The Pirate's Revenge (5 page)

He sighed as if the world might end.

‘No pleasing 'em, either. They don't know a decent meal when it's put in front of 'em.'

‘Maybe they eat different things in Spain,' I suggested.

‘They'll eat what they get, and be happy about it,'
he said. ‘It's not as if they're even Spanish. Bunch of misfits from all over, that's what they are. If they were proper Spaniards, we'd get along just fine. He appreciates good cooking, your real Spaniard, I'll say that for 'im. But this lot …'

Miller stuck his head around the corner. ‘If you two have finished swapping recipes, Cyg's got work to do back on the
Mermaid
. Boat's leaving now.'

I jumped up and kissed Cookie on the cheek. ‘I can't say I was happy to see Diablo,' I admitted, ‘but I'm very glad to see you.'

He stroked my face with two of his soft, fat fingers. ‘Remember what I said, my little cygnet.'

‘I will,' I promised, and ran to catch the boat. As much as I loved Cookie, I didn't want to be stranded aboard
Gisella
, with her vicious captain and grim-faced crew.

As soon as my feet touched the deck of the
Mermaid
, Jem was getting us under way.

‘Cyg!' he shouted, even though I was only about ten feet away. ‘Set the course!'

‘For where?' I asked.

‘Isola di Bravo. You're guiding Diablo into the Golden Grotto. He wants to search for treasure.'

It lay dead ahead, a dark slash in the bright yellow cliffs, flooded by cool, creamy crashing waves. Great kelp welts trailed in the water like monstrous snakes, whipping and darting out towards us. The sea was kingfisher blue, but the currents were strong. It was easy enough to row in towards the grotto, but making our way out against the swell would be another matter. It took muscle enough to keep the prow headed for the cave instead of smashing against the rocks, but
Gisella
's men were strong and determined, and their oars beat the water in good time.

At last the boat glided into the black maw of the cave. Jem lit a blazing torch and held it high above his head. He sat in the bow, and I crouched as close to him as I could get. The other crew were all strangers to me, Diablo's men. Pilchards, Cookie had called them, and looking at their pinched faces and glassy eyes, I could see what he meant.

‘Steer hard to larboard,' I called. A shark-tooth-sharp rock in the centre of the pool had caught many a boat unawares.

‘See the opening there?' I pointed. ‘Take us in — that's the grotto.'

Diablo stood up in the stern, peering ahead into the darkness. The boys were silent, bowed over their oars, as we passed through the final archway. We all gazed up as the grotto roof opened out, cavernous, the noise of our breathing echoing around us like chattering sea-sprites.

‘I don't see anything,' said Jem.

‘Look around the ledges,' Diablo ordered, so the men rowed gingerly along the rocky sides of the cave.

When the boat had finished its circuit, the men stopped rowing and looked at each other. Nothing here.

‘More torches!' Diablo shouted, and as they began to blaze, the men gasped. The Golden Grotto glitters when you shine a light, but nobody knows why. It's not gold, although many a poor fool had thought he'd found his fortune here and chipped away great lumps of the rock. In the light of day, his treasure turned out to be just mucky, rotten limestone.

Lucas and I had once brought some stones home to Mama, crying ‘Look, we're rich!' and she'd laughed.

‘My sweets,' she'd said. ‘There's no more gold in that grotto than in my apron pocket. But luckily I have all the riches I need.' Then she'd squeezed us tight.

But the Grotto glowed, then and now, and Diablo's eyes gleamed.

‘It's nothing,' I said, ‘just shiny slime.'

Diablo shot me a look of such venom I felt my bones
freeze. ‘As you will, Miss Know-Everydamnthing. You better get in that water and don't come up for air without a fistful of something more valuable than slime.'

I stood up and met his eyes. ‘There's nothing here. I told you that, months ago.'

‘Dive!' he shouted, his hand on his cutlass.

‘What am I looking for? Seaweed?'

The captain's voice was a low ominous growl. ‘Throw her in.'

Hands grabbed at me and shoved me over the side. I hit the water face first, sinking down deep, and struggled back to the surface. Through my own spluttering and splashing I heard laughter.

‘Look, boys, it's a baby seal.' Diablo ripped a pistol from his belt and aimed it right at me. ‘Now, girl, for once you will do as you are ordered.'

The crack of the pistol shocked the daylights out of me, just as he intended. It frightened the bats in the roof, too, and the echo of the shot ricocheted around the walls laced with the ghostly shrieks of hundreds of the vile flapping creatures. He'd missed me by a mile, but he would not miss next time.

I dived.

It was freezing black water, depthless and bottomless at the same time. I had no idea if I was swimming down or up or sideways. There was no way of knowing. When I broke the surface again, I was thirty feet from the boat.

‘So?' called Diablo.

‘Nothing,' I yelled back.

