curryandchaos: why daisy
flagofnonation: in bulgaria, the name mags is margaritka. the daisy. i have a cat avatar lol. we’re thinking of starting a virtual reality just for cats and calling it ninthlife
curryandchaos: cats already have nine lives duh. it should be tenthlife. for an extra one
flagofnonation: you’re so smart. hey we never finished our top ten list of drum fills
curryandchaos: add that screaming trees cover of freedom by buffalo. that part at 8:40 where the drums go nuts is fukn sweet
flagofnonation: that’s not a fill lol. it’s a while solid minute of drum stuff
curryandchaos: whatever auntie. awesome doesn’t have a time limit. when are you picking me up for your birthday party
flagofnonation: ugh i can’t. i crashed the queen anne
curryandchaos: wtf? nice job dorkwad
flagofnonation: i suck. but i got you covered nephew. my old pal ryder says he can give you a lift
curryandchaos: is he some kind of psychomaniac
flagofnonation: nah he’s cool. not very hip about music but you’ll like him. he’s got great stories. i’ll have him meet you at our secret rendezvous
curryandchaos: won’t be much of a secret then will it
flagofnonation: don’t you worry about ryder. he’s got bigger secrets than that locked in his head
curryandchaos: like what
flagofnonation: wouldn’t be much of a secret then would it? ok i gotta run
curryandchaos: say hi to patches for me
flagofnonation: ok <3 love you =^.^=
15
Hang My Body on the Pier
See’st not how corpses rise and float on the surface of the tide,
while pearls o’ price lie hidden in the deepest main?
In heaven are unnumbered the many stars,
yet ne’er a star but sun and moon by eclipse is o’ertaken.
—The Arabian Nights; Based on translation by Richard Burton.
November 2029.
Two days after leaving Alonso with her octopuses and Soviet space monkeys, Meteor Mags borrowed Plutonian’s ship to take supplies to her new and unusual crew. She expected her mates would be making a home of the freighter Hyades and working hard to restore the laboratory on the freshly-named Svoboda 9 asteroid. Having worked with so many musicians in her long and reckless life, she really should have known better.
With Patches by her side, Mags took the elevator from the surface down to the lab. The door slid open to reveal to their ears a pounding, pulsating music. The entire cavern throbbed. Patches purred and rubbed her face on a rocky outcrop. Pressing her ears back, she dashed into the lab.
Following her cat, Mags strolled to the epicenter of the sonic earthquake. She discovered Alonso with his baritone guitar plugged in, jamming with the macaques. They had created a drum ensemble from anything that wasn’t nailed down, and quite a few things which were.
On her first visit to feed her colony of mutant krakens, Mags used explosives to demolish the doorway separating their cave from the lab. The resulting rubble now made an orderly semicircle around the gap in the wall.
The monkeys’ matriarch sat in a lotus position on the largest rock. Her left hand, moving back and forth with the beat, held a can filled with nuts and bolts to make a shaker.
At the base of her elevated perch stood Karpov, the leader of the males. With the focused ferocity Mags had come to expect from him, Karpov struck a wrench against an empty and overturned ten-gallon bucket. The percussive bass kicks unified the group, which Mags noted was no longer segregated by gender. The males and females, having kept mostly to themselves for years in their previous home, now sat casually side-by-side on stones and scavenged furniture from the Hyades.
Karpov had fashioned a colorful cloth into a doo rag, and he was not the only macaque to have suddenly and uncharacteristically dressed. Several of the females wore necklaces and bracelets made from odds and ends taken from the freighter: bottle caps with holes punched in them, rubber gasket rings, bolts and washers, and an array of shiny objects. At Alonso’s side, the tiniest of the male monkeys had strapped a welding mask to his face. Tendrils of smoke poured from the sides, and the odor of burning marijuana reached Mags.
Alonso waved his pick hand at her and returned to cranking out riff after monstrous riff. The din sounded like a Clouds Taste Satanic album, with Kodo as the drum section. Patches found a monkey without a drum and flopped at his feet for belly rubs.
Mags took one look at the crew riffing along in perfect unison, and immediately she knew the score. Her octopuses had focused their telepathic abilities to create a mental link between the musicians. Warning them had been pointless.
Her lips curled into a perverse smile. At the circle’s edge, she belted out a painful, high-pitched wail. If Kathleen Hanna had covered Slayer, it would have sounded like the brutal vocal treatment Mags subjected the asteroid to that day. She closed her eyes, clenched her fists, and screamed.
Hang my body on the pier
Hoist it up and shed a tear
Pyrate life is short but free
Now my heart returns to sea
Hang my body on the pier
Hang my body on the pier
Mags thrashed her scarlet curls in time with Alonso. Then she raised her head and sustained a note that grew higher and higher in pitch until, at some unspoken cue, the macaques brought their improvisation to a thundering close.
Alonso wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “That’s so heavy, tía.”
“Great-gramma sang it to me once, when I couldn’t sleep.”
“No wonder you couldn’t sleep,” said Alonso. “With her screaming at you like that?”
