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.
Someone would find us if we had a fire.
Someone would save us if we had a fire. It’s the rule of the ice.
They’d just save us for later.
I’m colder than you. Pull your leg in and close the gap with the head.
You’ll have to unscrew the leg.
It’s off. We’ll have a nap. It’s warm through.
Into the belly of the beast, foot to head, the two of us about to be birthed into another world not half so—
That was quite a bear.
Not so much white as green. I thought it was a shrub come to life.
Not as green as that.
Mossy.
If you be the back legs, I’ll be the front and we’ll creep up to a pack of them.
The front paws are frozen dead to the drift.
Pull, pull.
No, sleep, sleep.
Sleep will kill us.
Sleep.
Open the wound as a window.
There. Now the snow is houses-high.
There be no houses here.
Some new snow, as I said.
You forget how much in your sleep. It’s no deeper.
We’ll sink and be swallowed, we’ll need a boat to cross it.
It will harden or it will melt.
What’s that coming? Another bear?
Quit your shaking, you with your mighty cutlass.
He wanted our bear.
He wanted a bit of talk.
He wanted to se
parate us and then slaughter us.
He wanted to get inside.
A South Seas whaler, can you imagine that? A man from the colonies is a rare enough but a whaler from such a place, coming all the way from what they call the Viceroyalty of Peru to here?
Must’ve been pressed.
Must’ve been hard pressed.
So all the time you had a paper.
Aye.
Kind of him to read it.
He thought it would save him, I thought it would save me. Baltrick wrote it out, the cur. But instead of it swearing I’d been forced—
It said to kill us.
It were the Black Spot, only with words. I could have read the Black Spot. At least I didn’t give it to the gaoler.
You get to your death and it says the same for everyone.
I should have learnt to read words.
And myself!
The paper was very complimentary to my bravery.
He read it wrong.
You’re a cagey brother. It shows we are not related, this caginess.
You were looking at me with eyes penny-size whilst his whale-lance whistled through the bear.
His face was at me so sudden.
We had the bear’s true likeness with that fur upon us so well and tight, and breathing hard with us going about inside. He was no fool.
Too bad you hit him so hard.
I didn’t think so quick as my cutlass.
We could have wanted more of a talk from him.
Aye. A bit more before the dying.
At least he read out the paper.
But he ate the paper.
Must’ve been hungry. All those weeks he had without what you need, food or a drink of water. Alone.
Put your hat on your head, your nose has gone black.
By the blood of the bear.
That whaler thought you were the almighty himself, with a pitchfork and tails, and that by reading he could get a berth with you, the devil-priest carrying the paper for our hangings.
You’ll not remember.
What?
He was our brother. See the ring on his last finger but one? A perfect emblem of the scar on your back.
You’ll be seeing brothers in bears next. You are saying we shouldn’t eat him?
I am not saying so much as that. I’m saying Brother!
A South Seas pinkie whaler? Ma could do better than that.
Brother!
He would eat you and then me if we had not been so fast. Better we drag the leg of the bear with us for food and keep watch for the boat he left behind him with others of his like. He’s not going to spoil.
I’ll keep my cutlass clean.
Let’s try seven paces forward and then seven west and seven north and fourteen east, each time forcing a distance away from them without returning.
I hope you prove better with numbers than with letters.
Seven’s the number, a lucky one. See, we’re moving directly in one direction even though we’re touching all four of them.
Seven, and seven, and seven. The seven seas. I can do sevens.
And fourteen. Oh, for a cove and the depths.
You did make a pirate, didn’t you, after all, brother?
Seven.
Sorry. You have to watch which way. Now I’ve lost count.
What’s this? Did somebody else leave their golden gods out on the ice like a service was wanting? Is this a regular dropping off spot for sacrileges? What could the priests and Beezlebub be thinking? All of them in a nice little row like that, not buried nor mapped neither.
Quiet now, silence. You’ll shake the snow off the cliffs.
I have the need to speak as much as you do. South Seas, South Seas.
Spit it out. South Seas! But silent. By the by, isn’t that your ear there we saw from the last time around?
The navigator’s. Too tough, remember?
Perhaps our boat met the South Seas’. “Two Boats Abraided by the Icy Seas” be the figure.
Aboutface on seven, lips or no lips, I say. We’re walking away from them, we’re leaving them.
Was that a whole turn or a half?
The wind feels by half.
Yes, that’s good. I remember the wind against the gold.
Nothing can scare me after Ma.
Must be death coming on if you’re telling me about our old Ma again. Must be death in a hat or all this quiet.
