Greenbeard (9781935259220)

by Bentley, Richard James

  “My head hurts, Sylvestre,” said Blue Peter, “and this Madeira isn’t helping. Have you any brandy?”

  Captain Greybagges rose from his armchair, put another log on the fire and rummaged through a chest. He came back with a bottle of brandy, and poured two glasses.

  “Your head will only hurt, Peter, if you try and understand it, for common sense does not help very much. Anyways, the effect of it is that the present is slightly plastic or elastic. Given that time and distance are the same thing, too, it is possible to tinker about with time to some extent. The extramundanes, or at least the influential ones like the Glaroon, have discovered how to do this. The lizard people and the little grey buggers have not, so they are as much their victims as us. There are constraints on messing about with time, though. If one went back one hundred years in time - which is quite possible - and murdered one’s grandsire, then there would be no consequences when one returned to the present, one would only have created a dead-end time-path, and that would heal itself and disappear. By the same token, if one went a week into the future, found the result of a horse-race and came back to the present and wagered on it then one would surely lose, because one would only have seen a possible future, one of many.”

  “Then there is little point in moving through time, surely?”

  “Not entirely. It is still possible to cheat a little bit, if one goes with the natural fall of events. For example, I myself was away on Mars for about three years, but I travelled back in time to the very point at which I left. This was a breach of the laws of time, so to speak, but me being displaced from my normal time-line was a bigger one, so I continue with my existence here and the closed loop in the timeline which I took when I was abducted to Mars is what shall wither away from history, or it would except that it is kept open by my beard, which is in contact with the Glaroon’s library.”

  “I’m not sure I follow that,” Blue Peter sipped brandy.

  “Nobody could. As I say, common sense is inadequate to deal with these matters. I will give you another example.” Captain Greybagges handed him a piece of coal. “Note that this lump of sea-coal has the impression of a leaf in it, where it has been split.”

  “I see it quite clearly.”

  “The leaf is several tens of millions of years old, yet it remains recognisable, for not much has happened to disturb it. If one were to travel back in time and collect a leaf and bring it to the present then it would be only slightly wilted because it would be travelling in the rough direction of its own time-line, much as that more-decayed leaf has done, and so not much harm would be done by that. It would not, of itself, create an anachronistic problem.”

  “Tens of millions of years?”

  “Yes. The world is much older than is currently assumed.”

  “Not an anachronism?”

  “Not really. Other leaves have made the journey, you have one in your hand, so what odds does it make if another one does? If one was to take something back in time, then there could be a huge consequence, even if the something was only as insubstantial as a mere idea. Take the secret of gunpowder back in time and give it to the ancient city of Carthage, the Romans lose the Punic wars and the whole of history would be different from then on. It’s too much disruption, so it can’t happen and won’t happen. I travelled back three years, but it was a small anachronism as it restored a timeline, which is a good thing, and it was only three years so the past wasn’t properly hardened, and so it did happen, and so here I am.”

  “How does this affect your plans?”

  “Now we get down to it, Peter. The Glaroon, having mastered the laws of time, can travel back and bring things forward, and so it does. Inanimate things are best – objects of marble and bronze, jewellery of diamonds and gold – they can be stolen from the past with ease because they could have been lost or buried and then found again, so no problem with them arriving in the present. The Glaroon, as you may imagine, has a large collection of such things stolen from the past, a collection worth more than all the money in the world’s coffers, bank-vaults, exchequers and treasuries put together. Is that not a cheery thought, shipmate? We go to plunder the biggest treasure of all!”

  “Um, how do you plan to get to Mars?”

  “You will see! But there are other things that the Glaroon steals from the past, thefts that are less easy to forgive, for they are thefts of people, men and women like ourselves. We not only go to take a vast fortune, but also to free the Glaroon’s slaves, to liberate his menagerie of humanity. That should make you proud and glad, Peter! Mr Benjamin too, I should think.”

  “People stolen from the past, you say?” Blue Peter gulped brandy.

