The King`s Commission - Dewey Lambdin

That act convinced him, if nothing else did, that there was more than usual danger in what they were about to do, and he regretted that he had not taken the time to write a few letters. There was Lucy, whom he had been forbidden from seeing since his disastrous actions of the months before. There was his maternal grandmother, who had rescued him from ignominy and poverty. There was Caroline Chiswick, now safely in the arms of her family in Charleston, if they had not already sailed for England by now. Poverty-stricken she might be, but she had been such a sweet and lovely girl, a little too tall and gawky for fashionable beauty, but damned handsome nonetheless, and devilish smart and delightful to converse with. God help him, he felt a pang for Dolly Fenton, and wished that he were back in her bed that instant. She at least had for a time loved him as well as she was able, and that was damned fine. He still regretted that last hour or so with her, when he had to tell her he was sailing away for good, and that her dreams of a little love-nest for just the two of them could not be. She had wept as quietly as she could, clung to him, given him passionate love once more, saving her real tears and squawls for total privacy. She had been so sweet, too, so dependent, yet good of heart, and, thank God, nowhere near as dumb as Lucy.

"Might as well write my fucking will while I'm at it!" he muttered, suffering a premonitory chill even as he said it. His insides cooled noticeably, and his stomach got a touch queasy as he finished gathering up a change of clothes and a few personal items in a sea-bag.

Damnit, this was a bloody undertaking, not like a sea-battle at all, which was gory enough for anyone's tastes. With Mc-Gilliveray to lead them and negotiate, they might be safe as houses, or they could end up tortured to death, screaming for death, and painted savages dancing about waving their own hair and their privates at them in glee!

"Jesus, I'm scared witless!" he whispered soft as he could in the privacy of his quarters, the temporary luxury of untold space in the former master's cabin. He had been frightened before. Any time he had to scale the masts. Before battle was joined, when he had time to think about how he could be mangled. The two duels he had fought in his short life. The shelling at Yorktown, or the horrible battle they had fought with Lauzun's Legion and the Virginia Militia on Guinea Neck before they could escape. Even the first few weeks under Lieutenant Lilycrop's pitiless eyes as he fumbled his way to competence had tied his plumbing into hot knots, but nothing like this icy dread.

"Damn the Navy, damn King George, damn everybody!" he spat, within a touch of begging off at the last minute. It was all he could do to walk to the cabin door and think about joining his party.

There was a knock on the door, which almost loosed his bowels.

"Enter," he bade from a dreadfully dry mouth.

Cashman stepped inside, clad in pretty much the same rig as Alan, but with the addition of a scarlet officer's sash.

"You look like death's head on a mop-stick," Cashman said with a quirky little cock of his brows.

"How I look is nothing on how I feel," Alan grumbled.

"Then let's liquor our boots," Cashman suggested, crossing to the former captain's wine-cabinet. He drew out a wine bottle and took a swig from the neck, then handed the bottle to Lewrie.

"Ah, that's the ticket," Alan sighed. "Incredibly foul vin rouge, my last taste of civilization."

"I hope you've remembered rum for my troops?" Cashman asked. "God knows how anyone could do what we're about to do sober."

"Aye, rum enough for everyone for three weeks, though not the usual sailor's measure. A sip, no more."

"It's beginning to feel a touch insane about now, ain't it?"

"Insane ain't the word for it, sir." Alan shuddered.

"Call me Christopher," Cashman told him. "Growl we may, but go we must, you know. Give me that bottle, if you've had enough. I feel the need for a generous libation to put me numb enough to get on with the business."

"Feeling daunted yourself, hey?"

"Bloody terrified," Cashman admitted easily. "You?"

"I was wondering if I could break a leg or something at the last minute." Alan grinned back at him. Cashman tipped him a wink.

"Either way, it's bloody daft, the way we leap at chances for honor and glory," Cashman said with a belch, and handed the bottle back, which bottle had diminished in contents remarkably in a very short span of time. "Personally, I think it's a lot of balls, but that's what they pay us for. This is the worst time, when one steps out into the unknown. Once we've been shoved into motion, it usually goes much better."

"That's been my experience." Alan nodded. "What about Cowell and McGilliveray?"

"Cowell sahib is still scribbling away at his objections, but the Turtle-rajah came round at the last, long as the goods get up-river. He suggested the sloop would do better to handle the transfer of goods from Shrike, instead of having your ship come inshore with her. Wants you to pass the word to your captain to load her up and stand ready to meet us once we get the gora logs convinced to set out the red war pole."

"Could you possibly speak the King's English, Kit?"

"Ah, sorry, not possible, you see. Been too long away from it. I can pidgin with any Samboe you want from the Hooghly Bar to the Coromandel coast. I can even get along in Creole with the slaveys up in the Blue Mountains. Who knows, by the time we're done, I'll master Creek, too?"

"Well, we can open another bottle," Alan sighed, tossing the empty onto the coverlet of the hanging cot. "Or we could get started while it's still dark and quiet."

