Blaggard's Moon

by George Bryan Polivka

  Damrick looked at the round hole in the canvas above him, saw it was blackened around the edges. A few red embers still struggled to catch the canvas. He had heard stories about red-hot cannonballs, how they’d pass through a man and leave him dead with a clean hole and no blood. He raised his own long rifle, sighted down the barrel at the approaching ship. He saw a thin plume of smoke rising from her afterdeck. That would be the furnace in which her crew heated the shot.

  “Savage Grace,” Damrick read aloud the words painted in faded, flaking gold leaf across the stern of the pirate vessel. Damrick’s dark eyes scanned his adversary as his mind turned.

  “Pipe down,” his lieutenant ordered. This was Hale Starpus, a broad man with a big brow, a strong belly that rode high on his torso, thick arms and legs, and a wild tangle of sideburns that looked as though they had never been trimmed. “Ready your muskets and fire on my signal.” Then after a pause he said, “That’s Sharkbit Sutter’s ship, lads.”

  “Sharkbit!” The pirates listening to Ham’s tale in the forecastle shouted out their delight. “Sharkbit Sutter, the madman!”

  “Aye, the very one,” Ham confirmed. “He was new to the world’s oceans, and his reputation was just beginning. But that name already struck fear into simple hearts whenever it was uttered.”

  “Is it true he used to be a priest?” one of the sailors asked Ham.

  “Nah,” Sleeve groused. “He was a pirate from birth. That was just a lie.”

  “Oh, but it wasn’t, Mr. Sleeve,” Ham countered. “I know men who know, men who knew men who knew our Sharkbit well, so rest assured it’s true. A priest he was, until one night he was praying at a ship’s rail in a storm during a missionary voyage, and was washed overboard. Left behind, he survived…but only to be attacked by sharks and swallowed whole by one of them, a huge and ancient beast. So he found himself alive in its belly. But unlike the repentant Jonah, this priest went mad and fought against his fate, ripping in a blind fury through the thing’s flesh. He killed it from within, and surfaced without a scratch. Still punching and flailing, he raged at the other sharks until they abandoned him as just too much trouble. When his shipmates hauled him from the water, there was a dark wildness to him, a danger that ran deep into his soul. He stripped off his robes and never prayed another prayer.”

  The forecastle deck was silent, pondering. “But let’s continue our tale,” Ham finally suggested.

  The pirates grunted their agreement.

  The hammers of eight long-range muskets cocked back, and all bores aimed down line from high on the foremast fighting top.

  “Ye know why they call ’im Sharkbit, don’t ye, when not one shark ever bit ’im?” Lye asked. Damrick had heard, but said nothing. “It’s ’cause he cut his way out of that shark’s belly usin’ naught but his own teeth.”

  Damrick was no coward, but he felt sweat on his gunstock. He noticed that his own knuckles, where he gripped his rifle, were bloodless. White knuckles. In the back of his mind he acknowledged that this meant fear. He’d never before considered that the phrase might be literal.

  Another flash and a hot orange blur flew from the Grace, this one below Damrick and the fighting top, this one on target. It crashed through the hull at the bulkhead, just below the quarterdeck, amidships. Sailors on deck streamed down through doorways, headed to the ship’s belly with buckets. They were followed quickly by the ship’s carpenter, looking like an ironmonger in his heavy gloves, carrying huge tongs, the surgeon sent to remove a deadly foreign object from deep within his patient’s wooden flesh.

  Suddenly, scores of lead balls whistled through the air or smacked into nearby masts and spars. Puffs of smoke and hard cracks, pistol fire mostly, erupted from the Grace’s stern. The men instinctively lowered their heads and pulled in their shoulders to avoid the barrage.

  Lye Mogene cursed, then shook his right hand as though he’d been stung.

  “You hit, sailor?” their lieutenant asked.

  “Nah.” He settled his cheek back into his gun stock. But Damrick saw blood seeping through Lye’s sleeve, just above the wrist.

  “Ready and steady,” came the order. Intermittent pistol and musket fire whistled and pattered, pinging all around them.

