The Strangely Wonderful: Tale of Count Balásházy

by Karen Mercury

  Flashing his carious teeth at the appalled woman, Zaleski carried on in a haughty tone, “Played at The Park in New York City for several seasons, with songwriting by the most celebrated cove in the city—’The Wonderful Pirate,’ it was called!”

  Tomaj woke from his angry trance. “Yes,” he told Dagny in earnest. “‘With me they made a circle round this world—’”

  Zaleski couldn’t resist this opportunity to display his healthy pipes, and, hand held dramatically to his chest, he burst forth with:

  With me they made a circle round this world

  Disclaimed relation, country, friendship, fame.

  They toiled, they bled, they burnt, they froze, they starved

  Each element and all mankind their foe

  Familiar to their eyes saw horrid death

  In every climate, and in every shape

  When, in this Isle, our shattered barks found rest

  With universal voice, they called me King.

  With the last notes of Zaleski’s exuberant song trailing off into a netherworld of brimstone and hellfire, Tomaj knew from the cut of Dagny’s jib that all was lost.

  She snapped her lower jaw back into something that approximated a face, and turned her ire on Tomaj. “I cannot live any longer with highwaymen and criminals. That part of my life is done!” Tears issued from her brimming eyes, and her lower lip trembled. “How you have fooled me into thinking you were a man of honor! If all I wanted was squalor and wretchedness, why … I would have stayed in New York!”

  Wrenching her shoulders with dignity, she flounced out the front door, swishing the skirts of ramatoas who waited holding food and drink.

  Broadhecker snorted. “Well, isn’t that just typical?”

  Bellingham turned on Tomaj. The little spitfire cried, “Now you’ve done it! She’s never coming back, and it’s all because of you!” He raced out.

  Tomaj followed onto the portico, in time to see the woman stalking down his arbor, her mussed skirts held high in her hands. She had no brother, no filanzana driver, no baggage, only a tow-headed boy scurrying after her down the crushed coral drive, limbs flailing.

  “Mademoiselle!” Bellingham called. “Miss Ravenhurst, wait!”

  Tomaj formed his hand into a speaking trumpet and bawled, “Dagny! Where is Salvatore? Reason I ask!” The entire plantation could hear him by now. “If he’s gone to find my celestine mines as I have reason to believe … he could be in danger! We were not quite able to polish off every last …” Here his voice faded, as he realized the futility of advertising his business to the back of a woman’s dress before the whole island, “… every last man jack on the riceman ship.”

  His hand fell to his side.

  Broadhecker patted Tomaj’s shoulder. “Never you mind, sir. As the Froggies say, ‘Weather, wind, women, and fortune, all change like the moon.’”

  Tomaj would have slapped the hand off of him, but a new messenger limped up the drive.

  Slushy, who had ostensibly been patrolling the grounds for ricemen, attempted to accost Dagny with his exciting news, but she shoved him away with pique and continued flouncing out of sight behind the hedgerow.

  “They need to remast,” Tomaj said remotely. “They’re roundly beaten, they’d be jackfools to stay.”

  “They need stores,” Zaleski pointed out. “We can easily find them and scrag every last one.”

  Tomaj said, “We shall have to deal with Peg.”

  It had rapidly become evident it was only through the assistance of the spurned concubine that Wenkai had at all gained unfettered access to the plantation house. The men who were stationed in the guard towers were strangely absent last night, having been enticed away by impromptu assignations in the gardener’s shed.

  All hands inched away from Tomaj. Youx shook his head. “I’m not touching her, Tomaj. For all she did, she’s still a woman.”

  “Don’t get in a state,” Tomaj assured the men. “I wouldn’t even send Zaleski out on a … challenging undertaking like that. No, I think I’ll pay a visit to the newest knocking shop in Tamatave, see whether Ezekiel Zhukov will take on Peg, and a few more girls I’ve tired of. Anyone else you can think of? Meantime, Broadhecker, send a few men out to the mines, fast runners, will you? I’ve got a bad feeling Salvatore’s hanging around there. Now, what’s Slushy all ahoo about?”

  For Slushy had commenced running quick as a streak of lightning down the drive, and all the men on the portico drew their pistols. Adopting an abreast formation, they darted their eyes around the manicured bushes of the formal garden for any signs of conical ricemen hats lurking in the passionflowers.

