Blaggard's Moon (4 page)

“Mystery, Mr. Trum. Let there be mystery.”

“He means shut yer yap,” an elder added helpfully.

“Thank you, Mr. Sleeve. Though you do take a good bit of the poetry out of the language.” The others laughed. “But the song is done, for you see, just then a gruff voice broke that dream all to bits, like a gunshot shatters the silence of a night watch. ‘Time to pay for your sins!' ”

Delaney closed his eyes, and he remembered being there, then. He remembered how those words had pierced through hazy, cluttered layers of deep sleep, and how he had jolted awake that day, up to the harsh and grating recognition that this voice had an owner, and the owner was a jailor, and the jailor was glaring down at him from the other side of grimy black bars.

The jailor clanked a tin cup along those bars, an angry clatter penetrating Delaney's pounding skull. The jailor was dark-skinned, bald, with arms like a bull's forequarters, a round brass cuff tight above his bicep. “What, you think you kill a man then sleep 'til noon?” he asked. “Not in this town! Judgment in Mumtown comes at dawn!” And the dark man's skin glistened and his eyes were afire. Then he laughed, all echoing and hollow.

“Who's kilt?” Delaney asked him, sitting up painfully, his own voice screeching in his head.

“You don't remember? Why, the
Stellat
man, what you would call mayor! And so it is death to the lot of you.” His sweeping gesture went beyond Delaney.

“Hang on, now,” another sailor piped up. Delaney turned his head, wincing with the accompanying pain. There were half a dozen shipmates here with him. His heart sank when he saw the two boys, the young Trum brothers, here among the newly condemned. The sailor who spoke was in his twenties, not quite as big as the jailor but probably as strong. Nil Corver, trembling amid his complaint, continued. “We din't kill no ‘stellar man.' We din't kill no one, not till we was fired upon!”

“Aye!” his fellows added. “Defendin' our own selves!”

“The mayor? The mayor fired first?” the big jailor asked, teeth blazing at the absurdity of such a suggestion. “The mayor of Mumtown pulled out a gun, and fired on you?” The nods were universal, if not terribly confident. “Through the floor of his room above your heads?”

Now there was silence. Then all eyes swung to the gaunt man leaning back against the corner of the cell. Spinner Sleeve met their accusing gaze with disregard. “Didn't know about no mayor up there,” he said coldly. “How could I?”

“We're real sorry about what Mr. Sleeve did, then,” offered another, a kind-faced man of middling age, hoping to win some pity.

“You shut it, Avery!” Then to the jailor, Sleeve said, “We ain't admittin' to nothin'! None of us!”

“Fine. Tell it all to the
Horkan
man. What you call the judge. Oh wait, that's me!” He showed them his teeth again, and several sailors groaned audibly. “Clean yourselves up as best you can. You'll want to impress me. Trial right after breakfast!”

“Yer givin' us a trial?” Sleeve asked suspiciously.

“Yer givin' us breakfast?” Nil asked hopefully.

Their jailor and judge, the
Horkan
man, just raised an eyebrow.

“His
breakfast, ye ninny,” Sleeve grunted from his corner.

“Oh.” Nil grew glum again.

“Delaney, do somethin'!” Nil pled, as soon as the jailor had left them alone again.

“Are we really going to die for our sins?” a Trum boy asked.

Delaney blanched. The men looked to him because he could fight. But he was weaponless. “I don't even recollect rightly what happened.” His
head pounded some more and he closed his eyes. But as soon as he did he saw that ship again, heard that sweet song.
A true lang time
…

“Well, it was like this,” a somber voice interrupted. Delaney kept his eyes closed, but recognized the gentleness that was Avery Wittle. He was a deliberate and thoughtful man who always worked within his abilities, large or small though they may be. Mostly, they were small. “We anchored
Tomorrow
in the bay for a little shore leave. Found a nice little tavern. Remember? We were singin' to King Reynard. There were a few foreigners around, I grant that.”

Delaney opened one eye. Avery had his cap in his hand. His expression was more earnest than any man over ten has a right to wear, as though Delaney could absolve them all if only the events were recalled in sincere enough fashion. “We sang songs. You remember that?”

