“They’ve taken my brothers! Have they taken any of your people? I can count ten of you dead on the ground!” Apparently they were angry, too, for the miners frowned and babbled wildly. “Which of you men will come with me to the ocean and get our people back? Count Balásházy will pay you well for being such loyal workers. We can take all the guns from the dead sinoy rice-eaters. Let us gather all the ammunition, for if you won’t come with me, I’m going alone. Count Balásházy will not want to hear about that!”
Whether by appealing to their loyalty, their guilt, their lust for revenge, or through sheer machination on her part, she managed to gather a band of about fifteen men. Dagny stumbled about the mining operation, kicking aside dead pirates with the leg that had not been crushed by the boulder. It was unfortunate that most of the pirates clutched the unwieldy blunderbusses that looked as though they needed rowlocks to mount them and could probably only be fired by the slight Malagasy by fitting them over another man’s shoulder. A few old wretched matchlocks and shotguns lay tossed about, muskets with touch-holes big enough to admit a tenpenny nail.
Dagny let the men staying behind keep the unreliable blunderbusses and matchlocks. She gathered some of the ricemens’ short pikes and jammed them into the knapsack she had been using for a pillow. Handing this knapsack to the angry head miner, she allowed the others to use the longer bamboo pikestaffs they were more accustomed to hurling.
At last, much more prepared than the miners, who argued over who should get which pikestaff, Dagny reloaded her pistol and set off down the trail they used to transport celestine to the coast. She figured she had lost two hours, which might not give the pirates enough time to make sail.
The inaccessibility of the peninsula, Dagny knew, was the reason it remained so primeval, so unscathed from the woodcutting, burning, and farming of human hand. Halfway down the ridge, the mining trail diverged, and instead of following the beaten trail, the miners insisted on plunging off an almost vertical cliff.
The roaring in her ears had subsided as the searing pain in her right tibia increased, and until the trail diverged, Dagny relied on a walking crutch a friendly miner had fashioned for her. She could now hear, in a blurred manner, that the Malagasy believed the spot some had seen the sinoy junk—described as having no windows in the back, and shaped like a drinking trough for horses—was well north of the beach where they stowed celestine onto Tomaj’s ships. In fact, it was the island of Nosy Tovaraty.
“But,” Dagny said, “do you not think the sinoy will try to attack the celestine beach?”
“Perhaps.” The angriest miner, Radriaka, concurred. “But because of the holes in the boat that Captain Balásházy made with his guns, they cannot go fast and will probably still be behind Nosy Tovaraty.” He wanted to kill ricemen, because they had just killed his nephew and uncle at the mine.
Dagny had to submit. Tossing away the useless crutch, she plummeted down through the jungle. She could have grabbed vines aplenty to temper her fall, but it was a constant diagnosis as to which ones were sturdy, and which seemingly innocent ones really concealed knife-like spines. Spiderwebs were invisible until after one had crashed through them, and because her leg was increasingly unable to support her weight, she was eternally falling. Falling down waterfalls, rock faces, red jungle roots like so many slimy udders, sliding past frogs she’d never seen before. Now she cursed the frogs, because they inhabited this noxious island that had caused so much misery for her family.
The miners were the ones who had blown up the mine, on orders of Captain Balásházy, they told her. If sinoy sailors come, he’d told them, blow up the mine.
At last Dagny staggered into a fishing village at the mouth of a creek that gave in to the Bay of Antongil. She toppled onto the sand while Radriaka palavered with a group of fishermen. In the shade, the sand was tolerably warm, of a burnt coral hue that normally she would have found quite pleasant.
“Mademoiselle,” the kindly miner said into her ear. “Come. We have found the boat.”
Dagny had to be assisted to stand by two additional men. They walked to the shore where many of the hollow dugout pirogues were moored. Dagny was glad when they led her into the warm shallows where red leaves dotted with black floated like goldfish. It pained her to bend, so she waded until the water came to her shoulders and she could wash away the residuals of that pigtailed pirate’s inner chest, the moss, the gunpowder, the spiderwebs.
“Mademoiselle,” the kindly miner insisted, touching her bruised arm.
