Blaggard's Moon

by George Bryan Polivka

  The next day handbills were posted along the docks, and in various parts of the city where shipmen—and former shipmen now in the dry-goods business—could find them.

  HELL’S GATEMEN We Safeguard the Seas! Let the Men who Sent Sharkbit Sutter Back to the Devil Protect your Ship from Pirates

  And down in the lower right-hand corner it gave an address where anyone could find, or join up with, a man named Damrick Fellows.

  Conch Imbry had a sheet in his hands and a sour look on his face. “ ‘Safeguard the seas.’ Who in yellow blazes is Damrick Fellows? ‘Safeguard the seas.’ ”

  The unimpressive Mart Mazeley shook his head. “A marine ensign and a sharpshooter. Or was. He just got the idea in his head, they say, and took out after Sharkbit.”

  “Ensign, eh? Got lucky then, I say.”

  “Perhaps. But he killed Sharkbit Sutter.”

  “Just him by hisself?”

  “There were two of them. They shot three or four sailors, plus Sharkbit. Disarmed the rest of a skeleton crew aboard the Savage Grace. Daring raid, by all accounts. He and the other man rowed out in the darkness, pretending to sign on.”

  Conch’s eyes scanned the paper one last time, then he handed the page back at Mazeley. “I want him dead. Kill ’im, will ye?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Conch twirled a moustache around the tip of one finger. Then he pulled on it. “He get any takers on his offer?”

  “We don’t know. They’re singing songs to him in the pubs.”

  “Songs?” Conch’s eyes were slits as he glanced around his stateroom, finding no place they could rest. “He’ll be famous all over the city, then. Go tell the men we’re shovin’ off fer Mann in one hour. Get all hands aboard, and on deck. I’ll show ’em who’s famous.”

  “The men are on leave, sir.”

  “I know where they are! Round ’em up! How many places could they be in this rat hole of a city?”

  “Six or eight, at least.”

  “Go roust ’em. Get Chasm to help. We’re fit and loaded. Just get ’em here on board, I don’t care what condition.”

  “Yes, sir. But I don’t recommend leaving port shorthanded. These Gatemen—”

  “There ain’t no Gatemen!” His eyes blazed at Mazeley. “You’re believin’ this tin hero has what, a whole fleet? You think he’s got the stuffin’s to take on the Shalamon? He’s puke in a bucket. I’ll kill ’im. I’ll kill ’im so dead they’ll be singin’ songs about how dead he is. They’ll sing songs about how no one ever got hisself deader faster than Damrick floodin’ Fellows.”

  Any other man would have backed off. When the Conch started talking about men dying, one or more of them usually did. But Mazeley was unmoved. “Whatever Hell’s Gatemen are or end up becoming, Captain, we know what they will not be. They will not be afraid. This Fellows met Sharkbit face-to-face and took him down. And Sharkbit was a man who could make the devil seize up inside. Now the whole City of Mann is reveling in this act. He can sign up scores of discontents who can shoot and sail. Don’t underestimate this, Captain. Crush him, yes. But I recommend a full complement of men to do it. If you’ll pardon me.”

  This just made Conch sour. “Two hours, then. We sail in two hours wif whatever we can scrounge. You watch me, Mr. Mazeley. I’ll put six holes through Damrick Fellows and slice ’im gut to chin before he even knows he’s in a fight.”

  Mazeley smiled. “Aye, sir.” He pulled a sheaf of parchment from his jacket. “Thought you also might like to send something like this along to the mayor.”

  Conch read it. He softened. “Ye got a way wif words. I’ll sign it.”

  The mayor, once he read the note, immediately sent official word to all shipping lines with offices in the city, which meant, effectively, all shipping lines that did business up and down the western shores of the Vast Sea, north and south as far as men could sail. The message was this: Any merchant doing business with Damrick Fellows or Hell’s Gatemen would lose all harbor privileges in Skaelington, and all associated goodwill. The proclamation didn’t need to elaborate. Everyone who read it knew what loss of safe harbor in Skaelington meant. It meant the loss of Conch Imbry’s protection. Without Conch to answer to, every pirate up and down the coast would be free to attack. They would be effectively invited to attack.

