Fire over Swallowhaven (6 page)

“I’d say not,” breathed Trundle.

“Firwig ho!” shouted Esmeralda as they came speeding up alongside the flagship of the Swallowhaven fleet. Another of Captain Wilde’s scarlet war galleons had smashed into the side of the
Gilded Lily,
and the two were locked together. A lot of hand-to-hand fighting was going on.

“Let’s get at ’em!” yelled Trundle, waving his sword and so filled to the brim with battle fever that he quite forgot to be scared.

Esmeralda brought the
Thief in the Night
around hard, and they made a bumpy landing on Admiral Firwig’s foredeck.

With chilling war cries, the three brave animals leaped into the thick of the battle.

“T
ake that! And that! And
that-and-that-and-that!
” yelled Trundle as he skipped and pranced among the discomfited pirates, his sword a glimmering blur of deadly steel. He never knew he had such courage in him! Close by he could hear Esmeralda and Jack causing chaos, Jack swinging the business end of his rebec, Esmeralda brandishing the tiller arm like a bludgeon.

And then, almost before he knew it, Trundle found himself standing on the foredeck of the
Gilded Lily
,
panting for breath and gazing across the pirateless deck at his two companions.

“They’re breaking off,” shouted Admiral Firwig. “Look at them running! Joy in the morning, my lads. Run up the signal for victory!”

He was right. Many of the pirate ships were in flames, but those few that had escaped the attention of Captain Darkside’s flamethrowers had already turned tail and were speeding away with every sail bulging. Unfortunately, among those fleeing unharmed was the
Iron Pig
, and even as Trundle spotted it careening away from the battlefield, he heard a voice booming back through a megaphone.

“We’re not done with you, Esmeralda Lightfoot!” roared the enraged Grizzletusk. “We’ll meet again, and then you and your little friends will be sorry you were ever born!”

Esmeralda looked at Trundle. “I think we’ve upset the poor captain,” she said with a grin.

“Amery Wilde doesn’t look too happy, either,” remarked Jack.

Of Wilde’s six red war galleons, three were in flames and two were running, and the sixth—the
Scarlet Scavenger
itself—had been boarded and subdued by Dolly Wideawake’s Amazons. Captain Wilde was at that very moment being roped to his own mast, with his dented silver helmet smashed down over his eyes.

“We can never thank you enough.” Beaming, Admiral Firwig turned to Trundle, Esmeralda, and Jack. “You shall have a triumphal parade! A victory feast! Seven days of festivities! Statues commissioned for the Grand Square! Medals! Gold! The freedom of Swallowhaven!”

“Well, thanks very much.” Trundle smiled. “That’s very nice of you. But what we really need is for the
Thief in the Night
to be fully supplied with provisions so we can continue our quest.”

“What my dear, sweet, unworldly friend means,” said Esmeralda, sidling up to Trundle and putting a firm arm around his shoulders, “is that we’d like the supplies
and
all that other stuff you said. If that’s okay with you, of course.”

“No problem!” said the Admiral. He turned to a nearby officer. “Signal all the fleet, my good fellow. Tell them we’re heading for harbor!”

And so bright and cheerful signal flags were run up the mast of the
Gilded Lily,
and the victorious windships of the invincible fleet of Swallowhaven headed for home.

It was not until quite a while later that anyone noticed that the four ironclad windships of the steam moles of Hammerland had slipped quietly away.

“Well, the gifts of pure gold were my favorites,” said Esmeralda as the
Thief in the Night
sailed away through the empty skies that stretched far beyond
the island of Swallowhaven. “Pity it was all too heavy to take with us, but it’ll make a nice little nest egg once our quest is over.”

“I think I liked the feast best,” sighed Trundle, patting his stomach and remembering the tables of the Grand Banqueting Hall, piled so high with food and drink that you had to eat for an hour before you could even see who was sitting opposite you.

“I just adored the songs and the dances,” said Jack, lying in the bottom of the boat, tapping his long feet rhythmically against the mast and lazily bowing his rebec. “It’s a pity we couldn’t stay for the full seven days of festivities, though.”

“One day was quite enough,” said Esmeralda. “Another six days of feasting like that, and we wouldn’t have fitted in our clothes anymore.”

“We wouldn’t have even fitted in the
Thief in the Night,
” chortled Trundle. “We’d have had to find ourselves a bigger powerstone to keep us afloat.”

“Hello, hello, hello,” said Esmeralda, getting to her feet and peering off into the distance. “What’s that?”

“What?” asked Trundle.

“That there!”

“What where?”

“If you’d stir your lazy bones and look, you’d see what where,” Esmeralda retorted. “It looks to me like a bit of a windship.”

Intrigued, Trundle and Jack got up and stared out over the prow of the
Thief in the Night
.

“By golly, I think you’re right,” said Jack.

At first Trundle couldn’t really make out the tiny object at all. But then, as Esmeralda turned the tiller and they made a long, slow curve toward the floating whatever-it-was, he began to realize what it was: a broken length of a windship’s mainmast, complete with the crow’s nest and the powerstone basket. And as they got closer, he also noticed the skinny and
ragged shape of a hare, squatting on the basket and flapping his arms about as though he was swatting insects.

“The poor fellow,” said Jack. “We must rescue him.”

“Ummm…,” began Esmeralda. “Well-l-l-l-l…”

Trundle looked at her. “You’re not seriously considering just leaving him there like that?” he protested. “Not even you could be so heartless.”