  “Captain! Captain! Youx! Zaleski!” Slushy shrieked. Tomaj leapt down the staircase to reach the bootblack before he crumpled, grabbing him by the shoulders, as with his momentum he would have continued barreling right on through to the Indian Ocean.

  “What is it, man?”

  “It’s—it’s—a calamity of the—highest order! It’s—it’s a tragedy of—”

  “Johnny!” cried Zaleski, taking over from Tomaj the task of shaking the hapless messenger. “Get a hold of yourself!”

  “It’s—it’s the king!”

  “Yes?”

  “The king is dead!”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THAT COWDUNG-EATING ETERNAL HELLFIRE

  RETURNING TO HER COTTAGE JUST BEFORE NOON, Dagny relaxed with Bellingham, drinking a cup of tea while he tried to persuade her that Count Balásházy wasn’t the “bad” kind of pirate.

  “He weren’t at all like the East Indian pirates what you hear of with wicked designs and black and bloody flags,” Bellingham said, dissecting a tamarind with scientific aplomb, “like that William Kidd what was a notorious animal of the ocean, burying his Bible in Plymouth Sound so he wouldn’t have a book that condemned him in his nefarious career. Why, along the coast of Malabar, Kidd would have his prisoners hoisted up by the arms and drubbed by a naked cutlass, just to get wind of where the treasure lay, or killing one o’ his own hands by braining him with an iron bucket, or shooting random natives after tying ‘em to a tree.”

  “Oh, unlike what the captain did to the three ricemen at Barataria last night?”

  Bellingham glowered. “That were protecting his own property and life, Miss Ravenhurst! You didn’t see him setting out on the July winds to Sumatra just to fire Wenkai Zhang’s village of shacks on stilts, though there were some who said he should’ve!”

  “Even so.” Draining the last drop of tea, Dagny languidly reached her arm out for the flagon of brandy, the last that Paul had sent over some two months ago. “If Tomaj were not a pirate to begin with, he shouldn’t have to worry about the ricemen in the first place.”

  “Ain’t that rather like that hen and egg problem? Which one came first?”

  Dagny had to laugh. “Dear Bellingham! You’re a Greek historian. I shall call you Hector Bellingham. That means ‘steadfast’ in Greek, and also ‘an anchor.’” Upturning another tumbler, Dagny poured the boy some brandy. “Here, to celebrate your naming.”

  Hector raised the glass and cried, “Was ye ever in Canton, where the men wear pigtails long, and the gals play hong-ki-kong?” Her laughter encouraged him, for he gave the next verse as, “Was ye ever off Cape Horn, where the weather’s never warm, when ye wish to hell ye’d never been born?”

  They giggled like silly geese for several minutes. Hector sobered up, though his eyes still watered with mirth. “I ain’t shooting you a line, Cap’n Balásházy’s never crashed anyone didn’t deserve it, nor given me a jawbation I didn’t need.”

  “What about last night when he slapped you?”

  Hector reddened. “Ah, I was being a little shit. No, it’s true he’s a pirate—hey, we’re all pirates then, aren’t we?—but he ain’t half as much a miscreant villain as that Edward Low, what tied the Portagee friars to the foremast, letting them down several times afore they was dead! He cut off another Portagee’s lips and broiled them before his own eyes!
Why, he murdered men from good humor just as much from passion. He finally crashed his own quartermaster while the cove was taking a caulk in his hammock. Or L’Ollonais, who cut the breast of a Spaniard, pulled out his heart, and munched it!”

  “I’m sure there are many who are more vile than Captain Balásházy.”

  “His crew wouldn’t have him as Cap’n for long if he was! Cap’n Balásházy’s more the good kind of pirate, like … like Henry Every, who ruled the Île Sainte-Marie with his Malagasy queen!”

  “It’s just that … dear Hector. I came from a world as vile and deadly as Captain Low’s. The quarter of New York we lived in … well, I’m sure Slushy has told you stories, because I believe he hails from the same quarter. It was a brutal, unpleasant place, and I was acquainted with only brutal, unpleasant men. I’ve no wish to associate any longer with men of that ilk. I’ve no wish to remember anything of brutality or treachery!”

  “But,” Hector poured himself another tumbler of brandy, “why was you a Quaker in the filthy ghetto of New York? I thought Quakers came from the countryside.”

