by Geoff Rodkey
“What do you want them to think—that you’re a hero? Or a treasure hunter?”
“I’m neither,” I protested.
“You’ll be one or the other to them. And we need their help.”
And it wasn’t just hard explaining things to Adonis because I couldn’t tell him the truth about the treasure. My brother wasn’t exactly quick-witted, and he had a hard time getting his head around even simple concepts, like the fact that Roger Pembroke had tried to murder our whole family.
“I’d want to kill a bloke, too, if ’e lost my balloon.”
“You didn’t lose his balloon—he had his men cut the tethers so you’d drown in the ocean!”
“Stuff! Who’d waste a balloon like that? ’Sides, if ’e wanted to kill us, why’d ’e buy us lunch?”
“To butter you up!”
“Wot fer? Coulda plugged us on the spot…Fine meal, too. Still thinkin’ ’bout that jelly bread.”
“Adonis—he’s evil.”
“Says you. Bought us lunch and gave us a balloon ride, says me.”
“You know the silver mine on Sunrise? He owns it—and all the people he’s got working there are slaves.”
“So?”
“So?! He’s a slaver. He buys human beings and works them to death.”
“Smart move if ye can pull it off. Beats payin’ ’em…Dad oughta do that. Get slaves fer the plantation. Be a sight easier to manage than ’em lazy field pirates.”
After that, I gave up on trying to talk to Adonis. I figured Dad would tell me what I wanted to know.
Meanwhile, Kira managed to start a conversation with the surly Moku, but she had a hard time getting anything useful out of him, either.
“Did you ask about my sister?” I whispered to her after they’d been talking awhile.
“I am trying. First, he only wanted to talk about why he was innocent.”
“Innocent of what?”
“Stealing. That’s why he’s here. And now he won’t stop talking about how much he hates your brother. But I will keep trying.”
Once darkness fell, their conversation died out, too.
“Did you learn anything?” Millicent asked Kira.
“Not much. He is very afraid he will be put to death soon. He wants to sleep now. But he says we can talk more when morning comes.”
WE MOSTLY FELL SILENT ourselves after that. I was so wiped out, I was starting to doze off by the time Dad came back, along with a middle-aged Moku warrior. They both carried burning torches, and after ordering us to stand back, Dad dropped his torch into the middle of the pit.
“Here! Give ye light to see the food.”
He lowered a basket with food and water for us. The empty basket went back up, and before I’d had time to take more than a few sips of water, Dad tossed the end of a knotted rope into the pit.
“Climb up, Egbert. Just you.”
Adonis didn’t like that. “Dad! Wot the deuce?!”
“Watch yer mouth! Know where ye stand with her. Doin’ me best, but it takes time. Now, c’mon, Egbert. Get up that rope.”
“What about my friends?” I asked Dad.
“Tried. Nothin’ doin’. Maybe tomorrow.”
I didn’t want us to get separated—it made me worry for both them and me—but there didn’t seem to be any choice.
“Sorry about this,” I said to the others. “I’ll get you out. I promise.”
“Be careful,” said Kira.
“See about gettin’ my hook back,” said Guts.
I turned to Millicent, and to my surprise she wrapped her arms around me in a fierce hug. I hugged her back just as hard.
Then she pulled away, just far enough to take my head in her hands with her fingers nestled in my hair, and stared into my eyes.
I stared back, mesmerized by that inner furnace I could see glowing behind her eyes even in the dim flicker of the torch near our feet.
For a moment, time seemed to stop. Or at least my heart did. First, I thought she might kiss me. Then I thought maybe I was supposed to kiss her.
Then I realized if things went badly, I might never have another moment with her like this one, and I should tell her I loved her so I’d never have to regret not having said it.
The words were on my lips when she spoke first.
“Don’t say anything stupid,” she said. “You came here to rescue them.”
“I know that.” The last thing I wanted just then was a lecture.
Then she smirked, and the whole moment was ruined.
