Pirate Emperor

by Kai Meyer

  Soledad looked around the island’s shore but discovered neither Walker nor the Ghost Trader. The visions had also dissolved into the air. Only the rum barrel was still standing in the same place. But no boots were sticking out of it anymore. Instead, damp footprints led to the living corpse at her side, which continued to clutch her hand. His fingers felt soapy.

  She pulled all her courage together. “Do you remember my father?”

  “Old Scarab? But of course. A son of a bitch, but one who stood by his word,”

  “You know what happened to him?” Her voice sounded thick at the memory of her father, especially here, in this strange in-between world.

  “Kendrick slit his throat.”

  “Yes … he did that.”

  “And now you’re out to get Kendrick, right? You were already a Satan’s brat as a child. Once I tried to buy you from your old man, but he didn’t want to give you up, not even for ten barrels of rum.”

  Silently she sent a prayer of thanks to pirate heaven. “You know something that could help me.”

  “What have you got in mind?”

  “I have to find Kendrick. And I want to get the Antilles captains on my side.”

  Santiago shook with laughter. “What, you think they give a damn about you? Or about what you have in mind?” With a shake of his head, he let go of Soledad’s hand and trotted toward the barrel again. Soledad followed him with heavy, sluggish steps.

  “Wait!”

  He didn’t even turn around. “Why should I?”

  “Because … because we called you up and you must obey me.”

  “You?” He laughed again. “Maybe your one-eyed friend … yeah, probably him. But you? Dream on about the pirate throne, little Soledad, but leave me my peace.”

  He was faster than she, in spite of his substantial weight and his sodden limbs. It infuriated her to have to stare at his broad back but not be able to summon him back.

  “Peace?” she asked. “You call this peace? Beset by your own memories and nightmares?”

  “What do you know, anyway?” he said with a shrug and stomped on.

  “Santiago!”

  “What?”

  “I won’t try to fool you. I can’t help you. But I need your help!”

  “Doesn’t sound like a good deal.” He reached the barrel. The metal-banded edge hit him at his belly. Instead of climbing in, he simply leaned against it with a groan and let himself fall over forward. He sank headfirst into the barrel until only his sun-bleached boots showed.

  Soledad felt that the situation was getting away from her. She couldn’t just give up.

  She placed both hands on the edge of the barrel and looked in. There wasn’t much to see: Santiago’s broad behind blocked her view.

  “Scurvy fellow!” she cursed him.

  “Leave me in peace,” he grumbled. Coming from the barrel, his voice sounded hollow and subdued. So there couldn’t be any rum left in it. Even while dying the old souse had drunk it empty.

  Helpless, she looked up from the barrel and the fat man and scanned the beach. The entire island consisted of an extended sandbank with a few palms and bushes growing on it. It might be the unreal atmosphere of this place, but she didn’t wonder that Walker and the Ghost Trader hadn’t accompanied her into the between-world. Anyhow, this had been her idea and it was her mission alone.

  “Are you finally gone?” came from the barrel.

  “I have no intention of being gone.”

  “You’re a damned plague, little Soledad. You hear me? A plague!”

  “Damn it, Santiago, you drank up a whole barrel.”

  “You think I didn’t notice that?”

  “A whole barrel, for God’s sake!”

  “Bring me another and maybe I’ll help you.” Now he sounded sulky, like a little boy who wanted a second piece of birthday cake.

  She kicked the barrel angrily. “That’ll be the day!”

  “Ow!” he wailed. “That was loud!”

  “Oh, really?” She kicked it again. And a third time.

  “Ow-ow-ow,” whimpered the ghost.

  “Come out of there again, right now!”

  “Ow-ow-ow.”

  Still another kick. And another. Now an especially hard one.

  The captain’s wailing from inside the barrel sounded spooky. Soledad was gradually realizing that there were far more reasons to pity ghosts than to fear them.

  “All riiiight,” he howled, “I’ll be right there.”

