Free Pirates of the Timestream by Steve White Page B

need to be cleared, degrubbed and dewormed even before the planting. At first, most of that work was done by white indentured servants or ‘buckras.’ These men lived a hellish life—packed into tiny shacks, subject to beatings and floggings for any reason or no reason—which between a third and a half of them did not survive. But at least in their case there was light at the end of the tunnel. Indentured servitude was for a fixed term, typically seven years. Slavery was forever. And by this time, the indentured servants are starting to be replaced by the African slaves who will form the basis of the future population. In just a few years, Jamaica will be importing fifteen hundred of them annually.”
    As they watched, one of the slaves stumbled and fell, dragging down the nearby ones to whom he was roped. One of the guards sprang forward and brought his whip down across a back already crisscrossed with welts and running with pus. The slave gasped with pain and staggered desperately to his feet to avoid more blows. The line resumed shuffling forward.
    Jason watched Boyer closely. They had all been warned to expect this, and cautioned that they must react—or appear to react—with the same indifference any other seventeenth-century pirates would have displayed. But such instructions were sometimes very difficult to follow. A mission leader always had to be alert to the possibility that emotions might grow too intense for some people when they came face to face with the various horrors of the human past, and stand ready to take whatever preventative action was necessary. But Boyer’s dark face remained carefully expressionless.
    “It’s easy to understand why slaves and indentured servants often ran away and became pirates,” Mondrago commented. “The planters must have just loved that!”
    “They were always complaining about it,” Grenfell nodded. “But not very loudly, even though they technically had the law on their side. They could never forget that the buccaneers were the only defense they had against the Spaniards. And besides, any slave-catcher who came aboard a pirate ship demanding the return of a runaway would have been pitched over the side to feed the sharks.”
    “Good enough for him,” Da Cunha opined coldly.
    “But a rotten thing to do to the sharks,” Mondrago added. Boyer continued to maintain a silence that Jason thought might be a little too tightly controlled.
    Nesbit rejoined them, wiping his chin, his complexion pale green. Jason motioned them onward, past the slave ship and its cargo of misery. They had gone a short way before a commotion—noisy even by the raucous standards of Port Royal—erupted from an alley to the left, a short distance ahead of them.
    A figure came running from the alley into the dockside area, with four men in pursuit.
    She was female but clearly no whore, and black but clearly no slave, for she wore garments similar to their own and had a brace of pistols thrust through her rope belt. Jason barely took all this in, so stunning was her appearance.
    She was tall even for Jason’s era, which made her towering for this one, and her body was that of a warrior goddess: slim-waisted, full-breasted and leanly muscular. She was ebon-dark, but her features suggested mixed race, for her lips were full without being thick and her nose had a narrow and slightly curved bridge, although the nostrils flared. It was a striking face, and one of the most beautiful Jason had ever seen.
    One of her pursuers sprinted ahead of the other three and was almost within reach of her. With a motion of almost invisible quickness she turned toward him, whipped off the broad-brimmed, feather-plumed hat that crowned her tightly curled black hair, and sent it spinning into the man’s face. It threw him off his stride, and as he tried to regain his balance her booted left foot shot out in a powerful kick that caught him between the legs. With a whistling shriek, he doubled over.
    “What a