by Geoff Rodkey
It was some curse. Guts would have been proud of it.
“And they’ve got the gall to suggest it’s somehow my fault? And that the business arrangement—which had profited them all so handsomely, and for so long—has to be disavowed and discarded just because that little . . . oh, this is where it really gets irritating . . .”
He leaned in toward me again, his blue eyes fierce. “Tell me this: what in Savior’s name did my daughter say to those people?”
I would’ve smiled again if the look in his eyes hadn’t been so disturbing.
“That there were slaves working the mine. And it was wrong. And it could never happen again.”
“Oh, my —! The hypocrisy! How many people heard her say this?”
“Everyone.”
“Everyone?”
“Everyone who wasn’t dead.”
He grimaced. “—! I should have had a son.”
He shifted the pistol to his injured hand, grunting a little in pain as he inched the arm halfway out of its sling to keep the pistol pointed at me. Then he rubbed his face with his good hand.
“Well, that’s the end of that, isn’t it? So much for my grand experiment in respectability . . . I’m done with that game. But I’m not done with them. Not by a long shot. They want to make me a villain? Next time, I’ll give them a reason to. When those fools see me again, it won’t be pink-fingered Roger Pembroke in a silk shirt. Reggie Pingry’s going back to his roots.”
Reggie Pingry?
“You’re going to find me that treasure . . . and it’s going to buy me a fast ship . . . and a hungry crew . . . and every one of those simpering cowards who sold me out is going to know what fear is.”
He saw the look on my face, and smirked.
“Didn’t your uncle tell you? About his old pal Reggie? Who taught him everything he knows? He used to lie at my feet, begging for scraps. Little Billy Healy. Who wanted nothing more than to be like me.”
“That’s not true!” His eyes were so wild and demented I didn’t want to provoke him by talking back. But I couldn’t help myself.
“Oh, it is,” he said, nodding. “And then some. But, of course, he wouldn’t tell you any of that, would he? ’Cause he wants you to think he’s somehow better than I am. And that there’s actually such a thing as an honorable pirate.”
Pembroke—or was it Pingry?—laughed to himself. Then he stared at me for a long time, with a little smile playing on his lips.
“And if he never told you about me and him . . . I suppose it’s a given he never told you about me and your mother?”
I dropped the oars. The rowboat was lurching in the waves.
“That’s right, boy . . . I could have been your father. I very nearly was.”
The smile on his face was almost tender.
And I was going to be sick.
“No . . .”
“Oh, yes. Jenny was going to be my bride. Nothing would have made her happier.”
The waves slapped against the boat. My hands were trembling.
“You’re a liar.”
“I’m far past the need for lies, boy. And I can well understand your sense of shock—I felt the same way when I first made the connection. Standing on those palace steps in Pella, watching you with a noose around your neck. Imagine what Jenny would’ve thought if I’d hanged her son . . .”
His voice trailed off for a moment. Then he perked up. “Thank heavens for small favors, eh? Get back to rowing.”
I didn’t move.
“Son, this boat’s not going to row itself.”
I stared at my feet. And the chains that bound them together.
I heard Pembroke sigh. Then there was a creak and a rustle of burlap. He was digging in his sack for something.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You row . . . and I won’t have to use this.”
I looked up. The pistol was still in his injured left hand.
His right hand held a leather whip.
“And if you’re a very, very good boy, I’ll tell you some stories along the way.”
He must have had a lot of practice with a whip. In the end, he only had to crack it once to convince me to start rowing again.
I ROWED THROUGH THE DAY, long past the point of exhaustion. Finally, he let me rest. He had a little jug of foul-smelling water in his sack, and he gave me some of that, along with two strips of rotten meat.
“You’ve got her face, you know. You’re lucky in that. Don’t have that horse nose your brother and sister got from your father. I never would’ve guessed she’d marry such a dog. Must’ve fallen on hard times after we split up . . .”
He sighed. “All right. Fun’s over. Back to work.”
IT WAS SUNSET, and the volcano’s plume was black and sinister against the red sky. There were blisters on my hands, and my mouth was so parched I couldn’t swallow or talk.
I wished he couldn’t talk. The things he was saying made me sick.
“We had some fun, I’ll say that. Your mother certainly knew how to have a good time. And she was so — devoted to me. Wanted nothing more than to cook my meals, and keep my house, and have my babies . . .
“But it had to end. You know why? Because they were small. Small people. Her and her brother both. Small dreams. Small minds. Small morals. Even Billy, once he’d made a half-decent pirate of himself, couldn’t think any bigger than a dirty little corner of a dirty little sea. All the while patting himself on the back for his — Code of honor.
“Do you know what honor is? It’s the consolation prize a man awards himself when he hasn’t got the guts to do the job.”
IT WAS NIGHT, so dark we could barely see each other’s faces. There were tiny threads of orange spitting up from the mouth of the volcano to guide my way.
