by Geoff Rodkey
“‘I am Cromazol the scribe,’” she began. “‘Servant of Hutmatozal Fire King—man-god, instrument of Ka, father of the Dawn Princess. His body here dead, his soul eternal. This is the story of his end.
“‘Two days before solstice we Okalu traveled in large number to the Place of the Sunrise, to give to Ka his bride the Dawn Princess, and the gifts of her dowry.
“‘The Stink-Men waited there in a trap. They slaughtered us by hundreds. Hutmatozal Fire King raised his Fist, but Ka gave no answer. Our magic failed, our princess was slain, our tribe was shamed.’”
It was just as Millicent had described the legend: the Okalu had gone to their temple on Sunrise Island for the yearly Marriage of the Sun ceremony, bringing a treasure with them as an offering . . . and were ambushed by Cartager soldiers.
Kira continued the translation.
“‘Five of us remained, with the body and the dowry of the Dawn Princess. We followed the Fist across the water to the Sweat-Place, where lived Thunder God Ma, the Death-Lover.’”
That must have been Deadweather. What with the volcano and all, I guess it was as good a place as any for a thunder god to live.
“‘Hutmatozal Fire King offered the Dawn Princess and her dowry to Ma the Death-Lover in his sacred place, atop the Red Cliff, above the Valley of the Choke Plants.’”
Makaro used his finger to circle the middle section of the map—the squiggles, shapes, and dotted lines that I’d always figured weren’t hieroglyphs but an actual map. Until now, I’d had no idea what place it depicted.
“Makaro says this is a map,” Kira said. “Of what, he does not know.”
“I know exactly what that is,” I said. “There’s a valley in Deadweather, below the south slope of the volcano. Full of thick brush. That must be it here”—I pointed to the map—“and above it, between the valley and the volcano, there’s a lot of bare rock, in a funny reddish-pink color. The pirates in Port Scratch call it the Devil’s Pimple.”
I pointed to a large mark on the map. “Looks like they left the dowry halfway across the top of the pimple. If that’s where it’s buried, we can find it.”
I couldn’t help smiling. But no one else did.
“That’s good, isn’t it?” I asked.
Instead of answering, Kira nodded to Makaro. He started reading again, at the spot below the map where the hieroglyphs began again. Kira echoed him in Rovian.
“‘Hutmatozal Fire King swore allegiance to Ma in return for his help. We left the Red Cliff and waited for a sign.
“‘Thirty days we remained. We ate of the tasteless fruit. Two men died, and we gave their souls as gifts to Ma.
“‘When Ma growled from the earth, we returned to the Red Cliff.
“‘Ma had ignored our gifts, shaming us further. Hutmatozal Fire King cried out in anger. He demanded of Ka and Ma that they listen—and he pledged the devotion of all Okalu to whichever god would help us.
“‘Ka and Ma ignored him again. He cursed them as false. He cast away the Fist of Ka, and buried the dowry in ash. Then he took his own life.’”
Kira paused to take a deep, shaky breath.
“‘We carried Hutmatozal Fire King’s body to this place, that his soul would observe the sunset for eternity. I die here also, with Zamozol his lieutenant, to serve him in the beyond.
“‘This we swear as truth: the man who seeks rescue from gods will die in bitterness. Neither Ka, nor Ma, will save him. The only savior of man is man.’”
Kira was crying again, silently this time.
I could understand why. I’d long since given up hope that the Fist of Ka would help anyone. Finding out, once and for all, that the map didn’t hold the secret to some magical power was only the third most depressing thing I’d learned that day.
But until now, Kira had believed, deep in her bones, that finding the Fist of Ka would mean salvation for her people. And the truth was devastating to her.
We sat for a long time, with nobody saying much of anything except for Mr. Dalrymple, who couldn’t stop refilling everyone’s tea.
I wondered if I should be doing, or saying, something. I traded looks with Guts for a while. He kept jerking his head, but I couldn’t figure out if he was trying to get a point across or his twitch was just acting up.