‘Wrong answer,' he shouted and raised another
pistol. This time, his aim was closer. I took a deep breath and dived again, down, down, and opened my eyes. It was murky and still, thick with darkness, but somewhere a shaft of light cut through the depths. I swam towards it, my lungs heaving with the effort of holding that one mouthful of air, and followed the light back up to the top.

Bright sunlight hit me full in the face, stinging my eyes with glare and salt water as I surfaced. I was alone in a low cavern, edged all around with seaweed and a rocky ledge. A good spot for a rest — let Diablo hold his breath for a while. I dragged myself up out of the water to lie, panting, on a bare patch of sand.

After a few gulps of air, I rolled over on my back and stared up at the sunshine. It was streaming in a thin flash through a crack in the rock — the only spot of light in the whole cave and yet it lit up everything like a lantern. I sat up slowly and looked around.

There was nothing here, either. Diablo would go on shooting and I would go on diving until I drowned. For what? Nothing. A pirate's greed and a girl's pride. All for nothing but a cave full of seaweed and oyster shells.

I picked up an oyster and eased it open slowly with my dagger. That's how you have to do it: slowly and then a sudden twist. My mother had showed me how.

But this oyster was different. It came open easily, but there was hardly any meat at all, barely enough for a mouthful. Instead, perched inside like a whispered secret, was the most perfect pearl.

It was creamy almost, or the colour of the waves in the shallows or a whitefish's belly or maybe a shiny egg. It was pearl-coloured, that's all. There's nothing else like it. It lay in the palm of my hand as if it belonged. I suppose it did: nobody else had ever seen that pearl before, and that made it mine.

But Diablo? Damn him. He could wait. I prised open another shell. Empty. Another — inside was a smaller but equally perfect pearl. I dropped to my knees and crawled along the ledge. There were hundreds of oysters clinging to the edge of the rocks. Each one might contain a secret. Each one might hold its own treasure.

The two pearls fitted perfectly inside the seam of my trousers, under the shirt where nobody could see. Diablo didn't deserve such pure preciousness. The secret of the oyster cave was mine alone. I dived back into the pool and followed the light down, my hands feeling through the kelp for the tunnel back into the grotto.

I surfaced, spluttering, with my back to the boat, and splashed around to swim towards it.

‘Still nothing,' I gasped, as if I'd held my breath for the longest imaginable moment.

‘There's no treasure here, sir,' said Jem.

‘Hussein was right, it's a fool's errand,' grumbled Diablo. ‘Damn him!'

I struck out towards the boat. Something large and hard and slippery bumped against my leg under the water.

‘Throw a rope, quick,' I called.

‘You'll do no such thing,' Diablo snarled.

‘Let her back on board now, sir,' said Jem. ‘She's finished.'

‘Jem,' I screamed, ‘there's a sea monster in here!'

Diablo had reloaded his pistols. This time he pointed them both at his crew. ‘Start your oars,' he growled.

‘No.' Jem's voice was shaky but defiant. ‘You can't leave her here.'

Diablo brought the muzzle of his gun level with Jem's temple.

Slowly, the men began to row. The boat moved away from me. The torches were doused, so I could see only the pale gleam of Jem's face in the dark.

‘Don't worry, Jem,' I called. ‘I'll think of something.'

My words echoed, with the splashing of the oars, around the rocks. As the boat sped through the entrance, I saw Jem silently whisper:
I'll come back for you
.

I waved my acknowledgement.

‘You can rot in hell, Captain Bloodless,' I hollered, as they drew out of pistol range. ‘Captain Brainless. Captain Bleedin' Gutless!'

I would have shouted more, I was enjoying it so much, but the thing, the big slimy unseen thing, knocked against my legs again. I felt whatever it was slide under my bare foot and twist around. Time to get out of this hole. Suddenly I remembered Hussein's advice, all those months ago, in Diablo's cabin:
Remember, should you need to, you can dive as deep as you like in the Grotto, and you will find safety.

Of course.

I lashed out with both feet in a sudden movement, to frighten away the prowling creature, took another dive down, spotted the shaft of light, and swam as hard and as fast as I could back into the oyster cave. I couldn't scramble out of the water fast enough. Fear made my hands and feet slip on the weedy rocks, my leg muscles soft as pudding, as I struggled up out of the blackness and crouched, trembling, in the little patch of sun.

I was alone with my treasure, and there was no way out.

It took ages for me to steady my breathing and calm the quivering in my hands. I'm not sure how long I sat there. It may have been hours, but at last I got to my feet, took off my cold, wet clothes, and spread them out on the clammy rocks to dry a little while I figured out what to do. The sunlight was no longer streaming through the crack in the stone. The sun had moved on, and the light was weakening. Soon it would be as dark in here as it was in the grotto, and the crabs and sea creatures would come out of their fissures to scuttle and slither over me.

I held up my perfect pearl to let the fading daylight glisten and brighten its sheen. Tomorrow, perhaps, I might summon the courage to swim back out through the grotto, past the monsters, past the clinging kelp, through the waves, against the swell, and along the cliffs. Tomorrow, perhaps, Jem would row back to the caves with a boatful of trusty men from the
Mermaid
. If I lived that long; if I didn't go screaming mad in the darkness and the watery nothingness.

