The Trophy Chase Saga

by George Bryan Polivka

  Today the sheriff’s contingent charged with delivering the formal Notice of Confiscation to one Mr. Sandeman “Scatter” Wilkins was led by Bench Urmand himself, who arrived armed just as heavily as any patron in Croc-Eyed Sam’s. He entered with a pistol in each hand, drawn and loaded, his jaw set, followed by three sheriff’s deputies decked and armed in the same form and fashion.

  The front table, which happened to have four pirates on duty at this moment, stood and drew on Bench the instant he was inside the door. Bench and his men held their ground. Since each lawman had a pistol in each hand, and each pistol was aimed at a pirate’s head, each pirate therefore had two pistols aimed at him. The net of this simple equation was that even though the two sides were equally matched, the pirates felt outnumbered. This prevented them from firing on the sheriff’s crew, but it did nothing to improve their disposition. The two foursomes bristled in silence on the very cusp of extreme violence.

  Then Bench spoke in a crystal tone of command, through smiling eyes and gritted teeth. “Stand down, gentlemen, this is royal business, no need for gunplay. I have a paper to deliver to Scat Wilkins. I intend to deliver it and go my way.”

  “So you say,” a greasy pirate countered. “You put yer weapons down, maybe we’ll believe you.” This string-haired veteran of Scat’s ships, at whom Bench pointed one of his pistols, was Zeb Bones. He had missed the last voyage of the Trophy Chase because of a particularly dire case of dysentery, and he was looking to prove his mettle.

  Both of Bench’s arms were locked out straight, the muzzle of one flintlock inches from Zeb’s nose, the muzzle of the other the same distance from another pirate’s ear.

  “I’m the Sheriff of Mann, friend. Show me you mean no harm.”

  The pirate hesitated, then slowly lowered his weapon. Bench instantly did the same. All parties followed suit. No one put his pistol away, however.

  “I need to deliver a paper to the man himself,” Bench said easily. “Either I go up, or you fetch him down.”

  The string-haired pirate ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek, considering. He looked away from Bench to Jonas Deal, seated at the bar.

  Jonas grunted, then tucked his own enormous pistol, his hand cannon, back into his belt, and climbed the creaking stairs.

  A quiet, tense moment later, Jonas climbed back down. “Captain Wilkins is not interested in your paper. Leave what you want, but he ain’t comin’ down.” Then Jonas, his enormous brow furrowed with the preparation for a fight, actually growled. “And you ain’t goin’ up.”

  The three deputies with Bench all felt sweat on their pistol grips. Each in turn stole a glance at their leader, but he betrayed not the slightest trace of concern. “Scatter Wilkins!” he yelled, a deep bass that shook the timbers. “This is Bench Urmand, Sheriff of Mann. Do you hear me?”

  After a pause, the sheriff shouted louder. “Do you hear me?”

  The pirate answered quickly and irritably, clearly audible in none too loud a voice. “I hear you.”

  “I’m under orders from the king. I must put this in your hand.”

  “Well, I’m under no orders to receive it,” Scat called back.

  There was a pause. Then the sheriff spoke slowly and clearly. “I’ve thought of you as many things, Scat Wilkins. But I never thought you a coward.”

  The silence was thick and ugly. Pistols cocked.

  Bench continued. “You’re not afraid to loot unarmed citizens and shoot men in the back. Loot and burn their ships, leave women and children to drown on the seas. But you can’t face a simple piece of parchment?”

  Jonas growled again, this time following it with a mumbled oath that verbally dismembered the visitors and their mothers. Someone from a back table whistled two low notes that said “uh-oh.”

  The sound of feet on a creaking floor above them led to the sight of battered boots on a creaking staircase, and then to a whole and wholly irritated pirate, unarmed, but looking every bit the dangerous leader of bloody-minded men, descending the stair. He wore a simple woolen vest over his white sleeved shirt; his trousers were clean but stained with sweat or blood or both. His speckled beard was carefully trimmed, his hair oiled and pulled back off his scarred face, which was pale and blotchy. But it was not his look but his stature, the sense of an unexploded shell with which he carried himself, the dark danger he could conjure with a glance, that marked him as a singular man, one accustomed to having his way, and to having his way at the cost of human life.

