by Lisa Jensen
“Believes?” I echo. “He is the chiefest villain in Christendom.”
“He made a foolish choice once,” she counters. “Who hasn’t? He could change his mind if he wanted to, but he thinks his time’s run out.”
I stare at her, but it’s Proserpina’s face that suddenly swims before me, the witch’s voice that thrums in my head. I will give you all the time you need. That’s what she told me on the day I left her, ages ago. By God’s thorns, for centuries, I’ve blamed Pan for the eternity of my life here. But suppose it was never him at all, but Proserpina keeping me alive all this time, like her spider confederate? But why? For malice alone, or is there some other reason? I thought she was speaking in riddles that day; I didn’t listen. Time for what? What was I meant to do here?
From whom would I beg forgiveness, if I could? There are so many I have wronged, all who ever bled on my sword in the pirate trade, the thousands more I have led and lost in futile battles here. How many more must die? Proserpina asked me once. Suppose each death, however good or brave, only lengthens the chain of my crimes. Could I but halt this march of death, somehow, would my exile end at last? Is that the chance they all speak of? Is that what Proserpina meant by going back?
Death is the only release I’ve dreamed of for centuries. Can there be another?
A thundering like a broadside erupts on deck; footfalls pounding, weapons clattering, men shouting. Brassy races into the passage.
“Captain, quick,” he pants. “Boys!”
By God’s bile, not now! If Proserpina, not Pan, prolongs my life here, she must have had a reason, a key, a plan, but there’s no time for pretty theories with the boys on the attack. “Battle stations!” I roar. “Shields up! To your weapons…”
Halfway out the door, I see Parrish on her feet behind me. “Stay out of sight,” I warn her.
“But—”
“I beg you! My men will pay with their lives if you are seen.”
She pales, retreats, and I charge down the passage and up the ladder.
They are just now racing above the treeline over Pirates Beach, a cloud of racketing boys in their furs and foliage, Pan blowing a shrill fanfare on his pipes. My mind is racing too: I must think of some game to turn Pan away from bloodshed. Nutter and Swab have shoved aside the half-built barricade to position Long Tom; Filcher is passing out arms. Jesse, confident and resolute, is readying his flintlocks up on the quarterdeck, where I ordered him to be.
“Stand by there, Nutter!” I shout as the boys veer into range. Chase them back into the sky for another blessed moment; give me time to think! Turning for the ladder, I see Parrish crouched in the hatchway behind me, staring out at the swarm of boys.
“Damn and blast!” I sputter, throwing myself across the opening to block her passage.
“Captain! They’re children!” she cries indignantly.
“I know what they are,” I hiss.
“Fire!” Nutter shrieks, and I spin round to see all the little boys beating higher up into the air to dodge a peppering of grape fired one second too soon, while I was distracted. Laughing and jeering, they swoop in over the starboard bows, above our now harmless cannon. Nutter and Swab fall back into the waist as the boys hover above us, out of range of our hand weapons.
“Where’s that codfish you call a captain?” Pan cries, lighting on a spar on the mainmast, stowing his pipes in his belt of vines. “Show yourself, Hook!”
I stride out amidships, and the men on deck fall in behind me, clutching their swords, axes, pikes. “Well, Pan,” I hail him, “just the fellow I want to see.” Out of desperation, I reach for the brim of my black hat with its fine white plume. “I’ll wager this feather—”
“I make the rules here!” he brays at me. “Whatever’s going on in the Neverland, you know you can never beat me, and I’m here to prove it! You get three chances to try.” He motions down toward our spent Long Tom. “That was one.”
Damnation, I wasn’t quick enough; the game has already begun. I circle beneath him, my sword still sheathed. So long as we are engaged in a parley, he’ll not unleash his boys, but can I hope to win this challenge with words alone? “But surely nothing ever goes wrong in the Neverland,” I parry. “Who would dare defy the great Captain Pan?”
“No one!” He cries down at me. “And noth—”
A crack of shot; iron whistles overhead, but Jesse’s ball only comes close enough to make the boy jump on his spar.
