Blue Sea Burning

by Geoff Rodkey

  CHAPTER 7

  Housekeeping

  THINGS HAD CHANGED at the ugly fruit plantation since we’d been away, and not for the better.

  The lower fields were shaggy and overgrown, like nothing had been pruned in ages. Harvesting hooks lay here and there, spotty with rust. And there wasn’t a field pirate in sight, although I could hear hoarse voices yelling at each other down near the barracks.

  As we approached the house, the first thing I noticed was that the shark’s jaws Dad had hung over the front door were gone.

  Then I realized the front door was gone, too.

  Next to where the door used to be, there were two cannonball-sized holes in the wall. So it probably shouldn’t have come as such a surprise when we stepped inside and discovered a cannon in the middle of the living room.

  It was surrounded by a thick carpet of shattered bottles, chicken bones, bent playing cards, and some spectacularly broken furniture. Only the couch was more or less in one piece, along with the legless house pirate who was asleep on it with a copy of Principles of Citrus Cultivation open across his chest.

  “Quint?”

  “Back off, ye crapsacks!”

  He sprang to his feet—actually, his stumps, which ended where most people’s upper thighs are—brandishing a knife that must have been hidden under the book.

  Then he realized who we were.

  “Egbert! And . . . Savior save us, is that Adonis? Thought ye was dead!”

  Adonis was furious. “Wot’d ye do to the house, ye stupid—”

  “Respect—” I reminded him.

  “Foo—ye—thank ye very much!” he finished, spitting out the phrase in a way that gave it pretty much the opposite meaning from its usual one.

  Quint looked sheepish. “If I’d known ye was comin’, I woulda . . .”

  “. . . not blown holes in the wall?” I suggested.

  He shook his head sadly. “Bad night, that was. Lessons learned, I tell ye.”

  Then his eyes landed on Kira, and his face brightened. He vaulted himself up onto the arm of the couch and stuck out his hand.

  “Hello, luv. Don’t believe we’ve met. Quint Bailey, jack-of-all-trades. Don’t mind the legs. Clever men get by without ’em.”

  Kira shook his hand warily. “Kira Zamorazol.”

  “You are easy on the eyes, darlin’.” He turned to wink at me. “Know how to pick ’em, don’t ye, Egbert?”

  Guts didn’t care for that. “Back off, ye billi glulo porsamora!”

  Quint just grinned at him. “Look who’s been hangin’ round Short-Ears!” Then he nodded at Guts’s stump. “Where’d yer hook get off to?”

  “Had it pinched by Natives,” Guts muttered.

  “Bought it off Ozzy, didn’t ye? Got himself a new one down in the Scratch a while back. Prob’ly sell that to ye as well, now he’s outta money.”

  “Wot the deuce!?” Adonis had wandered off into the den, and judging by the fury in his voice, what he’d found there must not have been pleasant.

  “I was plannin’ to clean that up!” Quint yelled back at him. “Soon’s I can find the wheelbarrow,” he added under his breath.

  “What on earth is going on around here?” I asked Quint.

  He looked pained. “Why don’t I fix ye a meal? Better we talk on a full stomach.”

  LIKE MOST OF QUINT’S COOKING, the stew he put in front of us was filling but not exactly tasty, and we had to eat it fast before it hardened. Most of the dining chairs had vanished, so we stood around the butcher’s table in the kitchen while he caught us up on what had happened.

  Leaving fifty field pirates alone with nobody in charge, several crates of weapons, and enough money to get drunk for weeks had turned out to be, no surprise, a recipe for disaster. In addition to nearly wrecking the house, nobody had done a lick of work in the fields for six weeks, and what should have been a manageable case of planter’s blight had now spread over enough of the upper orchard that it was threatening to ruin the entire crop.

  The only good news was that the field pirates’ money was all gone, so they couldn’t buy any more rum unless they went back to work. And somebody—Quint wasn’t sure who—had been levelheaded enough to steal all the weapons in the dead of night and dump them over the cliff at Rotting Bluff.

