Blaggard's Moon (5 page)

That was one thing Delaney remembered about Yer Poor Ma. She sure
could cook. And so could Maybelle Cuddy. Seemed like all the women he ever knew at all could cook.

The girl!

Delaney remembered now, and it felt good remembering, that Ham had started his story with the girl. The crew always liked a story with a girl in it. Didn't matter what kind, whether mother, daughter, sister, wife, widow, lover, or tramp. Though most men favored one kind over the others. Ham would always put a girl right in the big middle, if ever he could. And there was a girl in this story. And not just a girl, but a woman. That was how he got it all going, the port at which Ham had set sail.

And it had all started just where Ham always said it did.
Deep in the darkest part of the heart.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

THE DEFENDER

“O
UR STORY BEGINS
on the day that a mysterious young woman met the eyes of a bold and battle-tested young sailor.” Ham puffed his pipe. “It was a sunny midday in June, in the fair City of Mann back in Nearing Vast. The docks were bustling, seagulls were careening and cawing, flies were buzzing around fresh stocks of fish that were being unloaded and gutted. Altogether a glorious day. This fine young lady was boarding a ship, and at that same moment a fierce young warrior wearing the blue naval uniform of a Vast marine was disembarking from another. She glided up the gangway to the main deck of a heavy-laden merchant vessel, which was bound for the southern seaports of the Warm Climes.”

“What's her name?” one of the men asked.

“Tell us what she looked like!” begged another.

“Aye, and don't tell us there's mystery to it!” another called out. Laughter rose. Ham was always shrouding some fact he easily could have explained, just so he could produce it later with a flourish, making his listeners feel satisfied after a long hunger.

“Oh, she was a mystery,” he said. “She was indeed. The sort of mystery that a man could look on and talk about and study over, and know every detail about, and still not fathom. Aye, our young lady was a mystery with a fine feminine cut. She was dressed in velvet and silk, bodice and gown. Her waist when it was all trussed tight was no bigger around than…well, than a soup bowl is around its outer edge. But she was not a skinny lass
otherwise, no sir, but of good proportion. Her face was kind and serene and wise. And she had long, wavy blonde hair, not light nor yellow, but golden, like fine sherry.”

“What's a fined cherry?” a sailor asked his neighbor.

“It's a fancy drink, ye lowlife,” the neighbor answered. The others laughed.

“Aye,” Ham continued, unthwarted. “She was a fine and fancy drink. But for you lads, let's just say her hair was the color of an excellent malt amber beer.”

“Ooh, that's nice.”

“And as she ascended, our man descended the gangway of a thirty-gun frigate, just in from those same southern shores. They turned and saw one another in an instant, who knows why? Maybe it was a songbird behind the one, a bosun's cry behind the other. Or perhaps, perhaps it was the call of something deeper. Perhaps it was a destiny neither could avoid. But if so, it was a hard destiny, a fate that would lead them both through unimagined battles and hardships and vicissitudes.”

“What's the sissitudes?” young Dallis Trum asked.

“Means hardships,” Sleeve answered.

“He already said ‘hardships.' ”

“So I did. Now shush. Whatever the reason, they turned in that moment toward one another, and their eyes met. And they recognized one another, for they were not strangers, but had a strange past together. And this is what he saw in her, in just that moment of sunlight. He saw beauty, fresh and unspoiled, radiant and sharp-eyed, but with sorrow somehow bound up deep within. And what she saw was a dark-haired, scruffy warrior just in from the wildness of the seas, fresh from the fight, but with some unquenchable thirst, a drive she couldn't name.”

“Wait, wait, did you say a fight?” one of the men asked. “What fight?”

“You are a hard bunch to tell a story to, and that's a fact. If you must know, that very morning Damrick Fellows had had his first battle against a pirate. It wasn't much, really, just a—”

Now the cramped room exploded.

“
Who did you say?
”

“Hang on now!”

“You sayin' it's
Damrick Fellows
?”