  “Give me your heavin’ paper, then,” was all he said. Bench reached into the leather pouch at his waist and produced a leather scroll, tied with a royal-blue ribbon, and marked with the seal of the king. He handed it to the pirate.

  “Is that all?” Scat demanded, staring death into the sheriff, who met his gaze with easy, unmasked animosity.

  “That is all for now,” Bench said. In fact, he was disappointed that it was all, disappointed to have seen Scat descend the stair unarmed. Had there been a shootout, Bench had no doubt he and his men, the best-trained of his office, could have routed this rabble in an instant, cleansed the city of so much refuse. The sheriff had harbored in his mind the faint hope that this errand would end with the pirate dead; a hope dashed the moment Scat appeared weaponless.

  “One day,” Bench could not resist saying, “one day you will hang for all you’ve done. And I will gladly pull the lever.”

  Scat’s stern look melted into a broad grin. “It’s nice to know the lawmen of the civilized world still recall me fondly.” There was laughter in the pub, and a couple of whoops. “What’s your name again?”

  The sheriff’s jaw tightened. “Bench Urmand, Sheriff of Mann. You’d best not forget it.”

  Scat’s grin melted away. “I’ve seen you brave young men before, with your righteous need to rid the kingdom of such like me. I’ve seen you come and go for decades. But you’re just an actor on a stage. You know that, don’t you? You and your kind are necessary because the king needs the good people who pay his taxes to believe his laws are being justly enforced.”

  “And so they are.”

  “That so? Then why don’t you arrest me, Bench Urmand, Sheriff of Mann? You say I’ve robbed unarmed men, killed women and children, shot men in the back. And I’ll admit it. I have done that and more. So tell me, why don’t you arrest me for all I’ve done? Tell me, Sheriff of Mann.”

  Bench stewed, but couldn’t speak. He knew why as well as Scat did. The king had ordered otherwise.

  Scat snorted, looked around the pub, and turned his back on the sheriff and all he stood for. “Nice show,” he muttered. “Come on boys, give him a hand.” Scat put his hands together. One man clapped, and then another, and then a robust round of applause ensued as the pirate returned to the stairway and climbed up out of sight.

  “How about a drink, Sheriff?” the man behind the bar called out cheerily as the applause died down. It was Sam himself, a black patch not quite covering the gruesome scar, the flattened skull where his right eye and most of the socket had been forcibly removed by a crocodile. Or so the tale was told. “We got whiskey and ale. No hard feelin’s. On the house for you and your men.”

  Bench’s face was still red. “I’d sooner drink horse urine,” he said darkly.

  Sam picked up a bottle that was half-full of caramel-colored liquid, swirled it around. “I don’t believe I have any a’ that, but this stuff here comes pretty close!” The pub erupted in howls of laughter. Bench Urmand glared at Sam, then quickly left, his men following him out.

  “Pimm, read that,” Scat ordered, and the jumpy servant took the leather scroll from the table where Scat had thrown it. The pirate captain sat heavily on the wooden bench beside the table, exhausted from his trip downstairs and back. His hands trembled; his forehead glistened with sweat. He had needed to summon all his willpower to pull off that small excursion as though he were still in his strength. He would not let his own minions, or the sheriff’s, believe he was too ill to defend himself.


  Scat hadn’t bothered to change much about Sam’s quarters, but he had made sure it was thoroughly cleaned, and he had brought in a few items of his own, most of them with the ability to fire a projectile at deadly velocity. He looked at the half-empty rum tumbler on the table and pushed it away with his fingers.

  “Can I get you something?” Pimm asked, watching Scat’s hands shake.

  “Just read the festerin’ paper.”

  “Aye, sir.” Deeter Pimm did not like this task at all. He was perhaps the only man yet alive who knew that Scat could not read. When he’d heard the angry sheriff downstairs say that Captain Wilkins was afraid of a piece of parchment, Deeter’s insides had bunched up in a painful knot. Scat was, in fact, afraid of pieces of parchment. Because he couldn’t read them or write them himself, he treated documents as if they were magical spells, capable of binding him in unpredictable and harmful ways. To have words stained into a paper, unspoken, waiting to be spoken at a later time and work their power far from the speaker of those words, just seemed wrong to him. Dangerous and wrong.

