Pirate Curse

by Kai Meyer

  THE WAVE WALKERS

  Pirate Curse

  ALSO BY KAI MEYER

  Dark Reflections, Book One: The Water Mirror

  Margaret K. McElderry Books

  Margaret K. McElderry Books

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  English language translation copyright © 2006 by Elizabeth D. Crawford

  Die Wellenläufer text copyright © 2003 by Kai Meyer

  Original German edition © 2003 Loewe Verlag GmbH, Bindlach

  Originally published in German in 2003 as Die Wellenläufer by Loewe Verlag

  Published by arrangement with Loewe Verlag

  First U.S. edition, 2006

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Book design by Paula Russell Szafranski

  The text for this book is set in Centaur MT.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Meyer, Kai.

  [Wellenlaufer. English]

  Pirate curse / Kai Meyer; translated by Elizabeth D. Crawford.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.—(The wave walkers; bk. 1)

  Summary: In a place similar to the 1706 Caribbean, two fourteen-year-old “polliwogs”—humans who can walk on water—rely on a mysterious figure known as the Ghost Trader and a band of pirates to help them escape from the evil that is chasing them.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-2421-0

  ISBN-10: 1-4169-2421-3 (hardcover)

  eISBN: 978-1-416-95126-1

  [1. Pirates—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Orphans—Fiction. 4. Caribbean Area—Fiction. 5. Fantasy.] I. Crawford, Elizabeth D. II. Title.

  PZ7.M57171113Pir 2006

  [Fic]—dc22

  2005035199

  THE WAVE WALKERS

  Pirate Curse

  Contents

  The Polliwog

  Flotsam

  Mussel Magic

  The Great Earthquake

  The Ghost Trader

  Messenger from the Maelstrom

  Sea of Darkness

  The Pirate City

  Princess Soledad

  Gideon’s Grave

  Firestorm

  The Gold Maker

  The Deep-Sea Tribes

  Tortuga

  The Voice in the Wood

  The Wisdom of the Worms

  Sea Battle

  Fire and Smoke

  The Decision

  Aelenium

  The Polliwog

  Jolly was racing across the ocean in long strides, her bare feet sinking a finger’s breadth below the surface of the water. Beneath her yawned the inky blue abyss of the sea, with perhaps several hundred fathoms to the bottom.

  Jolly had been able to walk on the water since she was born. Over the years she’d learned to move easily over the rocking surface—it felt like running through a puddle to her. She leaped nimbly from one wave to the next, avoiding the foamy crowns of the waves, which could sometimes turn into treacherous stumbling traps.

  Around her, a sea fight was raging.

  Cannonballs whistled past her ears, but one rarely came close enough for her to feel the draft of it. Acrid smoke drifted over the water between the two sailing ships and obscured Jolly’s sight. The creaking of the boards and the flapping of the great sails mixed with the thundering of the guns. The smoke from ignited black powder made her eyes burn. She’d never liked that smell, unlike the other pirates. Her friends from the Skinny Maddy said nothing smelled as good as the fragrance of fired cannon. And then, if the sides of enemy ships shattered in the distance and their opponents’ screams wafted over the sea, it was better than any binge on rum and gin.

  Jolly liked rum as little as she did the smoke of the cannons. But no matter how her nose responded, she knew her duty, and she’d carry it out.

  It was about fifty yards to the enemy ship, a Spanish three-master with two cannon decks and three times as many guns as the Skinny Maddy. The galleon was ornamented with striking carvings all around—faces that now and again peered through the smoke like inquisitive fabulous creatures, some looking so real, even at a distance, that it seemed they might come to life any minute. The Spaniard’s dinghies were lashed to the side of the hull. One had been grazed by a ball from the Maddy; part of the suspension line was shredded, and now the little boat banged against the mighty hull with each shock, producing a deep, hollow sound.

  The current favored Jolly and was carrying her even faster on her run toward the galleon. Jolly need merely place one foot on the water and she could feel the direction of the sea’s movement, sometimes even if bad weather was brewing or storms were raging beyond the horizon. Never in her life had she been able to imagine passing a long time on land. She needed the familiarity of the ocean, the feeling of the infinite depths under her feet. The way other people were seized with dizziness at great heights, Jolly was seized with panic if she went too far from the sea and its roaring surf.

  Now she ran a little stooped, even if no one on the Spaniard’s deck had noticed her yet. Oddly, she saw not a solitary human soul behind the turned posts of the railing. A galleon like this carried at least two hundred men aboard, and all had to expect that the pirates from the Skinny Maddy would try to board the Spanish ship. So why wasn’t there anyone on deck?

  Normally Captain Bannon, the captain of the freebooter and Jolly’s best friend, would keep away from a ship like this: too big, too strong, and too heavily armed. Not to mention that there were only seventy pirates on the Skinny Maddy, and in a man-to-man fight with the Spaniards, they’d be far out-numbered.

  But despite all that, when the ship had appeared on the horizon, some had favored the idea that it could be a rewarding catch. Captain Bannon had personally climbed up to the Maddy’s crow’s nest and studied the silhouette of the galleon with the telescope for a long time. “She’s reefed her sails,” he’d called down to his crew. “Looks as if they’re in trouble.”

