Greenbeard (9781935259220)

by Bentley, Richard James

  “Indeed, Captain ... Sylvestre ... I can see that. I can also sense that you are going to discuss affairs of great importance. May I give you advice? In the land of my birth such matters were discussed with due ceremony, and that usually involved an exchange of information and compliments; ‘do your father’s feet still stand firm upon the earth? and does the sun still shine upon your seemingly-endless maize fields? and does your mighty heart still encompass the love of ten wives?’ That sort of thing. It’s all nonsense, of course, but it seemed to work. Perhaps we should colloquise for a while longer, enjoy your banyan day a little longer,” Blue Peter ate a shrimp and took a swallow of beer, “before plunging into matters profound and weighty.”

  “In England we are not so different,” said the Captain, helping himself to a sausage. “In fact, there’s a phrase; ‘less of the old how’s-yer-father’ meaning ‘stop trying to cozen me and get to the point.’ As pretty maids are often the ones being cozened it has taken on the secondary meaning of amatory congress; a young lad from the Parish of Bow might say ‘I’m a-goin’ upta the ol’ Bull and Bush for a bit o’ how’s-yer-father’, meaning he would be going to the pub to find a lady of easy virtue. You are right, though, and I take your point. What do you wish to talk about?”

  “Tell me about your boyhood, how you played cricket in sunlit carefree days.”

  “Cricket? Carefree sunlit days? I did indeed play cricket on the village green, up at school and up at Cambridge, too, and I do love that England dearly, it is true. To play a game of cricket, even to watch a game of cricket, to spend all of a lazy sunny summer day just watching cricket, that is a rare delight. Yet even in those happy memories there are dark shadows. I was packed off to Eton, and that damn’ school nearly did for me. A brutal place where one is either the bully or the victim, take your choice. Cricket at Eton was politics, too, not the simple joy of a game on the village green.”

  The Captain picked up a biscuit, examined it critically, then ate it.

  “My young boyhood was happy, mind you. My mother passed away when I was young, and I only remember her as a kind of a vision, but my nanny, Goosie, was the kindest and most good-humoured soul that ever walked the green earth. My father - ‘the Pater’, as they made us say at Eton - was a different creature altogether. The mean old bugger spent his entire life obsessing about his damn’ estates, so he had nothing to talk about except the price of corn and the villainy of the yokels, and what the grasping old skinflint was thinking every waking minute was how to tighten further the screws on his field-hands and tenants. The money, some of it, went to making me a lawyer, because he wanted a shyster he needn’t pay, so that he could make his neighbour’s lives more miserable without spending his own money to do it. Eton, Cambridge, the Inns of Court ... and a damn’ good lawyer I was, too! I could exonerate the guilty or convict the innocent, as required, and take my fat fee whether justice was served or not. Some cases, though gnawed at me, until it occurred to me that the fine people in their fine clothes were themselves no better than thieves, or indeed pirates. Worse, in fact, for a lusty freebooter wagers his own life, not the lives of others, and does his business honestly with the edge of his cutlass, not with secret whisperings in dark corners and dirty deals in back-rooms. It further occurred to me, after I had broken a cider-jar over my father’s head and been disinherited, that piracy may be just as morally corrupt as the practice of the Law, but it is certainly much more fun. So here I am.

  “We are pirates, Peter! The Free Brotherhood of the Coasts, for all its many faults, will take any buccaneer into its membership whether black, white, brown, yellow, red, or even,” he waggled his beard, “partially green. Even women! And all are equal! To be a pirate is to be more free, more democratical, than even those ancient Greek coves in Athens knew of. We take people’s money, and sometimes we have to kill them, but that’s a small price to pay for freedom. If you ever go to England, Peter, go as a pirate and be proud of it. They will either hang you at Tyburn or make you Equerry Of The King’s Chamberpot, it cannot be foretold which, but if you go as a would-be squire they will put you in a cage and charge gawpers a shilling to look at you, and half-a-crown to poke you with a stick.”

  “Sylvestre, you have crushed my dreams!” laughed Blue Peter. “Is there indeed a custodian of the royal pisspot?”

