Pirate Emperor

by Kai Meyer

  “They needed help and lured humans through the fog to Aelenium. Men who took over the tasks for them.”

  “But these men had children. And they again had children. Generation on generation.”

  “And while the old gods who had withdrawn to Aelenium died off, the number of humans grew. Today there are only a few of the original inhabitants left.”

  “Forefather?” Jolly asked hesitantly.

  “The oldest of all. The Creator.”

  Jolly held up her hands defensively, as if she could push away the things the spinners were saying. “But Forefather is only an old man with a lot of books!”

  “He is that today.”

  “But he was not that always.”

  “He had a name then.”

  “Many names.”

  “But he was always the same. The Creator. The first who came out of the sea of seas and kindled a light in the darkness.”

  All at once Jolly felt the weight of the sea over her, a column of water as wide as her shoulders and many thousands of feet high. Powerless she sank to her knees, let herself fall back, and pulled her legs into a cross-legged position.

  “Forefather is God?”

  “Not the God. Only a god.”

  “The oldest.”

  “What about the others?” Jolly asked. “Count Aristotle and d’Artois and—”

  “They are men. Eager hands with a spark of understanding.”

  “… and the Ghost Trader?”

  “The One-Eyed One.”

  “The Raven God.”

  “Formerly his birds bore other names. Hugin, the one. Munin, the other. They were ravens then.”

  For a long moment there was silence, as if the three spinners were aware that they were already forgetting things. That their strength too was weakening, just like that of the gods.

  “No matter,” said one of them finally.

  “No matter, no matter,” the two others agreed.

  “But the Masters of the Mare Tenebrosum,” said Jolly, still trying to wring a meaning from all this, something that she could take in and comprehend. “The Masters are … bad!”

  “What is that?”

  “Who said that?”

  “Above all, they are young. And powerful. Just as the gods of this world once were, an infinitely long time ago.”

  “They are curious.”

  “Greedy, perhaps.”

  “Or envious.”

  “But bad? What is bad, Jolly?”

  It did not escape her that the women had called her by name for the first time. And she knew what that meant. The women expected an answer from her. Nothing parroted, nothing she had been taught, but her answer.

  What is that—bad?

  The Acherus had murdered Munk’s parents. That was bad. Or not? Was it bad if Spaniards killed Englishmen?

  All a question of point of view, thought Jolly, and felt sick and guilty about it. But it didn’t change the answer. All a question of point of view.

  No! she pursued the thought. Killing is bad, no matter what the reason is. Perhaps that was the solution. But how could she presume to judge the Masters of the Mare when she herself had taken part in countless forays and privateering expeditions? Certainly there were people who would have described her—Jolly—as bad. So it couldn’t be that simple.

  “If the Masters of the Mare Tenebrosum are not bad,” she said thoughtfully, “then why are we fighting against them?”

  That earned her nothing but silence.

  “Why?” she asked once more, and she jumped up. She was just about to grab one of the women by the shoulder and shake her.

  “These are the facts,” said one spinner. “Produce a meaning for yourself.”

  Laboriously Jolly attempted to put everything she’d learned into a reasonable order. Forefather was born out of the waters of the Mare Tenebrosum. He had “kindled a light,” as the spinners had called it, and created this world. Jolly’s world. More and more life had arisen from the new oceans, other gods, then animals, then humans. And as the gods had finally used up their power and become weaker, they withdrew to Aelenium, with which they sealed the door to the Mare Tenebrosum. They were no longer strong enough to savor the fruits of their creation to the fullest, but neither would they grant that to anyone else. They were not prepared to share with the powers of the Mare Tenebrosum, not even Forefather, who’d originally come from there himself. They jealously guarded what was theirs; they were not protecting humanity but defending their position. Like a child who withholds a plaything from another even if he no longer plays with it himself.

  So that was the secret of Aelenium. A city of gods who had ceased to be gods a long time ago. Some gone and forgotten, others still alive but already on the threshold of oblivion.

