Pirate Emperor Read online

  The flame leaped from tinder to a candlewick. The yellowish glow drove most of the shadows from the man’s face, but deepened some others. He had full, round features and big, chubby cheeks. His eyes were very bright, either blue or of a catlike green, and stood in remarkable contrast to his plump appearance. His lips were narrow and scarcely distinguishable from the folds of his multiple double chins. Whatever Ebenezer Arkwright was doing down here, at least he didn’t suffer from hunger.

  Griffin’s stomach growled again, but he tried to ignore it.

  “A meal would certainly do you good, boy,” said the man, who hadn’t missed the sound. “I have a few new recipes to choose from in there.”

  Griffin recoiled. He could already see himself landing in the cooking pot of some kind of madman—before it became clear to him that Ebenezer meant it completely seriously. He was in fact inviting him to a meal.

  “Fish recipes, I’m afraid.” Ebenezer smiled apologetically. “But I think you like seafood, don’t you? I might have a very tender shark fin in a piquant marinade to offer. Or squid, grilled, not fried in fat, with an outstanding—”

  “Wait.” Griffin silenced him with a wave of his hand. “I’m sorry I struck at you just now, but—

  “You didn’t hit me. I stumbled, that’s all. One so rarely meets anyone alive down here, you know? That’s one of the reasons I hardly ever come out. Entirely aside from this unpleasant smell.” He laughed merrily. “You gave me quite a fright before.”

  Griffin shook his head. Countless drops of water sprayed from his braids in all directions. “I … don’t understand that. Where are we?”

  “In a whale, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t know that?”

  “I was swallowed … by something. But a whale?” Said aloud, it sounded a thousand times more incredible. “I thought I … oh, I don’t even know. Maybe I’m just imagining all this.”

  “Most certainly not. And if you’ll permit me, my marinade according to a Breton cloister recipe will definitely convince you.”

  “So we really are inside a whale?”

  “Certainly.”

  “But no ordinary whale has—”

  “I didn’t say it was an ordinary whale. On the contrary.”

  “What, then? Something out of the Mare Tenebrosum?”

  One of Ebenezer’s eyebrows twitched higher. “Certainly not. But I might have guessed you’d know of that. You appear to be an unusual young fellow, or you would not have arrived in this place unhurt.”

  “You know the Mare Tenebrosum?”

  “Not from my own experience. But I know the stories. I know a great deal about the islands and the mainland. I even wrote a book about it.”

  “About the Mare Tenebrosum?”

  Ebenezer waved his hand. “About the coastal regions of the Caribbean. As a young monk I was a member of a small mission station. I was the first to collect data and facts about the animal and plant world. I was almost finished with my work when the provision ship on which I was visiting one of the islands encountered a storm and went down.” He expelled a deep sigh. “God knows what became of my manuscript. But that was long ago, thirty years or more.”

  Griffin’s eyes widened in disbelief. “You’ve been here that long?”

  Ebenezer nodded. “He swallowed me at that time. I survived and … well, and discovered something.”

  “Didn’t happen to be a way to get out of here, did it?”

  “Oh, that! Certainly I know a way, but that wasn’t what I meant.”

  “You know how to get out of this thing—I mean, how it spits a person out again?”

  The fat man laughed. “Very possibly. But first you’ll try my marinade.”

  Griffin looked at the unappetizing environment. He had a murderous hunger, but he doubted that he’d be able to get anything down here. And nothing at all that smelled of fish. Or even tasted like it.

  “Come with me.” Ebenezer began moving. He pulled up his cloak, which Griffin now recognized as something like a monk’s habit, only more colorful. Carefully he stepped over rubbish and ribs. “I’d like to show you something.”

  Griffin was about to resist, but then he changed his mind and followed the strange bird. The candle illuminated only a narrow circle, leaving the walls of the stomach cavity—if indeed that’s what it was—mostly in the dark.