“C’mon, boy!” Dad was getting impatient.
She dropped her hands to my chest and pushed me gently toward the rope.
“Be smart. Get us out of here.”
I turned away and grabbed the rope. My hands tightened on the knots, ready to start climbing.
Then I stopped. I was annoyed—no, mad—no, furious with her, for being such a condescending snot.
And I loved her like nothing else in the world. And I didn’t want to leave feeling just the anger and not the rest of it.
I turned around. They were all watching me in the torchlight. She still had that infuriating smirk on her face. I marched over to her. As I got closer, she started to open her mouth to say something clever and probably insulting, but before she could do it, I pulled her to me and kissed her hard on the lips.
I broke it off first. Her eyes were still closed when I pulled back.
They fluttered open. The smirk was gone.
“I love you,” I said. It came out sounding angry.
Her eyes got wider. She looked shocked. Or maybe it was scared.
“I love you, too,” she said in a quiet voice.
As I turned back toward the rope, I heard Adonis mutter something, but I didn’t catch it. All I could think was that I had to get out of there before I botched something. I grabbed the rope and climbed as fast as I could.
WHEN I REACHED the top and dropped the rope, my arms and legs started shaking, and there was nowhere to sit except the ground, so that’s what I did.
“Ye awright?” Dad asked.
I looked up. He was staring down at me with a look of concern. The grim older Moku with the torch was standing to one side of him. In the flickering torchlight, Dad’s nose cast a jumpy shadow across the side of his face. There was a surprising amount of gray in his beard.
Even with all the time I’d had to get used to the idea that he was still alive, seeing him up close was a shock.
“Just need a second,” I said. My limbs were shaking hard—getting up the rope had been tougher than I’d expected, and with so little food in me, I guess my muscles just couldn’t take it.
And my head was swimming.
She said she loved me…
“Is there more food?” I heard myself ask.
“Plenty where we’re goin’. C’mon.”
I thought I might pass out if I stood up, but I managed to get to my feet. Dad put one of his meaty hands on my upper arm. When I looked at him, he had a strange kind of nervous look on his face that I’d never seen before.
He raised his other arm, and at first I thought he was going to hug me. Then the arm sort of hung there for a moment, until finally he used it to pat me awkwardly on the shoulder.
“Good seein’ ye.”
He dropped both arms and turned away with an uncomfortable grimace.
“C’mon.”
He and the Moku with the torch started toward the road.
I followed them, still woozy.
Did he just…Was he going to hug me?
He’d never hugged me before in his life. It just wasn’t something he did.
The ground felt like it was tilting away from me. I realized I was about to pass out. There was a big rock a couple of steps ahead, and I lurched over and sat down on it. I pressed my hands to my forehead. When I shut my eyes, I saw little explosions of light behind my eyelids.
A moment later, I heard Dad’s voice in front of me.
“Wot’s wrong, boy?”
I took a deep breath, and my whole chest shuddered. I felt like I might start crying, and that was the last thing I wanted.
“Just…need a minute.” My voice was all wobbly. “Haven’t eaten much…Kind of a strange day.”
“Get ye more food. Oughta do it.”
“Yeah. Must be it.”
I kept gulping air until I could take a breath without shuddering. Then I stood up again, much more carefully this time.
“Right. Let’s go.”
Dad and I walked slowly, side by side a few steps behind the Moku holding the torch. Nobody spoke until we were on the paved road, headed to the center of the city. On either side of the road, small cooking fires burned in front of the makeshift huts and stone buildings, and I caught the occasional glimpse of a person moving ghostlike around them.
“How the blaze did ye get here?”
“Captain Racker gave us a ride to Pella Nonna. Then…mostly, we walked.” I left out the part about getting kidnapped, because it would have meant explaining about the map. And even though I wasn’t sure I agreed with Millicent that I should lie about why we were here, I didn’t have the energy to explain everything right then.
“Ye got the harvest in? Ship sailed full?”
“Pretty much.”
