“A true point,” Ham admitted. “But if I go on with the tale, how are you getting any sleep then?”
Blue pondered. “Well, I guess I won’t,” he admitted. “But at least I’ll hear the tale!”
“Hmm. Very true. All right, then,” Ham acquiesced. “If the other boys agree.”
They did.
“What business do you have here, two wayfaring strangers?” Sharkbit asked, leaning over the rail. “Or is it four?” His harsh voice was cold and casual.
“Just two, and we come to join up!” Lye blurted.
Damrick turned to look at him. Lye ignored his friend, fearing that anything but a highly believable lie would get them killed instantly. He kept his neck cricked and his eyes upward, watching the hooded figure who hovered above them, dark as death.
“You have in the boat there the evidence of where such a life will lead. Why would two such robust young men in the prime of their lives desire the spiritual poverty of piracy?”
“Um. The money?” Lye managed.
“Temporal riches, then. You’ll trade your mortal souls for filthy mammon?”
Lye was silent, sensing some trick behind the question. He shrugged, finding none. “Sure.”
“Is that a trade you demand of all your sailors?” Damrick asked. “That they sacrifice their souls to you?”
“Your tone is a bit harsh for one who seeks but to serve,” Sharkbit replied.
“I’m a bit harsh,” Damrick told him through clenched teeth.
“Then you’ll do. Come aboard.”
Suddenly two sailors appeared, one on either side of Sharkbit, and a knotted rope was thrown down. In what seemed to Lye like an unnatural hurry, Damrick put an arm through the loop of his duffel, threw it over his shoulder, and climbed. The weapons within clinked and rattled. Lye watched the pirates above as Damrick used a hole left by the Defender’s cannon for footing. Then Lye took a deep breath and followed, grunting aloud and swearing silently.
As soon as his two feet were firmly aboard, before his partner had even cleared the rail, Damrick had a large pistol in each hand, the muzzle of the left one hovering three inches from Sharkbit’s forehead. The other was aimed at the nearest pirate, to his right. “You’re under arrest, Sharkbit. Please, resist.”
Sharkbit showed his teeth. “I recognize you. Your aim was not so good this morning.”
“It’ll be plenty good now.”
Lye fairly fell over the rail, trying to get his pistol from his belt as he scrambled aboard, his heavy pack falling on top of him. He came up with the weapon in his hand, aimed it at the other sailor, the one to Damrick’s left. To his dismay, however, he realized that both the pirates had pistols in their hands as well. It was a standoff.
Then shadows started drifting up from below decks. As the bounty hunters stood, ready to take their prisoner, they were gradually being surrounded.
“Lord, why aren’t all your men at the inn having some fun?” Lye muttered irritably.
“Lord, indeed,” Sharkbit answered. “They serve me and do as they’re told. Despite my statements at our earlier meeting today, which were made to maintain my reputation as a madman, my standards are actually quite high.”
“Yeah? Then who are those drunks in the boat?” Lye asked.
“Applicants. Supplicants. Rejects. Drinking off their disappointment, I presume.”
“Get in the boat, Sharkbit,” Damrick ordered without emotion.
The captain of the Savage Grace shook his head. “Dear man. You have misjudged much. Do you believe yourself so superior that you could climb aboard an enemy ship and take its captain ashore with a pistol and…a poor opinion?”
“You about through talking?” Damrick asked.
“You do have some courage,” Sharkbit acknowledged. “No. No, I don’t think I am through talking. Why don’t you come to my parlor, little fly, where we can talk further. I begin to think you might make a very good spider yourself.”
“You want me to join up with you?”
“It does occur to me. You have the cold heart and the steady hands required. You could become great. You could become very rich.”
“I’d never follow you.”
“Because you’re a leader. That’s what I like about you.”
“I’d take everything you have.”
“You can have all I own.”
For the first time, Damrick paused. “Why?”
“Because I want a lot more than I currently own, and I have the means to get it. I’ll have greater means yet, with you captaining a ship for me.”
“You sail under Conch Imbry, is what I hear.”
“You hear right.”
“Why?”
“Power. Wealth. Protection.”
