A dozen sailors were standing about the deck. Lacy was in no trouble at all, though swaying back and forth fifty feet from the quarterdeck straight down must have been very uncomfortable. The sailors began to laugh happily. Lacy screamed curses, almost fell off to the right and clutched so hard that he overdid his adjustment and almost went off to port. The yard wove great circles against the greenish sky. Lacy screamed in terror. The sailors doubled up on the deck, holding their sides with glee.
“GET HIM DOWN, DAMN YOU!” screamed Malek as canvas began to shake loose and fill. Uneasily, the ship pushed ahead against her anchor cables, pointing toward another vessel not a hundred yards dead ahead. And now the unstayed lateen billowed with a crack which almost boosted Lacy all the way off.
Malek despaired of getting anything done for him. He seized the halyards and, braking them on the pins, swiftly slacked them off. Lateen yard, Lacy and a mass of disorderly canvas came billowing down to the quarterdeck. Lacy climbed off and weakly sought the rail where his shoulders hitched convulsively. Malek blew sourly upon his rope-scorched hands. The sailors, to the best of their ability, stilled their mirth.
Malek hitched at his belt to get his exposed pistols around into reach. With grim visage and glittering fangs, he stalked down toward Tiger. But Tiger was gone again and Jan cowered in his soul.
“So, you are a different man, are you?” scowled Malek most awfully. “So, you know nothing, do you?” His fingers wrapped around the butt of a gun and he brought it forth, tossing it up so that it came down with the muzzle in his fist. With this for a club Malek stepped so close to Jan that Jan could count the crumbs in his beard. The guard, especially the victimized marid, pressed close about and seized Jan’s arms from behind.
“Let him alone,” said the bosun, coming over from the starboard rail. His thick, rolling body was belligerent and his heavy face was dark. He was a very tough human being. “I seen it with me own peepers, Mr. Malek. This here marid, like the dummy he is, was monkeying with his trigger. I seen it, I tell you.”
Malek looked doubtfully at the bosun. “You expect me to believe you?”
“We seen it too!” chimed some of the other sailors, coming up. “This here marid was the one. It wasn’t Tiger. No, sir!”
“Captain Tombo!” shouted Malek as the captain appeared in a hatch. “Tiger is at it again. I—”
“He isn’t either!” yelped the crew. “This here marid—”
“Stow it,” said Captain Tombo. “What’s the odds? Leave him alone, Mr. Malek. He’s out of our hands now. The port captain is taking charge.”
Behind Tombo came a portly and foppish ifrit who fanned the air before him with a perfumed handkerchief to fend off the odor of sailors. He handed a signed release to Tombo.
“Thank you, Boli,” said the captain. “There’s your man. I wouldn’t be too extreme if I were you. After all, Tiger’s got some little reputation.”
“For brawling, theft and rapine,” sniffed Boli, gazing with disgust at Jan. “But the matter isn’t in my hands either. This is a case for the crown. Yes, indeed, the crown. Hail my boat,” he added to Malek.
Malek shouted to a barge which had been drifting under the quarter and now it was pulled forward to the gangway. It was crammed from gunwale to gunwale with armed men, but they were port sailors and rather given to fat and softness.
“Down with you,” said Boli, punching Jan in the back with his sword scabbard as though appalled at the thought of touching him with a hand and so soiling it.
Jan started down the ladder. Along the rail thronged the fickle ship’s company, wholly won again by the incident of Lacy.
“S’long, Tiger.”
“Give’m hell, Tiger.”
“Mess ’em up, Tiger.”
“Give Her Majesty m’love, will yuh?”
Jan suddenly found that he was grinning up at the faces above him and swaggering down the steps. The boat was bobbing in the slight swell and, loaded as it was, the gunwale was none too far above the water. The guard sailors were ready with their weapons as though expecting anything to happen and rather surprised that Tiger took it so mildly. Evidently he knew some of them, thought Jan.
Suddenly he remembered his manners and stepped back so that Boli, fat and awkward, could enter the boat first. And, seeing that the guard was quite on the alert and that the boat was, after all, bobbing rather badly even in this glassy sea, Boli was nothing loath to have a hand all of a sudden, even from a criminal.