“No, no, no!” I yelp, beside myself, as three or four outraged flying boys shear off toward the quarterdeck, shrieking, brandishing their weapons.
Pan’s feral grin is showing. “No fair!” he trumpets at me.
“A misfire,” I counter desperately. “My weapons are old and unreliable—” But Jesse’s second pistol is already drawn, his intent unmistakable. He raises it, and fairy glitter explodes in his face.
“Liar!” Pan yodels, as his whelps close in on Jesse.
I scarcely know what I cry, feinting back toward the starboard ladder as Filcher and Nutter race up the larboard side. Miraculously, the arc of the poleaxe Nutter whirls over his head with such ferocity checks the advance of the first two flying boys, lunging in with swords drawn. They’re forced to veer aside while Jesse, even blinded, holds his ground, squeezes off a second shot. But Pan has leaped out of range, and as Nutter and Filcher slash at the first two boys, a third darts round them straight for Jesse. Unarmed, I think, until I see what’s clasped in his grubby hand, a weapon that doubles in length before my horrified eyes, a deadly stiletto rasping out of a black case.
“Jess!” I bellow.
Jesse raises his shield arm to ward off a flying assassin he can’t see, and the boy dives in with his wicked blade. He rams it up to the hilt between Jesse’s upper ribs, viciously yanks it out, sparkling gaudy red in the sun, and shoves it in again. All the boys erupt in cheers.
Even I am stunned by the savagery of it, howling impotently at the foot of the ladder until my men finally drive the boys back into the air with their longer blades. Jesse stumbles blindly about, hands outstretched, his twisted foot buckling under him, his expression perplexed. A dark stain begins to spread across his shirt. He staggers toward the rail, misses it, and crumples to the deck, felled by the blade I stupidly put in Pan’s hand.
“That’s two,” Pan smirks at me.
Outrage boils up in my vitals. I turn on the little murderer, drawing my sword. “Come down and face me like a man!” I roar.
He leaps eagerly down to the deck while I wave back my men to make a clearing. The boys will not attack them again unless they try to interfere; Pan likes things fair, after all. We round on each other, weapons drawn, as anguish and wrath consume me. “How soon before your boys learn there’s something in the Neverland you fear?” I goad him.
“I’m not afraid of anything!” He swings his blade angrily at me.
“Then why are you here?”
“To teach you a lesson!” He scuttles sideways, out of my reach, rounds on me fiercely. “How many of your men will it take before you learn it?”
I crash my blade into his, give myself up to bloodrage, slashing and driving. When he loses ground, he rises into the air. I flail after him, stretch to my full height, greedy to injure him, cost him his buoyancy so he might fight me on even terms just this once. But he shoots up out of range, defiance and exhilaration shining in his eyes, baby teeth bared in a chilling smile. My hook curls round a line, and I claw up the shrouds after him. We battle on, rising above the deck, blades singing, my feet on the ratlines, my hook anchoring me in the shrouds. He darts under the lee of the shrouds, and I lurch round with a vicious slash.
But I thrust at empty air, my body twists out above the deck, and I jerk to the force of his pointed blade through my shirt.
“That’s three!” he crows, as deck planks rush up to meet me, and all is black.
Chapter Fifteen
SUITE: RESURRECTION
1
It’s not so hot in He
ll as I imagined, and it stinks of wet wood and brine. A smudge of dim light moves from side to side beyond my closed eyelids, as with the motion of a ship, and my sluggish wits surrender their last tiny hope. Not Hell. Not yet.
My eyes open on the all-too-familiar appointments of my cabin aboard the Jolie Rouge. I’m flat on my back on my bed as murky shadows dance below the swaying lantern hung from a peg in the deck beam above me. I wince at its brightness. My phantom fingers twitch, but the dead weight of my hook is still fixed to my arm. I can force naught but a dry wheeze past my thickened tongue.
Something rustles up out of the shadows beside my bed, a black silhouette in the dim light.
Stella Parrish gasps, staring down at me. “You live!”
“I always live,” I croak. I should know by now the Neverland is my eternal Hell. I taste stale blood; pain thrums in the small of my back, and when I try to shift, it flares up my spine like a thousand stinging hornets. I can’t stifle a groan, which effort awakens acute throbbing in a network of muscle beneath my collar bone. I shudder and lie still again.