  “Well, yes, we were originally from the countryside. But when we became youths, our parents, that is, my father and Zeke’s mother, didn’t wish us there any longer. They were newly wed and rather … hot as monkeys.” She used a term of Tomaj’s that Hector might understand. “Zeke’s mother really didn’t like children. We felt we had no choice but to try our hand in the city.”

  “But you’re a naturalist, Miss Ravenhurst, a bang-up naturalist, the best I’ve seen. There ain’t no plants or critters in the city.”

  “Not many, except rats as big as fossas and great bugs of the order Blattodea.”

  “Cockroaches! Do they hiss like the ones in Madagascar?”

  “No, they rather stand up on their hind legs and rear at you. Regardless, several years ago, when we heard my father was ill, the three of us—Zeke, Sal, and I—went back to Pennsylvania to care for him, and that’s when I made the most tremendous strides in my education, for my father was a great naturalist, as well.”

  Hector inclined his head. “Didn’t Zeke’s mother chase you off, then?”

  Dagny sighed, desiring another brandy herself. “No, for she was waiting for my father to die so she could take everything he owned and go marry a landowner in Philadelphia.”

  Hector’s face drained of all color. “Ohhhh …” he uttered in commiseration. “Rotten luck! No wonder, then, Zeke’s a drip when it comes to the ladies. I’d be the same way myself, for the same reasons, excepting I was only a wee nipper when me mum scuppered her pimp.”

  “Oh, Hector!” Dagny rose to her feet, but Hector cut her off by raising a stiff arm and quickly continuing.

  “Now, them ricemen, you’ve seen how they comport themselves. They’s not exactly high flown themselves. Why, Wenkai’s men mix their putrid gunpowder—much less sparky than ours, and given to failing to ignite—into their beverages! Makes ‘em choke and turn red, and they think it looks bluff. We used to see the outcomes of their raids, aye. The ‘Black Squadrons’ would raid villages, Miss, not just other vessels, and take harmless old women with their feet wrapped so tight they had to be dragged, plundered their sorry old fishtanks and gardens. Can’t tell you how many of them prisoners we set free when we’d gain a junk as a prize. No, Cap’n Balásházy’s more like the kind pirates of the Île Sainte-Marie, back in the glory days. Not one on his crew as wants to leave.”

  Dagny sighed halfheartedly. “I know. He has loyal men. And I know he has a generous heart underneath that surly facade. I merely … cannot be with anyone who practices outlawry as an occupation.”

  Hector nodded sagely, as though familiar with the ins and outs of romance. “You’d be a devilish good next wife for him.”

  “Oh, Hector! Don’t be silly. First of all, the count will never marry. He told me so. Wait one moment. Next wife? What do you mean?”

  A frightening army of footsteps pounded up her front wooden stairs. “Mademoiselle!” men shouted urgently, hands pounding on her door. “Mademoiselle! Come quickly! It is important!”

  Casting Hector a sharp look, she said, “Do you refer to Holy Eleanora Brown and those others?” while the cabin boy slid down in his chair.

  The pounding continued, so Dagny had no choice but to move across the drawing room and open the door. A crowd of about thirty excited men told her that a shark fisherman, along with several helpers, had pulled a gigantic trondro fish from the bay, viciously snapping its jaws at them, that it resembled all manner of Malagasy ancestors whom Dagny wasn’t personally acquainted with, but they knew from her love of animals and what Izaro had told them that she’d want to see—and possibly purchase—this fish.

  “Hector!” she called. “It’s a trondro, an extinct Cretaceous fish! Come, you’ll want to see this! Come, let’s get my—net? No. My spear? No …”

  “We’ll haul it back on a filanzana!” Hector deduced.

  Sending a few men ahead to instruct the fisherman not to maim, kill, or smash the trondro about the head, Dagny and Hector dashed down to the beach where, in an unclouded cove, the poor lumbering reptilian fish lay panting in the blazing crushed coral sand.

  Shooing the men away from the extinct fish, Dagny fell to the sand and laid her hands on the iridescent silvery lateral line of the trembling fish.

  “It’s a living dinosaur,” Hector marveled. “Its fins look like legs. Is this the one what you fell on in the drink?”

  “The same,” Dagny whispered. Tears scalded her eyes. “He’s come back to find me.”

  “This is the frightenest thing I’ve ever seen!”