  But not before the fifty men had been reduced to thirty-six, mostly due to arguments over card games.

  “Fact of the matter is,” admitted Quint, “none of us is what ye’d call captain material. We can follow orders all right, ’specially with a hard stick backin’ ’em up. But leave us be to make our own rules . . . don’t go so well.”

  “What about Otto?” He was the foreman, and he’d run a pretty tight ship in the past.

  “He, ahhh . . . wound up wrong side of the cannon. That rule yer dad had ’bout nobody havin’ guns? Smart.” Quint nodded appreciatively. “No drinkin’ an’ gamblin’ was another smart one, come to think of it. Reckon it’s time to get back to that.”

  “Gonna get back to all of it,” said Adonis firmly. “Me and Egbert are in charge now. Gonna set things right round here, thank ye please.”

  “Dunno how the lads gonna take that,” said Quint. “By now, they’s good and used to not havin’ no boss on the plantation.”

  “But there’s not going to be a plantation if this keeps up,” I said. “It’ll fall apart completely.”

  The whole situation was making me feel angry—and helpless, which was worse. Fortunately, Mung showed up just then, with a smile that filled his whole face, and gave me a big bear hug.

  Of all the busted-down pirates who’d worked the fields for my dad, Mung was my favorite. He was missing a good chunk of his skull, which left him unable to talk in more than a gurgle, but even so, we’d always understood each other pretty well.

  After he’d said hello to Adonis and Guts, and I’d introduced him to Kira, he asked me a question. The words were incomprehensible, but I got the gist of it. And I was too tired and beaten down to be anything but honest.

  “It’s a mess, Mung,” I said. “I don’t even know where to start.”

  He gave me a kind smile. Then he patted me on the shoulder and told me, in his gurgling way, that it was all going to be fine and I should get some sleep.

  I looked at my haggard, heavy-lidded friends. It was only late afternoon, but we were all beyond exhausted from the past few days of hard labor on the Grift.

  “Let’s just get some rest,” I said. “Deal with things in the morning.”

  My bedroom was only a few steps away. I headed for it, glad to be able to lie down in my own bed for the first time in ages.

  “I’d be careful openin’ that if I was—”

  I pushed the door open before Quint could finish his sentence, and I was looking back over my shoulder at him when the monkey jumped on my head and started trying to claw my face off.

  The next few seconds were pretty chaotic—not to mention painful—but Mung and Guts managed to peel the little monster off my forehead and heave it back into the bedroom, then slam the door shut before it had a chance to mount a counterattack.

  “Yeh, that’s Clem,” said Quint by way of explanation. “One o’ the lads bought him down in the Scratch. But he don’t much like people, so, ah, livin’ in the barracks didn’t go over. Really took to yer room, tho’—happy as a pig in poop in there. Well, monkey in poop. There is quite a lot of poop. He don’t come out much ’cept to steal food.”

  “I think I’ll sleep upstairs,” I said.

  IT WAS A LONG WALK up those stairs. I felt like I’d lost before I even got started.

  I couldn’t leave my brother with a mess like this. But I had no idea how to fix it.

  And how on earth was I going to take down Roger Pembroke if I couldn’t even take down a two-foot monkey in my own bedroom?

  When I reached
Dad’s room, I didn’t dare look inside, let alone sleep there, for fear I’d go to pieces at the memory of him. So I went to my sister Venus’s old room.

  There was a foot-wide hole burned through the middle of her mattress. Somebody must’ve poured rum on the fire to put it out, because the whole room stank like a Port Scratch tavern.

  I curled up on the edge of the bed and wondered how my sister was doing.

  We’d left Venus back in the jungle, raging crazy as she lorded it over the Moku. They were treating her like a queen, and she thought that’s what she was. But it was all a mistake. Somehow, the Moku had gotten the idea that Venus was the Dawn Princess—a goddess worshiped by Kira’s Okalu tribe, the archenemies of the Moku. So the Moku were keeping my sister fat and happy until the rainy season came, when they planned to sacrifice her to their Thunder God, Ma.

