by Geoff Rodkey
Dash dot feather, cup, two dash dot firebird. Spear, sun eye, jagged line stars, tree. Three dash four dot woman face rays. Arrow down line, skull, snakes circled…
Cornstalks, lightning fist, boat over water, cloud eye…
Three squiggles down left, four dashes up, side bird, three circles straight, X…
Sun eye, cloud eye, circle X. Man under circle. Man in circle.
Check the copy. Do it again.
Dash dot feather, cup, two dash dot firebird…
Check the copy. Do it again.
My hand cramped. A leg fell asleep. I stepped outside and hobbled around the lava field until the tingling stopped.
I wished I’d brought food. I should have. There was room in the sack. Stupid.
The stars were fading. It would be dawn soon. I wasn’t ready yet.
I went back in and started again.
Dash dot feather, cup, two dash dot firebird…
Three copies later, I made a perfect one.
The one after that had two mistakes.
The one after that had six.
It was light outside now. I still wasn’t close to finished.
I ran out of paper. I started on the margins of the book.
Three copies later, I made another perfect one.
The next one had two mistakes.
I heard the crunch of feet on the volcanic rocks outside.
It was Guts and Millicent.
“Stumpy’s back,” said Guts. “Boat landed at dawn. They’re comin’.”
“Do the pirates know?”
Guts nodded. “When we left, they was handin’ out the guns.”
I gathered the book and the parchment into a little pile in the corner. They watched me.
“Did you memorize it?” Millicent asked.
“Pretty much,” I said. Then I lit a match to the paper. The Savages of Urluk’s cover peeled into sections as the flames consumed it.
I picked up the sledgehammer.
“It’s in yer ’ead? All of it?” Guts asked.
“Hope so,” I said, and swung hard at the wall.
It was strange how easily it all fell to dust. That map had stood undisturbed for a hundred years, and I shattered it beyond recognition in half a minute.
The little fire died out, and we left the cave. The bright morning sun made me blink.
I started down the mountain with Guts, but Millicent hung back at the cave entrance.
“I’m staying here,” she said.
I stopped and looked back at her. She was leaning against the rock wall, arms crossed. Not angry, exactly. More sad. And frightened.
I wanted to tell her I loved her. But it was too big a risk. At that point, it was better to live with the question than press for an answer and get the wrong one.
“Wish us luck,” I said.
She shook her head. “How can I?”
Guts and I walked away. When we got to the edge of the field of wildflowers, I looked back. She’d disappeared inside the cave.
“Don’t worry,” said Guts. “She’ll be down in a few.”
“How do you know?”
“Not gonna miss it. ’Ow could she?”
“Then why didn’t she just come with us?”
“’Cause she don’t know what side she’s on.”
SHOWDOWN
Took courage, memorizin’ that map,” said Guts. We were at the edge of the upper orchard, moving at a pretty good clip down the hill.
“It’s not about courage,” I said. “If anything, it’s cowardly.”
“Wot ye mean?”
“I mean, he can’t kill me now. If he does, he’ll lose the treasure.”
“Nah. Just kill ye later. After he tortures ye.”
“Why would he torture me?”
“Make ye draw the map.”
I hadn’t thought about that. Why didn’t I think about that?
Guts looked back over his shoulder at me. “Why ye stoppin’? Gotta hurry.”
“I’m thinking.”
“Think and walk, then!”
I started moving again, slower than before. A little knot of worry was growing in my stomach.
“The point is… he can’t kill me—”
“Not till he tortures ye.”
“Stop saying that! Look… I memorized it because I want to avoid killing him—”
“No avoidin’ that.”
“There’s got to be a way—”
“How?”
“I haven’t figured it out yet.”
“’Cause it’s impossible.”
The knot of worry was spreading through my entire body. I was starting to feel shaky.
“Oh, God… was I just incredibly stupid?”
“Not stupid! Genius!”
“How?”
“’Cause now ye can’t run. He’ll follow ye to the end of the earth. Can’t surrender, or he tortures ye. Yer all in, man. Gotta fight him to the death.” Guts finished the sentence with a jubilant-seeming twitch of his whole head. “Brave, that is.”
“I wasn’t trying to be brave,” I said in a small voice. “I was trying to be clever.”
“Stick with brave. Better at it.”
I TRIED NOT TO THINK about the fact that my brilliant plan to salvage my future with Millicent had not only guaranteed its destruction, but probably my death as well.
Fortunately, I didn’t have much time after that to think about anything. When we got back to the house, the last of the field pirates were disappearing into the lower orchard with their weapons. A dozen men, Mung and Quint included, had stayed behind to man the fortifications on the porch. Quint had brought out his stew pot and turned it upside down to use as a perch so he could shoot over the dirt-bushel fortifications.
Guts cursed when he realized the pirates had taken all the grenades into the fields. Then he cursed even more bitterly when he stepped onto the porch and saw that someone had pushed the cannon to one side to clear a path down the porch steps.
“I had her locked in on the middle of the road! Gotta aim her all over again!”
