Pirate Emperor Read online

  “You were aboard the whole time?” she asked in bewilderment.

  “No,” Buenaventure teased, pulling his jowls into a grin. “I’m good at backstroke, you know?”

  “I can’t believe it.” She shook her head. “You were below deck the entire time while I was up here….” Again a shake of her head.

  “Well, we had a few problems down there, too. The shipworm ate one of the Spanish throne chairs. And the three-eyed Madonna. Walker won’t be exactly thrilled, but I couldn’t see the little fellow starve.”

  “And what about me?”

  “You’ve learned your lesson, I hope.”

  “I almost died out here.”

  “I doubt that. We kept an eye on you all the time. Actually, you didn’t do your job badly. Until yesterday, that is.”

  Jolly hadn’t told the two of them anything about her visitation by the Mare Tenebrosum, less from fear of calling up the vision again than from inability to describe the images.

  “Until yesterday? How long have I been asleep, then?”

  “A day and a night.”

  She looked up at the sun in disbelief.

  “Did you find the food beside your cabin?”

  “If I hadn’t, I’d probably have eaten the worm already.” She sent the little fellow a crooked smile, but he repaid it with only a cool snort. Only a few days before, a remark like that would have goaded him into a minutes-long tirade of scolding. But now he was quiet.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked him.

  “Humpf,” said the worm.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Humpf?”

  “He’s sworn to silence,” said Buenaventure. “He swore it when I got him out of a … well, an uncomfortable situation. Right, worm?” He laughed softly.

  “Humpf.”

  “What kind of an uncomfortable situation?” Jolly asked.

  Buenaventure laughed even louder and shook his head.

  “The thanks for my poetic art,” said the worm morosely, but he didn’t give any further explanation.

  “You know,” said Buenaventure, “that the good burghers of Aelenium were crazy about our friend here.”

  Jolly nodded. “The Merlin of Marvelous Meters,” she reminded him, grinning.

  “Wonderworm,” growled the worm. “Puh!”

  “So,” she said, “what happened?”

  “They gave him a house in the Poets’ Quarter. And then they—”

  “What’s a worm supposed to do with a house?” the worm interrupted him. “If it had at least been made out of wood. But no—coral. Everything out of coral. Yeech!”

  “They brought him wood. To eat.”

  “Sawdust,” corrected the worm. “Lumpy, damp sawdust!”

  “For that he was supposed to give a taste of his … hm, lyrical talents every day at sunup and sundown.”

  “So?” Jolly asked. “On Tortuga you used to give a public poem every day. One more or less shouldn’t be a problem for the Maestro Poeticus, should it?”

  The worm sank a handsbreadth deeper into the knapsack. “You’re just making fun of me!”

  “The problem,” said Buenaventure, “was not the insufficient wealth of invention of our highly prized bard, but his ravenous appetite.”

  “Sawdust!” cried the worm once again, scornfully. “Damp sawdust!”

  “He used the time between his poetic presentations to eat up half a dozen street barricades that the inhabitants of Aelenium had erected against the enemy. He ate two weeks of work, mind you. You can imagine that he can’t let himself be seen in Aelenium for the time being.”

  “That means we aren’t sailing back?” Jolly asked hopefully.

  “Yes,” replied Buenaventure. “I can understand why you couldn’t take the city anymore. It hit me the same way—and after all, they don’t want to send me down to the Crustal Breach.”

  “I didn’t take off because I was afraid,” she said. “I mean, I am afraid, of course. But I also swore to find Bannon.”

  Buenaventure nodded without looking around. “It’s your decision.”

  “Does that mean you’ll help me?”

  “I have nothing better to do right now, the way it looks. Besides, I promised Walker to keep an eye on you.” He laughed his odd dog’s laugh. “Oh, well, would have done it anyway. Without the promise, I mean.”

  She leaped up, although it made her so dizzy that she almost fell over again, and embraced the pit bull man from behind. It felt as though she’d put her arms around the trunk of a jungle tree, he was so massive.

  “Thanks,” she whispered.

