Deadweather and Sunrise (16 page)

Looking north, I saw a good-sized island a mile or two ahead. I couldn’t tell if it was inhabited, but it was lush and green, so I guessed there’d be fresh water and probably fruit to eat. I didn’t think I could make it swimming, but if we were floating in that direction—the sails of both ships were struck, leaving us adrift—I
thought we might get close enough at some point to make a try for it.

I was wondering whether marooning myself was better than staying in the company of a pack of murderous thugs when I heard a voice boom behind me.

“S’is the boy?”

I turned around. A beast of a man was approaching me, with three of the men from the dining hall trailing behind him. He was well over six feet, shoulders wide as a horse, with a machete in his belt and a pair of pistols tied to a sash slung across one shoulder. There was something peculiar about the shape of his head, but it was hard to say what.

I tried not to look terrified, but I couldn’t help shrinking back as Ripper Jones loomed over me, gnawing the meat from a bone that I hoped wasn’t human. It looked like pork, but I wouldn’t have put it past him.

He reached out with a hairy finger and yanked down the ascot. “Healy fire, neh?”

“N-no, sir. Not a real one. Th-they drew it on me. For sport.” As I gestured toward the boats fleeing in the distance, my hand trembled. In that situation, I think anyone’s would have.

He tossed the bone away. As he inspected his greasy fingers, I realized why his head looked so strange. He had the smallest ears I’d ever seen, so small they made his whole face look narrow and weasel-like.

As I wondered how many men he’d killed for making fun of his ears, he licked the grease from one finger. Then he wiped the others down the front of my shirt.

“Man pu’ a Healy fire on me… be righ’ angry.”

I nodded vigorously. “I was.”

The more he talked, the more I realized there was something odd about the way he spoke—something slithery, like all the hard edges had been sanded off the words. In its way, it was as unusual as the size of his ears.

He pursed his lips in a thoughtful sort of way. “Say I help ye… say I cu’ ’er off?”

He drew his machete, raising it to my neck. The men behind him sniggered.

“All righ’ wi’ you?”

My whole body was trembling now. I could feel the razor edge of the blade tickle my neck.

“Rather you didn’t,” I managed to whisper.

Seconds passed. Finally, he laughed, clapping me on the arm as he lowered the knife. “Goo’ answer.”

Then he turned to the other men. “No’ bad, ’is one. Figger ’e go’ some fight in ’im?”

“Dunno. Should we give ’im a workout?”

The Ripper grinned. His front teeth had been filed down to sharp points, and when he showed them, he suddenly looked less like a weasel than a shark. “Neh. E’en better—le’s pu’ ’im an’ Gu’s inna ring. See ’oo’s tougher.”

“Right on, Cap! Should we make a show of it?”

“Yeh! ’Ave Mink se’ a line.”

One of the men turned and ran toward the other end of the deck, where a net full of plundered cargo was being lowered down to one of the rowboats.

IN THE HALF HOUR or so it took for them to ferry over Guts, whoever he was, the pirates showed a knack for organizing I wouldn’t have guessed they had. The deck was cleared and sprinkled with a thin layer of sand. A large square area in front of the mainmast was marked off with chalk, and the crowd assembled on its edges in impressively straight order, considering how drunk most of them were. A complicated betting system was established by the quartermaster—bets were made and secured against odds that constantly shifted, although I was never given a better than five-to-one chance of winning.

They sat me on a stool and left me to sit alone in a corner of the fighting square. No one spoke to me, but from the conversations swirling around the deck, I got a sense of where things stood. This Guts was a cabin boy. He wasn’t big, but he was tough, mean, and thought to be insane. There was something wrong with him—the pirates called it his “crip”—but the general opinion was that it wouldn’t hurt his chances, and a few men even argued that he could use it as a weapon.

The fight would be to the death. No one really expected me to win, even the ones who bet on me.

The longer the wait went on, the more sick to my stomach I got. I’d already been the entertainment on the
Earthly Pleasure
once that day. This time promised to be much worse. I would have jumped overboard if I thought I could make it to the railing without getting tackled.

So I tried to distract myself by studying the crowd. At the far corner stood a handful of pirates who kept to themselves, apart from the others. They were swarthier than their mates, with the same tiny ears as Ripper Jones, and at one point I caught a snatch of their conversation, which sounded like mushy gibberish until I realized they were speaking a foreign language. It occurred to me that they must be Cartagers, which came as a surprise. I’d never seen one in person before, and I never would’ve guessed that Ripper Jones not only had them on his crew, but was one himself—which explained not only his ears, but his slithery accent.

Toward the end of my wait, when the boat carrying Guts had arrived and the net had been lowered to haul him up, one of the less drunk pirates, who’d been standing in the front row to my right and staring at me curiously for a while, finally opened his mouth.

“Yer from Deadweather, aren’t ye?”

I nodded. He grinned, nodding in recognition. “Yeh! Yer that fruit picker’s son! I seen ye in the Scratch. Where’s yer Dad?”

“He’s dead,” I said.

The man shrugged. “Don’t worry. Probably see him in a few.”

A cheer went up from the crowd. The net had cleared the deck rail, its human cargo wriggling inside. Someone unhooked the net, and Guts tumbled out.

He sprang up fast, short and skinny, eyes darting under a mop of tangled hair that fell below his shoulders and was so blond it almost looked white. His head and limbs moved in unpredictable, spastic twitches, like a trapped and desperate animal.

He might have been nine or sixteen or anything in between. It
was hard to tell. I’d never seen a human move like that. If someone had told me his father was a wolf, I would have believed it.

He was in such constant motion that it wasn’t until he’d been herded into the far corner of the ring that I realized his left hand was missing. At the end of his forearm, right where the left wrist should have been, his arm suddenly ended in a rounded-off stump.

