NO SURVIVORS

"No survivors, eh? Then where do all the stories come from?" - Jack Sparrow

"Did they hurt you?"

The demand hits the rescued man like a slap in the face: after all he has been through, even a simple question is almost too much to bear. His head lolls back, eyes stinging with salt water, and he stares up at the dark lines of the rigging against the clear sky. All around him are the comforting, familiar sounds of a working ship - a ship where the boards creak gently under the touch of the water and the warmth of the sun, where the sails make heavy, solid flapping sounds as the wind catches in them.

The contrast to his experiences of the previous night is so pronounced that he almost laughs with the sheer childlike joy of it.

"Answer the captain, you grinning idiot."

The first mate of the Mary-Sue, a scrawny, foxlike man, grabs hold of the rescued man's chin and turns his face upwards so he can look carefully into the staring eyes. "Ach, he's feeble-minded, I reckon. Been adrift too long, maybe. Swallowed too much seawater!"

"I'd say he's been in the water less than a day," says the captain, patiently resting a hand on the worn wooden rail. The captain of the Mary-Sue is known for his intellect rather than his cruelty: he leaves all the cruelty to his first mate, the red-headed Sanchez. "He has both his legs, his colour is good, and nothing's taken a bite out of him."

"And what about the gold?"

This from another member of the crew, a balding man, against a background of general supportive muttering from the rest of the rank and file. They are, after all, pirates, and the treasure is automatically their greatest concern.

"Aye," agrees the captain, amenably enough , and hunches down next to the man's supine form. "What about the gold?" he asks in a reasonable tone that all his crew know by now to be exceedingly deceptive. "It's a vast hoard, I'm told. A treasure from the days of Cervantes! Perhaps - " and all the crew are nodding at this point, because they've heard the stories too " - perhaps it even belonged to the man himself, eh?"

The man they pulled from the waves stares up at them, the sun on his face suddenly seeming as cold as winter moonlight and the crowd of sailors surrounding him as insubstantial as shadows. He swallows, hard, tasting the salt on his cracked lips, and the captain sees the glaze of horror in his eyes.

"Did they hurt you?" he repeats, a little more gently this time. "The ones who took your ship? Did they?"

Again the man wants to laugh, wildly, because he needs to tell the captain something important, something fundamental, but the trauma of the events he has witnessed allows only a bubbling giggle to his lips at first. His name is Clausen, but that is part of memory and he is trying hard not to remember anything.

"They?" he gasps as the pirate crew murmur in disgust at his outburst and draw back from him. "They…"

…had only just missed the first wreck when they passed it at twilight. The stars were coming out. Against the blue vault of heaven the sharply angled mast of the sunken ship looked black and forbidding.

"Rocks?"

"Reef," said Clausen, with certainty, leaning out to peer over the side. The mast seemed to vanish into the depths, swallowed by the darkening water with no sign of the rest of the ill-fated ship. "We must be close. The old man said a cave. That means a shoreline, and shorelines mean reefs around here…"

He made the mistake of winking cheerfully at the captain, his caution chased away by excitement. "This is it. We're really going to get it…"

"I hope for your sake that is so," grumbled the captain of the Electra. "Clausen, when I agreed to take you aboard my ship, I didn't expect to spend days in profitless fishing ports checking star charts and bantering with senile old fools who spend all their time telling tall tales to any idiot who will listen!"

"Ah, but this isn't just any tale, Captain," said Clausen with a smile. "This is the tale. You know it, your men know it."

"We know it, but we don't believe it," the captain countered.

Clausen's smile widened. "If you don't believe it, then why are you here?" He caught the narrowing of the captain's eyes, and added, "Sir."

The captain made a low, warning growling noise in his throat. Clausen pressed on regardless, pushing the luck that had sustained him all his life. "Cervantes de Leon was a real man, as real as you or I. He lived on the ocean and he made a fine living from it."

"Aye, and a fine dying too, if all the stories are true!"

The captain's patience, never his best feature, was exhausted. "Clausen, get above and help my crew navigate around your precious reef." He stalked away, boots thumping on the boards. Clausen sighed. The crew needed no help, he knew that: they were the best pirates in Europe, or the worst, depending on how you wanted to think of it or which end of the sword you were on. This was purely the captain's way of trying to get Clausen kicked in the head again. The crew had never taken to him. They were a close-knit community, and not keen on outsiders.

He looked up at the stars, and across at the distant horizon. The night was peaceful and clear, with only a few clouds scudding across the shining surface of a gibbous moon. A shout from the lookout drew him to the prow.

"What the bloody 'ell have you got us into here, Clausen?"

The indignant pirate's bellow echoed around the ship, bringing even the crew who had been sleeping below decks up to see what all the fuss was about. Clausen found himself being shouldered and elbowed more than strictly necessary as the men pushed past him, and forced himself not to react in anger. The crew were muttering amongst themselves, sounding by turns concerned and irritable. He pushed himself up on his toes to see what had caused so much consternation, and almost overbalanced as his collar was grabbed by the first mate.