“Them foreigners didn't take to it,” Nil suggested. “Not our fault!”

“They ain't the foreigners,” Delaney countered crustily. “We are.”

There was a pause as the men considered that possibility.

Delaney remembered the songs. He recalled the bitter faces at the other tables as a dozen careless men from a far northern port stood up, puffed out their chests and raised their mugs, singing out their own superiority. A proud moment for Nearing Vast. But this was Mumtown, in the island nation of Cabeeb—a dangerous port if a man had any money, and more dangerous if he didn't.

“They fired first!” Nil insisted.

“Sleeve fired first,” Delaney said. He remembered that part clearly. “Didn't ye, Spinner?” It all came back now, in a rush. His heart sank like a lost anchor. The mayor left, headed upstairs with a wink. Then the shouting commenced. Accusations. Threats. A fistfight. Shots fired. Then more gunfire. The haze drifting over the silent room. A man's leg propped up on an overturned table. Another man facedown, draped over a chair.

More than one man had died last night.

“There's a trial!” Nil offered. “Cap'n Stube will come. Cap'n, he's a good man. He'll vouch fer us all!” His eyes brimmed with sudden hope.

“The
Tomorrow
has sailed. Stube's gone and left us.” A bald man spoke, not much above a whisper. His deeply tanned skin was lined with hard years, his head was wrinkled and dry. Silence fell as they all looked to Mutter Cabe.

“Is it true?” Dallis Trum asked Delaney. “Did the Captain leave us?”

“Naw!” his older brother told him, punctuating the statement with an elbow to the ribs. “Cap'ns don't do such as that!”

Sleeve harrumphed.

Delaney's heart sank further. “Ye don't know he left us, Mutter.”

Mutter's dark eyes were blank with certainty. “He came. Stube came in the night. He spoke to the warder. Paid gold. Took Blith. Took Peckney.”

The men in the cramped cell looked around them. Blith and Peckney were the first mate and the navigator. They had been here last night, had been a part of it all. Now they were gone.

“May their souls writhe in red blazes,” Sleeve hissed.

“Don't say that!” Avery blurted.

Sleeve looked Avery up and down. “May they all writhe in the red blazes a' hell, until the end a' time. And you right with 'em.”

“Look,” Avery offered, “I don't want to die any more'n you do. But if it's dyin' we got to do, then we got to be of a forgivin' sort of mind. I don't want to go to my Maker otherwise. Do you?”

“I ain't goin' to no Maker!” Sleeve stood. “I'm gettin' out of here if I have to kill every last Cabeeb on this rat-infested pile a' sand.” He scratched at a bug bite for emphasis.

The other men looked back and forth between the two voices, hovering in their opinion.

Time to pay for your sins!

“Not the startin' place,” Delaney explained to the fish. He felt a crick in his back, and straightened up a bit. The sun was hot, the post was hard, and he'd been slouching over as the story ran through his mind. But it had suddenly occurred to him, as he got to the hard part, to that point in time when a life of crime had seemed the only honest way out, that Ham had not started the story there. He hadn't begun it with the dream and the jail. That was just the place where Delaney had gotten caught up in it. Those were things Delaney himself remembered. But there was a whole lot that had gone on before. It had wound its way around for many years, having nothing to do with him until it met up with him there in Castle Mum. Those earliest things, the ones Delaney had had no way to know, those he'd learned from Ham Drumbone and his stories.

Delaney stretched again, then looked down into the water. The fish were hungry. “Starve, ye little wretches.”

He might have died there, that day in Mumtown. It would have been a better death than this, better than what awaited him now, after nightfall, in the dark of the new moon. He rubbed his nose with vigor and sniffed. He wasn't a man to feel sorry for himself. But it did seem
odd. Back then, his sins didn't deserve the fate that the
Horkan
man had pronounced upon him. But now they did. They deserved it precisely. A clean hanging or a simple firing squad was more than a pirate could ask for, all he deserved. But now such an honorable end was no longer an option, and now, Delaney didn't deserve
this
fate. He didn't deserve to be left to the
Onka Din Botlay,
the Rippers of the Bone. Who did? Not even Belisar the Whale, if what the Hants said was true…if the mermonkeys really did strip away a man's meat to get at his bones, without bothering to kill him first.

