Opening Atlantis

XI

T here was a day when Avalon was the wildest, wickedest, wan-tonest city in all of Atlantis and all of Terranova, too. It wasn't a long day, not even so long as the prime of a man's life, but there was never another one like it, not before or since, not anywhere. And when it ended, it ended in a way worthy of what had gone before.

Red Rodney Radcliffe brought the Black Hand into Avalon Bay after a profitable summer raiding the towns and shipping of the Terranovan coast. The Dutchmen and the Spaniards beyond the broad Hesperian Gulf cursed his name. The Spaniards called him a heretic. The Dutchmen, who were Protestants themselves, called him worse than that. Rodney Radcliffe only laughed. They could call him whatever they pleased, as long as they couldn't catch him-and they couldn't.

Nothing could catch the Black Hand-so Red Rodney swore. He wasn't far wrong, either. The brigantine, made of fine Atlantean redwood and pine, scudded over the waves. With the wind astern, she could make twelve knots. She'd come from Terranova to Atlantis in just over three and a half days, and left whatever might be chasing her far behind.

"Land ho!" came the cry from the crow's nest atop the mainmast, and then, a moment later, "Damned if that's not the Gateway, dead ahead!"

The mate, a one-eyed bruiser named Ben Jackson, lifted a three-cornered hat from his head: the closest to a salute Red Rodney was likely to get. "Nicely steered, skipper," he said.

"I thank you." If Radcliffe sounded smug, who could blame him? He'd brought his ship across a thousand miles of open ocean and put her exactly where she needed to go.

"Better than Moses, by God," Jackson said with a gap-toothed grin.

"I should hope so!" Red Rodney grinned back. He took blasphemy for granted-as who on the Black Hand did not? "Moses wandered forty years before he led his people to the Promised Land, and he died before he got in. We're here again-not for the first time, nor even for the twenty-first. And I'm not ready to turn up my toes just yet."

"Better not be. Think how many pretty ladies'd be sorry if you did." The mate tipped him a wink. "Or even the ones who aren't so bloody pretty, if you've been at sea long enough."

"If you want to waste your time with ugly women, that's your affair," Radcliffe said. "Nothing but the best for me. The best ship, the best crew, the best loot-"

"We've got plenty of that," Jackson broke in.

"We do," Red Rodney agreed. Furs and prime pipeweed lay in the holds, along with a mayor's silver plate and a governor's gold. He'd seized two fat merchants to ransom, and upwards of a dozen copperskinned Terranovan natives. The men would be hewers of wood and drawers of water; one brothelkeeper or another in Avalon would be glad to buy the wenches.

The copperskins' moans floated up from below. The Dutch merchants kept their big mouths shut. They would be fine even if they had to say farewell to some of their fortunes. They would, that is, unless their kinsfolk preferred the loot to the merchants, in which case they would cook over a slow fire. But the natives knew a short life, and not a merry one, awaited them. Why not mourn?

A pinnace and two light galleys patrolled the Gateway. The freebooters of Avalon might have to fight to hold what was theirs. Forts on the northern and southern spits that closed Avalon Bay so well mounted heavier guns than any ship of the line would carry.

"Run up our flag," Red Rodney called. The black hand on white flew from bowsprit and stern, and from atop the mainmast. The brigantine carried a fine set of flags in her locker. She could show England's St. George's cross, either alone or differenced with the red-crested eagle of the eastern Atlantean settlements. She could show the red and white stripes of a Portuguese merchantman, Sweden's gold cross on blue, Spain's red and white and gold, Holland's red and white and blue, the crown and fleurs-de-lys of France, or even the Corsican Moor's head.

Or she could show her true colors, as she was doing now.

One of the galleys rowed out to meet her. It stayed off her bow, where its gun could strike without fear of reply. Galleys were nimble, galleys were quick-but galleys weren't seaworthy enough for long cruises, and carried too many men and not enough supplies to go far. They did make first-rate guard dogs, though.

Thin across the water, a challenge came: "Show yourself, Red Rodney!"

"I'll do it!" Radcliffe shouted back as he strode to the bow. "Is that you, Stephen? How are Meg and the brats?"

"Good enough, good enough," the captain of the galley answered. "And how was the hunting out west?"

Rodney struck a pose. "Better than good enough, by Christ!"

