“What do you think I’m trying to do?”
“Kill somebody? Here, let me! I use this all the time in the mine.”
The miner had a good technique. The grappling hook caught, and Radriaka pulled Dagny to the rope and shoved her heavenward.
“Don’t board, just watch me,” she told him. “I want to find my brothers before they realize we’re here.” Clenching a riceman knife between her teeth, she climbed, Radriaka right below her, pushing and holding her aloft by the backs of her thighs and her behind.
When her face cleared the gunwale, Dagny peered around tentatively. This main deck was mounted with perhaps sixteen guns, and there was a ramshackle shed of matting abaft on what could be called the quarterdeck. Limbs of several men sprawled listlessly in the shack’s doorway, perhaps smoking opium—indeed, Dagny caught a whiff of the fusty library scent, mingled with steaming rice.
Behind the shack rose another steeply pitched deck, ostensibly the poop. The sentries she had seen before were posted here, but they didn’t pace or keep watch; rather, they sat and shuffled tiny playing pieces between themselves. Directly athwart from her among messy coils of ropes, two men, sitting atop chests and smoking pipes, played cards. Around the mainmast were arranged the elephant guns, wretched muskets, and long bamboo pikes that the miners had argued over so assiduously. On the foredeck another rickety matted roof seemed to serve as fore hatch to the companionway below.
Smoke burned her eyes as she fumbled beneath her turban to retrieve her pistol. So much smoke rolled from the fore hatch and the ladrones’ opium pipes, that she wondered if they’d even notice the fire ship smoke at the stern.
Breathe. Don’t move. The knife in her mouth tasted like fresh raw blood, mercury.
At last, a staccato yelp from two men on the high poop, and every last man jack rushed to the stern rail, canting the ship aft while they jumped on each other’s backs. Suddenly twenty ricemen materialized, perhaps roused from naps on the deck, a few of them bashing each other with blunderbusses in their zeal to shoot. The two bastards sitting atop the chests didn’t flinch a muscle or even glance aft, and none of the limbs poking from the quarterdeck cabin budged.
Radriaka shoved Dagny from below, so she clambered over the rail. She hopped as lightly as she could onto the deck, trying not to cringe from the shattering pain in her leg. If all the stern commotion didn’t interest the card players, maybe she wouldn’t.
One riceman shoved the other in the arm, angered at a controversial card play. Dagny tiptoed to the fore hatch as she tossed the pistol to her right hand and cocked the hammer, withdrawing the knife from her mouth with her left hand.
The ricemen looked at her, then back to their cards.
Then looked at her again.
Sauntering innocently, Dagny nearly made it to the fore hatch before one of the cardplayers rose to his feet, reaching a hand into his robe. Squatting, Dagny aimed, but before she could shoot, the riceman dropped to the deck, half of his face vanished onto the card table and the filthy shirtfront of his mate.
Radriaka has two pistols, Dagny thought as she jumped into a smelly darkness that choked her lungs. Her lamba caught on something, so she ripped it from her waist and left it behind, crouching low to avoid the tar-caked beams. Now I’m wearing pantalettes, and can’t conceal who I am.
Bulkheads of different sizes partitioned off this deck. It was a maddening maze in which she crouched, and each time she peered behind a bulkhead there was naught but an oily blackness, the odor of unwashed bodies, patchouli, dung, and stale tea. She panted so fervently with fear that her head swam from lack of air. Two ladrones emerged from the blackness, stumbling against each other, flattening her against a wall.
“Fire!” Dagny said in English, pointing urgently above with her Chinese knife.
Happily, they took her meaning and reeled toward the companionway.
Emboldened, Dagny continued down the dark passageway. Other pirates, perhaps understanding her English word, roused themselves from their piles of limbs and staggered past her. One drowsy man, awakening into alacrity, mistakenly sliced Dagny’s left wrist with his cutlass as she squirmed past. She couldn’t raise her arm to feel the wound, but it felt nearly to the bone.
Dagny dared to shout louder. “Fire!” Then, “Fire! Hector!”
It was the only word she could think of that ricemen might not be familiar with.
Her turbaned head crushed against the slimy deckhead that dripped water, she listened beyond the river of bodies that slimed past. Again she tried. “Fire! Hector!”
An elbow in her belly expressed what little air she retained. Clear luminous bubbles appeared inside her eyelids.
