Cinnamon and Gunpowder

by Eli Brown

  The planks of the ship, though, were radiantly warm, and I pooled there like soft cheese.

  8

  THE DREAMER

  In which I am entertained by the King of Thieves

  Half a dozen lascars were above me, wearing thin cotton shirts embroidered at the bottom and the cuff with a scrolling stitch. They offered a canteen, the contents of which unfurled like tender shoots down my throat. When my stomach gripped the panch with an angry fist and threw it up, the smiling men gave me more.

  Between swallows, I coughed my thanks.

  “Where do you come from?” someone asked.

  “Escaped from the Flying Rose.”

  At this I was lifted to my feet and dragged to an aft cabin, where figures sat before a table full of maps and charts. The forward wall was made of tarpaulin and had been lifted and tied to make a wide awning. My sunburned eyes seemed unable to adjust to the dim light beneath, but I knelt before the figures and offered my thanks. “Infinite gratitude,” I said, “a thousand blessings for rescuing—”

  As I began to make them out, my joy broke like a yolk forked. These were no fishermen. There were three of them, and each was more upsetting than the last.

  The first was a figure so horribly burned that it took courage to look at him. This man’s head was a tangled knob of scars. His ears, lips, and nose were gone, leaving him with a perpetual graveyard grin. He held a small brass bell and was seated on a crate watching over two figures seated back-to-back in quiet meditation. This ghoul put one finger over his bared teeth and hissed.

  On the left was a woman whose obsidian hair cascaded over her silk wrappings into her lap. Her bare arms were festooned with bangles, and about her neck was slung a dagger in a filigreed scabbard. Her hands were the cleanest things I’d seen in weeks. Her spectacles sat primly on the end of her nose, and she did not even twitch at the bustle around her.

  Her companion, though, was most upsetting. A handsome young man wearing a calfskin vest and a thick belt crowded with compartments, no doubt powder and shot for the pistol he scratched his knee with as we approached. He opened one eye to peer at us, and I recognized that stare.

  “Captain,” said the lascar holding me. “We have a guest.”

  “I heard the calls. We’re meditating,” grumbled the captain, and closed his eyes again. His oiled hair was thick and copper hued; when he spoke, it shifted with its own weight like wheat ready for harvest.

  “But he says he’s from the Flying Rose.”

  The captain leaped to his feet, clearly relieved to be able to arch his back, and peered at me with glee. The ghoul rang the bell and the woman rose with a scowl. “That was hardly an hour,” she said, “and you fidgeted the whole time.”

  “Don’t nag, Kittur,” said the captain. “We have company! So that was the Rose we spied. That is too close for comfort.” He lifted his voice to his crew: “Give a wide passage! She’ll come about if she sees us.”

  I gawked, sure my sea-pickled brain was playing tricks. He had her gracious lips, her cheekbones, her hair. “Welcome to the other side,” he said, and by his voice, by the freckles splashed across his nose, this was Mabbot’s kin.

  “What is this?” I begged, for I feared my troubles were far from over.

  “Just leaped overboard, did you?” He laughed. “I understand, believe me, but at least I waited until we were ashore before I gave her the slip.” His entourage chuckled. “Do you have a raga for the man, Kittur? Poor walrus looks half-dead.”

  At this the woman produced a stringed instrument, vaguely resembling a guitar, and the music that arose from it only increased my dizziness. I was not altogether sure I was awake.

  The woman’s henna-embroidered feet, the ghoul’s angry welts, the mesmerizing sounds, these were spectacle enough, but it was the color of the young man’s hair that made me stare.

  “You’re the Brass Fox,” I blurted.

  “But who are you, friend?”

  “Owen Wedgwood. Ramsey’s cook. Mabbot captured me when she killed him.”

  The dream music stopped and the ship went quiet. The other two watched the Fox, holding their breath, as he bent over me with a scowl.

  “Did you say killed? She killed him?”

  As I rushed to explain the events that had culminated in my capture, the Fox aimed the pistol at my eye. When I stopped in terror, he cracked the barrel against my forehead and shouted, “Speak!”

