Pirate Emperor

by Kai Meyer

  “They’re going to sink us,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Yes,” he answered, likewise outwardly unexcited. “But that was worth it. Almost.”

  Now for the first time his jowls drew into a sad smile. He might have the face of a dog, but his smile was more human than that of the cannibal king.

  Suddenly she thought of Walker. The Carfax had been his mother’s ship, the ship of the first woman pirate in the Caribbean. This sloop was her remembrance, her legacy. There was even an urn with her ashes in it in the captains cabin.

  She’d gambled with all that. And lost.

  “I’m—,” she began, but the cannon fire drowned out her words. The Carfax shook, and Jolly was thrown off her feet. Balls shredded the sails, and barely a second later the air was full of iron. Shredded ropes whipped around like snakes’ bodies. Splinters of wood rained down on the bridge and onto the deck. The foremast dropped like a felled tree. The ghosts crowded into a nebulous whirl that seemed to be everywhere at the same time, yet they could no longer stop the sinking of the sloop.

  “Jolly!” shouted Buenaventure, who was still holding the wheel. “Over the side! Quick!”

  “Not without you.”

  “Stop arg—” Billows of smoke wafted up to the bridge and separated them. Fire had broken out somewhere, at the guns, probably. Again the cannons sounded, instantly followed by further hits.

  The Carfax sank.

  The ship screeched and moaned and groaned like a dying animal as its boards and masts convulsed one last time. Jolly felt through the smoke for the wheel, but the wheel was gone. Instead a deep hole of devastation gaped there.

  “Buenaventure!”

  She looked around, panicked, but she could discover no one.

  “Buenaventure!”

  The bow pointed down. Water rushed and slapped as the stern was raised out of the waves. At any moment the ship might break in two.

  “Just say something!”

  But she received no answer. Not from the pit bull man, not from the Hexhermetic Shipworm. Both were gone.

  She wanted to go down with the Carfax. She alone bore the blame for all that had happened. If the two of them were dead, then she wanted to die too.

  “Jolly!”

  Someone was calling her name. Bannon? Tyrone? The Quadriga was no longer visible on the other side of the wall of smoke.

  “Jolly! Down here!”

  Perhaps she was only imagining the words. The noise around her was deafening. The ship beneath her convulsed, everywhere wood shattered, and she had to avoid the remains of the rigging so as not to get caught in it.

  Nevertheless, she heard something again.

  “Jolly! Jump!”

  In a last burst of reason, she recalled what she had learned in Aelenium. The stern was now up in the air at such a steep angle that she had to fight against the incline to get to the railing. When she reached the spot, there was no railing left, just a row of shattered wooden stumps.

  Jolly threw herself into the deep. Head forward, she shot downward, arms outstretched. It was her only chance; otherwise, as a polliwog, she would shatter on the surface.

  She broke through the waves, pulling a trail of air bubbles behind her. Instantly, the noise around her was cut off. How deep she glided down before she remembered her arms and legs and began to kick she did not know. There was blue-green half light around her. Churning water. Debris falling, spinning, to the bottom.

  And then a murderous drag.

  Right beside her, not twenty feet away, the Carfax sank into the sea. When her broken, exploded stern was finally underwater, there was no more holding her. The hollow spaces inside her filled immediately. In a chaos of ropes, rags of sails, and knife-sharp broken timbers, the wreck plunged down and pulled everything in its vicinity with it.

  Jolly struggled in vain against the suction. She could of course breathe underwater, and when she wanted to, her hands parted the waters like air. But she couldn’t make any headway against the force of the sinking ship. She saw the light pale above her, desperately fast. The deep caught with invisible fingers at her clothes, at her limbs.

  Jolly shot downward, half on her back, lying almost horizontally, her face turned upward, her hands outstretched, as if over her there were something to which she might have held fast.

  But there was nothing.

  Only emptiness and the daylight, which was becoming ever weaker.

  17

  The Water Spinners

  The suction dragged Jolly through dismal nothingness.

  Around her reigned the uniform gray that she owed to her polliwog vision. It made her realize even more clearly the hopelessness of her plunge to the bottom.

  If she didn’t drown, she might be buried under the debris. Or speared by the tip of a mast.

  Odd that she could still think so clearly. She might possibly be the first shipwreck victim who perceived her fall to the bottom consciously, without panic robbing her of understanding. The wreck of the Carfax had sunk faster than she was doing; it was somewhere beneath her, wrapped in a mantle of air bubbles. Pieces of debris kept detaching themselves and shooting to the surface, so that she had to take care not to be hit by them.

  She could change her position within the vortex and turn herself belly and face downward—but she could not escape from its force, which was pulling her relentlessly toward the bottom. Like a nail pulled by a magnet, she followed the shipwreck down.

  How deep might the sea be here? Five hundred feet? Five thousand? No, probably not that deep; they were too close to the coast for that. It wouldn’t be much longer, probably, before she reached the bottom.