“This story is about Hell's Gatemen?”

When the room calmed, Ham puffed his pipe for a moment. Then into the tense calm, he spoke the single word, “Aye.”

The room erupted once again, this time in glee. “Tell us the
fight
!”

Ham savored the moment. “But gents, we were about to learn of fair Jenta Stillmithers, and her travels, and how she was first introduced to the world of pirates and scalawags.”

“
Jenta
?” and “Wait, ye mean the pirate's woman?” and “We want to hear Jenta!”

“No!” and “Hang on, tell the fight!” others countered.

And then the forecastle was in an uproar, men shouting at one another from their hammocks, until a few rolled out and stood, the better to argue their points, particularly should their own position on the matter require proofs of a somewhat more forceful nature.

“All right, shush now! Shush or you'll hear neither!” Ham bellowed. The room quieted some. “You'll get the Whale down here thinking there's fisticuffs broke out amongst us, and we'll all be feeling Mr. Garvey's lash. Just furl some sail, boys, and ease up a bit.”

The men grumbled but settled quickly, then waited impatiently.

Ham cleared his throat. “Aye, the tale is of Damrick Fellows, and Jenta Stillmithers, and Conch Imbry and his gold. And you shall hear it all.”

Grunts and mutterings of approval now lapped over and filled the gaps between opinions.

“As for Jenta, many say she was the pirate's woman true and sure, and many say she never was. But none can argue that she was drawn deep into the darkest lair of the greatest pirate of the age, and from within that lair drew to herself the heart of the greatest of pirate killers. Her tale begins earlier that day, in the hours before her eyes met Damrick's on that gangway, with words spoken in urgency by her dear mother. Those words were these: ‘Girl, our ship awaits! Pack your things, we're headed south!'

“As for Damrick, it could be truthfully said that his calling, which as all pirates know by now was to draw hard lines and sharp swords against the likes of us, began within sight of land earlier on that very same day, his last as a uniformed member of his majesty's marines. And while it is true that many to this day find reason to doubt the final allegiance of his heart, no one can question his early mercenary zeal. And he knew the first stirrings of that deadly fervor when he heard words shouted out with urgency—perhaps at the very same moment that Jenta heard the particulars of her own fate, though the pair were far from one another across the seas. What he heard were words that have stirred men's spirits for timeless ages. And those words, gents, were ‘
Battle stations!
' ”

A rumble of anticipation went through the forecastle. “Now we'll hear it!”

But Ham did not quench their thirst just yet. “And thus on one day began the true story of Jenta, and of Damrick, and of Conch Imbry…a tale of love and destruction, of deception and betrayal and the death of dreams. For this is the story of the great battle between the pirates of the world and the band of merciless men who would purge us from the seas, and make the name ‘Hell's Gatemen' a source of terror to us all.”

A great colored bird flapped and cawed up to the canopy above. Delaney watched it wing through the air until it disappeared into the blue beyond. Below him, the fish still looked hungry. He absently checked his pockets for a morsel of food.

It was a funny thing, how pirates loved to hear stories of their great enemies. He supposed it wasn't much different than how good men and women, upright folks with children in tow, would sit around listening to tales of cutthroats and buccaneers, men who in actual life would flay them and quarter them and feed them to sharks, given half an excuse. Maybe it was the thrill of fear, he didn't know. But there it was, and it worked the same way with pirates.

“Bah,” he said to the
Chompers,
realizing suddenly what he was doing—looking for food to feed that which mostly wanted to feed on him. He held up an empty hand. “I'm hungry, too. Don't mean I'm eatin' nothin'.”

Delaney was in fact hungry, but not as hungry as he was thirsty. He knew that the more he thought about it, the thirstier he'd get. That was the way these things worked. He'd told younger sailors plenty of times just to focus on the work and quit bellyaching about being tired or hungry or thirsty, and sooner or later it would all come. But now he had no work to do. He had nothing but his own thoughts, and they went where they wanted. Right now, they wanted a drink. He worked a little moisture up and swallowed it down in a sharp lump, trying to think of something, anything, else.