A trace of a glint from Damrick’s eye caught Sharkbit’s eye. Sharkbit grinned. “It’s a powerful temptation for any man. But you, you carry the fire of destiny within you.”
Damrick lowered his pistol.
Lye Mogene gripped his more tightly, swung the barrel around to aim it at Sharkbit. Then he stared holes into Damrick. “You’re not seriously…” He trailed off. Damrick ignored him.
“Come,” Sharkbit said. “Let’s have ourselves a drink.”
“Lead on.”
Sharkbit nodded, then glanced at his men, who lowered their weapons as well.
“I’ll be tarred and feathered,” Lye said aloud, but mostly to himself. He was the only one now with pistol raised.
But as soon as the dark captain turned his back, Damrick swung his pistol butt, a straight right that caught Sharkbit at the base of the skull and crumpled him to the ground. A fraction of a second later, two blinding cracks of fire dropped the two pirates closest to Damrick. Their heads snapped backward and their bodies thudded to the deck. Lye, recovering himself, took one step backward as he aimed and fired. He killed a third pirate before the rail caught the back of his thigh and he tumbled over it, somersaulting backward into the lagoon with a thudding splash.
Damrick, alone now with his enemies, dropped his two empty pistols and dove for the unconscious body of the pirate captain. He heard hammers click back, saw two flashes from pirate pistols, heard two shots and the ring of a ricochet. He landed on Sharkbit’s back, blasting air from the man’s lungs as he did, and then he rolled him over so that the hooded pirate was on top of him, his closed eyes and blank face aimed upward at the moon. From that position, under the captain, Damrick reached down to his own belt and found a third pistol, pulled it, and aimed at the nearest pirate. As he did, Sharkbit’s limp arm jumped into the air, his palm open. It appeared to be a gesture of command, a signal to halt. It worked as precisely that, freezing the pirates where they stood.
Wrapping an arm around Sharkbit’s chest, Damrick pinwheeled himself around, clicked the pistol hammer back, aimed the pistol at pirate after pirate, each of the half dozen who now had him surrounded. Seeing that they were for the moment unwilling to fire for fear of hitting their leader, Damrick pushed the pistol’s cold muzzle to the temple of their captain.
“Lower your weapons, boys, or I’ll empty his skull of all but lead.”
“You do that, yer dead right after,” one pointed out.
“Then I’ll die happy.”
They pondered this, glancing at one another.
“You don’t think I’d have come aboard like this if I cared one whit whether I lived or died, do you?”
They pondered some more. It seemed a reasonable line of argument.
“You want your captain dead, you just keep standing there with your mouths agape and your pistols pointed.”
One of them lowered his weapon. Then another. Then all of them did.
“I want those pistols on the decks.”
They dropped them to the floorboards.
A dripping Lye Mogene grunted up over the rail again, pistol still in hand. “Good,” he said, panting. “You got ’em.”
“Pick up their pistols,” Damrick ordered.
Now with both feet
on the deck, Lye waved his gun menacingly. “Don’t try anything!” After he had collected nine pistols from the deck and stuffed them into Damrick’s duffel, Damrick rolled Sharkbit off of him. Lying face down on the deck, the dark captain took a hard breath, writhed a bit, then winced.
“Check him for weapons,” Damrick ordered, now standing, still pointing his own pistol at Sharkbit. When Lye had checked the captain and had come up empty, Damrick gestured toward the sailors. “Check them, too.”
“All right, lads, off with yer boots,” Lye ordered them, still waving his own pistol at them.
The men sat, and those who were wearing shoes or boots removed them. A couple of derringers and three or four knives hit the planking.
“Now your belts,” Damrick commanded, as Lye collected the weapons.
As the men untied or unbuckled belts, several more pistols and knives fell to the flooring. Lye collected these as well. “Got ’em all,” he reported, holding up the bulging, heavy duffel.
Now Damrick pulled the last pistol from his belt, his fourth. “Here, take this,” he said, holding it out for Lye.
Lye took it. “Why?”
“Give me yours.”
Lye handed it over. Damrick looked at the wet weapon, then tipped the barrel down. After a moment, a dark gray goo, wet gunpowder, dripped from the barrel. A second or two later, the ball dropped to the floorboards.
