Wolves Read online

  Wolves:

  Raised By Wolves

  Volume Four

  By

  W.A. Hoffman

  Smashwords Edition

  Published December 2012

  Alien Perspective, LLC

  Copyright 2010 W.A.Hoffman

  Raised By Wolves series

  Brethren

  Matelots

  Treasure

  Wolves

  All four novels are available in trade paperback editions.

  For additional information please see

  W.A. Hoffman’s Smashwords page and

  AlienPerspective.com

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other readers. If you wish to share this book, please purchase additional copies. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use, then please return to Smashwords, or an appropriate retailer for your reading device, and purchase your copy.

  The author reserves all rights to this work granted by United States copyright law and applicable international copyright law. No part of this book may be altered or excerpted without the express permission of the author, except for brief excerpts used solely for the purposes of publicity or review.

  This book is a work of fiction written for the purposes of entertainment. Though some personages mentioned herein were actual people, their personification in this story is purely of the author’s fabrication and not meant to reflect upon the original individuals. Readers interested in separating relative truth from fiction in regard to the historical people, events, or social structures portrayed in this novel are invited to read the resource material listed in the bibliography and make their own determinations.

  Dedication

  This book and its brothers have been labors of love and faith, made possible by the following people. I dearly wish to thank:

  My husband, John, for being my matelot through thick and thin, artistic despair and ecstasy, and for richer or poorer. Thank you for loving me. I could not do it without you.

  Barb, my editor and bestest writing buddy ever, for her unflagging optimism and encouragement, loving critiques, and eagle eye. Thank you for helping me look good.

  My mother, for teaching me how to dream and always reach for what I want. My brother, for being my biggest fan. My sister, for her love and support. My father, for teaching me to think and judge for myself. I am very grateful I was not raised by, or with, wolves or sheep.

  My alpha and beta readers for their faith and enthusiasm: for reading every revision I threw at them and still continuing to give me feedback. And all the people who have read my work, either this piece or others, and offered their support and encouragement. Thank you all.

  And, of course, to the Gods. Without You, nothing. I give special thanks to Venus, invincible Goddess of Love and Beauty. Every book is a temple, for You did not make me a stone mason.

  Eighty-Three

  Wherein We Return to Peril

  “It is wholly within the fickle nature of the Gods that we will arrive and find nothing untoward has occurred in our absence, and my father has sent a letter of apology,” I said with some amusement as we raced the sun to reach Port Royal. I reckoned the date to be somewhere in the last week of May, 1669. We had been gone nearly six months.

  “Our people will not be happy with what we have learned or planned, even if nothing has occurred,” Gaston said and rolled onto his back.

  As I was on my belly, watching what I could see of our wake beyond the cabin windows, his movement pulled me closer to him in our hammock and twisted my spine, compelling me to move. I turned toward him and found a more comfortable position, bracing my knee against his hip to keep from slowly rolling atop him.

  Despite its sagging, and its often inconvenient proximity to the ceiling, I was pleased we still had Pete and Striker’s hammock. Even though Striker had long since healed and could once again use what was now our nest, they had chosen to remain on our old mattress on the cabin floor. I had not wished to question them on it, as discussion of the matter might induce them to change their minds. For all its faults, no one stepped on this bed, and with a blanket stretched across the netting, it afforded us a great deal of privacy. Of course, upon waking, we always had to peer over the edge to see who else occupied the cabin before we began to speak or tryst.

  I realized with dismay that in light of our plans, we would not have this cozy nest for the next leg of our travels: the women and children would need to be housed somewhere for the voyage to Tortuga, and it would likely be this cabin: there was none other on the Virgin Queen.

  Though I had spent nights worrying about their safety in our absence, and knew for the good of all they must leave Port Royal, I was not anticipating their joining us with any relish. These last months roving against the Spanish had been peaceful—in a manner of speaking—in comparison to our last weeks in our home port amongst women, children, and the trappings of civilization. That had ever been the way of it for us in these West Indies. Going to war against and amongst men, though it involved much violence and peril, was far safer in regards to the comfort and well-being of our hearts and souls than living within the bounds of society with all its rules and expectations.

  At least we were alone for this moment in the final hour of our approach. I savored it. All others were on deck peering at the coastline of Jamaica as it drifted by to starboard. We had already reached the peninsula known as the Palisadoes—where Port Royal squatted on the tip—and, according to the Bard, our Master of Sail, we would make port by nightfall. After roving for half the year, most of our men foolishly wished to disembark and spend some, if not all, of the hefty sum we had stolen from the Spanish at Maracaibo and Gibraltar. To them, Port Royal was home, and they feared nothing awaiting them there but the occasional lurking unpaid debt and the ever-present specter of drunken boredom haunting them until they could rove again.