“Of course not,” Esmeralda said indignantly. “We could give him some food and water. You know, enough to keep him going till someone else comes along to rescue him. What do we do with him if we
do
pick him up? We’re serious questers, Trundle, not a local ferry service.”

“But what if no one else
does
come along?” asked Jack. “No! We have to bring him aboard—it’s the only civilized thing to do.”

“And then what?” Esmeralda asked. “We’re heading off into uncharted regions. Where do we
drop him off? Or are you suggesting we go all the way back to Swallowhaven with him?”

“I’m sure we’ll find somewhere perfectly pleasant up ahead to put him ashore,” said Trundle.

Esmeralda shrugged. “Very well, then. If you insist,” she said. “But if this all goes pear shaped, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

As they moved cautiously closer to the floating chunk of mast, they could hear the flailing animal chattering away to himself.

“Flies and fleas, wasps and bees! Bite my nose and gnaw my knees! Without a ‘may I’ or a ‘please’! Flies and fleas and wasps and bees!”

The
Thief in the Night
came up gently alongside the debris with its wretched babbling passenger. So far as they could tell, the air around the gibbering hare’s head was quite empty of insects.

“Uh, hello there,” Trundle said amiably.

The scrawny figure became still, fixing him with a bulging and lunatic eye.

“Would ye have a cup of toenails for a poor lost mariner, me pretty bucko?” he asked in a high-pitched, screechy voice, his long ears twisting and untwisting above his head like propellers as he spoke.

“Not as such…,” Trundle hesitantly replied.

Before anything more could be said, the hare made a flying leap onto the
Thief in the Night
, clutching at Trundle and sending him bumping onto his back on the bottom boards.

The tattered hare sat on him, staring around and grinning. “Life begins at one o’clock!” he said, blinking his huge eyes at Esmeralda and Jack. “Brandy for the parson’s nose, if you please.”

Trundle gazed up at the manic hare. “Are you entirely all right?” he asked in a squashed kind of voice. The newcomer was all skin and bones, but he
was sitting full on Trundle’s chest, which did make breathing a little difficult.

“Who be ye, me pretty bucko?” asked the hare, eyeing him again. “I can see by yer snout you’re as wise as a cuckoo’s egg!” And so saying, he began to shriek with laughter, clutching at his knees and rocking back and forth on Trundle’s chest while all poor Trundle could do was gurgle and splutter.

“Here, let me help you up,” Jack said kindly, lifting the skinny hare under his armpits and standing him on his feet. “Welcome aboard the
Thief in the Night
.”

“Thief? Where thief? Who thief?” squeaked the hare, clutching at his ragged clothes and peering suspiciously about the skyboat. “He’ll get nothing from me, the dirty rotten burglar. A man’s blackpowder pouch is his own private kingdom! I’ll eat it first, so I will!”

“Calm down, my friend. There are no actual burglars aboard,” Jack explained. “This skyboat is
called the
Thief in the Night
.” He smiled and tapped at his own chest. “I’m Jack Nimble, at your service. And that’s Princess Esmeralda Lightfoot, the daughter of noble Roamany lineage. And the chappie sprawled on his back there is my very good friend Trundle Boldoak, a brave and bold adventurer.”

“Ishmael March is me name, me bright young button,” said the hare. “Windship’s cook, thirteen years before the mast.” He pointed to the floating debris. “That there mast, to be exact.” He ran to the side of the skyboat and peered over the bow. “But where’s the rest of the windship gone? Where are me pots and me pans and me knives and me forks and me lemon squeezer and me asparagus tongs?”

“I think they’re…um…gone,” said Esmeralda, spiraling one finger slowly downward in a significant way. “Sorry and all that. Have you been out here on your own for very long?”

“A while, your royal majestieness,” said Ishmael,
blinking rapidly. “I’ve been drifting adrift all on me tod, as it were, except for the buzzing fellers in me head, ever since the freakish fire drakes burned the
Gob Sprite
out from under me.”

“Hold on a minute,” said Trundle sitting up. “The
Gob Sprite
? That was the name of one of the pirate windships from the battle!”

Jack looked solemnly at the hare. “Is that true?” he asked. “Are you a pirate?”

Ishmael March held finger and thumb a fraction apart. “A wee bit of a pirate, perhaps, on me mother’s side,” he admitted. “But not a fighting pirate, oh, my dear no. Windship’s cook, that’s me. Ishmael March, cook and…what was it they called me, now? It began with L and rhymed with spoony.”

“Loony?” Trundle offered.

Ishmael nodded and grinned. “That’d be it!”

“A pirate!” said Esmeralda, folding her arms and giving Trundle and Jack a caustic look. “We’ve taken a brain-addled pirate on board.” She snorted meaningfully. “Great!”

“He looks harmless enough,” said Trundle. “It’s not like he’s armed or anything.”

“That’s what you think!” exclaimed Ishmael, whipping out a small potato peeler from his belt. “Ready for any occasion, that’s me! Bring on the spuds! I’ll take their eyes out in a jiffy! I’ll have their skins from their backs, I will! That’s old Ishmael!” He eyed each of them in turn. “Thank ’ee mightily for rescuing me,” he cackled. “Ye saved me from going mad, me salty herrings! Ye arrived in the nick of time to save old Ishmael from going stark mad!”