What a stupid predicament.

As the sunlight softened, I peered up to find its source. High up above a fallen boulder was a mighty rent in the rock, a cobweb-filled shaft of air and light. I scrambled up towards it. My fingers could just reach the edge of the crack, crumbling it into sand and stones which splattered down onto my face. But from here, I could smell the outside.

At the other end of this split in the rock was the rest of the world, the
Mermaid
, the island, the sea and the sun. All I had to do was squeeze my way through a crack no wider than my leg.

I worked all night. I didn't care any more about the monsters and the crabs. I didn't mind that in the depths of the grotto the water churned and sloshed its way closer, up through the channels and over the oyster beds. My bare feet kept slipping on the pile of stones I'd stacked up to reach the hole in the roof. With one hand, I bashed again and again at the edges of the crack with a rock, and with the other I steadied myself and brushed the grit from my face.

The noise kept the crabs at bay. A fierce fury helped keep my arms from failing, long after my strength had gone. I would not rot alone in this dank hole. El Capitán de Diablo would live to regret the day he abandoned me here.

In the darkness I could see the shape of the rocks and the pale patches below me where the sand covered the cave floor. I squeezed my arm through the ever-widening hole I had made. Sure enough, after nearly an arm's length the crack opened out. I just had to create an opening big enough to climb through. Tomorrow, in the world outside, there
would be grass and blue sky and breezes.

Perhaps the fissure led out onto the cliff-face. I didn't care. I could climb any cliff. Perhaps the shaft was five miles long and I would be a grown woman by the time I dug myself out. So be it. I could live on oysters until then. Diablo had taken his revenge against me, but mine would be all the sweeter. He had no treasure: I had a secret cave full of pearls. And he had no idea I was coming after him.

The rock slipped from my grasp and fell with a splash into the pool. I stopped for a moment to rest. It was thirsty work. In a few hours it would be broad daylight again. Maybe less. I had to keep going. I had to get out.

When the sun finally rose, the light began gently, softening the edges of the rocks and reddening the gloom. I took another rest, sitting on the rock, swallowing a mouthful of oysters. I pulled on my damp clothes and waited. Soon enough, I could see clearly. The crevice high in the rock had opened out, smashed apart by my aching arm and the improvised sledgehammer, and above me somewhere was a glimmering, a ruddiness that lit up the rocks and led me on.

Before I crawled out, there was one last task. I counted sixteen oysters, opened them up to find sixteen pearls: one for each of the boys on the
Mermaid
, one for Mama, one for Lucas, and one for my father, in case he was still alive somewhere.

‘One day, Papa, you and I will come back here for all the other pearls,' I whispered, even though nobody was there to hear me. ‘I swear.'

I slipped the pearls into my pouch and slung it around my neck. My limbs were so weary I could hardly climb back up the rock-pile, but hand over hand I dragged myself up and slowly began squeezing my head and shoulders through the cleft and into the darkness above.

It was such a strange feeling, inserting myself head-first into the rock. But once my shoulders had wriggled through the opening, I could feel for a hand-hold and pull my body through the hole and up the crevice. My toes scrabbled for a grip and pushed me along. There was dirt in my eyes and more pouring down my back. Dirt: that was a good sign. I couldn't be too far from the surface.

My knees and elbows rubbed raw against the rocks. Slowly I inched my way upwards, a human centipede, clawing blindly at the dirt with fingers and toes. Spider-webs wrapped themselves around my head. I couldn't look up, and I couldn't turn away — my face was pressed against the crumbling earth that seemed to press down on me from all directions, trying to push me back down into the cave, into the darkness.

But there was no going back now, even though everything hurt. I couldn't even stop, because the moment I took just a second to rest, I started to think, and thinking is not a good thing to do when you're underground, maybe with no way out.

No air. Pure, paralysing panic was only a thought away. ‘I'll get out — I know I will.' My mouth was full of earth and grit, but I kept talking, urging myself on.

‘Saints alive, save me,' I mumbled, as I'd heard Mama say so many times.

Salt water was washing my face now.

‘Sea spray. I'm getting closer.'

The voice in my head sounded like a prophet of doom:
No, you idiot, those are tears
. There was no strength left. A fingernail tore away as I gouged at the earth. Where was the light? Where had it gone? A voice that seemed to be someone else's was whimpering.

‘Push!' I screamed into the rock, into the heart of the earth.

Every fear I'd ever had, every hope and every spark of anger boiled and burned in my body and erupted in one final rush towards the sun. The rock around me gave way and crumpled, falling sideways, dragging me with it, thundering and dusty, until I found myself on my knees, sobbing, in broad daylight.

I couldn't open my eyes at first. It was too bright, and my eyelids were coated in dirt and muck.

But as I squinted out to sea I knew what I would find: the
Mermaid
, under full sail, coming back to find me.