"Then pass in!" Stephen said. The galley slipped out of the brigantine's way. Graceful as a dancer, the Black Hand glided into Avalon Bay.

There were days when William Radcliff wished his name were Jones or Bostwick or even Kersauzon. By all the signs, this was going to be one of them. No matter that the trading firm he ran from the growing town of Stuart-a trading firm whose ships sent salt fish and timber and other goods from Terranova all the way to Arkhangelsk-was as honest and reliable as the phases of the moon. No, much too often no matter at all.

The gentleman come to do business with Radcliff today was a stout Londoner named Elijah Walton. He wore a fancy powdered wig and badly wrinkled velvet that must have stayed folded in its trunk all the way across the Atlantic. "A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Radcliff," he said, extending his right hand.

"And you, Mr. Walton." When William took the master merchant's hand, he was surprised at the strength of his grip. More to Walton than met the eye, then.

He surely had all the fashionable vices. He took from his pocket a small enamelware box, took out a pinch of the powdered Terranovan herb it contained, and then inhaled it. After an explosive sneeze, he held out the box. "Care for some snuff yourself, sir?"

"No, thanks. I don't use pipeweed in any form, I fear. I trade in it, but it's not to my personal taste." In wool and linen, the only hair on his head that which he was born with, Radcliff knew he seemed a crude settler to the sophisticate from the mother country. Well, so what? he told himself. He is what he is, and I am what I am.

With a shrug, Elijah Walton made the enameled snuffbox disappear. "May I ask you a question, Mr. Radcliff, without fear of offending?"

More to him than met the eye…and also less. William was as sure he knew what the question would be as he was of, well, the phases of the moon. "Go ahead," he said, no doubt sounding as resigned as he felt.

"Ah, you will have heard it before, then." Nothing wrong with Walton's ear. "I shall ask it nonetheless. The similarity of the surname, but for one character, the prominence of men of that surname, however spelled, in Atlantis these past two centuries…Have you a family connection with Red Rodney Radcliffe of Avalon?"

"To my shame, Mr. Walton, I do. We both descend from Edward Radcliffe through Henry. Rodney's grandfather and mine were brothers, so we are second cousins. Knowing this does not delight me-nor, I daresay, him. But I would not dissemble."

"That no doubt speaks well for your integrity, which I have already heard highly praised," Elijah Walton said.

William shrugged. "You are too kind, sir. I might also remark that my lying here would serve little purpose, since you can inquire of almost anyone in Stuart and learn the truth in short order, did I try to conceal it."

Something in the way the master merchant's rather protuberant gray eyes glinted told Radcliff that he had already made those inquiries, and knew the answer before asking the question. A test, then. Well, I passed it, by Christ, William thought. Walton did not admit to any such thing aloud, however. Instead, he asked, "Why the curtailed spelling on your branch of the tree?"

"That happened in my grandfather's day, or so I am told," William Radcliff replied. "He hated waste in any form, and so lopped off the final e."

"I marvel that he did not leave you but a single f," Walton observed.

"The story is that he thought hard on that, but decided not to for fear men might pronounce the name Radclif." William lengthened the i in the last syllable. "I cannot say of my own knowledge whether this be true-he died when I was a boy."

"One more impertinent question?" the Londoner asked, a small smile playing across his full, red lips.

"Ask, sir, ask," William said. "If it be impertinent enough, I will put you out on the street once more, and be damned to your business."

To his surprise, Walton's smile got wider. "And if it be impertinent enough, you will put me out on the street without bothering to open the door before you pitch me through it. Well, I hope to avoid that, at any rate. All I wish to know is, what is your opinion of your…notorious cousin?"

"Again, this is something you could learn from others besides me," William Radcliff said. "In a word, I despise him. Not only does he dip the family name in the chamber pot, not only does he revel in befouling it, but he also preys on my ships whenever he finds the chance. If I could kill him with my own hands, it would be a pleasure-and a privilege."

Walton took another pinch of snuff. This time, he had to slap the lid back onto the box lest his sneeze blow its expensive contents all over Radcliff's office. "Potent stuff!" he said, dabbing at his streaming eyes with a blue silk handkerchief. "Well, sir…Very well indeed, in fact. How would you like to win that privilege and take that pleasure?"

