The Pyrates

by George MacDonald Fraser

  “Haw-haw! We believe you! Whoopity-whee, a likely tale, i' faith! We know! Ha, some innocent, that doth flaunt her curves in male attire! Avery's got a girl-friend, nyah-nyah-nyah!” And while Firebeard blew huge raspberries and Bilbo jeered saturnine in his cage, Sheba spat in contempt, and our Ben went beetroot with anger and scorn.

  Little could they guess that while they engaged in futile insult and denial, three flights up Don Lardo was pausing at the door of his bedchamber, frowning in sudden thought, which made his face look like granny's X-rays. He plucked at his great nether lip.

  “Ha, did I misjudge thee, Enchillada?” he croaked. “For now I mind me – there were no curried beans on the buffet tonight…” His eyes rolled like gob-stoppers. “So … that strange gasp of wind I heard on the staircase … whence came it, if not from thee …?”

  Back down in the dungeon Avery had gone from beetroot to off-white, his haughty gaze raking the captives.

  “For shame! To bandy a lady's name in the dungeon! But why should I waste breath on you? Come, Meliflua.” And he scooped Goliath under his free arm and turned away.

  “Farewell, hero!” Sheba's smoky snarl followed him. “Crawl back to England and tell 'em how the Dons did your dirty work for you!”

  “Aye, faith!” cried Bilbo. “He was to hunt us down, this roaring blade! Why, what a cat's-paw is he, to creep hence – aye, but he fled more nimbly before my point this night, did he not, Sheba?”

  “And we did not peach on him before the Viceroy, neither.” Sheba's eyes were on Avery, no longer scornful, but proud and passionate – oh, she's fairly percolating for him still, the crazy Jezebel.

  “An' we give him a fair chance on Dead Man's Chest, an' all!” bellowed Firebeard. “Course, we'm just poor pirates, we – not gentlefolk like him, wi' a wannion! We don't know no better'n to stick by our mates, aye, through hell an' brimstone, scuttle me! I'll bet he got off Dead Man's Chest sneaky like, an' all!”

  “Now, look here!” cried Avery. “I've had about enough of this. Firstly, you are not my mates. Secondly, Bilbo, I was miles ahead on points, and you know it. Thirdly, it's not my fault if you're in the toils o' th'Inquisition …”

  A small hand on his arm interrupted him, and he found Donna Meliflua regarding him with troubled eyes.

  “Mus' yoo leave them, Capeetan Ben?”

  “Lemme loose!” Goliath was wriggling beneath Avery's arm, kicking fiercely with his one leg. “Put me dahn! If yore goin' to scarper, I'll stay! I've changed me mind! I'll turn you free, mates, an' we'll take our chance, the four of us! Lemme go, rot yer boots!” He tried to bite the captain's arm, struggling feebly in that iron grasp, weeping and swearing something frightsome.

  Then Avery looked round the dungeon again … well, you know what he was thinking. Only a rotter could leave them, blood-stained enemies though they were – on the other hand, if he relented, they'd probably turn on him at the drop of a plumed castor, and where would Vanity and Meliflua and his mission be then? Their parole wouldn't be worth a curse … and yet, Sheba had stocked his boat with goodies, and Bilbo was a simply topping swordsman, and Firebeard had a mental age of about three and presumably couldn't be held accountable … and dammit, even the dwarf was going all noble on him …

  “Oh, all right!” he said irritably, and dropped Goliath, who promptly hopped over and drew the bolts from Bilbo's cage. At Avery's moody sign Meliflua unclamped Firebeard's shackles, and our hero himself slit Sheba's bonds with his rapier. Like a striking snake the black bombshell uncoiled from her bench, her arms flew round Avery's neck, and as her lips locked on his like electromagnets he heard the bongo drums booming in his brain and jungle incense inflaming his senses; a strange weakness jellied his knees momentarily, and then Sheba's voice was throbbing throatily at his ear:

  “Ah, mad fool! 'Twas inevitable – why must ye struggle against fate? Thou'rt Sheba's, and she thine – aye, to the end o' the seas and beyond, thou lovesome hunk! Nay, hold me, barracuda, for—”

  “Don't you believe it!” Avery broke loose briskly and slapped away her hand, which was massaging his shirt-ruffles. “I doubt not I shall repent me this weakness -but hark ye, woman, and you sea-scum,” here he rounded on Bilbo and Firebeard, who were on their feet, rubbing their cramped limbs and regarding him with wolfish wariness and open-mouthed looniness respectively. “This is but truce till we be beyond reach of the cursed Dons; thereafter 'tis war betwixt us, and you'll save yourselves a ton of trouble by packing it in and throwing yourselves on the mercy of the court. For 'twill be surrender or death for you, mark me—”

  “Surrender,” crooned Sheba, nuzzling his ear. “Ah, 'tis all I ask – surrender in your arms, caro mio!”

