The honor of a savage

It had been near to nightfall when they’d come across a battered raft drifting on the currents. It seemed to be miles from any land, and most astonishingly, there were six men on board. They wore rags, but none of them seemed to really be suffering the pangs of hunger or thirst yet. Bruce had come out on the deck to observe at the first shout from the men on watch, but Davies had been the officer on deck at the time, and so he had not interfered as the six men were taken on board, searched, and questioned. Their ship was called the H.S.S. Eagle, a name the crew all considered lucky. The men whispered that these escaped slaves were another sign of the luck, that they’d been found so quickly. Most would have died of thirst long before they were found.

Refugees, they claimed to be, escaped slaves from one of the many pirate ships. Somehow in the night they’d broken free of their oars and fled with a little water and the day’s ration of food that they had. One of the men still had manacles at his wrists, with lengths of broken chain dangling from iron cuffs. Their hands were calloused, that much anyone could see, and it was possible they could have made on an oar. To Bruce, however, they moved a little too easily, a little too much like those who were used to carrying swords to really be oarsmen. Almost he said as much, but it was bad form to impose on another officer’s watch. If nothing else, this was a learning opportunity for the younger man. So Bruce stood back, watching dispassionately. The men were given a place to sleep on deck, given blankets and food, promised to be taken to port as soon as possible, for which they expression appropriate and prefuse gratitude. All, however, claimed to be British citizens. None were Spaniards.

One… was a Scotsman.

Wordlessly, Bruce had gone back to his own bunk, knowing he had the duty of the dawn watch. Captain Nielson maintained that there should be an officer on deck at all times, and so had long since established a rotating schedule of shifts, so that each of the officers had a turn and a chance at the duties. It was a learning opportunity for the younger officers, if nothing else, and Bruce approved of the Captain’s foresight. Not every captain was a thoughtful or as interested in teaching the younger officers. He doubted men like the Lieutenant understood their good fortune.

Still, it was with confusion that he woke some hours later, earlier than necessary. The ship was dark, the sea was quiet. He lay still, listening to the creaking of the wood around him, to the sound of the water lapping at the sides of the ship and the wind, trying to figure out what woke him. Slowly, he filtered through all the sounds. Snores of the crewman, faint but audible. He closed his eyes, nearly dismissing some splashing as just that of a fish, or even slops being dropped off the side of the ship. But it was too near for the first and too late for the second. Frowning, he sat up, rubbing a hand over his face. He needed a shave, but that could wait. Grunting a little, he slid off his bunk, easing the door open to peer out and up at the short set of steep stairs which led to the deck of the ship. The moon was out, but clouds covered it. Still, he could see shadows moving, those of mean moving stealthily over the deck. That wasn’t right, couldn’t be right, because there were too many shadows, and none of their crew men would have any reason for stealth.

Carefully, he eased back, glancing at the room’s other occupants. It was a small room, with four narrow bunks built into the walls, bunks which could be folded up when the need for space was more than the need for sleep. “Roberts,” he whispered, grabbing the shoulder of one of the Lieutenant Commanders. The man was a light sleeper, and generally not a fool. Bruce didn’t have to say anything more, but he did pick up his sabre, the slight ting of it audible in the room as he removed it from its leather sheathe. It was a good blade, with Spanish steel, the metal burnished so that even in the darkness it almost had a gleam. Barefoot, he moved purposefully back out, to the stairs, and then up to the deck. He stood there, in silence, and watched the men on the deck slowly become aware of his presence.

The whisper of a foot against the deck behind him was all the warning he had. He turned, lifting the blade none of them had seen yet, and the man who’d been trying to sneak up behind him died with a startled scream. “RISE! PIRATES ON DECK!” Bruce roared, as hot blood poured over his hand, as another blade whispered through the air an inch from his ear and he turned just in time to meet the attack of another. “MEN OF THE EAGLE! TO ARMS!”

He drew breath to shout again, and lost it in a strangle gasp, taking a boot to his gut instead, and falling backward, just as yet another man came from behind him. The blow might have taken his head off if he hadn’t already been rolling over the bloody planks. He stopped right beside the body of another of his own crewmen, saw the dark form he recognized as that of the big Scotsman above him in the dark, and rolled to the side.

