Death by Airship

by Arthur Slade

  Thankfully, we had good winds. Our steam engine was acting up again. Odin promised to have it fixed again by the next day.

  We climbed higher and higher. It wasn’t long before the smell of smoke was blown off the ship. I went from spyglass to eyeballing the horizon to spyglass to compass.

  After about three hours I spotted Break Bones Island and Bartha’s tree house. By tree house, I mean a gigantic tree mansion made up of more than twenty rooms, built in a tree that reaches out of the earth like the hand of a giant. The morning was cool, and there was lots of fog rising up from the ground and clinging to the tree house itself. Right at the top was the dock. Big enough to hold several airships at once.

  I could see through my eyeglass that Crusher was docked. Good. “Come straight out of the sun,” I commanded. We climbed up and up and then tipped the front of the ship, flattened the sails and rocketed down out of the sun. My hope was that they wouldn’t see us until the last moment.

  Princess Bartha is second in line for the throne. She isn’t the delicate kind of princess. She knows how to use a cutlass better than anyone. And she can swear like a, well, like a pirate. She is not someone you should ever underestimate.

  “Powder the guns!” I shouted. My cutthroat crew obeyed. “Raise the flag!” They raised the Prince Conn flag, which bears the skull and crossbones and a pickle.

  Yes, a pickle. Like I said, I got last choice when it came to the pirate gear. But at least it was a pickle with an eye patch.

  No one messes with the pickle!

  Only as we got closer did I see that the tree house had already been smashed. Clearly it had been under attack recently. There were cannon holes here and there. And what I’d thought was fog was actually smoke. The drawbridges lay broken, a whole floor made of bamboo was in tatters, and Bartha’s flag, the skull and crossbones and a single red eye, was smoldering.

  “Full stop!” I shouted. We swooshed up the sails and dropped anchor. It caught the top branch and jerked us to a stop.

  “Bring Cindy in close!” I shouted.

  We swung alongside the dock, and I jumped the gangplank and landed on the creaky wood. I’d been here many a time in the last few years. Bartha is a pretty good big sister, and she makes rather good brownies. I rushed up the stairs to her main quarters and burst through the door. Odin and Bonnie were right behind me.

  The front room is where Bartha keeps her doll collection. The dolls are made of clay, and each one is missing its left eye. Bartha did that on purpose, and then put an eye patch on each doll. But now I could see that someone had broken every one of their clay heads. As I stepped into the room, the floorboards creaked, and several of the dolls said, “Mommy, mommy, mommy.”

  That really creeped me out. I used to be unable to fall asleep when they were in the same room as I was. But today I sped past their broken bodies.

  I kicked open the doors of my sister’s observation room.

  Bartha was leaning up against the wall, a white dressing bandage across her chest and a flintlock pistol in her right hand. She pointed it straight at me. Her skin, usually quite tanned from all her days in the skies, looked quite pale. The blood seeping through the bandage might have had something to do with that. I motioned for Odin and Bonnie to back off.

  “Hey, sis,” I said.

  “Hey, traitor,” she said.

  “What does that mean?” I slowly put my cutlass away. There was no point bringing a cutlass to a flintlock fight.

  “You sabotaged my boat, and you attacked my tree house. And you killed my parrot!”

  Her emerald-green parrot, Poxonyou, was lying at her side. Dead. She’d been a good bird.

  “I’m very sorry about Poxonyou,” I said. “But I didn’t do any of those things!”

  She pointed down with her left hand. Her right held the gun steady, despite her wounds. “Your victory flag is planted in the ground.”

  I glanced out the window and looked down at the beach. There were twelve skull-and-crossbones-and-pickle flags waving in the sand. They did look rather impressive.

  “But it wasn’t me!” I said. “Cindy doesn’t have that kind of firepower.”

  “You hired out. Found more cutthroats.”

  “I have no reason to. I swear, Bartha, I didn’t do it!”

  “You’re seventh from the throne now.” She said this in an accusatory fashion. “When I die you’ll be sixth.”

  “What do you mean? I’m ninth!”

