He looked up.
A skyline that had been all palmetto now showed jagged with men's heads. There must have been a dozen of them, rising in twos and threes, utterly black against the almost-black of the sky. They came toward Adam.
He drew.
A light showed suddenly. A man had unwrapped a lanthorn, and he held it high, and then Adam could see the fat greasy smiling face of Everard van Bramm.
"Welcome back, Captain."
The pirate ran the tip of a pink tongue lightly over his lower lip. His earrings, rubies and diamonds set in rings, swung on either side of his face.
"We have been waiting for you," he added, "for two nights and two days."
The men edged closer. He could not make out individual faces, nor indeed details of any sort, though he noted that there were muskets among them.
He touched the Book in his pocket.
"May I pray?" he asked.
"By all means pray. Captain."
Adam knelt, facing the men, the dim figures, and placed his sword on the sand before him.
He did not bring out the Book.
He prayed briefly, asking nothing for himself. He asked for Maisie, and for Deborah Selden, and Jethro Gardner, for little Lillian Bingham in London and her mother and father, the proprietors of the Hearth Cricket. He prayed, in fact, for quite a few folks. He said "Amen" aloud, and picked up his sword, and rose.
"Might we have that blade, please. Captain?"
"Why don't you come and get it?" Adam said.
PART TEN. God and How to Get Water
This was where he was to die. He looked around. It was not much of an island—a blip, a blop, a nub of rotten rock and sere sun-scorched grass, merely a brown-and-yellow wart on the blue serene far-stretching surface of the sea.
It was his impulse, when he had waded ashore, to drop to his knees in prayer; but he resisted this, knowing that the men in the boat would take it as a sign of weakness. There was no slight trace of pity in the faces of those men, who, though they were impressed by the dignity of the occasion—for death deliberately dealt out is always dignified, even to such riffraff—remained stern. Captain Long had violated one of their few laws, so he merited their only punishment. He had gone on the account —hadn't Captain van Bramm assured them of this?—and then, immediately afterward, trusted, he had cut out the schooner, which was communal property. He had, that is, deserted. Worse, he had stolen. These men were thieves of the sea, who spent all their days stealing or seeking to steal; but perhaps for this reason they were horrified when one among them stole from the rest. They were infatuated with the notion that there is honor among outlaws.
Van Bramm had seen to it that the warmest of Adam's admirers, Sharpy Boardman and such, were at sea when Adam arrived. They had not been present at the trial, where Adam was heard in silence. Van Bramm's hold on these rascals was none too secure; but just at the moment van Bramm had been dramatically right. That Adam had killed Cark and badly wounded another man, before being brought down at long distance by realtas against which he couldn't possibly fight, told rather for than against him with the Providencers. But the fact that he had declared himself one of the Brethren of the Coast and then had cut out the schooner—this was unforgivable. He had been tried promptly, in a glinting bright dawn, and soon sentenced to be marooned. The pirates for once were efficient. Within a few hours of the time when he had so confidently stepped ashore on Providence he was being shoved aboard a barcolongo which presently put forth for this marine flyspeck of no name.
When he had asked if he couldn't at least retain his sheath knife, they told him no.
"You'd cut your wrists inside two days," they had said. "We want you to last longer than that."
They did allow him, however, to keep his Book. This was tight in a pocket of his coat when in a time of tawny sunset he waded ashore. He scorned to ask for further favors.
He did not wave and didn't even look back. Nobody shouted a goodbye.
Adam walked clear around the island, keeping to the shore. He might as well have crossed the center. It was much the same everywhere—sand and rubble, soft rock, chipped shell fragments, no trees. It was utterly dreary, bleak. The only vegetation was grass, and there was precious little of that. No birds flew overhead.
The island was roughly round and about a quarter-mile across. From almost any part of it you could see any other part. Similarly from almost any part of it, the center being only slightly higher than the shore, you could see if not immediately at least soon the sea in any direction. Nevertheless Adam determined that he would force himself to walk clear around the island like this at least four times each day, conscientiously checking the horizon.
"At least four times," he said aloud.
By the time he came back to where he had started from, the barcolongo was almost out of sight. He got down on his knees.
He prayed for a long time, and it was dark when he rose. He was already thirsty. He tried not to think about this. He made a pillow of his hat, snuggled out a soft sandy spot in which to rest his hip, closed his eyes, and after a while fell asleep.
He was astir before dawn, feeling chill, his clothes clammy. His thirst was urgent, and anything he did, any way he moved, seemed to make it worse. He walked slowly around the island. He had waited until first light in order to do this, but he seldom scanned the sea, which anyway was as bare as a baby's bottom; for the most part he regarded the rocks and sand.
These were sufficiently monotonous. The sand would make a good abrasive—but, to abrade what? The stone was soft, nothing flinty. The whole island indeed had about it a feeling of softness, of chalkiness, a feeling, too, of uncertainty, as though held above the surface by no sure shoring and likely at any moment to collapse, so that when Adam walked it he felt as more than once he'd felt in the boatyard when he walked a rickety structure of sticks, a set of scaffolding designed to endure only for a day. The very breeze, feeble though it was, seemed able to shake this key. The slow-paced wavelets, patient, unimpassioned, appeared to cause it to shiver.
He could find no stone sufficiently hard to give him any hope of using it, together with his belt buckle, to get a spark. The buckle, to be sure, was not steel but brass—it had been given to him by the Binghams of London and had been overlooked by the pirates—but it might be made to serve as steel if only a suitable flint could be found.
But the stuff underfoot might have been breadcrumbs. Cretaceous, it crumpled at a push of the thumb.
It was like this from the beginning. One of the first things he had told himself when dumped ashore—at first inwardly, later aloud—was that he would resolutely refrain from thinking of anything that would cause his heart to ache or even divert his mind from its proper channel. He had made a vow of it: "I'll think only about God and how to get water." Yet here he was already, striving to find not water but fire.
He retired to the middle of the island, where with steady fingernails he unwove part of his shirt, saving the threads in a small hollow box of rocks where they wouldn't blow away. He put a flat stone over this to keep out rain—if there should be any rain. He tore out some of the dry brittle juiceless grass which grew reluctantly here and there, in bunches, and put this, too, into the enclosure, weighting it with stones.
If he did manage to make a spark he wanted to be prepared with tinder.
After that he made another trip around the island, most of the time paddling in the shallows, stooped far over, searching for mussels or cockles or shrimps, finding none.
He scooped up some seaweed and carried this to the center of the island, where he laid it out to dry in the sun. Conceivably it, too, might be used as fuel. He wondered if he could eat it.