I don’t want to go up. There’s Silas and Fremont, dead of the fever and if the Frenchman finds them, I’ll have to haul out their bodies and my wrist is finished, a bloody stump from these shackles. I might as well get a hook now and be done with it.
You should not have got your hand caught in that loop of rope.
I was trying to grab for his faretheewell when he walked down with his whip, and my peg tripped me. But what of you? You’re a gimlet-eyed false woman with your fineries so fair, so many castoff jerkins you look about to birth a nation of castaways.
They do round me. He lets me keep them all, even the lacy bits.
No more talk of the Frenchman. Let’s talk of women, the women of my wants, the women in my life.
The harridan, your wife?
She made me drink quince at every meal and diced my socks with rough yarn. There is nothing like that kind of a woman to suck you down.
The anchor that pulls you under.
The woman we courted, now there was a woman.
Aye. A pirate’s woman before we were pirates.
I daresay she had an eye for you in my dazzling wake.
An eye, yes, but not a foot. She didn’t stray from your path.
The last woman I heard had a tip-tap so light on deck it could have been a goat.
It was a goat. You could smell it roast for hours.
Not food, not so much food in our talk. Me-hearty me with a song if you must. My wrist!
Avast ye, creature of Ma-a-a-mmon,
Bail ye, swine, past long lost Adam—
You rhyme without shame.
I hate this belowdecks of yours and my getting pale for a slavers’ auction. Let us talk of fish instead, of the fish swimming alongside us, a’singing.
That was a swell, no fish song.
They sing what fools we be, you a scrimshaw saint, I a dead mother’s helpmate.
Your foot is in my hair.
I thought it was vermin!
The fish sing that the wind is upon us now. The fish, the wind — they sing together.
Your bowels are so loud I can scarce hear myself.
Now a scratching only, a fish come to gut us from below.
21. Six Months and a Storm
All hanz on deck! Methinz zee ship is zinking or I have fallen into me glasz! Where is zee crew?
Washed over or strung out on the line, shackled and drowned behind the boat.
I zay drink to zee drowned then! Where is the plug to plug ziss hole?
Lightning green on the rigging, the spar’s loosed up on deck, and the waves—
A fairy show. Evil faireez. I have seen fish standing on the wavez to greet uz, fish big as zaintz. To zee wine eenstead, zwill a drink to the cutlass by ze Savior de Papa, as ze Portuguese would zwear it!
Hanged. Hanged.
Which way, parrot?
Zee parrot knows zis lightning. Drink to zee parrot.
The wheel’s tied off.
Itz spokes cried out for the rope! By my gown of zee Christian monk and the gown of Meez Hanged and zee bold waters of Julian Julien—
Well done! He needed the crucifix as hard as you gave it.
The gash won’t kill him. Another wave!
I thought you’d washed over with the rest.
I hate the deck so, I stayed clear of it when they halloed.
Oh, god let us stay afloat.
Another.
That’s the mast going. Take his sword — it is yours, the rubied one. Fasten yourself to it.
The lash, I want the lash too.
Leave the lash, you idiot.
Waves across the fo’sicle, waves that—
Took the lash.
Yo-ho-ho, yo-ho-ho, yo-ho-ho.
Drink his drink down. All of it. It’ll hot your gullet, quiet your bloody bones, it’ll settle you where you need settling.
Argh!
His blood rushes out as quick as the water rushes in.
Hanged.
I’ll cut off the beak of it!
Enough slaughtering.
No wind of a sudden.
Clear as Christchurch! The sky scrubbed rough with soap.
This could be but the eye, just the eye of the storm.
I’ve heard tell of it.
We’ll swim home.
Don’t dance in the rigging yet. I’ll climb the crowsnest.
Maybe we are drowned and don’t know it. The blue-painted ocean — who said that? Why do you dally so?
Don’t tip the flagon so deep. Wait until I make my report.
Report?
It’s a trick of the weather up there. Is there a rope yet to belay me?
Under that cask that is split.
I don’t see a cloud in all of the sky, not a one.
My stump be a’tingle, how can it storm more?
We’ll need real luck this time. The parrot—
— left its feather.
I’ll take a drink now. What — just the dregs?
If the wind comes, athwart is where I’ll be the safest. I’ll lie down there.
It’s black above now, you drunkard.
There’s a face at the scuppers, a dead slave come to haunt us. Oh, god from above!
A woman?
They say they come at the last.
Only a screaming wind and more wave.
Best we lash ourselves down.
Yes, the deck at last.
Not both of us to one plank or we’ll both go to heaven.
One for both, or none. No swimming for me.
Nor for myself neither.
The wind! The wind!
Come away from the side. The heaving’s less here, hold to the hatch.
The heaving’s worse, the wine — I’m—
All over me.
22
I saved you.
I thought the fish saved me.
That terrible fish? It was as big as the size of yourself and roiled through those waters like two men, it was as big as the water pigs Bligh told us of.
Must’ve come up from the deep on account of the storm.
It had you afloat on its scales until I came at it with my cutlass. I couldn’t see its face—
You stuck it with the cutlass. Almost through the gills.
Gills or gullet, I couldn’t see for the thrashing. Waters like hell, they were. It had ahold of you and you were going full to your end, going down, down, down in all your many clothes.
My pockets will drown me yet.
Take out the coin next time.
I had no coin. I saw other fish circling, while it had me.
Not I.
Others came up around it in the swirl of the blood and the storm.
You did not see that. You were too soon holding fast to my leg and blowing to the surface.
I saw what I saw. The fish was less holding me than pulling me down as sure my leg now dangles for the sharks to trim.
I saved you with my wooden leg afloat.
If the wind hadn’t fallen, we would have been finished, wooden leg or no.
The wind fell.
The wind is falling more now.
Falling.
Falling.
The water is cold and will be colder — this current sweeps north.
More boats north.
The waves will decide, boat or not.
So soon? What ho?
Those rogues never turned our way before, unless to gull us. Stay low.
Let’s hullo them.
No — wait for a sign—
We should wait while sharks and the other fishy demons eat off our last three legs?
We should. That’s Smith at the bow, that villainous grogman, the keeper of the stories of brothers Bungleston and of pirates pale as turnips. From Luggams’ crew.
Friend or foe? I don’t remember.
Friend, friend — I don’t know. Someone we know.
You two, whatever you be doing in the drink swimming like the fish knew your names? Get on aboard and rest your fins.