  “Indeed there is. He is called the Chamberlain of the Stool, if I recollect a’right. It is a position of great influence and power. I dare say the fellow doesn’t touch a po these days, that is merely the origin of the title. Such a fellow must have access to all the King’s private apartments and all of his private affairs, and so must be loyal and trustworthy.”

  Captain Greybagges rose to get another bottle of beer from the bucket, and stretched lazily, looking out to sea, unable to resist scanning the horizon. He settled back down again, searching around for his knife to open the beer.

  “Tell me of your boyhood, Peter, if you will.”

  Blue Peter took a swallow of beer, wiped his mouth and burped.

  “Where I was born there was little distinction between summer and winter. There was the season of the rains, but it was still hot then, so one couldn’t call it winter. Time was reckoned in lunar months, but I suppose I was about eight years old when I was given into slavery by my uncle, my mother’s elder brother. I was what you would call the heir apparent. My father was the chief - the sachem, if you will - of the tribe and I was his only son. My mother and my father died, one after the other, and, after a period of mourning of thirteen months, I was to be made chief. My uncle, who was acting chief, pro tempore, took me to the sacred grove alone, as was the custom, said the sacred words and cut my cheeks with these marks.” Blue Peter indicated the cicatrices on his face. “He rubbed ashes into them, then some fellows came along and he told me to go with them. I thought it was part of the ceremony, so I did.”

  He drank some beer.

  “Good Lord!” said the Captain. “Do you believe that wicked man killed your parents?”

  “I’m not sure. He may just have taken advantage of circumstance. He had a son the same age as myself, and alike to me in looks. I believe he may have cut his own son’s cheeks, but savagely, to disguise him, and passed him off as me. Those that detected the substitution would pretend they hadn’t, since my uncle had been chief for thirteen months and, presumably, had firmly seized the reins of command. I was young, of course, and my recollection is fragmentary, so these are mere suppositions.”

  “Why, then, did he cut your cheeks?” asked the Captain.

  “So that I was unsuspecting of betrayal, and distracted by the pain of the cuts, most likely. Perhaps he was also afraid of the Gods; he had thus done his duty by custom, and had not killed me, other men had then taken me away, and I had gone willingly, so what befell me subsequently would be their evil-doing, not his.”

  “Men, and women, will often lie, as it is the natural thing to do. I have often observed this, and not only as a brief in the courts, I assure you,” said Captain Greybagges. “Yet when a man begins to lie to himself each step he takes carries him further down the sloping path to Hell. You must loathe your uncle greatly.”

  “I do indeed, but that has taught me the futility of hatred. The forest grows quickly, trails and rivers change their course, villages move. I cannot even be sure which barracoon I was taken to, since they are all alike from inside a stockade of logs. There are no maps of the interior of the African continent, nor likely to be. Retracing my steps back to my homeland is impossible now; it is quite literally a lost kingdom. Strangely, when I was a slave I never met a single soul from my own land, or indeed any slave who even knew of my country, so I have not spoken my own tongue since, except to myself. I met some few who spoke similar languages, so that we could talk after a fashion, but never my own mother-tongue.”

  Blue Peter heaved himself up to get a bottle of beer. When he had made himself comfortable again against the tree, with a full glass in his hand, he continued.

 
; “I will not speak of the barracoon, or of the sea-crossing on the slave-ship, as they are foul memories. I was bought by a family in Virginny, who, because of my scars and my size, thought it a fine jest to make me a page, and dress me in a little jacket and knee-britches of pink silk. This was a lucky thing for me, as a house-nigger I was not treated too brutally, and I was encouraged to learn a fine clear English and even to read and write. The plantation owner’s younger brother taught me, and gave me some Latin and Greek, too, and some other learning. He was a drunk and a pederast, but I think he had a genuine affection for me. He never molested me, and my times learning under his often-bleary tutelage were some of the happiest I experienced as a slave. The family were great despisers of the English, thinking all Englishmen to be effete, pompous and sly, whilst counting themselves rugged pioneers, despite their life of luxury and idleness. I have few illusions about the English, Sylvestre, but if the likes of Master Chumbley and his vile wife hate them, then they are the fellows for me! The dislike of the English is becoming widespread in the colonies, and it will smoulder into flame one day, I feel sure. Not all Colonials are like the Chumbleys, of course. As you once said, ‘the Colonials can be rare plucked-uns when they be a-riled-up’, and indeed they can be, but in such a circumstance the Chumbleys would be hiding under their beds a-shivering and a-praying, not getting a-riled-up, the sanctimonious hypocritical sods.

