by Kai Meyer
“A freebooter body and soul,” declared Walker, full of pride and also a little wistfully. “More men went to their deaths for her than I can count … and I can still count to a thousand,” He grinned broadly. “On a good day”
A woman pirate. Captain of a ship. With command over a whole pirate crew.
That alone would make it worth it to see this thing through to the end, Jolly thought.
She cast a last look at the urn, and it was as if a voice were speaking to her: You can be like me, Jolly, said the dead pirate woman in her head. You can be like me, if you really want to.
And finally she became conscious of what the Ghost Trader meant when he said it was the future that was at stake. No longer an empty phrase, no vague, indeterminate goal without value and shape.
The future reverberated in her.
Perhaps it would in fact be worth it to fight for it.
Munk was sitting cross-legged in the bow of the Carfax when the first jagged rocks appeared on the horizon. He’d spread his mussels in front of him on the deck. Again and again he laid them out in a new pattern, gathered them up impatiently, sorted them out again, exchanging individual ones or staring broodingly down at them and massaging his temples.
After the high in Walker’s cabin, Jolly was seized by another, utterly contrary feeling that she had suppressed for much too long. Oppressive, piercing despair overpowered her.
She could no longer endure the inactivity and brooding mood aboard. It wasn’t only Bannon’s loss that ate into her mind, not only the grief over him and her friends on the Skinny Maddy. It was the loss of her earlier life, the playful outlaw existence among the pirates, that was giving her trouble. At this moment she just wanted to be somewhere else, not here, not under the watchful eye of the Ghost Trader; even his silences evoked calamitous premonitions and fears.
In her former life on the Maddy, she’d often climbed up to the crow’s nest, even taken watch out of turn, in order to be alone, to think, to remove herself from the others for a while; from the deck, the crew, even from the sea. She remembered that again now, when the confinement aboard the Carfax was becoming so uncomfortable that she thought she was going to suffocate.
She swung herself up into the shrouds and climbed up the network of ropes to the tip of the mizzenmast, the farthest aft of the Carfax’s three masts. Under her flyweight, the taut ropes hardly sagged. The hemp cut into her palms, but she enjoyed the pricking and scratching because she remembered it from before. When she closed her eyes now, at half height over the deck, she could imagine that everything was the way it used to be, with Bannon and the others; for a moment she felt light and carefree; the wind blew past her nose and was almost like a medicine that got her on her feet and brought her to herself.
The mizzenmast had no lookout platform, but it didn’t matter. She sat down on one of the two highest yards, held on firmly with one hand, and let her legs dangle.
Many fathoms below her lay the deck of the Carfax, and now it appeared to her very small and insignificant in the middle of the blue ocean waste. The Trader was as tiny as an insect and at one stroke lost all his menace. At this height, even the ghosts were visible only as pale phantoms, vague blurs over the red cedarwood of the deck planks.
If she stretched a little to one side, she could see the remains of the rigging of the mainmast and look past the foremast at Munk, bent forward over the mussels, which he moved over the deck with skillful hands, like a shell-game dealer. He was also very far away now—but he’d be that way if she were standing right next to him too. In the last few days he’d withdrawn deeper and deeper into himself, speaking and eating less and less. The change he’d shown after his parents’ deaths was taking place faster and faster, and she grew quite dizzy at the thought of where the change might lead. Vanished was the Munk who’d scrubbed the deck with her, vanished also was the curious boy of a few days ago who’d experienced his first sea battle with amazement. Munk had taken a road that led him through deep shadows, and she wasn’t sure whether the daylight would really appear at the end.
But she didn’t want to think about it now. Her eyes followed the flight of the gulls who accompanied the sailing ship on its course. For a moment Jolly was overcome by the confusing feeling that she could do the same thing, simply push off from the yard and waft over the sea. Who knows, she thought with bitter amusement, perhaps polliwogs can walk on much more than water alone? How would she ever find out if she could fly if she didn’t try it?