Seconds passed – though it could have been hours. He was almost positive it was only seconds, though. The Scotsman was busy fighting elsewhere. Someone had brought up a lantern, and it rolled across the deck now, oil sloshing, flames catching where it splashed, and lighting the dark ship with an eerie light. Suddenly Bruce could see the rope ladder hanging over the side of the ship, the dark form of the much, much larger vessel only a few hundred yards off, the head and shoulders of another pirate rising above the railing. He pushed up, scrambled through flames and over bodies to those ropes, slicing them with one slice of his blade. He heard men yelling, heard splashing.

“CUT AWAY THE ANCHOR!” Bruce yelled. “GO TO FULL SAILS!” Because their hope, their only hope, was to get underway, to risk the sailing at night, to get the speed to get away from that massive ship. They were grossly outnumbered, or would be. They would have at least twice the guns to use on them, too, and distance was the only defense. Distance and speed. The risk was real, because these weren’t terribly well known waters, and small islets tended to rise out of the sea at unexpected intervals, little bits of sand or volcanic rock that would rip the bottom of their ship open as surely as the sun would rise.

Bellowing more orders, he parried and sidestepped, as another pirate rounded on him. It was too dark to tell much about him, but he was smaller than the Scotsman. His foot stepped in a patch of blood and nearly went out from under him. Just in time, he righted himself, but not in time to avoid the deep slicing cut that opened his side. He pressed a hand to the wound, hunching over a little and swearing more. This man was quick as a snake. By far the better swordsman, that much was clear even in the dim light of flames. Bruce pressed the attack, knowing his ship, knowing it was his only chance, and knowing -- yes. Right there. That unexpected half-step up. This pirate he was fighting didn’t know it, didn’t see it, and tripped. He landed hard, his blade skittering just a few feet away from his hand.

“MORGAN!” It was the Scotsman yelling, a warning, as Bruce stood over this man – Morgan was his name? – and prepared to run him through.

He would have. He should have. Not even to himself could he have said why he didn’t. A whisper in his own mind, the hints of fate? Or maybe just the sound of loyalty echoing off the clouds and sea on the deck of a burning ship (and who would expect loyalty from a pirate, least of all a Scottish one?). But he stopped, taking a half step back, holding his blade up, levelling it at that damn Scotsman. “GET OFF OUR SHIP!” He bellowed, like a fool. He was dizzy and bleeding, and maybe that explained why he did it. He would never know why. It was idiocy to yell like this, when a quick slice would have ended one of them. “TAKE YOURSELF AND YOUR MEN OFF! Or by the love of God, we won’t be the only ones staining the sea with our dead and blood tonight!”

Did the Scotsman stop? He might have. It wasn’t clear. And by then the man he’d been fighting was up again. Fast, agile. Dangerously quick. Morgan held his sword again, brought the hilt of it down. Bruce saw the movement from the corner of his eye, felt the blow on the back of his head. And that was the last he knew for some hours. By the time he regained consciousness, it was daylight again, and they were still sailing at full mast, gathering every ounce speed available to them. Later he’d learned it was the fact that they were moving away from the other ship that had been their grace, because the pirates had jumped off before they’d risk being taken too far away from their own vessel. Only the wounded had stayed, two of them too badly hurt to make the jump. Neither of them would survive the trip back to port.

Neither of them were the Scotsman.

However, they weren’t mistreated, either. The ship’s surgeon tended both, after he’d sobered up. Bruce had done his best to tend himself, not trusting the old drunk hack to sew him up. Even now, as he stood in the Admiral’s office, he was wrapped in bandages under his uniform. He stood straight, fighting the urge to hunch over, the ache in his side always worse the longer he stood thus. His other wounds had been minor in comparison, and had healed quickly, but his side was a festering ache.

Despite the wound, he knew that he’d been spared, too. He didn’t understand it. But surely as he’d been prone on the deck, he’d been an easy target.

