Blaggard's Moon (3 page)

He looked down at the marks, the chunks ripped from the aged, gray wood, some fresh, some faded, above and below the waterline. Triangular punctures not much bigger than what an iron nail might leave, leading up, up, up to where he sat, to the crimson-black stains that colored the open grain of the wood…

Yes, this was what worried Smith Delaney. This was what he found most troubling.
Onka Din Botlay.
They attacked only in the blackest darkness. Nightfall was hours away, but it was coming. And tonight, there would be no moon.

After a while the images faded and Delaney's heartbeats slowed. A man can think on his own gruesome death for only so long, he concluded. He rubbed his nose, then shifted from one buttock to the other and back.

He wished he had his knife. Belisar the Whale had wanted to leave Delaney with a knife. Not that it would save him. Pirates should die fighting, is all—so Belisar believed. But that lamebrain Lemmer Harps had botched the throw, careening it off the post, where he'd meant to stick it within Delaney's reach. Lemmer had thrown it from the shallop, the small ship's boat that had brought him here. He'd thrown it from only a short distance, close enough to be sure not to miss, but just far enough away that Delaney couldn't try anything other than maybe to throw it back again from his awkward perch.

But Lemmer had missed. Now it was useless, a good knife gone,
ker-plunk.
A true shame, too. He'd bought it in the Salmund Islands, the ones that ring the Sandavale nation. They could make a knife, the Sandavallians. That blade would hold an edge. It was balanced and hard as diamonds, sleek to look at and sharp as a razor to cut with. Delaney ran a hand over his stubbly chin, and felt a pang of sorrow that he'd never feel its cool steel on his whiskers again.

Lemmer had paid dearly for that poor throw.

Delaney didn't want to think on it, but as the events were fresh they came into his head anyway. He didn't mean to remember, but when he started thinking about his knife, and then about Lemmer, well, what Belisar had done just came next like a wagon follows a team of mules. Hungry piranha feeding on a live man's hand was not a good thing to think on. He closed his eyes against it, but his mind rolled on anyway, and now he saw Captain Belisar Whatney's bulk in the back of that little boat, making the prow point upward like a scolding finger, and he heard the pirate captain's words.

“There's the knife right there, Mr. Harps.” Belisar's was a high-pitched voice, with just a touch of a whine.

“I don't see it, Cap'n,” Lemmer answered, peering down into the dark waters. His chin shook a bit as though he already guessed what was coming, and it made his jutting beard quiver. His eyes were small and sharp, and they were placed close in, right next to the thin bridge of his long, crooked nose, so close in fact that Delaney often wondered if Lemmer saw everything like he was looking from two sides of a wall at once.

“Just reach in the water there,” Belisar said, almost gently, the fat flesh under his eyes rising up with dark pleasure. “I'm sure you'll find it if you just reach your hand in.”

Then Lemmer's head jerked upward as his pinpoint eyes searched his captain's, recognizing only too well the dancing gleam he saw there. “But Cap'n…”

“You lost it, Mr. Harps. You left our dear Mr. Delaney to die without a fighting chance. So just reach in the water, and fish it out for him.”

“But…there's them
Chompers
in there…” Lemmer said pitifully. The Hants had called these fish the
Jom Perhoo,
but never explained what that meant. Lemmer had translated it directly into a word he recognized. It certainly fit.

Belisar leaned back against the small boat's high stern planking, quite at ease. “Blue, you may need to help our reluctant Mr. Harps.”

Blue Garvey had the oars in his calloused hands. He was a big man, master at arms aboard Belisar's ship, and just the sort of man a pirate captain would trust with all his ship's weapons. He was loyal as a collared bulldog, though it was rumored aboard ship he had no heart at all. Word was he'd lost it in a poker game with the devil. Delaney didn't believe that sort of talk. Still, if ever there was a man who would hand his heart over on a bet, Delaney figured it would be Blue Garvey. He was merciless as sunrise on execution day.

