“I need a mug, Ox!” called Monkey, as ale splattered onto the street.
Cap was startled, but instantly let go of the blade, reached instead for a mug. He squeezed past the woman with a quick, “Excuse me, ma’am,” avoiding the cold look in her eye. He was sure she could hear his heart pounding. He handed the mug to the shorter man, who turned the spout back on and began to fill it. Cap scratched his head. How did Packer…? But then he knew.
One of the items Packer had insisted on taking with him into the barrel was a winebladder full of ale, mixed with water and a shot of whiskey. Cap didn’t understand why Packer had wanted it, but now it was obvious. Inside the barrel, Packer had waited until the point of the spigot penetrated the barrel lid, and then he pushed the wineskin against it, puncturing it. The mug was a quarter full when the man turned off the spout.
First one, then the other man tasted it. The woman declined with a shake of her head. “Strange,” said Ox. Monkey made a disapproving face.
“It’s light, but it kicks like a mule,” Cap offered, thankful that he had also remembered that bit of the story.
“It’s awful,” Ox said. “Something wrong with it.”
“Then leave it,” the woman instructed.
Packer heard this clearly, and he fought back a surge of disappointment.
“Oh, thank God,” Cap said aloud. He felt genuine relief.
Ox and Monkey stopped short once again and stared at Cap.
Ox walked over to Cap and grabbed him by the shirt collar, pulled his face so close that the barkeeper couldn’t avoid his breath, beef-and-cabbage. “Why don’t you want us to take this? Tell the truth now or I’ll crush your bald skull.”
Cap’s lips trembled. He looked off into the darkness of the night, not wanting to make eye contact with any of them. “Take it. That’s fine. Or leave it. Either way. It’s just the Fall Festival, that’s all. All those, um, foreigners, you know. They’ll be disappointed, coming so far for such a famous ale.” Most of that story came from Packer’s instructions, but the foreigners he added himself.
“Foreigners?” Ox asked.
“Famous?” asked the Monkey.
“Well, a ’course,” Cap said, deadly serious now. “It’s…Hangman’s Ale.” He kept not looking at Ox or Monkey or the woman or at his now-prized barrel.
Ox released Cap, who straightened his collar, then his apron. The two supply men looked at one other. Then they looked at the woman. She nodded her head, almost imperceptibly. Ox turned back to Cap and sighed. “We’ll take it.”
Cap was glum.
Ox gestured, and Monkey quickly helped him right the barrel. “Two coins,” Ox said to Cap, seeing that he was crestfallen. He handed the money to the barkeeper with a sly smile.
Cap looked at them. There were three. “But—”
The big man leaned in. “The extra’s for the trouble you’ll have with a crowd of angry Drammune. It’s tough enough with just one.” He said it with a wink, cutting his eyes toward the woman.
Cap was looking at the coins and didn’t see the woman’s eyes narrow. Then the two men hoisted the barrel into the cart and climbed aboard. The big man shook the reins, and the cart creaked away. The woman walked beside it, sword still drawn.
Cap looked at the three coins in his hand, suddenly feeling his breath come back to him, as though he had not been breathing for the last five minutes. He glanced up at his tavern’s shingle, the sea monster writhing through the waves. “I hope it’s not blood money, Packer Throme,” he said aloud.
The cart turned a dark corner ahead.
Packer was thankful they had tapped the barrel. The air had quickly become too thick to breathe, something he somehow hadn’t anticipated. His back ached already, and he wished he had insisted on some cloth to soften the hard wood beneath him. All that he could ignore. Air, however, he needed. He pulled the hatchet that Cap had given him from his belt, and gently tapped out the cork that Monkey had hammered in. The fresh air was an immediate relief.
With the cork out, he found he could hear snatches of conversation over the creak of the cart and the thudding of the horse’s hooves on the dirt road.
“They find the Firefish, and our backs won’t fear the lash,” Ox was saying. A chill ran through Packer’s spine. They were, then, hunting the beasts.