  Just that quickly, any ship or shipping company aligned with Damrick Fellows was marked. Fair game, open season.

  Damrick looked over the merchandise once again. Every knife, musket, sword, pistol, bow, and crossbow for sale in the small shop was pulled out once again, and then some. And then quite a bit more some. All the weaponry that the store’s proprietor could scrounge from all his suppliers and every neighboring store was piled high on countertops, on every free inch of floor space, on top of chairs, barrel tops, sacks of flour—everything that wasn’t an armament itself became a display for everything that was. Three hundred square feet of space was now two feet deep in weaponry.

  “This all you could find?” Damrick asked, disappointed.

  The merchant blanched. “I rounded up all I could, like you asked.”

  “Can you get more?” He picked up an ancient blunderbuss. “Just new weaponry, though. I don’t need to wonder what will work.”

  “I can try.”

  “Then try. This won’t be near enough. Did you get my cannon?”

  The owner crossed his arms. “You paid your bill on the last one, Damrick, but this…”

  “I have Sharkbit’s reward money. I’m prepared to turn it over to you.”

  The merchant did the calculations in his head. “All right. I’ll see what I can find.”

  “What are these?” Damrick looked at strips of braided leather, each about two feet long, that hung on a peg by the counter. He took one down, examined it.

  “Tie-downs. Lashes. My mother used to make them, and we always found them handy for something.”

  “I’ll take forty. Can you get me forty of them?”

  “Sure.” Then after a pause, “Damrick, does your daddy know you’re doing this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why isn’t he stocking you?”

  Damrick stared at him. “Do you want the business?”

  “Sure I want it. It just seems rightly to be Didrick’s business, unless there’s something I’m missing.”

  Damrick aimed a long rifle out a window, admired its weight and balance. “Fellows Dry Goods has closed its doors.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because its proprietor has gone back to his first love.”

  “Who’s that?”

  Damrick looked at him evenly. “Not who. What.”

  “What then?”

  “Shipping.”

  Calliope was not a noble ship. She was not fast, nor sleek, nor maneuverable. She could not hold more than a hundred cubic yards of cargo, and even that had to be weighed carefully or she’d sit too low to be seaworthy. Her hull was heavy, and her beam was wide. She had long been at harbor, tended at no small cost by a dry-goods merchant who sailed her almost never, but couldn’t bear to let her go. She was the prize possession of Captain Didrick Fellows.

  His son, Damrick, was proud to serve aboard.

  “That thing won’t hold off a determined shark, much less a pirate, son.” The elder stood on the dock, watching as the iron swivel gun was lowered by a boom onto the deck.

  “This little cannon will surprise you. It’s a long-range gun.”

  “I thought that barrel was unusual.”

  Damrick patted the breech. “Tempered steel right there. She can handle twice the powder of a standard swivel cannon of the same size. Twice the power, twice the range.”

  “What’s that, a four-inch bore?”

  “Three-and-a-quarter.”

  Didrick shook his head. “And you’ve only got two of them. Any pirate ship will have four times that number at least, and all of them twice the size of that popper.”

  “I know what I’ve got, Captain,” Damrick replied, gu
iding the dangling weapon to its appointed spot on the deck. “Sharkbit paid well, but not so well as to turn a freighter into a frigate.” He and two of his new Gatemen easily maneuvered the small cannon onto its plate and began turning bolts to secure it to the deck at the port rail. The second gun, for the starboard rail, lay in an open box on the dock.

  “You think a couple of cannons and a little courage will get you past the likes of Skewer Uttley or Scatter Wilkins?”

  “I think I’ve got an idea what it’ll take.” Damrick, wiping sweat from his forehead, tucked a wet strand of hair behind an ear. He looked up at his father. “Uttley’s retired, anyway.”

  “They say.” The sea captain turned merchant turned sea captain again crossed his arms. He was not as tall as Damrick, but he was broader in the shoulders. With a full head of hair he would have looked very similar. He had the same sharp eyes, which bored into his son now from above. “You’ve got an idea, do you?”

