by Geoff Rodkey
“Got the necklace. Want money, just sell off a stone.”
Guts had taken a necklace from the Fire King’s skeleton back on Deadweather. It was a long string of gems, crowned by a three-inch firebird pendant made of rubies, diamonds, and the like. After a hundred years in the tomb, the gems were crusted with dirt, and rotted feathers hung from it like clumps of dried seaweed. But it was obvious, filthy as it was, that it was valuable.
“Don’t be stupid! We need that for the Okalu. It belonged to their king—it’s got to be precious to them. If we hack off parts of it to buy food, think how mad they’ll be.”
Guts didn’t say anything.
“And that’s if they don’t cut our hearts out at the sight of us. Or is Lucy going to get you out of that fix, too?”
He still didn’t say anything.
“Are you even listening to me?”
I waited for an answer to come through the darkness.
Then I heard him snore. Unbelievable.
I didn’t sleep that whole night. But not because of the snoring.
What the crew had said about the Cartagers in Pella sounded true enough. In all my favorite books, from Basingstroke to Red Runs the Blood, Short-Ears were villains—every one of them vicious, black-hearted, and cowardly. Killing us for being Rovian seemed like just the kind of thing they’d do.
I hadn’t read any books about Natives, or even laid eyes on one, unless you counted the distant glimpses I’d gotten of the silver mine workers slogging away up on Mount Majestic, above Sunrise Island. But there was no reason to doubt what the crew said about them, either.
I started to wonder if we shouldn’t scrap the whole plan and go back to Deadweather. But I knew if I did, Roger Pembroke would find me.
Then again…what was going to stop him from hunting me down in Pella Nonna? Or anywhere else?
As I thought about it, lying there in the dark, my heart started to pound like a drum. Because I realized no matter where I went, he’d be coming for me. Pembroke wanted that map badly enough to kill for it, and as long as he was rich and powerful, and I had the only copy on earth, I was in danger.
Pretty soon, my heart was pounding so hard I could hear it in my ears. I tried to settle it down by telling myself I’d managed to outwit him so far.
But then I thought about everything that had happened over the past few weeks—really thought about it—and I realized I hadn’t outwitted anybody.
I hadn’t been clever. I’d just been lucky. And sooner or later, I was going to run out of luck.
Or maybe I already had. Something was going horribly wrong with my body—my heart was racing, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t breathe…My chest felt like somebody was stacking cannonballs on top of it.
I needed air. I thrashed against the hammock until it dumped me out on my head. Guts mumbled groggy words at me, but I didn’t answer. I flailed around, knocking against boxes and crates and ceiling beams and who knows what else until I finally found the stairs and managed to stagger up to the main deck.
At that hour, the Blue Sea was black.
I thought about that as I puked under the moonlight.
I SPENT MOST OF that first night at sea retching over the side. I was still at it when Guts finally got up the next morning and joined me on deck.
It wasn’t any easier to talk sense into him than it had been the night before.
“If they’ll hang us just for being Rovian—”
“How they gonna know?”
“It’s obvious! What are we going to do, cut off our ears?”
“Can’t see our ears—too much hair. Problem solved.”
“It’s not just our ears. We don’t speak a word of Cartager!”
That stumped him for a while, and he wandered off. Half an hour later, he came back with the snaggletooth, whose name was Mick, and who Guts had just hired—for ten silver, no less—to teach us Cartager.
Mick said he’d picked up the language in a Fish Islands prison, where he’d shared a cell with a pair of Cartager dock thieves. Pretty quickly, the limits of that became obvious.
“Blun.”
“Blun,” Guts and I repeated.
“Means dung,” said Mick. “But ye can use it for anythin’ ye don’ like—food, weather, prison guards—”
“Right. What else?”
“Balamunor.”
“Balamunor?”
“Means dog-brains. Shroof.”
“Shroof.”
“Means a coward. Man wit’ no honor. Big on honor, Cartagers are—want t’ get under someone’s skin, shroof’s worse’n balamunor. Wot else…? Wanaluff.”
“Wanaluff?”