“You might have traded with me a tad earlier,” Lye seethed, turning red.
Damrick’s eyes shone in the moonlight.
Sharkbit sat up, held the back of his head, and looked around through slitted eyes. “What happened?”
“I declined your offer,” Damrick told him. “Now, get in the boat.”
“Wait, I always heard Sharkbit was shot in the back!”
“Aye, from a coward’s pistol! Everybody knows that story.”
“You’re gettin’ it wrong again. Tell it how it really happened!”
The men were restless, unhappy. “You boys need some sleep, is the problem here,” Ham informed them with infinite patience. “I should have quit the story when I said.”
“But ye got it wrong!” another complained.
“Did I now?” Ham asked.
They all answered him in the affirmative, adding a wide variety of colorful intensifiers.
“Well, let’s just put the story away and lock it up for the evening. Before I do, though, I’ll say this: Sharkbit was not one to go quietly.”
“Aye!” and “Now yer sayin’ right!”
“He carried on him a weapon that Lye Mogene had not found. A dirk, tucked down the back of his hood. So as he walked to the rail, he reached up as though to scratch his skull, and he pulled the blade. He wheeled around, meaning to kill Damrick Fellows. But he failed, lads. For ye see,” Ham continued in the brooding silence, “our Captain Sharkbit believed he could not be killed. And a man who believes he cannot be killed has no reason to believe he can be taken alive. Sharkbit’s long knife came around in a flash of silver, but Mr. Fellows was ready. He had the pistol. He had the will. He fired. And you already know what a crack shot he was. Could be but one result. Sharkbit tumbled over the rail, landing smack on top of our two drunken would-be pirates, a pistol ball clean through his head, entering at the left eye.
“ ‘Go home,’ Damrick then says to all the other pirates gathered there, as they stared in stunned silence at their fallen leader. For they too had believed that Sharkbit Sutter could not be killed. ‘Go home,’ he says, ‘or die likewise.’ Then he and Lye threw all their boots into the drink, so as not to be followed, and climbed down the side of the ship, rowed to shore, and carried Sharkbit’s body all the way back to Mann for the reward. And from then on, Damrick Fellows never thought about any line of work other than ridding the seas of the likes of us.”
“I don’t like ’im,” Sleeve said aloud. “All righteous-like. He’s a killer, and likes to kill, I say, as much as any pirate ever did. Don’t he?”
“Maybe so,” Ham said. “Certainly, he killed more men than all but a very few of the most legendary cutthroats. But I tell you this story so you’ll know who he is. So you’ll know what we’re up against, when he comes to fight a man like Conch Imbry.”
“The Conch!”
“Aye, the Conch!” others echoed. “He’ll take ’im down!”
“Aye, the Conch,” Ham confirmed. “So what we have now, gents, is what’s called a bit of drama. It means that when we do get a fight between the chief of the pirates and the chief of the pirate hunters, it’s likely to be a good one.”
Delaney sighed. His anger had dissipated. Fighting like a madman would get a man killed off right enough, but it wouldn’t get him out of a jam. Foolhardy as it may have been to climb aboard a pirate’s ship, once he had gotten himself on deck Damrick hadn’t just started shooting. He hadn’t just gone wild with blood frenzy. He’d used more than his weapons; he’d used his wiles. Guns and guile together. Delaney didn’t know much about how to do that, but he thought it was a good combination, one that might work for him yet if he could figure it out.
So Ham’s story wasn’t about remembering, all of a sudden. It wasn’t about keeping his mind occupied, either. Delaney didn’t need drama. He needed ideas. Not to kill off pirates, but to beat the Hants and the Chompers and the Onka Din Botlay. And maybe, just maybe, Ham’s story could help him do it. Damrick had had a whole string of ideas right in a row, hadn’t he? First, he’d pretended to go along with Sharkbit’s bid to turn him. Then, he’d pistol-whipped the pirate from behind. Then, he’d dove onto him and used the pirate’s body like a shield. Then, he’d put the pistol to Sharkbit’s head, rather than aiming it around at his enemies when he was outnumbered. Those were all ideas, one right after another, and together they’d saved him.