  Damrick found and sighted on a ragged-haired pirate who stood on the weather deck of the Grace. He waited for the rifle to steady itself. Accounting for the rhythm of his own ship’s rise and fall on these small waves was easy enough; he could feel it all, through his right knee, his left foot, his whole body. But taking the measure of the opposing ship’s movement, that was the art. That was the skill at which Damrick had labored, through three years of practice in drills and maneuvers. He knew the moment would come, if he would wait, and watch, and relax, and let his eyes lock on the target while his mind and body made their own peace with the seas.

  And then it came. Suddenly he no longer sensed the movement of the Grace; he saw his sights lock down, stopping dead on target, as though his rifle knew its business and needed him not at all. All else in the world moved, everything but his rifle sight and one ragged villain.

  “Fire at will!” came the cry from below.

  “Fire when ready,” grumbled Lieutenant Starpus. He knelt to Damrick’s left, Hilly Manders between them.

  Damrick eased the trigger back. When the hammer hit the flint, the powder breathed out a menacing hiss. And then it exploded in anger, propelling its missile in a roar of fire and smoke.

  The ragged pirate’s head jerked backward, his long hair flipping up. And he was gone.

  There could have been no other outcome, and Damrick nodded at the simplicity of that fact. He had a new powder charge in his hands and down the smoking gun barrel without thinking, without willing it, and then he had the shot packet, wad and patch and ball, rammed home and ready. Cannon thundered below him.

  Damrick found his second target quickly, and his rifle sight settled almost instantly. Another squeeze of the trigger, another pirate down. Pirates, he thought dismissively. This is why they run.

  Then the marine to Damrick’s left jerked suddenly and dropped his rifle. His hands quivered before him as he reached out, fingers clawing the air as though searching for a wall in the darkness. He moaned once in dismay, hardly more than a whimper, and then tumbled forward off the fighting top. His safety line jerked taut with a sound like the plucked string of a bass fiddle.

  “Fire on, sailor,” the lieutenant ordered.

  Eyes wide, Damrick nodded, reloaded. Hilly Manders, was all he could think. That’s Hilly Manders, shot dead. And then that thought turned to hot anger. A good man shot dead by worthless cutthroats. Damrick took aim at the first thing moving and fired, but missed. He took a deep breath and choked on black powder smoke. Now amid the crack of pistols, the roar of muskets, and the boom of cannon he heard for the first time cries of men in pain, the death throes of comrades below him. Had this madness just now descended, or had he somehow, until now, ignored it? He calmed himself and reloaded. His hands shook as he replaced the ramrod.

  Scanning for a target, he saw one of the Grace’s stern windows drift open, gently, as though blown in the wind. He rammed the packet home, raised his rifle, searching inside the darkness behind that open frame. He saw a shape, perhaps a face, hardly visible, rimmed in darkness. As he aimed, the face moved suddenly into the light. And then it looked at him. Damrick froze. He saw wild eyes. Not wild in the way of the lunatics who lurk on street corners in Mann, reciting incoherent complaints against the world, but wild like the feral dog he’d shot once in the woods as a boy. Wild like a growling wolf. And he saw the man’s teeth in the growl.

  Damrick’s finger squeezed the trigger, and the musket exploded.

  A hunk of wood blasted away beside the iron frame, and glass flew. But the face was still there, teeth still visible. Damrick wasn’t sure if the look had changed or if he had imagined it, but he was quite sure now that this was no growl. Damrick was being mocked.

  Moving quickly, wanting this
prize, he rammed another packet home and raised his musket.

  But the face was gone.

  He moved his sights around the stern of the ship, the rails, every window. Nothing. And then he settled in on another target. But before he could fire, a dark figure in a hooded cloak appeared on the weather deck, the highest point astern. Damrick aimed, and waited. His sight drifted down from the man’s bleeding face and stopped dead, covering his heart. A shark’s tooth hung there, just where a priest would wear a cross. As Damrick’s finger squeezed down on the trigger, the man raised an arm, and in his hand was a white bit of cloth. No more than a handkerchief. But it was white, and he waved it.

  Damrick froze, uncertain.

  “Cease fire! Cease fire!” came the call from below.

  “Hold your fire, men,” Lieutenant Starpus repeated, closer by.