Then she heard it. Muffled screaming, coming from behind a bulkhead to her right.
She climbed over a body, her feet squishing many limbs to the deck beneath. Her knife sliced into someone’s head, hitting a skull bone. She bawled, “Hector!” and got a mouthful of the detritus that plastered the beams. The screaming was closer.
Bursting into a cabin, she sucked a lungful of suffocating air. Tripping over a limb, she sprawled face-first into a body that squirmed.
She placed the knife in her lap so she could run her fingers against Sal’s face, his cheekbone coated with grime, his mouth, so dry.
“Sal, I’m here. Let’s get the hell out.”
“Dagny,” he whispered.
She now saw murky outlines of humans. Hector thrashed about, clearly unharmed. Sal’s arm was positioned at an impossible angle, probably broken.
He wasn’t gagged as Hector was, so Dagny sliced through Hector’s rope arm restraints. The energetic urchin tore off his own gag, bounced to his knees, and panted.
“Miss, there’s a—”
Hector was faster than Dagny, and threw himself between her and a slashing ladrone, who appeared from the shadows wielding a knife. Hector was a buffer between them, and the knife barely sliced her shoulder. Her arm cradling Hector, she shot the pirate in the stomach. Crunched under the odiferous body, she released the pistol.
Hector, however, slithered out from between them, snatched up the pistol, and clubbed the supine pirate over the head. Again and again.
Dagny cut through Sal’s rope handcuffs and maneuvered him about, but he was as heavy as a hogshead of wine.
“Sal’s in a bad way,” Hector whispered, yanking the knife from the riceman’s fist. “They used him bad, don’t know if he can walk.”
Hector stuck the pistol into his waistband, and together they hauled Sal to his feet, slinging each of his arms over their shoulders.
The passageway was clear of men, so they towed Sal through the layers of muck coating the deck. His feet dragged, but they hauled him through the maze and up the companionway. Sal was conscious enough to help a little by propping himself upon each rung, but he had almost no strength.
They peered tentatively over the edge of the hatchway. Snakes of smoke clouded the deck—all Dagny saw were feet running to the stern, and buckets of water sloshing onto the deck.
“Miss,” Hector panted. “Do you have mates?”
“What?” Dagny shouted a bit louder than she should have. She tried to use her Chinese knife to hoist herself aloft, digging into the deck with it, but Hector held back.
“Mates!” Hector shouted. “Mates!”
“Hector!” Dagny shouted back, since she didn’t know what he was talking about. “Reach down behind you and grab that white lamba. Sal needs it.”
Hector did as bidden, and they wrapped the length of white cloth around Sal’s naked torso.
Hector hissed, “Mates! Friends! What I’m trying to say, miss, is do you have anyone waiting outside this god-damned ship of hell?”
“Oh! Yes, there are some Malagasy somewhere, but I think they’re all dead by now. It’s not that far to shore, let’s just swim.”
Dagny looked at Hector. His wild eyes told her he’d do anything. Without speaking, they clambered over the hatchway, dragging Sal so that his face b
anged against the dull wood.
Hector slashed at a passing ankle with his knife, hacking so thoroughly through the tendon that the fellow fell to his face. The bucket of water he carried splashed to the deck and washed over their feet and knees as they crawled.
“Now there’s a nice bachelor’s son,” Hector remarked.
He referred to a riceman who sailed overhead, hot on the tails of a Malagasy miner, the riceman’s fingers gripping the miner’s ankles before they slithered upon rivers of bloody water directly into the forehatch. Other ricemen apparently preferred to take their chances jumping overboard rather than burn to death, shrieking their bloodcurdling wails as they leapt.
Dagny asked, “Larboard, there, see that coil of cable? From there it’s a short swim to shore. Stay low, avoid the smoke.”
They crawled, one elbow at a time. Dagny’s leg was about as useless as Sal’s.
“He’s alive, right?” Dagny asked.
“Aye, he’s alive, through no thanks to these butchers. I can swim, can you? How we going to swim with Salvatore?”
Dagny paused, dropping her forehead to hit the deck. That was a damned good point.
She had no answer, so she tightened her grip around Sal’s forearm and continued crawling.
“Perhaps …” Bellingham panted, “we can get … your mates … to help. Or go starboard and hide … on the island. By God!”