  “What do you do down here?” Griffin asked. “Besides cook, I mean.” But before Ebenezer could answer him, Griffin stopped, rooted. Something had occurred to him. “Wait … that’s you, isn’t it?”

  “Who do you mean?”

  “The man in the whale!”

  “Well, yes, I am a man, and this is definitely a whale.”

  “You’re known all over the Caribbean. I’ve heard the stories as long as I can remember. Everyone is afraid of you. It’s said you have the whale ram ships, and then he eats the seamen, and … and …” Griffin’s voice failed, and now he raised the rod to the level of his torso, ready to strike.

  But Ebenezer’s voice didn’t sound the least bit angry. Quite the contrary. “They say something like that about me?” he asked sadly. “About me?”

  “On every ship.”

  The man had stopped and now turned to Griffin in the candlelight. “That’s just terrible.”

  “Is it true, then?”

  “Of course not! I have never yet … that is, never really …” He fell silent, thought for a moment, then nodded slowly. “There was once this whaler, about—God, that was so long ago—about twenty years ago. He wanted to harpoon our friend here, and … oh, well, I couldn’t allow that. But he would have rammed the ship anyway, even without me. Whales are very smart, you should know, and this one is smarter than all the others. Even if he probably doesn’t look that way from the inside.”

  “The whaler went down?”

  “With every man.”

  “And that was the only time?”

  “But definitely.”

  “Then there must have been survivors,” said Griffin. “One of them saw you.”

  Again Ebenezer nodded. “I was standing outside, in the mouth, because I thought I could convince those men to leave us in peace.”

  “Someone must have survived and told others of it. That must be how the stories got started. Everyone has added something to it, and so you’ve become the bloodthirsty man in the whale.”

  “Bloodthirsty! Good heavens!” Ebenezer put a hand to his temple in shock. “But I want nothing except—But wait, you will see it right now.”

  Griffin wasn’t completely convinced that he could trust this extraordinary stranger. On the other hand, Ebenezer knew a way to the outside. And Griffin had to have something to eat, too, right away, no matter how bad it smelled.

  The monk climbed up a hill of all kinds of debris and rubbish. He’d built makeshift steps of boards so that their feet didn’t sink into the sludge.

  At the top of the hill was a door.

  It was of massive oaken planks, mounted with metal that gleamed in the candlelight. That really should have rusted in the damp, salty air, but Ebenezer appeared to polish it regularly, the hardware shone so. The door was fixed in a frame that was anchored to the top of the hill with slanting supports. Griffin guessed that more stakes led deep into the interior of the rubbish hill, so that the frame would stand even if the whale was at a steep angle while diving or surfacing.

  They approached the door from the side, and so Griffin saw that it led nowhere. If you went through it, you’d come out on the other side but still be standing on the hill. He was growing more and more doubtful about the condition of his amazing host’s mind with every passing second.

  Ebenezer reached the door and waited until Griffin had come up to him. Then he turned the heavy knob and pushed the door open. Flickering firelight greeted them. Suddenly the smell of grilling fish hung in the air.

  Behind the door lay a room. Not the other side of the horrible rubble and bone hill
, but a real room. With woodpaneled walls, an open fire, and cozily gleaming wooden flooring. And at the opposite wall there was something that might have been a bar.

  “Welcome to Ebenezer’s floating tavern,” the monk announced proudly.

  Griffin blinked. Then he stepped outside the door and walked around it. It was open on the other side too, and when he looked through the frame he saw Ebenezer standing there and smiling.

  “It only works from one side,” said the monk.

  Griffin turned back to the starting point of his round and looked again into the room behind the door.

  “Walk in,” said Ebenezer, walking in.

  Griffin scraped the last bits from the plate with knife and fork. He’d just demolished his second portion.

  “That was good,” he said, licking his lips.

  “Nothing like practice.”

  “I thought you were a monk.”

  “The good Lord does not fill one’s stomach by Himself. Even monks must eat. And someone has to cook for them.”

  Griffin cast a regretful look at his plate, but it was empty. “So then, were you the cook at the mission station?”

