A hand caught him at the collar and jerked him to the surface, planting him back on their raft. Ray sputtered and lay stunned across the bobbing log. Conker clasped an arm across Ray’s shoulder.
“Sorry, Ray,” he muttered.
Ray was too winded to reply.
“Ray,” Conker said again. “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s okay—”
“No, I’m really sorry.” Ray nearly turned to sock Conker in the arm, but then he saw why Conker was apologizing.
A woman was moving toward them, silhouetted in the light of the steamer. At first Ray thought she was standing on the water, somehow suspended at the surface. She wore a knee-length moleskin coat strapped across with bandoliers heavy with an assortment of firearms and swords. A silk sash was tightened across her brow, flattening a billowing mane. Hip boots extended up her legs with the cuff folded over her knees. With one hand she removed a cigar from her curling lips. In the other, she clasped a pair of reins.
Ray followed the reins down to the water and realized what she was standing on. It was an ancient, gnarled alligator. Conker saw it, too, and that’s when he fainted across the log.
Within a minute, the rusty ache of a winch sounded from the hull of the Snapdragon. Ray and a semiconscious Conker were attached to the end of a cable and hoisted from the water by a davit. As they were dropped to the slick deck, a leering mob of men, boys, and even one hard-faced girl surrounded Ray and Conker.
If one had to sum up the crew of the Snapdragon, many words would come to mind, but ugly would be the most ready response. Their soiled clothes, rotten teeth, and the general stench that hovered about the deck like a swarm of flies could be blamed purely on bad hygiene. However, Ray would have bet that no matter how much you scrubbed and groomed this bunch, not one could keep a baby from crying.
“Two more!” a fish-eyed man laughed from the rabble. He wore a bicorne and poked at Ray and Conker with the butt end of a matchlock rifle. “Tie ’em with the China girl.”
At the mention of Si, Conker came fully to life and sprang to his feet. As he reached his full eight feet, the pirates gasped and scuttled back, crablike. “Where is she, you scummy bandits?” Hammers clicked back as dozens of pistols, scatterguns, and rifles all leveled in a semicircle around Conker and Ray.
A growl sounded from the midst of the group and several pirates were knocked to the side as a grotesquely oversized man pushed his way to the front. Conker was gigantic, but he was proportioned as any normal man would be. This man had heavy gorilla-like arms and shoulders so inflated with muscle that they consumed his neck.
Although he had to look up to face Conker, the pirate outweighed him by at least a hundred pounds. His lipless mouth twisted into a grin as he marched up to Conker. Conker kept a calm expression, but Ray saw that he was clenching his fists, ready for a long fight.
“You know how to fight?” Ray asked skeptically.
Conker turned and said, “This is for Si! You best just stay out of this—”
Before Conker could finish or even turn around, the pirate plowed his fist into Conker’s chin, spinning the boy giant across the deck. Just like that, the fight was over.
“Tie ’em tight!” the fish-eyed pirate howled, and the rabble rushed forward with coarse ropes. It took eight of them to get Conker to his feet. Conker’s eyes rotated around in his sockets, and he could barely keep his knees from collapsing.
“Best not to mess with Big Jimmie,” the girl pirate said. “Gets right cranky when he’s tired, and he en’t got a nap in all day.”
As the crew began to lead Ray and Conker, arms tied against their sides, across the deck, Ray turned to the girl to ask, “What will she do with us?”
The girl was wiry and gaunt, with strings of braids dangling from her head. She began eagerly, “Seeing as we lost five of the crew a week or more back—we’s raiding on this town and how’s we to know the marshal and his men was waiting in ambush—suspect she’ll break you in and make you full with the crew.”
“Pirates!” Ray coughed. “She wants us to be pirates?”
“Right fair life if you don’t mouth off around—” but she clamped her lips shut as the winch started up below deck and the pulleys on the davit whirled the cable in again.
The cable had been wound around the belly of the alligator. The Pirate Queen was still riding upon its back. As the davit swung around to place them on board, the Pirate Queen leaped to the deck, taking a last draw from her cigar before flicking it into the dark.