William Radcliff leaned toward Walton so intently that the older, paunchier man gave back a pace. "Tell me more," Radcliff said.

Avalon despised law, scoffed at law, reviled law…and lived by law. What the pirate town would never have accepted if imposed from outside, its freebooters took upon themselves without a qualm. A virgin carrying a sack of gold could go from one end of Avalon to the other without let or hindrance-so long as she was, and was known to be, under the protection of one pirate lord or another.

Flags fluttered from the hilltop forts of Avalon: Red Rodney's black hand on white, Christopher Moody's swordarm and skull on red, Cutpurse Charlie Condent's three skulls and crossbones on a long black pennant, Goldbeard Walter Kennedy's naked headsman holding an hourglass, Stede Bonnet's skull and heart and dagger, and more besides. Some of the chieftains hated others, and would attack them on sight anywhere else in the Hesperian Gulf, the Atlantic, or the Bay of Mexico. In Avalon, though, a truce and the rule behind it had held for most of a lifetime.

You don't shit where you eat.

Red Rodney Radcliffe sometimes dreamt of uniting all the pirates of western Avalon under the black hand. He dreamt not of harrying the Terranovan towns but of seizing them and ruling them-of going from pirate to king. Only one thing kept him from trying it: the certain knowledge that all the other chieftains would combine against him the instant he tried to change them from equals to subjects.

He knew he wasn't, he knew he couldn't be, the only captain with dreams like that. He also knew he would cut the ballocks off any man who tried to make him bend the knee. Knowing that kept him from trying to impose himself on the others.

With his loot and his hostages and his slaves safe inside Black Hand Fort-one of the best, since it lay close to the harbor and had a reliable well even though it was on high ground-he could relax. Fields of indigo and sugar cane were beginning to stretch across southern Atlantis. With sugar naturally came rum.

At sea, Rodney doled out a glass of grog to his men each day. He took no more for himself, lest they think he thought he was better than they were. Ashore? Ashore, he could drink to his heart's content, and so could they. When he couldn't steal rum, he traded for it like an honest man, and he wasn't the only freebooter who did.

"This is the life!" he told his daughter. The rum sang in him, but he hadn't drunk himself sleepy yet. He hadn't drunk himself mean yet, either.

"Well, of course it is." Ethel Radcliffe was eleven, and knew no other. None of the women Rodney had taken into his bed since her mother had dared mistreat her in any way-or not for long. One wench who roused his ire in that regard left Black Hand Fort most suddenly, naked and with stripes on her back. Ethel drank rum, too, and swore and scratched as she pleased. She was a dead shot with a pistol.

Red Rodney laughed and tousled her buttery-yellow hair. "One of these days soon, by God, I'll bring you along with me when I set sail. Blast my mizzen if you wouldn't make a better raider than most of the dogs I could scrape up here."

"Do it!" the pirate's daughter said eagerly. "I want to shoot a Dutchman, or even a copperskin. Can I shoot one of the copperskins you brought back?"

"Sorry, love. Not this lot," Rodney answered.

Ethel pouted. "Why not?" Her voice took on a sugared whine that could coax almost anything out of her father.

Almost-but not quite. "Because they're worth good silver to me, that's why not," Rodney Radcliffe said. "And they cost blood to take. That makes 'em too dear to kill for sport." Whether killing them for sport was wrong didn't worry him. Silver did. Silver was one more measure of a man's rank among men.

"But I want to," Ethel persisted. She didn't care to come up short at anything-which only proved she was her father's daughter.

"No," Red Rodney said, and the flush that mounted to his cheeks came from choler as well as rum. "My men listen to me. You'd bloody well better, too. If they don't listen, I make 'em sorry. You think I can't make you sorry?"

He didn't put his foot down very often. When he did, he was likely to crush whatever lay beneath it. That could include Ethel, as she had painful reason to remember. The whine didn't go away, but it did change course: "Well, what can I shoot, then?"

"If you have to shoot something, go up on the stockade and shoot the first stray dog you see. Nobody'll miss that," her father answered. "And after you do, get one of the slaveys to chuck the carcass into the bay. Don't leave it lying there to rot and stink. Does that suit you, you little rakehell?"