“Means cow-ears. Prob’ly hear it a lot—on account o’ to a Cartager, two o’ you got cow ears. Man calls ye wanaluff, try callin’ him a porsamora.”
“Porsamora?”
“Yeh! Means he likes pigs. And not just fer eatin’, if ye know wot I mean. Now, if ye really wanna insult a man—”
“Do you know any words that aren’t insults?” I interrupted.
“Wot ye mean?”
“I mean, we’re trying not to get killed. So what we really need are useful words.”
“Porsamora’s dead useful! Good in all sorts o’ situations. Man don’t have to actually like pigs fer ye to call him that, ye know.”
Mick was looking at me like I was thick in the head. So was Guts.
“But insults aren’t going to help us get over with Cartagers,” I said.
“Wot is?” Guts asked me.
“Things like, ‘Can you help us?’ Or ‘We’re friendly.’”
Mick curled his lip in disgust. “Gonna say that to a Short-Ears?”
“I’m not,” declared Guts.
“Can you at least teach us to say, ‘Do you speak Rovian?’” I pleaded.
Mick scrunched his eyebrows together. I seemed to have stumped him.
“Why don’t we just forget the whole thing?” I suggested. “Give us back the silver, and—”
“A-a-a-a-a! Give it a chance, boyo!” Mick waved his hands at me like I’d just threatened to slug him. “Wot ye want to say? ‘D’ye speak Rovian?’”
“That’d be a start,” I said.
“Fine. ’Kay. Here it is. It’s…” He paused, his eyes narrowing into slits. When he finally spoke, it was unusually slowly—like he was making it up as he went along. “Dee…lo…spee…lo…Rova…neelo.”
“Deelo speelo Rovaneelo?”
“That’s right,” he said, bobbing his head confidently. “Wot else ye want to know?”
“More curses!” said Guts. “How ye tell someone he’s ugly?”
“Lots o’ ways! Lessee…Palomuno, means horse-face…”
I quit the lesson a few minutes later, after Mick’s claim that “Where can we find an Okalu?” translated as “Weerwo feerwo Okaleerwo?” convinced me nothing he taught us was reliable, except maybe the curses. Guts stuck with it, and eventually picked up a few dozen of what Mick promised him were the foulest insults in the Cartager language.
He was as thrilled with his new vocabulary as he was with his new hook. For the next three days, he practiced them both nonstop, usually at the same time.
I spent the days doing a few things over and over myself: practicing the map, puking over the gunwale, worrying over who among the Cartagers, Natives, and Pembroke was going to kill me first…and eventually cooking up a plan for how I could quit the whole business.
The plan itself was simple. Once she’d dropped the ugly fruit cargo in Pella, the Thrush was headed south, way down to the Barker Islands. I’d never been, but I knew they were Rovian-held, so at least there wouldn’t be any Cartagers or Natives around to slaughter us for no good reason. We’d be that much farther away from Pembroke. And from there, it’d be no trick to hop a ship across the Great Maw to the Continent, where even someone as rich and powerful as Pembroke would have a hard time tracking us down.
It was cowardly, I know. I’d be running away f
rom the man who killed my family, when the truly noble thing would be to seek him out and avenge their deaths somehow.
But after a few days of stomach-clenching fear, I didn’t want to be noble. I just wanted to not be dead. And I told myself that even if I bugged out now, I could always come back and avenge them some other time. Like in ten years, when I might be rich and powerful myself. Or at least slightly less terrified.
Bugging out would be easy. There was nothing to it. All we had to do was stay on the boat, and not get off when we reached Pella.
The hard part was figuring out how to sell the idea to Guts.
“SO TALK,” HE SAID on the morning of the fourth day.
“We can’t go to Pella,” I said. “Really can’t. We’ll just get ourselves killed—if not by Cartagers or Natives, then…by the others.”
“Quit bein’ a shroof! Gonna be fine.”
“It won’t! And I don’t care what you call me. We’re not going.”
He must have realized I was serious this time, because his eyes started to twitch.
“Wot about the treasure?!”
“Probably just a myth anyway.”
“Blun to that!”