  Pimm untied the ribbon, unrolled the leather, took the parchment from within it, and cleared his throat. His voice creaked. “ ‘Be it known to all men that King Reynard of Nearing Vast hereby confiscates all seaworthy vessels in the ownership of one seaman known as Scatter Wilkins, commandeering them in exchange for fair payment to become warships for His Majesty’s Navy. The seventeen ships listed here below will be turned over to Admiral John Hand at the time and place of Admiral Hand’s choosing, for use as he alone sees fit, by his sole discretion.’ ”

  “Those are John Hand’s words!” Scat snarled, pointing. “That’s not the king’s voice. ‘His sole discretion,’ that’s Hand speaking right out of that parchment.”

  Deeter nodded in agreement, not knowing what else to do. “Aye, sir. Should I continue?”

  “Yeah, continue.”

  “ ‘For fair payment, the king has deposited in the accounts of one Scatter Wilkins five hundred gold coins, which shall be increased to one thousand when the ships named hereunder are manned and manifested under the direction of Admiral Hand, and proven seaworthy.’ ”

  “A thousand coins? The Chase alone is worth that!” Scat gnawed that thought for a moment. “A simple man robs his neighbor and hangs, but a king! A king can rob a whole country and reign on in peace.”

  “Shall I continue?”

  “Yeah, continue.” Scat stewed. He opened the cigar box beside him and angrily pulled a cigar from it, bit the end off, and spat it out. It could hardly get worse.

  “ ‘All officers and crews shall be chosen at the sole discretion—’ ”

  “Of Admiral John Hand, yeah, yeah, read on.”

  Pimm cleared his throat. “ ‘Of Admiral John Hand. To this order I place my royal seal, this twenty-sixth day of—’ ”

  “Forget that. What about the list? Read the ships.”

  “Very well, sir. ‘Rake’s Parry, Black-eyed Susan, Poy Marroy, Homespun, Danger, Marchessa, Wellspring, Blunderbuss, Candor, Campeche, Gant Marie, Forcible, Bonny Anne, Swordfish, Windward, Gasparella, and Trophy Chase.’ ”

  Scat chewed on that list a while. Then he frowned. “Not the Seventh Seal?”

  “It’s not listed, sir.”

  “Count ’em. Is that seventeen ships?”

  Deeter counted. “Aye, sir.”

  A gleam came to Scat’s eye. “He’s left me a play, then.” Scat searched his vest pocket and found the small, ornate gold lighter, recently relieved from the king’s employ, and lit his cigar. He coughed, a deep and scratchy thing. “Fetch me Jonas Deal,” Scat said when he could. “We’ve got a ship to sail.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Muster

  The muster of Nearing Vast began. As intended, King Reynard’s proclamation brought almost the entire able-bodied male citizenry of the kingdom into the City of Mann. The plan was simple. Recruiting stations were set up in stores, post offices, taverns, street corners, anywhere the recruiters felt they could post their signs and lay out their papers effectively. Lines formed, and the recruitment began. When a man presented himself, the recruiter would take a look at him, ask a few questions, and decide on the spot: in or out.

  If in, the inspired new recruit would be given a small green ribbon for Army, or a blue one for Navy, and sent to one of two muster stations established for this purpose within the ramparts of the Old City. If out, the dejected man was sent back home to plow or fish or sell dry goods.

  That was the plan. As it was implemented, however, several complicating factors intervened. First, the location of the recruiting stations remained a mystery to a good portion of the public interested in finding them. In some parts of town there were six or eight within spitting distance, while in others men searched in vain for anyone who knew where to apply. Within a few days it became known, or at least rumored, that the number of recruiting stations tended to increase in direct proportion to the number of taverns. Word of mouth then brought the majority of the male population of the kingdom into those sections of the city where the primary economic engine was the sale and consumption of ale, whiskey, rum, and nog.

  Which led to the second complication.