As he hauled the cannon back into position, I found Stumpy. After two days of shuttling back and forth from Port Scratch, there were baggy dark circles under his eyes.
“How many soldiers?” I asked.
“Hundred twenty. Plus a few what don’t wear uniforms.”
“Is Roger Pembroke one of them?”
“Dunno. What’s he look like?”
“Tall. Handsome. Rich.”
“Yeh, think it’s him. Leadin’ the pack.”
Guts aimed the cannon as best he could, and we were about to fire it to test its range when we heard the drums. They were surprisingly close—probably no farther than the edge of the property line a couple hundred yards down the hill.
We all got into position, crouched behind the dirt-filled bushels along the length of the porch. Guts and I were in the middle on either side of the cannon, its barrel peeking out over the bushels at the top of the steps. Mung was to my right. Quint was on the other side of Guts. Everyone kept his head and rifle down.
The drums were getting louder. Their relentless, pounding rhythm must have been meant to scare us into giving up.
They didn’t scare me exactly, but they did make my head hurt. I felt dizzy and weak, and I wished I’d eaten breakfast and gotten some sleep instead of staying up all night and memorizing the map like an idiot.
But Guts was right—there was no chance of my running now. I was going to defend my home to the death. And even if I failed, Pembroke wasn’t going to get that treasure.
Maybe that was why memorizing the map had felt like the right thing to do.
Maybe it was brave after all. Stupid, but brave.
The drums rose to a wall of sound, overwhelming everything. They were close.
I got up on one knee, raised my rifle over the bushel in front of me, and sighted down the barrel to the point where the road first broke through the trees.
If Roger Pembroke was
leading the pack, I was going to shoot him the moment he came into range.
The first line of troops appeared, in crisp blue uniforms crisscrossed with black ammunition belts. Ten men across, rifles at the ready, bayonets fixed. Pembroke was nowhere in sight.
The first line was followed by a second. Then a third. Then a fourth.
Within seconds, the lower road had filled with a sea of blue uniforms, bayonets glinting in the morning sun.
I searched the throng for Pembroke. All I could see were soldiers.
When the last of them came into view, someone must have barked an order, because they stopped in unison. Just as quickly, the drums stopped.
The silence that followed was much more unsettling than the drums themselves.
Then I heard his voice.
“My name is Roger Pembroke,” he boomed from somewhere in the back of the sea of troops. “I am the lawful owner of this land. I’ve come to retrieve my daughter and bring a murderer to justice. To anyone who can hear me, I offer a warning and a promise. The warning is this: the penalty for harboring a fugitive is death.”
He let that one echo through the orchard before he continued.
“The promise is as follows: if I leave here peacefully, with justice served and my daughter unharmed, as a token of my gratitude I will bestow on every employee of this plantation a bonus of one hundred pieces of silver.”
I heard the low grumble of voices to either side of me. The pirates were mulling over the offer.
“He’s lying!” I hissed at them.
“Let me repeat that!” Pembroke called out, still unseen. “A hundred silver for each of you! And all you need to earn it is to stay out of our way.”
There was a sudden clatter on the porch, followed by a gurgling bark from Mung. I looked to my right to see him glaring down a line of abandoned rifles at the last of the pirates, hobbling out of sight around the corner of the porch.
Mung looked at me helplessly. The rest of them wouldn’t be back until it was time to collect their money from Pembroke.
I turned to look at the other side of the porch. They’d all disappeared on that end, too—except for Quint, who was still standing on top of his stew pot but looked like he’d rather be anywhere else.
And Guts, who was crouched over the short cannon fuse with a match in his hand, ready to light it.
“Say the word,” he said.
“Don’t!” I held up a hand, begging him off.
Then I looked back at the sea of troops. It was hopeless. Pembroke’s money had beaten me before we’d even fired a shot.
“Forward!” I heard a soldier yell.
The troops fanned out, spreading into skirmish lines as they began to march on the house.
“Guts, be smart,” I whispered. “Get out of here. If you tell them you’re a field pirate, there’s a hundred silver in it for you.”
“Nuts to that,” he said, and lit the fuse.
The thunder of the cannon nearly burst my eardrums, and the smoke briefly obscured my view as I felt the earth shudder from the impact.
When the smoke lifted, the same array of troops was in front of us—all staring at a smoking crater two-thirds of the way between the house and the front line of soldiers.
The only thing Guts had killed was the front lawn.
“Nuts,” he croaked.
Then he hurriedly dragged the cannon back to reload. But there wasn’t any time. The soldiers had quickened their approach, and they’d be on us with their bayonets long before another round was ready.
I could shoot one of them, maybe even two or three, considering the loaded rifles abandoned all around me. But it was pointless.
Unless I could shoot Pembroke.
But I couldn’t even see him.
And the soldiers were closing in. I had to draw him out quickly.
“I HAVE WHAT YOU WANT, AND IF YOU KILL ME YOU’LL NEVER GET IT!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.
Someone barked an order. The troops stopped advancing and went into a defensive crouch. A hundred guns pointed in my direction, the closest one less than thirty feet away.