  “Well, not in person. The principle of minimum disruption still applies, and people are more fragile than bronze statues. The Glaroon instead steals a fragment of a man or a woman – a flake of skin, a hair, even a drop of saliva, I believe – brings it to the present and by some process can recreate the whole corpus and animate it. That of itself it not a particularly wicked thing to do, but the copied people – the artificial identical twins, if you will – do not then have the freedom to make their own time-line, but are kept as slaves in durance vile. Worse than that, their real memories are erased and replaced with artificial memories, so that the Glaroon may converse with Ghenghis Khan if he so wishes. I think the Glaroon does it to ease his boredom, the crushing ennui resulting from the millenia of its unmitigated selfishness. The wretched slave is not commander of his own destiny and is not even master of his own soul. Poor Ghenghis! How captivity grates upon his noble warrior’s spirit, even though it is not truly his! Yet he is a cheerful fellow, and witty. I shall be pleased to see him again!”

  Blue Peter was silent for some moments.

  “This Glaroon thing, it has many people such as Ghenghis Kahn?”

  “Why, yes! People from the recent past and from antiquity, even from prehistory. There was a fellow there who had supposedly invented the wheel. He was a glum cove, but then the Glaroon would force him to make wheels all the time, copies of his original wheel, so that he could give them as amusing gifts to other influential extramundanes, and that must have been galling. The poor fellow would often curse the day he thought of making a wheel-barrow, and bewail the fact that the mere desire to ease his aching back when taking his melons to market should have caused him such torment. Yet if that tormented slave should end his own life, well, then – abracadabra! – the Glaroon would just make another copy of the poor fellow and carry on. It must be stopped, you see. Also, all the going into the past and shifting things forward does have a cumulative effect, so the history of these regions is currently a little scrambled-up, with broken and stretched timelines all over the place. There are things happening now that should not happen for years yet, and things that should have happened which haven’t. Sooner or later it will mend itself, of course, but that won’t be a good thing, not unless the Glaroon has been stopped by then and some repairs made to the time-fabric so that the unravellings and the re-ravellings end up creating a past that’s much like it ought to have been. The Glaroon is just amusing himself at the expense of the whole human race – and the races of the lizard people and the little grey buggers, too – and at the expense of the past, which is our past and which should not be used as a play-thing for such as the Glaroon to diddle with ...” Captain Greybagges swallowed some brandy. “… the bastard. It is personal, too. I told you that, Peter.”

  “What are these creatures, creatures of the the Glaroon’s breed? Where do they come from?”

  “Creatures such as the Glaroon call themselves the Great Old Ones, or the Great Ancient Ones, but I think that’s just pure conceit, alike to a French count who traces his ancestry back to Jesus’s cousin Freddy by way of Alaric the Goth. There’s no doubt that they are old, very old, but they are still just creatures. It is said that the great turtles can live for centuries, but they are still just turtles, are they not? I don’t know much about the Old Ones, really. I don’t know whe
re they hale from. I don’t know how they reproduce, or if they have emotions as we do. I don’t know if they are all the same breed, distantly related or all entirely different, being only similar in their great age. I don’t know if they are allied with each other, although I do suspect that they are like the Italian princes of old who would smile courteously while plotting each other’s doom, the kind of sly fellows for whom Machiavelli wrote his Il Principe, that vade mecum of treason and betrayal. I have never seen the Glaroon, never actually clapped eyes on it, but I have seen some of the other ones. They are pretty ugly and weird for the most part, although I did find a very few of them congenial. Great Cthulu was always pleasant to me, and his daughter Lulu has a mischievious impish sense of humour that lightened some moments of my imprisonment.”

  “Are you not afraid that attacking the Glaroon may earn you the emnity of the others?”

  “I must risk that, but I think that they will be secretly amused if I succeed, much as a tyrannical potentate might be delighted by another such being scragged by his peasants, as indeed Louis was mightily pleased when the father of the present King Charles was beheaded, despite his pompous protestations to the contrary.”