But unhappily, the more Delaney thought, the more he knew he could not have done what Damrick had. Had it been him, he might not have pitched over the rail like Lye Mogene, but he sure wouldn’t have pulled off all of Damrick’s deeds, either. And not for lack of physical skills, but for lack of mental ones. None of those ideas would have come to him, he knew, not if he’d had a year to sit and scratch and ponder. And worse, not one of those ideas was the least bit useful secondhand, though he tried every one of them like stray keys into a stubborn padlock. But mermonkeys weren’t likely to ask him to join up. Nor would they care if he pretended to join them. And they weren’t likely to hand over their teeth and claws just because he held a gun on them. A gun he didn’t have anyway. So after further contemplation, he came to the conclusion that he needed a set of new ideas.
And he had no idea where to get them. How did people ever imagine something that wasn’t, and then bring it to pass? No answer came to mind. None ever did. He couldn’t imagine, because he had no imagination. He couldn’t even pretend, hadn’t been able to even when he was a boy.
Except once.
He remembered that time vividly. It was before his Pap took him away. He remembered the little house where he’d lived, and he was lying on his belly on the one rug, which covered a small part of the dirt floor, right at the center of their one room. Yer Poor Ma was sitting beside him, smiling down on him. Her face was warm like the sun.
“It’s a soldier, don’t you see?” she said to him. And he looked at the big wooden spoon in her hand with the napkin tied around it, and the small table knife tied to the napkin. She had used some charcoal to draw a face on the big scoop of the spoon. “He’s standing tall, and that’s his rifle right there,” she explained, pointing at the knife. Her voice was smooth and full of light, carrying him with it. “And he’s holding it against his shoulder. For marching.” And as she moved it across the floor, just for a moment Delaney could see it. For just a moment the spoon was a soldier at attention, and his charcoal eyes were alive, and he was proud, and Delaney saw it! He took the soldier from his mother’s hand and marched him clumsily across the rug. And as long as he marched that spoon, it was no spoon at all, but a soldier.
And that was the end of play-pretend. It was the last time he ever did such a fool thing. But Delaney remembered it, so clearly after all these years, how that wooden spoon came almost to life. He knew what it meant to imagine, he sure did. For he’d done it once.
But a smiling spoon wouldn’t help him now, either. He had to have not just an imagination, but a true idea. For some people, it seemed like ideas popped up in their heads like their minds were gardens, somehow, where ideas grew like tomatoes, and there was always a ripe one to pluck off the vine whenever it was needed.
Delaney’s head wasn’t full of tomatoes like that. He’d never grown a tomato in there, as far as he knew. Instead, his garden grew whatever it wanted, and that was weeds, mostly. Even now, now that he’d thought about tomatoes, the more he tried to think of ideas, the more he ended up thinking about tomatoes.
He’d had a crewmate once who told of growing tomato plants in his backyard at home. When you poured water into the dirt, he said, it didn’t all just disappear into the ground—no, a lot of it went into the plant through the roots, and then it went up the stem and into the vines. Sucked up like little kids with cut straws suck up lemonade and ginger beer. And then the water collected up into the tomato as though that tomato was a wine bladder, and that’s what pooched it out so much, so it got big and fat and red. When that sailor described his tomatoes, you just wanted to bite into one and let the juice drip down your chin.
Delaney decided at that moment that he would climb down and get some water. No sense trying to have ideas when all a man can think about is tomatoes, and especially when those tomatoes needed water to grow. If tomatoes were like ideas, then ideas needed water, too. So maybe that’s why he couldn’t have ideas. Maybe he was too thirsty to think up ideas.
He would shinny down the pole. He didn’t need much of a drink, he figured, because the tomatoes he wanted to grow weren’t real tomatoes, just idea tomatoes, and they likely wouldn’t take nearly so much watering. Once he had a little water down his throat, then he could shinny back up and sit for a while, let that water get sucked up into his brain, and he could grow some ideas. He wasn’t sure it worked that way, but since he didn’t really know how it worked, it sure made sense it might work like that. And besides, he was thirsty.
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