Jan felt things stirring inside him and was too frightened to think the matter through, afraid lest he discover another awful plot within him. He took hold of the bowman’s boat pike and helped him hold the barge in to the landing stage.
Boli, striving to see over his chest ruffles, watched the barge drop four feet below the stage and then bounce four feet above it. In truth, the condition was very ordinary, seeing that there had to be some manner of swell about a vessel anchored in the roads, but Boli had had one or two in the captain’s cabin and he well knew that his reputation only wanted a ridiculous incident to throw down much of his carefully built authority.
“Here, you,” said Jan (or rather Tiger) to the gunwale guards. “Give M’Lord the port captain a hand before I knock you about. Look alive, swabs!”
The two moved hastily, getting up on thwarts to reach for Boli’s hands and steady him. They were going through a usual routine but the presence of Tiger had rather shattered their composure. Boli wished ardently that the vessel weren’t so far to sea.
“Easy, now, M’Lord,” said Tiger, looming above Boli as a church steeple rears above its almshouse. “When she starts down, step aboard and lively. And you, y’landlubbers, don’t muss’m up or I’ll break your skulls like they was eggs. Now!”
He eased Boli ahead. The barge swooped down from the height of the port captain’s head. Boli, aided by Tiger’s left hand, stepped to the gunwale as it flew downward. His men eased him quickly aboard while the barge kept on going down to four feet below the stage.
Tiger, still holding the bowman’s pike in his right hand to help the bowman hold the barge in, suddenly yelped, “Don’t pull her in, you fools!” And pulled her in with a jerk which almost hauled the bowman out of the boat.
The next instant an awful thing happened. The barge, four feet under the stage, started instantly on its upward surge. But this time it didn’t miss the underside of the protruding stage. With a rending jar, the gunwale caught under the stage itself and the wave did the rest.
With a swoop, the barge capsized! One instant it was a normal enough boat, full of sleek and flawlessly uniformed sailors and the next the only thing which could be seen was the keel, all dripping and bobbing on the waves. From tumblehome to tumblehome, the boat displayed its bottom.
“Help!” bellowed Tiger, safe and dry on the landing stage.
But before help could even start, sailors out of the barge were rocketing into sight all about it, having ducked out of the terrifying but perfectly safe air pocket under the boat.
Tiger waited to see no more. He went overboard in a long dive. The green water fled past him. The dark barge was over him. And just ahead was a pair of very fat legs kicking desperately. Tiger encircled them deftly and hauled hard. Down into the sea went Boli!
Tiger came up by the stage an instant later to let a wave boost him to a hold. Boli was floundering like a grounded whale but still Tiger did not let him be. Up he came and up went Boli to his brawny back. Swiftly Tiger made the deck, surging past the ship sailors who were fishing up the boat guard, man by man.
Laying the port captain out on a hatch cover, Tiger pumped him thoroughly dry, taking the weak but strengthening protests as unworthy of notice. Artificial respiration seemed to work wonderfully upon Boli and in no time at all the man Tiger had rescued from a watery grave was sitting up turning the air scarlet and azure all about him.
The barge men were hauled up, every man of them, to be dumped in all postures by the ship sailors. There was no great
love lost between seamen and this spying patrol which policed the port.
All the while Jan was shuddering in horror. If he was in trouble now, what would he be in, in a few moments? But he was utterly powerless to do anything about it and he was aghast to hear himself say, upon Boli’s running out of breath, “By God, M’Lord, it’s lucky I was there. If you’ll take a sailor’s advice, M’Lord, I’d jail that bowman for a month, so I would. Why, by God, sir, even when I yelled at him to desist he insisted upon hooking his pike into the stage itself and pulling you under it! Beggin’ M’Lord’s pardon, but you’d better get some sailors in that crew of yours that know their business. Damned if not.”
Boli glowered and had dark suspicions. Tombo and Malek tried to keep scowling and be severe. The sailors attempted to stifle their merriment until a more appropriate moment.
“Is your breath all right now, M’Lord?” said Tiger with earnest interest. “Captain, perhaps he’d better be let to rest in a cabin, if I might suggest it. That was a very trying thing and though he came out of it like a hero—”
“Tiger!” said Tombo.