  “Cook, scientist, illustrator. One learns such a great deal when one is suddenly stranded in the wilderness.”

  “And you never wanted to go back there?”

  “In the beginning, certainly. But then I said to myself that it was a sign from the Lord to allow me to survive in this place. After all, I’m not the first brother in faith who has met this monster.#8221;

  “No?”

  “The Old Testament also told of it. There was a man by the name of Jonah, to whom God had given a highly unpleasant task. But Jonah decided to run away instead and fled to the sea with a ship. However, God followed him with storms and thunder and lightning. When the sailors realized that Jonah was to blame for the bad weather, they threw him overboard on the spot. But before he could drown, Jonah was swallowed by a gigantic fish, who threw him up three days and three nights later, safe on a shore.”

  “And you think that was this whale?”

  “Very possibly. There are still more stories about him. Have you ever heard of the Irish monks who sailed the sea in ancient times? The best known of them was the monk Brendan, who encountered him during a seven-year search for the land of the saints. His story was written down at that time, under the title Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis. In any case, in the sixth century after Christ, this Brendan met a mighty fish, bigger than an island, and he gave him the name of Jasconius. Brendan and the other monks even celebrated a holy Mass on his back, it’s said.” Ebenezer scratched his head and smiled a little apologetically. “It’s a fact that there are others like us. And in some ways I’ve become accustomed to my situation. This whale is also a land of sheer milk and honey. You cannot imagine what all he swallows. Especially when we’re in the vicinity of a trade route. Day after day entire cargoes go overboard, ships sink, and so forth. A quantity of the stuff that goes missing lands here with me sometime. Meanwhile, Jasconius has developed a good feeling for it.”

  Griffin shook his head. He could comprehend nothing of all this. “And the door? This room?” He waved a hand at the room. “Are we now in the stomach of this whale or … or somewhere else?”

  Ebenezer’s eyes followed Griffin’s gesture through the room. The wooden paneling, the fire in the fireplace, even a handful of paintings seemed to be appropriate to the country house of a European nobleman. Anyway, it didn’t look like a piece of stomach.

  “To be honest, I can’t give you any correct answer about that,” said Ebenezer, with a shrug.

  “Have you tried to look behind the paneling?”

  Ebenezer nodded. “Stone.”

  “A wall?”

  “Quite right.”

  “But that’s utterly crazy!”

  “One gets used to it.” Ebenezer waved a hand. “In the beginning it’s certainly a little strange, but after a while … And you know: Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. And it has its advantages. I’m not sure if I could have held out for very long in that damp hole outside there. But here inside … why not?”

  Griffin stood up, walked to one of the walls, and knocked on the paneling, testing. Then he went back to the door, opened it, and looked out: As before, there lay the dark swamp of parts of wrecks and bones from the insides of giant animals. With a shudder he closed the door and turned to the second one, which was located behind the bar.

  “May I?” he asked.

  “But of course.”

  He found himself in yet another room, just as big as the first. Here Ebenezer had set up his kitchen. There were several tables and chopping blocks of rough wood, as well as shelves and cupboards with a jumble of various dishes, which apparently came from some wreck. Griffin saw a cast-iron oven with cooking plates and a gigantic fireplace with a smoke catcher in which one could have roasted an ox. Where the smoke was drawn off to, however, wasn’t possible to tell.

  Shaking his head, Griffin crossed the room toward the only door. He placed each step very timidly, as if careless movement could make the surroundings burst like a soap bubble.

