by Geoff Rodkey
“Guts is fine.” He turned his head to look at me. “Wot’re you?”
“Egg,” I said, because I liked it better than Egbert. And because it reminded me of Millicent.
“How long you been a pirate?” I asked.
“I’m not.”
“Did they capture you?”
“Nah. Bought me.”
“From who?”
He was silent, head down, bangs hiding his eyes, nose pointing past his bony knees to the ground. I asked him again.
“Who sold you to them?”
“Shut up.”
He said it quietly, not so much angry as sad. I felt bad for asking twice.
“Want more food? There’s plenty left.”
“Nah. Wrap it in some leaves. Have it in the mornin’.”
I did as he suggested, carefully putting the leftovers on top of the water barrel we’d dragged over from the beach. Then I added a few more branches to the fire and sat down again.
“Got family on that ship?” he asked.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I was a stowaway.”
“Was it fancy? Looked fancy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But not for me.”
We were both quiet for a while, staring at the fire.
“You know what I think?”
“Wot?”
“I think rich men are just as bad as pirates,” I said.
“Dunno ’bout that.” He looked at his stump as he said it.
“Not in some ways. But… what I mean is, they both think they can take whatever they want. And people like you and me are just… meat. What they don’t chew up, they throw out.”
I poked at the edge of the fire with a stick, knocking the gray ash off a branch that still glowed red underneath. As I stared at it, I thought about everything that had happened to me over the past few days. Pembroke. Birch. The passengers who’d spit on me. The pirates who’d gambled with our lives.
“No more,” I said, shaking my head.
“No more o’ wot?”
“No more taking it from them.” I sat up straight, raising my chin and squaring my shoulders. Everything still hurt, but I had a belly full of food, and I could feel myself getting stronger.
And I was going to fight back. It was the same feeling I used to get with Adonis. I could only take his abuse for so long before I had to give him some in return. It didn’t matter how much bigger and stronger he was, or how much worse he’d wallop me for fighting back. Enough was enough.
“There’s a man who lives on Sunrise Island,” I told Guts. “A rich man. They say he’s more powerful than any pirate. He’s after a treasure. It’s buried on my family’s land somewhere. He killed them for it. Then he tried to kill me.”
The fire was hot on my face. I turned to Guts, staring him in the eye.
“But it’s on my land. That makes it mine. So I’m going to find it before he does. Then I’m going to kill him. And then, someday… I’m going to marry his daughter.”
I don’t know if I really believed all of that, or any of it. For all I knew, Pembroke had already found the treasure and made off with it. And I wasn’t sure I could kill anybody, even him.
But it sure felt good to say those words out loud.
“Need a hand?” Guts asked.
I looked at him closely. He didn’t seem like he was joking.
I thought about it for a moment. Anybody with that much fight in him could be a real help. But he was crippled, and he’d nearly killed me once, and I still wasn’t sure if he was crazy or not.
“What’s in it for you?”
“Share o’ that treasure.”
“I wouldn’t give you half. It’s too much.”
“A third, then.”
“Dunno. You’ve only got one hand.”
“Yeah, so—one, two, three.” He nodded at my hands, then his own. “Three hands, three shares. Two fer you, one fer me.”
“How do I know you won’t crack my head open and take it all?”
“Wouldn’t.”
“You already did!”
“Now’s different.”
“How’s it different?”
“’Cause.”
“What?”
His face twitched as he scowled. “Gonna make me say it?”
“Say what?”
“I owe you one, you——.” He finished the sentence with one of the foulest oaths in the language.
“Just one?”
He twitched again, shaking his head in exasperation.
“Two. All right?——!”
He’d definitely spent a lot of time around pirates. There were curses in there I’d never even heard before. But coming from him, they were weirdly comforting. He was crippled, and he might be crazy, but I was pretty sure I could trust him.
“All right, then,” I said, sticking out my hand. “Partners?”
He shook it with a grip as firm as a man twice his size.
“Partners.”
He added more wood to the fire, then yawned and stretched himself out on the grass, folding his arms over his chest.
“Where’s this treasure?”
“Deadweather Island. You heard of it?”
“Course. Close by. Day or two, as the crow flies.” He stared up at the shadowy silhouettes of the trees overhead. “Too bad. Woulda liked to stay a bit.”
“Probably have to. Take us time to build a raft.”
He snorted. “Not buildin’ nothin’.”
“How else are we going to get off?”
“Same’s the pigs.”
“What do you mean?” He wasn’t making any sense.
Guts lifted his head, sniffing the air. “Smell that?”
I nodded. Even with the smoke from the fire, the undercurrent of stink was still noticeable.
“What is it?”
“Dung. This ’ere’s Pig Island.”
“What’s Pig Island?”
“Wot it sounds like.”
He lowered his head and closed his eyes, and in less than a minute, he was snoring.
