Nightbred by Lynn Viehl Page A

and challenge the first warrior who looked askance at him, and beat him into the dirt, but that would solve nothing.
    Jamys wanted to ask her whether she still had feelings for him, or if he had been completely mistaken in his suspicions. But his fear of her answer was far greater than his desire to know.
    He had only one chance to win her, and that was to become a man Christian could admire as well as love. He would do that by finding the gems, delivering them to Richard, and securing rule of Ireland.
    Once he retrieved his laptop from his traveling case and set it up on the desk, he switched it on and accessed the Internet. His initial search for information on the
Golden Horde
produced more than eight million references, most of which had nothing to do with seventeenth-century pirates. He recalled the scant information from the high lord’s summons, and refined the search to include the keywords
Jamaica
,
emeralds
, and
lost treasures
. That narrowed the results to one hundred thousand, among which he found the Web site of Professor Charles Gifford, a salvage specialist turned piracy historian who had spent much of his career searching the waters between Jamaica and Florida for the wreck of the
Golden Horde
. The site, decorated as it was by images of skulls and old coins, offered a surprising amount of information about seventeenth-century piracy around the Caribbean, including an entire section on the island of Jamaica.
    Jamys skimmed through it until he found the first mention of the
Golden Horde
:
    Port Royal authorities, dockworkers, and islanders recorded sightings of the infamous pirate ship, which all accounts describe as sporting black sails, a skeletal-looking crew dressed in rags, and strange red lights glowing on deck. According to the final entry in the port master’s log, the ship circled the island several times but never came into port, nor did the crew ever come ashore.
    This record is contradicted by the journal of Father Bernard Bartley, whose mission in Runaway Bay provided sanctuary for reformed pirates, most of whom had been sailors captured during raids and forced into the life. At the time the Horde was sighted on the north side of the island, Bartley wrote this after finding a half-dead man washed ashore near his mission:
    “He had been brutally treated, and expecting his demise, I offered him absolution, so that he might go before God with the grace of his sins forgiven. The castaway refused, insisting that Hell would be nothing to his life. He claimed he had brought ashore his master, the captain of his ship, who had him steal the jewels from a relic buried in the sand; jewels that had been used by the first mate to transform his captain into a monster. As the fever took the castaway’s wits, he began to rave about this transformation, during which his master had died and then come alive again to drink the blood of the crew. That night, an hour before he died, the castaway cursed his master, this Captain Hollander, that he might never know port again.”
    Few facts are known about the captain of the Golden Horde, whom some records name as Frederick Hollander. The most popular myth associated with this captain was a bargain he struck with the devil to trade his soul for eternal life. As you might expect, there was a catch, as the legend claims that Satan (or perhaps the curse of the much-abused castaway) doomed Hollander and his crew to sail the seas in darkness forever. Several eyewitnesses supported the myth, and insisted that as soon as the sun rose above the horizon, the Horde would simply vanish into thin air. . . .
    Jamys copied the information and stored it in a file before he returned to the Web site’s front page. One of the coin images, a Spanish gold piece sporting a cross similar to the Templars’ martyrdom cross, looked vaguely familiar to him. When he couldn’t place it, he returned to the search results.
    Another Web site devoted to salvage diving and recovery maintained an