I was breaking down. With every pull of the oars, my whole body shook.
But whenever I tried to rest, he’d hear the blades stop pushing through the water, and the whip would crack.
He’d finally stopped talking about my mother. But he hadn’t stopped talking.
“It’s money . . . It’s always money. Never let them tell you different. Money is power. Money is love. Money is men. Money makes the world go round . . . and round . . . and round . . .”
IT WAS SNOWING.
I’d never seen snow. I’d only read about it. But little dry flakes of it were everywhere now. Sticking to my hands. Sticking to my face.
His voice came through the dark, ragged and weak. “I’m going to win. Do you know why? Because nobody else has the sack to stick their hand in a volcano and pull out a fortune.”
THE SKY WAS PURPLE. The water was still. We were close.
I knew now it wasn’t snow. It was ashes. Coughed up out of the volcano and sprinkling down over everything.
He hadn’t moved or spoken in a while. His eyes were closed. A thin layer of ash crowned his head, and bits of it stuck to his eyelashes. The pistol was tilted to one side, resting against the sling that held his injured arm.
I lunged at him.
But I’d forgotten about the chains. They caught me short, and I fell wrong. He startled awake.
We struggled. The boat rocked wildly, nearly pitching us into the sea.
But in the end, we were back where we started.
Me at the oars.
Him with the gun.
Ashes falling from the sky.
THE SUN MUST have been up, but I couldn’t see it anywhere. The sky was dark and raining ash. The volcano loomed ahead, pouring its anger into the heavens.
Still I rowed. I don’t know how. I was numb. Floating through a nightmare world.
There was a ship. Pulling toward us. Sails slack. Oars in the water.
I heard voices. Ghosts in the distance.
“Friends of yours?”
I pe
ered through the haze of ash. The ship was off our port side. There were figures moving on the deck. Too far away to make out faces. Too far to hear the words their voices made.
It was too late for words.
HE HAD TO PULL me out of the boat onto the dock, yelling in anger and pain all the while. The pain must have been from his arm. He’d taken off the sling, and he held himself funny as he stood over me. Like a wounded bird protecting its wing.
There was ash everywhere. It choked my throat and burned my eyes.
I shut my eyes. He was yelling at me, but I was beyond caring.
WATER WAS POURING down my throat. I coughed it up, sputtering.
“Here. Drink.”
I was in a chair. At a table. In a dark, empty tavern. There was a bucket and a cup in front of me, along with some stale biscuits and half a wheel of cheese. Pembroke was cutting the mold off the cheese.
“Eat up. Hurry.”
He left me alone, taking the knife with him. I tried to get up, only to feel the chains bang painfully against my feet.
I slumped back into the chair, and drank and ate.
I WAS ALMOST FINISHED with the cheese when I heard a gurgling noise. I looked up.
Framed in the gray light of the open door was the silhouette of a man. He was missing part of his head.
He gurgled again, and I realized who it was.
“Mung . . .”
Wet ash clung to him like a gray paste. Water dripped from his clothes and hair. His gurgling was loud and urgent. He held out his arms, beckoning toward me.
I stood up, my heart in my throat and the chains clanking in my ears as I shuffled toward him.
I was halfway to the door when a hollow, metallic thong rang out, and Mung crumpled to the floor in a heap.
Roger Pembroke stood in the doorway, holding a shovel like a club.
“Where did he come from?”
I stared down at the motionless body of my old friend. I hoped he wasn’t real. I hoped I’d just imagined him.
I hoped I’d just imagined all of it.
A shovel head struck me on the arm, just hard enough to convince me.
“Time to go.”
CHAPTER 36
The Red Cliff
“MOVE!”
We were halfway up the ridge, dripping sweat in the shimmering heat as we forced our way through the waist-high choke plants that covered the hillside. It was slow going. My chains kept getting caught in the low branches.
Pembroke was behind me. It was so hot he’d taken his shirt off, and his upper body was caked in the gray ash that blanketed the hillside and dotted the air all around us.
“Move!”
He’d stopped threatening to whip me. It didn’t do any good, and he needed me strong enough to dig if we ever reached the top. We were only a few hundred yards from the pink-tinged rock face of the Devil’s Pimple, up and across the ridge to the left. But there was a constant, dreadful rumbling under our feet, and from time to time the sky lit up as the volcano spat molten lava into the air.
“Faster!”
I yanked my foot free of a choke plant. “It’s the chains,” I said. “If you take them off . . .”
He shook his head. “Just move.”
“Please . . . I won’t run.” That was a lie.
“You want them off? Find my treasure.”
There was a loud crackling noise up the hillside to our right. We both turned toward it.
Something was breaking a path through the choke plants. At the leading edge of it, the branches shook violently, stirring up puffs of ash before sinking out of view like they were being eaten by some slithering, unseen animal.
“Hurry!” Pembroke shoved me up the hill.
