Pirate Emperor Read online

  “Sure,” she said, grinning. “Come here a minute.”

  “I’m already—”

  “Closer, I mean.”

  He bent forward and closed his eyes. She lifted her torso to kiss him. When she touched his lips, it was as if needles were sticking into every pore in her body. But it didn’t hurt, it only tickled. She was hot and cold at the same time, and that was something new, something altogether confusing.

  He opened his eyes and looked at her as they kissed. She couldn’t remember ever having been so close to any person.

  “Jolly—,” he was beginning, but he was interrupted by a sound. Hastily he turned around. They both looked toward the other end of the room.

  “I … knocked,” stammered Munk, who stood in the open doorway, pale as a ghost. “But no one said anything … and so I … I mean …”

  He fell silent and stared at them: Jolly on the bed with her torso naked, Griffin very close to her, one hand on her waist.

  Then he turned on his heel, left the door standing open, and ran away.

  “Munk, wait!” Jolly called after him.

  Griffin sighed deeply, took the cloth out of the now cold water, and patted her back clean with it. She fidgeted uncomfortably and rubbed a hand over her face, but then let herself sink down onto her stomach and remained lying there.

  Griffin looked at her in surprise. “Don’t you want to go after him?”

  Jolly rolled onto her back. “Would that change anything?”

  8

  Forefather

  Forefather was sitting in his wing chair and explaining the world. Jolly was alone with him in the high cathedral of books.

  No one knew where Munk was. She’d knocked on his door in the morning, but he hadn’t opened it. None of the servants had seen him. Forefather was as surprised as she was that Munk hadn’t shown up for class.

  Soledad had warned her. Jolly ought to have known this would happen sooner or later. But why should she deny her own feelings just to keep Munk from being angry at her? That would only have made her angry at him. All in all, a heap of trouble, for which, sighing, she took the responsibility herself.

  “The world,” said Forefather, in his sonorous, impressive voice, “is really not one world but consists of many. Some say these multiple worlds lie beside one another, and they touch from time to time. But I think they are arranged over one another, like round slices. Imagine a pile of plates. That is the universe.”

  She had other things on her mind than imagining worlds as dishes. And yet something of what he said got through to her.

  “Then one of the plates would be our world,” she said, “and another the Mare Tenebrosum. Do you think there are many others?”

  “Innumerable ones.”

  “But our world is already so big … and so hard to understand.” It must have sounded to him as though she were thinking about the blank places on the maps, of the unknown continents and faraway countries. But in truth she meant something entirely different.

  “Just because you cannot count all the stars in the sky, they don’t become fewer, do they? No one is interested in what humans can grasp and what they cannot. Every world has its own conflicts to settle, every one has its own concerns.”

  At the moment she didn’t care. She had a world to save—and a friendship. And did not the one possibly depend on the other? How was she going to explain that to anyone?

  Forefather went on, without noticing the haze of tears in her eyes. “Most people think of the past and the future of our world as a line that begins somewhere and will end at a distant point somewhere. Or one not so distant, depending on whom you ask.” His smile was impish, like that of a child, and at the same time a little sad. “But in reality, time moves in a circle. There is no beginning and no end. Time is only the edge of the plate, it always leads back to itself again. The world is made of repeats.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Your battle against the Maelstrom, for example. Others have done the same thing thousands of years ago. The same opponent—a similar battle. And if you look back into history and tradition, there have always been individual human beings whose task it was to save the world from the worst. And has one of them ever refused?”

  “Perhaps I’m the first.” She ran her fingers nervously through her hair. “That makes me feel much better right off.”

  He shook his head. “Listen to me, Jolly. Things repeat themselves. All things! Only we don’t necessarily recognize it. Time is a circle, it rushes around the plate at a furious speed, over and over again.”

  “And what good does it do for me to know that?”

  “You say that you are only a girl. But that isn’t right. Anyway, not anymore.” He raised a hand. “No, wait, listen! The worlds never overlap of their own accord. Some people maintain the opposite, even your one-eyed friend. But the truth is that there is no overlapping. Only beings who live in the worlds can create a connection.”

  “And?” She was gradually becoming impatient. Where was he leading?

  “Most people never get to look into other worlds. They don’t grasp the connections, they never even try to. They live in the moment and, quite literally, never look over the edge of the plate. But there are exceptions, those who risk a look and sometimes very much more. Those are the painters, the poets, the artists, and the shamans—they look over and describe what they have discovered to all the others. But not even they are capable of going over there. They can see events and images, they can tell of them, but they can’t really visit those other worlds. That is reserved for a very few only. The elect. People like you, Jolly.”

  Again he made a gesture to stifle her objection. “And it is this that makes you something unique, whether you want to be or not. You have the power to leap from the speeding gallop of time, from one plate edge to the next. You and Munk—and the Maelstrom. For he also is a living being, and he also is elect.”

  “Are you saying that we polliwogs and the Maelstrom … we are alike?”

  “Like siblings.”

  Griffin’s words rose from her memory. Munk would himself become a maelstrom, he’d said. She shuddered.