The crew responded immediately to her presence. Cowering like cockroaches in the light, they gave her a wide berth. Eyes were pitched down toward their toes sticking from the holes in their boots, and Ray heard a distinct whimpering from several in the crew. Even Big Jimmie laced his fingers together at his front, meek as a choirboy. The fish-eyed pirate alone managed the courage to pass by his queen as he hurried to untie her alligator.
“Excellent catch, my lady. Right successful evening, I’d reckon,” he mumbled.
The Pirate Queen took slow, heel-thumping steps around the deck, her eyes surveying her crew. In the light aboard the ship, Ray could now see that the Pirate Queen was fair-skinned, deeply spotted with coppery freckles, and had hair of flame red to match. About her neck was a tangle of necklaces, some with jewels, others with the claws of beasts. Ray saw hidden among them the small black bullet that Hobnob had told him about. The Pirate Queen cast a glance back at the fish-eyed pirate at her side, and he groveled away under her gaze.
“Successful evening?” she snarled. “Are we off the shoal yet, Mister Lamprey?”
“No, my lady.”
“How did I wind up with a crew that’s got the collective wit of a barnacle?”
“I couldn’t say, ma’am,” Mister Lamprey replied.
“Well, have you located our position on a map?”
“Not yet, my lady, but …”
“How are we going to find our way out of the maze?” She batted Mister Lamprey angrily but stopped as her eyes fell on Ray and Conker.
Mister Lamprey scurried forward, holding his hands over his head. “The big one, he’s feisty. If I might recommend, we ought to keep them tied, too. The China girl ain’t going to slip her ropes no more now that we got her hand”—he shivered as he mentioned Si’s hand—“locked up.”
“Why are you clucking around like a gaggle of geese?” she shouted at the pirates. “Avast! I want a draw beneath this ship and I want it now! All hands—outboard—now!”
The crew snapped into a frenzy of action, pushing and shoving their way to the rear of the ship. Mister Lamprey squeezed his hands together as he approached the Pirate Queen’s side. “What of the … prisoners, my lady?”
Looking over her shoulder to Ray and Conker as if they were a nuisance she had tried to forget, she said, “Joshua, Piglet, tie them with the girl.”
Joshua turned out to be the most elderly of the pirate crew, a rheumy-eyed old man, seemingly too old to help pull the cables. Piglet, the girl who had spoken to Ray, was surely the youngest, maybe only a year older than Sally.
She and Joshua pulled Ray and Conker along by their bound hands to the quarterdeck. Si was tied to a crane extending from the center of the quarterdeck. Like Ray and Conker she was tied about the waist, but the pirates, having discovered her tattooed hand, had placed it inside a five-sided lead box and bolted it over her head. As the Pirate Queen passed her, Si’s eyes remained fixed upon the woman, hatred brimming at their edges.
The pirates tied Ray and Conker on either side of her, each of their backs to the crane, and ran to join the others with their grappling irons, desperately attempting to get the Snapdragon back into open water.
As the Pirate Queen moved away, Si said, “How did you idiots get caught?”
“Well, I found Ray and we … arrgg!” Conker howled as the ancient alligator lumbered up the deck past them.
Even Si drew in her feet, pulling back from the beast. The alligator turned slightly as
it passed, its gaze seeming to linger on Ray. It reached its mistress’s side, and the Pirate Queen knelt to rub its jumble-toothed snout. “That’s a good Rosie,” she cooed. “Good girl.” In between the love talk with her alligator, the Pirate Queen barked orders and curses at the crew.
“Snakes, gators, even snappers,” Conker moaned. “I hate anything with scales.”
“Turtles don’t have scales,” Si argued, but Conker, not in a state to argue about the distinction between snakes and snappers, only whimpered.
Ray cocked his head in a whisper. “Si, can you reach your hand to my back?”
“Oh, sure,” she said wryly. “Where’s it itch? We’ll give each other back rubs.”
“No, I’ve got a knife on my belt.”
Si squirmed for a second and then replied, “No, can’t get my hand over there.”
Keeping an eye on Rosie the alligator, Conker tried. “I think I got it, Ray.”
“Stop!” Si hissed. The Pirate Queen peered around at the three.