Finally, I decided to speak. “There’s a hot bath and clean clothes waiting at the hotel,” I told Kira. “Plenty of food, too. Might make you feel better.”
“Sounds like a good idea, dear,” said Mr. Dalrymple, patting Kira on the hand.
She nodded but didn’t move. Mr. Dalrymple and Makaro exchanged a few words in Okalu. Kira joined their conversation for a moment. Then the two older men got up and shuffled toward the door. Makaro had a bad limp, and his cane made a loud clack on the floor with every step.
“Just shut the door behind you, dear,” said Mr. Dalrymple. “No need to lock up.”
“Come later,” Makaro added. “We sit together.”
The men walked out, leaving us alone. Kira sighed and pushed her chair back from the table. “I need a bath. And a meal.”
“Where the others goin’?” Guts asked.
“Makaro wants to drink something stronger than tea,” said Kira. “And Mr. Dalrymple thinks he knows of a pub that won’t have pirates in it.”
CHAPTER 21
Drowning Sorrows
WE WERE SITTING at a corner table in a little pub on the edge of town. It was the saddest room I’d ever been in. Even the handful of locals sitting at the other tables looked miserable. I guessed that was because the pirates were in town, and everyone was terrified they might barge in any minute and start pillaging. Or maybe Edgartown was just an unhappy place.
Still, if there’d been a contest for the unhappiest people in an unhappy town, we would’ve won it going away. For the first couple of hours, after Kira and Guts had gotten baths and food and we’d rejoined the older men, Mr. Dalrymple had made a game effort to buck everybody up.
But he was lousy at it.
“Perhaps there’s a bright side,” he suggested at one point.
Makaro looked up from his glass of spirits. He’d been staring into it like the secret of his tribe’s salvation was floating at the bottom.
“There is no god,” he said.
Dalrymple looked horrified. But he soldiered on. “Goodness, I don’t think it said that. Only that perhaps it’s a . . . different kind of god than the one you . . . hoped to . . . rely on . . . for . . .”
Kira and Makaro were both staring at him with withering looks. Dalrymple gave up in midsentence, switched from tea to beer, and didn’t speak again for another hour.
I was mostly wallowing in thoughts of Millicent. I felt awful for her that she was in jail, awful for me that she was in there with that Cyril, really awful for the fact that she’d betrayed me by taking up with him, still more awful because my uncle could get them out but refused to help, and twice as awful on top of it all because I felt like what I should be feeling awful for were Kira and the rest of the Okalu, but I was so wrapped up in my own personal awfulness that I just didn’t have anything left over.
It was awful.
Around late afternoon, two Rovian soldiers appeared, collected every gold and silver coin the owner had in his till, and gave him a slip of paper in return.
The owner wasn’t happy. “This is an outrage!” he bellowed.
“Tell it to the Governor,” said one of the soldiers.
“Better yet, tell it to the pirates,” said his partner.
That earned him a glare from the first soldier. He corrected himself.
“Did I say pirates? I meant ‘Rovian Irregulars.’” But he rolled his eyes when he said it.
The soldiers left. Sunset came, the owner lit a few lamps, and we ordered dinner with our drinks. I told the waiter to put everything on Commodore Longtrousers’s
line of credit. He looked skeptical when he heard we were with the pirates, but Guts threatened the man with his hook, and that did the trick.
After the dinner plates were cleared, Mr. Dalrymple persuaded Makaro to play a game of cards. They asked if we wanted to join in. Kira just shook her head. I didn’t feel up to it, either.
Guts’s face twitched hard. “— pudda cards!” he snarled.
Mr. Dalrymple blanched. “Sorry! Didn’t mean to offend.”
Kira elbowed Guts.
“Sorry, too,” he mumbled to Mr. Dalrymple. “Don’t like cards is all.”
We watched Dalrymple deal out two hands, one to himself and one to Makaro.
Kira sighed. I’d never seen her look so sad. In fact, I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen anyone look so sad.