May - 1695
(5 years prior to start of the Chronicle)

One week later he was on a ship, tucked into a tiny room with three other passengers. The Admirals had been generous with their coin, perhaps because they knew they were buying the Scotsman’s death, but more, they were buying Bruce’s silence. He was essentially giving up his career, because he would know Hayes’s face, and they thought – they hoped – he was skilled enough with a blade to rid the navy of this damn nuisance. Between the writs and the sale of his commission, he had a healthy sum now in a private bank under a false name: a false name he knew in time would become his real one. Or wouldn’t matter at all. From the festering ache in his side, he suspected his wound was not improving. He had changed the bandages twice, each time pulling away a blackened patch of cloth with a horrible stench. Now, he didn’t want to try it, didn’t want to look. He was feverish, and the pain was getting worse, though, and he knew those weren’t good signs. In morose silence, Bruce was drinking well spiced wine.

The spices, of course, were opiates. They left him dizzy and with a dry mouth, but they dulled the pain so that he could sleep, at least. If he had no appetite, there was no one on the ship that cared enough to ask why. There were men Bruce could have hired to make this trip with him, to help him with tracking down Hayes, with the killing that would be done at the end. Bruce hadn’t even made inquiries. Anyone he hired would be someone to watch, likely someone who would be answering to the Admiralty. Whatever happened, he had a growing resentment for those two men, with their powdered wigs and their condescension.

An idea had sprouted in his mind, in fact, perhaps borne of the fevered dreams that haunted his opiate induced sleep. He could find Hayes, and he might even succeed in killing him, but there had been something in the pirates he’d seen and admired even in the flames that had been consuming their ship in that night of fighting. They hadn’t fought with any particular discipline, no, or even any more skill than a well-trained British sailor. But they had fought with … loyalty, to each other. That was something he rarely saw on board any of the ships, something it was the duty of a good commander to instill into his men. At least, it had been part of his duties to instill loyalty to the ship’s captain, to head off the sting of complaints that came from long hours of work and often brutal conditions. Whatever could be done to stave off mutiny, really, though no one liked to admit that this was a danger every ship’s officer learned to avoid as surly as shoals and sharks.

Most tried to keep the crew controlled with fear, the free use of the flogger or by keel hauling. No one who saw a man ripped to shreds by barnacles was likely to risk the same, particularly when there could be no predicting when the punishment might be used. Keep the crew afraid, their spirits from rising too greatly, and you would never face any rebellious bastard trying to take the Captain’s head.

But now Bruce found that he’d seen and admired something else in that madman of a pirate. He’d fought like a… Scotsman, it was true. Blood flying, without restraint or fear. But his men had followed him onto a dark ship, against a moderately gunned British crew, for some purpose. It could not have been for wealth, for the Eagle wasn’t carrying anything particularly valuable. When they’d done the inventory later, Davies hadn’t reported anything of significance missing. Yes, they were missing a few books, but none of their casks of powder or shot had been touched, and their drinking water wasn’t polluted. Not even the food stores had been looted. But somehow in the night, the ship had come up from no where. Had it only been to rescue the six men on their deck, the ones they’d found adrift? In his conscious hours, Bruce stared at the sea, trying to find the logic in it.

Maybe he would find Hayes just to ask. Curiosity’s sake.

The days passed, each league taking them closer to Tortuga. He would have to hire another ship, likely, to actually get him to the island. No honest captain would risk a trip there, not without some real chance at profit, or a strong enough crew to warn off the pirates that haunted the waters around the island. Sometimes a significant show of force was sufficient to avoid having to actually use the force. The days passed in a haze of opiates and wine, each day a little less comfortable than the first, with fevers that came and went. He changed the bandage on his side again, when the other passengers in the cabin started to complain about the odor, but didn’t risk looking at it, least of all trying to clean it himself.

Most of the four week journey he would never remember later, nor would he remember the first time he walked into the Black Rose Taverna, the way he staggered to a table, ordering another tankard of wine or grog or whatever they had, since it didn’t matter and he didn’t care, and besides, he probably wouldn’t remember drinking it. He sat hunched over, one hand clutching his side against pain that no drugs would entirely dull.   Bruce's eyes were bright with fever, his face flushed with it.  Too hot.  He was too hot.  But he wasn't sweating.  Part of him knew that was bad.   Most of him was too numbed to care.   He was dying.  That was all that mattered.

Oddly, what stuck out in his mind was the way the old man who owned the place had met his eyes, and how a woman had sat down at his table five minutes later. Quite a pretty woman, in her own way, too, though he’d never really been interested in women from Asia before.

