Blaggard's Moon (13 page)

Once the fish seemed to have settled again, he slowly unknotted his ankles from behind the post. Surprised and a little worried by how stiff his legs had become, he stretched his bare feet out in front of him and wiggled his toes, keeping his balance by holding the post under his buttocks in both hands. Feeling a little more confident, he put the soles of his bare feet against the wooden sides of the post, then lifted up his right buttock and slid his right hand, palm down, onto the cross-cut surface under him. He shifted over so that he sat with his right buttock on just the edge of the post. Pushing up with his feet and legs as well as his hand, he raised himself enough to reach his left hand over in front of him and place it palm down beside his right hand.

“Here's the tricky part,” he said aloud, less to the fish than to himself. The pole shook and trembled, but with agility gained in flinging himself around the rigging of tall ships, he loosed his feet and turned himself around to face the post, his feet quickly but carefully finding the post again, inside arches pressing tightly to the rounded sides. He lowered himself until he was hugging the post in a shinny. There he waited once again for the hungry fish to calm themselves.

“I'm tellin' you boys, leave it be.”

Slowly, inch by gradual inch, he shinnied down until his toes were about two feet from the surface of the water. The
Chompers
seemed highly interested, but not highly agitated. He paused again to remove the bandana from his belt, which he did quite slowly. By now, his mouth felt dry as dirt, his throat hurt him just to think of swallowing. The worst part, though, was that he could smell the water now; he could feel its coolness rising upward. The thought came to his mind that he could just let go and plunge in, drinking in all the cool water in the world before the inevitable, before it was all just over and done, but he shook that thought away with a start. It was the sort of strange imagining that dying men did.

He looked down again, saw the silvery blue fish moving from sunlight to shadow, shadow to sunlight, circling, bobbing up to the surface for a better view, waiting. Taking the bandana in his right hand, hooking the post in the crook of his left arm, he squatted down on his haunches so he was sitting on his own heels. Then he began, ever so carefully, to lean down, down toward the water, his left arm unwrapping itself until he clung with his two feet and his left hand, reaching out to dip the bandana in with his right. All he needed was to get it wet, and then he could suck
its moisture into his mouth. It was a plan that couldn't fail, he thought. He had seen how high the
Chompers
could jump when they took Lemmer's hand. His bandana was a good twelve inches long, and none of those fish ever got more than six or eight inches from the surface unless they were pulled up out of the water, with jaws clamped on—

“Don't think on that,” Delaney whispered to himself.

As he lowered the bandana, the fish grew agitated again, sure now that here at last was a morsel on which they could feed. They swarmed so thick under the cloth that Delaney suddenly wondered if there was any water between them at all. Then he worried that so many of them would try to take the bandana, it would be shredded before they could determine it was naught but cotton.

But as he held the bandana poised above their heads, a strange thing happened.

The piranha disappeared. They turned in an instant and were gone, fleeing in all directions. Delaney looked at the bandana for a moment, wondering how it might have scared them. Then he realized this was his chance, whatever the cause, and he plopped the cloth into the water. It was a bit of a greasy thing, and floated on the surface at first. So he waved it a few times through the water to be sure it had soaked up some moisture. Then he pulled it up and put it in his mouth. He closed his eyes and felt the cool liquid pour down his throat. No ale ever tasted better.

Suddenly the post lurched, as though something had slammed into it hard under the surface. Delaney lost his grip and fell sideways with an awkward splash, into the lagoon.

Panicked and under the surface, he turned back toward the post and kicked hard with his feet, pulled with his hands, coughing out a great bubble, willing himself back to the post the way a man in different straits would have shot upward for air. His head still underwater, he felt the post with his hands, pulled it toward him…

And then he saw it.

It was right below him. The face, doughy and puckered, blind white eyes, bared teeth, hugging tight to the post not eight feet under him.

Scrambling upward with strength and speed born of terror, Delaney shot out of the water up the post, slipping as he went, sliding back down the wet surface, twice as far as he climbed it seemed. But he reached the top alive, and was instantly seated again on its upmost end. He peered down into the darkened water, dripping wet, heart battering his ribs like a flurry of cannonballs hitting a hull broadside. He pulled his feet up under
him as far from the surface, as far from that thing, as he could possibly get them.

The dark water was silent. And then the
Jom Perhoo
came back, arriving lazily, unconcerned. As though nothing had happened.

But nothing had
not
happened. It was not
nothing
that had happened. It was
something.
He had seen that something, and that something was the
Onka Din Botlay,
Ripper of the Bone. Sure he had—he hadn't imagined it. He was no good at imagining. Besides, he was wet; his clothing was soaked. He had fallen in and he hadn't been eaten by
Chompers.
So it had happened.

He had seen its face.

That
was going to stay with him a very long time, he knew. That is, if he in fact had a very long time, which now that he'd seen the face, he realized he undoubtedly didn't. That face had howled at him, Delaney was sure. But he was also sure it had made no noise. It was shrieking like the monkeys of the forest, with mouth wide, eyes blind in anger, a vicious cry. But it was silent. Its claws were dug into the post. Long fingers, just as the Hants had said, that came to points like carpenter's nails. It was whiter, pastier, older, uglier than he had known how to envision. Hollow cheeks, sunken like it was starved. Eyes deep and piercing. Like there was hatred in them.

Delaney's breaths came a little easier now, now that it seemed the thing wouldn't follow him up the post. And the
Chompers
were back, which he was very glad to see. They suddenly seemed like old friends. “Good little fishies,” he told them, hoping they'd stay around. So long as the piranha surrounded him, he was safe.

The lagoon had grown placid again. The mermonkey was gone.

Onka Din Botlay.
Why hadn't it ripped out his bones? Why had it showed up at all? They come out only at night, is what the Hants said, under blackest moon. But it was day. And the thing was definitely out.