  Somehow he succeeded, with much kicking and cursing, in crawling backward out of the barrel, which was by no means a pretty sight. His shirt rode up, then also his sash, and finally Soledad tactfully turned her eyes away until he stood panting beside her and had put his clothing to rights.

  “Humiliating,” he grumbled. “And that in front of a lady.”

  “Nice of you to call me that,” she said, giving him a captivating smile.

  “Oh, no,” he cried hastily, raising both hands defensively. “No, no, no … that’s not going to work. That’s nothing for me anymore. I mean, just look at me.”

  Soledad abandoned her seductive arts and placed her hands on her hips resolutely. “I want nothing but information from you, Santiago.”

  He scratched his chin. Beard stubble and tiny shreds of skin sprinkled down onto the sand. “Well, then,” he said grumpily, “if you’ll disappear again, for good.”

  “That’s a deal.’” she cried with delight.

  He began to clean the fingernails of his right hand with those of his left. One broke off. “So?”

  “The secret meeting of the Antilles captains. Where is it taking place?”

  “That’s all?” He raised a doubting eyebrow.

  “That’s all,” she confirmed.

  “After that you’ll finally get out of here?”

  “For sure.”

  “And promise never to kick my barrel again?”

  “Agreed,” she said, raising one hand to swear it.

  “Good, good.” He cleared his throat and coughed up a little gush of rum. “Saint Celestine,” he said. “That’s where they’re meeting.”

  Her tension vanished in an instant. “Saint Celestine! That isn’t far from here!”

  “But you understand that Tyrone is going to turn up there? The cannibal king?”

  “Do you know him?”

  He nodded. “Be careful of him.”

  “Yes. I will.”

  He expelled a gurgling sigh. “They should all just leave me in peace out here.”

  “Don’t worry. None of them dares to come to your island. There are rumors, you know. About a curse.”

  He perked up. “A curse?”

  “An especially nasty, gruesome one.”

  “My curse, by any chance?”

  “But of course.”

  He gurgled again, and for the first time he looked happy. “They’re saying that about me? That I cursed the whole filthy lot?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you!”

  “By Henry’s red beard, damme!”

  “You’re famous, Santiago. And feared.”

  “You don’t say!”

  “Nice that it pleases you.”

  He grinned with self-satisfaction for a moment and then turned to his barrel again. “Good luck, little Soledad.”

  “You too, Santiago.”

  He let himself thump into the barrel again and waved farewell to her with his left foot.

  She closed her eyes, thought about Walker, and at the same moment felt his hand on hers.

  I know it, she thought proudly and repeated it once more aloud: “I know it.”

  “Yes,” said the Ghost Trader, when she opened her eyes again. “You reek quite horribly of rum.”

  12

  Alone at Sea

  Jolly wiped the sweat out of her eyes. She was dog tired. Even the excitement at having fled Aelenium wouldn’t keep her on her feet much longer. She could hardly feel her hands on the grips of the wheel, and her knees fe
lt as flabby as octopus arms.

  She’d now been standing at the wheel of the Carfax for one day and two nights. Occasionally she’d tied it with a rope and slept for an hour, eaten and drunk something now and then. But that didn’t change the fact that she was completely exhausted, and her stomach was growling so loudly that it was audible even over the breaking of the waves against the bow.

  On a calm sea she could have left the wheel unsupervised. But not on this one. A sharp wind was blowing across the Atlantic from the east, the waves formed valleys and hills six feet high. Spume dashed against the hull and sprayed over the deck. It wasn’t a real storm, nothing that should cause concern in an experienced steersman. And Jolly understood navigation and cartography, too; she knew how to steer a ship and what dangers wind speeds like this brought with them. But what she lacked was pure physical strength. The wheel was as high as she was, and she had to keep her arms outspread to hold it. Each time the Carfax plunged into a wave trough, or an especially furious breaker crashed against the prow, it felt as if her arms were dislocated. A grown man might not make much of the strain. But Jolly was too small and, as she had to acknowledge to herself as she ground her teeth, not strong enough for this task. Let alone for a day and a half.