“But … it’s not possible! I saw you die!” Her gaze draws mine to the rusty red staining my shirt. “I saw the blood.”
“I can bleed,” I rasp at her. The ravaged hulk of my body can absorb an infinity of scars and holes and mutilations. “I can fall out of the rigging like an imbecile.” Animation is returning slowly to my tongue. “Only Death eludes me.”
She must shrink from me now, unnatural monster that I am. Yet there she stands, the light moving across her ashen face, a glistening in her dark eyes. She snorts in a most ungenteel fashion and wipes a hand under her nose.
“What are you blubbering about?” I bark. The effort produces a sputtering cough like grapeshot rattling through my lungs.
“It’s the usual response when someone dies,” she snaps back, pawing at her tears with the back of her hand before gliding away into the shadows.
But it’s not usual at all, not for me. No one has ever cried for me before, not the Wendys, nor generations of Lost Boys, nor any of the children to whom the story is so often told. They always cheer when Hook dies.
She reappears above me, holding something that catches the light, one of my fluted wine goblets, clear liquid aswirl inside, and my dry mouth convulses with longing. She pours from the glass into her cupped hand; stray drops fall into my beard. The heel of her hand presses gently against my lip, leaking its cargo of blessed water into my mouth, until I’ve drunk my fill.
“Easy, Captain, easy,” she murmurs.
A fresh tattoo of pain rattles through my shoulder; I bite back another groan as each reawakening muscle adds its own unique voice to the symphony of torment.
“Does it hurt?” she asks.
“Hellishly, thank you,” I mutter again, closing my eyes. When I open them, she’s wrestling something out of a pocket in her trousers, some piece of dried vegetation.
“Here,” she says, “chew on this. For the pain.” She slips the dubious thing between my lips. It tastes bitter, but not rancid. “I’ll be right back.” And then she’s gone.
How I crave sleep; there is no part of me that’s not stiff or aching or drumming with pain. But I can’t stop thinking.
She mourned me.
* * *
Woodsmoke, as sweet as one of Burley’s pipes, but more intense. Fire, I think, forcing open my eyes against its sting, but there is no inferno, no alarm, only a haze of smoke and a distant, flickering light. Top notes of smoke give way to other scents: hewn pine, cured hides, sweat. Anticipation.
Bodies move all round me in shadowy half-light, not men at work, but men, women, even children, in a kind of dance. Their slow, swaying motion answers the rhythm of a hollow drumbeat, to which the shadow people respond by chanting syllables foreign to me, silhouetted against the wavering light of a small fire contained in the middle of their circle. Its silver smoke curls up into cavernous shadows overhead, and out a hole in the roof, a roof of thick notched logs, like the walls supporting it. My hand connects to solid ground and dried grass, where I sit in the outer shadows.
This is not the Rouge.
Long plaited hair and leather fringe drip from the figures around me; I hear the clack-clack of shell adornments clattering together with their movements. The ominous drumming continues. Redskins, for certain, yet none is taking any notice of me.
The drums and the chanting cease. I blink through the gloom, see an elder of the tribe rise up beside the fire in the center of the circle. So frail does the creature appear, so small and wiry, with such long silver braids, I can’t tell if it’s male or female, a face as wrinkled as a raisin beneath a towering headdress of buffalo horns. Swathed in robes, with strings of corn kernels, shells, dried berries, animal bones depending from its neck, the creature rises on a staff sprouting feathers and beads. The people shush each other.
“Grandfather Buffalo speaks,” someone whispers nearby.
“For suns and moons beyond counting, the story has been told,” the old man begins in a light musical piccolo of a voice. A tiny, bell-like tinkling of adornments accompanies his every move. “One sign from the earth, one out of the sea, one in the sky, so say the ancestors. Three signs.”
“Three signs,” the crowd chants back. “One from the earth, one from the sea, one from the sky.”
“Now hear Running Fox,” the old man says, with a gesture of invitation. A seasoned brave, hawk-beaked and sinewy, steps out of the pack, long plaits shiny black beneath his beaded headband.