  What did that mean for Jolly? For her friends? For the battle against the Maelstrom? She was much too confused to find answers, so she asked her question aloud.

  “It means nothing,” said one of the women.

  “Or everything,” another added.

  Rage mounted in Jolly. Rage at everything that the Ghost Trader had withheld from her the whole time. Rage at herself because she felt so terribly helpless. And rage at these three women (who were certainly anything but ordinary women). Why tell her these things if they couldn’t give her a solution?

  “Because the solution stands only at the goal of your journey,” one spinner said. “Perhaps.”

  “You thought everything was simple. Go to the Crustal Breach, close the Maelstrom back into his mussel, and everything is over.”

  “Nothing is over.”

  “Nothing is ever over.”

  Jolly stamped her foot angrily in the sand. Dust arose from the bottom of the sea and, before she realized it, surrounded her like a fog. She quickly took several steps to one side, but that just made it worse.

  Only when the swirls had settled again did she see what purpose they had served.

  The water spinners were gone. The bottom was smooth, the magic strands vanished.

  Not fifty paces away lay the wreck of the Carfax, and that was also what had stirred up the ground: It was still raining debris, which landed in the sand around the ship, very near Jolly.

  A dream? A hallucination from the fall into the deep?

  No, she thought. Most certainly not.

  Her legs were wobbly, but she flexed her knees, summoned her strength, and pushed off. Like an arrow she shot upward into the dim light, toward the crystal roof of the distant surface.

  The brightness of the day came nearer, sunlight breaking on the glassy crowns of the waves. Golden-white beams pierced the surface, only to vanish several fathoms into the deep.

  From down here it looked as if someone had brushed through the waves with a golden brush; the sparkling bristles combed the waves, now in this direction, now in that.

  Jolly slowed her ascent a few feet below the surface of the sea. She wondered if sharks had already been lured by the spectacle of the battle. As long as she ran over the water, she was safe from them. But when she swam, she was a prey for the predator fish like any other shipwrecked person.

  Buenaventure! seared through her mind. How could she have forgotten him and the Hexhermetic Shipworm while she was speaking with the spinners in the deep? Had she squandered valuable time? On the other hand, they’d hardly left her any choice. As had so often happened in the weeks past.

  She cautiously stuck her head through the surface. The sparkling of the sunshine on the wave crests blinded her for a moment. The unaccustomed low angle of sight, from which she’d seen the sea only a few times, made her uneasy. For the first time she felt restricted by the masses of water, something almost like claustrophobia.

  The Quadriga was gone.

  Jolly’s first thought was: How long was I under there, actually? And her second: Where are Buenaventure and the worm?

  Ship debris can stay on the surface for days, or even longer, depending on its composition. The fact that until a few moments ago pie
ces were still falling to the bottom didn’t mean that the Carfax had sunk only a short time ago. Anything was possible.

  Nonsense! Don’t obsess over it. You only spoke to the spinners for a few minutes. Only a few minutes.

  And then Jolly caught sight of them: three silhouettes rising from the horizon, narrow and high and remarkably shaped. About two hundred feet away. Not ships, most certainly not. In the first moment she thought the spinners themselves had risen up from the bottom.

  An instant later she recognized the truth.

  It was sea horse riders!

  Humans on three hippocampi.

  “Ahoy!” she called as loudly as she could. “I’m here! Here I am!”

  She placed her hands on the water on each side of her as if it were a ledge and pulled herself up. From one second to the next, she was standing upright on the waves. And she realized at once that there was no going back: For miles around there was no high point to dive—and without the dive she couldn’t go under again. So she was at the mercy of the riders, whoever they were.

  “Jolly?” cried a disbelieving voice. And then breaking with joy: “Jolly! There she is! That’s Jolly over there!”

  “Soledad?” She rushed toward the riders. “Walker? Is that you?”

  The sea horses were nearing so fast that Jolly’s eyes could hardly follow the movements. Soledad was the first beside her and made her sea horse sink deeper into the water so that her face was on the same level as Jolly’s. With a shriek of joy, the princess embraced her. “Blast it, Jolly! We were just thinking we’d lost you!”

