The Pirate Empress

by Deborah Cannon

  He dragged the raft to shore and hauled the boy under his arm, stunned that the little mite had cost him his voice. He could whisper quite loud, but not shout. Maybe that was just as well; silence might be his best friend under the circumstances.

  Moonlight struck some white berries on shrubbery banking the jungle, the same fruit he had consumed the last time he was here. They grew thick and bubbly on clustered branches. He had been starving and had eaten them without knowing what they were then, and so again, he grabbed a handful with his free hand, before guessing his way along the path to the lagoon.

  The moon was bright enough to bring white light into the glade. All was as it was before when he learned to tame the Fenghuang.

  On a rock overlooking the blue-green pool stood a crane, its smooth white neck shining like satin, and below it, a wall of stones showed sharp and deep. In the center, the water was dark, and shadows moved as the trees above shifted in the breeze. A mist hovered lightly over the surface and moonbeams penetrated the mist, reflecting a pale spectrum of colours.

  The boy wriggled under his arm. “Be still,” he ordered.

  He dropped the boy on his bottom, the mist parted and he waited. The crane was gone. A giant bird with the head of a golden pheasant, the tail of an azure peacock and the legs of a crane, took its place. Wu screamed, went silent when Esen kicked him. Even the boy recognized the creature haloed by the bold face of the moon: Fenghuang, the shape-shifting Chinese Phoenix that one saw only on painted vases and tapestries, and heard about from faerie stories. Its long graceful wings spread wide and it came toward Esen. This time he was ready.

  “Why does it not kill you?” Wu asked. “The phoenix is a symbol of high virtue and grace. It is a symbol of power sent from the heavens to the empress.” He paused for a moment. “That would be my mother—”

  “I told you to shut your trap.”

  “Fenghuang will only stay if the ruler is without darkness and corruption.”

  “For a boy, little more than a baby, you know too much.”

  “I will be a great warrior like my father.”

  Esen shot Wu a wilting look. “You also talk too much.”

  He approached the phoenix, one fist clutched toward it. While the berries had done nothing adverse to him, they seemed to have a strange hallucinatory effect on the phoenix, putting it in a state of rapture that made it obey him. He had fashioned a necklet of the berries, which he had strung around its enormous neck, and it hung there still, the tiny fruits dried to wrinkled pearls.

  He fed the giant bird new berries from his cupped hand, and immediately, it grew complacent and bathed in the lagoon. He strung what remained with a vine and looped the fresh necklet over the phoenix’s head, then grappled Wu by the arm and said, “We’re going for a ride.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Demise of the Say Leng

  Bound and gagged, all that was visible of the captured soldiers in the dark sea night was the pallor of their faces as they were herded into the rowboats they had arrived in. When Li’s crew were also safely aboard, she abandoned the ferryboat to its fate and turned her attention to the cries of astonishment as the Say Leng’s officers realized they’d been duped.

  The merchant junk was close enough now so that Li could watch the battle on her decks. Men ran helter-skelter. The explosive sound of a blunderbuss sent a palpable backdraft across the water. The Say Leng’s men had firearms, but it was too late for them to use their cannons. They were already boarded. And they were no match for the blades and pikes of the pirates. Cargo junks were notoriously ill armed, and they had a miscellany of old matchlocks and bird guns. Chinese muskets were wretched things, crudely made and of small calibre, with large touchholes. If the charge did not blow out the back, it often escaped forward, because the ball was inserted without wad or ramming.

  Li took in a breath, glanced back at Zhu who was rowing, and braced herself. They had been sighted. From where she sat at the head of one of the rowboats, she had a clear view of a sailor attempting to light a slow-burning cord over the hole with which to fire a decrepit matchlock at them. She did not waver. By her orders, the two commandeered rowboats steadfastly retained their heading, and only stopped at her signal, when they were just short of colliding with the junk’s hull. Li tossed a grappling hook overhead to the deck and raised her pike, a deadly sharp, sabre-like blade, now aimed at her would-be sniper, while her small crew brandished a medley of short pikes sharpened at either end, a woodcutter’s billhook and long-handled knives with iron-tipped blades that served as swords. As the sailor with the long-burning wick tilted his matchlock, Li raised her tightly woven rattan shield, but the wick fizzled out before the poor soul could fire a shot, and the man fled.