A body fell immediately before them, bouncing a few times before it came to rest.
“By my ancestors!” Dagny muttered. “That thing just fell from the rigging!”
Hector released Sal’s arm in order to prod the body with his bloody knife. “That’s … Stephen Miller! By God, it’s that waister! Plays a devilish good guitar! See the tattoo? What’s this cove doing here?”
“Perhaps … it means that…”
A grand Hessian boot kicked the dead waister from their faces, depriving them of the sight of his cracked coconut of a head. An iron cage containing a terrified chattering lemur slammed onto the deck betwixt them.
They looked up.
“He never should’ve gone aloft,” Tomaj said. Squatting down, he grinned at them. “Was always afraid to. He just fell.”
Dagny cried.
Sticking his pistol into his waistband, Tomaj slid his hands underneath Dagny’s arms and pulled her into his lap. “You’re alive. Bellingham’s alive. That’s all that matters. I’m taking you out of here.”
She sobbed, and Tomaj attempted to wipe her face free of grime.
“Stern’s afire, Cap’n,” Bellingham remarked.
“Aye, longboats are athwart the bow.” Tomaj removed Dagny’s soiled turban and stroked her head. “Dennis O’Bell just took a dive off the bulwarks, too, but everyone else is fine. I’ll take her.”
Dagny reared up on her haunches. Tears rolling down her begrimed face made deep trenches. Her statement was murderous. “Sal’s not fine!” She took a deep breath of smoke before she let loose with her next invective. “Are you blind?” Another deep breath. “Why don’t you even look at him?”
She shut up, panting furiously, but Tomaj kept his eyes locked on her. He raised a hand to hail Broadhecker abaft him, as Broadhecker sallied by with his favorite cutlass lifted, yet no enemy to scrag. Tomaj had only to point at Salvatore for the boatswain to hail another hand, and they both hoisted the body.
Tomaj said to Dagny, “Malala. The ship is ours. You’re alive. Let me take care of you.”
Her eyes shimmered with grief. She collapsed against his chest.
There remained a ladrone on the main deck, who up until now had been content to loll upon a powder chest with his face stuck into a fistful of cards. A hand, it may have been Mark Williams, chose this moment to snatch up a blunderbuss from a dead Kwangtungman and blast the riceman. Williams’s aim was not very true, or else the riceman should not have been sitting atop a powder chest. In any event, the chest blew sky-high, taking the riceman with it. Dashing like lightning to the gunwale, Tomaj and Bellingham cringed and raised their hands against the body parts that rained down upon them. They were lucky today—only a mutilated arm fell onto their persons, Bellingham batting it away with his palm.
“We done here yet?” cried Bellingham, wiping his hands on his trousers. “Because if we are, I’m bailing into the longboat.”
“We’re done,” said Tomaj, lifting Dagny into his arms like a baby.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
SERPENTS IN A COTTAGE
Tamatave
THE FINAL OBLITERATION OF THE LADRONES—THE burned shell of the junk was left scuttled in the Bay of Antongil, a few remaining ricemen caught passage to the Mauritius, and a few vanished into the hinterlands—signaled the start of a mystical strangeness in the eastern forest.
Dr. Lyall, who had still not been received in Antananarivo as the new British agent, was not Tomaj’s favorite, but he was a British vazaha and an adherent of Radama’s more moderate policies. Zeke was right: Lyall never bathed, he spat tobacco heedlessly, and seemed not to care that Tomaj could hear as he muttered remarks about “androphiles,” “inverts,” and “aristocratic vice,” whenever Tomaj would enter Sal’s bedchamber to care for him, or nap in the same bed as Sal. Tomaj had nowhere else to go, as it would be even more unseemly to share Dagny’s chamber, and Lyall had overtaken Zeke’s, while Bellingham slept at Zeke’s chop-house.
Dagny’s leg had been broken in the mine explosion. She insisted upon staying in the Tamatave cottage. Sal’s injuries took a lot longer to heal, and Tomaj wouldn’t leave them, so he sent Youx to captain the cruise to Zanzibar.