  “Politics would seem to be the same everywhere, even on faraway worlds. I am not sure if that is a very depressing thought or a richly amusing one.” Blue Peter shook his head sadly, then drained his brandy.

  A pirate knocked on the door, opened it against the dragging rug, and brought them mugs of hot cocoa, which they laced with brandy as a nightcap.

  The next morning Blue Peter Ceshwayoo rose early, as was his custom, and shaved and dressed by the light of a candle in the pre-dawn darkness and cold. In London he had purchased long woollen underwear, and he blessed his foresight. He loathed the late rising of the sun in these northern latitudes, but found his pocket-watch oddly reassuring as he wound it and stowed it in his waistcoat pocket; it was light and warm somewhere, the watch proved that, just not here. He ate a bowl of oatmeal burgoo and drank a cup of black coffee in the kitchen, in the hope that it would ease his slight hangover, and went on another tour of the boatyard, wrapped in a boat-cloak against the unceasing rain.

  He found Mr Benjamin in his copper-foundry, red-eyed but happy. The castings he had poured the previous afternoon were solidified, he had been breaking open the moulds at intervals throughout the night to obtain knowledge of the cooling, and was satisfied, he said, clambering out of the smoking casting-pit, peering through his pince-nez spectacles as he scribbled in a note-book. Now he was ready to cast some proper pieces, not test-specimens, and he was quietly eager.

  “Go and get some sleep, Frank,” Blue Peter said kindly. “Your men can finish up here.”

  Copper ingots were stacked in the foundry ready for the crucible, and laid on the stone floor against the wall were dozens of rods of copper the thickness of a pencil and four paces long, tied together in bundles with split-withies. When did they come? he thought. No wonder we have burglars What are they for? The foundry was wonderfully warm, but Blue Peter continued his tour in the dark and the cold rain.

  At the edge of the dry-dock pit he stopped and watched the work on the Ark de Triomphe. Four pirates, supervised by Israel Hands, were carrying a long forged-iron plate into the stripped shell of the hull by the light of oil-lamps. All rotten timbers – and a wooden ship always has some – had been cut out and new timber scarfed-in, and the whole hull re-caulked. Now these long plates were being bolted to sandwich the keel-timbers and create an iron spine. Blue Peter had no idea why.

  He paced on in the darkness, considering the implications of fornication and heaps of copper on his anti-pilfering strategies. The sky would not even begin to lighten until the repeater-watch snug in his pocket struck nine, but then he should have breakfast in the warm parlour. A Liver bird somewhere in the dark went ‘awk!’

  During the winter months the work continued on the Ark de Triomphe. The iron backbone was completed and curved iron members and angled plates were added to lock it to the wooden ribs of the hull. Three flat iron plates were bolted like tables onto the backbone deep inside the hull; one for’ard, one aft and a larger one in the middle. The outside of the wooden hull was covered in tarred canvas then sheathed in a gleaming jacket of thin copper sheet nailed to the planks with copper nails. The thin copper rods in the foundry were bent into wiggled shapes and brazed together with sleeved junctions, the sleeves cast by Mr Benjamin in his foundry. The fitting of the copper rods into the hull recesses was brutally difficult work. In some places the rods had to be threaded through restrictions, each foot of the rod being bent to pass then straightened to continue - bend-and-straighten, bend-and-straighten - and only those with the most powerful hands and arms could do it, so Blue Peter, Bulbous Bill and Loomin’ Len and his bully-boys were recruited to assist in the work. Blue Peter had painful memories of struggling with the unwilling rods, and of taking a break, massaging his aching fingers with tears in his eyes, then returning below decks to do another stint. The work was made more difficult as the rods were wrapped in three layers of tarred linen ribbon and tight-bound with hemp cord, so too much force or abrasion and the covering would tear and everything must start again. The strong-arm crew cursed those copper rods, especially as none of them knew what they were for, and yet Captain Greybagges and Mr Benjamin were very particular as to how they should be laid out and connected.