  Walker and the Ghost Trader guided their animals to Soledad’s side, and now she saw who was sitting behind the captain in the hippocampus’s saddle.

  “Buenaventure!” Jolly loosed herself from Soledad and ran over to the pit bull man, who looked so relieved that he would probably have preferred to leap off the horse and run to meet her on the water.

  “Jolly! You’re alive! By Poseidon’s algae beard!” They embraced each other, as well as they could. The pit bull man was so overjoyed that he wouldn’t let go of her again. His barking laugh rang out over the water, and he grinned with relief.

  “Good to see you, Jolly,” said Walker. He was also relieved, although dark shadows lay on his face, shadows of grief and loss: His ship, his mother’s ship, was destroyed. The Carfax lay on the bottom of the sea.

  “I’m sorry,” Jolly stammered. “I—really—I don’t know what I can say.”

  “I’ll tan your bottom for it later,” said Walker somberly. Numbly he looked over the pieces of flotsam that were still floating on the waves. Then he quickly shook his head. He visibly had to pull himself together. “But now—”

  “First of all, we’re glad that you’re alive,” the Ghost Trader finished Walker’s sentence. Jolly turned around to him. The water spinners’ words rose to her mind when she saw him sitting above her on his sea horse, a dark silhouette in front of the sinking sun. His robe bellied out, fluttering in the sea wind. Above him hovered the two parrots, their wings beating frantically.

  She straightened her shoulders and looked from one to the other. “I was dumb. I would like to apologize to all of you and … Wait! Where’s the shipworm?” Her eyes had fallen on Buenaventure’s knapsack, which hung flat and empty on his back. “Oh, no.”

  The pit bull man shook his head despondently. “He didn’t make it, Jolly! I looked for him right after I went overboard…. But the knapsack, it was suddenly empty. He must have slid out and …” He fell silent and dropped his eyes.

  Jolly whirled around to go look among the flotsam, but the Ghost Trader’s voice held her back.

  “No, Jolly! It’s pointless. We’ve found no trace of him.”

  Jolly’s gaze slid over the sea and the floating remains of the Carfax, far out to the horizon and then to the distant stripe of coast.

  Again it was Soledad who was the first to come up beside her and gently place a hand on her shoulder. But this time the princess said nothing, only listened with her to the whispering of the wind.

  Jolly felt salty tears on her lips, and for the first time in her life it occurred to her that sorrow tasted exactly like the sea.

  18

  The Fleet of the Enemy

  The fortress of the cannibal king had been erected on a mountain, half of which had long ago tumbled into the sea. This had produced a steep rock wall that fell away some sixty feet to the ocean and ended in a foaming wall of spume. The winds here blew sharply from the northeast and drove the sea relentlessly against the coast. Remains of the sunken mountain stuck out of the water as jagged reefs, surrounded by foaming surf. It was next to impossible to maneuver ships through the rocks from the north and east. The only passage through the reefs was to the south and west, and it led into the shallow waters of the Orinoco delta.

  On a side arm of the river, beneath the cliff fortress, there was an extensive settlement of huts and wooden houses, whose outskirts overflowed to a huge tent city. It had long ago spread out over the cultivated area and merged with the dark green thicket of the jungle.

  “Where’s the harbor?” Walker asked, when they saw the fortress and the settlement lying in the distance. He was still having trouble keeping the sea horse steady under him. In contrast to Soledad, who controlled her mount as surely as if she’d had years of experience with it, Walker obviously didn’t find it easy to ride on the hippocampus, even after several days. Having the heavy Buenaventure behind him in the saddle didn’t exactly contribute to his well-being either.

  The Ghost Trader squinted his one eye as if he could see the coast more clearly that way. “That is strange,” he said. “Where do they moor all their ships?”

  Walker scratched his head. “Maybe Tyrone was telling the truth. If his cannibal tribes intend to attack Caracas from the land side, they don’t need any ships.”