No, that's not what the Hants had said. He remembered it now. The fire was burning, casting its flickering light on the faces of those seated around it.

“
Onka Din Botlay
attack only under the black moon,” the leader had said, the one with his face tattooed black-and-white in the shape and figure of a skull. He was their chieftain, or their priest, it was hard to know which. He said it, then he let the sickly old man translate, then he took a great tug on the long
hoobatoon
pipe. He blew the swath around him
in an odd, ceremonial fashion and handed the pipe to Belisar the Whale. The pirate took it, nodded, and did the same.

They
attack
only under the black moon. That's what the man had said.

Delaney took a deep breath now and exhaled. He had gotten his water, but so far it had grown no idea tomatoes in his head. In fact, it had pretty much run everything out of his head but mermonkeys. Mermonkeys that would come in the dark, and climb the post, and eat his bones.

It would have been better to die that day in Mumtown, like Avery Wittle did. That would have saved him this horrible end. And saved the world a load of piracy. Avery hadn't turned. Avery had made his stand there, in Castle Mum. And though Delaney didn't want it to come back, didn't like to think on it, there it came, a memory from four years back that seemed so lifelike, it seemed it was happening all over again.

“I need your hands,” the
Horkan
man said, picking bits of beef breakfast from his teeth with a twisted splinter of wood. “You first.”

The
Horkan
man wanted to bind them all, and he wanted to bind Delaney first. His head still pounding, Delaney stood to face the challenge, then glanced over his shoulder at his fellow captives. They were all watching to see what he'd do. He swallowed once, filled his lungs, then did the only thing he could think to do. He extended grim fists between the bars, just as the jailor demanded. He had no other ideas.

The big man tied Delaney's protruding hands at the wrist with a thin leather thong. The sailor admired the handiwork in spite of himself, the firmness of the wrap, the quick, careful frap that drew it tight, the easy, firm double half-hitch over his right fist to secure the end. Here was a man who knew his business.

“You next,” the
Horkan
man said, attempting to pull Sleeve from the corner with a bent finger. Sleeve swore at him, but didn't budge.

“No trial for you, then.” He pulled a pistol from where he kept it in his belt at his back and aimed it between the bars. “And I'll kill two others here, just for spite.” He pointed it at the Trum boys.

“Whoa now!” Delaney offered. “Let's not be hasty. Sleeve moves slow, is all. But he's movin'. Ain't ye, Sleeve?”

Sleeve snarled his displeasure, but the encouragement of cellmates convinced him to follow Delaney's example. After Sleeve, the jailor bound Mutter Cabe, and then big Nil Corver. Delaney furrowed his brow. Something about the order in which his fellow captives were
summoned struck him as odd. Then he knew what it was. The Cabeeb jailor had somehow assessed the danger his captives posed and was securing them in order, from best fighter to worst. Information bought with Captain Stube's gold, no doubt.

Least and therefore last was young Dallis Trum, eyes wide and unseeing, lower lip trembling as though saying as many prayers as he knew, as fast as possible.

“It's all right, young pup,” Delaney tried to assure him. “It's just a bit of a pinch, that's all. Pinches come and go.” He winked in what he hoped was a knowing sort of way, but there was a sting like a particle of dust in his eye, and all he could think was that he wished he hadn't taken the two boys under his wing quite so thoroughly.

Dallis put his pudgy hands through the bars next to his brother without being requested, having seen all the others do the same.

“Oh, not you,” the jailor told him. “You will be the first to die.”

“Whoa, wait!” Nil trembled. “What about the trial?” The corners of his mouth drew downward, pulling his eyes into a blank stare. “You
said.
”

Sleeve harrumphed. “Ain't gonna be no trial, ye blame fools.” He rattled the bars vigorously and vainly, using all of his strength and most of his vocabulary. The others just watched.

“Trial, yes,” the jailor told them once Sleeve's bile was spent. He stared deep into Sleeve's eyes from the free side of the bars. “Yes, we must do things in the proper order. My mistake. First, the trial.
Then,
you die. Sometimes I forget and do it backward.” But the humor was now gone from the
Horkan
man, replaced by flat, dry death.

Sleeve reached out to grab the jailor by the throat, but the big man stepped back easily, out of reach.

Now the jailor turned to the wall behind him, which was fashioned from rough boards tied together with lengths of hemp, and to the surprise of his prisoners he slid it aside as though he were opening a curtain at some theatrical show. When their eyes adjusted to the sudden stream of blinding sunlight, the doomed men saw an empty dirt courtyard fenced around by stone walls, darkened from decades, maybe centuries, of dirt and smoke. The sunlight that fell here seemed only to make the grime more dismal.

In the center of the little space was a platform, the broad remains of a huge cedar or some other gnarled tree, its long-dead roots twisting up here and there from the sandy earth like gray snakes that had died
sunning their bellies. The platform this trunk created was six feet across and a foot or two high.

The jailor unlocked the iron padlock with a rusted key and went into the cell, binding Dallis Trum's hands behind him. Then he walked the boy out and stood him in the center of the stump, turned him to face the crewmen.

“Witnesses,” the jailor said. Delaney thought he was addressing the sailors until two men stepped toward the stump into view. One was of no particular distinction, average in height and weight, middle-aged, no beard, dressed like any merchant of Nearing Vast.

The other man, however, was a sight to behold. He overshadowed his partner in every way. This one was tall and broad-shouldered and was dressed in a cream-colored silk shirt, silvery satin breeches, and white silk stockings to his knees. His calves bulged; his knotted muscles almost made the jailor's proportions seem small. He wore no hat, and his light brown and sun-streaked hair fell in glorious curls to his shoulders.