BY EARLY THE NEXT AFTERNOON, we were standing on the ridge that split the island into its two sides—the wild, uninhabited one where we’d come ashore, and the side we were looking down on now, that stank to high heaven and, according to Guts, was the main source of meat for the islands around the Blue Sea. On the nearly treeless hillside below us, hundreds of head of cattle and sheep grazed in fenced-off meadows. At the foot of the hill, closer to the sea, were half a dozen giant pens holding thousands of pigs, all wallowing in muck.
Even from that distance, the smell was fierce.
A short way from the pigpens was a cluster of buildings, connected by a stretch of dirt road to a dock that jutted out into a horseshoe-shaped bay.
There was a cargo ship half a mile offshore, sitting high in the water. Guts pointed to it.
“She’ll come in on the tide,” he said. “Load up, go out on it in the morning. Just gotta get aboard.”
I wasn’t too thrilled about stowing away on another ship, but I had to admit it made more sense than trying to build a seaworthy raft.
“How do we know she’s not headed to the Continent?” I asked him.
“Don’t ship pigs ’cross no ocean. Next port she makes, we’ll jump ship to Deadweather.”
He gave a twitchy shrug, then stepped back off the top of the ridge. “Jus’ need to wait fer dark.”
We found a good shady spot just inside the forest and lay down on the grass to wait out the sun. Even though I’d slept plenty the night before, I dozed off pretty fast. When I woke up a while later, Guts was standing nearby, bare-chested. He was so skinny the sun practically shone through him, and I could see every one of his ribs. He was holding up his stump, squinting at it as he turned it at various angles. Then he feinted with it few times, like it was a knife he was using to attack someone.
He smiled, pleased with his fantasy. Then he noticed me watching him and grimaced, dropping his arm quickly to his side as he look
ed away.
“What’s that about?” I asked.
“Shut up.”
“What were you doing?”
“Nothin’!”
“Aren’t we partners?”
“So?”
“So you can tell me.”
“Not ’ardly.”
“I’d tell you.”
He snorted. Then he sat down on the grass.
After a few moments of quiet, he said, “Want to get a hook.”
“For the end of your hand?”
He nodded.
“So why don’t you?”
“Need a blacksmith. Money to pay ’im.”
“A third of a treasure would probably take care of that.”
“’Pends on the treasure.”
He reached over to where his shirt lay on the grass. He must have taken it off to use as a pouch, because there was a large pile of berries on top, picked from a nearby bramble. He scooped up a handful and then motioned for me to take what I wanted.
“Wot is it?” he asked through a mouthful of berries.
“What?”
“The treasure.”
“Oh… I don’t know, exactly.”
“Gotta know somethin’.”
“It’s Native. There was a ruler, a hundred years ago. I forget the name. They called him the Fire King—”
Guts made a strange choking noise that I gradually realized was a laugh.
“What?”
“The Fire King? Tell another!”
“What?”
“It’s bunk! Don’t exist!”
“How do you figure?”
“Wot, never heard the jokes?”
“No. What are they?”
“Like… if a pirate’s spoutin’ off, like, ‘I can whip this whole crew at leg wrestlin’,’ another’ll say, ‘That an’ a map get ye the Fire King’s treasure.’ Or he says, ‘Ten more cannons, we could outgun Burn Healy,’ an’ the other one says, ‘Yeh—an’ if I ’ad the Fire King’s treasure, I could retire.’ It’s a joke!”
“That’s not a joke. Just says it’s valuable. Doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”
“Yeh, it does.”
“If it’s all a joke, then why’s my family dead?”
“Dunno. ’Ow’d they die?”
I told him the whole story from the beginning, starting with Dad coming down the hillside acting funny and ending with Birch trying to throw me off the cliff. By the end, he wasn’t laughing anymore.
“Gotta be somethin’ on that land,” he said. “Don’t make sense otherwise.”
“So what do they say about the Fire King’s treasure?”
“Who?”
“Everyone. The men who joke about it. What do they say is in it?”
“Dunno. Just… big.”
Then he scrunched his eyes until they were nearly shut, like he was thinking hard about something.
“And more’n that… Magic, too.”
“What kind of magic?”
He thought some more.
“Killin’ magic… Power o’ the Gods.”
“How?”
“Dunno.”
One thing that hadn’t really made sense to me—if Pembroke was already rich, why go to so much trouble just to get richer?—suddenly got a lot clearer.
It wasn’t just treasure he wanted. It was power.
But Guts was shaking his head. “Bunk.”
“Why’s that?”
“If the Fire King ’ad magic power… wouldn’ta lost.”
“Who says he lost?”
“Ever see a Native?”
“Not up close. Just in the distance. Working the silver mines on Sunrise.”
“Yeh. Bunch of slaves.” Guts shook his head, twitching with distaste.
“I’m not sure they’re slaves,” I said, remembering what Pembroke had once said about slavery being illegal.
“Close enough.” He gave a twitchy shrug. “So much for magic.”
FROM A CONCEALED SPOT on the top of the ridge, we watched the ship dock—two of the men from the island, no bigger than ants in the distance, met the boat and tied up the lines thrown onto the dock by the ship’s small crew. Then the crew disembarked, and they all disappeared into one of the outbuildings.
