“The navy’s supposed to run on due process,” Drinka said, her cheeks blooming red. “Not extermination orders.”
“Bridgewater is his own process,” Merrick said.
“His cannons took the ship right down, as if it was made of straw,” Niccu said. “He’d have sunk us, too, if we hadn’t made it to the coast alive.”
How quickly things had shifted, Fidelia pondered as she chewed the most delicious-tasting cod of her life. Moments ago, it was Merrick the Monstrous who had held her imprisoned; now he was the captive on his own ship. Such was the life of pirates, she guessed — kings of the food chain one minute, their necks between the teeth of bigger, stronger beasts the next.
And apparently for both the pirate crews, this Bridgewater was the beast above them in the chain.
Fidelia gratefully finished her kebab. Only then did she notice that Merrick was watching her from across the flames. She held back a shiver.
The moon, a wheat-colored sickle, rose higher above the water. Night cloaked the ship in darkness. The fire in the sandpit striped the two groups of pirates in golden light and shadows as the Rasculat captain and crew licked salt from their fingernails, smacking their lips for the last morsels of flavor before tossing their skewers into the flames.
“So,” Niccu said to Fidelia, “you are captive here. Shanghaied?” He twirled his beard between his grimy fingers. “You want to barter for rescue?”
Fidelia focused on the toes of her boots, the dull light of the moon flashing off the rubber. “No, I —”
She was cut off by an eruption of coughs. Merrick braced himself against the mast, coughing so violently, red spittle flew from his lips, painting the deck. Fidelia’s own chest tightened at the sight.
The cough of the red daisies, Niccu had called it earlier, and Merrick hadn’t wasted a second before he denied it.
“What are the red daisies?” she asked, and immediately felt the air on the deck thicken, dense as soup.
Niccu took a pipe from his pocket and filled it with cropweed.
“From the stories, pralipe. Stories of a turquoise sea that gleams against the sky like liquid gemstones. Stories of an underwater cave, with enough air to breathe for a day and a night, deep beneath the waves.” Drawing a dramatic breath, he finished, “Stories of treasure.” He puffed his pipe, emitting a chalky smoke ring.
Merrick tilted his head back against the mast, mismatched eyes to the stars.
Fidelia, on the other hand, felt her pulse suddenly spike.
Treasure.
“There isn’t a sailor alive who doesn’t wonder if the stories are true.” Niccu held his pipe aloft, silhouetting it in the firelight. “But few are brave enough to seek it, and those who are have no idea where to find it.”
He reached into Bloody Elle’s knapsack and found a stack of crack-o-mallow bars, which he passed around for Fidelia and the Rasculat sailors to unwrap and nibble.
“The man who owns this treasure is the most feared pirate to ever sail the nine seas,” Niccu continued. “His name alone is the stuff of legend.”
Fidelia stole a glance across the fire, but Merrick was now concentrating very hard on the dark sea.
“Now, there has never been a treasure of this size, pralipe,” Niccu said. “Mountains of gold, the stories say. Stockpiles of jewels. Riches that would make the queen sick with jealousy.” He puffed on his pipe. “But even if the stories were true, few sea dogs would dive down into the cave. Even if the stars guided them right to it.”
“Why not?” Fidelia nudged her crack-o-mallow nearer to the flames in the sandpit until it got nice and gooey.
Niccu exhaled smoke through pursed lips. “The red daisies,” he said.
Hanzi crossed himself.
“An odd breed, they are,” Niccu said. “They grow on the walls of the cave, clinging like ivy —”
Fidelia shook her head. “Daisies need sunlight to grow.”
“These daisies do not.” Niccu spoke with such certainty.
“But …” But if the red daisies were real, she would have heard of them. She was the daughter of a Gilded Iguana–winning marine botanist. She would have known the red daisies’ scientific name, their bud count, their native habitat. They would have been sketched in her father’s observation book.
“It’s only a story, pralipe,” Niccu continued. “Anything is possible in a story. Now, the red daisies are beautiful flowers, they say. Beautiful and deadly. But it is not the touch of the petals that kill you, no.” He took a drag from his pipe. “They have a lethal pollen. One inhale, and it is the beginning of the end for you.”