“What do you want?” He’d asked, and because he still thought of himself as a gentleman and an officer, he tried to make his tone polite when he asked it, even to a woman in a tavern.  Dying he might be, but it would not be as some tavern savage.  He still had his pride.

“The question is what you want, isn’t it?” She’d asked, in English, but heavily accented. She sounded French, actually. “I’m Sayo.”

"Tilly.  John Tilly," he introduced himself.  "And I'm looking for Hayes, the Scotsman."

He was never really sure how much time passed. He could remember waking up from time to time, seeing an old man standing over him, seeing the woman. A man, who sounded a lot like her, with the same accents. He remembered a great deal of pain. At first, he thought he was being tortured, with the first old man staring at him, another one carving away at his side. He heard arguments, without understanding them. Lucidity was a skittish deer, chased through shady groves of trees. But it was illegal to hunt, which every man knew, especially on the king’s lands. He was going to point that out to them, several times, but it never seemed quite right.

And then he opened his eyes again, staring at the ceiling, one both familiar and strange to him. He was sure he’d spent hours staring at it now, but without any real memory of when. He tried lifting a hand, found that he couldn’t, that his wrist was held above his head, tied. Not uncomfortably, but secure. He tried, found he could move his other hand, though. Both ankles were free, though, so that was a surprise. He looked down, realized he was naked under the blankets that covered him.

“You’re one of the most quiet men I know,” a voice said, and he blinked over at a young man. Asian, by appearances. His hair was bound at the back of his neck. “Even when you’re delirious. No ranting, no yelling, no interesting fever dreams and muttering.”

Bruce turned his head, looking the man over. “I’m not delirious now,” he answered, in a low voice.

“Not now, no. Sorry about the ropes. You kept trying to move that arm, and get up to leave. And when we stopped you, you nearly broke my neck, gave me this,” he gestured to a dark bruise on his face.

“I’d apologize—but, uh.” Bruce looked at the ropes again, then at the other man. “Do you mind untying my arm, then?”

“Not yet. I’m Zoreyan, by the way.  The doctor said you needed to keep it immobile for a little while yet, and besides...  Hayes is on the way.  You did say you wanted to see him, right?” the Asian was smiling. He found this amusing, apparently. Bruce wasn’t laughing.

“I do want to see him,” he answered. “But not like this. Not naked and with one arm above me.”

“Your clothes were ruined anyway. We had to cut them off you, and as it was, you nearly died from the shock of cleaning that wound.”

Bruce winced, looked down. His side definitely looked… well. Odd. Sort of sunken in, under the mass of bandages. “What did you do?”

“Let’s just say you should avoid letting anyone punch you in the side, in the future. But you’ll probably live. We can’t really risk letting you move yet, anyway, not without tearing your wound open again,” Zoreyan explained. “When we do, you won’t be able to move that arm much, not for a while.”

“I’ll take the risk,” Bruce answered, hearing the tread of boots on the floor outside. The door opened again, and the big Scotsman stood there, the one he recognized from the fight on the burning ship. He stared for a moment, not sure if he’d be recognized or not.

“So they say you’re Tilly,” the man said, pulling up a chair, sitting down.

“That’s true,” he nodded, reminding himself that he had to remember that. Tilly. The name he’d chosen. “I’d get up, but, it seems they’re afraid I’ll hurt you.”

This earned him a very dry, rather annoyed look from Zoreyan. “Don’t agitate him.”

Hayes just laughed. “I’m Hayes,” He said, confirming Bruce’s suspicions. “You’re looking for me, so let’s talk, then.”

Tilly nodded. Suddenly not sure exactly what to say. He’d been supposed to find Hayes, and kill him. Instead he was getting found, while flat on his back. One arm was restrained. His sword arm, in fact. Unconsciously, he flexed his hand, trying to work feeling into his fingers. Seeing the movement, Zoreyan moved closer, to the other side of it.

“Well?” Hayes asked, waiting. “I’m here.”

“I’m Tilly,” Bruce repeated. “I was in the Royal Navy. Sold my commission a couple of months ago now.” It seemed a bad way to start off. But clearly, he couldn’t start the way he’d originally planned.

Hayes nodded a bit, leaned back in his chair. He didn’t look that worried, but Bruce – Tilly, he had to think of himself by this new name – noticed that that the Scotsman had one hand on his dagger.

“I was sent to kill you,” Bruce went on.