"I'd still rather shoot a copperskin," Ethel said. Red Rodney's face must have sent up storm warnings, for she backtracked in a hurry: "A stray dog will do, I suppose. Better than nothing." She hurried away.

A few minutes later, a pistol banged. Rodney was tearing into roasted honker then, and couldn't hear the dog howl. He guessed it did, though, because Ethel didn't come back unhappy. A smile spread over his face. He'd done what a father should do: he'd pleased his little girl-and he'd got her out of his hair for a while.

He didn't smile so much about the honker. "What have we got here?" he demanded. "This sorry bastard's no bigger than a rooster's drumstick." He exaggerated, and by no small amount, but he'd seen plenty of bigger honker legs.

"Begging your pardon, sir, but it's the best the hunters brought back," the cook replied.

"Likely tell, likely tell," Rodney said. "When I was Ethel's age, by Christ, the honkers were three times the size of this miserable bird."

"Hunters say, sir, that the big ones are all gone-at least from close enough to Avalon to bring them back before they spoil," the cook told him. "They have to shoot the smaller, scrubbier kinds instead. Even those are harder to find than they were once upon a time."

"Sweet suffering Jesus!" Rodney poured himself more rum. "Will we have to start raising sheep and goats and cows? Are we farmers or are we men?"

The cook maintained a prudent silence. He was no pirate himself. He'd cooked for the governor of Nieuw Haarlem in Terranova till Red Rodney captured him and carried him back to Avalon. After eating some of his food, Rodney refused a ransom for him. The cook hadn't done badly here-or rather, he might have done much worse, and he was smart enough to know it. If he said too much, his lot might change in a hurry.

"Running out of honkers!" Rodney said. "Bloody hell! What's Atlantis coming to if we're running out of honkers?"

Meinheer Piet Kieft had impressive waxed mustaches and an even more impressive pot belly. The governor of Nieuw Haarlem nodded to William Radcliff. "I do not love your cousin," he said in gutturally accented English.

"Well, your Excellency, I must say that I'd wager I've not loved him for longer than you have," William replied. "He has robbed me, plundered my ships, done all he could to hurt me."

Piet Kieft snapped his fingers and poured more rum into his pewter cup. "Did he ever make you jump out a window naked when you were about to futter a serving girl with the best tits in the world?" He paused meditatively. "It was a second-story window."

"Oh, dear," Elijah Walton said before William could respond to that. "I'd heard you were somewhat discommoded in that raid, your Excellency, but I confess I did not realize the full extent of your, ah, difficulties. Please accept my sympathies."

"And mine," William added. He hoped, for the serving girl's sake, she'd been about to get on top.

"This is not even the worst of it," Kieft continued. "That son of a sow of a Red Rodney Radcliffe, that black-handed bastard, he stole from me my prime cook, and would not sell him back to me. It is war to the knife between me and him."

Yes, you look as if you've spent all the time since starving, William thought. Piet Kieft hadn't come to Stuart to be mocked, though. "Well, your Excellency, now is the time to see whether we can pay him back."

"Pay him back for sacking my town-ja," Kieft said. "I sack his. Pay him back for stealing Cornelius and making Katrina giggle when she sees me instead of opening her legs?…Even if I cut his heart out, it is not enough." His piggy little eyes flashed. He wasn't pretty, but William Radcliff wouldn't have wanted him for an enemy.

"You have ships," Walton said. "Mr. Radcliff here, our kindly host, has ships. I also have ships at my beck and call. If we gather together our separate contingents and sail against Avalon with overwhelming force-"

"It will be the greatest miracle since the Resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ," Radcliff finished for him.

"Your lack of spirit is distressing," Walton said.

"I don't lack spirit-no such thing," William replied. "But who will bell the cat, and when, and how? I admire you, sir, for persuading Meinheer Kieft to confer with us. Nevertheless, people have been mooting the fall of Avalon since the pirates first seized it. That is many years ago now, but they hold it still."

"They go on holding it, too, if we don't work against them," Piet Kieft said. "I aim to work against them-and most against Red Rodney-no matter what you do. But Master Walton is right. We have a better chance if we work together. I will do this. I do not even claim command."

That made William Radcliff blink. That a Dutchman would take orders from an Englishman at sea…was no small miracle itself. The Dutch reckoned themselves the best sailors in the world, and the English would have been hard pressed to prove them wrong. England and Holland had fought two naval wars in the past generation, and the Dutch had got the better of it both times.