"You've brought us to a blasted graveyard!" Marchon snarled. His outflung hand took in the scene in the bay laid out before the Electra, gleaming cold blue in the moonlight.

The water was unnaturally still. Jutting out of it at angles, irregularly spaced, were the remains of a dozen or more ships. Broken masts hung awkwardly, ropes tangled and knotted back against themselves. In the upended bilges of one casualty bobbing barrels had collected, thrown in by the tide. Two large crates, still lashed together, bumped gently against the Electra as she continued slowly forward into the little bay.

"What manner of place is this?" snarled the lookout.

"Seconded.," Marchon growled. "This place is a deathtrap." He made to lift Clausen off his feet by the collar. "What say we throw the jonah over the side?"

"Look at all the cargo," one of the crew put in, abruptly, pointing at a string of small cases, each carefully nailed shut and beginning to tarnish orange with rust. This observation made the mood suddenly much lighter, as a shout went up from the port side as well. Marchon, distracted, let his burden drop, and Clausen backed off, rubbing his neck bitterly.

"This one's one of the silk run ships, and it's laying heavy! Still loaded!"

"These barrels are full, too!"

"Don't waste time. Fetch a rope! Get the hooks!"

This last was from the captain: Clausen watched grimly as the crew went into their salvage operation with practiced ease. Even Marchon gave him a grudging nod as he brushed past.

This can't be it, he thought. I can't have come all this way for a few yards of silk and casks of rum. I came for the treasure. Cervantes' treasure.

There was a groan of wood against wood as the ship came about for the crew to board one of the stricken wrecks, the silk run ship spotted to port. Clausen listened to the captain's shouted orders, and heard, after a short while, the distinctive sound of chains as the drifting cargo was hauled up. He let his head loll back with a sigh, looking at the sky, unable to escape the sense of emptiness. For six months now he'd followed the lure of the infamous pirate's hoard. Not a pirate himself, Clausen had been a docker in Port Salut when he'd heard his first tale of Cervantes. The man had been a menace, that was for certain, but a successful one, and had amassed a huge fortune by the time he died, killed in battle by some wandering warrior or other. None of Clausen's sources were quite clear on how Cervantes met his fate or who exactly dealt the killing blow, but they all agreed on one thing: the pirate had been as crazy as a rabid dog and his death was a mercy to both him and the civilised world.

And, they had added in hushed tones, he had hidden all his money for some brave soul to find some day…

Clausen's eyes re-focussed as a shadow darkened the moon above the ship, hiding the stars. Clouds were racing in fast, and into the still water the rain began to fall, ruining the sleek shining surface by pocking it in a thousand places until the whole bay was a mass of churning, chopping water. Clausen looked to his left as the broken masts on the silk-running ship began to creak and splinter. The wind was whipping up, too, blowing in not from the sea but from within the bay from the land.

Clausen's shoulders hunched automatically as the rain intensified. Water hammered the decks, and Clausen swore as the Electra began to swing and buck in the nascent waves. All around in the sea the wrecks surged as the black water slapped at their rotting hulks and pulled at loose boards. The night had been quiet up until now: but now it was alive with the groans of stressed timbers and the smack of wet ropes, along with the constant battering of rain and wind against the sails. The moon was utterly fled, swallowed by black clouds. The lanterns of the Electra, swinging wildly in the wind, cast a sickly yellow glow over the crew as they continued to work at bringing the crates on board.

"Captain!" Clausen yelled as the man stalked past him, rain streaming from his hat. "Shouldn't we return to open water to ride out the storm?" Receiving no immediate reply, he persisted: "Isn't there a danger with so many wrecks around us…and the reef…isn't there a danger of damage to our ship?"

The captain turned and looked at him with pure contempt. "I must be hearing things," he said slowly, "for a moment there I though I heard you telling me how to look after my ship. Or was it 'our' ship, you said?"

Inwardly, Clausen cringed.

"Spare me your advice, lad, and make yourself useful." The captain's form was illuminated starkly from behind by a brief flare of lightning. "Don't think me ungrateful. You've found us a fine treasure and I'll see to it you get your share, same as the others."

Something of the continuing concern on Clausen's face must have registered, because the captain gave him a short smile. "I grant you, the weather's turned very fast, but the Electra is the best of her breed out of Southport and this is no more than a spring breeze to her. We're in no danger." He gestured with a flick of his head towards the rest of the crew, who were still manhandling the crates and lashing them down with ropes. "Now get to work. This isn't a sight-seeing tour."