  In the chaos, she tried to find Madam Choi, sighted her on the quarterdeck fighting hand-to-hand combat with one of the junk’s officers, her sabre flashing and her colourful silk tunic glimmering in the lantern light. The Say Leng had too many sailors, and Li hollered up to her captain that they should retreat. “No!” the pirate woman shouted between slashes of her sword. “Not until Number One Daughter is avenged!”

  A ball of fire came flying out of the dark and landed nearby, and Li turned and saw Ching’s fleet. He and his pirates were hurling firebrands at the sails from out of long hollow bamboo stalks. Li gasped as she realized the viciousness of his plan; from his flagship, ‘stinkpots’ flew at the enemy. The earthenware pots were filled with gunpowder and liquor, and pieces of ignited charcoal were put into their lids and the pots suspended from the masthead in bags. The pirates were aiming the stinkpots straight at the Say Leng’s decks.

  She dived at Zhu and he lost his footing as she dragged him down, a stinkpot shattering, and igniting the gunpowder and sending up fire and smoke, and a horrific smell. Several of the merchant seamen lay dead or wounded by the blast, and the planks were ablaze. Ching had lost his mind and they had to get off this ship.

  Li looked to Madam Choi. She had witnessed the blast after incapacitating her opponent, and now swung down the halyard to join her companions, who had risen to their feet.

  “This attack with stinkpots wasn’t sanctioned,” Li said.

  “Irrelevant now,” Madam Choi answered. “The Say Leng is doomed and all of her men with her. They can’t put out the fire.”

  Li grabbed her captain’s arm, catching her tunic sleeve at the same time, and then let go as she suffered the ferocity of the pirate woman’s glare. She bowed apologetically for daring to touch the official costume of the Chief of Pirates. “We leave then?” she asked humbly.

  “Not until I kill the man who murdered my child.”

  “He’ll die anyway,” Li said. “The flames will see to that.”

  “I have to see it.”

  “How will you find him in this bedlam?”

  The dark eyes moved ever so slightly, a thin crescent of white showing at the bottom of her black irises. “I see him now.”

  She sheathed her sabre and lifted a trident that was lying on the deck, stalked through the blaze, insensible to the grasping fires that exploded all around her, and deliberately and single-mindedly forced her way toward the sailor who had taken her daughter’s life. He recognized her, saw the demonic rage on her face and raced to the bow, but Madam Choi was directly behind him and aimed her trident at his back, hurled it as though she were harpooning a whale, sending him screaming as the three-pronged weapon speared him between the shoulder blades, toppling him into the sea.

  Li squeezed her eyelids tight, the heat of the flames baking her, eyeballs burning and tearing from the incessant smoke. She felt Zhu’s hand on her shoulder. “It’s over,” he said. “She can’t expect more from us. Let’s go. Wu is waiting.”

  She inhaled. That was a mistake, coughed—the acrid air choking her—and rubbed smoke from her eyes. Sailors were racing in a panic, some throwing themselves off the ship rather than standing about helplessly, waiting to be consumed by the flames. A few stalwart souls tried to put out t
he fires with heavy blankets. It was pointless.

  Many of Ching’s pirates had looted the ship while Madam Choi and the others were fighting. Now the thieves were tossing goods and silver to the serpent boats below. Out on the water—safely out of harm’s way on his pirate junk—Captain Ching orchestrated the retreat of his rogues.

  Re-joining her associate, Madam Choi barely acknowledged the hand he extended to haul her aboard his junk. She turned to the merchant ship floundering in the sea, and saw that the large husk no longer resembled a sea-going vessel. With her bamboo sails incinerated and the booms long fallen, the ship cracked and broke like a fortune cookie left too long in the oven. She watched it writhe and burn to smoldering timbers as they weighed anchor and made sail with every pirate accounted for.

  When they reached the cove where Madam Choi’s junk sat anchored, Ching was invited aboard to discuss division of the loot and the ransom of captives. As soon as he boarded, Madam Choi lit into him. “Do you realize what you’ve done? Now the Imperial Navy will have no choice but to rout us out!”