"Best go, then. Or we'll never." Cashman tried to smile.

"Aye. Goddamnit."

"Amen, parson Lewrie."

Chapter 4

Florida pretty much ain't worth a tuppeny shit, Alan thought moodily as they lay up ashore just a few miles short of the headwaters of the Ochlockonee. The past night and day had been miserable. The air was still, and foetid with the smells of marsh and mud, the swamps aswarm with mosquitoes and biting flies, biting gnats. Alligators and poisonous snakes were two-a-penny on the banks, in the water, laying out for a bask on the tree limbs that overhung the banks when they were forced close ashore by a bend in the channel, or snuffling about under the banks in their nests and roaring at them when disturbed.

They had made very good time, though, catching a favorable slant of wind on the first night when the river was wide enough for short-tacking inland. So far they were a day ahead of schedule.

It was only after the sun had come up that they had been forced to row as the banks closed in and rose higher in thickly treed hammocks that blocked the breeze from the sea, and the familiar tang of salt air was left behind like a lover's perfume. The heat wasn't bad, though the air was stiflingly wet enough and humid enough to wring perspiration from them by the bucket, and it was a blessing that the leafy green waters could be drunk safely, or dipped up and sluiced over tired bodies.

Bald cypress, scrub pine, and yellow-green stagnant ponds spread out on either hand under the canopy of the marshes, punctuated by water reeds, sharp-edged grasses, or jagged stumps of prodigious size. Bright birds the like of which the hands had never seen cried and stalked or fluttered below the canopy. Frogs the size of rabbits croaked at them from their resting places. Water bugs skittered on the deceptively calm water as it slid like treacle through the marshes. Now and then a hammock of higher sandy ground loomed up around a bend in the channel, covered with pines thick as the hair on a cat's back, open to the bright sky as the result of a lightning fire, or burn.

Otter, deer, a host of wildlife, lurked along the banks. Alan saw raccoons for the first time, and opposums hanging by their naked tails like obscene caricatures of rats. He had been almost nauseated by McGilliveray's granted comment that opposums were very good to eat, though he was never one to refuse a bread-room fed "miller" in his midshipman days-at least the ship's rats were decent-sized!

McGilliveray had gone totally native by then, stripping off his shirt to bare more pagan tattooing, wrapping a length of cloth about his head like a Hindi's turban as Cashman styled it, naked under breech-clout, and the leggings only covering his thighs, held up by thongs from the single strap that held the breech-clout in place. Most of the sailors had tied their kerchiefs about their heads like small four-cornered mob-caps. The soldiers sported rough imitations of turbans, and had taken off their shirts as well, though their skins gleamed almost frog-belly pale in the fierce light, and several were already regretting the exposure, and patting their burns with water. At least in that regard Alan's sailors were more fortunate, since they had had months and years of continual tanning by the sun, so they appeared at first glance as ruddy as any savage.

"Apalachee scout over there," McGilliveray whispered, coming to Lewrie's side. "I shall go speak to him."

"Is that wise?" Cowell asked, almost prostrate with exhaustion, though he had not done a lick of work since plunking his posterior on a thwart the night before. Alan thought it comical to see how McGilliveray had tricked Cowell out in breech-clout, leggings, moccasins and calico checkered shirt, with a turban of his own, like a maggot done up as a man. He could not have fooled a European at a hundred yards, and any Indian running across him would have asked him how fast the pitch was at the new Lord's cricket grounds.

"We have to let them know who we are eventually, sir," McGilliveray said. "They saw us land, tracked us up-river. I had hoped we would make contact with them last night. It's only polite, seeing as how we've crossed most of their territory already."

"If this is the best real-estate they have, they're welcome to every bloody stick of it," Alan griped.

McGilliveray stood up and waved an arm, calling out in his odd language, and from where Alan thought only a mosquito could live, up popped a full half-dozen savages, dressed in breech-clouts and tattoos only, bearing long cane bows and arrows. McGilliveray took off his moccasins and waded across a shallow slough of weeds and reeds to converse with them.

"They don't look like Rousseau's noble savages, do they, Mister Cowell?" Cashman asked, coming to join them as they stood idly by watching the parley.

"Look how lithe and tall they are, how nobly they bear themselves, sir," Cowell disagreed softly. "One does not need much clothing in such climes. Mankind, reduced to Eden, without a houseful of possessions and gew-gaws, with no prating philosophies to occasion rancor, shorn of metaphysics, of confusing science. They are a handsome folk, you'll not be able to deny. All pretensions of society cast aside, and relying on Nature and our Creator and their native wit for sustenance. You may speak of barbarity, of quick anger and bloody-handed murther, but has Mankind, in all our wisdom, gone far beyond those passions for all our supposed improvements, Captain Cashman?"

"We don't kill quite so openly and easily, sir," Cashman replied.

"Life, in all its facets, is closer and more personal with them, sir. They are not like us, but we were once much like them, and still are, in many ways yet. The brave man slays with a sword, the coward with an invitation to tea, if I may paraphrase the quotation, ha ha."