“That’s true,” Monkey replied solemnly. “An extra coin for a famous ale means nothin’ to the Captain if the money’s rollin’ in.” Packer’s heart raced. It was true. It was all true.
Ox just grunted.
“But another week without a score, and it’ll come straight out of our hides,” Monkey continued. “You know how he gets when the revenues are down.” Packer was amazed. They didn’t know where to look for Firefish! And that meant they needed the one piece of information he carried with him. They would listen to him. They would have to.
The woman snarled. “I hope we never find another one of those stinking fish.” Her voice was very near as she walked beside the cart; her exotic accent was unmistakable and her sullen anger frightening. But it was what she said, more than how she said it, that cut into Packer.
He knew who she was. He’d learned about her from his swordmaster. This was the woman who served as Scat Wilkins’ enforcer, the security officer of the Trophy Chase, and she was one of the best hands with a sword alive. “Maybe then we’ll return to the old ways,” she said.
Packer knew when he chose this path that he would have to face Talon eventually. It was through a breach of security he meant to gain passage on that ship. But he certainly didn’t anticipate that she would hate this new venture of hunting the Firefish. He pondered it. The information he carried in his head about the great beasts was his only real protection. If it was Talon’s trust he must gain in order to preserve his life, he was in deep, deep trouble.
He lowered his head farther, between his knees, and fought back a sudden riptide of fear. Talon stood between him and his mission. It would be impossible to fight her and win, and now it seemed it would be impossible to side with her. He was not prepared for this turn in the road.
The very real possibility of death upon discovery now weighed on him. Talon was merciless; she would follow the pirate’s tradition and execute her stowaway on the spot.
Was Packer prepared to die? No, he realized. He was not. He was suddenly very much afraid of dying. So what had he been prepared for? What had he expected? And suddenly he couldn’t conceive of why he was taking this kind of risk, when a full life with Panna, and with a home and children like she had described, was waiting for him. Why was he doing this?
And as he asked himself that question, dark answers began to come to him. Was he really doing this for the fishermen of the village? Or was that just something he told himself to help justify this…this what? This blind ambition. This substitute for the priesthood. This need to prove himself, to vindicate himself and his father’s dreams. Was Will Seline right? Was he no more than a sword-brandishing vagabond, fit only for humiliating old men in pubs?
He tried to calm himself. No, no. It wasn’t that simple. He did have a mission. This was his mission, and an important one.
No…mission was not the right word. He was no missionary. A missionary would not get into a barrel in order to join up with pirates like Scat Wilkins and Talon. And there could be no doubt now, these were still pirates, some of them at least. His resolve faltered again. If this was no mission, then how was God in it? How could He be?
Fear begot fear, and his sudden loss of confidence multiplied, collapsing in on itself. If the very first sign of trouble caused this kind of doubt, if one statement from Talon was all it took to put a hole in his hull, how could he expect to survive when he had to face her? Or a whole ship full of her fellow pirates? Suddenly he was sweating like a prisoner in a hangman’s noose.
And then he felt the burning weight of shame. How utterly foolish to think he could succeed at this. He was an ignorant peasant who had grown drunk on his own ambitions. He was the
gutless boy Dog believed him to be. He was the rogue Will Seline feared him to be.
What must God think, looking down from heaven on such a person? If God is not in it, he thought, I will never survive this. And what if God were not in it at all? What if all this was but his own elaborate attempt to recreate something God had so clearly taken away? The prophet Jeremiah said it: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it?” Those words moved him from shame to despair. To be cast aside by God was worse than anything Talon could do to him.
Packer’s past came to him now as nothing more than a long series of failures and sins. The worst of them was, he had attacked a priest. The fact that Usher Fell wasn’t a good priest, or even a good man, was beside the point. No matter what the man had done, how could there be any hope for someone who had it in his heart to do that? Being thrown out of seminary wasn’t nearly punishment enough.
Then Packer had added to that shame by studying swordplay, with a vengeance. Hour after hour, day after day, as though it would save him, cramming the hollow places within him with this substitute calling, forming it into a new kind of mission, a new passion, ignoring all else.