She had to force herself to repress the thought, even if she wasn’t entirely successful. To think about something else, she looked over at the Palomino.
The bounty hunter was sailing in their wake, small as a toy or one of the tiny ship models Bannon used to place on his sea charts sometimes to plan the course of a battle or an ambush.
Yes, she thought, it did actually help to withdraw up here. A new perspective, a new point of view. And the feeling of unbounded, absolute freedom: For the moment she wanted to believe in it, wanted to be like the gulls, like the foam on the waves, like the wind over the endlessness of the sea.
And then suddenly Griffin was beside her.
She hadn’t noticed that he’d followed her up the mast. Nimbly he pulled himself from the upper end of the shroud to the opposite yard of the mizzenmast. They were now sitting beside each other, their faces forward, separated only by the broad wooden trunk of the mast.
“Am I disturbing you?” he asked.
She was tempted to say yes, but then it occurred to her that he wasn’t disturbing her at all, that she was even grateful for his nearness. The feeling was almost weirder than the urge to leap off into the air a few minutes before.
“No, I was only …” She stopped, but he finished the sentence for her.
“Looking for a little space?”
She smiled. “Perhaps. Yes.”
Griffin nodded as if he understood exactly what she meant. And yes, she thought, he really does understand.
He noticed that she was looking at him, examining his profile, and pointed quickly down at Munk.
“He’s been doing that business with the mussels for days now,” he said, lowering his voice. “Does he really think that’s going to help us somehow?”
Jolly sighed softly. “Anyway, he’s doing something. The two of us can only sit around up here and wait.”
“Too true.”
“Maybe he really will think of something. Once I actually saw him call up a gust of wind. If he really exerts himself … I don’t know how something like that works and if its even possible … but if he really exerts himself, maybe he can make us go faster.” She shook her head. “Or make something else happen. I have no idea.”
“Turn us into frogs?”
She smiled in amusement. “Would you like that? To be a frog?”
“Only if I could find me a princess and kiss her.”
Jolly looked down at Soledad, who was making practice throws with her knife at a target on the mast. Soledad paid no attention to the wailing of the shipworm, who was sitting only a scant six feet under the target and flinching at every knife throw.
“She is very beautiful, isn’t she?”
“Yes.” Griffin smiled. “But she isn’t the princess I meant.”
Jolly looked at him. She had a sharp remark on the tip of her tongue, but then she realized he was serious, and her sarcasm fizzled unuttered. “You’re making fun of me,” she said, although she knew better.
“Has he kissed you?”
“Munk?” She laughed nervously. “Of course not.”
“But he’d like to.”
“Where do you get that?”
“Because I’ve spoken with him.”
“About me?”
Griffin nodded. “About how it would be to kiss you.”
She was unprepared for his frankness. Instantly there was a lump in her throat, “You are completely crazy. Don’t you … I mean, don’t you have anything better to do?”
“Count fl
ying fish? Or shark fins?” He laughed, and the multitude of blond braids on his head whirled around like the arms of a water plant. But then he was serious again. “Of course, that was before Munk preferred to talk with his mussels instead of with the two of us.”
She wanted to change the subject, but his honesty, and even more, his strange look, which she couldn’t deal with at all, made her uneasy. He disconcerted her, and that made her embarrassed.
Jolly had never been embarrassed. Until today.
“May I?” he asked straight out.
She became panicky. “May you what?”
“You already know—kiss you?”
“God—no!”
“Too bad.”
She looked quickly down at the deck to make certain that none of the others were listening. Wasn’t Soledad stealing a look up at them now and then?
“You are impossible,” said Jolly to Griffin.
“I’m a man.”
Now she had to laugh. “You’re a cheeky rascal, Griffin, a swindler, and a loudmouth—but a man, that you most certainly are not.” She pointed at their pursuer on the horizon. “And the way things look, chances aren’t too good that you’ll ever be one.”