Mags lit a stolen cigarette. “I added the screaming. Would you like to hear how Great-gramma sang it?” Without waiting for an answer, she stepped up to Alonso in the center of the tribe. “Are you synched up with these little communists?”
“Yeah, they—did I do something wrong?”
The cherry of her cigarette burned like a laser sight over his face. “Did you?”
“The Svobodans, they—”
“The Svobodans.”
“Right, the monkeys. And me, I guess. And—just what do you call a herd of octopuses?”
“A flock, not a herd. Nobody’s playing cowboy with my calamari. They are as free as a flock of—” She waved her hand in the air. “I don’t know.”
“I know there’s a whole lot of them mother-flockers.”
“Two hundred and seven, I’d say. Lonso, do you think you’re playing an instrument right now?”
“Of course I am. Rockin’ out over here, tía.” He played a series of triplets as fast as he could, bent a high note out of shape, and scraped his pick on the strings down the entire length of the neck. “In case you didn’t notice.”
“I noticed. Have you stopped to think that you are the instrument? And the octopuses are playing you? You’re like a set of bagpipes or a drumstick to them.”
“You’re saying I’m a tool.”
“You are such a tool!”
Patches meowed in agreement.
“Now take it from the top, but more acoustic, and play it with this beat.” She clapped a rhythm for him. The matriarch’s shaker startled her. Without a word, the simian drum circle picked up on the beat and accompanied the smuggler. “That’s almost creepy.”
“Just go with it.” Alonso strummed a C minor. “We got your back.”
Over the instruments, Meteor Mags sang the song as her great-grandmother sang it to her more than ninety years before, on a bleak night filled with fear, on a train to nowhere across a landscape thick with enemies.
Mags always thought Great-gramma made it up. But the song was first sung more than three centuries before, on the coast of the American colonies.
1726. From Magdalena’s Memoirs.[1]
When I was thirteen years old, my father said, “Remember what I told you, son.”
&nb
sp; I did remember. Keep absolutely quiet. Simple instructions, but well-advised.
I will call him my father from here on in this memoir, for we lived as father and son for nearly a decade to the outside world. I knew my gender was a deception, and that our survival depended on this deception, and it troubled me not at all. The seas will be unkind to anyone suffering from an unfortunate compulsion to always tell the truth.
After all, honest men decorated the piers of the so-called New World. Their bodies hung in cages to attract the carrion birds and remind all who saw them, as their skin rotted in the sun and scavengers consumed their organs, that to be a pyrate was to sign your own execution order. But before serving as the government’s instruments of terror against hard-working people, many of the hanged men insisted on telling the truth.
On that day in Boston in my early adolescence, I heard much truth, and little of it came from the officiators of the murder, on account of pyracy and mutiny, of one William Fly. Against the wishes of the judges and Jesuits who had instructed him in the procedure of being executed by the state, he spoke truth that day.
I knew it was truth because my father and I had served with Fly. Was he quick to murder? Most assuredly. Did the captains he tossed into the sea deserve to die for what they had to done to my former shipmates? Undoubtedly. I would as soon again murder in the company of that man as I would draw my next breath, for I would know with certainty the actions were just and served the interests of the crew.
Fly was to speak that day of the moral necessity of avoiding the sins of a pyrate’s life; of escaping the trap which so justifiably claimed his life now; and the need to eschew taking wealth not rightfully yours to squander on stiff drink and loose women.
Instead, he told the crowd the reasons his former captain deserved to die. Father’s grip on my shoulder reminded me we knew these reasons all too well. The beatings. The starvation. The mutilations. Men speak of hell as if it waits for us after death. But I knew by that age that hell was a merchant ship, and its satanic scourge was a man called the captain.
As the hangman draped the rope around his neck, William Fly sang. The renegade sang before his spine snapped and his abandoned flesh hung in an iron cage for ravens to pluck its tearless eyes and voiceless lips. I shall not soon forget that song.
According to my father’s wishes, I kept silent until we entered what passed for a pub in the colonies of those days and claimed a table in a darkened corner. He fetched us two pints of ale from the bar. Other witnesses to the afternoon’s spectacle wandered in, and their noise formed a cocoon of privacy for our conversation.
“Maggie,” he said, abandoning the pretense I was his son, “that’s the fate awaits us now. If not on this shore, then the shore of someone who sees we’ve wronged them.”
I accepted the ale and drank it heartily, for it vexed me to see one of the few people I admired turned into a scrap of jerky for the gulls. Life with my adopted father had taught me many things, including that its otherwise appalling aspects became tolerable with generous rations of ale and spirits. “That’s if we’re not lucky enough to die at sea, first.”
Father swallowed his ale. I judged him. I did. He was prone to drunkenness, but I was usually too drunk to mind. Except when he struck me.
He had secured profitable employment for us on a year’s voyage, and we had lived in semi-retirement for a year on the spoils. Then the money ran out, and we signed aboard a privateer. Our departure was two days hence, and today’s hanging amounted to Father’s idea of schooling.
I judged him against other men I had known in our travels. He was rough-spoken, though I had helped him with his literacy. We had met a few scholars at sea, and I knew Father was not a man of their intellectual caliber. But he could work rigging and sails with a skill I had seen educated men die attempting to equal.
