Crossing the river while the sailors rowed, Pendleton wrote down the heathen Scott’s every word with an ink-dipped quill in a sheepskin book bound in fine leather, the very book gifted to him by his Auntie Mary before he had been shipped off to the , Stadthouder’s service. Yet a boy, Pendleton was initially concerned about the burning of Porto Soto, the battle and the pursuit. As the white maroon named Jay discussed these things with Pendleton he had a kind, haunted easiness about him, the bearing of a child who knew not what wreckage he had wrought while knocking over the scholar’s inkpot, blithely recounting his actions in a state of brutal innocence.
They pulled up onto shore and made a little ceremony of escorting him out of the boat. He even walked through two short files of oarsmen standing at attention, past Griegs who made a comic face at his passing, in order to frighten his companions into thinking that he was about to bring the wrath of this murderous savage upon them. The Spanish pike-man was now sitting up attempting to bind his knee. Jay set down the girl and motioned for her to aid the fallen soldier. He then walked over to the pike and helmet hung with hundred and more colorfully adorned scalps—the actual platted, teased, bestially adorned top hair of warrior upon savage warrior, which formed a monstrous coif hanging nearly to the ribs of the wearer. Pendleton sucked in his breath in amazement at the sight of the savage headpiece, “May ,I Jay?”
“Sure Lord Shaw, try it on if ya like.”
He and Hempstead examined the piece in detail, Pendelton even beginning a sketch. “Just for the proportions you know—a mere moment. I can complete it from memory. Don it please, Jay.”
Jay posed briefly with the helmet on his head and scalps draping his upper body as Pendleton sketched furiously. The wild Scott then grabbed the pike and handed it butt-first to the little Pendleton. “Dare ya go, Lord Shaw, sometin’ ta take home. I need to be headin’ back to my people now.”
As he said this he handed his helmet to the woman and heaved the soldier across his shoulders.
Little Lord Pendleton Shaw was excited. “Chief Bracken, if I may name you so, I intend to pen a mariner’s guide regarding this land. What advice might I offer in your words, for those doughty English and Dutch souls who might venture upon these shores?”
“Tell them, Lord Shaw, that my sons and I will see that it’s just a visit—and a bloody one at that, just like we did for Old Don Tinoco, Frank Drake and Big Don Enrique. Thanks for the ferry across.”
He then turned to his recently acquired woman and slapped her on the rear end, and said in a barbarous corruption of the Spanish language—which flowed beautifully from even the basest tongues in the normal course of things, “Undalay Chakeyta, undalay.”
As the beast of a man plunged into the wild world, like a satiated Achilles, with captive Trojan and copper-hued Brisais, Pendelton was compelled with the effusive giddiness of the discoverer, and blurted, “Have you ever seen such a savage sight! He be the very image of our ancient ancestors. A descendent of Prince Madoc he be. I wager, Hempstead, that a turreted keep rises in this hinterland somewhere. To think, Hempstead, a race of White savages ruling the heathens—what treasures they must have hoarded!”
“Aye me-Lord, a frightful shore this be—and if I may, it is time to order this in your mind for the Captain’s ear. He will be little concerned with savage hair hanging from ancient helms, but wanting an appraisal of the military situation.”
Hempstead then looked to Griegs who had fallen out of line and was leering at the savage nun as she walked along—in a not very Christian manner—behind her rude master, her shape showing through the aging garment, “Ya see, boys, what treasures they got in this land!”
Griegs then ducked the unseen buffet of Hempstead’s big hand and rejoined his mates with a wry grin on his pinched face…
The pinched, pocked, and weather worn face of Griegs regarded him as it hovered above his desk, blinking its dull, mirthy eyes in the inquiring way of the idiot of the lower orders, much like a dog hangs its head in dim and fruitless contemplation of his master’s desire.
Why do not the words come to my pen—naught but the time, the bearings, the tea consumed, the imaginary repairs made to the as yet unseen ramparts of my stronghold?
The idiot head of the pinched, mirthy face, yet floated above his parchment and quill, the weathered hand of gnarled proportions molesting the inkpot, with the bottom used to tap on the oaken desk as a moor calling slavers to auction with the thwack of a great peezal upon the back of a slave—Is my desk a slave, an unruly slave to my befuddled mind, an eater of my time, a ruiner of my mind’s measure?
“Lord Shaw,” crooned the pinched face, with a look of worry that seemed to drive the mirthiness of its countenance away, “are you well, milord? Shall I raise Hempstead, milord?”
He looked into the idiot eyes of a true and cursed soul and felt pity for him there, and yet felt soiled by the pity of this mean little mind for his own wretched condition. The admonishment of Hempstead to ever put on the airs of his station as a cloak against rebuke, rose by rote, and he leveled his middling glance of condescension at this inquiring creature, and lied the lie of Eve to Adam, “All is well, Griegs. Just considering the fortifications you know. The Lord Protector wants a puritan bastion against the pagan hinterland and Catholic stench welling up from Florida.”
“Might I help, milord—for I have seen it, fell off of the east bastion after tapping the grog keg once—such a mean little wall I barely took a lump to the noggin. Might I serve up the lay for milord?”
And so the wretched creature will not be put off.
“Very well, Griegs, the scale of this map is such that the height of a man is that of the width of my pinkie nail…”
For the first time since setting sail from Portsmouth, Pendleton Shaw did not feel alone, did not feel as if he were unworthy of the task before him, did not feel as if he were groping in the dark as the mirthy chatter of his rowdy manservant guided his drafting hand with many bawdy asides, and much groping for proper words, this formerly irritating visitation of the lowly building into something bordering on comradery, a sensation Pendleton had never experienced, rather had he always found himself jealously considering that sense of united striving exhibited by those beneath him.
For once upon this voyage, Pendleton failed to notice as the keel of Drake's Revenge moaned in the lamp-lit night as it cleaved the surface of the Deep in the cause of keeping his paltry appointment with Fate.