  “When I was fourteen I punched the son of the family on the nose, which he richly deserved, and they flogged me and then put me to work in the fields like a beast of burden. To my small surprise the other slaves despised me as a house-nigger, so I had to punch a few of them, too, and got flogged again for damaging the livestock. The years in the fields put muscle on me, so, after the last flogging, I was able to pull the ring-bolt from the wall and knock the overseer unconscious when he came a-calling. I would have dearly loved to have killed him, but that would have led to a larger hue-and-cry, so I took his keys and chained him up with my shackles and gagged him with his own socks. I went to free the other slaves but only one of them was game, a skinny old fellow of the Kroo tribe. The Kroo boast that they’ve never been slaves or owned slaves, so he had a point to make, I suppose. Strangely, the Chumbley’s daughter, a skinny little madam who was always spying upon me, saw me and the Krooman sneaking away, but she only grinned and put her finger to her lips, childishly thinking us upon a mere lark, I suppose. We made our way to the Great Dismal Swamp and joined some other escaped slaves, cimarroons, who were living there. It was nearly as damn’ dismal as slavery, that swamp, so I took off for New Amsterdam. The few glimpses I’d gotten of the ocean on the slave-ship had intrigued me, so I signed on as a sailor. After a couple of voyages before-the-mast, I met Bulbous Bill Bucephalus in a tavern in New Orleans, he was sailing with Jean Lafitte back then, and I became a pirate. So here I am.”

  “That is an extraordinary tale, Peter,” said Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges, “I understand better your detestation of the slave-owners of Virginny. A little suit of pink silk! That is almost satanic in its cruelty!”

  Blue Peter threw an apple core at him, and they both laughed, then lay against the trees in silence for a while, gazing at the sea and sipping their glasses of beer.

  “It has been truly excellent to sprawl here, eating, drinking and yarning with you on my banyan day,” said the Captain at last, “but I fear I must now darken the occasion with serious talk. As the Bard wrote ‘I now unclasp a secret book, and, to your quick-conceiving discontent, read you matter deep and dangerous’, and it is indeed deep and dangerous, what I have to say, so harken to me now!”

  And Blue Peter turned to him, and listened.

  CHAPTER THE FIFTH,

  or The Captain Unclasps a Secret.

  “Before I start my grim tale I must explain a couple of things,” said Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges, “or you will be confused.”

  He scratched his belly and drank some beer.

  “In your readings, Peter, you may have heard of the theory of Nicolaus Copernicus.”

  “From his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, or ‘On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres’,” said Blue Peter, “in which he coyly suggested that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe.”

  “Indeed, and he was right, and that cove Newton, whom I saw at Cambridge but never spoke to, put the whole thing square by identifying gravity - the force that makes the apple fall and the cannonball curve in its flight - with the force which holds the moons and planets on their courses,” said the Captain. “Furthermore, you may have heard of the ideas of the Italian monk Giordano Bruno.”

  “I was thinking of him only this morning, and how I was not unduly surprised that the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition tied him to a stake and burned him, by way of a critical appraisal of his work.”

  “He was right,” said the Captain.

  “What? That the stars of the welkin are suns alike to our own sun?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that planets may orbit them as our Earth orbits the sun?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that creatures may inhabit those distant planets?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that those creatures may be intelligent aware beings, such as we are?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ay caramba! Be you serious? You seem very certain, how can you be sure of that?”

  “Because, Peter, I have met some of them,” said Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges.

  Blue Peter was silent for some time, then he drained his glass of beer in one long swallow. The Captain stood up and looked in the sailcloth bucket.

  “The last two beers,” he said, handing Blue Peter a bottle. He settled his back against the tree-trunk again. “Now you are thinking that I am bereft of my wits, or else engaged in some kind of egregious spoof, or leg-pull. I am neither insane nor jesting, I assure you. You can see why I have kept this to myself for nearly a year.”