  “No,” she said. “Clint is dead.”

  Clint? My brother Clint is fourth in line to the throne—or, at least, he was.

  I pictured his rugged face. It had become rugged because he won fistfights by using his head as a battering ram. Nothing could kill him. “How? What happened?”

  “As if you don’t know!” she barked. “Poisoned. By a pickle, no less. That was so creative.”

  “What? I don’t poison people with pickles!” I spat this sentence.

  “You’re the quiet type. You’ll do anything,” she said with a sneer.

  Again, I want to point out that the gun she had aimed right at me was not wavering.

  I did some quick math. “Wait! If I’m seventh from the throne now, who else died?”

  “Tressa! Her ship blew up and crashed into the water. Sabotage! Probably an exploding pickle. All they found amongst the floating broken boards were your pickle playing cards and a tattered flag.”

  Not Tressa. She had a great heart. And she was always so kind. Except for that time she broke my arm when I beat her at blackjack. “I did not do these things!”

  “I don’t believe you.” Bartha clicked back the hammer. “And with one flick of my finger, my last act will be to end your attempted reign of terror. Right here. Right now.”

  A bead of sweat ran down my forehead. My toe began to tremble. Violently.

  She pulled the trigger.

  Chapter Three

  Pffft.

  That’s the sound the flintlock made. Like a gun-sized fart. No round ball came shooting into my brain.

  Did you know that gunpowder doesn’t work well when it gets wet?

  Bartha looked at the gun, shook it, pushed back the hammer with her left index finger, pointed and pulled the trigger again.

  PFFFT.

  She rolled her eyes, then threw the pistol at me. She was weak from her wounds, so it landed at my feet.

  “Now you can kill me and be sixth from the throne,” she spat. “Well, go ahead, bro. But first I will cast my final pirate curse.” It was a curse that all pirates have. It doesn’t often work, but it makes us feel better as we die. “I curse you to dwell down full fathom five in Davy Jones’s locker, where the crabs will nibble on your toes. And other extremities.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. Especially the “other extremities” part.

  I put my hands on my hips. “I’m not going to kill you.”

  “Oh, torture first? Great. You’re so predictable. Bring on your worst pickles!”

  “No. I’m not going to torture you! Or maim or poison you or even snap your eye patch. Or squirt pickle juice at you. I didn’t do any of those things you accused me of.”

  My sister stared at me for a long moment. Well, several moments. Then she sighed. “Sorry, Conn. I really did think it was you. You have a shifty look in your eyes.”

  What did that mean? But I didn’t snap at those words. Instead I took a deep breath and said, “It’s okay. I’ll take your suspicion as a compliment. I am a pirate prince, after all. And I really am sorry about Poxonyou.”

  “She saved my life. ‘Duck, duck, duck!’ she shouted. And I ducked. A cannonball took off my pirate hat. And took Poxonyou too.” Bartha looked like she was about to shed a tear. But she sniffed loudly instead. “Still, one of their snipers got me when I was issuing commands. A darn good shot.” This time she huffed out a wheeze. “Well, I think I’m going to die now.”

  I looked at her wound. The redness near her stomach didn’t seem to be growing any brighter o
r bigger. I motioned, and Bonnie Brightears came closer. She took a medical kit out of her leather fanny pack. She got to work and within seconds held up a round ball of shot. She gave me the thumbs-up.

  “You aren’t going to die,” I said.

  “Yes, I am,” Bartha said. “I can feel it coming.” She looked around, then closed her eyes. She opened them again a moment later. “Actually, now that you have that bullet out of me, I’m feeling slightly better. Maybe the pain I’m feeling now is sausage gas.”

  Bartha does like bacon-flavoured sausage. She’d poked me in the eye once just so she could steal some from my plate.

  Bonnie finished treating my sister’s wound. It takes a lot to kill a pirate princess.

  “I guess I won’t die,” Bartha said. “I’m kind of disappointed actually. I’d prepared a long final speech.”

  “Well, save it for next time. As Mom often says, be prepared for death, because death is prepared for you. Anyway, you should take it easy.”