Blue took Lemmer's arm above the wrist in an iron grip.

“No!” Lemmer squawked.

“You'd rather your hand, or all the rest of you?” Belisar asked with a satisfied sort of smirk. “Mr. Garvey won't be letting go his grip till one side or the other of you goes in the drink.”

Lemmer couldn't parse the meaning of that, so Belisar explained it patiently, like a schoolmaster. “Do you see where Mr. Garvey has his grip on your wrist, Mr. Harps? Well, he can put the short side in, which would
be from your wrist to your fingertips…Or, he can put the long side in, which would be from your wrist to your heels. It's your choice, but I suggest the former. I'd hate for you to lose that nice pair of boots.”

Blue emitted a guttural hiss, sounding like a snake with poor sinuses, that Delaney knew from experience to be a laugh. “I'll take 'is boots, Cap'n, then chunk all the rest of him in for ye!”

“I'm sure you would, Mr. Garvey, and I thank you for the offer. But Mr. Harps will make the right choice. Won't you, Mr. Harps?”

And he did. The
Chompers
were in fact exceedingly vicious, or exceedingly hungry, or both. Inside of sixty seconds of blood frenzy, Lemmer's hand was nothing but white bone and gristle, still attached at the wrist.

Delaney shuddered. It was Lemmer's face, for some reason, and not his hand, that stuck in Delaney's mind. It wasn't pain there, not really. It was more like…amazement. And at the same time…sadness. It was odd. It was as though Lemmer was amazed to be losing his hand, and grieving for the loss of it at the same time.

Delaney shook his head to clear the image, which didn't work very well, because after the shaking he wondered if that's what his own face would look like when the end came, when the mermonkeys took out his bones. He looked at his knobbled knees, his scarred knuckles, and he flexed his fingers. He'd broken several of them, plus an arm and a leg and a toe over the years, but they'd all healed fine. Gnarled and rough as his bones might be from the hard labor of hauling sheets and tying off lanyards and climbing ratlines in the rain, fighting and falling and rising up again bruised and bleeding and battered, they were still good bones, with a lot of years left in them. He'd be sorry to see them go. Sorrier even than he was about his knife.

Then he looked up through the hole in the cloud canopy to the sky above. He needed to find a better place to put his mind. His whole life had come down to a post, a pond, and a few hours of daylight, and all he could do was think on the worst possible things, both what had already happened and what was yet to happen. He squinted against the sun that flamed down into this dank hole. It looked like a torch against a blue background.

Yellow light in a blue sky.

A blue-eyed little girl in a yellow dress. Eyes shining.

Now there was something to think on! Delaney brightened and inhaled the dank air as if it were suddenly fresh and pleasant. Her face came back to him now, and it was a mercy. Her eyes were sad, but not
like Lemmer's had been sad. Hers were blue and sweet and made you want to pick her up, protect her, take her back to her mama. How could anyone see such a sad, sweet face as that little girl's and remember his orders? It's no wonder he didn't obey. Those eyes had little white specks in the blue parts, like she had inside her a whole world of sky and clouds, all shining out.

She'd be dead now if he hadn't done what he'd done. He knew that. She'd be dead if Delaney had followed Belisar's orders the way Belisar had meant them. But now she was alive. He grinned, showing the piranha the gum line above his teeth. She was alive, and he was the reason. That was a good thing.

But now Delaney was dead, or nearly so. And that was a bad thing.

His grin faded. His face bunched up, and he scratched behind a ragged ear. There was something all akilter in the world when obeying orders would have got her killed and disobeying would get him killed instead. And it was doubly akilter when neither he nor the girl deserved such a fate. He hadn't been given his orders aright.
Go take care of the girl,
was what Belisar had said. If he had wanted her dead, he should have said so plainly.