“I love you until all’s blue …” she whispered with eyes shut.
“There is the sinoy boat.”
Her eyes popped open. Behind a rocky outcropping of Nosy Tovaraty, looking almost wrecked upon the shoals by the way it heeled toward shore, was the dreaded riceman junk. Black-and-white hulled, three-masted with odd ropey sails that looked as if they could be reefed like manor curtains, it indeed had no stern windows, instead crude paintings of enormous birds, flowers, and dolorous eyes. The mainsail and foresail were set, but Dagny could detect no one aloft. Only two men crawled on the bowsprit, all the activity she could see.
The group stared dumbly for a few moments, then Dagny twirled in the water. “Come! We can’t let them see us!”
In the concealment of the fishing huts, Radriaka told her the fisherman’s story. Sometime earlier that day, the pirates had returned, and they had two vazaha with them. The bigger one they had to carry, and he may have been dead. The smaller white-haired one was trussed with raffia strips, but he was definitely alive. They could tell by the way he kicked and squirmed. After that, the only sounds were of the ricemen fighting among themselves. The fishermen hated the sinoy because, being mighty fishermen themselves, the sinoy took all the good fish from the bay.
“Now, what will we do?” Dagny said to herself. “Shoot at them? We’re lucky to have ten pistols. And if we shoot, they’ll definitely kill Sal and Hector. That will get us nowhere.”
Accepting a coconut shell of rice arrack, which the fisherman poured from bamboo canes into large basins, Dagny wandered as close to shore as she dared. The little flotilla of dugout pirogues looked absurdly feeble against the bulk of the junk moored in the lee of Nosy Tovaraty, about 250 yards from shore.
She thought about what Hector Bellingham had told her about ricemen tactics when they were encamped. With a cringe so agonizing she cried aloud, she recalled why they tortured by cutting off one body part at a time. In the lingering “death of a thousand cuts,” a good executioner could kill a man after only eight cuts. A body going to the grave in pieces, Hector explained, went against Confucianism—the body could not go back to the ancestors whole.
“These ideas aren’t helping,” Dagny breathed, tossing the empty coconut shell into the nearby mangroves. The odor of powder smoke still coated her nostrils, and she wanted to go into the water to wash her face, but she didn’t dare. A cooking fire smell of fish brought back a happier memory.
“My brothers are in there,” she whispered.
The pirogues.
Three fishermen approached one of the hollow canoes, laughing as they tossed lines and nets to each other.
“Stop!” Dagny shouted.
She clapped her hand over her mouth, ridiculously afraid she’d be heard speaking Malagasy in an American accent by the Kwangtungmen a quarter mile away. Dagny turned from the startled fishermen and limped back to the fishing hut. She waved her arms, aware at least one of them was mightily bruised or fractured to the point where she could not pull oars alongside these healthy specimens of men.
Radriaka and the helpful miner ran forward to meet her.
“The pirogues!”
“Yes, they are there.”
“No, no! Can we take your men, and take some pirogues out to the sinoy boat? These men who lost relatives—I will pay them greatly!”
The helpful miner was skeptical, even in light of his crewmen who had been long sitting in the bushes cleaning, arguing over, and admiring their new weapo
ns.
However, Radriaka liked her idea even before he knew what it was. “Yes, yes, Mademoiselle! We can do this!”
Tomaj stood ensconced in the foretop crosstrees. From here, as they stood into the Bay of Antongil, the Nosy Tovaraty island appeared as a rocky tree-covered mound. If the junk hadn’t moved since Broadhecker had sighted her, she was lying to leeward of the island, heeling into an inaccessible outcrop of rock so she could only be reached by boat. It would be unthinkable to lie off the windward side of the island, land men, and engage them directly by boarding. Tomaj had charted this bay ten years ago, and knew they would need to lower themselves by rope down the cliff face to board the moored junk. By that time they’d be seen, and many of his men would be used up from broken bones, plummeting into the bay in the faint light of the quarter moon.