"Well, well." William Radcliff turned to Elijah Walton. "If our comrade is so generous, can we fail to match him?"

Walton frowned. "My instructions are that an Englishman should lead the fleet against the corsairs."

"And what am I if not an Englishman-and the man on the spot?" Radcliff asked angrily. "If you call me a damned honker, sir, as if I were a New Hastings man, I will wish you joy of our enterprise-and much luck in taking it anywhere without the aid of Radcliff of Stuart."

"Be not overhasty, Mr. Radcliff, I pray you," Walton said. "All these insults come from your own mouth, and none from mine."

"You say this. Can you prove it? Will you prove it?" William pressed. "Or, by saying I am but an Atlantean, will you make me out to be a worthless settler, not deserving to associate with, let alone lead, his betters from the mother country?"

Coughing, Elijah Walton answered, "You cannot deny, sir, that your roots have been transplanted away from English soil these two centuries past."

"Bugger my roots. My heart is English," Radcliff said.

Piet Kieft stirred. "You started this, Walton. You set the pot on the fire. Will you now take it off and let it go cold because you cannot get all of your way? Or did you come here for just that purpose, so you could go back to London and say, 'I tried, but we could reach no agreement against these corsairs'?"

"Before God, Meinheer Kieft, I did not!" Walton exclaimed.

Kieft looked around William Radcliff's baroque jewel box of a study: the bookshelves, with volumes in English and Latin and French; the polished brass astrolable on the wall, part decoration, part tool; the ready-cut quills and the jars of ink; the coffee simmering over a low fire; the calico cat curled up asleep on a cushion. "This place seems English enough to suit me. Does it not seem to you the same?"

Perhaps Walton flushed, or perhaps it was a trick of the light streaming in through the south-facing octagonal window. The veritable Englishman's gaze fixed on a honker skull, cleaned and polished, that held down one of the piles of paper on Radcliff's desk. The honker seemed to stare back from empty eye sockets.

"Oh, come now, sir!" William said. "Come now! You might see the same, the very same, in a merchant's residence in London, or a scholar's, as a curiosity of natural philosophy. Deny it if you can."

Instead of denying it, Elijah Walton grunted. "Oh, very well," he said-most grudgingly, but say it he did. "Shall we style you Grand High Admiral of the Hesperian Gulf, then?" He gave a mocking seated bow.

"I care little what you call me," William Radcliff answered. "If I do what I set out to do, everyone who comes along will try his damnedest to filch the credit from me. And if I fail, I'll be that stupid honker from Atlantis, and all the blame will come down on my head. You win either way, Mr. Walton."

Piet Kieft chuckled and nodded. He too knew what being a settler meant. As for Walton…he did not seem entirely displeased at the prospect.

A pigeon fluttered into the roost at Black Hand Fort. Pigeons had spread with men in Atlantis. Several native varieties of dove lived here, including a couple with wings too stunted to let them fly, but there had been no pigeons till people brought them hither.

This particular pigeon had a piece of parchment tied to its left leg. The handler who spied the parchment gently removed it, read the note on the inner surface, and hotfooted it to Red Rodney's chamber.

His knock didn't quite interrupt the pirate captain at play, which was lucky for him. Rodney's companion squeaked and yanked a silk coverlet-loot from one of the small, Spanish-held islands south of Atlantis-up to her chin. "Don't fret yourself, Jenny. He wouldn't dare bother me if it weren't important," Radcliffe said. As he pulled up his breeches, he also raised his voice: "What's toward?"

"A pigeon from Stuart," came the voice from the other side of the door.

"Ha!" Red Rodney threw on his shirt, too. He was still barefoot, but he didn't care. He went without shoes aboard ship more often than not, the better to feel the deck under his soles. "I knew it had to be something that mattered."

"And I don't?" Jenny said sulkily, but he was already striding toward the door.

His mind moved perhaps even faster than his feet. Of course he had spies on the east coast. Who in his right mind wouldn't? He assumed his foes had spies in Avalon, too. They had reason not to love him and reason to try to find out what he was up to. With luck, he could feed them full of lies.