“Another reason to clear the matter up now.”
“You talk as if it were about fighting some sort of a duel.” His grin was making her livid. But she also had a strange, warm feeling in her belly, and that confused her so much that her knees were trembling. Or was it the other way around?
“Maybe, only maybe, I might let you kiss me if we were stranded together on a lonely island—and all the wild pigs and the tree spiders were already eaten.” She looked at him once more, as angrily as possible. Then she let herself fall backward, reached out in a horrifying moment of complete emptiness around her, then grabbed the yard with both hands, whirled around like an acrobat and landed with hands and feet in the shrouds. While Griffin stared after her open-mouthed, she climbed quickly down to the deck and joined Soledad.
“Show me how to do that?” she asked in a quavering voice as she pointed at the knife.
Soledad looked at her in amazement. “Didn’t Bannon teach you that?”
“I … but I want you to show me again.”
“You’re all flustered. What happened?”
Jolly looked Soledad in the eye and realized that the princess knew exactly what had just happened.
“Nothing. I …”
“Aaaaaaarrrrgggghh!!!” wailed the Hexhermetic Shipworm. “Fire! The ship is burning! Save me!…. Save meeee!”
Everyone whirled around.
Forward, in the bow, flames shot up and made the sky over the jib flicker. But it wasn’t the ship that was burning.
It was Munk.
Jolly plunged forward, Soledad right behind her. Griffin did gymnastics down the shrouds and ran to one of the ropes on which a bucket dangled outside on the ship’s wall.
Munk sat cross-legged in the midst of the flames and held his hands over a magic pearl, controlling it as it floated in the center of the mussel circle. He seemed not to feel the heat. The fire flamed out of his skin, out of his hair, even out of his eyes—but it did not consume him.
Munk was burning—and didn’t even notice it.
He lifted his head in surprise when the others stormed up to him.
“What—,” he began, when the full load of water from Griffin’s bucket hit him in the face. He started, lost control of the floating pearl, and shouted a warning.
The pearl swept out of the charmed circle that had been holding it, twisted upward in tight spirals, jerked from starboard to port like a ball of lightning gone wild, made a circle around Buenaventure, then with a hissing sound whisked over the railing and out into the emptiness over the ocean.
It was barely a hundred yards away and hardly visible any longer when it exploded. A fireball bloomed high over the sea, stood for a few seconds in the violet evening sky like a second sun, and then collapsed until it was again the size of the pearl, and finally went out.
The flames around Munk’s body were extinguished. Wet through, he sat there, swore softly—and immediately began to try out a new pattern for his mussels.
“Munk!” Jolly crouched down beside him. “Munk—what was that?”
He lifted his face. She was horrified as his feverish gaze skimmed over her. His eyes twitched, his lids fluttered nervously like butterfly wings.
“I can’t do it,” he murmured over and over. “I simply can’t do it.”
Jolly shook her head and was about to reach for the mussels when he hit her arm.
“Damn it, Munk—that hurt!”
“Don’t touch!” he gasped out vehemently.
She pulled her hand back, but she didn’t take her eyes off his fevered face. Suddenly black material rustled beside her. When she looked up, the figure of the Ghost Trader rose over her.
“Leave him,” he said firmly. “Munk mustn’t be disturbed now.”
Jolly leaped up and planted herself angrily in front of the Trader. “He’s sick!”
“No. Only exhausted.”
“Then he needs to take a rest.”
“Too many hopes rest on him. He must not give up now.”
“But he’s trembling. His eyes … did you see his eyes?”
“I say to you, he does not need rest. Not now. What he urgently needs more than anything else is success.”
Munk’s voice interrupted them. “I was so close. So close …”
Griffin set the wooden bucket down on the deck with an audible noise. “I’m beginning to believe you’ve lost your mind.”
“By all the sea devils!” Walker’s voice broke the silence. Even Munk looked up to the bridge.