Perhaps with more education, Father would have been one of the pioneers who created the compass, or the steam engine, or calculus. But he had a taste for drink, and I recall he finished his first ale before the foam had entirely vanished from mine.
“Yer a cold one, Maggie. It’s kept ya alive. We’ll be privateers now. But a letter of marque makes us no less thieves. We take what is not ours, and make it ours.”
I offered my glass in salute, and all the old man clinked against it was froth. Instead of drinking, he softly sang in his gruff, grey-whiskered voice the words William Fly had sung that very day on the gallows.
Hang my body on the pier
From a chain and shed a tear
Pyrate life is short but free
Now my heart returns to sea
Hang my body on the pier
Hang my body on the pier
The sentiment rang true, and not a drop of my ale remained. “But I have different plans,” I told the besotted sailor who raised me. “And I’ll see a thousand frocks die before I see another one of my mates hang like a rooster in a cage.”
“Ha! What do ya plan, little Maggie? Start yer own colony, perhaps?”
“That,” I said, handing over my glass, “is exactly what I plan to do.”
By the time he returned with a second round, he had forgotten my assertion. It took six more years to make good on my promise. By that time, Father was a feeble man.
The sea is cruel to sailors, and it turns many into cruel men. I will not deny he was, at times, cruel with me. But a child at sea learns to expect a certain amount of cruelty as part of any normal day; and she herself becomes cruel.
When I had years to reflect on it, I would judge him again. I would find him, on the whole, the best thing that could have happened to me after my parents’ deaths.
I later felt remorse for treating him as roughly as I did.
1722: The American Colonies.
The girl knelt in the dirt outside the wreckage of a cabin. She slumped forward, and her tears fell to the ground. They did not quench the smoldering embers around her. Nor did they bring to life the silent corpses of the man and woman sprawled before her.
Her sobs would have broken the heart of a man more accustomed to genteel life, and they could move even a sailor as prone to butchery and mayhem as McTavish.
He came this way to scout what goods the nearby village might hold for his crew of brigands, mercenaries, and soldiers without wars to feed them. He suspected whoever killed the man and woman and sacked their isolated cabin was on a similar mission. What grim satisfaction they took in their murder, or what moved them to such cruelty, was not apparent to McTavish, though he had sailed with many who enjoyed savagery as a form of sport.
He peeled off his woolen overcoat. A dirty, blood-smeared nightgown gave the girl scant protection from the morning cold. Approaching cautiously, he draped the coat over her shoulders. She continued shaking, as if McTavish and his coat did not exist in her world of grief.
The cabin’s door, torn from its hinges, lay to one side, and axe blades had scored its obverse face. Inside, the sailor found broken cookware, torn clothing, trampled books, and the contents of a writing desk, all scattered across the floor between overturned tables and chairs. A chest of drawers stood empty. Its insides were strewn about the dwelling. “Sink and burn me.”
McTavish rifled through the mess of papers still on the desk. The script meant nothing to him. Certain seals and insignias he recognized, but he had hardly mastered script in his native tongue, much less these foreign scribblings.
He took a step back, then reconsidered. “Maybe the captain can make sense of ’em.” He rolled the papers like a tube and slipped them into a pocket inside his vest.
The crying stopped.
She stood in the open doorway, clutching his coat around her.
McTavish met her piercing gaze. He judged her to be nine or ten years old, and her red hair reminded him of the woman who raised him. “How are ya called, lass?”
She answered with the wordless stare of a trapped animal, part fear and part hate.
“Devil take ya, then.” He started for the doorway
to make his exit, but she did not step aside. “Brave one, eh? Mark my words: I weren’t with the lot who did this to yer mum an’ dad.”
She slid the coat off and tossed it on the cottage floor before him. “Magdalena.”
He squatted to pick it up. “Ho there, Maggie. I regret we didn’t meet under brighter skies.” When he held the fabric, he shivered as if the devil had brushed him with an icy finger. With his eyes fixed on the girl, he drew himself to his full height.
She asked, “Are you a pyrate?”
“We make do as we can on the account.”
She turned away to join the corpses. They had grown stiff and cold to her touch. She stared at them mutely, and what counsel the solemn child kept remained hers alone.
“This country’s no place for ya on yer own. I’ll fetch ya to the village.”
“No,” she said. “To the sea.”
McTavish laughed with the quiet of a graveyard at night. “It’s no fair lot to sail with on me ship, lass. I’ll take ya to the village and ya can fend for yerself well enough there.”
“I can tie knots.” She walked past him back into the cabin and returned with a length of rope.
In her hands, it became a loop. She passed the rope’s end through the loop, around, and back through. Sailors called the result a bowline, and its uses aboard a ship were endless. The other end of the rope, she tied into a hitch that could serve as a block and tackle.
“Split me skull. Where’d ya learn the trade?”
She tossed the rope at his feet, like the coat. “To the sea.”
McTavish made a decision that would change his life. “To the sea, then. But you’ll never be taken aboard as a lass. You’ll have to do as a lad.”
Meteor Mags: Omnibus Edition Page 57