“I was in my canoe in the bay, at first morning light near the end of Pirates Beach,” the fellow tells the others. “The empty place of rock and waste where nothing green can live. But I saw them!” His dark gaze flits all around the crowd. “Under the bluff. Growing out of hard rock and sand. The forbidden flowers. As many colors as a bird has feathers.”
“So our Earth Mother creates beauty out of waste,” the shaman intones. “One sign from the earth. The great dream quest begins.”
“For which warrior?” one of the men asks eagerly.
The old shaman shakes his horned head with a rattle of his heathen adornments. “For the one who is brave enough to follow the dreampath.”
A note of anxiety seems to pulse through the crowd.
“Are the people in danger?” a woman’s voice asks.
“The Great Spirits who cradle the Dreaming Place in their hands will protect the people,” the shaman reassures them. “The one who follows the dreampath must dare to go another way.” He raises his feathered staff. “It is a perilous quest. The risks are great. So too is the reward.”
As the people fall to muttering again among themselves, the old man’s quavering voice rises once more. “If the dream quest is not fulfilled when all three signs are seen, the time will never come again to follow it. Never, ever.”
And the crowd chants back, “Never, ever.”
2
“Welcome back, Captain.”
I force open sluggish eyes to see Stella Parrish dipping her hands in a water basin on my little cherrywood table, drawn up beside my bed aboard the Rouge. Her shirtsleeves are rolled up, her bouncy hair drawn back with a length of twine, and some voluminous scrap of sailcloth tied at the waist covers her clothing. Pale purple dawn streaks through my stern windows; the last of the loreleis’ discordant yowling is just ebbing away. I glance down to see my shirt sliced open and peeled away from some kind of poultice of crushed greenery and paste and other witchery tied over my latest wound. But one reflexive twitch assures me my hook is still buckled in place, the straps criss-crossing my uninjured shoulder.
At the table, she stirs something into a tankard and brings it to me. “Drink this,” she says. “You’ll feel better.”
I struggle up on my good elbow, although she still has to hold the vessel. How helpless I must appear to her. The thought makes me irritable, and I sniff at the tankard. “What is it?”
“I found some useful plants in the wood, near where the fairi
es dwell,” she shrugs.
“Toadstool?” I suggest. “Nightshade?”
She peers at me coolly. “What would you care if it was?”
“Excellent point,” I agree, and drink some down. She’ll not get to the windward of me. Whatever she put in it, I taste only rum, and savor it, watered down as it is, and lay back again. They are never mortal wounds, which never stops them hurting most damnably. But at this moment, my breast no longer throbs, nor does my back complain, and a calming warmth seems to ease my other scrapes and sores and aches as well. I’m almost lulled to contentment, but for a sudden jolting vision worse than any nightmare.
“Jesse,” I rasp at the woman. “My marksman. He’s the one you ought to be patching up.”
She frowns at me, shakes her head. “There was nothing I could do for him.”
I grimace at the memory. Jesse, his modesty, his easy grin, his quiet competence, his courage, all dispersed like particles of dust. All because I duped him into thinking he could ever prevail against the boy. Another soul across the Styx without me. Another pointless death. Another loss. “Then what use are all your black arts?”
“Not much,” she replies wearily. “I’m a nurse, not a witch. I can’t raise the dead. Usually,” she amends, with another tentative glance at me.
“And the others?” I groan. “The rest of the butcher’s bill?”
“There were no others. When the two of you … died … he flew off with his boys.”
I nod grimly. “He prefers to slaughter them in front of me. I took the fun out of it for him, dying first.”
She peers down at me. “Then you saved their lives.”
“Stupidity is not twin to nobility,” I mutter. She turns away with the tankard, as if to move off, but I stretch out my arm, trap her wrist in the curve of my hook. She halts, gazes down at my hook, and then again at me. “All this fuss,” I say coolly. “What do you mean to gain by it?”
She looks at me in silence for another moment. “You offer me protection, at no small cost to yourself,” she says quietly. “I mean to deserve it.”