To approach obliquely and rake her stern and bow was also not advisable. There was a remote chance the three missing naturalists were aboard the junk. Tomaj consistently tried to press this from his mind. Perhaps the three had already gone back to Barataria, but Tomaj had no way of knowing that. He’d left instructions at Barataria with several sturdy filanzana bearers to race up the mining trail in case of this, but such a 150-mile run would take thirty-six hours, even if they switched to fresh messengers every eight hours.
No, the plan was to lie off Nosy Tovaraty and send a boarding party out in the two longboats. They would approach amidships and, if the ricemen weren’t occupied playing cards, might get blasted with those risible matchlocks that rarely harmed anyone. Hand-to-hand fighting, however, was a different matter. Merely boarding was a tricky task due to the ox hides and fishing nets they lashed to the ironwood hull to prevent such an eventuality. Engaged in combat, the Kwangtungmen were the most ruthless in Asia.
I need my family back, Tomaj thought, before he realized how ridiculous that sentiment was.
They weren’t his family. All of his family members were long dead.
Yet hadn’t Dagny created a new family, finding her old one lacking? Sal and Zeke weren’t her brothers by birth. She had chosen them, and they were melded in the sort of love that stuck through eternity.
Tomaj exhaled. How wonderfully odd to have finally discovered a new family, only to see them all murdered, too.
“By the blood of the Balásházys,” Tomaj whispered, without taking his eye from the glass.
The junk lay in the narrow channel where they’d expected to catch sight of her.
“Sail ho!” Tomaj bellowed below. Slinging the glass, he wrapped his thighs around a backstay and jumped from the futtock plate. He sprang deftly, dropping down on deck like his outcast lemur.
Youx was at the foot of the mast. “Where she was before?”
“Aye—Sail afire!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOIR
THIS COD-DAMNED SHIP OF HELL
THE THREE PIROGUES PADDLED SILENTLY ACROSS the bay.
Dagny had chosen three twenty-foot-long canoes all carved from single inophyllum trees. These canoes had a single rude mast fitted with a square sail of cotton pieces stitched together. There had been no rain for three days, so the sails were good and dry.
Dagny and the miners skirted beaches, ducking into inlets choked with mangroves wherever possible. The canoes were laden with faggots of dried mangrove branches formed into cones, coated with pitch, and tied with traveler’s palm strips. Dagny had managed to get just enough willing fishermen to paddle the canoes, and they played at fishing, casting nets listlessly as though pulling in mangrove oysters. Her thick hair braided into one solid queue, she tied a piece of cloth around her head and donned a lamba to cover her silk drawers. Her petticoat had been tossed into the jungle after her journey down the first mountain’s waterfall, and she was barefoot.
The two men they’d spied as sentries at the junk’s stern rail huddled under a lantern, drinking and arguing.
“They are drunk,” said Radriaka, who had elected to paddle with Dagny in the lead pirogue. They had decided to speak in Malagasy as a further safeguard against being understood by the ladrones, some of whom might possibly understand English. “These fishermen say that every night the sinoy are drunk, playing cards and fighting. Sometimes they shoot each other.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful.” Dagny sighed.
Lightning flared over the bay. It was not the jagged-bolt sort, but a sheet that illuminated the entire landscape all at once. One burst lit up the last mangrove inlet before the rocky outcrop where the junk seemed to have foundered.
“Radriaka,” Dagny said, “when I board the junk, can you follow behind me? I ask because of my leg. I might need … Might need a push up.”
“No!” Radriaka shouted quietly. “I will go first! What if there are armed sinoy on the deck?”
“I have no doubt there will be.”
“I do not want you even going aboard! Count Balásházy will have me thrown off a cliff if he finds out I allowed you aboard the pirate ship.”
“I need to find my brothers! You’re there to avenge your dead nephew and uncle.”
“Hush. We need to get everything straight with the other pirogues.”
It was agreed they would lazily paddle the lead pirogue toward the junk while the others remained in hiding. If successful, the second pirogue would emerge, and so on.
“These are some very fine oysters,” Radriaka remarked casually as they neared the junk’s stern.
“You don’t have to talk about oysters,” Dagny told him. “They don’t understand Malagasy. If they ask us what we’re doing, ask them in English if they want to buy some oysters.”