“Sir?” said Tiger.
Captain Tombo tried to scowl more ferociously. But it happened that he had, on many occasions, suffered great delay because of the effeminate whims of this gross port captain and, for the life of him, he couldn’t carry that much sail at the moment.
“Tiger,” said the captain with a glance at Boli. And he was about to go on when he saw the bedraggled silk which hung in bags all about the lord. He changed his mind.
“Sir?”
“Give them a hand in righting that boat.”
“Yessir.”
Tiger sped down the gangway once more where the ship’s mirth-convulsed seamen were working. They said nothing. They couldn’t and still keep their laughter inside where it would not offend Boli’s ears above. But their eyes were full of great affection.
They righted the boat and, shortly, Boli’s guard came down, leaving a river of water to run behind them on the steps. Gingerly they got into the barge. Nervously they prodded Tiger into the stern sheets. Fearfully they aided the port captain to his seat of state amidships.
They shoved off and all along the rail above, sailors waved farewell. Even Captain Tombo smiled and Mr. Malek put a rope-scorched hand to his cap and raised it slightly to call, “So long, Tiger. We’ll all be in to see you.”
Boli rolled around and glared at his prisoner. Now that the port captain was on, so to speak, his own deck, he was quite recovered (save that his ribs ached from respiration treatment).
“You are very clever, my fine bucko. Everywhere you set your foot, things happen. I have heard it. Well! Do not think for one moment that your saving of Admiral Tyronin from the Isle of Fire, that your timely bombs at the Battle of Barankeet, that all your other mad deeds, will stand a bit in your favor. You have flown too high! Whatever these charges are,” and he fished a sealed packet from his soggy shirt, “and I don’t doubt that they are severe enough, you will be tried for the crime at hand, not for deeds of questionable character long past. You have been recommended for trial by the queen herself and if she doesn’t sentence you to swing, it’ll not be the fault of mine.”
There was so much hatred in Boli’s voice that Jan shivered. Out of him, like a dying fire, went the reckless madness which had brought him to that deed just done. He could not reason that Boli’s hatred was not only born of that deed but of another, more delicate thing. Boli was badly built, ugly beyond description. And before him sat a tall, handsome fellow of a rare kind calculated to stir the most frigid of feminine hearts. But Jan could not see himself. Jan was just Jan now. He recognized no ships, he recalled nothing. He even fumbled for his glasses to wipe them in his confusion and was mighty startled to find that he wore none—indeed, did not seem to need any.
“The queen?” he gulped.
“The queen,” said Boli, satisfied now that he could feel the uneasiness in his prisoner. “Not four days past she put five heads on pikes outside her palace and that for mere thievery on the highroad. I am given to understand that you have some dread stigma attached to you. Ah, yes, my fine prankster, it seems that your lighthearted days are done. Before you there is nothing but doom and death.”
Boli enjoyed himself for the moment and almost forgot how wet he was. For the remainder of the voyage across the harbor, he piled up torments and watched his victim squirm. But, when he reached the quay, a number of loafers, beholding M’Lord the port captain as soggy as a drowned rat, burst into braying mirth.
Boli swept an imperious eye across the rank on the dock and roared, “Sergeant, arrest them! Up, I say! I’ll show you the price of laughter, that I will!”
And though his guard tumbled swiftly up the gangway, when they got to the dock, not a man was left. Only laughter’s echoes were there.
Snorting, Boli stamped to the wharf while four men carried Jan along at the points of their swords.
Jan, bewildered, stared up at the buildings of the town. They stretched back across the plain for miles. They reached around the harbor for leagues. What an immense town it was! Commerce jammed the wharves. Men sweated and swore, hauling cargoes about. Horses stamped and neighed as they strained at rumbling trucks. A bewildering array of signs spread out in every direction and the odd part of it was that one moment they were so many chicken scratches to Jan and the next their meaning was quite plain. Taverns and brokers’ offices, sailors’ hotels and shipping firms, trucking barns and chandler shops. Immediately beside them reared the customs, a building some four stories in height and of a queer architecture which was prominent in its immense scrolls and swoops and towers. All the buildings were like that, presenting a baffling line of distorted curves and garish, mismatched colors.