Jenta Stillmithers came right to mind. Now there was a distraction. Women like her seemed all delicate, especially when they were frilled up and fancy as she was, walking up that gangway, looking like they were woven together with some fine thread. Somehow, those delicate, fragile things turned the strongest men weak as babes. Men who couldn't be beaten with a sword or a club or a fist could be taken down with an eyelash, and a certain sparkle in the eye behind it. Even men like Damrick
Fellows. And women like Jenta Stillmithers, they could be shattered with a silent turn of the heel.

It was a mercy, Delaney thought, that he himself didn't have the swash and the swagger to draw such a woman's fancy. Smith Delaney wasn't such a man as Damrick, and Maybelle Cuddy wasn't such a woman as Jenta. But even so she had managed to stick a pike deep into his heart that was somehow still there, even after all these years.

And then, as Delaney relaxed into it, Ham's story began to flow again.

“Battle stations!”

Damrick, the young marine, heard the cry from the bosun, collected his long rifle and ammunition from the armory, and climbed to the fighting top halfway up the foremast. The seabreeze blew back his hair, and his heart was pumping even faster than his feet. Arriving ahead of his squad, he attached his safety line to the mast with a large brass toggle. It couldn't protect him from flying musket shot, cannonballs, and shrapnel, to which he would be completely exposed. But it could keep him, or what was left of him, from falling to the deck or into the sea.

Damrick did not know this from experience. The thousands of drills and maneuvers in his three years at sea had gone like clockwork. The Kingdom of Nearing Vast had not been at war for decades, and while the Kingdom of Drammun postured and threatened and encroached and spied as always, the only actual bloodletting enemies of the Vast people were pirates. And in Damrick's experience, pirates flew like rousted pheasants when a royal navy frigate like the
Defender
topped the horizon.

Today, though, on the final leg of his last voyage, a sleek little brigantine flaunting the skull-and-bones was revealed suddenly when the
Defender
rounded the western tip of Fire Island, on a northwesterly heading. In full view of the Vast man-o'-war, the pirates unloaded a salvo into the belly of a fat, slow merchant vessel. These pirates, intent on their prize, were caught sails struck, stern to their new foe. The brigantine began a turn to windward, hard to port, abandoning her would-be prize in an effort to avoid being run upon from starboard astern, hopeful to get her prow around far enough to manage a broadside engagement, port side to port side.

She moved quickly, but in error. The
Defender'
s captain immediately ordered his helmsman to steer the ship between the pirates and their prey.
The brigantine's port turn and the man-o'-war's forward momentum would conspire together to keep the outlaws' stern exposed for the entire pass. With only one aft cannon facing a broadside of fifteen guns, the conclusion was foregone.

The
Defender
was at two hundred yards and closing, all her guns primed and loaded, when fire belched from the brigantine's stern cannon. An orange blur whirred over Damrick's head, passing through the heavy sailcloth as though it were frayed gossamer. The echoing boom trailed behind like a lazy watchdog finally aroused. Damrick felt heat in the wake of the shot, as though the midsummer sun had suddenly crossed the sky in a flash.

“They aim to burn us down,” muttered the compact, red-faced Lye Mogene, kneeling to Damrick's right. This young marine wore a thick, ragged brown beard under round, ruddy cheeks that pushed up against deeply creased, sunken eyes. The combination made him look healthy but always tired. Now he swore at pirates in general and nestled one cheek firmly into his rifle stock.

Damrick looked at the round hole in the canvas above him, saw it was blackened around the edges. A few red embers still struggled to catch the canvas. He had heard stories about red-hot cannonballs, how they'd pass through a man and leave him dead with a clean hole and no blood. He raised his own long rifle, sighted down the barrel at the approaching ship. He saw a thin plume of smoke rising from her afterdeck. That would be the furnace in which her crew heated the shot.