  The ocean was too deep at this point to anchor. That meant that in spite of good wind conditions, the Spaniard was drifting—which simply made no sense. But Bannon wouldn’t have been one of the wiliest pirates in the Caribbean Sea if he hadn’t let his nose and his curiosity lead him in a case like this.

  “I have a funny feeling about it,” he’d said before he ordered his men to the guns, “but maybe we’ll all have more out of this thing than it looks right now.” Captain Bannon often said such things, so no one was surprised. His crew trusted him—especially Jolly, for whom Bannon had been something like a father and mother at the same time, ever since he’d bought her as a small child in the slave market of Tortuga and made her a member of his crew.

  The thunder of guns, louder than before, made Jolly leap to one side. She felt the drag of the heavy iron cannonball and thought she saw it whistling past her, hardly an arm’s length away. When she looked back, her worst fears were confirmed.

  The Skinny Maddy took the hit.

  A cloud of water and splintered wood rose from the stern of the racy xebec, a type of ship not much seen in this region. The Maddy’s railing consisted not of decorative spindles, like that of the galleon, but of a smooth, hip-high wooden wall, in which openings had been left for the gun barrels. The ship was painted blood red, and on
the prow, Bannon had had white fangs painted along the red edge, so that the bow looked like a predator’s open jaws.

  Furious shouting came across to Jolly, scraps of voices that drifted through the gray wall of smoke between the two ships.

  Jolly half turned and hesitated. From this far away, she couldn’t tell whether the Maddy had suffered any serious damage» Please let nothing happen to her! Jolly begged in her thoughts.

  But then she remembered Bannons order, her duty to him and the others, and she faced forward again. In a few steps she reached the hull of the Spanish galleon and ran along it until she was standing beneath one of the rear gun ports. The lower gun deck was about nine feet above the surface of the water. Jolly wasn’t even five feet tall, but it would be easy for her to toss one of the missiles from her shoulder bag through the opening.

  She pulled back the flap of her leather bag and took out one of the bottles, which had clinked together dangerously at every step. They were filled with a bronze-colored fluid, the necks sealed with wax.

  Jolly pulled back her arm, took a deep breath—and flung the bottle through the first gun port, just past the mouth of the cannon barrel. Someone cried out an alarm, loud enough for her to hear it outside. Then, out of the port shot a cloud of green smoke, so thick and stinking that Jolly quickly ran to the next opening. There she pulled out a second bottle and threw it. She worked from opening to opening until green vapor was billowing from most of the ports. None of the lower guns was firing anymore. The gunners behind the weapons must have been blinded by the smoke, and from experience Jolly knew that the smell hit even the most hard-boiled sailor in the stomach.

  For variety, she tried to throw the next bottle into the second gun deck, which was higher up. Here, too, she made a direct hit into one of the ports. If it kept on like this, her mission would be a complete success. With some luck, she’d disable the crew of the galleon single-handed. Bannon and his pirates would only have to board the ship and meet their coughing, half-blind opponents on deck. They no longer had to expect serious resistance.

  But Jolly’s next toss to the upper gun deck was less successful. The bottle flew through the port just as the men on the inside were shoving the cannon outside to fire the next ball. The glass shattered on the steel of the gun barrel, and the fluid sprayed against the hull and immediately evaporated into a biting vapor. Jolly dove forward and threw herself flat on the surface of the water to escape the gas. At the same time, the cannon over her fired. A heartbeat later, a second hit resounded from the direction of the pirate ship. Wood shattered, followed by an explosion—the ball had gone through the Skinny Maddy’s hull and hit the munitions store.

  Tears filled Jolly’s eyes as she saw the flames flickering from the gaping opening. She knew what a hit like that meant—she’d experienced it often enough. But it had been the opposing ships who’d suffered such a fate. Now there could be no more doubt. The Maddy would sink. Damn it, how could Bannon have made such a mistake! Jolly had lived on three ships in her time as the captain’s pupil, but of all of them, the Maddy had been her favorite. To see her sink was like losing her home and a good friend at one blow.

  There was only a single hope for the pirates: They had to succeed in capturing the Spanish galleon in the little time that was left to them. Otherwise they’d sink to the bottom of the sea along with the Maddy.

  Desperate determination got Jolly moving again. She pulled out another bottle, and this time she hit her target. The same with the next, and the next. Still no shooters were bending over the railing to place her under fire. But then someone shoved his head out of one of the gun ports, saw Jolly, and bellowed, “They have a polliwog! They have a goddamn polliwog with them!”

  A second head appeared. “There aren’t any more polliwogs. They’re all—” Then he caught sight of Jolly. His soot-rimmed eyes widened. “Oh, goddamn, they actually do have a polliwog!”

  Jolly gave the men a grim smile. She took aim and threw a bottle inside the galleon, just missing their faces. Swirling green shot out behind their heads; a moment later they’d vanished.