  “I’m fine.” She tried to get up, then fell back down on her rump. “Maybe I’ll just stay seated.”

  “I’ll get you to Stitch-Me-Up Island. And then I’m going to hunt around and figure out who attacked you.”

  Bartha pointed at me. “Good luck, Pickle,” she said. Personally, I hate the nickname. She must have seen the look on my face. “I mean, good luck, Conn. Be careful. Someone really sneaky is trying to bump us all off.”

  Then she closed her eyes. Bonnie made a motion, and two of my crew came in to transport my sister. They’d row her on one of the smaller boats to Stitch-Me-Up Island and then catch up with us.

  While I had been talking to my sister, my hearty crew had already been up and down the island, looking for clues. No one had spotted a thing. I went down to where the pickle pirate flags were flapping.

  I grabbed one. Checked out the flagpole. It was a normal wooden one. Then I studied one of the flags itself. It was a very good copy of the original. Someone had taken the time to deliberately frame me for this. Imagine how long it must have taken to make all these flags. Well, no sense in wasting them, I thought. I would get my crew to gather them up for the next time we returned to Skull Island with a hold full of bounty. Flags would make our arrival look so much more cool.

  I looked closer at the bit of silk. Generally, seamstresses are proud of their work. And sometimes they sign it. Their initials can often be spotted somewhere, be it a hankie, a pair of underwear pantaloons or a flag.

  There were two initials on the back of the flag, in the bottom corner. P.P.

  Patricia Pandora.

  I knew the name well. She had been my kindergarten teacher at pirate school.

  Chapter Four

  I have fond memories of pirate kindergarten. They were the best three years of my life.

  That’s a joke. It only took me two years to finish kindergarten.

  We gathered together on Cindy—mustered is the correct word, but my crew gets hungry and starts thinking of hot dogs whenever I say that. We had found a store of dry gunpowder and a collection of cannonballs. Which was good, since during our last battle we ran low and were shooting pots and pans from our cannons. Not exactly effective or frightening. And it made our cook pull his hair out.

  It had been about ten years since I’d last seen Mrs. Pandora. I knew she’d moved from Pirate City on Skull Island to a small village on One Tree Island. So we upped our anchor and set sail.

  The island really does have only one tree, and it’s a pine tree, of all things. There aren’t that many pine trees in this part of the world, so people there make the most of it. Every Christmas they have a huge celebration, and presents for every villager appear under the tree. It might be a way to get people to move there. It worked on Mrs. Pandora—she went there after she retired and opened a seamstress business in her home.

  We landed next to the tree. Bonnie and Odin slid their cutlasses into their belts, and Odin adjusted his beard daggers. They made to follow me off the gangplank.

  “Hey! Hey!” I said. “You don’t need to come with me this time.”

  “With all respect due,” Bonnie said. She had her hand on her pistol. She had named it Eye Squasher. I’d never asked her why. “She be dangerous, I bets.”

  “She’s my kindergarten teacher!” I said. “She taught me how to make paper snowflakes. And happy-anniversary cards.”

  “Just the same, Sir Captain Conn”—Odin was always so official—“we should come along. Maybe put a cannonball through her hut first.”

  “You will not be blowing up my kindergarten teacher’s home! I forbid it. Walk around the village. Scrape some barnacles off the ship. But stay away from Mrs. Pandora’s house.”

  Odin didn’t say anything, but I could tell from his face that he wanted to argue. So did Bonnie. She opened her mouth.

  “That’s an order,” I said.

  Their faces became even harder stone.

  I left them standing there like statues. I marched down the gangplank and through the village to Mrs. Pandora’s shop, Little Sew and Sew. Clever name! She worked out of her home, which was a large hut made of bamboo, with a grass roof. There were all sorts of sample flags for every member of the royal family on the outside wall of her hut, including my pickle flag. I guess people collect them.

  I knocked on the door. No answer. I knocked a second time.

  Mrs. Pandora had tried to teach me the difference between right and wrong, a hard thing for pirates to learn. But I was pretty sure it would be wrong to kick down her door.