  The simple task of determining who was fit to serve and who was not became more guesswork than assessment. The recruiters, mostly retired military men, were forced to make judgments based on their best guess as to what a man standing before them might look like, or say, or be able to do, when sober. And as the recruiters were being paid by the head, they had little incentive to let a small thing like intoxication stand in the way of patriotic duty. So a large contingent of men of steady purpose but unsteady comportment were given their ribbons and their instructions and pointed in the general direction of service to their country.

  Which led to the third complication.

  The men had trouble finding the muster stations. This was in part because they were unable to follow the directions they were given, but it was in larger part because they had little desire to go looking for the muster stations. On one sunny afternoon within three weeks of the king’s pronouncement, a significant portion of the newly arrived recruits, the new martial forces of the kingdom, the hope of Nearing Vast, could be found gathered or camped or sprawled in the streets, singing in taverns, and occasionally retching over horse railings. Celebration was in the air, and the streets were littered with hundreds of little green and blue ribbons.

  The recruiters, quickly having lost all control of the situation, were left to salvage what they could by ensuring that the general tone and spirit of the revelry was as patriotic and martial as it could be. In other words, they felt it their duty, if they could not discourage the men from drinking, at least to encourage the right sort of drunkenness.

  Which led to the final complicating factor.

  The recruiters joined the recruits. Rolls were misplaced, papers went missing. Entire recruiting stations disappeared, unrecoverable. What had been planned as an orderly and simple process to raise a new and noble fighting force had degenerated with dizzying speed into an ale-sodden celebration of the past and future glories of Nearing Vast and the unworthiness of their despicable enemy, the Drammune.

  It was in this precise environment and on these precise streets that the indefatigable Bench Urmand spent his first days on the job, having finally been announced as minister of defense. He coolly assessed the situation, and quickly took action. He started at one end of one street, and with five good men began to clean it up saloon by saloon, pub by pub, inn by inn.

  After the first day’s work, he had succeeded in filling one tiny jailhouse with eight belligerent offenders, and filling with anger and indignation a hundred times that many citizens, none of whom appreciated his authority over these matters—and all of whom were, after a bit of soggy recollection, quite sure they were already in the Army, or the Navy, and therefore also sure this man was diminishing the very military might of Nearing Vast.

  Drunken outlaws Bench could han
dle easily enough, but he found he could make little headway against the stubbornness of drunken patriots. So he took to appealing to the pub owners and the saloonkeepers to shut off the spigots. And just as quickly, they took to treating him as a dangerous madman, someone who needed to be appeased until he could be convinced to go elsewhere.

  After two days, Bench Urmand gave up in extreme frustration, took his men, and rode away cursing the weaknesses and stupidities of human nature, despairing of how such a rabble would ever become a fighting force, much less become so within weeks.

  But the great forces that move history would soon conspire with the mean realities of personal economics to accomplish what the just and upright minister of defense could not. Eventually, the men ran out of money. And when they did, the spigots were shut off more finally and effectively than any decree of any king could ever accomplish. Men without ale being generally sober men, they began gathering their wits and their possessions. Most were able to locate their wits again, and most of their possessions. Their weapons and ammunition, however, were long gone.

  Sadder if not wiser, they had nothing remaining to do but blame the Drammune. And then, with their new brothers-in-arms, they all joined the trickle, which became a flow, and then a flood, toward the long-neglected muster stations. They picked up ribbons they found in the streets along the way, or just went without, rightly assuming they would not be turned away from their glorious destinies just because they happened to misplace a small bit of colored cloth.

  And thus the Kingdom of Nearing Vast would replenish its armed forces and prepare to return to its former glories in the face of the inevitable onslaught of the highly disciplined, thoroughly trained, battle-hardened, and merciless Drammune war machine.

  As the citizens’ supply of pistols, muskets, swords, and ammunition dwindled, Scatter Wilkins’ stockpile of arms grew. His pirates drank but did not celebrate; instead they pilfered, and what wasn’t sold or hocked made its way into the armory of the Seventh Seal. The captain was making preparations for his own war, and though his was on a smaller scale, it was also a far more efficient operation.