  She saw no fish during her fall. The animals avoided the colossus that had invaded their kingdom from above. Later, when the Carfax was lying on the seabed, they would draw near curiously, explore the debris, and gradually incorporate it into their world. Morays would then nest in her splintered stern, algae cover her boards, and crabs go searching for prey in her cracks and splits. Someday the misshapen mountain would be no different from its surroundings, ensnared by plants, half-buried under sand and slime.

  These images chased through Jolly’s head at top speed, flashed up, and were extinguished again. She thought that the suction was letting up a little now. The stream of air bubbles dwindled, and she could see the destroyed ship beneath her again, cocooned in waving ropes and bulging sails.

  And she could hear! More and more quickly her ears were getting used to the new environment. When she and Munk had dived through Aelenium’s undercity, they’d been able to converse. But she’d been too excited to perceive the underwater world’s own sounds.

  As silent as a fish, the saying went. Not at all! In the distance Jolly could hear a confusion of whistling and peeping and roaring, uttered in the chaotic rhythms of bird twitter, except it wasn’t twittering but the voices of the fish that must be there somewhere beyond her sight.

  The noise of the wreck’s breaking up also rose toward her. The pressure was squashing the wooden interior spaces. It must long since have pulverized the cabin with Walker’s memories of his mother. Again Jolly felt such a powerful stab in her chest that for a moment she thought her body had been pierced by a piece of debris. But it was only her bad conscience that was hurting her, the certainty that she had saddled herself with terrible guilt.

  And still she continued to fall.

  Now she wept—there was no one she had to hide it from anymore. And her tears became one with the water as soon as they came to her eyes. She didn’t need to wipe them away—even while crying she could see as clearly and sharply as if she were on the surface.

  Any moment she expected the impact that would probably break all her bones, given the speed of the suction. She wouldn’t drown, wouldn’t be crushed by the pressure—she would plainly and simply lie there, unable to move. God, she would become the first human to die of thirst on the bottom of the sea.

  Suddenly a second drag seized her. It pulled her out of the grip o
f the first and drew her to the side, much faster than before, as if she were sliding through a narrow tunnel. Perhaps she lost consciousness for a moment, perhaps even for hours. Or did she merely blink her eyes?

  When she opened them again, she was in another place.

  She’d just been seeing the Carfax below her, a tangle of wood and rope and bent iron. But in the next moment the ship was gone, as if it had dissolved into nothing from one heartbeat to the next.

  The stream of falling debris was also gone.

  Below her, Jolly now saw the sea bottom, a gray wasteland, which reminded her of the descriptions of the Crustal Breach. But this couldn’t be the Breach or even a place in its vicinity. They were thousands of sea miles from it, entirely aside from the fact that there was no trace of the Maelstrom anywhere.

  Was she dreaming? Was this the first step to the other world? Was she perhaps dying faster than she’d feared?

  The suction faded away. At a height of about fifty feet over the bottom of the sea, she got her fall under control, hovered, and looked down.

  There was something that puzzled her.

  At first look it looked like a dark spot in the gray sand in the shape of an equilateral triangle. Only as she slowly sank deeper did she make out three figures. Three old women were sitting there, facing outward, with long white hair that divided at the backs of their heads into two skeins. They were linked together by these skeins, which stretched taut among their heads and wove over and under one another so that it wasn’t possible to tell where the hair of one ended and the other began.

  The three women perched on low stools; before each stood a spinning wheel. Jolly rubbed her eyes, so very much did she mistrust her perception. But with a careful look there was no doubt: The women were sitting at spinning wheels at the bottom of the sea.

  Now Jolly floated about twenty-five feet over them. She tried to remain on guard, but she was so fascinated by the strange sight of the spinners that she couldn’t tear herself away.

  Why did the three have their backs turned to one another? Why were they bound together by their hair? And what the devil were they doing down here?

  “Hail, young polliwog,” said one of them without lifting her head. Jolly couldn’t tell which of the women had spoken.

  “What … is this here?” she asked tentatively, sounding to herself quite simpleminded. This must be a hallucination, which would make dying easier for her.

  “You will not die,” said one of the women.

  “Not yet, anyway,” added a second.

  Jolly looked from one to the other but couldn’t make out which of them had moved her mouth. “Where is the Carfax?” she asked, now a bit more composed.

  “Far away from here.”

  “Or not.”

  “It depends how one takes it.”

  Had they spoken one after the other? If yes, then they spoke with one voice.

  Jolly hesitated to let herself sink any farther. When she realized, however, that this conversation would go nowhere as long as she wasn’t looking the three in the eye, she overcame her nervousness. She glided a little to the side, so as not to land in the center of the triangle, and then moved down.

  Sand puffed up when her feet touched the bottom. One voice cried, “Careful, child! Don’t step on the yarn!”

  Yarn? She looked down and discovered that the ground was covered with a sort of net. Countless threads were interwoven into a dense web. They came from all directions, in a star shape, and ended at the spinning wheels of the old women.

  “What is that?” She crouched down and stretched out her hand to touch one of the finger-thick strands. She half expected that the women would restrain her, but there was no protest.