  I blurted everything I could recall of the scene, even the fishes that attended the boat that carried me to the Flying Rose. Here the Fox interrupted me again.

  “Too soon!” he yelled, and, with the slightest declination of his pistol, fired past my head and struck an albatross from the lines of the jib sails. As I covered my ringing ear, the bird fell and flopped about on the deck.

  The ghoul spoke with a lipless sibilance. “Saves us the trouble, though.”

  “But too soon,” the Fox growled. “The vultures will be circling. Shut up and let me think.”

  “Got to make it happen now. No time to go to the Congo.”

  “Gristle, shut your hole!” roared the Fox.

  Kittur, setting her instrument aside, stepped past me and wrapped her arms around the Fox from behind. After a moment he softened against her.

  “Gristle is right,” she whispered. “We will enlist Africa when the time comes … if we have to. For now we head back to Macau and ready ourselves. It’s time to send Mabbot a message.”

  “We rescue Braga first.”

  “Braga must wait,” Kittur said.

  “Mabbot has Braga,” I blurted, hoping that if I showed no allegiance to her, they would think twice about killing me. I told them about the prison break and the strange bearded man Mabbot took aboard there. “He mentioned something about tunnels in China.”

  The Fox kneaded his forehead with his fists. “Damn all. What exactly did he say?”

  “Only that they’re near the Pearl River,” I said.

  “Nothing more? Nothing about what is in them?”

  “Braga is loyal,” said Kittur.

  “Braga was loyal before I left him on the penal island. Things tend to go moldy in damp cells.”

  “All the more reason to move quickly,” whispered Kittur. She pushed the Fox back to a stool, and he sat dejectedly.

  “Shall we bring her about?” asked Gristle.

  “Aye,” grumbled the Fox. “But well to the west, and two men atop with an eye for the Rose. She’ll spot us if we aren’t careful.”

  As Gristle shouted orders and the schooner banked, I felt the Fox’s eyes coming to rest on me again.

  “A pet of Mother’s—perhaps you’ll carry the message for us?”

  “You must deliver me straightaway to the nearest civilized port,” I demanded.

  “But you’ve only just joined us. Give us a sporting chance.”

  “God help me, I’ve heard that before.”

  It was then that I made out a figure lashed to the fore rails. My sunburned eyes had mistaken him for a bundle of oilcloth, but he was wearing the uniform of the guards from the penal island. His face was blistered from the sun, and his mouth was gagged with rope. I would have thought him dead except that his eyes were burning into me, begging for help.

  Kittur and the Fox conferred in whispers. I took this time to assess my straits. I was out of the water but by no means saved. In my exhausted state, I’m ashamed to admit, I could not even imagine coming to the prisoner’s aid. I was only steps from his fate, and my chief concern, it seemed to me, was to keep from being lashed to the bowsprit myself. But how to be of value to these brigands?

  The Fox turned his attention to me, and, like a simpleton, I croaked, “I’m valuable!”

  “Are you?”

  “I can cook.”

  “And I can whistle ‘Farewell Winsome Maiden’ with my arse, can’t I, Kittur?” asked the Fox.

  To her credit, the woman ignored him and handed me a flask containing water, simple water cut only with lime
juice—sweet nectar!

  “Did you actually see Ramsey die?” the Fox was asking.

  Wiping my mouth, I responded, “With my own eyes, I saw her do it.”

  The blood returned to his cheeks. Even in temper he was Mabbot’s child. “To have seen that—I’m envious, I am. Who are you to have witnessed … but too soon!”

  His eyes darted around the deck; perhaps he was shifting schemes of great weight in his head, or maybe he was only looking for another bird to shoot. I had a moment to take in the charts that festooned the walls of the cabin behind him.

  The table was littered with logs and maps weighted in place with knives and a tackle block. Behind it were crates stuffed with books and scrolled parchment, their edges tattered and stained. If Mabbot’s library had been stowed in a hurry, then nested in by a family of large rodents, it might have looked like this. It was the office of a madman, a shabby Napoleon bent on taking the world by alley and basement door. Our new course brought the wind into the space, and Kittur began to roll and stow logs. She was putting books in their place so swiftly that it was clear that this hasty library was hers as much as the Fox’s.