Si growled in an undertone, “I was sure that copper nob was going to kill me. Now at least I won’t go alone. … Conk, what’s the matter?”
Ray turned his head sharply to peer around at Conker. The giant had an odd expression on his face, and Ray could not tell if it was pain or fear or something else.
“I … feel strange,” Conker murmured.
“You sick?” Ray asked.
“No, not like that.” Conker shook his head and seemed clearer again. “I can’t describe it, but I feel like … I don’t know.”
As Ray was trying to puzzle this out, his gaze caught something bright nailed to the side of the galley. It was a yellow hat, made of dandelion petals.
Si said to Conker, “Maybe you feel your brain finally starting to work—”
“Hush,” Ray said. “I’m working on a plan.”
“What?” Si said. “Going to cut our ropes? Sure. The three of us will fight off a ship full of pirates armed to the teeth and drive the boat back to Nel. Great plan! Keep that knife hidden, before she sees it and guts us for her gator’s supper.”
“Hey!” Ray shouted to the Pirate Queen. Some of the pirates nearby cast anxious glances at Ray.
“What are you doing, Ray?” Conker whispered.
“Hey!” Ray called again. The Pirate Queen ignored him and unleashed a string of profanity upon the pirates to work faster.
“The ship’s stuck, right?” Ray asked. Her fingers went to the handle of a particularly large-barreled pistol and tapped the hammer with agitation.
“Well, we can help,” he said. “We can get you free.”
She tossed her fiery hair about her shoulder and gave Ray an icy stare. “You’re about one breath away from your last. Why don’t you save it?”
“You don’t understand who we are,” Ray said. Her hand withdrew the pistol, and several of the pirates nearby scattered as the hammer cocked back.
“We’re Ramblers,” Ray added firmly.
With the pistol leveled at Ray’s mouth, she said, “You’re not Ramblers. Do you think I’m an idiot? The Ramblers are gone. Heard the last died not two months back, at the mouth of the Gog’s Hound.”
“We’ll prove it,” Ray said. “I can give you what you most want.”
The deck had grown quiet. The pirates no longer heaved and shouted and pulled upon the grappling cables. They all listened, some chuckling at what Ray could only credit to their anticipation at seeing a good murder, but most genuinely fearful at the way the stupid boy was provoking their captain.
“Kid, when you lay down your cards, you’re going to come up short. You have no idea what I most—”
“But I do,” Ray said, with a jut of his chin. “And I’ll give it to you. Then we’ll get your boat back into the water. We can lead you out of this swamp, too. But I want you to promise that you’ll set us free.”
The Pirate Queen’s face was hard as granite, and several taut moments passed. Rosie nestled up against the queen’s leg.
“Then let’s see your hoodoo,” she said at last.
Ray closed his eyes. He wasn’t sure what he should look like if he was supposed to be conjuring, but he decided to take the least dramatic route. After mumbling to himself, he opened his eyes. “Cut my ropes.”
The Pirate Queen, her pistol still outstretched toward Ray, motioned to Piglet. The girl’s bare feet slapped across the deck as she ran over to the crane and cut Ray’s rope with a rusty knife.
Ray stood slowly, one hand still behind his back. The Pirate Queen never lowered her pistol, but her face betrayed a curious anticipation.
Ray held up the Pirate Queen’s silver dagger. The deck exploded in gasps, cries, and dumbfounded exclamations. The Pirate Queen’s eyes popped as she reached out to snatch back her lost dagger.
“W-where … h-how … you got it?” she stammered. Turning to Piglet, “Did you check their pockets before they were tied?”
“Of course. Aye, my lady,” Piglet lied nervously. “Hadn’t a thing on them but some food.”
The Pirate Queen holstered the pistol and lovingly ran her fingers along the knife’s blade. Without another moment’s hesitation, she jerked a fresh cigar from her breast pocket and sliced the tip with sigh of relief. Mister Lamprey rushed up with a match and held it cupped in his hand as the Pirate Queen took several deep puffs to draw the flame to the pungent tobacco. Her mouth relaxed in a smile, smoke drifting in thick summertime clouds from her lips.
“I’ll need my friends untied,” Ray said, “so we can get your boat off the shoal and out of this marsh.”