Half-heartedly, Clausen took up the slack on one of the dripping ropes and began to haul. Years of dock work had left him with hardened hands which didn't feel the sting of the wet rope dragging across them, but it was still miserable labour, with the rain now pounding down so hard every inch of his skin under his clothes was soaked. He was tossing his head back to get the dripping hair out of his eyes, when his attention was caught by movement ahead of him.

Out on the water, one of the larger of the wrecked ships, the third one out behind the one with the listing mast and the silk-running ship that was broken in two, had shifted position in the waves. It had obviously been a grand, expensive ship in its day, possibly even the flagship of a fleet. When the Electra had come questing into the bay at twilight, the massive hulk had been adrift on its side, with the rudder waving at the sky and the ruined sails swirling like seaweed in the currents.

Now, slowly, very slowly, the huge vessel was swinging upright. The masts rose from the water, sails streaming and ripped, as the hull rolled on the waves and lurched alarmingly as it gained equilibrium. Clausen watched, the ropes slack in his hands, as the wreck began to come about, turning impossibly against the wind and moving forward. The torn sail-cloth, heavy with water, snapped loudly in the gale like gunshots.

One of the crew shoved Clausen sharply and he jumped. "If you're not going to pull, get out of the way!"

"Don't you see it?" Clausen demanded, pointing forward. "That ship! It's coming for us…"

The pirate gave a cursory glance and then rolled his eyes. "Gods save us, a half-wit. Sir!" This last to the captain, who had come to see what was delaying the loading of the last few crates, and didn't look at all surprised that it had turned out to be Clausen. "One of the wrecks has come adrift. Best we keep an eye on it." He sneered. "Clausen here thinks it doesn't like the look of us."

"Shut your face," Clausen snarled, hearing with dismay the almost immediate chorus of derision from the crew within listening distance.

"Clausen…Davy Jones himself is coming for yooo-ooou…"

"Look out! It's the Spanish Navy coming to throw us in the cells, Clausen!"

Laughter mingled with the surge and splash of the storm-thrown water.

"Enough," the captain ordered, but Clausen could tell that he too was smiling, amused at the stupid docker-boy who thought he could be a pirate. "Get the cargo safe. Wilson, get forward and let me know if that broken hulk gets within spitting distance."

"Aye, sir."

Clausen found the ropes being firmly taken from his hands, and he let them go, already furious and humiliated by the jibes. "Go and help Wilson," the captain said, low and forceful. "When we next turn into port, you're off my crew."

Rain streamed into Clausen's eyes as he followed the lookout up onto the bridge. He swiped it away angrily, staring out into the bay as the drifting ship advanced, cutting through the roiling water as if it was as calm as a millpond.

"Fine-looking thing, ain't it? Or leastways it was once."

Wilson had always been far less belligerent towards Clausen: he was older than even the captain, and possessed of greater wits than most of the crew. He had already opened a bottle and was drinking from it as he watched the bay ahead of them.

"Yes," Clausen agreed, leaning on the soaking rail. He felt empty. The treasure he'd chased for so long had turned out to be nothing more than a trade ship's graveyard, and he was due to end his adventures in a backwater shipping port, far from home, with whatever meagre portion of the spoils he was given. He stared out through the sheets of rain, blankly, his sodden shoulders slumping. Details on the approaching wreck were beginning to stand out in the occasional flashes of lightning. The figurehead was battered and defaced, but the flag was intact. On black cloth faded and salt-stained the grinning skull and crossed swords stood out plainly as the flag caught the air. Clausen straightened. "Why, it's a pirate ship!"

Wilson sniffed disparagingly. "Was. Was a pirate ship. Who uses that thing anymore? It's outdated."

Clausen watched intently, ignoring the bottle Wilson offered to him, as the pirate wreck drew level with the broken masts rearing out of the water. Surely in a few more moments it would collide, scuttle its already leaking hull on the other ship's remains, and stop…

He watched in disbelief as the pirate ship smoothly turned, steered outwards and around, and passed the sunken wreck with the broken masts without even slowing its pace.

"Tell me you saw that?" he croaked at Wilson.

"Aye, I did," the old pirate said grimly. "We're being duped, lad. That ship's not dead - someone's aboard her, steering her. They've been waiting here all this time, like as not, to catch us off our guard. Clever, I'll grant 'em…but not clever enough. Keep your mouth shut and don't let 'em know we've spotted 'em. I'm away to tell the captain."

He turned and ran from the deck, leaving Clausen staring dumbly at the approaching ship. Closer now, the sheer size and dilapidated condition of the vessel was clear. Holes gaped like mouths in the timbers of the hull, and the gunwales were all broken away, strips of wood still hanging in places like the fangs of some huge animal. The stern looked as if it had been stoved in by the club of a giant, beams crumpled and rotting. With slow grace the ship turned again to draw alongside the silk-runner's craft, and the shabby lettering on the bows stood out plainly for the first time.

Adrian.