  Blue Peter poured his beer, a thoughtful expression on his face.

  “Pray continue, Sylvestre. I shall reserve judgement for the meantime, although this tale is becoming a little rich to easily swallow.”

  “When I rowed around the point into Nombre Dios Bay a year ago, dressed all in black, with my face blackened, in a black boat with muffled oars, I believed myself invisible. I was not. As far as those extramundane creatures were concerned I might just as well have been in a Venetian carnival-gondola, strung with coloured paper lanterns, playing a bugle. They have a device to see in the dark. It sees heat instead of light, and our bodies are always warm. So they caught me, Peter, and I was enslaved.

  “The brujo who spoke to Bill’s pal spoke the truth; it was not the Spanish plate fleet, but the Martian saucer fleet. The extramundanes have ships which sail the empty voids between the stars as we sail our ships upon the oceans. They are called ‘saucers’ because they resemble a saucer if seen from below as they fly by in the air. They do not come from Mars - which is a bleak cold lifeless place of nothing but empty deserts, the air too thin to breathe - but they do use it as a base, as we use the island of Recailles. Thus the Martian saucer fleet.”

  “What do they look like, these extramundane creatures?” said Blue Peter slowly.

  “I did not clap eyes upon the Glaroon at all - it was he who had captured me - He cannot breathe our air, and so resides mostly in a sealed chamber filled with the noxious air of his own home-world. His minions serve him and do his bidding, some human slaves such as I became, some extramundanes of various sorts, some of them slaves, too. One sort are small grey men with slanting black eyes. Another kind is alike to a toad-man, and very strong but not very clever. Another is alike to a lizard with six limbs; the front two being arms, the rearmost legs and the middle two somewhat in between. They are excellent mechanics, those lizard things, as they can work on an engine with four hands, sitting back on their rear legs and their tail. Their speech sounds like the chirm of birdsong, but some of them can mimic
our tongues well enough to converse. They are congenial company, too, unlike the little grey buggers, who are so dreich that they could make a conventicle of Methodies seem like a beano in a bawdy-house.”

  “Congenial company, Sylvestre? Six-legged lizards congenial company? You stretch my credulity too far!”

  “I only speak the truth. They are fond of an alcoholic drink, particularly beer; as spirits are too strong for their heads, unless watered. They enjoy a good yarn, well-told. They like to dance and cavort, although their music sounds strange to our ears. They do love a game of cards and are great gamblers. And great cheats, too! With four arms it is almost too easy for them to finesse a deck, d’you see? Actually, they are more alike to chameleons. They cannot change colour - they are a shade of greeny-blue - but they have those woogly eyes that can point in different directions, if you know what I mean.”

  The Captain demonstrated ‘woogly eyes’ by putting fingers in front of his eyes and waggling them around. Blue Peter got to his feet, walked slowly down to the beach, then ran up and down on the sand, shouting ‘arrgh!’ occasionally. He walked back to the knoll and sat down again against the tree.

  “There is no more beer,” said the Captain, “but here is rum.” He poured a large shot into Blue Peter’s glass. Blue Peter took a swallow, and grimaced.

  “Captain, if the green of your beard did not tell me something strange had happened to you,” he said, “I would have already shot you for trying to gull me with such a ludicrous account. I shall call you ‘Captain’ now as your banyan day must be over; if you have gone mad that is serious; if you speak truly that is surely even worse. Pray continue, but perhaps tell me how it is that you were away from the barky for three hours, yet seem to have been away for much longer, having had the time to socialise with six-legged reptiles?”

  “Well, I said that I must explain a couple of things, but I got distracted,” said the Captain. “The second thing is that time and distance are the same. Some extramundanes, such as the Glaroon, have found the way to travel in the void, in space, but that means also travelling in time, so they have mastered travel both in distance and time. From your point of view I was away for three hours, but from my point of view I was away for about three years. Don’t ask me to explain it, as it is not yet completely clear to me, but it has to do with the speed of light not being infinite. It is very quick, but not instantaneous, and that has consequences, apparently. Time is often a fractured mirror, reflecting a bizarre image of reality.”