“Are you okay?” I asked her. “Is there anything we can do to help you?”
She thought for a moment. “Not me. The Okalu. We have to help them. It is like the map said: the only savior of man is man.” Her jaw tightened, and her sad look turned fierce. “We have to free my people from that silver mine.”
“Oughta start by findin’ the treasure,” said Guts. “Fist or not, might still be worth a pile of money.”
“We can do it,” I added. “If the Dawn Princess’s dowry is still buried where the map says it is, I can find it for us.”
Kira looked skeptical. “What good would a treasure do us?”
“Buy guns with it,” said Guts. “And men.”
Kira thought for a moment. Then she shook her head. “We need to get Millicent out of that jail. She will have ideas.”
I nodded. As tangled up as my feelings about Millicent were, there was no question she was clever—and as determined as Kira to stop the slavery on Sunrise. “But how do we get her out?”
None of us had a good answer for that. We’d fallen back into another sullen silence when the pub’s owner approached. He was a heavyset man with a bushy beard.
“Are you really with them pirates?” he asked us.
“We are,” I said.
“What’d your lot come stormin’ into town for? What do you all want from us?”
I thought about what the Governor-General had said—that nobody in Edgartown knew of the agreement between the pirates and the government. That made it more than a little hard to explain.
“Do you know how a bank works?” I asked him.
Before he could answer, Guts piped up. “Tell ye wot I want.” He pointed at the far wall. There was a guitar hanging from it. I’d seen him eyeing it ever since we’d come in. “Play that guitar.”
The owner gave him a bewildered look. “You only got one hand!”
“It’s all he needs,” I said. “He’s the best one-handed guitarist in the New Lands.”
Kira smiled for the first time all day. “One hand or two—he is the best guitarist anywhere.”
The owner snorted. “Have at it.”
Guts lit up with a rare smile. He went to the far wall and pulled down the guitar. Then he got a stool from the bar, sat down with his back to the wall, and began to tune up.
Conversations stopped all around the room as everyone turned to stare at the wild-eyed boy with a hook for a hand, bent over a guitar like he actually meant to play it.
Guts finished tuning and looked at Kira.
“Wot you want to hear?”
She smiled again. “‘Samana Bey Na Fila,’” she said.
It was a Cartager song. I didn’t know what the words meant, but I’d been told it was about the end of a love affair, and that’s exactly how it had always sounded to me—aching, sad, and full of regret.
Under the circumstances, there were a hundred other songs I’d rather have heard just then. As Guts bent his head over the body of the instrument and began to play, I bit down on my lip and resolved not to cry.
If the weeks away from playing had left him rusty, he didn’t show it. His hook flashed up and down the guitar’s neck as he filled the room with the sound of heartbreak, pulling note after shimmering note out of the strings.
It was beautiful. And excruciating.
Don’t think about Millicent, don’t think about Millicent . . .
I couldn’t help it. My throat went tight, and it took all I had to hold in the tears as waves of pure emotion poured out from Guts’s fingers.
Halfway through the song, I gave up and let the tears go. It was impossible to resist. He was that good.
Kira was crying, too. No surprise there. Makaro looked like he was on the brink as well.
Mr. Dalrymple seemed strangely unaffected. I thought that was odd.
Guts finished the song. Kira, Makaro, and I were clapping so hard my hands hurt. Then I happened to look around, and I realized Dalrymple wasn’t alone.
The pub was more than half full, and everyone in it besides the two Okalu was Rovian. A few of them were offering polite, halfhearted claps. The rest just looked bored.
“Not bad,” said the bushy-bearded owner. “A little dull. Know anything with a bit more pep?”
Guts’s lip curled. “Like wot?”
“‘Froggy Went A-Jumpin’’?”
“Oh, that’s a great one!” chimed in a man at the bar. “Or even better—‘Jitterbug’s Fancy’!”
“Right on!”
From all around the room, people began to call out requests.
“‘Crack, Crack, in the Haystack’!”
“‘Boo-Hoo Bettylou’!”