  She’d tried to give the unmanageable wheel to one of the ghosts. But the vaporous beings weren’t suitable for this duty: Countless sailors had lost their lives aboard the Carfax, certainly, but not a single one of them had been a steersman. The ghosts stood there helplessly, without any of the sensitivity that was necessary to sail a sloop. A steersman must assess each vibration of the hull, each thrust against the bow, and be able to respond to it. With the ghosts, on the other hand, it was as if you tried to get a wooden doll to ride a stallion: You might tie the doll into the saddle ever so firmly, yet somehow the horse would shake it off or smash it against a post.

  If the weather didn’t change soon, Jolly’s situation was hopeless. She would hold out a while longer, three hours, maybe four. But then she’d finally have to admit she was beaten. The wooden colossus under her was stronger than she was, and she had vastly overestimated herself when she’d assumed she could sail it, all alone, with only the help of the ghosts, to the mouth of the Orinoco.

  The sun had come up some time ago, but that didn’t make Jolly’s situation any more hopeful.

  During the night hours Jolly had asked herself the same tormenting questions over and over: Why the devil had she gone off alone? Why hadn’t she taken Griffin with her? She hadn’t seen him again since that evening two days before. But all the more painfully, she was becoming aware of how very much he meant to her. And now she’d left him behind in Aelenium without a word. Without saying good-bye, without explanation. Had she actually believed she had to carry out her search for Bannon alone? Or had she simply been too proud?

  She missed Griffin more than she could have thought possible. Missed his gibes, in which there was usually some truth, his laugh, and the concern he felt for her. She thought of the tattooing on her skin and of what he’d said before Munk appeared in the doorway. If she closed her eyes, she could feel how his fingers had moved over the image on her back, as if his touch was caught within the pattern and was wandering gently between the lines of the coral.

  Jolly pulled herself together and forced herself to concentrate on the Carfax and the sea in front of her. Gray clouds covered the sky, though occasionally sunbeams broke through the mist and shone over the sea like glowing pillars. The Atlantic was boiling all the way to the horizon in shades of treacherous beauty: color blocks of gray, silver, and ice blue lay sharply delineated next to each other and augured uncertain wind conditions and changeable seas.

  Jolly and the wheel seemed to have become fused in all the hours together as they held each other mutually upright. More and more often she felt her vision darken and her thoughts stray in a way she knew only from the minutes shortly before falling asleep: moments in which reality and imagination mixed with each other and both became plausible at once. She thought she was watching as the sea around her turned black, with foam crowns of tiny creatures. But her mind was no longer alert enough to realize that she had seen this image once before, at the end of a bridge, in the gulf between the worlds.

  The sun must really have risen higher, but for some unexplained reason it was darker. The glowing pillars of light that had been supporting the clouded sky a while back grew thinner and finally disappeared altogether. All at once darkness came down on the Carfax. In the bright light of morning it became night again.

  The wind was no stronger, but now the hull creaked, as if there were something in the pitch-black, foaming water that was compressing it on all sides. Jolly’s head sagged forward, but her fingers were so firmly curled around the grips of the wheel that she remained standing upright. Her black hair fell over her forehead and tickled the tip of her nose. She started up, was suddenly wide awake, but the darkness remained, and the waves were no longer water but something that possessed a life of its own. The foam that sprayed over the railing on both sides of the ship did not seep into the boards but formed on deck into hordes of iridescent crabs, as small as water fleas, but there were thousands and more thousands and they kept forming ever new designs: stars, swelling spots, and netlike, pulsing patterns.

  The Mare Tenebrosum has come to me, she thought with surprising matter-of-factness, and she repeated the thought to herself until it sounded quite logical, quite self-evident: It has come to me.