  Ching snorted. “She was a prize.”

  “What kind of prize is it that you burn!”

  “Those sailors were in the way. The captain refused to hand over the ship.”

  “How do you know? You were not aboard the Say Leng!”

  He sneered. “You are the Chief of Pirates.” He bowed, but by the tone of his voice, Li knew he was mocking Madam Choi. “There is room for only one leader on a raid. You had not convinced the Say Leng’s captain to release her. I saw the chaos. You had a mind for one thing and one thing only. Revenge. While revenge is well and good, those who aid you in your vendetta must be paid. I took steps to ensure there would be payment.” He nodded at the serpent boats loaded with booty and the captive sailors who had tried to escape a fiery death only to end up prisoners of the ruthless Ching. “Those captured include the ship’s officers. They will bring in a pretty sum. That, plus the ransom we get for the women you took from the ferryboat will pay my men for their troubles.”

  His men? Li exchanged looks with Zhu. Madam Choi’s face was streaked with sweat and grime, but that did not mask her fury. A trickle of blood leaked from a flesh wound beneath her right temple. “Even as we speak, the word is out concerning the burning of the Say Leng and the massacre of its crew. The White Tiger seeks us.”

  Ching screwed up his nose, the flaring nostrils snorting like an ox. “The White Tiger is a myth. The actual man who stands in his shoes is a poor excuse for a Sea Dog. He is all puff and no bite. Under His Most Honourable Supreme Chief Choi, our past leader and your late husband, the Imperial Navy failed to stop us—and it will not stop us now.”

  Li had had enough for one night. She left the bickering pirate captains and went to the hatch where the children slept, but when she opened the hatch, her heart stopped.

  %%%

  The girls were cowering in the shadows with fear distorting their features, and the only thing that showed up clearly was the ring of white around their black eyes. They crawled nervously out of their hiding place while Li glanced frantically around. Wu was gone!

  He Zhu reached out to stop her from unleashing her fear on the hapless youngsters who admitted to Wu’s abduction by Esen. “They are only children, Li,” he said, using a quiet voice.

  “They are pirates. They know better. Wu is only four years old. They are older. They know not to trust a Mongol.”

  Madam Choi struck out a hand to stop the arguing. “Enough. She is right. The girls were left in charge. They were negligent. They will be punished.”

  “Come,” Zhu said. “We shall question the captives. Perhaps they can give us a lead as to what happened and where the barbarian has gone with Wu.”

  “What happened!” Li demanded of the female hostage when they had freed her from her prison. “How is it that you and the other captives are in the hold and the warlord is not!”

  The woman shivered, refused to speak, knowing that anything she said would be used against her, and Madam Choi threatened to cane her, to string her up on the yardarm and flog her, but Ching stepped in and told them that the females would be worthless if they were marked.

  “Esen could not have escaped without help,” Madam Choi said.

  Li interrupted, her nerves and her fear for her son overriding the fact that she was stepping out of line by cutting off the pirate chief’s speech. “Madam,” she said, addressing the prisoner respectfully. “No one will harm you. I don’t care how the Mongol escaped. I only want to know where he has gone.”

  Tears streamed down the captive’s cheeks and she no longer looked pretty. “I don’t know where he has gone. I only know that he took the little boy and he took some kind of gemstone.”

  Zhu grabbed the woman by the shoulders, and Ching seized Zhu by the wrist and forced him to release her. “I won’t hurt you,” Zhu said. “You say the Mongol took some kind of gemstone with him? How do you know that if you couldn’t see? You said that you and the others were tossed below into the hold.”

  “I heard the beast talking. The two of them, the barbarian and the boy were standing over the grate, and I overheard him ask the boy to take him to the gemstone.”

  “What does this mean?” Li asked Zhu. “How would Wu know about your gemstone?”

  “He saw it on my finger. And you know how little boys are. They are like parrots and monkeys, fascinated by shiny objects. He must have watched me hide it before we left for the raid.”

  “But why would Esen want the gemstone? On the surface it is only a bauble and not a terribly fine one at that. It is saffron brown, nothing very special in colour.”