And maybe they were trying to do the same to him. Well, he'd find out. His thumb came down on the latch. He scowled at the man in the hallway. "What's going on, Mick?" It had better be interesting, his voice warned.

"Pigeon just in from Stuart, skipper," Mick repeated, and held out the message the bird had carried.

Red Rodney needed to squint to read it; the handwriting was precise but tiny, to cram as much as possible into a small space. As he read, he started to swear. "You've seen this?" he demanded.

"I have indeed," the Irishman answered.

"Well, keep your mouth shut about it till I decide what to do. Can you manage that?"

"Sure and I can."

"You'd better, by Christ. Dutchmen and Englishmen and my own cold-hearted cousin. If that's not a mix cooked up in hell, I don't know what would be. They aim to gut us, Mick, gut us like a honker after you knock it over the head. Are we going to let them get away with it?"

The pigeonkeeper muttered something in Erse. Rodney Radcliffe didn't know what it meant, but it didn't sound as if the man favored giving their enemies an easy time. No one in Avalon would. What the English did to pirates they caught could make the hardest man shiver of nights. And what the English did was a mercy next to what happened when the Spaniards got hold of you. The Spaniards liked whips, and they liked fire…

He read the scrap of parchment again. The Spaniards didn't seem to be part of the gang William Radcliff was putting together. Rodney assumed his cousin crouched at the center of the plot. Where else would a spider go?

Returning to English, Mick asked, "How do you aim to stop the spalpeens, now?"

"We'll have to fight 'em. We can't very well run away, now can we?" Red Rodney said. The other pirate shook his head. Rodney muttered under his breath. Could freebooters fight as a fleet? They would have to, wouldn't they? He could see the need. Would his fellow great captains be able to? How many of them were in Avalon right now? How many would get back soon?

"You'll need a grand parley, won't you?" Mick said.

"I was thinking that very thing," Rodney answered. "A grand parley. Been a while since we had one." The pirate chieftains of Avalon were independent princes. They parleyed to keep from fighting among themselves: rarely for any other reason. Would they hearken when Rodney summoned them?

They'd better hearken, by God, he thought. Otherwise, the first we'll know of the enemy is when he starts cannonading us.

Even figuring out where to hold a grand parley took more in the way of diplomacy than most corsairs had in them. He couldn't invite his fellow captains to Black Hand Fort. Oh, he could, if he aimed to start the squabble he wanted to head off. They would think he was trying to lure them all to one place at the same time so he could get rid of them at once. If he got an invitation like that, he would think the same thing himself. He had to find neutral ground.

Some unkind or possibly jealous soul had called Avalon the Sodom of Atlantis. A visitor from the other coast, the somber coast, had marveled that so many pirates were sick. Then he saw how the freebooters drank, and marveled even more that they weren't all dead.

Mary's Paradise would do if no other place sufficed. It was the biggest, bawdiest, grandest brothel and tavern in Avalon. Red Rodney knew he would have to pay Mary Carleton a goodly sum to take her establishment out of circulation long enough for the chieftains to meet there. No one in Avalon did things from the goodness of his-or her-heart. Maybe he could get some money back from his fellow captains. Or maybe not.

Jenny squawked when she heard that Red Rodney purposed talking with Mary Carleton. "You want some poxy trollop!" she shrilled. "You'll swive her, and then you'll fetch the foulness back to me!"

"I'd be poxed if I tried buggering Goldbeard or Cutpurse Charlie, that's certain sure," Red Rodney replied with a laugh, "but I want 'em there to do them a favor, not to try to take their favors."

"Oh, yes." Jenny didn't want to believe him. "And you won't even look at the doxies falling out of their dresses. They're as common as a barber's chair, they are-one's out and the next one's in. And who was the man who paid five hundred pieces of eight just to see some strumpet naked?"

"I've heard the story, but I don't know the sorry bastard's name," Radcliffe answered. "It wasn't me-I'll tell you that. If I'd laid down so much silver, I'd've got more than a look for it."

"Sure enough-likely you would have got the gleets," his lady love said.

However snide Jenny was, Rodney sent a man he trusted to dicker a price from Mary Carleton. She proved more reasonable than he'd expected. "I know which side my bread's buttered on," she told Radcliffe's emissary. "We'll get enough of the ordinary business now that the Black Hand's back in port."