  Our cabal had far larger concerns. We were sailing into a port full of enemies, where we had left a number of loved ones and cherished friends. That our roving had proven necessary to flush out our assassins, or that we had not known the full extent of the intrigues marshaled against us until after we sailed, would do little to assuage our guilt if any ill had befallen our people. It had weighed heavy on us these last weeks, as we repaired the storm damage to our ship and sailed home.

  I could see it wearing on my matelot even now, as he lay staring at the ceiling with a concerned frown. I ran a finger down his high, intelligent forehead, finely-wrought brow, straight nose, lips that were neither too full nor too thin, and strong, handsome chin. He turned his head to face me, and emerald eyes met my gaze.

  “We should trim your hair,” he muttered, and ran his fingers through the straw upon my scalp.

  His red hair was over a finger’s-width long as well; and it stood on end, pointing every which way, as it was ever wont to do. And three or four days—I could not remember when last we shaved—of stubble adorned our jaws: his as red as that on his head, mine golden brown.

  “What aspect of the matter are you pondering with such concern?” I asked.

  He sighed and returned his gaze to the ceiling boards. “Death. Even if your father and the governor have done nothing, little Jamaica could still have died.”

  I suppressed a sigh as I considered the possible death of our poor pickled child: the sickly infant I had claimed, though she held no relation to either of us. She was the get of her drunken mother, my wife, by way of some unknown buccaneer.

  “I wonder if Vivian has returned to the rum, or whether she has remained sober under Mistress Theodore’s watchful eye,” I sighed.

  So much could have occurred in our absence, even without the tribulations unearthed and stirred to li
fe during our most recent stay there. Despite our loved ones being seasoned to the tropics and practicing measures purported—by my matelot and not some damn-fool English physician—to increase their health, they could still have contracted any number of ailments and died. And if not some tropical malaise, the Spanish might have swept in, raided our port and hauled them off to the dungeons of the Inquisition on Cuba, as they had once done to the families of Tortuga’s buccaneers. But I doubted such events had befallen our people: if the Gods wished to ladle trouble upon people unfortunate enough to be connected with us in the skeins of the Fates, there were more than enough trials available without the Gods stooping to pedestrian forms of calamity such as war and pestilence.

  The last six weeks we spent in Port Royal had been quite tumultuous. It was the longest I had spent in the place in the two and a half years I had been in the West Indies; I had likely spent longer in the assorted Spanish towns we had raided. Our brief stays in our purported home port were always rife with excitement and stirred up changes in the lives of those we knew. Whenever we arrived, they usually seemed to be fairly calm; and then the storm that seemed to be ever in our wake would strike, and all would be forced to scurry about and make the best of it until we left again. I fancied they settled back into their usual calm, daily regimens in the peace of our absence.

  Yet was that hubris born from my only seeing what was before me and not knowing truly what occurred when we were not present? I should not be such a fool as to think their lives revolved around us, as if we and our problems were the sun. Or was it hubris because we were not the true cause of the turmoil? Was not my father responsible? Had he not ever been the catalyst for our change? The roiling clamor of our visits was always predicated by some announcement of his: him sending me to Jamaica: his demand that I marry: his sending a bride: and in this last visit, our discovering that he had put a price on Gaston’s and Striker’s heads and colluded with the governor to see that I did his bidding and put the drunken wife out.

  Gaston was regarding me with curiosity, and I gathered my thoughts were apparent.

  “I am wondering if they would be better off without us—me,” I said and shrugged. “This is surely not your fault. I weave your being with mine in every thought, because I so truly feel we are one now, but…”

  He grinned and rolled to face me. “We are one.”

  I did not seek to gainsay him, even in my heart. We were so truly entwined now that all arguments concerning our being separate entities in the face of the matters at hand were moot. The Gods knew I would not exist without him. And I knew—though it made my heart yet swell with emotion I was at a loss to express—that he believed the same of me.

  I found myself frowning with a new thought. “We are better men for having troubled one another, are we not?”

  He frowned and nodded. “Do you doubt it?”

  “Non, non, I am profoundly moved by how little I doubt it. Non, I am thinking of the others: the lives we have troubled for which we do not have… perhaps, the balm of love—such as we share—to ease the rub and irritation of our presence.”

  He chuckled. “You wonder why they tolerate us?”

  I grinned. “Oui.”

  “Perhaps we do share the balm of love with them,” he said thoughtfully. “I too, find it difficult to believe, yet… How often have you told me I am worthy of love? And are you not the same? They choose to stand by us. Perhaps we should not question such beneficence on the part of any person or divinity.”

  “It is my nature to question,” I sighed. It would likely be my undoing. I imagined that if I could have learned to just sit in the cave and be happy with the shadows of truth upon the wall like everyone was supposed to do, I would be a happier man; but nay, I was ever yearning to turn my head and see the light at the cave mouth, even when I was too young to know of Plato or his allegories.

  Gaston nodded as if I had made some sage pronouncement. “You would not be you if you did not.” He frowned. “Do you worry that they will have a change of heart? Or do you worry that we have doomed them?”

