Pirate Emperor

by Kai Meyer

  “Try it,” the old man commanded again.

  They were in Forefather’s book room, a part of the library that he had all to himself. It was a very large room with irregular walls, like almost all the rooms in Aelenium. Therefore it was next to impossible to install regular bookshelves. There were thousands upon thousands of volumes piled on the floor, some in hills like funeral pyres, others in exquisitely precise interlocking towers and book fortresses, circular or horseshoe-shaped, layered over one another like walls of roof tiles. If you wanted to withdraw one of the books underneath, you had to be nimble: You grabbed the book with your left hand, holding a second one in your right, ready to shove it into the resulting gap before the entire book structure could collapse.

  Jolly hadn’t credited the fragile Forefather with so much agility, but he surprised her the first time he displayed the trick. His bony fingers were as artful as a pickpocket’s. Neither Munk nor she could exchange the books as swiftly as he could. “This way,” he’d explained to her, “there’s never disorder. All the books are lying there where they should be, and no new piles develop to need putting back in their places every few weeks. For every book the library gives, it demands another. A proper exchange.”

  Forefather insisted that all these mountains of books were arranged in a precise order, and he knew the exact place where every single volume was located.

  “Jolly.”

  His voice snatched her from her thoughts.

  “You will do it. Trust me.”

  She blinked from her three mussels to him. His face was as brown and fissured as a ship’s keel. It seemed to her that he nodded; although he was looking at her without moving at all. It was his eyes that spoke to her. Like no other person she knew, Forefather understood how to impart something just with looks. Sometimes she wasn’t even sure if the words she thought she heard from his mouth had really been spoken aloud.

  He stood beside her, his back bent, leaning on his whale rib stick, his brow knitted into a perennial frown.

  “You did it before,” he said deliberately. “Now work at it. Work on yourself.”

  Jolly sighed, closed her eyes, and tried again to concentrate on the three mussels. In the darkness behind her eyes they seemed like the fireballs one sees after looking at the sun for too long.

  “You must feel them,” whispered Forefather.

  She imagined how her fingers groped over and reached into the open mussel mouths, which were much bigger in her mind than in reality. She slipped her hand inside—not the real hand, only the imagined one—felt the magic under her fingertips, and pulled it out like a long piece of thread, like undoing a seam. She brought one thread after another together into the center of the mussel group until she felt that the connection was established.

  “Very good,” said Forefather.

  She opened her eyes and yes, there it was: A glowing pearl floated among the mussels, just there where she’d connected the magic threads in her mind.

  “Now try to control them.” The aged man’s voice was gentle and demanding at the same time. “You’ve created the tool, now use it.”

  Jolly didn’t take her eyes off the glowing pearl. She’d awakened the magic of the mussels and formed the pearl—the first step of any mussel magic. Now she must direct the magic to a particular purpose, an object, an action.

  “What shall I do?” She tasted salty sweat on her lips.

  “You decide. It is in your power.”

  A book, whispered her inner voice. Pick out a book, pull it out, and replace it with another, before the pile can fall down.

  Her mental fingers groped toward a heavy folio with a broken leather binding, a good ten steps away from her. That one, she thought. That’s the one.

  The pearl glowed brighter, blinded her.

  The book moved, the man-high pile shook. Then the volume slowly slid itself out of the carefully built structure of book spines. With a rustling sound it kept sliding forward.

  Now another, she thought. Any one.

  She grasped a second book at the top of the pile that had the same mass as the first. Slowly it floated off, carried only by her mind.

  Do it! Now!

  The folio slid out of the gap, slid across the floor, and opened as if by a ghostly hand. The pages fluttered as if in a storm wind.

  The pile teetered.

  The second book pushed into the empty space.

  Yes! Jolly thought. Done!

  But the pile was still shaking. She’d rammed the book into the gap too hard and now it had caused the artfully arranged tower of books to begin swaying.

  The pages of the first book rustled even more strongly, as if they’d been awakened to life by Jolly’s magic.

  The upper books on the pile slid, fell forward.

  Jolly swore.

  “The pearl!” cried Forefather. “Don’t give up now!”

  She looked at the glowing pearl, which still floated among the mussels. Jolly concentrated again, but doubt had spread in her mind. She couldn’t manage it. It was too late.

  The pile of books tipped. Hundreds of books started teetering, then sliding. Finally they fell.

  And stopped in midair.

  Did I do that? Jolly asked herself. Her eyes sought Forefather, but he gently shook his head.

  The books hovered in the air like a swarm of wasps that couldn’t decide whether to attack. They trembled, barely noticeably. Then they slid, one after the other, back into their original positions. The pile built itself up again, one book after the other, and a few moments later the tower of books stood there completely undamaged.

  The fluttering pages of the first book came to a standstill; it lay there open.

  Jolly looked over her shoulder and saw Munk sitting at some distance, in front of him a dozen mussels arranged in a circle. A trace of a smile played around the corners of his mouth. It was he who’d held the book tower. His magic had repaired what she’d spoiled. Her failure was his triumph. Not for the first time.

  “The pearl,” Forefather reminded her again.