Someone whispered in his ear, and his eyes landed on me, burning fierce. If one of the pirates hadn’t been holding him back by the arms, he would have rushed me right then. They pulled him down onto a stool, holding him in place.

I felt hands press down on my shoulders from behind. They didn’t want me starting early, either.

Ripper Jones made his way toward a plush, high-backed chair that had been set up for him on one side of the square.

“Las’ bets, gen’lemen!” he called out. “Show’s abou’ start.”

“Final line is eight to one!” announced the quartermaster.

“’Ow d’ye figure?” yelled someone else.

“Gutsy’s hungry! Forgot to feed him today.”

There was laughter and catcalling. I tried to block it out. I needed to think, to loosen the grip of fear tightening around my brain and come up with some kind of plan for staying alive. I didn’t think I could kill this boy, or whatever he was. But I didn’t want to die, either.

I looked around for a third option. The crowd of pirates had closed around us—there wasn’t an inch of open space around the square. I looked up and saw a dozen men in the rigging above us, peering down like spiders in a web.

There was no getting out of here without giving them what they wanted. Which was blood.

The Ripper settled into his chair.

“You know rules, boys. Las’ one breathin’ wins.”

“On my count!” yelled the quartermaster. “Three… two… one…’Ave at it!”

The kid sprang at me, closing the open space like a bird in flight. I ducked him, diving under and to his left, where he didn’t have a hand that could grab at me.

I hit the gritty deck hard, rolled, and was halfway to my feet when he charged again.

I tried to duck him a second time, but he got me by the hair and we went down together. There was a tangle of limbs, and I was thrashing frantically, swinging and kicking with no aim at all. I got hit a few times and tried to twist away, and for a second I didn’t know which way was up and then there was a searing pain at the base of my shoulder, and I somehow thrashed away and as I pushed backward with my feet I got a look at him and there was blood in his mouth and I think it was mine.

I was on my back, still scrabbling backward with my feet, when he jumped at me again. But he was too far away and I had just enough time to kick him hard in the middle of the face and he flopped to one side and then I had time to stand up.

I backpedaled in a crouch as I watched him get to his feet. His nose was crooked and streaming blood.

We circled, keeping our distance, catching our breath. My shoulder burned where he’d bitten me. He wiped the blood from his face with his good arm, but more kept coming out his nose.

“’Ey, Gussie!” yelled the Ripper. “Bonus if you chew that mark off ’is neck!”

He snarled and jumped me again. I tried to get low on him, and we knocked heads so hard I saw colors. Then his mouth was going for my neck, but I got my hand up under his chin and tried to rip his jaw away from his skull. He gurgled and tried to punch me in the ribs, but it was his bad arm and the stump didn’t do much. I got a good grip on the fingers of his hand and wrenched them around, so he had to roll off me or they’d break.

Then I got him by the wrist and twisted his arm behind him as I sat on his back, and he was flailing, all wild fury, but he was flat on his stomach and couldn’t get any leverage with his legs.

A roar of surprise went up from the crowd. He struggled some more, but I had him good and stuck.

“Kill him!”

“End it, boyo!”

He was mine to finish. I thought about sinking my teeth in his neck, or bashing his head against the deck, or choking him out.

But I couldn’t make myself do any of those things. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the memory of that scream coming from Pilcher’s cabin. The one from the poor soul I hadn’t tried to help.

I lowered my head toward his ear. “I don’t want to kill you,” I said.

He flailed again, like a fish in a bucket.

“If we stop, they can’t make us fight. We don’t have to finish. Do you understand?”

He didn’t say anything, but I felt his body go slack. I kept my grip, just in case.

“I’ll stop if you stop. Both of us together. Will you?”

He didn’t answer. The pirates were getting angry.

“Finish him!”

There was a thud that I felt through the planking of the deck, followed by a low, gritty rumble. I turned my head. Rolling toward me, on a straight line from the Ripper’s chair to my hand, was a five-pound cannonball.

I looked up and caught the Ripper’s eye. His mouth was split in a grin, the sharpened teeth glistening.

“Do it!”

“Kill him!”

“Bash his head in!”

The cannonball rolled to a stop against Guts’s bad arm. His stump bumped uselessly against it.

“I don’t want to kill you!” I said again. “Promise you’ll stop and I won’t.”

His cheek was pressed against the deck, his eye dancing as he tried to look back at me. Under his nose, blood was dripping into a little pool on the deck.

I moved my head so it was in his field of vision. His eye stopped moving and settled on mine.

“Just promise!” I was practically begging him.

He jerked his head a little, up and down.

“Say it.”

“Promise.” His voice was weak and gurgly.

“The fight’s over?”

“Fight’s over.”

The crowd was yelling louder. They could see what was happening, and they didn’t like it.

“No more,” he said, louder this time. “Promise.” His eye was still watching me. The fierceness was gone from it.

I kept my grip. I wasn’t sure of him yet.

“Friend?” he asked, his voice breaking.

I nodded. “Friend.”

I rolled off him onto the deck to the sound of fury erupting all around us. The pirates were shaking their fists with rage.

I didn’t care. I was done with it. They could do what they wanted, but I wasn’t going to be like them. They weren’t going to make me kill some poor half-animal crippled kid.

I looked around the square, watching them yell themselves hoarse. I should have been terrified, but I wasn’t. They might kill me for this. But I felt like I’d won.

I was starting to smile when I saw their faces change, the eyes all darting to my left in surprise.

Then Guts hit me in the side of the head with the cannonball.

Everything went screwy for a moment. By the time my eyes refocused, he was straddling my chest, all the fierceness back in his eyes as he swung the cannonball toward my head again.

I had just enough time to curse myself for being an idiot before it all went black.

What a stupid way to die.