  Madam Choi scowled, nodded. “Your concern is not unfounded, Li. He could have taken the trinkets we stole from these captives. Their possessions combined—silver bracelets and gold rings—are of more obvious value than a plain brown stone. In fact, the ransom he could have gotten from these women would have far exceeded anything he could get from the gemstone—unless he knew its true worth.”

  He Zhu’s brow furrowed, and Ching turned his hands palms up. “What is all this fuss about a plain brown stone? What is it worth? I thought you wanted your son back,” he said to Li.

  She was not going to say anymore in the presence of the despicable pirate, and from the narrowed eyes of Madam Choi it was clear she agreed, and He Zhu had ceased speaking the moment he realized Ching was interested in his gemstone.

  “It is nothing, only a family heirloom belonging to the warrior monk,” Madam Choi said. “Li, take one of the serpent boats and go ashore. Find out what you can of Esen’s trail. He couldn’t have gone far. The closest land is that escarpment there, overlooking the jungle. Zhu, you go with her. Ching and I will settle business. Then I will join you in the search for your son.”

  They unfastened a serpent boat from the side of the junk and rowed shoreward. Zhu was a strong oarsman and they hit land in twenty minutes. They beached the serpent boat on the sand and followed a track of footprints that led toward the jungle.

  “There is only one set of prints,” Zhu said.

  “Naturally,” Li answered. “The barbarian would have been carrying Wu. Can you imagine Wu going willingly?”

  This drew a brief smile from Zhu. The boy had stabbed his captor once before when he was taken against his will, and Li only hoped that her son would not try something so foolhardy again without his mother to protect him.

  They followed the path through the jungle. Esen was not concerned about leaving a trail, and this made Li suspicious. Why would the Mongol wish them to follow him so easily?

  They entered the clearing and her mind swarmed with memories. She squashed them as though she were flattening a fly.

  The lagoon was as she remembered, except this time there was no crane standing at the far side of the pool, and the surrounding shrubbery was thick with white berries—but otherwise the scene was the same.

  “What a beautiful pool,” Zhu said, and glanced swiftly at Li. No doubt he remembered
looking down from the cliff top and seeing her and his captain in the water. “Something was dropped here. There are scuffle marks. I think the boy was put on the ground.”

  The prints moved to the edge of the lagoon, then ended. Had they gone into the water? But if they had, where did they go from there?

  He Zhu crouched, lifted something from the bank, and pinched a gold and azure feather between his fingertips. “It’s the same kind of feather that Tao found near Esen on board the pirate junk.”

  Fenghuang. The Chinese Phoenix. What did it mean? Wherever the warlord went, a feather was left.

  “This is not helping,” she said, frustrated, tears threatening to spill. “We are not getting any closer to finding Wu. He can’t just have disappeared.”

  “He did not disappear. Esen has him. And I believe he is safe.”

  “How can he be safe as long as he is in the hands of that savage. Esen wants him dead. He wants me dead. But if he can’t have me, he will settle for Wu.”

  Zhu’s face looked puzzled as he raised his eyes to meet hers. “I no longer think he wants Wu dead.”

  “What do you mean? All he has wanted, since the day you and Quan brought him to the Forbidden City to be dined by the Emperor, was to see Wu dead. He never wanted him to be conceived, no less born.”

  “No more,” Zhu said, shaking his head. “Esen has learned of the gemstone’s power. I am sure of it.”

  Li’s eyes widened until she was certain her lids would split from the force. “But he can’t use it. Only one with the gift can open the Tiger’s Eye. What can the gemstone possibly have to do with Wu?”

  Zhu searched the dark water in the center of the pool and the turquoise shallows, and Li strained her eyes to follow. The mist sparkled with the sun’s rays; tiny lights flittered among the mist, then dispersed. Oh, if only Wu knew how to summon the Ghostfire. It would have protected him, shielded him from the barbarian’s eyes. Maybe that was what had happened. Had Wu discovered the magic of Gwei-huo? Had he deceived the Mongol warlord and escaped? And even now, could he be hiding somewhere nearby in the jungle?