“Whatever…I don’t care about the treasure.”
“’Cause ye got a whole plantation? That it?”
“I gave the place away! To the field pirates. Remember? Anyway, it wasn’t worth much to begin with.”
“So ye need the treasure! Set ye up!”
“I don’t care about that.”
“I do!”
He was twitching badly now, worse than he had since we’d boarded the Thrush. And he must have really been getting hot, because he started swearing in Rovian again.
“Ye — —! Wot about yer family?”
“What about them?”
“He killed ’em! Gonna let him get away with it?”
“You didn’t even know my family!” It came out so loud I could see crewmen turning to stare from all the way down at the stern.
But once I got going, I couldn’t stop—everything I’d been trying to stuff down inside came up at once.
“I am sick to death of running, and fighting, and people trying to kill me—I don’t want treasures, or maps, or revenge—I just want them to leave me alone!”
My arms were shaking, and I had to cross them over my chest and stuff my hands under my armpits to get them to stop.
Guts twitched a few more times. Then he lowered his voice.
“Wot about yer girlie? Gonna let her down, too?”
He knew me pretty well by now. Other than avenging my family, Millicent was the one thing that made me think I shouldn’t cut and run.
“She’d understand. Anyway, I’ll get her back somehow. Just…not soon.”
Guts cursed a few more times. Then he shook his head, like he was done with the whole thing.
“Fine. Gimme the map, then.”
“What do you mean?
“Gimme the map! You ain’t gonna use it.”
“You’d go alone?”
“Course!”
It hadn’t crossed my mind that Guts might leave me behind. At the thought of it—just when all the other fear was finally starting to lift—a panicky feeling shot through my belly.
“Gimme the map!”
“You can’t memorize it. There’s no time.”
“So get paper! From the cap’n. Write it down!”
“And…what? You’d go to Pella? I’d go to the Barkers? We’d split up?”
I could barely see his eyes as they glared at me from under his long tangles of hair.
“If yer gonna bug…then yeh. Go it alone.”
The panicky feeling in my gut was spreading. As I stared back at him, I started to realize there might be something worse than just being scared.
And that was being all alone in the world.
The look in his eyes said Guts didn’t like the idea any better than I did. He lowered his head, staring down at the deck.
“Need that treasure. Bad! Set me up. Ain’t got nothin’ else. No way to make it, neither.”
His voice was scratchy and thick. “You an’ me had a deal. Partners. Things got hot, I didn’t bug on you. Don’t you go buggin’ on me.”
He looked up and met my eyes again, and I knew he was right.
If Guts was dead set on going to the New Lands, I was going with him. Like it or not.
I was opening my mouth to tell him as much when a voice called out from up in the rigging.
“PIRATES! DEAD AHEAD!”
BOARDED
PIRATES!”
I turned toward the horizon to look for the ship. The deck shuddered with the pounding of feet, and soon the captain was at my elbow, squinting through his spyglass into the late morning haze.
“SURE IT’S A RAIDER?!” Racker yelled, tilting his head up to yell at the crow’s nest atop the foremast.
“SHE’S FLYIN’ RED AN’ BLACK!” the lookout yelled back.
“HARD ASTERN!” cried Racker as he ran for the wheel.
I looked around for Guts, but he’d vanished.
I was trying to puzzle out where he’d gone when the deck suddenly pitched to starboard at such a steep angle I lost my footing. As the ship wheeled around, I spent the next few seconds in a frantic scrabble to grab hold of something so I wouldn’t fall overboard.
The Thrush righted herself and began to barrel north, bucking and lurching as she crashed over the waves. The crew were scurrying every which way to trim the sails, and I tried to stay clear of them as I scanned the deck for Guts.
There was no sign of him. He’d disappeared before the deck started to pitch, so I figured he hadn’t gone overboard unless it was on purpose. And no matter how much Guts hated pirates—he’d been sold into Ripper Jones’s crew, and even though he never talked about it, I got the sense that the Ripper was the reason Guts didn’t have a left hand—he wasn’t the type to drown himself in a panic at the first sign of trouble.