  As I thought about her, a nauseating lump of guilt started to grow in my stomach—because I knew that no matter how cruel and stupid Venus had been to me growing up, it was my duty as her brother to save her.

  Just like it was my duty to Adonis to stick around and try to help him untangle the mess that was the ugly fruit plantation.

  But I was going to leave both my brother and sister in the lurch. Because I had to stop Roger Pembroke. Even though I had no idea how to do it and wasn’t even tough enough to stop a monkey from pooping all over my bedroom.

  It was too much. If I’d had an ounce of energy left, I would’ve spent it bursting into tears over how helpless and overwhelmed I felt.

  I was kidding myself to think I’d ever be worth ten million gold, to Healy or anybody else.

  The thing to do was to run away.

  Far away.

  With Millicent.

  If I was lucky, she’d still be on Sunrise Island. And that was just a few hours’ sail from Deadweather.

  I could sneak down to Port Scratch . . . hire a boat with the money my uncle gave me . . . slip into Sunrise . . . find Millicent . . . persuade her to run away with me . . .

  Just the two of us . . . together . . . leaving all our problems behind . . .

  Me and Millicent . . .

  Millicent . . .

  I WOKE UP around dawn and lay in bed for a while, listening to the birds chirp outside and mulling over what to do next. Twelve hours’ sleep had shored up my sense of honor, and I no longer thought I had it in me to run away.

  At least, not until I’d helped Adonis clean the house.

  I went downstairs, drew some water from the well behind the house, and washed up for the first time in ages. I left two buckets of fresh water in the kitchen for the others, then found an empty bin and a shovel and went to work clearing the mess from the living room.

  I’d dumped a full bin of trash behind the stable—it was a relief to see our horses were still alive, and not much more underfed than they’d looked when I left—and was heading back inside to fill another when I ran into Kira.

  She was sitting on the steps of the porch, studying the map I’d copied for her on the Grift.

  “It tells a story,” she said.

  “I thought you couldn’t read it.”

  “I can’t. Just a few symbols. But look—” She pointed to a squiggly X with two circles over it. “These crossed slings mean there was a battle. And these two here—” She indicated a pair of symbols, a boat over water next to an eye inside a cloud. “The first is a journey over the sea, and the second is Ma, Thunder God. They journeyed to Ma—the god of our enemies.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But the whole story is about the Fist. Its symbol shows up over and over again. When we get this translated, we can find it.”

  The hope in her voice said she still believed the Fist of Ka had all the power the legends claimed for it. And that if she found it, she could save her tribe.

  “How on earth are we going to get it translated?” I asked her.

  She looked at me like I was an idiot. “The same way we are going to stop Roger Pembroke. By finding the Okalu.”

  “But how would that help?”

  “There are warriors among my people,” she said. “Plenty of them. And we have no greater enemy than Pembroke. It’s our tribe he uses as slaves in his mine on Sunrise. And the Moku hold our land because of guns he gave them.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “And he ordered my father’s death the same as yours. If we can find my tribe, every Okalu alive will help you against him.”

  “But what if the Fist isn’t—?”

  “Fist or no Fist. My people will help.”

  I nearly leaped up and hugged her. “That’s fantastic! I’d never even thought of it.”

  She laughed. “What—did you think we were going to stop Roger Pembroke by ourselves? Just the three of us?”

  I let that go without answering. As Guts joined us, taking a seat on the porch next to Kira, I started to puzzle over how we might get to the Okalu. Our last attempt to reach their base in the Cat’s Teeth Mountains had been foiled by both the Moku tribe and Roger Pembroke’s Rovian troops.

  “How are we going to reach the Okalu?” I asked. “We can’t go overland again. It’s too dangerous.”

  Kira had already figured that out, too.

  “We’ll go to Edgartown. My old tutor from when I lived there, Mr. Dalrymple, is a friend of my people. He will know how to reach the tribe.”

  “Just gotta get to pudda Edgartown,” said Guts.

  “It’s just a few days’ sail from here,” I said. “How hard can it be?”