  Behind this door lay a third room, just as large, in which stood an iron bed; at the head was mounted a coat of arms that was unfamiliar to Griffin. Perhaps it had once belonged to a captain or been m a nobleman’s cabin. An open wardrobe held nothing more than a dozen monk’s robes of different materials and of various colors. At least as far as clothing went, Ebenezer had learned nothing new in the past thirty years. On the floor, strewn all over in piles and careless heaps, lay books, some half-disintegrated, others wavy from the time spent in the water. Some had no covers anymore, others consisted only of bundles of loose pages, which Ebenezer had obviously sorted and then tied together with string. There was a wooden globe with a dent, exactly where Europe must have been located; a chessboard that was set out in an unfinished game; on the walls several paintings that were damaged from their meeting with the salt water; a grandfather clock that was still ticking; a candle stand; a fringed carpet with an Oriental pattern; a stuffed crocodile with a glass eye; a drafting desk, and numerous cracked glass cases full of butterflies and insects on pins.

  There was no other door in this room, so Griffin made his way back to the first of the three rooms. Ebenezer, still seated at the table, looked at him expectantly.

  “Well? What do you think?”

  “Quite impressive,” said Griffin.

  “Isn’t it? For an animal’s stomach, very comfortable.”

  “But how … I mean, how did you …”

  “Luck. Trust in God. Act of Providence. One day this door lay amongst all the other plunder. Jasconius had swallowed it with the remains of some ship. I haven’t the slightest idea where it came from or who made it for what purpose. I also doubt that I will ever unravel that secret. But maybe that’s all to the good anyway. Secrets are like the fire in the stove: They go out if one pokes around in them for too long.” He grinned as if he’d just uttered a deeply philosophical bit of wisdom. “Anyhow, the door opened when I fell on my stomach—I almost fell in headfirst. Then I stood up and—voilà!” He made an inclusive gesture with his hand. “Here we are now.“

  Griffin had been pacing nervously up and down while he was listening to Ebenezer. Now he let himself fall onto a chair, exhausted, rubbed his eyelids, and took a deep breath.

  “Here we are now,” he repeated with a sigh as he opened his eyes again and looked at the grinning Ebenezer. “I still have one question.”

  “Just ask it. We have all the time in the world.”

  “When you found me, out there in the stomach, you said then that you were in the … ‘hospitality trade.’ And then you said something about a floating tavern.” He indicated the bar with a nod. “Besides, there’s that bar, and I’m wondering … oh, well …”

  “Whether I have possibly lost my mind, is that it?”

  Griffin looked embarrassed. “Something like that.”

  “Not
at all, my young friend. Not at all.” Ebenezer shoved back his chair. He walked over to the bar on his short, thick legs and almost tenderly stroked his fingertips across it. A dreamy shine appeared in his eyes. “I am completely serious. Tell me, boy, what is your name, actually?”

  “Griffin.”

  “Good, Griffin, then you will be the first to whom I tell my plan.” He leaned his back against the bar and supported his elbows on the edge. With lowered voice and conspiratorial expression he went on: “This whole thing will become a legend in the business of hospitality. Something the sailors from the North Sea to the South Pacific will speak of. Oh, what am I saying—the world will speak of it, on land and on water!” He smiled archly. “But the unusual thing is: Only the very fewest will have the pleasure of a visit in person. And that’s just what will make the business so marvelous!” Ebenezer threw his hands into the air as if he had just revealed to Griffin a plan to subjugate the whole world. “Everyone will talk of it! Everyone will wish to have drunk his rum at this bar once. The first floating tavern! The first and only tavern in the stomach of a giant whale!” His eyes were now round circles and stared at Griffin expectantly. “Well, how does that sound?”

  Griffin swallowed. “I … am speechless.”

  “Right you are, my dear fellow, right you are! People will give their eyeteeth to be allowed to come here. They will then pine with longing for a second visit—but Ebenezer’s Floating Tavern will have moved on and be anchored in another spot. Sometimes here, sometimes there. It will become a myth! Can you imagine a better business idea?”

  “You know, I don’t have much of an idea about the hospitality trade, but …”

  “But?”

  “Why should anyone give their eyeteeth to eat in the stomach of a whale? That’s … oh, well… disgusting?”

  “Disgusting? Nonsense!” Ebenezer guffawed. “It’s quite amazing. People will eat fish inside of a whale. Who else can offer them that? Only—”