  “Nay, now, cully,” quo' Bilbo silkily. “Here would be rank waste, rat me! For bethink you, y'are still a wanted man – aye, and will be doubly so when word gets abroad that ye ha' broken us free o' King Philip his dungeon. Aye, and hast shown thyself right apt to piracy, having taken the Santa Cascara like any filibuster—”

  “It's a fact!” bawled Firebeard, and drummed on his chest. “Oh, a sweet stroke, burn, pink, and quarter me else! Aye, art a Brotherhood boy, Ben Avery, like it or not! So let's away, an' wi' the Laughing Sandbag an' this dago craft o' thine we'll raise hot hell along the Main, an' then Tortuga-ho! an' be damned, an' that!” His eye rolled on Meliflua, who was viewing with dismay and indignation Black Sheba's attentions to Avery. “Ar, an' we'll take this Spanish pullet as hostage, belike – or for some such purpose as we use wenches for, if I can mind me what it is.” He tugged at his beard in perplexity, trying to remember.

  “Now look here,” Avery was beginning, when suddenly Meliflua screamed, a great voice in the gloom above bawled “Lights!,” sirens whined, whistles blew, and the dim-lit dungeon was suddenly aflame with the gleam of torches which glittered on naked steel in the hands of armed soldiers; they crowded the stone galleries looking down on the chamber, and pressed behind the hulking figure of Don Lardo at the stairhead. His hideous face glared like a Hallowe'en mask from the shadows, his dentures clashed like castanets, and the vampires clinging to his scarlet robe squeaked and fluttered. Yes, the sneaky brute had come back to investigate the noise he had heard on the stairs, bringing the heavy mob with him, and now …

  “So, the birds would flutter away!” he gloated. “I was right, Enchillada! I'm always right! It's terrific!” He screamed with crazy laughter, slobbering down at the little group frozen among the instruments of torture. “Down and seize them! Lash them! Bind them with chains! Lay them helpless at my feet so that I can dance on them and hear them fracture! On, on!”

  Pandemonium ensued as the Spanish soldiers blundered obediently down the steps, the poor expendable slobs. You've seen them, often, lurching clumsily into the fray, ready to fall down obligingly as the big names in the cast run them through. Sure enough, the leading officer transfixed himself on Avery's point, and Sheba pounced on his fallen rapier and leaped to Avery's side. In a twinkling two more Spaniards had collapsed, covered in ketchup and crying “Aaargh!”, and half a dozen others were scattered like ninepins as Firebeard, grabbing up one of the fallen jailers and using him as a club, rushed roaring to join in. Bilbo, watching his crafty chance, disarmed an opponent by seizure, and in a trice there was a pile of corpses at the stair-foot as the attackers shrank from those three whirling blades and the body which Firebeard wielded with joyous abandon. Shoulder to shoulder fought the four, while Don Lardo tore his hair in apoplectic rage, and Enchillada kilted up his Buchanan tartan dressing-gown and hid behind a pillar. Donna Meliflua screamed and shrank becomingly against the wall as the dank chamber rang with dint o' steel, for there was no lack of Spanish reserves, and no way out for our party; they were bottled, but good, as the Dons flung themselves into the fight.

  Meanwhile Goliath the dwarf was using his loaf. Rightly concluding that the mêlée was no place for a one-legged individual two feet in height, he had hopped to the side of the other jailer, who was coming round
, and jabbing the man's own dagger at his throat, demanded to be shown the emergency exit.

  “Take them alive!” shrieked Don Lardo, shredding a bat in his claw-like hands and muttering: “One for the Maiden, two for the rack, three for scorpions wriggling in a sack … Why don't you overwhelm them, you cowardly rabble? You're not doing it properly! Disarm them by letting them stab you, and roll away with their swords! Collapse on them, you filth!” He mowed and gibbered as his men fell over themselves before that wall of dancing steel – Avery cool and academic as always, lips pursed thoughtfully as he lunged and parried; Bilbo hurling taunts as he slid in and out in his rakish Italian style, d'ye see; Sheba shouting with cruel glee as her point gored a throat or slashed a face; Firebeard bashing away regardless of the damage he was doing to the jailer. Even so they were being forced back across the dungeon, and Spaniards were spreading out to take them in flank, when—

  “This way, capting! Foller me! Quick, this way!”