  “Go ahead, touch it. What you see is an ichthyologic miracle, Hector. That means ‘the world of fish.’ We must preserve its skeleton and inner viscera. I will not move it until it expires. Do you know of any salutary songs, thanking fish?”

  “They stand with feet on their heads, like this,” proclaimed a fisherman, diving into the sand on his palms, kicking in the air.

  “That’s what Tomaj told me,” Dagny said softly. “Hector, have you seen groups of them with snouts tilted downward, standing on their heads?”

  Hector shook his head in awe. “Never.” He tilted back the lid on the brandy flagon he’d taken along as sustenance, gulped from it, and commenced to sing.

  I’ll sing you a song of the fish of the sea

  And all of her sailors were fishes to be

  Then blow ye winds westerly, westerly blow

  Our ship’s in full sail, now steady she goes.

  Dagny smiled and allowed her tears to fall on the flapping pectoral fins. “Look carefully at this fish, it may bring you great fortune. It’s a fossil come to life, a biblical monstrosity! Note the peculiar double tail…” Smoke from fishermens’ cook fires blurred her vision so that the fish appeared as a heavenly hallucination. She took the flagon from Hector as he continued to serenade the reptilian fish.

  First came the herring saying, “I’m King of the Seas.”

  He jumped on the poop, “Oh, the Captain I’ll be.”

  Up jumps the eel with his slippery tail,

  Climbs up aloft and reefs the topsail, and it’s

  blow ye winds westerly, westerly blow

  Our ship’s in full sail, now steady she goes.

  The Abyssinian horses galloped down the seaside road, kicking up a froth of ferns and frogs in their wake. Tomaj hadn’t had much success breeding the stupendous Wallo Galla horses, accustomed as they were to the brisk and healthy airs of the Abyssinian highlands, not the morbid, fecund exhalations of the coast. He sent most to Radama in the Merina mountain court where they thrived, and merely replenished his own stables with fresh ones from the Red Sea port of Zulla.

  Though the circumstances of the ride were dire, Tomaj took a certain enjoyment in it. He had spent a year as a Hussar (and was the grandson of a certain Count Hadik who in 1757 had marched furtively and swiftly through Prussian territory, sacked Berlin, and returned without losses). He soon l
eft the other lubbers behind, galloping like lightning down the coastal road. He terrified the slow-moving smiths and soldiers of the district carrying their assegai javelins, and women laden with heavy baskets of peaches and mangoes on their heads were so taken by surprise they jumped into ditches.

  Radama is dead. None of these people knew that yet. Slushy’s sources in Antananarivo’s royal court related that on Sunday two days past, Radama retired to his bedchamber with diverse quantities of rum and champagne, clouded in a brown study by the rigors of the disease Tomaj had long suspected was syphilis. In the despondent and dazed fit of the inveterate clinchpoop, he had reached for the rum bottle, but gripped a knife instead. He cut his own throat.

  Now, Slushy enjoyed a reputation as a swindler, a cheat, and a rat in the bilge. So Tomaj had instantly called forth one of the royal sources, currently enjoying a respite with someone’s wives down in Harmony Row, and the fellow had solemnly repeated the story. Adding, by the by, that some of Tomaj’s godowns had been set afire, no doubt by enemies of the king.

  After slapping the minion in bilboes for not having mentioned this detail earlier, Tomaj had roused his groom, who hadn’t seen this much activity in months. Today, the whole pirate crew—yes, pirates, don’t forget that according to the haughty and pristine Miss Ravenhurst who swallows my cock like a lick-spigot, we are feral, filthy pirates—were mounted and charging off through Tomaj’s prized flower beds, every last man jack who could ride, only about fifteen men.

  All were left behind in a cloud of sand, even Youx, who in New Orleans before Tomaj had retired from the navy had been known to engage him in a bit of thoroughbred horse racing with Lafitte’s colleagues.

  Radama was thirty-six when he’d mistaken a knife for a rum bottle, two years younger than Tomaj. In the tradition of Madagascar nimrods, Radama and Tomaj had roamed the western hills seeking the herds of wild boar, their expeditions more like organized invasions of territories. The numbers of beasts killed surpassed even the battues of German sportsmen. Together they’d walk the spine of a ridge, the panoply and stench of hundreds of flayed beasts behind them, and Radama would open his arms wide and declare, “Behold! I am king of all that I embrace!” He had a tendency to dance and bellow at the smallest victory, and conversely to sob and wail at every setback.