  By afternoon Jolly was already feeling so well that she could climb up to the crow’s nest. She sent the ghost who had been doing lookout there back to the deck. He whisked down as shreds of fog and took on the vague form of a human only when he got to the deck.

  Jolly let the wind blow around her nose. Her black hair danced on the powerful breeze like the pirate flag for which she was named. From up here the waves looked small and harmless, and although the ship was rocking considerably, the sea had become quieter. Looking like a scratched mirror, it stretched endlessly in all directions, glinting in the sunlight. There was no land in sight anywhere. The Carfax would probably be under way for three or four more days before the forested jungles of the Orinoco delta appeared on the horizon.

  Jolly held on to the tip of the mast with one hand. Over her the English flag waved in the wind—the usual deception ploy. The skull and crossbones, the symbol of the freebooters, would be raised only for attacks or pirates’ meetings.

  She kept her knees loose, in order to match the rocking of the ship. That wasn’t hard for her, since her legs still felt a little wobbly. The meeting with the Mare Tenebrosum had taken more out of her than she wanted to admit to herself. It annoyed her that she was so vulnerable, susceptible to the visitations of her enemies. On the other hand, at this moment, not even that could ruin her mood. She was finally on the way to Bannon. She had never thought about whether he’d actually been a sort of father to her—she didn’t even know how it felt to have a father. He was just Bannon, the captain of her crew and one of the smartest buccaneers on the Caribbean Sea. He’d taught her everything she knew—about the sea, about people and the art of privateering. She loved him as much as other children loved their parents, that was certain.

  And she missed him.

  Carefully she pulled the little box with the body of the dead spider out of her pocket, gazed at it one last time, and let the cover snap shut. The hideous cadaver had accompanied her for a long time, from the sinking of the Skinny Maddy, through the flaming hell in the harbor of New Providence, through Tortuga to Aelenium, and now even out of it again.

  The hairy body had fulfilled its purpose: It had brought her on the trail to Orinoco. And she’d climbed up to the crow’s nest to fling the box into the sea from here—a kind of burial, and at the same time a further turning point in her life. Until a few days ago, her fate had unfolded entirely according to the plan of the Ghost Trader. Now, however, she’d taken it into her own hands, and it was time to separate herself from this remnant of her past as well.

  She stretched out her arm to throw, when she felt something settle itself on her left shoulder. Claws poked into her skin. There was suddenly a mighty fluttering beside her ear.

  Startled, she whirled around, letting the box drop. It landed at her feet in the crow’s nest. She struck out with a cry. She just managed to hold back the blow when she recognized what had clawed at her arm.

  “Moe!” she exclaimed in surprise.

  The Ghost Trader’s black parrot ran along her arm with stiltlike bird steps until he was in an upright position again. His blood red eyes sought her gaze as if he were trying to deliver a piece of news with his look.

  “Is Hugh here too?” She searched around and located the second bird on the foremast. He was also staring at her, motionless.

  She remembered having seen the two of them on the pier at Aelenium. They’d flown ov
er the ship during her quarrel with Munk and sat on one of the yards. After that, however, she’d completely forgotten the parrots. Had they been aboard for the whole voyage? Then she really would have to have noticed them. On the other hand, she’d been so busy piloting the ship, maybe she’d overlooked the birds.

  With a flap of his wings, Moe moved onto her shoulder. It irritated her that she couldn’t look at him directly anymore, and she half expected him to whisper something in her ear. But the parrot was silent and sat there for a moment. Then he took off, fluttered toward the starboard, flew a few dozen yards out over the sea, and began to circle there.

  Jolly followed his flight, frowning, before she grasped what he was trying to tell her. She looked at the water’s surface beneath Moe.

  There was something in the waves, a dark outline. An icy shudder ran down her back. Everyone knew that the sea around the coral city must be crawling with kobalins and other creatures of the Maelstrom. They might not show themselves, but they were there: scouts and observers, a vanguard of the fighting power that the Maelstrom would very soon send into the field against Aelenium.

  No wonder that one of those creatures had followed the Carfax. But why hadn’t it attacked them yet?