  With a furious snort she turned to her three mussels, seized the glowing pearl with her mental fingers, and flung it into one of the open mussels much more vigorously than necessary. The mussel seemed to utter an angry sound as it snapped shut and swallowed the magic pearl. The two others also closed up.

  Forefather nodded thoughtfully, but now even his eyes were silent. Jolly clenched her fists and heaved an exhausted sigh.

  It was the third day of her training.

  Her twenty-second failure. She’d been counting.

  The easiest thing for Jolly now was the dive into the sea and movement under the water. She’d begun to enjoy the hours in the ocean, not only because her initial insecurity diminished but also because it was a welcome change from the hours of instruction in Forefathers library room. She was expected to arrive there right after she got up, have her breakfast with Munk and the old man, and begin the daily practices. Without any interruptions worth mentioning, it went on that way until evening—with the exception of one or two hours in the water. Usually it was d’Artois who called for them, or sometimes one of the other ray riders.

  Gradually it turned out that underwater Jolly was the more skillful of the two polliwogs. She flew—for her it was much more flying than diving—fast loops and spirals, completed turns a lot faster than Munk, and learned to let herself sink half a mile down in a few moments without becoming sick or dizzy.

  Munk didn’t betray any sign that he begrudged her the progress. On the contrary, he encouraged her to dare wilder maneuvers and to keep on hoping that things would soon be going better with the mussel magic, too.

  She’d had her first real success with the magic exercises on the fourth day, right after the noonday meal. With the help of a magic pearl, she’d succeeded in making Forefather’s whale-rib staff rise to the cathedral-high dome of the library room, where it twirled around very fast while balancing three books on its end and not losing any of them.


  Forefather had rewarded her with euphoric applause, and Munk grinned as proudly as if he’d performed this feat himself. She was gradually feeling closer to him again. Perhaps it had something to do with their having passed so many hours together, but possibly it was also because she hardly saw Griffin at all these days.

  Once, when they’d briefly met in the evening, he reported to her that d’Artois had assigned him to one of the stable masters as a pupil. The man was teaching Griffin how to control the sea horses and to ride them. Twice already, he told Jolly excitedly, he’d crossed the fog with a troop of d’Artois’s men and chased across the open sea on the other side. By the third day he was going out with patrols regularly, especially since he’d shown the soldiers that he knew how to handle blades and pistols as well as they.

  For the present, Griffin had given up any thought of leaving Aelenium, He and Jolly wasted no more words on it. She felt that he was more comfortable here than he admitted. Perhaps it was the same with her. So in their own ways, the two of them weren’t unhappy with the course of things, aside from the fact that there was so little time they could spend together—which wasn’t all right with anyone except Munk.

  Jolly knew all that. She could foresee the distance that was gradually building between her and Griffin, the lack of understanding over why they really were staying in Aelenium. And she also felt Munk’s relief that she and Griffin hardly saw each other.

  What is going on here? she thought once, at an inopportune moment when she was just diving from a ray into the depths. What’s happening with us?

  But she repressed the answers to such questions. The more she pushed the uncomfortable truths away from her, the more accomplished she became in handling the mussel magic.

  On the fifth day, through the power of her thoughts, she interchanged books at three different places in the library, all in the same breath, and made the three volumes flutter through the coral dome like the gulls that gathered around the towers and gables of Aelenium.

  She didn’t think of the Crustal Breach, nor of the gray lava mountain range of the sea bottom. She didn’t think of the Ghost Trader and only seldom of Griffin.

  She was becoming an apt polliwog student, and Forefather praised her as only he could.

  But in spite of everything, Munk remained the more skillful magician. She made three books fly, he did the same thing with six. She let a storm wind sweep through the canyons of books, he created a bolt of lightning that turned a whole pile of folios to ashes. She made the ghosts on the Carfax dance, he created from smoke the image of a kobalin with teeth bared.

  It was a competition, certainly, and on the outside it looked like a contest of strength between friends. But in fact, envy slipped into what they were doing—envy of Munk’s greater powers, envy of Jolly’s skill underwater, envy of every praise from Forefather, and envy of the approving calls that came from the windows of Aelenium when they walked through the streets.

  On the fifth evening, she wanted to visit Griffin in his room, but he wasn’t there, and someone told her that he was now a member of the ray guard and on a nightly ride over the ocean. Then Jolly was even envious of him, of his freedom and the work with the sea horses. She’d always liked animals and would rather have spent her days in the stables than in Forefather’s dusty library room.

  On the sixth day, at sundown, there was a knock on her door. “Your tattoo,” said Griffin, who was standing there in the torchlight on the other side of it. “It isn’t finished.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “If you want … I mean, I can do that, if it’s all right with you.”

  She smiled and had stripped her shirt over her head before he was through the door. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  He’d brought along what was necessary. Black ink. A long needle, not too sharp. A cloth. Even a basin with warm water, which he’d gotten from one of the kitchens.