  “That is not all,” said Forefather. “Even if it’s hard for you, you must try to understand these things. Every discovery of the other worlds, every conscious venture there involves dangers as well. Sometimes they could mean ruin, as perhaps for Aelenium. But sometimes they help us to something higher. You, Jolly, will grow into one, already are growing into one, who can take up the battle against the Maelstrom.”

  She stood up. “I don’t know if I’ve understood any of all that,” she said. “But it frightens me.”

  “It need not. It shouldn’t disconcert you just because it’s something new. You probably need to think for a while.” He pointed to the door of the room. “Feel free to go, if you wish. Go somewhere where you can be alone. Think about what I’ve said. The lesson is ended for today.”

  She didn’t argue with him, merely nodded to him and left the library. Forefather’s eyes followed her until she’d closed the door behind her.

  “Jolly!”

  She whirled around and saw Soledad, who was hurrying toward her across a coral platform on the west side of Aelenium, not far from where the steep mountain cone in the center of the city merged into the tangle of houses and little streets.

  Hundreds of gulls circled around the towers, but their screeching was drowned out by the rushing of the waterfalls that poured from the coral mountain down into the canals of the city.

  During her rambles, Jolly had discovered that the storytellers of Aelenium met here. They sat cross-legged on blankets or skins, some even on raised podiums, and gathered small groups of listeners around them, usually children, because the grown-ups were busy with the defense preparations.

  Jolly had wandered from one storyteller to another and picked up little snippets here and there, fairy tales and fables, but also episodes from the history of the city, of the Caribbean, and of the beginn
ings of colonization.

  “I was looking for you.” Soledad smiled. “The old man said you’d surely be up here somewhere.”

  Jolly hadn’t spoken with the princess at all for days, or with most of her friends from the Carfax, actually.

  For the first time she felt guilty on that account.

  “I had to think about something,” she said.

  “Oh?” Soledad tilted her head and raised her eyebrows.

  “Oh, don’t make such a face.” Jolly forced herself to give a halfhearted laugh.

  “Is it on account of Griffin and Munk?”

  “You never let up, do you?”

  Soledad studied her, hesitating, then she shrugged. “That’s your business, I’m not going to get into it. I wanted to talk with you for another reason.” She walked closer to Jolly and took her hands. “I want to say farewell.”

  “You’re going away?

  “Only for a few days, if all goes well.”

  “What are you going to do?” Jolly had thought she’d be the one who had to do the leave-taking when the time came for departure. The thought had been following her all day long like a spook.

  Soledad released her hands. “I’m going to end what I began in New Providence. I will avenge my father. Finally Kendrick’s going to bleed for having grabbed the pirate throne so treacherously.”

  Jolly stared at the princess. She’d known that sooner or later Soledad would go looking for the pirate emperor again. But recently she’d simply forgotten it. Or repressed it. Like so much, she thought. Like her own feelings and her search for Captain Bannon.

  “Where do you intend to find Kendrick?” she asked.

  “A rumor’s been going around for months that there’s going to be a big gathering of all the important pirate captains of the Lesser Antilles,” said the princess. “Kendrick’s going to meet with them. The pirates in that area have never accepted the pirate emperor. My father and his predecessors tried to force them, but it didn’t work. They have their own organization, and the decisions of their council are the only ones that apply in that region.”

  “Then why a meeting with Kendrick?”

  Soledad brushed back a strand of hair. “It’s said he wants to make them an offer they can’t refuse. No idea what he has in mind. My father ran into a brick wall with their stubbornness, and I doubt it will turn out any differently for that bastard.”

  Jolly frowned, “Do you know where they’re meeting, then?”

  Soledad grinned. “To be honest, it would probably be easier to get into the Spanish viceroy’s treasury than to get any information about the meeting place. But I have a plan.” She gave Jolly a piercing look. “An opportunity like this doesn’t come along often.” Jolly was just about to respond to that when Soledad went on. “Someone else is also going to take part in the meeting. Tyrone.”

  “Tyrone!”

  “Amazing, isn’t it? Looks as if he’s going to leave his hidey-hole in the Orinoco delta for it.”

  “But Tyrone … he doesn’t belong to them anymore. He quit the others.” This news had actually been a small sensation. Tyrone was a legend, a pirate whom even the other captains of the Caribbean feared. When, years before, he’d been driven into a tight spot by a Spanish armada, he’d fled onto the mainland and traveled up the Orinoco River on a raft with the rest of his crew. It was said that all the pirates in his crew had been killed and eaten by cannibals—with the exception of Tyrone, who in some mysterious way had managed to make the natives believe he was one of their gods. Since that time, rumors kept circulating that he’d risen to be ruler of the Orinoco cannibals, recruited new crews, and was making plans to fall on the islands of the Caribbean with a powerful fleet of pirates and man-eaters.

  Most people brushed these off as just wild stories. Even Bannon had believed that Tyrone had probably been wiped out by the cannibals along with his crew.

  And now Tyrone was supposed to appear to meet with the Antilles captains? That was almost as incredible as if the Devil himself had said he was coming.