He clapped me on the back. “Good work, boy.” Then he sighed with relief. “That’s a load off. Could barely sleep for worryin’ they’d all slack, and we’d end up bust.”
Even brain-fogged as I was, it seemed a little queer that Dad could find himself stranded in the wilderness with a tribe of deadly Natives, only to lose sleep worrying about who was going to get the ugly fruit harvest in.
“Field pirates give ye trouble? Did ye need to get on ’em much?”
“A bit.” It had been more than a bit. If I hadn’t sold the plantation to the field pirates in exchange for their help against Pembroke, they would have let the harvest rot in the fields.
But that was another thing I didn’t have the energy to explain.
“Who’s watchin’ the place fer ye? Not Percy!” His eyes widened at the thought of our fat, lazy, and treacherous former tutor in charge of the plantation.
“No. Percy’s gone. It’s Otto, mostly. Him and Quint.”
“An’ ye trust ’em? Achh…” He scratched at his beard and grimaced. “Almost rather ye stayed on Deadweather, kept the place runnin’ ’stead o’ comin’ after us…”
“I’m sorry,” I said, half sarcastically. Even though I hadn’t actually gone looking for them, it was still irritating to hear him tell me I should have stayed home to watch the plantation instead.
At the same time, I got a little twinge in my gut at the thought of how he was going to react when I told him I’d sold most of the place.
Maybe lying was a good idea after all.
“’S awright.” He clapped me on the back again. “Good yer here.” He shook his head and sighed. “It’s a bloody mess, I’ll tell ye. Can’t make heads or tails of it.”
He gave me a little nudge and jerked his head toward the Moku with the torch.
“Take this feller. Spends half his time followin’ me round. Don’t speak a word. Couldn’t understand ’im if he did. And wot I can’t figure—is he s’posed to be servin’ me? Or guardin’ me?”
“How on earth did they make Venus queen?”
“Dunno wot she is, tell ye straight. Some ways, seems like she’s queen. Other ways…dunno. See fer yerself, I guess.”
We reached the end of the avenue and stepped into the main square of the city. The scope of it was breathtaking—it was easily three times as big as the palace courtyard in Pella Nonna. The left half was dominated by the Temple of the Sunset, its tapered sides as smooth as hammered steel except for a wide set of oversized steps leading from the middle of the square up to the cropped platform where a rectangular structure the size of a small palace perched atop the pyramid. At the top of the steps, a pair of fires burned in large urns on either side of the entrance to the rectangular palace.
Facing the temple on the opposite side of the square was another temple-like monument, this one much lower and flatter but almost as wide, with a similar set of steps that led up its base and fires burning in urns atop the steps.
“Wow,” I said.
“Yeh. It’s sumpin’, awright.”
We followed the Moku with the torch toward the steps at the base of the Temple of the Sunset. Looking out over the vast square, I saw a few Moku here and there, most of them in a hurry to get wherever they were going. But otherwise, the place was deserted.
“Mind yer tongue round yer sister,” Dad warned me. “Way they been puttin’ her on, it’s gone to her head. Best ye don’t get on the wrong side of her.”
We were at the foot of the temple now. The bottom step was nearly as high as my waist.
“Where is she?” I asked.
He tilted his chin skyward, nodding toward the palace atop the giant pyramid of stone that loomed above us.
“Straight up.”
QUEEN
The temple steps were almost too high to climb. To get up each one, I had to raise my knee practically to my chest, and by the time we were a third of the way to the top, my legs were shaking so badly that I had to stop and rest. A few minutes later, when I stopped a second time, I caught the Moku with the torch giving me a look of contempt.
“Sorry,” I said to Dad, because he was the only one of them I knew how to apologize to. “Haven’t eaten much lately. And I was sick the past couple days.”
“Pain in yer belly? Made ye puke?”
I nodded. “Did you have it, too?”
“We all did, at the start. Natives had us eat some plant, cleared it right up.”
“I think it’s something in the water.”