  She still couldn’t recognize any clear outline. It could be a whole swarm of kobalins or a single mighty creature. But one thing amazed her: Whatever it was, it didn’t come any nearer. Instead it remained on a course parallel to the Carfax, as if it wanted to observe it, investigate it, but not attack. Or was it waiting for a suitable moment? Hardly likely, for there’d been more than enough of those.

  Moe flew a last loop, then returned to the ship and landed next to Hugh on the foremast. The two mysterious birds looked over at her with red and yellow eyes.

  Jolly picked up the little box from the floor, stuck it back into her vest pocket, and speedily climbed down the shrouds to the deck. Moments later she was standing beside Buenaventure and telling him of the parrots’ discovery.

  The pit bull man asked her to take over the wheel for a moment, hurried to the railing, and stared grimly in the direction Jolly had told him. But from down here the outline wasn’t discernible—the light reflections on the waves and the flat angle of sight made it invisible.

  “There’s something there,” Jolly asserted.

  Buenaventure nodded. His dog face did not betray how concerned he really was, but the wrinkles in his forehead meant nothing good.

  “We can place it under fire,” suggested the Hexhermetic Shipworm. “A few shots in the ribs, and voom! we’re rid of the thing. Very simple.”

  “Very simple?” repeated Buenaventure. “Perhaps in the eyes of a half-blind worm.”

  “What, pray, is that supposed to mean?”

  Jolly leaped in before the pit bull man. “That we can’t afford to fight something that so far hasn’t acted hostile toward us.”

  Buenaventure gave her an approving nod. “Even if it was a swarm of kobalins, which, to be honest, I don’t believe it is, we should beware of attacking. As long as he doesn’t come any closer, he’s of no further concern to us.”

  “A mob of kobalins doesn’t concern you?” The worm’s voice was shrill. “By my mother’s chisel tooth and the six hundred legs of her tattered tribe, you aren’t really serious!”

  The pit bull man looked out at the place in the sea once more, then silently took over the wheel again.

  Jolly climbed back up to the crow’s nest and was glad to be able to leave the shipworm’s ranting behind her. Buenaventure was right. It was senseless to risk a battle now.

  The peculiar silhouette was still beside the Carfax, not a hundred paces away. She blinked in an effort to see the thing more clearly, but even that didn’t help.

  Hugh and Moe fluttered over to her and landed on the yards to the right and left of the lookout. Almost imperceptibly they followed Jolly’s eyes. Only now did she realize that Buenaventure wasn’t the only one who’d been assigned to her.

  The parrots were also here to look after her—or to keep an eye on her.

  13

  The Man in the Whale

  Griffin spewed out a high arc of seawater, which tasted like cod-liver oil with a note of rotting fish and a good pinch of salt. He gagged and spit until his throat and stomach hurt, and even then he still wished he could exchange his tongue for a new one, so horrible was the taste that had settled on it.

  He was crouching, bent forward, in the midst of a confusion of split and shattered planks, black nets of seaweed, and a great deal of indescribable stuff that might be the wreckage of ships but also the remains of living creatures. A trace of light lay around a tunnel of semicircular arcs quite near him-either the ribs of an enormous fish or the boards of a destroyed ship’s hull. He felt no great need to find out which of the two possibilities was correct.

  On the other hand, what was of burning interest to him was the answer to the question of why he was still alive. And where the beam of light in the stomach of a sea monster was coming from.

  Unhappily, he wouldn’t stay alive long enough to solve this riddle. The stinking broth that was lapping at his legs was presumably a mixture of his vomit and the stomach juices of this monster. The thought made him retch again, but there was nothing left for him to bring up.

  He pulled himself up and tried to wipe the slime and muck from his uniform, but when he noticed that his hands were only patting around helplessly on his clothing, he let it stay.

  Now, for the first time, despair overwhelmed him. It hit him late and therefore that much harder, and it pressed him to his knees. He buried his face in his hands and closed his eyes for a while in hopes of mastering this nightmare.