  Damrick nodded. “I do.”

  “You going to tell me this idea?”

  “It’s still got a few tangles, Pa. But we’ll get it sorted out before we leave.”

  “You’re a stubborn cuss.”

  “Came by it honest. Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried. But your mother is. I’d like to give her some reason we’ll come back alive.”

  “Do you know anything in heaven or on earth can stop her worrying?”

  “Nothing I’d ever wish on her. Besides, she prays when she worries, and that’s something we’ll need.”

  Damrick looked at his father, then at the small cross he always wore around his neck—given by his wife on their wedding day. “Then let’s let her worry.”

  Once the deck guns were mounted, Damrick hiked back into town, straight to Muzzleman’s Shot Tower, where he had left Lye Mogene.

  “Any progress?” he asked.

  Lye stood at a table in the yard behind the tower, which loomed behind him, casting a shadow across the yard. He poked through a box full of musket balls of various sizes. A brick oven blazed in the afternoon heat behind him, near the wall of the tower. What looked like four iron pokers jutted from the flames. He wore a leather apron and a heavy blacksmith’s mitten on his left hand. A dozen muskets leaned against the table, and a half-a-dozen pistols lay in a line across the top of it. To his right, the grass was strewn with twice again that many weapons, as though he had test-fired them and thrown them away in disgust. A hundred feet away an archer’s target leaned against a pocked stone wall. It boasted three small holes, none near the bull’s-eye.

  Lye looked up at Damrick in overheated frustration. “Blew up a good musket.” He kicked it with his boot toe. “Breech just shredded.” The steel bent outward in fingers at the stock end. “Lucky not to have lost an eye.”

  Damrick pondered. “You tried double wadding?”

  Lye put his gloved hand into a box of cotton wads, the kind used to prepare musket-ball packets. He pulled out a handful. “Double. Triple. Ever’ blasted waddin’ and ball and patch and barrel…” He threw them back into the box, unformed curses moving his lips. “I ain’t cut out for this kinda tinkerin’.” He looked both ruddier and more tired than usual.

  Damrick took a deep breath. “You think we should give it up?”

  The question seemed to stun him. “Quit? Just when I’m about to get ’er all figured out?”

  “Then you’re making progress.”

  “You just go back to your ship, sonny. I’ll come get you when I’ve got somethin’ to show.”

  Damrick’s eyes widened. “Then you think it may work.”

  “Oh, it’ll work,” Lye said. “And when it does, them pirates better turn and run.”

  Damrick allowed himself half a smile. He reserved the other half for when and if he saw his idea in action.

  Inside the shot tower, red drops of hot iron fell in rapid succession from two hundred feet up, cooling only slightly before they splashed with a complaining hiss into a pool of water at its base. Damrick knelt beside the pool, reached in and picked up a cool outlier. It was perfectly round, black iron shot, barely a pock in its surface. Much smoother than the molded variety, and they would shoot straighter and farther. Assuming they were matched appropriately with a good musket.

  “Who’s down there?” the echoing voice boomed from above. The drops of molten iron ceased.

  “Damrick Fellows.”

  “These are yours, then.”

  “Mine?” The echo of his own words died away. “Who ordered them?”

  “Your man outside!”

  “What size are they?”

  The drops began falling again. “Either come up and talk or go away!”

  Damrick climbed the wooden stairs that spiraled up the insides of the round brick tower. From the outside, this structure could have been mistaken for a giant tapered chimney or a castle tower, but there was no fireplace and no fortification in Nearing Vast that required anything nearly so tall. The inside was like an enormous musket barrel pointed toward the heavens. The wooden stairs winding around it were built into the brick, and reinforcement beams were few. There was no handrail, and the stairs grew narrower as they went up. The last sixty feet were an interesting climb. The stairs were no wider than a man’s shoulders, and the walls actually angled in, as though pressing the climber toward the abyss. This, along with the constant dripping of white-hot metal mere inches away, turning red as it hurtled down into a hissing, panting darkness, gave the knees a mind of their own.