“Jones and Griffiths.” Lyall scowled. “I do not trust them at all, Count.” The Reverends Jones and Griffiths had been among the first missionaries of the London Society—Jones the sole survivor of the first pilgrimage in ‘18 when everyone else had succumbed to fever, and Tomaj sheltered him in Barataria for another year. They had single-handedly begun the chore of devising a Malagasy grammar, and compiled a Malagasy-English dictionary. “They’ve been participating in land deals, money-lending, and carousing with arrack with the artisans.”
“Perhaps, Doctor,” said Tomaj, himself pouring a glass of Sauterne, “they perceive you as being absent of the empathy that’s required to understand the natives.” He shared a smile with Dagny, who glanced up from her stuffing table where she was pinning down butterflies, the only critter she’d been able to collect of late, her leg stuck out stiffly with the splint Lyall had instructed Smit construct for her.
“Empathy? Pah. How can one have empathy with medieval hexes and charms such as are practiced here? This ceremony where they burn things and imagine they’re possessed—”
“Tromba,” Tomaj corrected him. “The emboka that they burn is an aromatic wood to request the tromba spirits to appear at their ceremony.”
“—and that hideous music with accordions!”
“It’s very joyous, Doctor,” Dagny remarked, not unkindly. “They say ancestral spirits need to have company in order to midola, which is play—dancing, joking, smoking—”
“Precisely!” boomed Lyall. “Count, you say I am to have empathy with this sort of behavior when it is precisely this mystical heathenism that is holding this country back into the antediluvian bog that it is mired in! And from what you tell me, since the king’s death it is only sinking further instead of embracing the neoteric concepts that have been offered—”
Flinging down her tiny instruments, Dagny braced her hand on the desktop and rose. “There’s Sal—”
“No, no, my dear,” protested Lyall, doing them the rare favor of getting to his feet. The good doctor became extremely conciliatory with regard to Dagny, but he seemed to loathe everyone else. “The youth must want his laudanum. I’ll fetch it. Why, where else will you find a peoples believing in a unicorn being milked twice a day, and driven in a carriage to visit the queen of this isle?”
“You stay with Miss Ravenhurst; I’ll go,” Tomaj suggested.
“Yes.” Lyall sniffed
. “I’m sure that you will.”
Rolling his eyes, Tomaj retreated for the back bedchambers, muttering, “Yet you acknowledge the existence in the highlands of something like a unicorn between the size of a Shetland pony and an elephant. Ah, you’re awake.” Tomaj smiled, shrugging out of the overcoat and unbuttoning the waistcoat he wore while indoors to appease the doctor. “Is it laudanum you want?”
“No, no more laudanum,” said Sal, his voice pitifully weak. It had been difficult to even gaze upon him for the first fortnight, his dear pale body so bruised and beaten. “Today I want my tea.”
“Ah, the dogwood bark? Let me relight the samovar.”
Tomaj gently clambered onto the mattress next to Sal. He’d been sleeping with him, holding Sal while he shivered, sweated, and wept in his dreams. At first, Sal had bled profusely from different orifices, and Dagny was convinced he had suffered internal trauma that led to a surfeit of blood, but Tomaj steadfastly refused to let Dr. Lyall bleed Sal. Lyall had a disdain for Sal that Tomaj didn’t trust—in his zeal, he was perhaps not as impartial as a doctor must be, so Tomaj preferred to shelter Sal. “Anything else you want before I settle in?”
Sal even smiled a shade. “No, nothing.”
Tomaj positioned himself into the attitude that worked best: sitting upright with his back against the wall, Salvatore cradled between his thighs. Sal draped himself in Tomaj’s lap, his sadly bruised and welted face none the better for having been dragged athwart the junk’s deck—but that had hardly been Dagny and Bellingham’s fault. They were only two against many.
He stroked Sal’s curly nacreous locks. “Dagny did a good job grooming your hair. No, no. Cover up.” He replaced the blanket over Sal’s naked shoulders, but Sal pushed it back off.
“I’m hot,” he whispered. “Is that ass-wiper doctor still insisting that soap and water will kill me?”
“Oh, he’s just a shit sack,” Tomaj griped. “He had an apoplectic fit when we bathed you, as though the dirt was the only thing holding your bones together.” Sighing, he gazed out the window to where a wild rose vine had wilted for want of water. Tomaj had thought to spare a gardener or two from Barataria, arranging for them to stay at Zeke’s.
The Strangely Wonderful: Tale of Count Balásházy Page 32