  Jolly took a deep breath. Soledad was planning nothing less than poking a damned wasps’ nest. “We need you here,” she said, holding her ground against the gaze of Soledad’s dark eyes.

  “No,” the princess contradicted her. “Only you are important. And Munk. We others aren’t important at all. In comparison to you, even the Ghost Trader’s unimportant.”

  “But—”

  “He’s going with me. Really, it was his idea how we could find the meeting place.”

  Jolly stared at her. “The Ghost Trader? But … he can’t just leave us in the lurch!”

  “No one’s leaving you in the lurch, Jolly. With some luck, we’ll all be back here again before you leave.”

  “We’ll all? Does that mean—”

  “Walker’s going too. And, no, before you ask: Buenaventure and the Carfax are staying here. Walker, the Trader, and I are taking hippocampi.”

  The fact that Buenaventure and Walker would separate—even if it was only for a few days—was unusual. But at the moment Jolly wasted no thought on it. “How come the Ghost Trader’s going too? It must be all the same to him whether Kendrick remains pirate emperor or not.”

  Soledad agreed. “In any other situation it wouldn’t matter to him. But if the captains listen to me, then perhaps I can make them understand the danger we’re all in—even they and their crews. If they believe me, I’ll turn back with an entire fleet that can support us in the war against the Maelstrom.”

  Jolly made a face and didn’t try very hard to conceal her lack of understanding. “You’re going to inform all the pirates of the Caribbean that Aelenium exists? And where it’s anchored? What do you really think they’ll do first of all?”

  “I know the risk. That’s why it’s so important to have the Ghost Trader there. He can assess whether we have a chance or whether the entire plan is madness.”

  “But they’ll turn up here with their ships, and then Aelenium will have two fronts it has to fight on. The pirates will plunder the city and leave the ruins for the Maelstrom.“

  Soledad stroked Jolly’s hair. It was the first time that she’d permitted herself such a familiar gesture. “You’re smart, Jolly. But don’t underestimate me. I’ve learned a lot from my father. I know how you talk to those fellows. And what you have to promise them to have them eating out of your hand. It’s about their survival too—they just don’t know it.”

  “All the same, it’s madness. What does Count Aristotle say about it? And the council?”

  “They’ve agreed that it’s a chance. Perhaps the last one. You both need time to get to the Crustal Breach. And even if you and Munk are successful in sealing in the Maelstrom, it’s still more than likely that Aelenium will be attacked first. In that case, we need all the support we can get.”

  Jolly saw that she couldn’t convince the princess. The plan had been under way for a long time without anyone letting her and Munk in on it.

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Right now. That’s why I was looking for you. I wanted you to learn it from one of us, not from the old man or one of those big shots in the council.”

  “And Munk?”

  “You tell him.”

  “What about Griffin?” Jolly felt her heart beating suddenly harder.

  Soledad pricked up her ears and smiled in amusement. “Griffin?”

  “Is he going with you too?”

  “No, Griffin’s staying here. Don’t worry.”

  Jolly blushed. She felt discovered.

  “Take care of yourself.” Soledad pulled Jolly to her and hugged her hard. “Remember what I told you. You and Munk will be dependent on each other down there.”

  “Munk is furious with me.”

  “He’ll calm down again. He’s probably sitting somewhere and sulking. Men are like that, believe me.”

  They looked each other in the eyes. Jolly blinked away her tears before they could roll down her cheeks.

  “We
’re coming back, no matter how it turns out,” Soledad said.

  “Yes,” Jolly answered weakly, “sure.” She took a deep breath, as if the burdens on her shoulders had become doubly heavy at one stroke. “I’m afraid.”

  “We all are.”

  Jolly shook her head. “Not of the Maelstrom or the kobalins. I’m afraid of being down there alone with Munk. He … he’s my friend, but … oh, I don’t understand myself what’s the matter.”

  “Don’t you trust him?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “And that’s the worst, isn’t it? The not knowing.”

  Jolly embraced her again. “Oh, Soledad, I’d much rather go down there with any other person. With any one of you.”

  The princess pressed Jolly’s head against her shoulder and said nothing.

  9

  The Truth About Spiders

  The Ghost Trader’s plan was as crazy as it was obvious. It was based on a story that was being told all over the Caribbean.

  A few months before, one of the most powerful Antilles captains, a certain Santiago, had been marooned on a desert island by his men. The crew had mutinied because they felt the captain had cheated them in dividing their loot (and anyone who knew Santiago knew that their feeling was sure to be right). The men headed for an island, hardly more than a solitary sandbank, and set their swindling leader on land there. At his own request they’d given him only a large barrel of rum for nourishment—this, too, was just what you’d expect of Santiago.

  No one wept a tear for him when the story made the rounds of the dives in the harbor cities. A drunk, tyrant, and swindler, the captain had had very few friends among the leaders of the Caribbean pirates.

  The whole thing would soon have sunk into oblivion, but not long afterward, another crew, sailing within sight of the island, started the stories all over again. From the railing, the men had clearly made out the gigantic rum barrel on the shore—and the two legs sticking up out of it. Obviously Santiago had become a victim to his boozing, fallen headfirst into the cask, and drowned miserably in rum.