I made my way to the stern, where the captain stood with Reggie the quartermaster, watching our pursuer. I could see her now, coming up hard, her silhouette growing by the second.
Racker looked even more gaunt than usual as he stared through his spyglass.
“Wait a minute…” He lowered the glass. “That’s a Cartager galleon. One of their warships. Take a look.”
“Cartagers…?” Reggie took the glass and peered through it.
“Cargaferf?!” Guts popped up beside me, out of breath and armed to the teeth. Literally—his jaws were clamped down on the blade of one of our knives, his good hand held a pistol, and two more were shoved in the waistband of his pants.
As the three of us stared at Guts’s arsenal—a little nervously, because the pistols were cocked and loaded, and he wasn’t being too careful with them—he handed me the one he was holding so he could take the knife out of his mouth and wipe the drool from his chin.
“Ain’t pirates after all? It’s Short-Ears?”
Instead of answering Guts, Reggie went back to looking through the spyglass.
“If she’s Cartager Navy…why’s she flyin’ red and black?”
A thought occurred to me. “Can you make out the figurehead on her bow?” I asked. “Is it a skeleton?”
Racker took the spyglass back from Reggie. “Let’s see…too far to…no, wait…think it is a skeleton.”
A wave of relief surged through me. “Thank goodness…it’s Burn Healy!”
At the mention of the most feared pirate on the Blue Sea, Racker and Reggie both turned to me with terror in their eyes.
“You sure?”
I couldn’t help smiling. “No question. That’s the Grift—he captured it from the Cartagers in the Barker War. We were just on it last week.”
As Racker stared at me in shock, Reggie put a hand to his mouth, like he might throw up. Another crewman had been close enough to overhear, and the word spread across the ship in panicked cries:
“DEADWEATHER BOY SEZ IT’S HEALY
!”
“BURN HEALY?!”
“SAVIOR SAVE US! IT’S HEALY!”
Boz, the grim-looking first mate who was manning the wheel, looked over his shoulder at Racker.
“Gonna run the white flag, cap’n?”
The crew had pretty strong opinions about that.
“DO IT!”
“QUICK! ’FORE HE SENDS US T’ THE BOTTOM!”
“PAINT THE DECK WIT’ OUR GUTS, WE DON’T SURRENDER!”
“CALM YOURSELVES!” yelled Racker. “THERE’S NO NEED—”
We never heard the rifle shot that took Racker’s hat off his head. Healy’s ship was too far away for the sound to travel. But suddenly, the hat was skittering across the deck, and when a crewman picked it up, there were two round, clean holes where the ball had passed through the crown.
That was enough for the captain. “Run the white! Strike the sails!” he croaked from a frightened crouch below the deck rail.
IN THE THIRTY MINUTES it took for the Grift to come alongside and tie up to us, half the crew turned religious, wailing on their knees to the Savior as they begged mercy for a lifetime of sins. The other half had pretty much the opposite reaction, breaking out a hidden store of rum and drinking themselves blind.
Racker made Guts put his weapons away so he wouldn’t complicate the surrender. Guts grumbled about it, but we knew Healy marauded under a code that guaranteed the safety of children. Since he’d included us in that category the last time around, Guts and I figured we didn’t have much to fear.
I actually felt a little guilty about the situation. While the crew were losing their minds in mortal terror of Healy’s arrival, I was looking forward to it. Although I still had no idea why, Healy had gone out of his way to be helpful to us in the past—he’d not only rescued us when we were lost at sea and given us passage to Deadweather, but the pistols we carried were left over from the crates of weapons he’d sent us to help defend the ugly fruit plantation from Pembroke’s soldiers.
Not only that, the food on the Grift had been much better than on the Thrush. If things went our way, we might have a shot at a decent meal.
As the Grift tied up to us, Racker ordered the crew to form a line on deck with our hands over our heads in surrender, Guts and me included. It wasn’t a pretty sight. The religious types couldn’t stop trembling, the drunks were swaying on their feet, Guts was twitchy…Pretty much the only man among us who could hold still was one of the drunks, and that was because he’d passed out cold on the deck.