I struggled to push through the vegetation, keeping one eye on the strange commotion to our right. Then I caught a glimpse of bright orange down at ground level, and I realized what was chewing up the plants.
It was lava. A fat stream of it was creeping down the hillside, melting everything in its path.
After that, Pembroke didn’t have to yell to get me to move faster. If I was going to drown in lava, it was going to be on open ground, where at least I could see it coming.
Ten minutes later, we were on top of the hill, emerging onto a field of ash-covered shale behind the Devil’s Pimple. It was just fifty yards from one end of the Pimple to the other, but fifty yards was a lot of ground to dig up.
And farther up the mountain toward the summit, I could see half a dozen streams of lava slowly oozing toward us.
Pembroke pushed past me, the shovel in his good hand, and began to stride down the length of the cliff. His boots crunched under the shale.
I found myself staring at a large, red scar on his upper back, just inside the left shoulder blade. His skin was mottled with bits of ash, half covering it, so for a moment I wasn’t sure what I was seeing.
It was a four-inch-high C, identical to the one on my uncle’s back.
Until then, I hadn’t really believed anything Pembroke had said about either Healy or my mother. But seeing that scar made me wonder all over again. I gaped at him for a moment, watching as he searched the ground for a sign that would tell him where to dig.
Then I realized his back was to me.
I started to search the ground myself—for a rock big enough to brain him with. But there was a layer of ash over everything, and even as I dragged the chain on my feet across it, turning over the flaky shale, I couldn’t find a piece bigger than my thumb.
“GET OVER HERE!”
He was kneeling near the middle of the cliff.
As I started toward him, a booming growl rose from somewhere in the bowels of the earth, and the whole side of the mountain shook so hard it nearly knocked me off my feet.
I heard Pembroke curse in surprise. When I looked up, he was staring toward the summit.
About two hundred yards straight up the slope, the ground had split open, and a fresh geyser of lava was bursting from the open seam and running toward us. The new lava, thinner and more liquid, moved at twice the speed of the older stuff.
“GET OVER HERE!” he yelled again as he stood up and jammed the shovel head into the earth. By the time I reached him, he’d pulled the pistol from his satchel.
He jerked his head at the shovel.
“Dig!”
I looked down. At first, I couldn’t tell why he’d chosen the spot. Then, as I looked closer, I saw a rock—larger, smoother, and of a color that was different from either the black shale around it or the reddish pink of the pimple.
There were several rocks like that—rounded stones the size of my fist, worn smooth by the sea. Painted on the biggest one, in colored dye so faint it had nearly vanished, was the image of a firebird.
The rocks were big enough that if I slung one at Pembroke’s head, it might kill him.
Which was why he had the gun trained on me again.
“Don’t get any ideas. Dig!”
I pulled the shovel out of the ground and started to dig. The loose shale gave way without any trouble.
“Hurry up . . . ! Not there—farther over . . . ! There . . . ! FASTER!”
I looked up from my digging to see why his voice had turned so urgent.
The streams of lava were closing in on us. One thin, fast-moving line was already dripping over the side of the red cliff just a few feet away.
I shoveled faster.
The shovel head struck something solid.
It was wood. Rotten and splintery.
“Give me that!”
He grabbed the shovel, shoved me out of the way, and started digging frantically, grunting from the pain of his injured arm.
I checked the lava flows on either side of us. Back the way we’d come, a three-foot-wide river of the stuff had already reached the cliff.
<
br /> I couldn’t jump three feet with those chains on my legs.
“Help me dig!” he yelled at me.
“Give me the keys!” I yelled back.
“I DON’T HAVE ANY!”
He’d lied before. Or he was lying now. It didn’t matter which. I was going to die if I couldn’t jump over those lava streams.
I looked over my shoulder at the thin stream right behind me. I could clear that one with the chains on, no problem. But farther past it, I could see an even wider stream, five feet across at least. It was already spilling over the cliff.
I was trapped on both sides.
Pembroke was screaming at me to help him dig, but I ignored him. Nothing he could do to me was any worse than what was going to happen if I couldn’t get those chains off.
How . . . ?
Just ahead, the shale was sizzling into vapor at the edges of the thin lava stream. It was slowly sinking below ground level as the lava ate through the rock underneath.
Melt the chains.
I scrabbled forward and sat on my butt near the edge of the stream. Then I raised my legs and lowered the dangling chain into the orange stream.
The iron sizzled as it touched the molten rock and began to dissolve. I felt a sharp tug as the flowing lava sucked my feet down toward it.
The heat on my feet and legs was intense, and getting worse by the second.
Just a few seconds more . . .
Then there was a new and different pain, higher up, around my ankles.
The iron collars were overheating.
I yanked my feet up and away, nearly splattering my lower legs with bits of lava.
The skin on my ankles was burning.
The chain had broken in two, but there were still a few inches of it dangling from either collar, and I knew if I tried to run with those flapping around, I’d break the bones in my feet.
I had to burn the rest of the chains off.