Delaney hoped she was running far away now, far away and safe aboard the
Flying Ringby,
running from the pirates, far north out of the Warm Climes, north toward the Havens Tortugal where the Kingdom of Nearing Vast held sway, and at least some sort of law could be counted upon. She'd be safe there. She'd be out of the Warm Climes, where nothing was as it seemed.

How she got mixed in with pirates, and how Delaney got mixed in with her, and how she got away, and how he got here on a post in a pond way upriver among the Hants, so far away from his home in the Kingdom of Nearing Vast…that was a story. That was the kind of story Ham Drumbone would be telling for years to come, speaking soft and low to silent sailors deep in the forecastle, as they swung in their hammocks at the end of a long day's watch.

“Good old Ham,” Delaney announced, happy again for another pleasant turn of mind. Hammond Drumbone. Oh, Ham would tell this tale. He'd already told much of it, up to the point where the little girl came in. These last parts now, he'd have no way of knowing. That wouldn't keep him from making something up, of course. But the rest of it, what had led up, that was a bigger story. That went back years. It was a big tale, too, with pirates and pirate-hunters, and fights at sea and on
the land, and then of course that whole tale of love and woe. Some was a famous story, known by all, but some wasn't. Some Ham picked up from bits and snippets that Delaney and others told him. Ham filled in a lot of it himself, no doubt. But no one ever minded. No one ever asked which parts were true and which parts weren't. Didn't matter. It was all true, the way Ham told it.

Delaney could almost hear Ham talking now, a shade of melancholy in his deep voice, calling up both lonesome longing and high hopes at the same time, painting those word pictures like only he could paint them. He was as good as the Hants were at conjuring images. He'd wait until there was quiet, there under the decks, quiet but for the creaking of the ship's timbers. And then he'd begin.

Where did it all start?
he'd ask.
Where do such tales ever start?
It was what he'd always ask at the outset of a story. Then Ham would answer himself.
Deep in the darkest part of the heart, where men don't know what goes on even inside their own selves. That's where every story starts.

That Ham. He could tell a tale.

“Dark and clouded it was,” Ham began one evening below decks, “with the sky iron gray and restless, the misty sea churning beneath it, throwing off white foam as far as the eye could see.” Smoke rose from his pipe as the men lay silent, hammocks in tight rows swaying together with the movement of the ship. “A storm was brewing, aye, and a big one, too. And then a thundering came, and it echoed, and then a voice came, carried on the thunder. But the voice was not like the thunder. The voice was high and beautiful. The voice was a girl singing sweet, and lingering on every note, a pure voice from far away, from out of the rain, out of the storm, out of a dream.”

“How old was the girl?” a young sailor asked in hoarse whisper.

“Don't matter her age,” Ham answered easily.

“What'd she look like?” asked another, bolder.

“It was just a voice, gents. A disembodied voice, as they say.”

“Ye mean she ain't got a body?” a third asked, somewhat shocked. “It's a ghost, or what?”

Ham sighed. “It's all happening in a dream. The ship, the singing, the girl…I'm telling you about a dream that Mr. Delaney had. When he wakes up you'll know where he is, for some of you were there. But I'm trying to build some mystery into it, so shush and let me tell it.”

The pirates went silent again, and Ham continued. “And then the
lightning flashed, and there was a ship. An enormous, sleek thing, sailing toward our Delaney at uncanny speed, sails full and billowing white in the sudden gale. And the voice sang words, radiant words that almost seemed to make sense, if only one could listen aright. But they didn't make sense, not to Delaney, and he was listening close. ‘A true lang time,' she sang in the dream, as sad and distant as lost love.” And now Ham's big bass voice sang out a melody, and Delaney imagined it many octaves higher, the way he'd heard it in his dream:

A true lang time,

A lang true la,

And down the silver path into a rushing sea,

Where moons hang golden under boughs of green,

And the true heart weeps

As she sings her song…

Ham's voice echoed into silence.

“What does it mean?” the young sailor asked. He was a boy of “almost thirteen,” the youngest of these cutthroats, and with his older brother, the newest.