  “We have this in common.” The Fox knelt before me, examining my face. The man was wearing a cologne of crushed sage and turpentine oil. “Both kidnapped from my father’s house.”

  “Ramsey, your father?” I choked on my disbelief. “It’s known he had no heirs, and besides, you’re the spitting image of Mabbot.”

  “No heirs but one.” Here the Fox gripped my cheeks with both hands and wrung them as if to get whey. “He has plastered over my rightful place with lies.” When I yelped, he let go and straightened his vest. “But we are prepared to correct that.” He sighed. “The time has finally come! A flock of barristers won’t stand against the argument I’ll give them. In the end they’ll see my way is easiest.”

  The man’s features danced like shadows—now enraged, now bemused. This was a turbulent heart, and the welts on my cheeks told me that he had left a good portion of his sanity on some barnacled pier long ago.

  “Is he really dead?” He tugged at his hair in wonderment. Kittur, obviously concerned by his pacing, took his arm gently and led him to sit again.

  “The doll,” I gasped. “The soldier with the tin sword. It was yours. I found it hidden in the woodshed.”

  “Did you?” The Fox draped his arm over Kittur, who watched him with concern. “I loved that toy more than a child should. Isn’t it strange that you may be the only person in the world who remembers it, and I fished you out of the drink a thousand miles from England. What are the chances, pet?” He bowed his head until their brows touched.

  She said, “There are no coincidences, premi. He is you. You are he.”

  “Was Ramsey still alone in that rambling palace?” he asked. “So crammed with furniture and yet so empty!”

  Kittur stroked the instrument with her slender fingers and sang to her mate: “Here sits the son of warring titans.”

  Looking at me with unsettling interest, the Fox said, “You may be right, kitten, we’re the same, this cook and I. What a strange thing to have in common with a man! Both snatched by Mother from Father’s house. In my case, Mother’s men threw me into a sack and carried me away screaming. Of course, you were too big for the sack, Owen? Ah, good, I pissed all over that sack.”

  “But you don’t mourn Lord Ramsey’s death?” I asked.

  “Father would have drowned me in the lake for looking like her if I wasn’t such a valuable hostage. Mother at least took an interest in me. Taught me to slit a throat. Each parent told me that the other was a monster. And they both told the truth. And here I am, child of monsters.”

  “Child of truths,” purred Kittur. The Fox smiled so sweetly then that I felt this whole thing might be one long practical joke—the drunken sound of the strings and this man’s rude intimacy.

  “Be careful, Owen,” said the Fox, “if you listen to Kittur, she’ll convince you that the entire world is being dreamed by a sleeping god: you, me, Mother, Gristle, even poor dead Father, all just motes in a single mind. What she won’t tell me, though, is which of us are the figments, and which one the dreamer.”

  Kittur clucked disapprovingly.

  “I have a hunch who it is,” said the Fox with a wink.

  “What is to become of me?” I asked.

  “You mean when I wake up?”

  “I mean, sir, which port will you be taking me to? How shall I get home?”

  “Home? Kittur, the man wants to go home! Haven’t you been listening? Once Mother liberates us, we never go home again—never sleep under that embroidered canopy, never hear the clattering silver platters of almond biscuits with quince jelly coming down the hall, never hide again between the legs of the topiary elephants. But, then”—he leaned close and, with a firm knuckle, lifted my chin toward the glare—“what a canopy is this sky! After this, how could we go back to those suffocating halls? So we are torn, you and I! The mind is its own place, Owen. Make a heaven of hell, that is the trick. One doesn’t do battle with gods until one is a god himself. Napoleon’s mistake was to crown himself emperor. He should have crowned himself chief shareholder. We would all be working for him now.”

  “I have nothing to do with your feud. Please be honorable and set me to port somewhere—”

  “Oh, I’m afraid not. You’ll get a message to Mother for me. I need her help.”

  “I am not some pawn to be passed back and forth!”