  Damrick did hold his fire, but he also held his aim. He could see now that the man did not wear a cloak, but rather a long black riding coat, the kind cut in the back all the way up to the belt so that both a man’s legs could be covered while astride a horse. It boasted a hood that its owner wore up, loose around his face, keeping him in shadow.

  “Do you surrender?” the bosun called, following the captain’s orders.

  “Aye, on condition!” shouted the man in the hood. His voice was hoarse, and ragged.

  “Identify yourself!” the bosun shouted back.

  “Why, I thought you knew!” came the gravel-throated answer. “I’m the worst seafaring captain of the sorriest ship ever to sail these dismal seas! And I have under me the least disciplined lot of savages ever called a crew!” His pirates grunted out in unison, a sound of agreement and dark joy, in a cadence that would have seemed rehearsed had it been at all less brutal. As it was, it sounded like a single snort of derisive laughter.

  Lye couldn’t contain himself. “And they’re all plenty proud of it, seems like,” he muttered. Then he spat on the floorboards at his feet.

  “Quiet!” the lieutenant ordered him. “Ready and steady.”

  “Are you the one they call Sharkbit?” the bosun called.

  “Aye, ever since that brute ate me and I gave it reason to repent!” His men now laughed.

  “What are your conditions?”

  “Parley! A simple parley with your captain.”

  “And then surrender?”

  The grin again, and a right hand raised in a gesture that looked to Damrick like the mockery of a solemn vow, “As God is my judge!”

  Rumbles and mutterings could be heard from below, on the Defender’s deck.

  Now it was the lieutenant who couldn’t contain himself. “God’ll be his judge, soon enough.”

  “Not soon enough for me,” Lye answered.

  “Terms accepted!” shouted the bosun. “Prepare to be boarded!”

  The man in the hood bowed, then made a sweeping gesture. “Welcome, honored guests!” And he disappeared from the deck.

  Damrick shifted his position, trying to look over the lip of the fighting top to see what had become of his companion.

  “Steady, now,” the lieutenant reminded.

  “Permission to…” Damrick started. He glanced at the taut line beside him. “Corporal Manders, sir.” His words did not form a question, but his tone did.

  “You and Ensign Mogene, then,” the lieutenant granted with a nod. Damrick quickly laid down his rifle, and he and Lye hauled Hilly Manders’ lifeless body back up onto the fighting top.

  “It wasn’t two hours later that the Defender sailed away,” Ham offered next, in the tone of a conclusion. “She left the Savage Grace behind to repair her broken rudder and refit elseways as best as she could. Her rear was shot all to pieces, but only one or two holes needed to be patched at the waterline. So Damrick Fellows, Lye Mogene, and that entire crew of fine, fighting marines watched the ragged pirate’s ship shrink away behind. They were mortified, gents. They were aghast. For Sharkbit had been let go.”

  “Pirate’s parley!” shouted one of the sailors who had been listening in rapt attention to Ham’s account. The other men laughed aloud and hooted. The men had wanted to hear a fight, and they had heard one. While it was good as far as it went, it was lopsided, and it did not lop in their preferred direction. The sudden escape of Sharkbit Sutter was therefore a particularly agreeable turn.

  “Aye, it was a pirate’s parley,” Ham affirmed. “But not like you boys may be thinking.”

  “What’s a pirate’s parley?” asked Dallis Trum.

  “You tell him,” Ham suggested to the old sailor who had first called out the words.

  “Not me. I ain’t good for no stories.” The sailor’s neck turned as red as the bandana tied around it.

  “I’ll tell ’im,” Spinner Sleeve said in a voice cold enough to douse a cookstove.

  After a pause, Ham said, “Well, have at it, Mr. Sleeve.”

  The gaunt man spoke to the darkness above him as he lay still in his hammock. “Pirate captains ain’t like regular folks, boy. They have different rules. You parley with a pirate, you parley with death.”

  There was a somber silence.

  “Well, that’s a fine bit a’ storytelling, Mr. Sleeve, and I thank ye.” Ham’s voice was full of mirth, and the men laughed, both in relief and approval. “But our Captain Sharkbit Sutter did not kill, nor did he even threaten the brave naval captain. Rather, he used a bit a’ guffin’, which had been worked up a while earlier to prepare for just such a strait. It was no more than a rolled piece of parchment that did the trick.”

  “A letter from the king?” asked a sailor.