The tall Pirate Queen looked down at Ray, her expression coarse and poisonous again. “Cut the prisoners loose!” she shouted. “Let’s see if these Ramblers can get us back to open water.”
THE PIRATES CLEARED IN A SEMICIRCLE AROUND THE STERN. Ray huddled with Conker and Si, discussing his plan. “Conker, all you have to do is pull the boat off the shoal,” Ray urged.
“You gone squirrelly! You know I can’t do that!” Conker exclaimed.
“You’re John Henry’s son!” Ray smiled. “Of course you can.”
“Ray, you saw that big fellow. How you expect that I could if he can’t?”
Ray argued in a low voice, “He can’t be as strong as you, Conker. I know it. I’ve seen what you can lift. That Big Jimmie just got a lucky punch in on you is all.”
“You’ve got to learn how to take a punch better,” Si agreed. But then she turned to Ray. “Conker’s right. They had twenty men pulling those cables before you all came,” she said. “And they couldn’t budge it a foot. When we can’t get it free, she’s going to slit our throats!”
“But he will—” Before Ray could continue, Piglet and the old pirate Joshua came over.
“You ready?” she asked.
Conker looked anxiously at Ray.
“Even if you get the boat off,” Piglet said, “we en’t going to find our way back to the river. Near true a maze out here. Shallow and full of shoals at every turn. Can’t believe we got this far deep.”
“Why’d you come up here?” Ray asked.
“We’s chased,” Piglet said. Joshua nodded wordlessly and chewed at something in his toothless mouth. “Met one of the Gog’s ships in the river and they fired on us. Thought we’d lose ’em up in this marsh.”
Ray exchanged a wide-eyed look with Conker and Si.
“Quit stalling,” Mister Lamprey called from the Pirate Queen’s side. They stood in the center of the pirates, who were all watching impatiently. “Joshua, Piglet, get back over here.”
Ray turned to Conker. “Just try.”
Conker sighed as he wrapped strips of burlap around his wrists to keep the cables from cutting him. As Si walked back with Joshua and Piglet, Ray paused, looking at the odd expression that was coming over Conker’s face. “Is it that feeling again?” Ray asked.
Conker nodded, wincing slightly. “Strangest thing …”
Ray cocked a brow curiously. “Good! Pull that boat
, Conker.” He slipped back to the others.
The pirates had thrown six grappling irons off the stern, each attached with a hard cable to cypress knees and roots. Conker twisted the cables together and looped them around the base of the crane to use its heavy foundation as a pulley. Then he wound the mass of cables around his wrists over the burlap strips.
He pulled back slowly, letting the cables tighten. His feet were braced against wooden slats nailed to the deck. He took a step back and the cables grew taut from his hands to the crane and from the crane back over the transom, to where the grappling irons were sunk in the mud fifty feet off the stern. The sky had begun to clear, and a thin witchy moon danced in the fast-moving clouds overhead.
Conker took another step and a groan emerged from somewhere deep in the belly of the Snapdragon. He leaned back and all watching from the deck felt the tension as a hundred tons of hull sucked against marshy shoal. Conker’s neck swelled with veins and strings of muscles. His shirt grew dark and wet as every pore burst with perspiration. A grunt began at his gritted teeth, and his body visibly trembled under the tremendous strain.
Conker suddenly howled, beastlike, and the Snapdragon lurched, throwing several pirates to the deck. The braces at his feet began to splinter, and Big Jimmie ran forward. Throwing his arms around Conker’s waist, the pirate kept the giant from sliding. Others ran forward, and soon there was a mass of stinking pirates all holding Conker steady. Conker worked his hands one over the other, inching the cable in as if reeling in a whale. The Snapdragon whined and tilted as it slid across the shoal. Conker and the crew fell back in a heap as the pirate steamer finally broke free and settled into the channel.
Shouts and cheers rang out as they got to their feet. A few pirates fired off pistols in celebration. Ray and Si ran to Conker, who was flat on his back, gasping for breath. Si fell at his side, kissing his brow and cheeks and wiping the sweat from his face.
“Conker!” she cried. “Are you alive? Say something!”
The Nine Pound Hammer Page 13