Senslar Zendoda, the Swordmaster of Nearing Vast, had tried to school him in what he called “the Heart of the Warrior”—his whole servant-warrior philosophy, the old man’s claim to fame. But Packer had never really followed that. Not really. He listened, he thought about it, but in the end he just learned to move his hands and feet in a way that would effectively kill an opponent, and he learned to exploit any weaknesses of will and of mind. Master Zendoda showed great patience with Packer, knowing and respecting Packer’s first choice, the seminary. But Packer’s drive was such that he simply took advantage of the good opportunity he had been granted, and learned to fight.
And now he had abandoned Panna once again. And he had talked a good, simple barkeeper into risking his neck to load him into a keg of ale and sell him to pirates. And not just to any pirates, but to the one pirate who beyond any shadow of a doubt could destroy him at swords!
What could he do now? Nothing. He was helpless. He could do nothing but carry it out to the end, whatever the end might be. He could not turn back. To call out, to break out of the barrel now, would be death. They would kill him, and then they would go back and kill Cap.
Packer had no control over the outcome. God could save him or let him be killed off. He could protect Cap or not. Packer realized he had thrown himself, quite literally, on the mercy of God.
And then, just as suddenly as he had been overwhelmed with guilt and shame and fear, a wholly unexpected peacefulness settled on him. It came from a single, simple thought, which he discovered he believed, absolutely: God will choose the outcome. No one else. It was truly, truly that simple. God had not vanished. God was here still, holding him in His hands, as surely as if this barrel were His fist. God could crush him. Or not. But either way, it would happen because God wanted it. Either way, it would be a good thing, the right thing. What God wanted.
Packer had given up control of his destiny by climbing into this barrel. He had handed his life over to God on a platter, and if God wanted to take it, He could have it any number of ways. And He would! Packer felt it, knew in his heart that God was there, and that He would choose. And the peace now began to grow into joy.
You will choose the outcome. That thought, spoken as a prayer, filled him with a joy totally inappropriate to his circumstances. He suddenly wanted to laugh out loud, to sing out, to dance with the sheer, weightless immensity of it. Packer Throme was free, and unconstrained.
The truth of his current state stood in stark opposition to the harsh reality of his circumstances.
CHAPTER 4
Keelhauled
Captain Scatter Wilkins was not a big man, but he wasn’t small, either. No one who met him in armed combat, as Packer Throme was about to do, had ever judged him less than a giant. He stood five-feet-nine and weighed two hundred pounds. As a pirate, he had always stayed in excellent physical condition, and his endurance in battle was legendary. The past years of this commercial venture had lessened his opportunities, and his ardor, for physical exertion. He had let himself go. But he was not the least afraid of making the first move, and making it count.
Most who had heard of his exploits and then met him face-to-face were surprised by his age. At forty-four, the Captain was the grand old man of the pirate clan, due to the carnage and infamy that had spread in his wake from his youth. Scatter’s peers were all dead now or gone into retirement, forced or otherwise. Belisar the Whale had disappeared, rumored to have been murdered. Conch Imbry was hanged gloriously. Skewer Uttley and Fishbait McGee had fled to the Warmer Climes, where, word had it, they drank rum and told lies—a couple of old, toothless sharks hand-fed by those who, but for the grace of God, might well have been their victims in years past.
Only “Scat” remained, brashly flying the skull and bones, continuing to build his legend, though in a slightly different line of work.
Now Scatter moved lithely and quietly from his quarters and into the Captain’s saloon. He looked around him. What had his steward said? Stowaway? Where? Had he misheard? No, that was the word. The jumpy, fearful man had yelled it while running the other direction.
Stowaway.
Now Scat walked slowly through the saloon. Table, benches, wire-screened cupboards. Nothing. He walked across the floor to the storeroom. He had requested a taste of that new ale the supply team had scrounged. Had the steward discovered something amiss while filling that request?