  In the end it was done, but while it was ongoing Blue Peter and Bulbous Bill had lost focus on discipline in the crew, and there was a tragic consequence. Two young pirates had argued over a local girl, and one had stabbed the other. At a drumhead court, convened according to the strict rules of the Free Brotherhood o’ the Coasts, the guilty pirate had nearly been sentenced to hang, but doubts remained over whether he had intended to kill his friend and so he was sentenced to be expelled and cast ashore. He went from the boatyard white-faced after being quietly warned by Captain Greybagges of the consequences of unguarded speech. The crew felt that being marooned for ever in Liver Pool would be punishment enough.

  The ‘tubs’ came and went, delivering boxes and crates of various sizes, and other mysterious objects, including a number of what appeared to be large bottles made of gun-bronze. Blue Peter had given up trying to make sense of it. Even the Captain and Mr Benjamin were overwhelmed at times, Mr Benjamin wishing plaintively for an apparatus to duplicate drawings. No such thing existed, but several local girls and women were brought in to act as secretaries and copyists. For once the pirates’ romantic urges proved beneficial, for the former apprentice-boys had been discreetly industrious and very ingenious in finding young women who could read and write, disguising their carnal intentions as yearnings for cultured conversation, and these social contacts had proved very useful.

  One morning trenches were dug to the Mersey to flood the pit. As the water rose the hull of the Ark de Triomphe creaked histrionically, until it finally floated free and swam again. The baulks of timber of the cradle bobbed up and were snagged with long boat-hooks and pulled to the sides, lest the turbulent currents flooding into the pit hurl them against the bright copper sides of the reborn ship. When the level in the pit reached that of the river the wedges were knocked out of the wooden wall at the end until it floated free and was pulled away, the remaining earth-banks collapsing into the water. The Ark de Triomphe was drawn out of the now-flooded dry-dock by the whaler, the bully-boys at the oars red-faced with exertion despite assistance from ropes ashore. The Ark de Triomphe’s hull, light-loaded and high in the water, bobbed and danced like a mettlesome horse being led from its stall, but it was moored at the jetty before the tide turned to the ebb, to everyone’s relief. By a pleasant coincidence the endless rain eased and a watery sun appeared through the clouds as the last of the mooring hawsers, the quarter-steady, was looped around its bollard. Captain Greybagges made a short but stirring speech from the quarterdeck rail and ordered a double ration of rum, the pirate crew gave three cheers, and some chaffering cat-calls, and then
set to work again.

  Over the next weeks the pirates worked steadily to refit the frigate. The iron skeleton inside the hull had added weight, but ballast was still needed. Lead ingots were used instead of rocks. The crew were amazed and impressed by the sheer profligacy of this; even the king’s own flagship did not have a ballast of pig-lead! The ancient sheer-hulk was warped over and the Ark de Triomphe’s masts re-stepped. The tops and cross-yards were swayed up and the frigate re-rigged with new cables, ropes, stays, halliards and rat-lines. The pirates swarmed over the upperworks singing pulley-hauly shanties and joyfully shouting to each other as the Ark de Triomphe slowly took its sea-going shape once again.

  Blue Peter watched her take shape, frequently pausing on his rounds just to observe her being clothed, put in harness for war. Her shape to a yokel landsman’s eyes merely meant that she was a ship, yet to a sailor’s eyes she was a predator, a predator as lairy as a wolf, but to a pirate’s eyes she was lovely. Her hull was long and lean and low, the foredeck and the quarterdeck barely shoulder-height above the waist-deck – much, much, lower than a frigate of the Royal Navy - the easier to board another boat from, the true mark of a pirate-ship. Yet after the rebuild the low deck was no longer an obvious modification, the decks hacked level more-or-less in haste. Now she looked as though she had been built that way from the keel up, and, more than that, she was a pirate-ship made for piracy with no constraint of expense, and she looked it. Blue Peter was minded of a leopardess. She had always had a wiggle of her stern when tacking, just like the twitch of that animal’s hindquarters when she jinked to cut off her prey, and now that little quirk seemed so fitting that it was eerie. The Ark de Triomphe was a dangerous lady, a femme fatale.