Everyone seemed to stop breathing at the same time. Fidelia’s eyes danced over to Merrick.
“How does it happen?” she asked. Another one of her incessant questions, perhaps — but she had to know. “In the stories, I mean?”
Niccu grimaced, as if even speaking of this delicate subject caused him pain. “It is not a pleasant death, pralipe. The pollen breeds in your very lungs. You stagger for oxygen. A horrible persistent buzz infects your body until you can barely take ten steps without collapsing into coughs.
Beyond the flames, Cheapshot Charlie squirmed under his ropes.
“Next is the purpling of the joints. The capillaries slowly burst and eject their liquid into the muscles. Painful, so very painful, to experience. Your skin becomes mottled with purple flecks.”
Fidelia tried to remember how Merrick’s arms had looked earlier that day, when he’d removed his peacoat — were there noticeable lines on his skin? Bulging veins? But she couldn’t think of anything but that dead, red eye of his.
“Finally,” Niccu said, his voice barely audible above the rustling of the Jewel’s tattered red flag, “your lungs deflate like burst balloons. You die, gasping for air, reaching for your last breath, but you never find it —”
Merrick suddenly burst into coughs, blasting noise up into the stars. Fidelia’s ears rang from the shift — the near-silence to the harrowing noise of Merrick’s lungs, straining for air.
She knew the story was real — of course it was, and Merrick was the dangerous, legendary pirate who owned the underwater cave full of riches. Merrick the Monstrous — Niccu had said it himself: the pirate’s name alone was legendary.
But the red daisies couldn’t be real. Arthur Quail wouldn’t have been able to keep such a morbid specimen out of his discourses. He would have been the only person to ever hunt for the legendary cave not for its treasure of gold and gemstones, but for its bounty of peculiar marine botany. Fidelia’s breath snagged in her throat as she thought of her brilliant, good-hearted father.
But if the red daisies were just a fiction, just a story … What about Merrick’s cough? Despite what he said, despite how he growled when he said it — this was no simple chest cold eating away at him from the inside.
Niccu put his pipe out, smacked it against the bench to empty it of cropweed residue, and walked to the mainmast, where Merrick coughed, still bound.
“I’ve dreamed of this very moment for two years,” Niccu said. He reached forward and grabbed Merrick’s throat with both hands. “You sent Yanko down into your cave. You sent him to his death,” the Rasculat captain said through bared teeth.
Cheapshot Charlie and Bloody Elle thrashed in their bindings like fish in a net. But to no avail — they had to watch their captain gasp for breath, his face reddening, Niccu’s hands tightening around his neck.
“I held Yanko every night as his lungs slowly choked him,” Niccu went on. “Everyone could hear him, every night, his cough echoing across the whole ship. Like hearing a ghost before the man had died.”
Merrick still coughed, Niccu holding his head in place against the mast. “Every night he asked me — begged me — to put him out of his misery,” Niccu said. “And one night, he coughed so long and so hard, I nearly went mad from the sound of it. And this time, when he asked, I obeyed.” Niccu’s voice softened. “Can you imagine? Putting a bullet into your own cousin, jus
t to ease his noise.”
Fidelia held her own breath, her pulse hammering; behind her, the pirates of the Rasculat stood and readied their guns.
“Then do it,” Merrick sputtered, his lips coated in red spittle. Fidelia closed her eyes, too terrified to watch.
But Niccu released Merrick’s throat and rubbed his slick hands on his tunic. He smoothed his thicket of curls back into a tighter ponytail.
“The reign of Merrick the Monstrous comes to a fiery close at last,” Niccu announced to the Jewel, looking right at its captain as he spoke. A bead of sweat dribbled down the Rasculat captain’s forehead. “But just because you are going to rot away into obscurity doesn’t mean your treasure has to.”
Niccu squatted down to meet Merrick’s eye level. “You will go back into your cave and you will bring up every piece of your treasure,” he said. “Every jewel, every gemstone. Do this, and I will kill you before the pollen does.”
Fidelia shivered. What Niccu was offering — it was an act of mercy, really.