“Could be.”
When we reached the top, it was surprisingly cluttered. There were gnawed-over animal bones and cores of fruit strewn about, and sloppy piles of firewood were stacked on either side of the burning urns. At the corners of the platform were big Continental-style cannon on wheels. Their equipment—steel worms, thick cotton swabs on poles, crates that I guessed held cannonballs—was scattered around them.
The giant stone columns that fronted the palace were carved with figures. I recognized a lot of them from the map in my head—firebirds and snakes, fists and spears, faces and skulls.
As we passed between the urns, a pair of warriors with rifles stepped out of the shadows. They exchanged a few words with the Moku who carried the torch before they let us proceed through the thick columns on either side of the entrance.
We walked down a wide corridor, and the first thing I noticed was the smell—smoky and sickly sweet, like someone had doused a pile of burning wood with some kind of heavy perfume.
The corridor opened up into an enormous hall, so wide and high I couldn’t see the ceiling or the side walls through the nighttime gloom. It was lit by torch sconces along the central columns that ran down the length of the room. Food scraps littered the floor, flies buzzing around them, along with dirty plates and bowls, broken cups, little piles of fabric that I guessed were clothes—
“WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?”
There was no mistaking the snotty whine of my sister’s voice. But as I peered down the length of the room, all I could make out in the dim light was a handful of figures standing around a giant, lumpy pile of something.
“Takes time! Bit of a hike, innit?” Dad yelled back.
“I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR-EV-ER!”
Something began to stir in the middle of the giant lump. As a couple of the figures rushed toward the lump, what looked like a giant feathered plume rose up and began to sway. Even though the plume of feathers looked nearly weightless, it was making a terrible racket, all jangly and metallic-sounding.
As we moved closer, the first two people I made out in any detail were Moku warriors, dressed in loincloths and holding feather-trimmed spears as they stood at a sort of attention in front of the group. Beyond
them were three older Moku women in simple frocks. They stood together to one side of the giant lump, hands by their sides, like they were waiting for orders. Two more Moku women were making a fuss around the lump, trying to pull something up from just below the feathers—and I realized all that plumage was just an attachment, stuck to the top of a big heavy thing that was making all the noise.
The lump turned out to be pillows—a humongous pile of them, stacked around some kind of stone altar in the middle of the room.
And the big heavy thing was my sister, struggling to her feet under the weight of what looked like a hundred pounds of rattling jewelry, and crowned by a feathered headdress as tall as she was and twice as wide.
The headdress lurched to one side, threatening to topple over. One of the women helping Venus gave a little gasp and rescued it just in the nick of time. Venus elbowed her out of the way and staggered toward us, grunting from the effort it took to raise her bracelet-heavy right arm and hold out a hand covered with rings stacked all the way to the nails of every finger.
Her hand rattled as she wriggled it at me.
“Kiss it!” she demanded.
“Kiss it, boy,” Dad muttered out of the corner of his mouth.
I stepped forward and started to bend over to kiss her hand—or actually her jewelry, because I couldn’t find any hand under all that metal and stone.
“No, no! On your knees! Crimey, Egbert—I’m a queen!”
Her eyes bugged out as she said it, which was actually helpful, because until then I’d been having trouble locating them. She was wearing about six different colors of heavy makeup, plastered over every inch of her cheeks, mouth, and eyelids. Between the jewelry and the makeup and the enormous headdress, it was hard to figure out where the outfit ended and Venus began.
The “on your knees” business seemed a bit much, but it was pretty clear she was going to raise a fuss if I didn’t do it. So I got on my knees on the hard stone floor and kissed a hunk of rock on her index finger that I think might have been a diamond.
When I looked up at her, she was grinning from ear to ear, although it’s possible the smile was drawn on with makeup.
“Isn’t it amazing? I mean, can you believe it? I’m queen!” The headdress was fixed with a strap that ran under her chin, and the whole thing wobbled dangerously every time she opened her mouth.