Pirate Curse

by Kai Meyer

  Mussel Magic

  At first the sun so blinded her that she saw only the silhouettes of the tobacco plants in the foreground and behind them a brown-green confusion, as if a painter had let the colors on his palette run together.

  Then she saw something like wisps of fog wafting around between the plants. Wisps of fog that, on closer inspection, had the outlines of human beings.

  Wisps of fog with faces.

  “Oh, good lord!” Jolly stopped, rooted to the spot. “Are they … real?” What a dumb question, but it crossed her lips entirely on its own.

  “Well, sure.”

  Carefully she approached the nearest plants. A ghost was hustling along, plucking the sticky-hairy leaves from the bottom up and throwing them into a wagon that he was pulling along the rows. He paid no attention to the two visitors, as if he didn’t perceive them at all.

  “Can you touch them?”

  “You can try it, sure.”

  She cast a searching look at Munk, then hesitantly stretched out a finger and poked against the gauzy body of the ghost. The white vapors instantly formed a dent around her fingertip and avoided the touch. Jolly pulled back her hand hastily.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  Munk acted bored. “We have a lot of them. They’re expensive to buy, but they don’t eat or sleep, and they aren’t lazy at the work. They cost more than slaves, Dad says, but he won’t have anything to do with slaves. Anyway, in the long run, it pays.”

  Real, living ghosts! Jolly had trouble concealing her astonishment.

  “The Ghost Trader says they’re very popular on some islands. You must have seen them if you’ve actually been around so much.”

  She whirled around. “I have been around a lot. But this …” She fell silent and shook her head.

  The ghost kept on with his work without letting himself be distracted. Jolly regarded his face. She could clearly make out eyes, nose, and mouth, and yet the features lacked any particular individuality. It looked as if someone had formed a human being out of fog, without providing him with any trace of personality.

  “Will we all become like them someday?” she asked uncertainly. “I mean … so we all look … alike?”

  Munk shrugged. “No idea. I’ve never been particularly interested in them. If you have them around you every day … well, you know. I just grew up with them.”

  “And how many do you have?”

  “About fifty, I think. Now and then one disappears, simply vanishes into thin air. Then Dad buys a few new ones and they keep for a while again.” He looked bored. “It really isn’t anything to get excited about, honestly.”

  Jolly pushed her black hair back over her shoulders with a nervous movement. She’d seen slave plantations before. People from Africa, or China—but ghosts?

  For Munk, sailing on the high seas and climbing around in ship’s rigging might be a great adventure; for her, on the other hand, this was something completely new and incomprehensible. Not that she’d want to trade with him—God forbid!—but she’d never yet come across anything like this.

  One thing was certain, anyway: If this mysterious trader was claiming that ghosts were used as laborers on many Caribbean islands, it was a downright lie.

  “Munk!” A voice snatched her from her thoughts. “Ah, and our young guest!”

  A man strode up to them through an aisle between the tobacco plants, just walking straight through the ghost. The silent, vapory creature shredded for an instant, then put himself back together and continued working, undisturbed.

  “Dad, this is Jolly.”

  The man stretched out a large, calloused hand and shook hers so vigorously that her shoulder hurt afterward. Perhaps she was even weaker than she’d thought after the long spell of unconsciousness.

  “Good day, sir,” she said, regarding him without shyness. Like his son, he had light hair that fell to his broad shoulders. His bare torso was browned by the sun and so muscular that he’d have made a good sailor. The slight beginnings of a belly showed that the tobacco business couldn’t be going too badly, not even on such an isolated island. He was unusually big and had a faint accent, which suggested a Scottish origin.

  “My Mary has made you well, eh? She knows how to handle herbs and things like that. Munk couldn’t wait for you to finally open your eyes. Where did you come from?”

  Haiti, she’d been about to say, before she realized that his wife already knew the truth. “From a ship. The Skinny Maddy.”

  His look darkened. “Bannon’s ship?”