  A tickling went through her hand and shot up her arm, but it withdrew quickly again, as if it streamed out of Jolly’s fingers back into the yarn. The material was soft and smooth and as clear as … water?

  Indeed. The old women were spinning strings of water. Or of something that was already in the water, at any rate, and thickened under their hands.

  “Magic,” said one of the old ones. “But you would have realized that yourself, wouldn’t you?”

  Amazed, Jolly looked away over at the network, whose end vanished at the edge of her range of vision. “Are these the magic veins?”

  “We call it yarn,” said the old one sitting nearest Jolly. Her lips scarcely moved as she spoke.

  “But that is probably the same thing,” said another.

  “Who are you?” Jolly asked.

  “Spinners.”

  “I see that. But I mean … what are you doing down here?”

  She knew the answer already, before the women said it. “We spin the yarn.”

  “What do you want with me?” Jolly knew without a doubt that her presence here was not coincidental.

  “We have observed you.”

  “You and the other polliwog.”

  “Did you create us?” Again Jolly looked down at the magic water strands, which, although they were surrounded by water, never lost their shape. As if they were firmer and thicker. Or even more magical.

  “The yarn created you,” said one of the women.

  “Not we.”

  “But that is unimportant.”

  “It is time that you learn certain things.”

  “We thought others would explain it to you.”

  “But no one has.”

  “So we will do it.”

  All three nodded, and the band of hair between them stretched to the breaking point. They seemed not to feel any pain from it.

  Jolly slowly circled around the three women. The sand whirled about her feet, erasing her tracks in seconds. “Tell me first what kind of a place this is.”

  “It has no name.”

  “We are spinners.”

  “Here we spin.”

  Jolly clenched her lower lip in her teeth. Instead of asking more questions, she inspected the women as she walked past them. All three wore long gowns, which covered their feet even as they sat; like everything else down here, the material of their clothing was a monotonous gray. The long, fleshless fingers of the old women worked the spinning wheels nimbly and with no extra movements. None of the three looked up at Jolly as she walked past them. But they spoke alternately, even though it wasn’t clear in what order.

  “You were created out of the sea, little polliwog.”

  “Out of the magic of the yarn and the power of the water.”

  Jolly stopped. The yarns were the magic veins she’d heard about in Aelenium. This was the place where they originated. She grew dizzy at the thought of how much power was concentrated here. It was said that the Crustal Breach was full of magic power, and only some veins intersected there. But this was the source, the root of the vein network. And the three old women were its creators.

  And thus, to be precise, also the creators of Jolly and Munk.

  No, she contradicted herself. They haven’t created me. Only the polliwog magic in me. But somehow this thought couldn’t reassure her either.

  Who were these three? Sorceresses? Witches? Goddesses? Or something that lay beyond the origins of the gods?

  Moments later she learned how close to the truth her guess had come.

  “The sea is the place from which all life stems,” said one of the women. Her fingers danced on the spindle and yarn like insect legs. “Every animal, every human, had its beginning in the ocean. Out of the water were born the first living creatures, and the water has made them into what they are today.”

  Jolly nodded impatiently. She’d already heard something similar. Hadn’t the cook Trevino told of it during one of his speeches about God and the world, which he always held forth on when he was drunk?

  “The gods also came from out of the sea long ago.”

  “Not out of this sea.”

  “Not out of this water.”

  Jolly crouched down in front of one of the women to be able to look her in the face. She now had no more fear, felt
not even a trace of shyness with them. Like a young animal that still knows its mother by her scent even months after its birth, Jolly was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of deep trust. An aura of the wondrous surrounded the three women like something she knew from dreams.

  “Not out of this water,” she echoed in a whisper, and then her eyes widened. “Out of the Mare Tenebrosum? Is that what you mean?”

  “The oldest of all seas,” said the woman in front of her, and another agreed: “The mother of all oceans.” And the third said, “The father of all waters.”

  Excitedly Jolly tried to follow the spinners’ words. What sort of talk was this about gods? She didn’t even believe in one God, never mind several.

  “They have all lived.”

  “And they live still.”

  “But they are gods no longer.”

  “Or what humans understand by that.”

  “They have become like you.”

  “Almost like you.”

  “They have lost their power since they created all of this.”

  “This world has cost them all their strength.”

  “It has sucked them empty.”

  “But so that no more powerful one follows them from the sea of seas, they have closed the entry and guard it jealously.”

  “Many ages long.”

  “They have hidden away and mourn the old days of their power. In order to be near the water out of which they were born, they established a city on the sea, which serves them as a hiding place and a fortress.”

  “A city that seals the passageway.”

  “Aelenium.”

  Although Jolly could breathe underwater, for a moment she was breathless with excitement. “You mean to say that the people of Aelenium … are not humans at all? But gods?”

  “Not all.”

  “Only a few now.”

  “They were too weak, even for the simplest things. Many have gone, simply disappeared.”

  “Like a dream in the first rays of the sun.”

  “No one remembers them anymore.”