  Jolly ran on. Threw. Ran. And threw again. The thought of her friends drove her forward. She paid no more attention to possible opponents, to her cover, or to the outlines of the sharks that had appeared under the surface of the water a few minutes before. Here and there she saw silver-gray tail fins cutting through the waves like saber blades, but she wasted no thoughts on them. Instead, she flung one bottle after another until her shoulder bag was empty.

  She’d now almost reached the bow of the galleon. Poison-green smoke was billowing from all the upper gun ports. No more shots were fired. The Spaniard’s deck was befogged with dense fumes that made any more fighting impossible. Even the carved faces around the railing appeared to be grimacing with all the smoke.

  Now if Bannon could just bring the Maddy—.

  A creaking made Jolly whirl around. She shouted with relief. Under full sail, the sinking pirate ship was heading toward the stern of the Spanish galleon. It looked as if the painted mouth on the bow of the Maddy was opening its jaws to derisively show its fangs one last time. Jolly jumped to safety with a few bounds. Shortly afterward, stern crashed against stern. Grappling hooks and heaving lines flew over to the Spaniard’s deck. A wild horde of pirates, with cloths tied over their noses and mouths against the green smoke, climbed up onto the bigger ship. Jolly knew every single one of them, some she’d known all her life, some for just a few months. The pirates wore the clothing of every country in the world: Oriental wide trousers, cotton shirts from the colonies, vests from Italy, and often a patchwork of remains of Spanish uniforms. Some had broad sashes around them, and one even wore a discarded skull-and-crossbones flag as a cape. Like multicolored ants they swarmed up onto the ship, hand over hand on ropes or swinging over from the spars of the Skinny Maddy onto their opponent’s rigging.

  Very shortly Jolly caught a glimpse of Captain Bannon, straw blond and furious as a dervish, who whisked over to the galleon on a rope. Their eyes met in that brief moment and she felt that he was smiling at her, despite the cloth over his face. His eyes could radiate such friendliness that sometimes Jolly wondered why his victims didn’t willingly hand over their ships to him, just on the basis of the warmth in that look, which didn’t fit at all with his wild determination and lack of scruples.

  Jolly raised her arm triumphantly and gave a jubilant shout; then she also came alongside the bow of the galleon, grabbed a dangling line, and climbed nimbly up it like a cat.

  The green smoke on the deck had dispersed quickly. Even as Jolly was climbing the rope, she could hear that the battle was already over before it had really begun. The coughing, spitting Spaniards surrendered with tearing eyes and running noses. Hardly any of them lifted a weapon against the pirates, and if he did, it was only a tired reflex, not a real will to fight.

  Jolly swung herself over the railing. Bannon saw her and hurried over to her. “Well done,” he said, thumping her shoulder so hard that she almost went to her knees. He turned to his men, who were driving the captured Spaniards to the middle of the deck.

  “Cut all lines to the Maddy so she doesn’t take us down with her,” he ordered, pointing to several crewmen. “The rest of you disarm our friends. From now on, this is our new ship!” With a grin in the direction of the girl at his side, he called even more loudly, “I guess the tub needs a new name. From now on she’ll be called Jumping Jolly!”

  Jolly grew dizzy with pride, while all around her the pirates broke into shouts of acclamation.

  But at the same time a creaking and groaning sounded from the Maddy. The painted predator’s mouth clenched its teeth in death.

  Ten minutes later the Skinny Maddy was still not entirely sunk. She rose slantingly out of the sea like a cliff, a memorial in front of the setting sun. The superstructure on the stern had almost reached the water, but the toothed bow was sticking way up. The figurehead on the prow—a dark Neptune with a trident—was raised toward the d
eep blue sky, as if it wanted to blare a last, proud cry against the world.

  Yet even as the pirates were still gathering the prisoners into a group on the deck, it appeared that something was not right. The captain acted victorious and satisfied, but Jolly saw the uneasiness in his eyes.

  There were too few Spaniards.

  There were just forty sailors aboard. Not enough men to serve all battle stations, not to mention occupy the necessary positions on a ship like this. Even Bannon, with his crew of seventy, wouldn’t have an easy time handling the galleon under sail. But forty Spaniards? Absolutely impossible.

  And there was another thing that was strange.

  “Those aren’t Spaniards at all,” said Cristobal, Bannon’s steersman. “Most of them speak Spanish, and a few of them even look it, but I’d hazard a guess they were born here in the colonies.”

  “And so?” Jolly burst out, earning a frown from the steersman before he turned to the captain again.

  “Most of them seem to be ordinary cutthroats. Look at the scars. And the boozy faces.” He grinned, revealing a blackened incisor. “Basically, they look just like us.”

  Bannon didn’t return the grin. He looked over the deck worriedly, briefly examined the prisoners, and then looked at the empty horizon. “What’s going on here?” he whispered tonelessly and so softly that only Jolly and Cristobal heard him.

  A shiver ran down Jolly’s back, A trap?

  “Our people have looked through everything,” the steersman said, “No other men aboard, also no explosives or other booby traps. Furthermore, no cargo, either,”

  “We’re getting out of here,” Bannon decided, “Fast,”