  “That’s been heard about before,” another suggested.

  “Aye it has,” Ham acceded, “for the king has had some dealings in the past with those of the pirate persuasion. So it is said. But nay…it were no letter from the crown, though it was sealed by the governor to prove the truth of its verity. This seal was broken before the eyes of both captains, right there on Sharkbit’s main deck, and there both saw together that the parchment within had been signed and pressed with yet another seal—the seal of a man all of you shall hear much more about soon enough. A man with dealings far and wide, and no lack of plans and schemes by which to line his own pockets. A man who would happily invite a fine-looking young woman and her mother into the very lair of the devil, and them wishing only to better themselves and their lot.” Ham paused, waiting. Not a soul had a guess. “The sort of man who would invite a lady far south to the Warm Climes, while she supposed him a gentleman of noble character.”

  “The one that took Jenta on board that ship headed south?”

  “Excellent! Mr. Roe, our fine helmsman, has not been asleep at the tiller. Aye, the document was signed by one Runsford Ryland, of Ryland Shipping and Freight. For you see, Sharkbit carried with him a signed affidavit. That’s a legal document, in case you were about to ask, a bit like a contract except it just writes down a man’s words so no one can question that a man said them. And the words written down were these…” Ham cleared his throat and stroked his beard, closing his eyes as though recalling it all precisely.

  For all men hereby, who may come to these portents and in due course meet with Captain Stansfield Sutter, better known as Sharkbit, I heretofore and with all due legal conformity herewith state for all men present that this same Captain Sharkbit Sutter be now in my employ, to ensure the performance of duty by my own ships and captains thereto, of any vessel sailing under the banner and in the register of the Ryland Shipping and Freight Company. Furthermore, I wherefore acquiesce that empowerment hereunto has been given, which allows said Sharkbit to halt and board for commercial purposes said ships of the Ryland line, using force as necessary to inspect and to confiscate such goods and materials as deemed by him necessary for the enactment of his said duties, heretoforeupon.

  “What’s all that mean?” Trum whispered in the dumbfounded silence.

  “It means, young pup,” Ham quickly answered, “that Sharkbit can do as he blame well pleases with a Ry
land ship, and Mr. Ryland himself gave the orders. And being as how the fat merchant vessel that was being attacked by Sharkbit was flagged and chartered by Ryland, it means what Sharkbit did was all good and legal, and so our courageous men o’ war could do nothing but let him go.”

  “How’d Sharkbit ever get such a paper?” a sailor asked.

  “Why, in a pirate’s parley, of course.”

  Much laughter, much whooping. A fine fight well told, they all agreed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A WOMAN OF SECRETS

  “AND NOW TO JENTA’S VOYAGE south to the Warm Climes,” Ham began the next night in the forecastle.

  “I’m sleepin’,” one said. “Wake me up when there’s another fight.”

  “All right, if you don’t want to hear about her wedding.”

  It had been a long shift in the sun, and a blustery wind had kept them busy furling and unfurling canvas, hauling and tying sheetlines. They had done no business today, no pirate’s business, but were on their way to the Stella John Shoals off the Bandamin coast, where business was always brisk. Muscles ached and eyelids drooped. They all needed rest.

  “She marries Damrick,” a tired sailor said. “Who couldn’t guess that. Tell us a fight, or let us sleep.”

  “Nah, ye dolt, she marries Conch Imbry. It’s Jenta, the pirate’s wench.” This was Spinner Sleeve. But even in argument he sounded weary tonight.

  “So she’s been called,” Ham answered. “But sometimes the truth is not what it seems.”

  “No mysteries tonight,” another weary voice implored. “Just tell us who she married, and we can sleep.”

  “Hmm.” He thought a moment. “No, that would be tapping the keg too early, and spoiling the ale. But I’ll say this, and then let you rest: The next man to fall in love with Jenta was tall and skinny. The son of a rich man, raised to run a rich man’s business. Heir to the Ryland Shipping and Freight Company. And Jenta, well, many thought Jenta lucky to have found favor in the eyes of such a man as Wentworth Ryland.”

  Snorts and epithets rose. “Lucky?” and “Wentworth?” and then “Are you kiddin’?” and finally “He ain’t man enough!”