Along the docks bobbed fishing boats, small beside the towering castles of the oceangoing ships. From the scaly decks of the little craft a variety of weird seafood was being hoisted so that Jan knew it was still very early in the day.
Boli stamped away up the stairs to his quarters where he could get a consoling nip and a change of clothes. His guard, forgotten, stood about, damply keeping an eye on their prisoner and very careful not to get within arm’s length of him. Jan found quite accidentally that when he wandered along he carried the whole company with him and so, benighted as he was with woe, he strolled restlessly back and forth, the men moving with him but well away from him and all about him.
Jan stared down at a pile of flapping fish just tossed from a tubby little vessel’s hold. He had never before seen any such denizens of the sea as these. Their eyes were lidded and winked and winked. They were as wide as they were long and their heads were as big as their bodies. For all the world they resembled sheep and Jan wondered distractedly if they tasted like mutton. Some of this catch was being laid on a miserable peddler’s cart, the wheels of which spread out very wide at the top and very narrow at the bottom, giving it a bowlegged appearance. Presently the two who had been loading it were accosted by the master of the fishing vessel who held out his palm for his pay.
One of the pair was a woman. Her hair was snarled beyond belief and a filthy, scaly neckerchief was swathed about her scrawny neck. Her dress glittered with dried scales which showed up very brightly against the black dirt which smeared the whole shapeless garment. Her pipestem legs shot up out of hopelessly warped shoes and got no thicker when they became a body. She could have passed through a knothole with ease and, doubtless, such an operation would have taken a lot of the dirt from her. She chose to be niggardly about the price.
“You soul-stealing lobster!” she shrieked in a cracked ruin of a voice. “You . . .” Jan wanted to stop his ears. “Last time you charge two damins the feesh! This time you charge t’ree damins. We don’t have to buy! We don’t have to deal with the slimy likes of you! We’ll take our trade elsewhere!” Her companion, an incredibly diseased fellow, tried to calm her. The fisherman tried to break in with the explanation—quite obvious—that these fish we
re especially fine, big ones. She would have nothing of it. Her rage mounted higher and higher, in direct ratio to the humoring it got from the two men. Finally this virago seized one of the fish by the tail and began to lay about her with all her might, screaming the foulest of language the while. Her rage made her blind and she lambasted several of the guards who could not get out of the way fast enough.
Jan was successful in ducking a swing but he tripped over a bitt and fell to stare up and get a full view of this termagant’s ugly face. He recoiled, frozen with revulsion.
This shrew, this harridan, this screaming unholy catamaran resembled no one if not his Aunt Ethel!
He recovered and scrambled back. At a safe distance he peered wonderingly at the woman. The voice tone, now that he listened for it, had a certain timbre; the eyes, the nose, the very ears, carried the resemblance. Her build, the way she stood now that she was calming down in the wreckage of her victory, was also similar. And finally, though he could not understand how it could be, he was forced to grant this revolting creature the identity of his aunt. Aunt Ethel, wife to a diseased fish peddler! Aunt Ethel, bawling like a harlot upon the common dock!
But how on earth did she get there?
Now that hostilities had ceased and a lower price had been paid, the woman signaled to the man to be off and the two pushed the cart along toward the shoreward end.
“My darling Daphne,” said the fish peddler, “the price we saved won’t cover the cost of bandages for my head. By swith, how it rings!”
“Be quiet, you wretched apology of a man. I’ll deal with you later when we get home.”
But Jan had to know! He stepped forward beside the cart. “Aunt Ethel,” he said, “how . . . ?”
She stared at him angrily and brushed on by just as his guards leaped up to take him again and keep him from communicating with others. She glanced back in high disdain and snorted.
“Y’see? Y’see, you worm-eaten miscreant? I’m sunk so low that convicts talk to me! Ohhh, you wretch, if you think your head rings now . . .” And so they passed out of sight just as Boli, much fortified, hove like a barge into view.
Slaves of Sleep & the Masters of Sleep Page 7