  A jolt made the surroundings tremble—an undulating tremor that began on one side of the cavelike space, rolled toward Griffin, almost swept him off his feet, and then continued on away from him, flinging up bones, ribs, and scraps of wood, and finally subsiding again. When the ground under him had steadied, Griffin listened tensely in the silence. There was a steady rushing, like the roaring of a waterfall behind three-foot-thick walls. And something else, a rhythmic thumping, deep and far away: the beat of a gigantic heart.

  Griffin supported himself on one of the tall arcs and took a deep breath. It stank horribly, as if someone in a fishing harbor had laid out the guts of a whole week’s catch to dry. The air was humid and so close that it settled itself on his larynx like an oily film. He cleared his throat, coughed, and spit, but nothing helped.

  The giant heart kept on beating in the distance.

  Griffin’s hand felt along the rounded arc. Too smooth for the plank of a ship. It was actually a bone, the arching rib of some gigantic animal that had been stranded down here some unknowable time ago.

  He moved forward slowly. In the vague half light that filled the cavity, he had trouble seeing where to put his feet. He saw outlines, black silhouettes of parts of wrecks, and mountains of ribs. Now and then he stumbled on human skeletons. Nothing about them betrayed how these poor devils had lost their lives. Had they drowned? Or had someone down here slain them?

  He picked up a metal rod that was sticking out of a knot of half-rotted wood, weighed it in his hand, and decided that it would make a passable weapon if necessary. His saber had vanished; maybe he’d lost it in the fall into the mouth. He also discovered no trace of Matador and earnestly hoped that he’d escaped the suction of the gigantic mouth. The sea horse would find his way back to Aelenium without his rider.

  How long had he been unconscious? A few hours? Even days? Since his stomach was growling, his arrival down here had presumably been quite a while ago. Besides, his skin was all soft and wrinkled in the places that had been lying in the water and digestive juices. He found it quite disgusting and hoped it would soon get back to normal.

  Not that it mattered, if he was going to be digested in a short time anyway.

  And he simply could not imagine what kind of a gigantic creature might have swallowed him.

  The pictures
of the Mare Tenebrosum assembled themselves before his eyes, movements in oily water, the murmurings of huge bodies under the surface. Was this thing here one of those creatures? Good heavens! Was he even in his own world still?

  Despair overwhelmed him again, but this time he was armed against it. He clamped his teeth together and clenched the fingers of his left hand into a fist so hard that it hurt. That distracted him for a short time, and when the pain died away, panic and resignation went with it. A trick he’d learned from an old seadog in Haiti.

  The iron bar in his hand felt slippery and pretty well rusted, but its weight provided him with a touch of confidence. If there were something here that could be dangerous to him, he’d defend himself.

  But what could he do against the digestive juices? When it began raining acid and a wave of poison whirled him deeper into some sort of intestine?

  “Good day,” said someone beside him suddenly.

  Griffin jumped back, stood astride a spot between debris and fish cadavers, and swung the bar in a semicircle before him like a sword.

  “Uh,” said the voice, and there was a clatter as its owner stumbled backward to the ground. Then the light went out. Darkness clutched at Griffin from all sides.

  “That was … not nice,” said the voice, with a groan. Griffin heard the man patting his hands around in the wetness.

  “Who are you?”

  “Ebenezer Arkwright. At your service.”

  “My … service?”

  “That’s what people say in my calling, young man. And a little more courtesy would likewise do you very well.” To judge from the sounds, the man had picked himself up and was brushing off his clothes.

  “What is your … calling, then?” Griffin asked.

  The man cleared his throat. “The hospitality trade,” he declared formally, taking a tentative step forward.

  “Don’t come any closer to me!”

  “Do I perhaps look as if I wanted to do anything to you?”

  “It’s dark, I can’t see anything at all.”

  “Ah, the dark … how careless of me. When one has been here long enough, one’s eyes get used to it and one sees almost as well as in brightest daylight.” There was a rustle as he pulled something out from under his coat. “Wait … now.” The sound of steel on flint, then a flame. “So. Is it better now?”