  I frowned at his choice of the word doom. “Is that what you worry we have done?”

  He sighed. “Sometimes.”

  “Do you feel this will end in ruin for all?” I asked.

  He shook his head quickly. “Not for all. Some will escape unscathed, but… Surely there will be tragedy.” He sighed and looked away. “There has already been tragedy.”

  I knew he meant Christine. We did not speak of her, but I knew he still carried the guilt deep in his heart.

  Despite his once saying that he could have escaped her attempts at seduction and not succumb to his madness and raped her, I did not blame him. Nor had I ever blamed him for his sister’s death; or would I ever blame him for any act he committed while mad. Whether he had knowingly willed himself into, or allowed himself to succumb to, that madness was immaterial to me: his doing such things, his seeking it, was merely another form his madness took, was it not? Or, as I had decided when last we were in Port Royal and insanity seemed on the breath of everyone we met, were we the sane ones and all the rest of the world mad? In which case, the supposedly horrible things he had done under the auspices of his madness—loving his sister and then ending her suffering by her request; and doing as Christine had bid, though poorly and cruelly—were actions of truth shorn of all the pretty lies and shadows of the cave. His sister had ceased to suffer. Christine had undoubtedly been cured of her sudden resolve to abandon her dreams and settle down and marry.

  I truly doubted she would ever thank him for this, though.

  “Is not a good tragedy one in which all the characters suffer for their sins?” I asked.

  He snorted. “Who says this is a good tragedy? It could be a poor one, suitable only for street players and the common mob.”

  I laughed. “I pray the Gods do not trouble us so only to cast us as pearls before swine.”

  Gaston grinned and kissed me, showing me with his tongue and hands, and eventually his cock, how very beautiful a pearl he thought me to be. Except for a brief glimpse to show myself what I knew I should not think of, I cast all thoughts of women and babes and my father aside, and twined and strained with my love in storming the gates of Heaven in what were surely our final moments of privacy. I soon did not have to try to forget all else, as he wrung every other thought from my mind, casting me into a cistern of pleasure to fill myself with him and love so that he could wring even that from me and leave me lying like a well-washed rag upon the hammock: thoughtless, warm, and sated beyond measure.

  Our post-coital cuddling was ended by Striker and Pete entering the cabin, tussling as they often did before they trysted. They were followed by guffaws from some of the men and a comment or two about them getting theirs before going back to the missus.

  Dickey dove into the room behind them with a shouted, “Let me get the charts before you get to it.”

  Their feigned humor fled as the door closed. Gaston and I exchanged one last private look and a sweet kiss before dropping down from our hammock to meet serious gazes in the small space. Dickey’s fine features were tight with excitement, such that one might think he was accompanying us. As he rarely went ashore since becoming the Bard’s matelot, I supposed his participation in the intrigue necessary to enable our evening’s little adventure had been quite entertaining for him. Striker appeared somber, his dark eyes black and unreadable, though the set of his strong jaw said much. Pete’s blue eyes were filled with mischief and none of the ancient wisdom that often made me liken him to a golden god of old: though leaning as he was with his arms raised upon a ceiling beam, and thus displaying the handsome musculature of his chest beneath his bronzed skin in the lamplight, I thought he looked to be a sculpture of something more than a mere mortal man.

  “YaBeReady?” Pete asked with a teasing grin.

  “I still say this is foolishness,” Striker said.

  “We have had this argument,” I chided with a smile. “We do not k
now what we face here, and so it is best we do not make ourselves available to be detained, or have the ship seized upon anchoring in the Hole.”

  “An’WeSurprise’Em!” Pete added with a clap of his matelot’s shoulder. “’LessYaThinkYaCan’t.”

  Striker made a disparaging noise. “I can swim with one arm.” He raised and lowered what remained of his right arm in emphasis, and I could well imagine him awarding his matelot his middle finger as he once had.

  Striker had proven he could swim when we careened. He had actually proven that losing his right arm at the elbow was not an impediment to his doing many things, and even taken to practicing writing with charcoal upon the deck with his left. I supposed that if one always thought he might lose a limb in his endeavors—as apparently Striker had always assumed, as he came from a long line of pirates and seamen—one could accept it readily enough and learn to make do.

  “Well, we should be drawing abreast of the Palisadoes wall soon,” Dickey said, and went to stick his head out the window. “This is as close as we dare pass, and Francis has slowed us somewhat, but if we slow much more, the men will wonder at it.”

  “All right,” I said grimly as I peered out the window. The shore sliding along to starboard seemed very far away when I considered that I must traverse the distance; but I knew I had swum farther on many occasions.

  “The Bard and Cudro are feigning speaking of the matter now,” Dickey said, “and when I leave the cabin, Cudro will step away from him and address the men, telling them that we will not anchor in the Chocolata Hole tonight because the sun has set and we do not wish to haggle with the governor’s men on matters of what they might tax until the morrow. Then he will arrange for the men that wish it to go ashore on the boats.”