The Confusion

Everyone in the town slept late the next morning, save a few sentries and low-caste laborers. Jack reckoned it would be a simple matter to find his sons passed out under a palm-tree somewhere. But he could not find them. The tide was about to go out, and men on ships were calling his name. Jack returned to the top of the cliff, intending to wake up Monsieur Arlanc and ask him to search for Jimmy and Danny later. But on his way to the apartment where the Huguenot slept, Jack detected volcanic emanations from the Queen’s chambers, and detoured thataway out of curiosity. As he approached her door he saw not just one but two sets of weapons leaned up against the door-posts: European muskets and cutlasses. Dim moanings, mutterings, and controversies emanating from the other side of that door told Jack that the boys had finally found what they had been looking for in the way of Oriental decadence, though Jack honestly could no longer tell it apart from the Occidental kind. In any event Jack left the boys there to pursue their own story while he sailed away to pursue his.

Two of Queen Kottakkal’s ships sailed on that tide, and turned opposite ways when they cleared the harbor. The one on which Jack was a passenger planned to coast southwards until it rounded Cape Comorin at the tip of Hindoostan. Then it would turn north and sally through one of the gaps in Adam’s Bridge-the chain of reefs and isles that stretched between the mainland and the Island of Serendib. From there it would be a short voyage to Dalicot, where the Cabal’s ship was being built. Their eventual purpose was to raid shipping around the Dutch settlements of Tegnapatam and Negapatam, and the English ones at Tranquebar and Fort St. David, but they said they would be happy to deposit Jack on the shores of his jagir, which was not too far north of those places. Enoch Root, meanwhile, took passage on a northbound ship, intending to make a rendezvous in Surat with a Danish merchantman that was ballasted with cannons, and that wanted to unload them to make space for saltpeter and cloth.

THREE MONTHS LATER JACK WAS a King no longer: merely a Vagabond sailor infringing on the hospitality of the Malabar pirate-queen. He and van Hoek, Jan Vroom, Surendranath, Padraig Tallow, and various Dutchmen sailed into Queen Kottakkal’s harbor aboard something that was close to being a ship. Her hull was painted and ballasted, her decks were in place, and a temporary foremast had been jury-rigged, giving her the ability to crawl through the water before a following wind. Her gunports were caulked shut. She was unarmed and helpless, but four of the Queen’s pirate-ships had escorted, and occasionally towed, her around Cape Comorin. She had not been christened yet-it had been decided to save that ceremony for when the masts were stepped, the guns installed, and all members of the Cabal on hand.

The cannons had preceded them, and were stacked on logs just above the tide-line. Jack, ever disposed to view things from a wretch’s standpoint, grasped right away that the movement of these objects from the hold of the Danish ship to their current position, concealed just within the first rank of palm trees, embodied a lavish expenditure of human toil-perhaps not so much as the Pyramids but still enough to give him pause.

For his part van Hoek, once he had sloshed ashore, stomped past the cannons without breaking stride, and did not even pause to light his pipe until he had encountered his three masts lying side-by-side in the middle of the town, out back of the Temple of Kali. He walked up and down the length of each one, stooping to inspect how they had been blocked up off the ground. He stood at their narrow ends and peered down them to check for undue curvature, and ambled up and down pounding on them with a pistol-butt and listening to the wood’s reverberations with a hand cupped to his ear. He frowned at cracks, as if he could weld these imperfections shut with his furious gaze, and rested his hand contemplatively on places that had been scarred by the sawing friction of hawsers, collisions with spars, and impacts of pistol-balls. At first van Hoek seemed in the grip of something that approached panic, such was his anxiety that the masts would be found wanting. Gradually this eased into the quotidian fretting and continual state of low-level annoyance that Jack knew to be the perpetual lot of all competent sea-captains.