  “A march from here to Caracas on foot?” Soledad shook her head decidedly. “Very unlikely. That’s more than a hundred miles through thick jungle.”

  “The natives know their way around the area, though,” Walker said, but his tone showed that he was anything but convinced himself.

  “We’re east of the delta here, aren’t we?” asked Jolly.

  The Ghost Trader nodded. “The outlet there must be the easternmost arm.”

  “Then I know where the ships are lying.”

  All heads turned toward her in surprise. Soledad inspected Jolly over her shoulder. “Really?”

  “I told you about the book where I discovered the drawing of the spider. There were also maps of the Orinoco delta in it. I tore one out.”

  “Do you have it with you?” asked the Trader.

  “No. It went down with the Carfax.”

  “Like so much,” said Walker grimly.

  Jolly still couldn’t look him in the eye, she was so very ashamed for the loss of the ship. “Anyway, I had enough time to look at the map and compare it with the ones in the cabin,” she explained in a low voice. “I think I know exactly now how the arms of the Orinoco run.”

  “And?” Walker asked.

  “The fortress wasn’t shown, of course, but the cliff it’s on was. Otherwise the coast is flat here. I think that behind the bluff there’s a kind of lake, with a connection to the delta. We can’t see it from out here because the mountain with the fortress is exactly in front of it.”

  The Ghost Trader looked toward the coast. “That means the fortress itself is on a kind of spit that’s bounded by the sea and the river on two sides and on a third, landward, by the lake.”

  Jolly nodded vigorously.

  Soledad was visibly impressed. She gave Jolly a smile, then turned to the men. “Tyrone is a pirate. He wouldn’t build himself a fortress like this if he had no way of providing a protected anchorage for several ships in its vicinity. What Jolly says sounds reasonable.”

  Walker had to agree. “In any case, we should take a closer look.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” said the Ghost Trade
r decidedly and drove his sea horse forward. Immediately all three animals were shooting along in the direction of the coast, in a wide arc, so that no one would see them from the battlements of the fortress.

  They came on land about two miles east of the rock. The sea horses withdrew to deep water again, while the five comrades waded through the surf to the shore. Before them lay a narrow sandy beach, which disappeared into the shadows of the ancient jungle after just thirty or forty feet. A few crabs crept over the sand; coconuts lay under the palms along the edge of the jungle. Walker broke some in two with his saber, and they drank the sweet milk inside, ate some of the meat, and shared a ration of meager provisions that the Trader, Walker, and Soledad had brought in their saddlebags.

  Not really fortified, but still halfway satisfied, they began moving again. Jolly stayed close to Buenaventure and observed with amazement how familiar Soledad and Walker were with each other. During the ride to the coast, the princess had told her what had happened on Saint Celestine and what Tyrone was planning; but as to what had happened between her and Walker, about that she’d said nothing.

  Anyway, Jolly’s thoughts were someplace else entirely. She grieved over the Hexhermetic Shipworm, and she could tell from looking at Buenaventure that it was the same with him. The little fellow might have been a pain in the neck, but during their voyage on the Carfax he’d become very dear to them.

  And then there was Bannon. Every memory of him was like a blow in the face. The man who’d raised her and whom she’d loved like a father had sided with her enemy. An enemy who—if Soledad’s suspicions were right—was not only a human-flesh-eating monster, but an ally of the Maelstrom.

  The Ghost Trader believed that Tyrone’s plan for taking Caracas was intended to distract the pirates. The truth was plain: The Spanish armada and the pirate fleet were to mutually demolish each other in front of Caracas, while the kobalin armies could attack Aelenium undisturbed. It was now clear why the Maelstrom had waited so long for his attack on the sea star city.

  But how important to all that was what Jolly had learned from the water spinners? Now that she was with her friends again, the meeting with the three old ones seemed even more unreal—blurry, like a dream. But could she make it so simple? It was tempting to divide the world into good and bad again, as before—Aelenium on this side, the Mare Tenebrosum and the Maelstrom on the other side—but her reason told her that it hadn’t been that simple for a long time.