But Merrick lifted his head, utter blankness on his face — not a whiff of gratitude or desire for this potentially charitable act. “How generous of you to offer,” he said, “but I intend to end on my own terms.”
“Rasculats.” Niccu stood and clapped his hands. “It is nearly miezul. We have a long way to sail tomorrow — first to Glassport for supplies, and then to the tropics.” He pointed at Hanzi. “Take first watch —” and then, pointing at Fidelia, he said, “and you.” He gestured to the hammock beneath the shrouds. “You stay right there. If you move from that spot, I’ll tie you to the hull and scrub the ocean floor with you.”
She should feel some relief, she realized. Merrick was finally tied up, so she was free from his captivity. Free from the crux of the Water-Eater, all of that. But what would the Molvanian pirates do with her once they’d gotten Merrick’s treasure? Would they sail her back to Arborley? Would they simply let her go?
Hanzi extinguished the flames in the pit with a kick of sand and stood next to the mast like a naval officer — chest out, hands on his guns, nose alert and in the air. He glared at Fidelia, who quickly flopped into the hammock and pulled her legs up.
The ship looked eerie in the cold moonlight, without the amber glow of the fire — the shredded sails silver as cobwebs, the shadows from the masts stretching long and black like tentacles across the deck. Fidelia tried to bundle herself with the pathetically thin blanket that stank of mildew.
But her thoughts spiraled. Red daisies, creeping up a dark cavern wall. Merrick gasping for breath, his single blue eye wide and bulging. Her parents’ faces pressed against the Egg’s porthole window as the submarine circled in the Undertow like a whirlpool in a bathtub drain.
The smoke from the dead fire wound its last curlicues up between the lines, then vanished against the pitch black of night. Across the deck, the Molvanian pirates were motionless. They’d forgone hammocks or cots, and instead strewn themselves onto the floorboards like a pile of slumbering sea lions.
Fidelia tossed from side to side, but exhausted as she was, she couldn’t get comfortable. A ship used to be calming to her, a rocking cradle to lull her to sleep. Now her insides shifted with the Jewel as she tried to keep everything level.
After counting imaginary dolphins leaping out of the water in majestic arcs, she gave up and left the hammock.
“Hey,” Hanzi warned, raising his guns for leverage. “Get back in bed.”
She scanned the deck for an excuse to walk near Merrick and spotted the blackjack of water next to his mast. “I just need a drink,” Fidelia said.
“I don’t care if your throat is the Nesmian Desert,” Hanzi said. “You stay in your hammock.”
Fidelia thought. “You know, if your captain decides to take me back to Arborley for a ransom,” she said, borrowing Merrick’s earlier fabrication, “my parents will want to know how I was treated.” It made her stomach a bit uneasy, using her parents for this lie, but she kept going. “They won’t be in much of a mood to negotiate if they find out you deprived me of basic necessities. So are you sure your captain wouldn’t want you to let me wet my whistle? Maybe we should wake him.”
A mild threat — but it worked. Hanzi’s upper lip twitched in annoyance, but he motioned to the blackjack, muttering something in Molvanian as she crossed the deck.
“Bad dream?” Merrick said while Fidelia sipped from the blackjack.
Fidelia didn’t hesitate. “Is it true?”
Merrick stared out at the sea. “Parts of it.”
“Which parts?” she asked. “The treasure? The cave?” She didn’t ask about Niccu’s cousin, whether Merrick had truly sent him to his death. She didn’t need to.
“Buzzing, buzzing, with the questions,” he hissed. “You’re worse than a damn mosquito.”
One more question: “The red daisies?”
Instead of answering, he coughed — and that was enough for Fidelia.
“Then … you’re dying,” she whispered, as if it were a secret. But they all knew it, didn’t they? Cheapshot Charlie and Bloody Elle did, with their sideways glances and their tight, strained sighs — they had entire conversations with their eyes every time their captain coughed. Niccu knew it — he pegged the very cause of Merrick’s condition the second he heard it.
“We’re all dying,” Merrick said.