Walker was standing up there with the telescope and looking back over the stern. “They’re doing what I would have done long ago in their situation!” he called without looking around to the others. “They’re lightening.”
“What does that mean?” asked Munk.
“They’re throwing ballast overboard,” Jolly explained in a trembling voice.
“What ballast?”
“The cannons!” cried Walker. “They’re rolling some of their guns overboard.” He let the telescope sink. “Now they’ll have us. They’ll catch up.”
It was a labyrinth.
A labyrinth of rock needles, shapeless gray domes, knife-sharp combs of stone, and a few single, densely forested island spines.
The Carfax reached the first rocks of the bizarre island group just at the moment they all believed the Palomino would be level with them any minute. Even with its remaining cannon, the bounty hunter had overtaken the Carfax. Captain Constantine had loaded the sloop with enough weapons to win a war single-handed. From the open gun ports projected muzzle after muzzle. Smoke rose between them. The torches were already burning, the cannoneers were waiting for their captain’s order to fire.
Just when it looked as if there was no escape left, Walker maneuvered the Carfax through a lane into the interior of the island labyrinth. Constantine had to turn in order not to run aground—there was no space in the narrow passage between the rocks for two ships side by side.
“How much time will that give us?” asked the Ghost Trader.
“Not much.” Walker acted neither relieved nor proud of his skillful maneuver. “We can’t cross between the rocks forever. The winds here are treacherous and the tides—” he broke off and shook his head. “And if we drop anchor, they’ll have us that much faster.”
“And so?” asked the Trader.
“We can only hope that Constantine is mad enough to follow us right away. That’s our only chance. If I really do know my way around here better than he does, I can probably lure him onto a reef or a sandbar.”
“In the dark?” asked Jolly skeptically. Bannon had also relied on maneuvers of that kind, but he’d always refused to take too-narrow passages by night. The risks were numerous and hardly possible to estimate.
Walker nodded grimly. “Unfortunately, w
e don’t have a choice.”
Meanwhile it had grown dark. The moon appeared to be almost full. It shone like a silver coin among thousands of diamonds on black velvet. The beauty of the firmament formed a confusing contrast to the fear that gripped them all. Even Buenaventure panted louder than usual. Jolly wondered how, after so many hours without sleep, he was still able to carry out Walker’s orders so exactly. And yet she was certain that the pit bull man, of all her companions, knew best what his limits were. He might be a veteran of many fights, like his friend Walker, but in his dog eyes there dwelled a wisdom that could compete with the Ghost Trader’s. As long as he was steering the ship, she had no fear of running onto a reef or crashing against one of the icy gray cliffs.
The moonlight drew all color out of the jagged island landscape. Even the few forested islands hardly differed from the bare rock slopes by night.; There must be a dozen islands here, crowded very close to each other, the peaks of a craggy, undersea mountain. The narrow, multiple twisting passages reminded Jolly of the tangle of streets in harbor cities, and here just as there, the enemy might be lurking in one of the side passages. They’d left the Palomino behind for the moment, but at the same time they’d lost sight of their opponent. Had Constantine also dared to press on into the confusion of the islands? Was he waiting for them behind the next dome, the next cliff?
Creaking and with sails whispering, the Carfax pushed between steep rock walls and points, through waters that appeared traitorously calm but under whose surface lurked currents and shallows. The few sounds were thrown back from the rocks, sometimes as echo, sometimes as something that sounded as if a living being had mimicked the sound and crowed back in the night.
Griffin had climbed to one of the yards on the foremast and was sitting there with legs dangling high over the water, looking over the night island landscape.
“There!” he called suddenly. “There they are!”
“Heave to!” bellowed Walker.
Buenaventure let the wheel rotate, ghosts scampered over the masts. The Carfax began to turn across the narrow passage. Thus they could receive the Palomino with a broad-side as soon as she sailed across the next crossing into their target zone, whether from the left or from the right.