  The same thing had happened before, and each time, the Mare Tenebrosum had swallowed the ships that had met it. But Jolly wasn’t fazed. Not anymore. The Mare Tenebrosum had come because it wanted something from her. She doubted that it had the power to kill her at this moment. Others who were not familiar with the sight of the Mare might fall into panic in this alien, hard-to-comprehend unreality and cause their ships to sink. But Jolly was not seeing this night sea for the first time, and though it terrified her to the marrow of her bones, it did not completely rattle her either.

  And again there was the same phenomenon as on Agostini’s bridge: The water’s surface appeared to extend to infinity, without losing any sharpness. It wasn’t the horizon that formed the edge of it, only Jolly’s sight. At last she had to turn her eyes away in order not to lose herself completely in this endlessness.

  “What do you want from me?” she cried out into the tumultuous sea.

  No one gave her an answer. What had she even expected? A bodiless voice that spoke to her? A sea monster that raised its hideous head and talked with her?

  Only blackness. Only the endless ocean.

  “Say what you want or leave me in peace!” she cried, holding the wheel as tightly as if it were her last hold on reality.

  To the larboard there was something going on in the distance. She couldn’t say how far away the place was, for all estimates were invalid in the superclarity of her surroundings. It might be ten miles or it might be a hundred.

  The oily waters of the Mare Tenebrosum then erupted into frantic motion, as if the millions upon millions of black foam crabs on the wave crests were creating a particular form. The seething and boiling turned into something that resembled human features, several miles long and just as wide, spread out across the ocean.

  It was her own face.

  She wasn’t certain how she recognized it, for she was looking from a strange angle over chin and lips, the towering mountain of the tip of the nose, along the cheekbones to the eyebrows and the forehead. The features could have been those of any human. But Jolly was sure: The Mare Tenebrosum was confronting her with her own image, formed from the waters of the primeval ocean.

  The hills of lips moved, as if they wanted to speak, but there was only the rushing of the sea and the flapping of the sails to be heard. Single flashes flared through the darkness, blue-white tongues of fire flickered in the rigging.

  “What do you want?” screamed Jolly into the distance again.

  The gigantic mouth opened and closed fast
er and faster before it exploded in an eruption of black water. A house-high tidal wave rolled toward the Carfax, but it subsided before it reached the ship. The distance must be much greater than Jolly had assumed—and the face inconceivably bigger. Where it had just been, a whirlpool was forming, first slowly, almost lazily, then faster and faster, until it became a rotating chasm that quickly spread in all directions.

  The gigantic vortex soon had a diameter of many miles. Now it even seemed to suck the lightning from heaven, for more and more branching arms of light flashed down into the boiling abyss.

  The Carfax, however, lay untouched in the water, shaking, creaking, and groaning, to be sure, but without being drawn into the devilish suction. That was the last sign. Now Jolly was certain that the only danger here threatened her understanding, not her body—and that she could put an end to all this with her own power. She must only want to, she must believe in it.

  “That’s enough,” she whispered and then cried resolutely into the darkness: “That’s enough!”

  The vision faded, drew into a dark nucleus in the middle of the abyss for a moment, and then tore into thousands of shreds, which vanished like fog patches in the sunshine. Light flowed at Jolly from all directions, striking her like a barrage of fire. She cried out, in fear but also in relief, and then she slowly slid to the deck.

  The last thing she was aware of was a dog nose bent over her, the face of a pit bull. Then a voice.

  “Oh my God,” wailed the Hexhermetic Shipworm, but if he invented some ghastly rhyme about it, she wasn’t hearing him anymore.

  “If Walker were here, he’d wring your neck,” said Buenaventure as he looked around at her.

  Jolly crouched in front of the railing on the bridge, only three feet from the wheel that the pit bull man was holding effortlessly on course with his hairy hands. The Hexhermetic Shipworm was peeking out of Buenaventure’s knapsack, which leaned beside her against the balustrade. He was surprisingly quiet. Since she’d opened her eyes again, he’d said hardly two sentences, and those were neither rhymed nor overwhelmingly caustic.