  With her upper body uncovered, Jolly went to the bed that stood near the arched windows. She wasn’t ashamed in front of Griffin. The old trust between them was established instantly again, as if there’d never been any doubt. She shoved the covers and pillow aside and lay on her stomach with her hands under her chin. From here she could see out to the red-golden sky and observe the ray riders in their rounds over the city.

  Griffin sat down beside her, placed the basin of water on the bed, and dampened the cloth. Then he gently rubbed over Jolly’s back, following the outline of the half-finished tattoo with the warm cloth and then patting the skin dry.

  “If you know it’s supposed to be a coral, you can really see it quite well,” he said.

  “Trevino did it, the cook on the Skinny Maddy.” She hesitated briefly, then added sadly, “That was just before the Maddy went down. I saw Trevino get bitten by the spiders and collapse.”

  “Did he do tattoos for the crew often?”

  “Sometimes. He said tattooing someone was like telling his fortune. You have to find a motif that means something to the person, something that could be important for him.”

  “I never thought about that before.”

  Jolly looked thoughtfully into the evening twilight. “The coral … it just came to me a few days ago. But it’s really quite obvious.”

  “Do you think Trevino foresaw that you would come here? Into a city of coral?”

  “Perhaps it’s just coincidence.”

  “Anyway, it’s pretty strange.” Griffin dipped the needle in the black ink and made the first prick to get the color under her skin. “Does that hurt?”

  “I’ve survived worse.”

  He smiled. “I know.”

  They were silent for a time, while he filled in the irregular outline Trevino had made with shapes and shadows. He kept patting the color and the sweat from her skin, now and again uttering an affirmative sound, as if he were satisfied with his work.

  “This is going to take a few days,” he said.

  “If it gives us the chance to see each other more often—then take your time.” She felt his eyes on the back of her head. Perhaps he was hoping she’d turn around to him so he could see if she meant it seriously. But she kept looking out into the glow of the evening. The fiery light bathed the light coral walls of the room in yellow and red. The bedclothes glowed as if they were in flames.

  “I’d love to ride on sea horses too,” she said as the sky over the wall of fog gradually darkened. “That must be great.”

  “Do you still have black-and-blue marks?”

  She giggled. “Those I am certainly not going to show you!”

  “Anyhow, mine are twice as big now and almost black,” he said, laughing.

  “Interesting idea.”

  “D’Artois and his men must have calluses as thick as tortoise-shells on their rear ends.”

  She liked that he could make her laugh. She’d had much too little fun in recent days. Forefather was always terribly serious and, God, so wise. And Munk doggedly pursued his wish to improve his capabilities, in spite of all the nearness to her.

  Griffin, on the other hand … well, he was just Griffin. A pirate and a trickster and a loudmouth. Sometimes, anyway. And from time to time he was also the way he was today. Himself, and yet somehow very different. As if all that she’d secretly liked about him earlier had suddenly become much more obvious. Had he changed? Or was she only seeing him differently?

  “The whole city is talking about you two,” he began again after a pause. “About the two rescuers and saviors and—”

  “Please, Griffin, stop.”

  “The needle?”

  “The talk of rescuers and saviors. That we most certainly are not.”

  “Munk, anyway, gives the impression that he isn’t altogether averse to that idea.”

  “He likes his role. And he enjoys the attention. But you have to understand that for fourteen years he met absolutely no one except his parents and a few traveling traders. And now the entire world appears to be revolving around him.”

  “Then h
e should watch out that he himself doesn’t someday … oh, well …”

  “What?”

  “If everything is revolving around him … if he stands in the middle and enjoys that, then he’s something like a maelstrom himself, isn’t he?”

  She pictured what Griffin had just said and unwillingly had to agree that he was right.

  Wasn’t that the greatest danger that threatened them: that they themselves would become what they wanted to defeat?

  “I’ve spoken with Forefather about that,” she said.

  “About Munk?”

  She shook her head. “About what’s happening to us. How we’re changing. That it’s only about conforming to the expectations of the others—and it really isn’t important anymore what we expect of ourselves.”

  The needle pricks in her back stopped for a moment.

  “What is it?” she asked, and tried to look up over her shoulder at him. He was now working by the light of several candles. Night had arrived outside the window.

  “But it’s true,” he said softly. “You really are something special.”

  “Only because I’m a polliwog? Because my parents were in the right place when they conceived me? That doesn’t make me anything special.” She was talking more and more excitedly, even though she knew she was not being honest with herself. She’d thought a great deal about these things recently. “Other people can just ride very well. Or draw. Or learn foreign languages. I can walk on water. To be precise, that’s no great difference, and not at all a question of talent. I simply can, you understand? I never have to do anything for it. I don’t have to exert myself.”

  The needle was still at rest.

  “That’s not what I meant at all,” he said quietly. “I said that you are something special. Not your abilities. Only you, Jolly.”

  She felt warmth spreading through her. She tried to turn around to him, but he held her back with one hand.

  “No, don’t. You’ll smear all the ink.”

  She remained lying on her stomach, but she almost put her neck out of joint to look around at him. “You’ve spoken quite nicely.”

  He smiled, and for the first time she saw him almost abashed. “The advanced pirate school of conversation,” he said. “Some people just have it in their blood.”