  So I snuck in through the window. Problem solved. She’d be very proud of me.

  It was dark in that hut. I wasn’t familiar with the layout, and my eyes hadn’t adjusted. I shouldn’t have been surprised when I knocked over something made of clay.

  It was breakable.

  And loud.

  “Umm, Mrs. Pandora, are you in here?” I asked.

  The answer was a blow to the head and a kick to my rear quarters. Something else made of clay or porcelain broke. My eyes were starting to adjust. I turned and received a foot to the jaw.

  I blocked the next blow and counter chopped the one after that. You see, I’d learned kung fu from Mrs. Pandora. It had been one of the best classes in kindergarten.

  My opponent was dressed in black, with a black bandanna. All I could see of his or her face were burning, angry eyes. I drew my cutlass with great style, but my hand was smacked, and the sword flew through the air and stuck in the wall. I had no extra daggers. Or even a thumb tack. I was disarmed. My least favorite way to be.

  I remembered Odin’s idea of putting a cannonball through the hut. I should have listened. I hoped they could say, “I told you so” later.

  I just had to survive.

  But I wasn’t sure I would. Because my opponent was good. Like, nasty good.

  I attacked with a double-fisted strike and found myself upside down and flying through the air. I landed on a wicker chair. It collapsed. I was struck with another blow on my backside. And then another blow, which I blocked. I was blocking every second one. And every first one hurt. Really hurt. I couldn’t seem to successfully mount an attack of my own.

  I was knocked into another room. A room with a window. And the light from outside fell on me.

  “Prince Conn!” my opponent cried out. It was a woman’s voice.

  I looked up. The masked face stared down at me, the eyes showing shock.

  “That’s me,” I said. I tried to stand but found I couldn’t.

  My attacker pulled back her black mask. It was Mrs. Pandora! She was seventy years old if she was a day, but she had just turned me into princeling mincemeat.

  “Welcome to my house!” she said. “Would you like some lemonade?”

  Chapter Five

  “I had no idea it was you.” Mrs. Pandora reached out and pulled me up. She was as strong as any twenty-year-old. She set me on a chair and somehow came up with a glass of lemonade. Which I sipped. It was to die for.

  �
��I didn’t know it was you. But why were your eyes so angry and red?” I asked.

  “Oh, I just haven’t had my coffee yet. Why were you sneaking into my home?”

  “No one answered my polite knock.”

  She gestured at her clothes. “Well, you just happened to arrive while I was doing my exercises. That’s why I’m dressed like this. And maybe I was a little hyped up. There are too many wannabe pirates here. Would you like some cookies?”

  All I could do was nod. My noggin hurt. My shins hurt. My spleen too. She handed me a a plate of oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies. After I ate one I felt much better. I’d loved cookie day in kindergarten.

  “So what are you doing here?” she asked. Then she paused. “Oh, and how did you like that order of flags? It really was some of my best work. Did your birthday party go well?”

  “Birthday party?” I asked. I took another sip. Boy, did Mrs. Pandora ever make good lemonade. “I didn’t order the flags. And I didn’t have a birthday party. Never do. They’re bad for morale. It’s best not to remind my cutthroat crew how young I really am.”

  “Well then, we better talk,” she said.

  “Who ordered the flags?” I asked.

  “The flags were ordered by royal decree.”

  “Royal decree?”

  She got up and opened a file. “Yup. I’ve got it right here,” she said, pulling out a little tube. I recognized the official royal orange paper. “Stamped by the ruler himself. Your father, King Jules.”

  I unrolled the roll. An order direct from the palace for fifty pickle flags in celebration of the fifteenth birthday of Prince Conn.

  Signed by my father. Well, it was just an X, but he had a very distinctive X.

  Shiver me timbers! Could my father really be behind this? It was hard to believe. For one thing, he never celebrated my birthday. Or anyone else’s. For another, did he have the smarts to plan an attack on Bartha and make it look like mine?

  Yep. He could. One didn’t become pirate king without having a brainpan full of smarts.