  PLENTY HARD, IT TURNED OUT.

  “Only ships out o’ Deadweather that put in at Edgartown,” Quint explained to us as he pulled a tray of breakfast biscuits from the oven, “are merchantmen. Most of ’em carryin’ ugly fruit fer yer dad . . . may the Savior watch over him.” Quint kissed a fingertip and raised it to the heavens. He’d taken the news about Dad’s death harder than I’d expected.

  “A merchantman’s fine,” I said. “We’ve got some money—we can pay our freight.” It was the same way Guts and I had gotten to Pella Nonna.

  “In that case . . . next one’s due in three months.”

  “We’ve got to wait three months to get a ship?”

  As I said it, the door to my bedroom opened, and Adonis entered along with a strong whiff of monkey poop.

  “Sounds just right,” he said. “Three months be ’nuff time to help me get this plantation runnin’, thank ye please.”

  “What were you doing in there?” Kira asked.

  “Feedin’ Clem.” He showed her a handful of tree nuts. “He ain’t so bad after all. Make nice to ’im, he’s a right good monkey, please.”

  The last thing I wanted was to be stuck on Deadweather for three months.

  And there was one other option.

  I looked at Guts and Kira. “Burn Healy’s headed to Edgartown,” I reminded them. “What if we hop a ride with him?”

  “An’ get sunk when he runs into Li Homaya and Ripper Jones? Blun to that!”

  “But the way Healy talked, it sounded like he was going to make for Edgartown before he tried to fight them. And he’s leaving right away.”

  Kira shook her head. “His crew would never let us board again. Unless one of us was a carpenter.”

  Quint looked up from his biscuits.

  “I’m a carpenter.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The Legless Carpenter

  “SORRY I SLUGGED YE, thanks.”

  I fingered the bruise on my cheekbone. It had swelled up pretty good over the last few hours.

  “That’s okay. Guess I would have been angry, too.”

  When it dawned on Adonis at breakfast that we were not only leaving right away, but taking with us the only person in the house who knew how to cook and do laundry, he’d exploded. Like most of his rag
es over the years, it had been directed at me—only I’d been lulled into a false sense of security by the new, trying-to-be-nice Adonis, so when the old one had suddenly reappeared, I hadn’t gotten my arms up in time to block the punch.

  After Quint and Guts had pulled him away, he’d spent some time screaming, “SORRY SORRY THANKS!” at me, but it hadn’t exactly sounded like he meant it. Then he’d gone into a heavy sulk, and for the next several hours, he’d refused to speak to any of us, or to do anything at all except sit on the front porch and feed tree nuts to Clem the monkey.

  I don’t know if it was just the tree nuts or what, but my brother and that monkey had really hit it off. Clem screeched and bared his teeth at everybody who came within a few feet of him except Adonis, who was now sitting on the porch steps and scratching Clem’s nut-swollen belly as the monkey lay on his back, dozing in the stifling afternoon heat.

  Not only was Adonis’s latest apology the first thing he’d said to me in hours, but it actually sounded halfway sincere. I figured it was okay to get within swinging distance again, so I sat down on the porch steps beside him.

  Adonis bit his lip as we watched Mung hitch the horses to the carriage. By now, my brother didn’t look angry, or even sulky. Instead, he looked scared. Once Kira and Guts got back from the western slope of the volcano, where they’d gone so Kira could get a look at the Fire King’s tomb, we’d be leaving Adonis alone with the mess that was the plantation.

  We’d done what we could to make it easier for him. After I’d cleaned the whole house, I’d gone down to the barracks to find Janks. He was the most dependable man among the field pirates who wasn’t already dead, and I slipped him five gold pieces to serve as foreman in Otto’s place.

  Meanwhile, Quint had washed Adonis’s dirty clothes and was inside making a fresh stew so my brother would have cooked meals for at least the next couple of days.

  “I’ll come back,” I told Adonis for the tenth time. “Soon as I take care of things.”

  He glowered. “S’posed to take care of things here, thank ye. Swore it to Dad ’fore he died.”