A few men reappeared an hour before sunset and made their way to the pens as the pigs crowded in a throbbing pink swarm around what must have been their feed troughs. Then the men went back inside. Smoke began to curl up from a chimney in the main building.
Once it was good and dark, I nudged Guts.
“Should we go now?”
He shook his head. “Just ’ave to wait in the ship longer.”
So we stayed there, drifting in and out of sleep, until Guts shook me awake in the middle of the night and we made our way down the hillside to the dock. We skirted as wide of both the humans and animals as we could, taking a roundabout route along the shoreline.
The closer we got, the worse the smell was. I nearly gagged on the approach to the dock, but I told myself (why, I don’t know, because it was particularly stupid thinking) that it would get better once we were on board.
The crew were all bunked on land, and we crossed a gangplank onto the deck with no trouble. Guts searched until he found a hatch in the flooring with a big iron ring, which he managed to lift with his good hand.
Even worse smells wafted out of the opening as he beckoned me in. It was pitch-black down there and impossible to tell how far down the floor was. I started in feet first, my upper arms braced against the deck, and slowly lowered myself, hoping to find the floor with my feet before I had to let go.
I got as low as I could manage, but my legs were still dangling in air.
“Drop!” Guts muttered.
“It stinks in there!”
“Come on, fancy,” he growled as he shoved me off.
It wasn’t a long drop—the hold was maybe six feet high—but I landed in a squish of straw and manure that made my feet slip out from under me, and I fell backward onto my rear with another heavy squish.
I was gagging from the stench and the general disgust when I heard Guts whisper, “Heads up!”
His feet slipped as he landed, and he fell just like I did—only I was already there, so he plopped right on top of me. There was more squishing, and I suddenly wished we’d built a raft instead. If this was better than drowning, it wasn’t by much.
“Disgusting!”
“Wait till the pigs come in.”
I tried to get used to the light, only there wasn’t any.
“I can’t see a thing.”
“Find a wall. Feel along that.”
“This is stupid! When somebody comes in, they’ll see us.”
“Not if we’re in the straw.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“Who’d go lookin’ for us?”
“What a stupid idea!”
“Too late now.”
It took some doing, but we managed to feel our way to a corner and pile up straw on top of ourselves. After a while, a few cracks of bluish light started to appear overhead as the sun came up and the light began to filter through the seams in the ceiling planks.
And so began the longest day of my life. I never got used to the smell—or, for that matter, the sensation of lying in a bed of manure—and Guts turned out to be right: when the pigs showed up, it got worse.
They came in squealing an hour after dawn, through a door in the side that flooded the room with light when it opened—and revealed that we’d done a lousy job of hiding ourselves under the straw. Fortunately, none of the men herding the pigs had any more interest in looking inside than I had in being there, so we went unnoticed.
The pigs ignored us, and we did our best to ignore them. But once the door closed and everything went dark, they started to squeal in fright, and as the ship got under way and began to lurch with the waves, they got even more scared, which made them squeal all the more. Finally, someone opened the overhead hatch, giving the pigs (and us) enou
gh light to see by, and the noise died down a bit.
Sometime around late afternoon, we docked. Guts and I had burrowed in pretty good by now, but even so there were some tense moments when a herder came in to hustle the less cooperative pigs out the door. After they were gone, I looked to Guts, my eyes begging him to let us stand up.
He shook his head.
“Wait till dark,” he whispered.
We lay motionless until the daylight faded away. Then we lay there some more. Finally, Guts nudged me. We got up and felt our way along the wall to a ladder on the opposite side of the hold, then climbed up to the deck.
The ship was moored at a dock on the edge of a good-sized port—a forest of masts and rigging surrounded us. At the rear of the ship, the crew were playing cards and drinking around a barrelhead. We moved away from them, monkey-climbing a mooring line to the dock. I was taking my first step toward the port when Guts suddenly pulled me back behind a pile of crates.
I peered around the crates and realized what had concerned him. Standing at the end of the dock was a pair of armed soldiers. They were facing away from us, but there was no way to get off the dock without going right past them.
We had a brief, mostly silent argument, making our points with hand gestures. I wanted to jump in the water and swim for the shore, but Guts was worried the splash would attract the attention of the soldiers.
Guts eventually gave in, and we jumped. But he was right—the first thing I heard when my head broke the water was the sound of feet running on the wooden planks overhead. I took cover behind the closest piling under the dock, out of view of anyone peering over the side, and tried to stay as still as possible.
Guts was doing the same at the next piling. We listened as the soldiers debated what they’d heard and whether it was important enough for them to look closer. Eventually, they shrugged it off and returned to their position at the head of the dock.
We waited awhile and then began to swim the length of the dock toward the sea, working our way slowly down a line of moored ships until we figured we were far enough from the soldiers to move out across the adjacent docks and into the bay of open water between the last dock and the shore.
I was so preoccupied with being quiet, and so glad to be out of the filth, that at first I didn’t pay attention to the outline of the island ahead in the moonlight, with its long stretches of beach that ended in a pair of cliffs slowly rising along the shore to either side of the port.