The battering of the waves against the rocks drowned out the calming orchestra of cicadas in the bush. As they drew closer, they paddled to windward of the rudder without being detected. Visible through the posts of the stern rail, the two sentries sat on kegs, a taller keg between them on which they moved playing pieces on a board, as predicted, paying no mind to the native fishing canoe that approached. The junk floated freely, not pinioned upon the rocks, but the standing rigging affixed to the newly set mast appeared all “ahoo,” as Zaleski would say. Perhaps those Frogs in Île Sainte-Marie didn’t utterly loathe Tomaj, as he often made out was the case, or loathed the ricemen more when they’d sold them the new mast. It appeared to be shorter than the other masts, and bent, as though the tree had grown from the side of a steep mountain and had curved to find the sun.
Eel-like, barely rocking the pirogue, Radriaka eased himself into the water. His white eyes appealed to Dagny, but they didn’t dare speak to each other, so she handed him the towline, and he vanished beneath the surface with a quiet leg stroke.
Dagny looked up the hull. It was covered with a strange sort of planking. It looked like …
“Leather?” she whispered to the man closest to her. If she dared lean over, she could nearly touch the vessel’s armor.
“Ox hides,” the man agreed, with eyes as big as coconuts. “Ox hides and fishing nets.”
Open-mouthed, Dagny stared back up at the high freeboard that loomed above her, now resembling the inviolable wall of a castle. “To make it impossible to board.”
Radriaka surfaced, panting quietly while spitting out mouthfuls of water, slapping his hands over the gunwale. “Make the signal!” he hissed. To Dagny, he instructed, “Get the weapons!”
She fumbled beneath the thwart as a fisherman took a stick from the faggot and set it afire by shoving it into a metal box of coals he’d brought. He waved it into an elaborate pattern for the men waiting in the mangroves. This was their signal for the second pirogue to approach, on the theory that if the ricemen had not spied or did not care about the first canoe, they might miss the second, and, ideally, the third, but to approach all at once was foolhardy.
“Radriaka,” Dagny whispered. “Look at the sides of the ship! Hides and nets!”
“Never mind. Hand me my bag.”
The miners buckled on their weapon belts. The second pirogue arrived without incident, then the third; each ti
me Radriaka took their towline beneath the water to tie it to a pintle in the junk’s rudder.
“All right,” Radriaka whispered, waving an arm. “Get out.”
Simultaneously thirty men slithered over gunwales, disappearing into the black water. Twenty were fishermen who glided back to the mangrove swamp where more pirogues waited. The miners stroked forward, laden with Malagasy and ricemen knives, some with blades between their teeth, two warriors remaining behind to light the faggots with the hot coals.
Dagny was terrified. Unlike when she’d fallen from the tree and into Mavasarona Bay, she was not prepared to die. Today she had no choice but to swim. Sal and Hector were definitely aboard this junk.
The lamba tangled in her legs, and the pain in her fractured shinbone was so excruciating her eyes watered. Never a good swimmer in the best of times, she found it easier to cling to the hull’s netting, inching herself along.
The faggots flared into life, sending up vortices of flame and dancing air as the pyrotechnists dove quietly into the water.
Hector told me that story of ricemen setting large boats afire and sending them into enemy fleets, Dagny thought, scrambling along the junk until she found Radriaka. “We can’t get up because of these nets and hides,” she whispered.
“No worry.” Radriaka raised himself upon the hull by a powerful arm, fingers digging into the netting, the weave of which wasn’t wide enough to permit a toe. He unclipped a line of some sort from about his waist, a coiled rope that terminated in a grappling hook, a native-wrought mining tool. Lassoing it above his head, he let loose, and it flew in a glinting arc as the boarders held their breath.
The hook merely glanced off the rail with a loud clonk and sailed back into the water. Everyone exhaled with anger. They pressed their bodies to the hull as flat as possible, but the few drunken voices above seemed to stay intent upon their card games.
Another attempt—clonk.
“You stupid idiot,” a miner hissed. “Hook it into the rail.”
The Strangely Wonderful: Tale of Count Balásházy Page 31