  “We have that in common too. Don’t worry, it builds character. Speaking of Mother,” he said, “what exactly is her course?”

  “After you. That’s all I know. To China, it seems.”

  “Not quite so far as that, no.”

  I found myself longing for the carmine balustrades and gilt trim of the Rose. True, Mabbot’s ship was a prison to me, and fraught with its own dangers, but the son’s ranting frightened me more than the mother’s acid bon mots.

  “We’ve had our differences, but I cannot manage this next part without her. You will tell her that. Remember my face. She must believe it was really me you’ve met today. You will tell her everything, won’t you?”

  I found myself nodding.

  The Fox then whispered something to Kittur, kissed her, and went to the fore to peer east with a spyglass. She tossed me a small apple, which I ate in two bites. It was gone before I knew it and tasted better than anything I had ever put in my mouth. I was suddenly very tired. The instrument was again in her hands, and she began to play a song that sounded like the bombinating of a thousand bees.

  Her voice was so lush that she seemed to be singing. “He’s a great man. Did you see it in the eyes of the ship hands? They adore him.” Her spectacles glinted in the sun.

  “Madam, I assure you, I care not. I wish only to be returned to my life.”

  “Men who long for the past are already dead. Look to the future, Owen.”

  It was then that the lookouts called, “Sail ho!”

  Leaning from the shade of the canvas awning I saw, in the rain-smudged northeast, the seed of a ship growing. The men on the masts called, “Rose!”

  “Fly! Fly west!” the Fox shouted.

  “The wind is with her,” said the helmsman.

  “That will change when she is abreast. We have twice her speed running. Stay the course.”

  The Rose advanced at an alarming rate as we beat windward with sickening lurches.

  “How did she find us?” I asked Kittur.

  “Her crow’s nests are three times higher than ours. She probably spotted us as soon as we changed course.”

  I was so weak from my trial at sea that I feared a battle would be the end of me. No matter where I stood on the tiny deck, I was nearly trampled by the lascars lunging with lines or moving in a tight choreography to tack now starboard, now port. The schooner heeled at a frightening angle as we pushed into the wind. I found myself gripping the belay pins to keep my footing.

  Soon the Rose was direc
tly east of us, perhaps a mile distant, and changing her course to beat, as we were, against the weather. Almost immediately she began to fall behind as the schooner outpaced her.

  I was making my way down the companionway to relative safety below deck when I heard the Fox yell, “Jettison the cook!”

  The very men who had kindly pulled me from the sea now grabbed my arms and dragged me to the aft railing. There the Fox said, “Give the man a barrel!” and shook my hand as if we had just shared a pint as friends. “Here is the message: Tell her that it’s time we worked together. I have a few things I need to set in order first, but she must meet me in Macau, on Coloane Island, northeast of the ruined temple. Follow the riverbed past the rocky hills to San Lazaro. There is a tavern there called the Serpent’s Tail. Repeat it.”

  “Coloane Island, northeast of the temple—”

  The Fox nodded to his men.

  “No, wait!” I found myself in the water again, this time hugging an empty apple barrel.

  To my horror, both ships were moving steadily away from me as the Rose followed the Diastema northwest. For ten desperate minutes I thrashed, pushing the barrel before me and hollering like a sea lion. Then, glory, the prow of the great ship slowly turned as if noticing me. I realized that the Rose was, of course, tacking; what I had seen as moving away had, in fact, been the backswing of a wide serpentine course that came to sweep me up on its next pass. If the Rose had been running a narrow course, I would have been left, a grain in the field, and so I thanked God for tacking.

  Rope ladders were unfurled against the hull for me to cling to as the Rose loomed. I had not made it halfway up the ladder with quivering arms when Mabbot screamed down at me, “Was that the Fox?”

  “Aye,” I croaked.

  “Louder, man, and tell me—was it?”

  As it was taking all of my withered strength not to fall from the ladder, I looked up at her and nodded. At her calls for redoubled speed, the bells rang out, and I could hear above me the crew tumbling about the deck trying to wring every drop from the adverse winds.