  Jolly cast an uncertain glance at Munk, but he was staring at his father in amazement. “You don’t know him, do you?” he asked.

  The farmer nodded. “Who hasn’t heard of the Maddy? I’d already thought you came from the pirates, girl. My wife showed me the tattoo on your back.”

  Munk’s jaw dropped. “You have a tattoo?”

  Jolly’s heart sank, but she straightened her shoulders. “It isn’t finished. One of the crew started it before we discovered the Spanish ship … the ship with the spiders.”

  She’d told Munk what had happened, but his father frowned. “You’ll have to tell everything at supper,” he said. “I’d like to get back to work now» Munk, you have the after-noon off today.” He turned to go, then turned back once more. “And you, girl, don’t put any foolish ideas into my son’s head, you hear? He daydreams all day long anyway, that boy.”

  “Don’t worry, sir.”

  After his father was gone, Munk grinned at her. “So,” he said, “which foolish ideas do we start with?”

  “My parents were cartographers,” Munk told her as he led Jolly down to the bay where he’d pulled her out of the water. “They scouted out routes between islands and reefs for one of the big trading companies. My father steered the boat and my mother drew the maps. She can draw really well, you know? She tried to teach me, but I never get it right. I mean, I can draw a bird … or a pirate ship.” It obviously pleased him that he could make Jolly smile despite the losses she’d suffered. “Oh, well, anyway, my parents passed on everything they found out about the routes between the reefs and sand-bars to the company. They got paid for it. Usually it took a while until a route was explored, but the company always wanted, above all, to be up-to-date. My father had warned the traders not to sail anywhere that wasn’t completely scouted yet. But one of them didn’t listen and took an especially dangerous route before my mother could even inspect the map once and clear up the last inaccuracies. He ran aground, and his entire convoy sank. He and many others were drowned.”

  “And they blamed your parents for that?”

  A bitter expression appeared on Munk’s face. “The trader’s brother was Scarab, the pirate emperor of the Caribbean. He put a price on my parents’ heads among the pirates. Since then, they’ve stayed hidden on this island. Their only contact with the outer world is a handful of traders they’ve known forever and trust.”

  “But why the caution?” Jolly wanted to know. “Scarab’s been dead for years. Kendrick is the emperor of the pirates at New Providence now. People say he killed Scarab to take power himself. He canceled a lot of Scarab’s decrees and laws or ignores them. I can’t imagine why he or anyone else would still be hunting your parents today.”

  Munk seemed to weigh her words. But then he shook his head dejectedly, “You know, I don’t think my parents are really still afraid of Scarab, or any other pirates. They like it here. They like the isolation and the quiet and—”

  “All the things that get on your nerves.”

  He smiled in embarrassment. “Yes.”

  “And certainly your father doesn’t want you to ever go to sea. Although he himself did it for years. Right?”

  Munk nodded. “He says he’s seen too many ships sink and too many good men drown. He hates the sea now. He can’t understand why I want to go there myself.” He was looking really unhappy now. “I never even get the chance to find out if maybe I’ll like the sea just as little as he do
es.”

  For the first time Jolly felt sympathy. She loved the sea more than anything, and that wasn’t only because she was a polliwog. She knew what Munk would be missing if he stayed on this island, and she guessed how he must be feeling.

  For a long time they walked silently side by side until they saw the white of the beach gleaming through the thickets. Then Jolly had a thought. “Why did you tell me all this? About your parents and their fear of the pirates? After all, I am one.”

  Munk smiled in embarrassment and quickly avoided her eyes. “Because I trust you” Then he ran down the incline to the beach and left her standing. “Come on!”

  Jolly looked after him in surprise for a moment, then she started moving. Lightly, she ran through the soft sand. All her strength returned in an instant when she saw the sea lying before her. Today the view overwhelmed her more than ever: the green-yellow crescent of the bay, then the teeth of the reef chain, and behind it the endless blue of the ocean. Gulls screamed in the air, and a warm wind carried in the scent of the sea and its spicy, salty taste.