Unseen to Scat, Packer stood only a few feet away, with his sword drawn in the center of the small storeroom, listening to slow, steady footfalls amid the creaks and groans of the great wooden ship. Once he had freed himself from his barrel and discovered himself locked in this storeroom, he had climbed up on a row of four other barrels of ale and found a small shelf of wood behind them. Wedged there out of sight, he had fallen fast asleep. And so he had missed his opportunity to face the Captain’s steward rather than the Captain himself.
Deeter Pimm was a man with no stomach for bloodshed, which was why Scat trusted him to be around when the Captain was sleeping, and otherwise vulnerable. The steward had taken one look at the remnants of Packer’s deception, a barrel upended and empty on the floor, and had slammed the door, bolted it, and gone running off in search of the first mate. He had chosen not to awaken the Captain, not for fear of his master, but for fear that an assassin’s evil deeds were being perpetrated even now behind that door. Running for help was a course of action Deeter Pimm had always found preferable to confrontation.
Now Packer heard the easy, finely-oiled click of a pistol’s firing pin as it was cocked and made ready. It was a fine piece, a wheellock pistol. Such a weapon rarely misfired, and rarely missed at close quarters.
Packer flattened himself against the wall. He breathed shallow, quick breaths as he was trained to do, preparing for battle. He thought about speaking up, about warning whoever it was that he was no threat. He considered surrender, then decided against it. God would certainly choose the outcome. Still, he liked his odds better with a rapier in his hand.
The iron bolt of the bulkhead door slid against its wooden runner. Packer felt it as though it were sliding within him, bone against bone. And then silence. He saw the door swing slowly inward. He heard its iron hinges creak as the wedge of light widened across the planks of the flooring. The door stopped when it hit Packer’s boot. The light exposed the empty wooden barrel, dust hovering around it.
Then Packer heard a hoarse whisper say, “Stowaways die.” This voice had no anger. It had none of Dog’s vanity, none of that masked fear. It had confidence, and credibility. This was the voice of a man who would kill him.
The gleaming steel muzzle came into view first, and then a finger pressed close on a trigger, and then the hand that held the weapon, gripping a mother-of-pearl stock.
Packer never thought about what he would do. He j
ust did it. It was easier for him than much of his training had been. Senslar Zendoda had always demanded pinpoint accuracy in swordplay, and in that regard, Packer had been a prodigy. In one quick, silent motion, Packer slipped the tip of his sword through the trigger guard just behind the trigger. He didn’t do it cleanly; he grazed the underside of Scat’s finger, but then Packer backed the thrust with speed and strength, driving the point of his sword into the wooden wall behind it.
In the moment it took the pirate to glance down to see what angel or devil had stopped his pistol in midair, Packer’s free hand caught Scat Wilkins on the mouth with a hard left hook. The Captain went down, leaving his pistol behind. In one more motion, Packer pulled his sword free of the wall, and the gun free of the sword.
As the Captain’s head cleared, he found himself looking up into the blue eyes of a young man, hardly more than a boy, holding a fancy dueling sword in his right hand and Scat Wilkins’ own favorite pistol in his left.
“I’m sorry,” Packer said quietly. “I don’t mean any harm to you, or to this ship.”
“That’s one cussed poor way to prove it,” the bewildered Captain replied in a ragged voice, staggering to his feet and wiping away the blood that trickled from his lip into his salt-speckled beard. “You’ll die for this.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I’m not here to cause trouble. I just want to meet the Captain of this ship, and tell him my business.”
“That’s half done, boy. Better tell me your business before the first mate arrives and blows your head clean off your shoulders.”
Packer’s face showed its first sign of confusion. The man was dressed almost casually. Except for the boots and the vest, he could have been any crewman. But Packer didn’t doubt. Even now, unarmed and facing two weapons, this man was a hairsbreadth from attacking Packer.
Footsteps now came from outside the saloon, men running down the alleyway, and Packer saw the light of Scat’s intentions glow. “State your business. And you best do it quick, or you’ll die unsatisfied.” The pirate smiled; he’d already won.
The Trophy Chase Saga Page 5
