Chapter 81: Word Before the Wind
"Right then."
James spoke to the empty cabin as naturally as if someone else sat across from him.
"You still in there?"
I am always here. It isn’t as though I have anywhere else to be.
"Comfortin’ thought."
James leaned back in his chair. "I have a custom order for you."
What, precisely, gave you the impression I accept custom commissions? Was it the centuries of carefully curated inventory? Or are you simply hoping reality will reorganize itself because you asked politely?
A short silence passed.
...Custom work is possible. I simply don’t advertise it. Experience has taught me that encouraging requests like yours is a spectacular mistake.
Once, the voice had explained that rumors could make a man’s name travel a little kinder through places where people already knew him. A little Fate bought a nudge to a reputation that was already beginning to grow on its own.
What James wanted now was something much larger.
He wanted an empty stretch of coast behind a reef, a place with no walls and not even a name yet, to begin living in the minds of men who had never seen it. He wanted them speaking about it in taverns he had never entered, long before anyone ever caught sight of the place itself.
Very well. Since you have elected to make this my problem.
A pause.
The more reality must inconvenience itself on your behalf, the more you pay. I assume that relationship would be self-evident.
Silence.
A whisper confined to a single tavern is inexpensive. Convincing four ports, several hundred drunkards, and eventually the specific people you actually want to hear it... costs rather more. Reality, unlike you, objects to unnecessary work.
"Aye, then put word out about the place."
James leaned back a little farther, already liking the sound of it. "Let the Caribbean start talkin’ about a free harbor in Andros island before there’s a soul livin’ there to prove anybody wrong."
In this world, word traveled slower than a ship, but it reached farther than any single vessel ever could. Stories could pass from one tavern to another until they crossed whole seas.
A sailor heard something in Nassau, repeated it drunk in Port Royal two weeks later, and before long some half-starved deserter was hearing the tale in Charleston.
By then the place had gained three extra coves, and the captain who founded it had somehow grown twice as fearsome.
That was how Nassau had earned her own reputation, one drunken story at a time, long before Hornigold ever bothered putting rules to paper. Tortuga had done the same a generation earlier, and old sailors still spoke of her the way men remembered the woman who had broken their hearts in youth.
James intended to use the same trick.
He wanted his story reaching exactly the sort of men who would answer it. Deserters tired of the lash, escaped slaves with neither papers nor patience, pirates weary of watching Hornigold and Jennings circle each other like dogs fighting over some bone, looking for somewhere new where they could raise a flag of their own.
A fascinating proposal. You would like me to convince the Caribbean that your glorious free republic exists before you’ve managed to build so much as a shed.
Another pause.
And when the first poor fool arrives expecting civilization instead of finding you ankle-deep in mud arguing about lumber, whose fault do you imagine that becomes?
James grinned, "By the time some bloody bastard hears the story three islands over, works up the nerve to desert, and spends however many weeks sailin’ till he finds Andros at all, we’ll have walls standin’ and a dock worth tyin’ to."
James spread his hands.
"Word’s always slower than the doin’, provided a man’s quick enough."
Normally, a place like this needed years before anyone thought its name worth repeating, Nassau certainly had. James had no interest in waiting that long, and he had the means to hurry things along.
Your reasoning is considerably more sound than I expected. That disturbs me more than if you had simply stumbled into the correct answer by accident.
James smiled despite himself.
Sixty Fate.
"Aye. Done."
He didn’t hesitate.
Sixty Fate deducted. Balance: thirty-five. Do try not to drink the remainder before you discover a better use for it.
James waited.
For a moment, he half expected a parcel to appear on the table while he wasn’t looking.
Nothing.
Only his charts and a candle burning low.
"That’s it?"
He looked beside the door, then beneath the bunk, checking every corner where a package might have appeared.
"Nothin’ for me to hold? No parcel, no letter, not even a medal to show for sixty Fate?"
I was hoping that was sarcasm.
The silence lingered for a heartbeat.
Somewhere tonight, inside a tavern you will never enter, a man whose name you will never know is about to begin telling a story about a place he will never see. There is nothing here for you to hold. That absence is the entire point.
James laughed silently and let the matter rest.
He crossed to the basin in the corner and washed the salt and dust from his face with water that had gone lukewarm hours ago. Then he picked up the small blade he used for the task and trimmed his beard into something respectable enough that a captain could wear without embarrassing the crew that had only recently signed aboard under him.
Those men didn’t need to be convinced anymore.
Cudjoe. Whitlock and Crick, still finding their sea legs aboard the Fortune. Mary Read, unpacking her gear there for the first time tonight. Bonnet, who still had to earn the title of captain from his own crew. Anne, finishing her final shift behind the Rat’s bar before claiming her place aboard in the morning.
Every one of them was already sailing toward the future James meant to build, whether they understood it yet or not.
This rumor was meant for men much farther away. The ones who had never heard the name. The ones some drunken sailor would convince that there was still a place left in the world that hadn’t already chosen a king to obey.
James caught his reflection in the basin, the water throwing back a face hidden by shadow. He looked more pleased with himself than the moment probably deserved.
"Bought myself a legend," he muttered. "Before I’ve even built the first wall to hang it on."