“Not as fast as you are.” A chill inched down her spine. “That treasure …” She found it difficult to breathe — is this what it felt like, when the red daisies took their horrible effect on a pair of lungs? Drowning in air? “You tried to get the treasure out yourself,” she hypothesized. “Didn’t you?”
He finally used that bright blue eye to look at her, to pierce her. “Go away.”
“I don’t understand,” she went on. “You, of all people … You knew how dangerous that cave was. Why would you go in that cave without a diving helmet, or a mask?”
Anger flamed in her chest. How could Merrick treat life this way? Like an angelfish, beauty of the sea, swimming right into a tiger shark’s mouth, willingly dying useless and alone.
“Enough,” he said.
“You’re dying for gold?” She couldn’t wrap her mind around it. “For jewels?”
“I said enough!” He spoke so sharply, Hanzi finally noticed.
“You, bebelus!” the Molvanian barked at Fidelia. “Get away from him. Back to your spot, or I wake Niccu.”
Fidelia obeyed.
Back in the hammock, Fidelia lay flat on her back, peeking at the stars.
We’re all dying … Merrick’s words flitted through her mind like damselflies above a pond.
What would it be like? To know your own countdown had started? To know, every day, that the end was coming, soon enough to measure?
She thought of her parents in their final moments. At what point had they known it was their time?
She pressed her face into the smelly blanket. She would give anything — all the treasure in Merrick’s cave and then some — if she could redo that last day. She would have done everything different. She would have docked the Platypus before the Undertow hit. She would have chained her parents to the boardwalk if she’d known the field study would end with body bags. If she’d known it was their last day —
She flipped over onto her stomach. These were Merrick’s final days, and what was he doing with them? Chasing after a treasure — no, now he was bound to his own mast, and his great treasure, source of all the legends, would go to someone else.
Irony was a cruel mistress. “Merrick the Monstrous, finally undone by his own cave of wonders,” Niccu had said.
Her repulsion for Merrick bubbled up like seasickness.
Tired as she was, it was a long time until she fell asleep.
Molvania’s market was exceptionally busy that day. Merrick stepped off the dock and into the wet market, strolling through five different conversations conducted in five different languages. People haggled for their own versions of the best pr
ices, shouts of excitement, and anger, and frustration, and delight, and a thousand other emotions all bending at once through the bodega — the spectrum of commerce. It was loud enough to drown the thoughts in a man’s own mind, but Merrick was quiet as he wove through the stalls.
The sun was a fiery golden ball hanging low in the sky like a pendant. Cheapshot Charlie and Bloody Elle flanked their captain as he moved through the bazaar, twin pillars with sharp eyes scanning the crowd for a flash of silver buttons or the royal blue of naval uniforms.
The paisley maroon headscarf of a Molvanian coastguardsman? Not a threat. But any sighting of a thatched-hay mustache or a head reminiscent of a beet? Make for the ship at once.
Tacked to the bricks of a hash house was a poster — a perfect charcoal sketch of Merrick, smirking at the viewer as if he knew something they didn’t.
Merrick the Monstrous, the poster read. Wanted for robbery, burglary, arson, murder, jail breaking, and piracy. Extremely dangerous. Ten thousand blue notes for capture, dead or alive.
“Ten thousand blue notes.” Bloody Elle whistled. “Imagine what we could buy with that kind of bread.”
“Do you two want to turn me in? Split the cash?” Merrick said. An obvious joke — ten thousand blue notes, as impressive a sum as it was, would be mere pocket change to them.
They walked away, leaving the poster where it was.
He wandered past baskets of dried shark fins, wooden crates filled with live crabs, florists’ booths with fresh orchid branches, spice merchants with displays of exotic cinnamon sticks, cardamom, cloves …
At every stall Merrick would do the same thing: stop, scan, then leave, scowling.
“This place will be swarming with officers by sundown,” Cheapshot Charlie reminded his captain.
“We’re not leaving until I find something,” Merrick said.
“The admiral knows you’re here —”
“The admiral can choke on a barnacle.” But Merrick did pick up his pace. If he didn’t find something here, today, at this wet market, he’d be returning empty-handed. He wouldn’t do that again. Not this time.
Race to the Bottom of the Sea Page 10