That being settled, Red Rodney sent messages to the other chieftains of Avalon, to the men who would have to lead the fight against the Dutch and the English and the eastern settlers if there was going to be one. Some of them were, or had been, his foes. He sent to them anyhow, under flag of truce. He hoped curiosity would bring them to Mary's Paradise if nothing else did, for he was not in the habit of doing that. A captain of an earlier generation, when a priest asked him on his deathbed to forgive his enemies, answered, "I have none-I killed them all." Red Rodney wasn't quite so deadly, but not from lack of effort.

Some of the other pirate lords promised to come. Others said no at first. Patiently, Rodney sent to them again. You hurt only yourselves if you stay away, he wrote. If you want to go on doing what you're doing, you need to hear me.

When he went down to Mary's Paradise, he wore a ruffled shirt-not quite clean-and a jacket of velvet shot through with gold threads that was splendid even if it didn't fit him quite so well as the Spaniard for whom it was made. He carried a cutlass, a dagger, two pistols in his belt, and a tiny one in his boot. His guards dressed more plainly but carried just as many weapons.

"You can futter the wenches if you find any you fancy," he told them. "But God help your scurvied souls if you get drunk. You're here to fight if you have to, and not to fight if you don't need to. No brawling for the fun of it, not today."

And maybe that would do some good, and maybe it wouldn't. His crew was better ordered than most, but men who'd put up with Royal Navy discipline didn't turn pirate to begin with. And even Royal Navy sailors roistered ashore. Besides, if one of the other chieftains' men started trouble, or if his own followers could claim they did…

Well, he would worry about that if he had to, the same way he would worry about Jenny slipping hemlock into his beer. He tried not to think about how black her scowl was as he left Black Hand Fort.

He had a standard-bearer carrying his banner, and another carrying a white flag to show he didn't intend to fight unless he had to. Similar processions wound down from the other fortresses. No one pulled out a pistol or fired a matchlock. It wasn't quite a miracle, but Red Rodney took it for a good sign.

Mary Carleton greeted him under a red lantern. "Welcome," she said. "The room is waiting."

"Thank you, Mistress Mary," he said, more respectfully than he'd thought he would. She had to be at least thirty-five, but she was still a fine-looking woman.

Rum and roast meats sat on the table. A couple of captains had got there before him. They were already eating and drinking. One of them nodded to him, saying, "This is a good spread. What kind of nonsense are you going to spout?"

"I wouldn't throw away this kind of money to spout nonsense," Red Rodney answered. He poured himself some rum and waited to see who would come and who wouldn't.

To his surprise, all the captains he'd invited showed up. Some of them scowled at him. Some scowled at one another. But nobody grabbed for a sword or a gun. "Let's hear your lies, Radcliffe," said Bertrand Caradeuc in buzzing Breton accents. A gold hoop glittered in his right ear.

"You want lies, go home to your mistress," Red Rodney answered. Most of the chieftains laughed. A few glowered: the ones, he guessed, who feared their mistresses were filling their ears with lies. He swigged from his mug of rum and went on, "The sheep are starting to think they're wolves. The honkers are trying to grow eagles' wings. The bastards in Stuart aim to kill us all."

"And you know this because…?" Goldbeard Walter Kennedy inquired. He was an enormous man, several inches taller than Rodney, who was no stripling himself, and wider through the shoulders. The beard that gave him his sobriquet spilled halfway down his chest.

Radcliffe told exactly how he knew it, though he didn't name his spy in Stuart. "We can let them pick us off a ship at a time, the way they're bound to want to," he said. "Or we can stand together and show 'em we're not to be trifled with. Which would you rather?"

"How do we know you're not lying so you get to tell us what to do?" Caradeuc inquired.

"Because I won't lead us even if you bloody well ask me to," Red Rodney replied. The renunciation hurt, but he knew he had to make it. "Pick somebody else. In this fight, I'll follow him, whoever he is. If I have a quarrel with him, it can wait till later. Everything else can wait till later."

He impressed them with that. He'd thought he would. They weren't used to backing away from power. They were used to grabbing with both hands. They wrangled and shouted and swore, and finally chose Michel de Grammont to command. Fewer of them hated him than anyone else. That seemed a good enough reason to them. What kind of high captain he would make…They'd find out.