“‘Merrily We Skip to Town’!”
I’d forgotten what horrible taste in music most Rovians had.
Guts was turning purple. I braced myself for the explosion.
“Do you know anything by the Piggly Twins?” asked a slightly dim-looking young woman with a ponytail. “They’re a-mazing!”
That did it.
“— yer stupid — Pigglies in the —!” yelled Guts. “Rather — a — in the ear than — play that —, ye — billi glulo porsamoras! Ye can — yer pudda hula saca domamora till the — and the — blun, ye —! Ask again, I’ll — yer pudda —!”
A full five seconds of silence followed. Someone in the back coughed uncomfortably.
“Oh, my stars,” breathed Mr. Dalrymple. “He’s got quite a vocabulary.”
“I think it might be time to leave,” I said.
LESS THAN A MINUTE LATER, the five of us were standing in the empty road outside the tavern. It was still early enough in the evening that nobody wanted to turn in for the night, so we walked the side streets of Edgartown for a while, listening to the distant laughter of Healy’s men and the occasional tinkle of breaking glass.
Guts and Kira hung back, holding hands and whispering to each other. Mr. Dalrymple and Makaro tried to make conversation with me, and I did my best to keep up my end. But they’d both had quite a lot to drink, and not much of what they said made any sense, except maybe to them.
Eventually, Mr. Dalrymple led us to the door of another pub, but its windows were blacked out, and it didn’t seem to be open.
“Strange,” he said. “Usually does quite good business on Tuesdays.”
He tried the door. To our surprise, it opened. Once we’d pushed past the layers of blankets that had been hung over the door to keep any light or sound from reaching the street, we found a room full of long tables, packed to the gills with townspeople trying to enjoy a night out without drawing the attention of any pirates.
When we entered, conversation dropped off as half the room turned at once to make sure we weren’t Healy men ourselves. Then, just as quickly, the chatter started up again.
“Make sure the waiter sees your hook,” I warned Guts. “Or we’ll have to pay cash.”
We squeezed our way into seats in the middle of one of the long tables. The men ordered beers, and the rest of us asked for sugared lemon. As I waited
for the drinks to arrive, with Dalrymple and Makaro on one side slurring at each other, and Guts and Kira on the other making moony eyes across the table, I started to think it might be time for me to pack it in and go to sleep.
But I didn’t want to be rude, so I figured I’d at least stick it out until the drinks arrived and I made sure we could charge them to Commodore Longtrousers. So I drummed my fingers on the table and tried to amuse myself by eavesdropping on the conversations that were swirling around me. Most of them were about Healy’s men and the stir they’d caused.
“Sent the wife and daughter off to Glimmer Bay. Might join them myself if this madness doesn’t end soon.”
“Don’t know why the Governor doesn’t call out more troops.”
“Outrage is what it is! I pay my tax! Where’s our protection?”
Then, underneath the louder voices, I gradually became aware of a much quieter conversation at the table directly behind me, between two men who weren’t eager to be heard.
“You have to understand, it’s a valuable thing . . .”
“Dunno what I’d do with it is all . . .”
“Where’s your imagination? It’s his personal seal! Think of the doors that would open.”
One of the voices was unpleasantly familiar.
“On Sunrise, maybe.”
“Not just on Sunrise—the man rules Pella Nonna now!”
The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. It wasn’t just that they seemed to be talking about Roger Pembroke. It was that I knew one of the men.
“If it’s so valuable, why you selling it?”
“Leaving the islands, aren’t I? Pembroke name’s got no pull on the Continent. But around here . . . possibilities are endless.”
“How so?”
“Draw up a letter of credit! Slap the seal on it. Take it to a merchant, walk out with half his store.”
I looked over my shoulder. At the bench just behind me, less than a foot away, was the back of a large man’s head. His hair was newly cut, and the rolls of fat on his neck were stacked like sausages over his shirt collar.
It was Percy, all right—my lazy, cruel, and stupid former tutor.