Shshshsh. Someone’s abreast of us.
It’s gone, whatever followed.
There’s always blood to mark the spot.
Only if it were plenty.
You want to kill me to mark it.
I did not say that.
It were on your very lips.
Nothing but ice on my very lips. Let’s leave the cutlass instead of blood. Finders would know pirates was here with such a one as yours, with the rubies at the hilt.
You just want me unarmed, you’re wanting me to leave it so you can grab it and use it on me and then eat me too, your own brother.
Never. Truly, never. Ach—these lips.
You’re not going to bother with a match or some wood like you did the others, you’re just going to take my cutlass and stick me to mark the treasure with and then eat me raw and bloody.
Bloody hell.
Give the eye up.
It’s mine.
Give it up.
I don’t have it.
I know which pocket.
Oh, which?
She was my woman and not no one else’s—not Peters’ nor yours, you traitor of the seven seas. Brother!
Give me that back, give it to me—
Traitor.
You threw it, you half-a-brother with half-a-leg and one eye and no brain and a hook, with an idiot’s stagger and the pirate’s want of parts lost out of stupidity and cupidity and titty—goodbye this time for good or ill. Goodbye and nothing. You can find your own way, you can crutch along until your stump goes soft, you jealous slag. I’m away, I’m off, I’m gone.
28
You cast out the whale’s eye?
My brother threw it.
He is not your whole brother and you are not the son of the father you think. Here, take it back.
I don’t have a father.
Your father floated to the top, and then sank straight to the bottom where your mother has wormed to.
My mother was buried.
There’s good water beneath your place, and strong current. Your mother does not fear it anymore. Now, get your foot out of the drift and listen: Your father is dead at last of the cut your brother gave him in the troughs of the storm.
He was the fish we fought?
A man of the sea. The mustachioed man of your mother’s Manuel.
Begone, you witch of the sea. Such lies!
But I have your child.
No, no—the child gone over?
The one you birthed from all your clothes.
The boat voted to put the babes and Molly off, for lack of food. I had no choice. I stitched an X to its pocket. I wanted it to have my name at least.
Name, name. Does the minnow bear a name? I was planning a treatise on the names of the healing kelp but no one will read it. They prefer to stare at the sky until the kelp washes over their wounds. Come below now. It’s time. Your babe is here.
Not below.
That’s the fear in you again, the mother-half that fights the father. How far I’ve had to chase you! Come now, the ice shifts, it will close again soon.
The water—
The sweet, sweet salt of it.
Can I not rest on your fishy rump and think it out? For a short time at least.
Oh, thinking, that’s what you’ll do there? Hasn’t the fighting of pirates and all the charnel-making chased thinking clear from your head?
It is thinking that makes me live. My true father, dead?
Seven, and seven. To fourteen.
My brother comes, to spite me.
Live then.
29
It must be the cold. You must have seen things. That woman from before? I have but one eye but even I can see this is not the place for such rendezvous.
Seven. And twenty-eight. Wipe that eye of yours better. Night is approaching. I saw her.
Night is not approaching, day is.
Seven.
You should not go off without me, brother.
Aye.
You won’t leave me again, will you?
I didn’t leave you for nothing, you forced me to go by throwing away my one thing, you brute!
Aye.
Aye.
Do you have a rope?
Am I the child of my mother?
Tie it between us so we cannot part.
Between us? As stupid as that navigator, letting Death have a chance to laugh twice?
I say tie it. I cannot drag my leg on without knowing you are here with me, talk or no talk.
You’ll drag me down.
I’ll lead you out. I know the way.
You do?
I have the bravery, I found it after you left me for good, to see things.
Let us keep to the number.
Quit muttering.
That monk—the Frenchman on the boat that slaved us, he muttered to himself too. I caught it from him. He lay athwart the hatch while you were below. Sometimes while he muttered, he worked out a paper from under his robe and folded it.
He had paper?
He would fold it and fold it, this bit of paper, into a gull that flapped.
Seven hundred and fourteen. He made a bird from a paper?
Aye. I saw it, while telling out one of my stories to keep him from lashing you. It flapped, his bird, like life.
You’ll be seeing our Ma next, as easy as paper flapping from that hardly-a-monk’s hand. Stop flapping yourself.
The snow’s in my face. And you’re dragging the rope.
We haven’t eaten it?
Not much farther.
Not so far that you can fly.
Seven.
If only we had paper, we could burn paper.
Or make a map.
Or a bird.
Or put death on it, like my paper.
It’s the bear.
Aye.
We have been circling it.
Pirate Talk or Mermalade Page 8
