That’s the truth of it.
A pleasure to eat him.
It was the parrot that loved us.
A love light on me shoulder. The way treasure is never heavy, the same.
You’re an old guff, saying that about a parrot so long gone, and so hated.
It’s the change of heat and the company that makes it so. I never thought we’d be anywhere the drifts would come up to my boot.
Nearly all the way to your tinkler, it is.
I wished I had those boots of yours. I take back what I said, that you looked like a dilly on the streets of Yarmouth, I meant to say those boots just cried out for trouble.
What? I can’t hear you with the sacrileges clanking.
Trouble, I said. I loved that parrot.
White — white all over.
Worse than a dead ocean on a flat day. Hardly a sea to see in such a snow.
Treasure’s not heavy in the heath, not heavy on horseback, not heavy in the hold — but heavy as hell’s a’blazes in a snowstorm and heavier still when the snow’s all over and boot high.
We must leave it.
But treasure be the point of pirating.
All this time and we had a wont of treasure, yes, yes, but leave it now we must. The treasure, or your life. That’s always the way of treasure.
I wouldn’t leave it for an explore and I won’t leave it now.
A map, then, for where we finally heave it off.
Think high thoughts, where the snow starts in the heavens — the sacrileges are not so heavy.
The last paper we had was charts.
The navigator burned them soon enough. To get warm, he said but I know he did it so we couldn’t get back and say he got himself and us lost.
We didn’t eat him at first, did we? We tramped.
He kept coming up.
Froze where he fell. Froze with the ashes of his charts sooting his pantleg.
I’d burn them myself all over again, just a cat’s ass warm it would make me, mind you, the way it did.
But don’t you remember — you still stand in the clothes of that first wreck as well as the dead of this one — you have paper. If you could be so kind as to review the pockets of Giorno? I went through mine own when you needed a sweet to suck on, as you might remember, and I can tell you right off I haven’t a scrap. Giorno had jewels wrapped in paper, I saw him steal them from the diva.
I can’t quite reach—
I can bend my hook. Alsop’s pockets, full of damp salt herring, Redbeard’s with twine — always one for twine for garroting, and here’s a shark’s tooth from Davy Brown’s or else his own tooth, what do you think? And here’s that whale’s eye.
Don’t you ever throw anything out?
I’ll be keeping that.
There’s a pocket in the rear in these rags of Louis’ and they’re as empty as they should be for one so prone, Lindamood the Younger’s kept rocks, rocks I tell you, that’s all he ever wanted. Giorno’s jacket was the rubbed blue? You’re right, I remember Giorno had paper for toileting, like he was royal. Candide he called the pages.
Check that brace of pockets he kept by his belt. My hands are too stiff.
Candide was short, I remember him saying. But there’s nothing.
So much for the literary boot.
What about carving a map into your leg, notches that tell the place of the booty-leaving by way of the carving?
Last time it was only three days before we forgot what the marks meant and then the wood splintered and I needed a new leg. You could carve notches into my good leg now, it’s as cold and as stiff as wood.
My tongue’s bit in pieces.
That’s the parrot feather you bit, where it was hanging low to your hat and froze.
It could have been a quill.
No ink but blood.
Oh, for another bird.
Pirates nearly always put treasure somewhere hard to find, it’s just hard to find the pirate who can ever find a treasure again.
You’ve had too much sun in the face.
Look who’s talking about sun, with your eye crusted shut and the patch missing.
They’re shut so I don’t go blind looking at that earring of yours against the ice.
That isn’t my earring, that earring froze and tore off at the start. That’s the sun itself through the fog that’s coming up fast through the ridge we’ve got to make for.
The fog’s running toward us.
Swill, that’s what we need. A nice bowl of swill.
A nice warm gallows.
A lit fire under our feet. A map that shows where to go, not so much of where we’ve been. The next cove or the next.
Oh, for the navigator.
He could read a map and draw one too.
It’s not my fault he stepped into the first hole he found in his explore. A man has to watch his feet in the snow.
And not burn the map. At least we didn’t go in for that idea of his of roping us together. Where would that have put us?
I do heartily repent.
I repent I did so little mischief.
I was lucky to get a striped shirt to parade about the deck in — though it looked more like prison garb in advance to me.
Always the fashion with stripes.
My sacrileges, my beautiful sacrileges.
Six of them are mine.
Any fool going south will see them thirty miles away when the snow’s all melted.
There are no other fools. Besides, the snow will never melt.
You said Carnaby went this way.
Carnaby liked a mirage. Carnaby smoked mussels and hid them in his shoes. I would’ve liked to have eaten his shoes.
Carnaby never left the boat, the boat we’ll never find.
Did the ice eat it?
The ice or the wind or it sailed away.
It could’ve been in the next cove.
No.
Carnaby’d be the one to find the gold gods, if he were about.
Carnaby hated gold, he only took pearls. I heard him say so. Picky after all his years of plunder.
People coming upon our sacrileges will run to them. A mirage! they’ll shout. Like Carnaby.
Or they’ll walk the other way, afraid it’s the golden gates swung wide. Again I say — Farewell to the gods.
Straight on?
Straight to hell, that’s where there’s heat.
Where we left the treasure is a kind of monument to us.
We’ll be dead by the time someone finds it.
That’s the way of monuments. They don’t put them up if you’re still alive in the world.
Who’s to know it’s ours if we don’t mark it? If we’d made a map, at least we would have marked the booty like an owner with an X. We must go back and mark it.
“Stiff” it should be named on the map, after ourselves.
Let us turn around and put the X—
Ahead — there—
What-ho?
Whisper proper now, whisper. We don’t want to scare it.
27
I slaughtered it on the spot. With my cutlass drawn so.
It didn’t even lunge at you.
I held on. I put my pegleg into the ice, and held on.
It was sick.
I hacked its head off.
Bother your boasting. I’m going inside. Wake me before the slit freezes shut.
Wait — there’s room for two if we eat this or that and get rid of the offal, a little more room just there.
This bit’s good.
Too bad there’s no wood. It’s big enough inside for a fire.