The Hants knew how bad this place was. They knew how horrible it was to die here. These were their
Jom Perhoo.
This was their post. This was their pond, a place of dark legend that scared even them. It was what they called
Kwy Dendaroos.
Doorway for the Doomed.

Belisar, plenty articulate but less poetic, dubbed it Blaggard's Hole.

Delaney closed his eyes, trying to go back to the beginning, trying to remember where Ham had started the tale. But he couldn't. It didn't seem to be anywhere in his head. He sighed and cursed softly. He was never much for getting his mind to do what he wanted it to do. He knew other men, captains and officers mostly, who could direct their minds wherever they wanted, and then direct yours there, too. But Delaney wasn't like that. His mind needed a captain to tell it where to go, and he was but a common sailor.

Telling stories, though, that took directing your mind, and your words. Not like a captain directs things, but more like a mother instructing a youngster. Not that he knew much about mothering. He recalled little of his own ma. She had a warm way with him. And a kind smile, sort of peaceful and easy, whenever she wasn't whupping him.

He didn't even know her name.
Ma,
that's all he ever called her.
Yer Poor Ma,
is how his Pappy called her. Delaney had been taken away from her when he was only, what, five or six? Not old. Just old enough to pinch liquor and vittles for his Pap, but not old enough to get jailed or beaten for it. At least, not bad beatings. Not usually.

Pap had taken full advantage of his skills for a few years, then left Delaney alone in the City of Mann when he was ten or twelve, when he got old enough to get into real trouble. Then his Pap didn't need a kid who couldn't carry his end of the log. That's what Pap said the last time Delaney saw him. So off Delaney went to learn how to carry a log like a man. He lived on the streets for a while, happy for handouts when someone was generous, just as happy to steal when someone wasn't.

That was when the priests came after him. Lawmen he could avoid, but the priests were tricky. Wearing those gray robes with their somber faces, they'd lurk around corners, then pop out smiling, speaking real nice like they were just coming around to help, reaching out with open hands, trying to grab you. He knew what they wanted. They wanted to scare him. They talked about hell. They said bad things about his Pap, said God was watching, and disapproved. One time a big priest caught him by the scruff of the neck and hauled him off to church. Afterward, he scared Delaney for hours on end. Talking about demons and torment and damnation, and how he was sure to drop straight to hell just any moment, unless he repented.

Delaney determined then to get as far away from priests as possible. When he heard that priests didn't sail much in ships, he signed on to the next one floating out of the Bay of Mann.

Odd. When he'd started sailing, he would have been about the same age as Dallis Trum was now. Funny that had never occurred to him. Dallis seemed like such a green young dolt.

But that was not the beginning of the story, either. That was too far back. Any man hanging in a hammock in the forecastle deck of a pirate ship would be fast asleep in no time, listening to a story like that, about some chucklebrained youngster learning how to grow up. Ham would never tell a story like that. Ham's tales were about battles and ships and lovers and losers, gambling and fighting and winning and getting killed trying.
Good
stories.

It was an odd thing, Delaney thought, how a deckhand like Ham with no particular skills otherwise, who could hardly keep up with his own pistol and powder, could somehow keep track of a thing as slippery as a told tale. But he could do it. Night after night. When he started speaking, all went quiet. He'd lie face up in his hammock, legs crossed at the ankles, one hand across his big chest, or under his head for a pillow, pipe in his other hand, smoke rising up from his mouth as the words intermingled with the gray swirls. His broad nose, broken at least twice, twitched now and then, and his beard bounced a bit, but other than that he'd just lie there and talk to the ceiling. Like he was reading a story written on the beams overhead. He never seemed to doubt where to start, or how much to say about what, or which pieces could be left out and what had to be hurried through and which parts he could meander around in slowly, just savoring it like a fresh meat stew.