  Munk didn’t stop until he reached the empty figurehead that had lain just beyond the tide line for three days, unchanged in the damp sand. Jolly examined the wooden Neptune and shuddered when she discovered the traces of the shark’s teeth. At the same moment her stomach lurched, and she threw up.

  “What’s wrong?” Munk asked in concern.

  The pictures came again: the faces of Bannon and the others, scenes on board the Skinny Maddy, adventures, dangers, but also security at the side of the pirates. The laughter of her friends, the trouble most of them had taken to make a pirate out of the thin little girl that Bannon treated like a daughter. And, of course, the successes to which she’d helped them as a polliwog, the praise, the approval, the cheers.

  All that was past now. Only memories that someday would fade more and more.

  “No,” she whispered to herself, but Munk heard.

  “They’re dead, Jolly. They have to be.”

  “You said yourself if someone has the antidote—”

  “But no one here does.”

  “But your mother.”

  Munk took a deep breath. “It comes from the mainland. That’s hundreds of miles from here. Besides, you’d need twenty or thirty bottles of it to save a whole crew. We have only two.”

  Jolly wouldn’t let go. “All the same, somebody or other could still have much more of it, couldn’t they?”

  “And why would he”—he was about to say waste it—“use it to save a whole pirate crew? Especially pirates whom he’d probably just lured into a trap? People like you aren’t exactly popular in the islands.”

  She’d thought of that herself. But it didn’t change anything.

  “If it had been your parents aboard,” she said, “would you have just given up too?”

  Munk held her eyes for a few seconds, then shrugged. “No.”

  Jolly let herself down onto the sand next to the figurehead, the only memento of the Skinny Maddy and her friends, and stroked the wood with her fingertips. Then she gave herself a shake and stood up a little unsteadily.

  “I’ll show you something,” said Munk in an attempt to cheer her up. “What do you know about mussel magic?”

  “Nothing more than that some say it exists and others say it doesn’t.” Her thoughts were still trapped in the past; she hardly heard what he was saying, not even what she answered.

  Munk wouldn’t let himself be distracted. “Then get ready for a big surprise.”

  She looked at him, “Magic?” she asked, a little perplexed, and the word snatched her from the fog of her grief.

  “Magic,” he confirmed, and he was beaming.

  Munk emptied the contents of his leather pouch onto the sand. Besides the box with the spider in it, it held only mussels, padded with leaves and straw: mussels of all shapes, sizes, and colors. Some were plain shells that you might find on any beach; but there were also some, shimmering in shades and nuances of color, such as Jolly had never seen before.

  “Are they all from here on the island?” she asked in amazement.

  Munk shook his head. “Only a few, the simplest. The others the merchants brought to me, especially the—”

  “The Ghost Trader,” she broke in.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s time you told me about him.”

  “You’ll soon meet him.”

  The mussels shimmered as if they’d been polished. Jolly was more curious than she wanted to admit.

  Mussel magic was something she knew from stories, like star money that fell from heaven or the giant kraken in the depths of the ocean. But she’d never met anyone who’d seen mussel magic with his own eyes.

  Munk began to lay out some of the mussels in a circle on the sand. She didn’t understand why he reached for one mussel but left the others lying, and it was an even greater puzzle to her why he moved his lips the entire time, as if he were having a silent dialogue with the mussels. She half expected that some of the shells would snap open and shut to answer him. But the mussels just lay there, apparently any old way, and yet arranged according to a secret, mysterious order.

  “So,” he said after a while, when he’d laid out a circle of twelve mussels. “Now watch very carefully.”

  The command hadn’t been necessary. She was staring at him anyway, as if he’d lost his mind.

  “Not me,” he said. “The mussels.”

  “Sure.”

  “What do you see?”

  “Mussels. Mussels in a circle.”