  The top was not much better. The sudden realization of extreme height was a shock to the senses. But it was the intense heat and brutal sunlight that hammered Damrick’s head. He felt like he was breathing the molten liquid that dripped from the cauldron just off the center of the round floor. Heat roiled from it visibly. The thick wooden decking under his feet was marked with grooves, concentric rings like a target, the bulls-eye being the hole through which the hot pellets dropped. The flooring was warped and charred, and it creaked as Damrick stepped carefully across it toward John Muzzleman.

  The ordnance-maker hummed softly, oblivious to both heat and height. He wore no protection other than a heavy leather apron and thick, padded mittens. Short and stocky, built close to the ground like a tree stump, he was dark, with wild black hair that grew only on the back of his head, from ear to ear and nape to crown. Damrick would have assumed that the heat had singed the rest away were it not for the man’s heavy, thick eyebrows. His round face looked like it was made of shiny new leather, and though he was clean-shaven, the dark stubble made it evident that he employed his razor in a losing battle with his beard.

  Muzzleman looked up, nodded once, removed a glove, and extended a sweaty, stubby hand. When it met Damrick’s, it squeezed like a steel vise. The tradesman immediately put his big glove back on and turned away. “I got to finish before this cools.”

  That anything up here might cool anytime soon seemed unlikely to Damrick. He watched as the munitions maker opened a small valve at the side of the cauldron. This allowed a trickle of the molten iron to flow down a narrow chute, not much more than a half-inch-wide groove in a thick steel plate. When it reached the end of the flume it hit a smaller, upright iron plate that stopped the flow, which then backed up and widened out until a puddle of hot iron formed, about the size of a large cherry. This put pressure on the iron plate until it overcame the resistance of a small counterweight, and the bottom of the plate opened suddenly, like a trap door sprung. A white droplet fell, and the little door snapped closed. The process began again, all under the watchful eye of John Muzzleman, who stood with one hand on the valve that regulated the flow. He was lost in concentration, increasing the flow gradually until the little door was ticking off drops at the rate of almost one per second.

  Damrick waited, looking around him. There was no furnace here, nothing to keep the iron in the big kettle hot. It was brought up hot, then. Now he noticed the pulley suspended above them for that purpose. It hung from a tripod of iro
n beams that met about ten feet above their heads. A small, sturdy chain ran through the pulley and led down to a large winch positioned near the head of the stairs. But the hole in the floor was not nearly wide enough to allow up a cauldron of that size. Damrick looked again at the concentric rings in the floor, which he had until now taken to be no more than a grooved pattern. He saw hinges protruding at each ring, and he realized that the hole in the floor could be opened to almost any size, depending on which of these round doors John chose to open. With a bit of queasiness, Damrick realized he was standing inside the largest ring, meaning he was actually on top of a trap door himself. He took a small step backward, until he was convinced he was standing on a permanent floorboard.

  He turned and looked over the parapet. The city stretched out for miles. To the west he could see the top of the royal palace, off in the distance. It was not substantially different than the other homes and buildings, but it was substantially larger. To the east he could see the docks, the ships lined along the prongs of the piers, their sails struck, and the ships moving in and out and around the bay, their sails catching the wind and gleaming white in the sun. And in between the docks and the palace, zigzagging streets, multicolored buildings of all different shapes and sizes, smoke rising from chimneys, horses and carriages and people with packages, in and out of shops.

  “Three-fifths of an inch,” Muzzleman said without looking up.

  “Pardon me?”

  “The answer to your question. Three-fifths of an inch.”

  It was not a standard shot size. “That’s what Lye ordered?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “One thousand.”

  “A thousand?” Damrick blinked. He heard the report of a musket, looked down over the edge of the parapet. Lye Mogene stood in the yard by his table. He lowered a long rifle and examined it. “He didn’t seem that confident.”

  Now Muzzleman looked up and grinned. “Oh, these’ll do.”

  “You’ve seen them work?”