  Goliath was hopping and yelling in an archway across the dungeon, and as one the four turned and ran, Sheba pausing only to stab the second jailer (she never could resist an unarmed enemy). Through the arch they raced, and turned again to meet their pursuers; steel clashed as Avery and Sheba faced them in the narrow passage, there was a soggy thud as Firebeard flung his human club (now rather limp) into the press, and Bilbo snatched up Goliath and shook him eagerly.

  “Whither, mannikin? What's below, ha?”

  “Dahn the steps, capting – a postern to the river! Boats an' canoes an' that!” (As there always are, of course, in any properly-appointed dungeon.)

  Sheba, her eye-shadow aglow with fierce excitement, buried her steel in the breast of a Spaniard, crowed with delight as Avery felled a second, clung to him for one brief passionate kiss what time she enveloped a thrust and riposted into the throat of a third, and gasped exultantly:

  “Ah, barracuda mine, what finer prelude to our union than this? Lust o' blood and lust o' love – both are ours!”

  “Please!” exclaimed Avery, neatly disarming a fourth attacker. “Control yourself, and try not to get in the way. It's extremely dangerous.”

  “What is danger with you at my side?” wondered Sheba adoringly as she lunged gracefully and recovered, wiping her blade with a flourish on her collapsing victim. “See – the dogs give back before us – let us fly, camarado!” But even as they turned to follow Firebeard, who was lumbering to the steps in Bilbo's wake, a tremulous scream sounded from the dungeon.

  “Ah, Capeetan Ben! Doo not leave me! See, I yam een thair cruel clutches!”

  Sure enough, beyond the reluctant milling mob of Spaniards, Avery beheld Donna Meliflua struggling in the arms of Enchillada, who was assuring a goggling Don Lardo that this was a female in drag, and Spanish by the sound of it.

  Bother, thought Avery, why have women no positional sense? Well, he'd just have to cut his way through to her, throw her over his shoulder, pink Don Lardo if possible, and fight his way clear again, that was all. “Back in a tick,” he said rather breathlessly to Sheba. “You and Firebeard hold them in play whiles I—”

  “Rash bombhead!” cried Sheba, her beautiful dusky face contorted, her lashes snapping in alarm. “She is beyond aid – and who cares, anyway? A mincing candlestick in men's weeds, and probably bent as a bottle of crisps! What is she to thee?”

  “A pledge of honour,” answered Avery, as with a sharp call of, “All right – mine!” he spitted a rashly-approaching Don. “Hang on, Meliflua! I'll be there, don't you worry – ulngh!”

  The words died on his lips, and he had a brief vision of primroses at the river's brim. Sheba, fed up with arguing, had gestured to Firebeard, and the giant, with the ponderous delicacy of a hippo swatting a fly, had clocked our captain on the nape of the neck. Avery's knees buckled, Firebeard grabbed him by the waistband, and with Sheba's sweeping sword covering their retreat the two pirates sprang down the winding stone steps. Avery's unconscious form bumped and rattled on the rough-hewn walls as Firebeard swung him effortlessly along, and Sheba railed at the giant to mind what he was doing, for God's sake, the adored object wasn't made of wood. They raced on down the narrow spiral, and emerged well clear of the pack on a narrow jetty beside a dark, foaming torrent, where canoes bobbed at their moorings, dim-seen in the star-shine, and Bilbo and Goliath were already afloat, fumbling with the painter and chanting: “Shove off, Jack – I'm inboard!”

  It was the work of a moment for Sheba to slash through the mooring of a second canoe, and order Firebeard to dispose Avery's limp form carefully in its bottom. But when the big ruffian would have clambered aboard himself, she directed him sharply to Bilbo's canoe – the she-corsair's subtle mind was already thinking ahead, and whatever might lie before them in their escape down that mysterious river, she didn't want Firebeard along playing gooseberry. This was her chance to get Avery on a slow boat to wherever, and she meant to make the most of it; furthermore, Firebeard was notorious for singing shanties in his sleep.

  Thus it was that when the Spaniards emerged with gesticulations and futile cries on to the jetty, one canoe was already shooting into the mirk, and the other was wallowing after it with Firebeard sprawled across the thwarts and Bilbo yelling at him not to put his foot through the side, while Goliath crouched motionless in the bows hoping that he might be mistaken for a figurehead. The Spaniards shook their fists and fired off arquebuses, but of course they didn't come within a mile of hitting the vanishing canoes; they never do. They mooched about the jetty for a while, though, acting thwarted but secretly relieved to be rid of such frightful guests, until a young and offensively keen sergeant said hadn't they better give chase? At this there were yawns and groans of “Not again, my morion's killing me!” “Tequila break!” “No way, José” and “Get out the garlic and mandolins.” All very well, shrilled the sergeant, but somebody was going to have to break the bad news to Don Lardo, and it wasn't going to be him – his words were drowned in a mad stampede for the boats, and the sergeant wondered despairingly if desertion wasn't the best way out.