  “What else?”

  “An idiot who’s trying to make himself look important.”

  He grinned again. “Wait. Now—look!”

  Suddenly he moved the palm of his right hand in a circle over the mussels, closing his eyes and again murmuring soundlessly to himself.

  The sand in the center of the circle formed a depression. She saw it very clearly, although Munk’s hand hadn’t touched the ground: a round pit, a little bigger than Jolly’s hand and as deep as a wine jug.

  In the center of the depression something gleamed. First she thought it was a piece of metal buried in the sand there, perhaps a coin. But then she saw that the light was floating over the sand and radiating from something that hadn’t been there a moment before.

  In the center of the sand pit floated a pearl, as big as a thumbnail.

  “You conjured up a pearl?” She wrinkled her nose. “I’ve seen better parlor tricks.”

  “No, I’m not done yet.” His voice sounded strained, and he was keeping his eyelids closed. “What shall I do now?”

  “If you don’t know …”

  “Request something. Something magic.”

  “I can’t think of anything.”

  He sighed. Sweat appeared on his forehead. “How would a gust of wind be?”

  She raised her eyebrows in surprise and nodded. “Good, a gust of wind, then.”

  Munk whispered something—and at the same moment Jolly was seized by a gust of wind that would have held its own with any rising storm. With a scream she was swept off the ground, carried two steps backward, and landed on her seat in the sand.

  A moment later it was utterly still, no wind at all.

  Dumbfounded, she stared at her footprints in the sand, then at the spot where she now sat. “Was that you?”

  Munk didn’t answer. He stretched out his right hand, executed the circular movement again, and pointed his index finger at one of the mussels. The floating pearl went into motion and, in a flash, shot into the open mussel. The shell clapped shut with a noise that sounded like the snapping of bony jaws.

  Munk opened his eyes, blinked, looked for Jolly, and found her still sitting in the sand. “Oh,” he said as he squatted down next to her. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

  “Are you seriously claiming that was you?”

  “Not me. The magic of the mussels. It’s only a matter of controlling it and directing it. There’s nothing magic about me myself, but about
these here …” He pointed at the circle of mussels with a gesture that seemed almost tender. “They are magic. Do you understand?”

  “Not a word.” Jolly scrambled to her feet and brushed the sand off her trousers«

  “The hard thing isn’t setting magic free,” he said, “but settling it down again afterward. In the beginning I was careless a few times and didn’t get it shut up again. Then the magic stayed free and caused all sorts of catastrophes. Once the roof of the house went up in flames. I was really only trying to heal the broken leg of a goat—but that was quite strong magic, and I didn’t know how to get it back in again. Another time, when I didn’t get the pearl shut back into the mussel, the next morning the leaves of all the palm trees around the farm were red” He carefully packed the mussels back into the sack. Every single one of them was wrapped and cushioned. “But since I realized that everything you call up you have to make disappear again, there’ve been no more problems .”

  “Where did the pearl come from?”

  “It’s only a kind of embodiment of the real magic. When I will it, the magic flows out of the mussels and forms the pearl in the center. That means that I can use its strength for the magic. As soon as the magic is worked, I have to move the magic back into one of the mussels, and that’s it. When I open the mussel the next time, the pearl is gone—it’s turned into invisible magic again and can be called up again. The bigger the pearl, the more magic available. Basically, it’s very simple—if a person has the talent for it.”

  “And you aren’t pulling my leg?”

  “Word of honor.”

  She grinned. “Not bad.”

  Munk was clearly flattered. “Oh, well, its just fooling around. Aside from healing the goat and a few other little things, nothing particularly useful has come out of it. I tried to double the harvest, but that went horribly awry. I’m not strong enough for something like that.”

  “What happened?”

  “Half the tobacco plants died. After that my father forbid me to use mussel magic.”

  Jolly smiled. “But you just did it anyway.”

  “Only to cheer you up.”