“Is that you, Egg?” I heard Pembroke call out mildly. His voice was coming from the rear, where a cluster of soldiers stood together.
“It is.”
“Where’s Millicent?”
“Never mind that,” I said. “I’ve got the thing you’ve been searching for.”
“What might that be?”
“Come closer and we’ll talk about it.”
“Not unless you stop reloading that cannon.”
I motioned for Guts to move away from the cannon. He gave it up reluctantly, moving back to the other side of Quint and picking up a pistol.
There were a dozen bushels of dirt at the top of the porch stairs, guarding the front of the cannon. Taking care not to stand up and present a target, I shoved the middle ones down the stairs with one hand, then swung my leg out, pressing my foot against the cannon’s carriage and giving it a hard shove until it rolled forward and tumbled down the steps with a heavy crash.
Then I scurried back into cover.
“Show yourself!” I yelled.
A moment later, the cluster of soldiers at the back parted to reveal a small group of men in civilian dress. Pembroke stepped forward from the group.
“Satisfied?”
I crouched behind one of the bushels under the porch rail, sighting him down the rifle in the little open slot created by the space between the bushel and the top rail. From the other side, the rifle wouldn’t be visible. He might guess I was aiming at him, but he wouldn’t know for sure.
The problem was, he was still most of the way down the road, too far away for me to be confident I’d kill him with one shot. And I probably wouldn’t get a second.
“Come closer,” I called out. “I can barely see you.”
He took a few steps forward. Still not close enough.
“Let’s not play games. What do you have?”
“Come closer!”
“I’m close enough. Tell me what you have.”
I wasn’t going to get a better shot. My finger curled over the trigger.
“Here it is,” I started to say—
“DADDY!”
She must have been watching from inside the house, because she burst out the front door and down the steps so fast that by the time I readjusted my aim after the startle her voice gave me, she was standing right in my line of fire, the only figure in the thirty feet of no-man’s-land between the porch and the front line of soldiers.
“Millicent!” He started toward her.
“Stop! Not another step, Daddy!” He did as he was told.
“In fact, move back. All of you,” she said, making a wide shooing motion at the soldiers.
They stared at her, bewildered, and held their ground.
She put her hands on her hips, her shoulders thrust back indignantly. “Seriously, Daddy, make them move. We’ve got a lot to discuss, and I really don’t think all these guns are helpful.”
Pembroke turned and muttered something to a soldier in the cluster at the rear. He must have been their commander, because he barked, “Fall back!” and the soldiers retreated a respectable distance to watch the situation unfold.
“Here’s the thing, Daddy… Can you hear me all right?” She was speaking so loudly they could probably hear her in the lower orchards.
“Yes, darling,” he said, more than a little impatiently.
“There’s been a terrible series of misunderstandings. Absolutely dreadful. First Egg goes out with Mr. Birch on a perfectly pleasant excursion, they’re getting along famously, when suddenly there’s a horrible accident. Birch trips on a root, falls to his death, and somehow everyone gets it in their head that Egg pushed him.
“Which couldn’t be farther from the truth. I mean, Daddy, you know Egg. He’s the gentlest and sweetest of souls, and he’d never hurt anyone on purpose, LET ALONE KILL HIM…”
As she said this, she turned awa
y from her father and threw a pointed stare in my direction, as if to say, Put that gun down.
“Shoot him,” muttered Guts from the other side of the porch.
“She’s blocking my shot!” I muttered back.
“And that’s just the start of it, Daddy,” continued Millicent. “There’s been a whole series of absolutely fantastical rumors swirling around. Completely unbelievable, and so slanderous of you I ordinarily wouldn’t even dignify them with a response. But they’ve gotten so widespread that I really must mention every single one so you can denounce them all, unequivocally, in front of all these people.”
“Darling, I really don’t think—”
“Here’s the first one: that you intentionally rigged that balloon accident to send Egg’s family to their death. That can’t possibly be true, can it?”
“Of course not, darling.”
“And the idea that you sent Birch to kill Egg—it’s preposterous, isn’t it?”
“Quite so, sweetheart.”
“That’s what I keep telling everyone! It’s laughable! But they’re quite stuck on the idea, probably because of the other rumor—that you created some phony adoption certificate and forged Egg’s name to it so you could take control of the plantation. Surely that’s false, right, Daddy?”
Even from a distance, I could see Pembroke’s face begin to turn red.
“That’s a bit less clear, darling—”
“Then let’s clear it up straightaway! Egg, did you ever agree to be adopted by my father?”
“No, I didn’t,” I called out.
“You never signed any papers to that effect?”
“Definitely not.”
“So if any papers did exist, they’d be forgeries, and completely illegal?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Millicent—” There was a hard edge to Pembroke’s voice. She’d pushed him to the limit.
“Don’t get cross, Daddy. It’s not your fault at all! I think I know what the problem is.”
“Which is what?”
“Shoddy legal advice. Is Mr. Archibald with you?”
“No, dear. He’s back on Sunrise.”
“Well, I think you should have a very pointed conversation with him when we get home, because he’s obviously served you quite poorly. Wouldn’t you agree?”
