, my lord. Tell the cook to put on something warm for our new guests. They’ll need their strength.”
Clementine found Grann Rose sitting alone under the mapou tree, where the ribbons and bottles hung from the branches and clinked softly in the dusk wind.
She didn’t know how to start.
So she just held out her hands.
The old woman took them.
Turned them over.
Looked at the dirt packed under Clementine’s nails, dark and wet, though she hadn’t touched soil all day.
“Every night since Nassau,” Clementine said.
Her voice was very small.
“Roots. Deep roots, going down into black water. Something in there calling my name. And I wake up with this on my hands.” She swallowed.
“I’m afraid of it.”
“Mm.” Grann ran her thumb over Clementine’s knuckles.
“You afraid of what calling you?”
“Yes.”
“Non.” The good eye rose to hers.
“That’s not what you afraid of.”
Clementine went still.
“You fighting something, auntie.” Grann’s voice was soft.
“Something you carry a long time. Longer than this calling. Longer than this island.” She squeezed Clementine’s hands.
“The thing calling you can’t reach you till you put the other thing down.”
Clementine’s eyes filled.
She didn’t answer.
She couldn’t.
Grann let go of her hands.
She lifted her staff and pointed it, not up the mountain, but down.
Off the edge of the terraces, into a deep green fold in the hills where the trees grew so thick and tall that even from here, in the last light, the ravine looked black.
“Down there. Old trees. Older than the French. Older than the Spanish before them.” Grann lowered the staff.
“You go. Alone. No lantern.”
“Tonight?”
“Tonight.” The old woman almost smiled.
“Some things, you don’t wait for morning.”
Grann Rose walked Kofi up the hill as the sun died.
She went slowly, staff in one hand, a small basket over her other arm.
Kofi walked beside her.
Behind them, the village had gone quiet.
People stood in their doorways and watched them pass.
Nobody spoke.
The path climbed past the mapou tree and out onto the bare shoulder of the mountain.
The graves began.
Rough stones.
Wooden markers, split and grey with age, some carved with names Kofi couldn’t read.
Some just carved with a cross.
Tall grass whispered between them.
At the head of the graveyard, the black cross rose against the purple sky.
Taller than a man.
The wood was old and cracked, and the purple cloth draped over its arms stirred in the wind.
Grann Rose knelt at its foot.
She reached into her basket and took out a small cloth bag.
She loosened its neck and let cornmeal trickle out between her fingers, pale gold against the dark earth.
She drew with it.
Slowly.
Carefully.
A cross.
A tomb shape beneath it.
Lines branching out, curling, joining.
A shape that looked almost like a gravestone, and almost like a man in a tall hat.
As she drew, she sang.
Low, rasping, in words Kofi didn’t know.
They sounded like a shovel in soft dirt.
“Ka-dimo, ka-dimo, se-lavi ma. Oro-bensa, oro-bensa, ke-sadu, ke-sadu…”
She finished the last line of the veve.
She set the basket down beside it and took out the offerings one by one.
A clay bottle.
She pulled the cork, and the smell of rum and hot pepper rose sharp in the evening air.
A thick, dark cigar.
A folded length of cloth, black and purple.
She laid them at the foot of the cross.
Then she rose, slowly, leaning on her staff, and looked at Kofi.
“You sit here.” She tapped the ground with the staff, just beside the veve.
“You don’t leave. Whatever come. Whatever talk to you. Whatever you see.” Her good eye held his.
“You leave before the sun, they keep you. Understand?”
“I understand.”
“You understand nothing.” Not unkind.
“But you will.”
She turned to go.
Stopped.
Looked back.
“Pitit.”
“Yes?”
“The dead don’t lie. So don’t you lie to them either.”
Then she walked back down the hill, her staff striking the path, and was gone into the dusk.
Kofi sat down.
The ground was cool.
The grass whispered.
Below, far off, he could see the village’s cook fires winking out one by one.
Beyond them, the black fold of the ravine where Clementine had gone.
Beyond that, the whole dark shape of the plain, and the sea.
The sun slid below the edge of the world.
The last light went out of the sky.
He was alone with the dead.
Clementine stepped off the path into the ravine.
The trees closed behind her like a door.
It was darker than she’d thought possible.
Darker than the hold of a ship.
Darker than a cabin with the shutters closed.
She put out her hands and felt bark.
Rough, cold, damp.
She took a step.
Something soft brushed her face.
Moss.
Or leaves.
Or fingers.
Somewhere ahead, far down in the black, water dripped.
And under the drip, so faint she thought she might be imagining it, something said her name.
She took another step.
Yaw lay on his mat in the dark, staring at the thatch.
He couldn’t sleep.
He’d known he wouldn’t.
Every time he closed his eyes he saw the four roads.
The rock in the middle.
The old man.
The yellow dog with the flopping ear.
You opened a door back there.
For those little ones.
Why?
He sat up.
He pulled on his boots.
He buckled on both pistols.
He touched the blue cloth on the grip, the way he did every time now, without thinking.
Then he slipped out of the house and down the path, past the dark peristyle, past the sleeping terraces, toward the trail that led down the mountain.
In the shadow of the peristyle’s painted center post, Mary sat with her back against the wood and her knife across her knees.
She watched him go.
She didn’t call out.
She didn’t move.
She just watched until the dark swallowed him, and then she went back to the slow, patient shhk, shhk of the whetstone.
Under the mapou tree, among the clinking bottles, Grann Rose sat wrapped in a shawl.
She watched him too.
When he vanished down the trail, she smiled.
It was a small smile.
Old, and knowing, and a little sad.
“Go on, pitit,” she whispered.
“He’s waiting.”
Far below, at the crossroads, a dog barked once.
Then the whole mountain went silent.