  He needn't have worried. The sight of blood always had a soothing effect on Don Lardo, and after the recent disturbance the dungeon looked like Dracula's dining-room. But even this, like the escaping captives, was forgotten in the tyrant's delight at discovering that the gorgeous young moppet in silk knee-breeches and ruffles who'd been left behind in the torture-chamber was his bride-to-be. True, she had fainted on being introduced, and had to be put insensible to bed, where nurses fussed about her with Ovaltine and thermometers and cologne compresses, but Don Lardo was undismayed. He gloated for a while over her pale loveliness, hardly able to believe his luck, and then lurched out, stroking his vampire bats and slavering.

  “Did you see the terror and hatred in those beautiful eyes ere she swooned, Enchillada?” he croaked. “She loathes me, the little darling! Boy, what a honeymoon we're going to have!” His huge shoulders shook ecstatically and his dentures shot out broadcast. “I just hope she doesn't go mad – at least, not too quickly.”

  “Sure, Excellencee,” cried the fat sycophant. “And she's reech, too. Meanwhile, do you weesh to have thee soldiers decimated – you know, those bums who let thee preesoners get away?”

  “You're just trying to make my night,” gurgled the Viceroy jovially. “Here, have a vampire. No, Enchillada, we'll just brand the officers and flog the rest, once over lightly. As for those pirate scum – they won't get far on the notorious River of Death! And if they do, I shall hunt them down in person – yes, and their whole vile Brotherhood. That's it, Enchillada – a mighty campaign to sweep these vermin from the seas!” He cackled crazily and rubbed his hands. “Think of it – my fame will ring world-wide, the King will give me the Order of Sant Iago and take me hawking by the Guadalquivir in a mink-lined coat, people will write for my autograph, and that adorable dolly asleep upstairs … oh, God, I don't know when I've felt so good! Proclaim my serendipity to the people tomorrow, and in the meantime let's go and watch t
hem cleaning up the dungeon!”

  “You bet, boss!” cried Enchillada eagerly. “Jus' for laughs.”

  Good news and bad news, really. Our hero is off and running again, but he'll have a whale of a stiff neck, he's in Black Sheba's toils, and what o' this River o' Death bearing them into the jungle fastnesses of the Main? At least there'll be no lack of timber for Goliath's new wooden leg. Poor little Meliflua, eh? Of course, romantic reason tells us she should be all right, but in a story of this kind you never know. And that was a sinister crack Don Lardo made about wiping up the Coast Brotherhood – aye, little do our bold filibusters know what's coming to them, and in especial Happy Dan and his wild crew, bedazzled by the glitter o' new-found gold …

  CHAPTER

  THE THIRTEENTH

  he reaction of anyone finding two million pounds in gold coin at the back of the garage, or in an old chest of drawers, is normally “Hell's bells, Doris, will you come and look at this!” And when they have gaped greedily, and babbled of Rolls Royces and villas at Marbella, and brewed a cup of tea to calm their excitement – then realisation dawns. Can't spend it at the shops, the stock market is too dicey … and aren't there laws about treasure trove, and capital gains tax, and currency restrictions, and other evil wheezes whereby greedy civil servants rob the deserving of their windfalls – to say nothing of the risk of being mugged, probably by the neighbours?

  Indeed. And it was just as bad in the seventeenth century, which is why pirates, who were always acquiring heaps of the ready, invariably ended up burying the stuff in some Godforsaken spot; it was simply the only safe thing to do. Sack a city, loot a galleon, scuttle a plate-fleet – it made no odds, like it or not, the end of the day found them hacking great holes in desert islands, weeping with frustration with their socks full of sand.

  Happy Dan's mob were no exception. When they saw the pile of specie into which Blood had inadvertently stumbled, and realised it must have been mislaid by some previous owner of the Frantic Frog, they had their customary rave and gloat (“Or! Or! Les oodles, morbleu! Nous sommes riche! Ah, St Tropez, 'ere we come!”), but they knew it was just window-dressing, and that the stuff would eventually have to be rowed ashore in neat parcels clearly marked, and shoved underground as usual, avec un malediction.