Alias Hook (6 page)

“Well, Hook,” he cries again, “what game is this?”

Tension thrums among the men, staring up at this impossible vision, a boy riding the air currents overhead with the ease of an albatross. None have ever seen him so close-up before. Beneath the Pan, behind his sight line, I see Jesse’s fingers inch off his oar, stretch toward his pistol. Something thrills in my blood, but prudence snuffs it out: no, not here, a misfire now will cost all their lives. I hastily signal him to halt in the act of raising my hand to tilt back my hat.

“No game,” I tell Pan. “We are burying one of our shipmates,”

“I don’t believe it.” He frowns down at the suspicious canvas at our feet, buzzes closer to me. He takes special delight in punishing deceit. “We haven’t even had a fight!”

“It was none of your doing,” I begin, and instantly regret it as his keen expression clouds over. It’s utter folly to suggest anything could happen in the Neverland beyond his command.

“I think you’re trying to escape again!” he counters.

“Come, my bully, you know me better than that,” I cozen him patiently. “Do you think me a fool?”

“I think you’re a liar and a cheat,” he sneers at me, with that maddening half-smile that is so often a prelude to death. “I think you’re a
man
!”

Should he take it into his head to draw his sword, my men will be at a fearful disadvantage; there’s buggering little room to maneuver in a boat, and we are vulnerable on the water. None of them can swim, I venture; for myself, I dread eternal life underwater above all things, forever at the mercy of monsters like the loreleis and the crocodile, eyes bulging, skin spongey, lungs forever bursting for want of air. I shake off the thought.

“You’re up to something, Hook,” Pan accuses, peering at me with combative intensity. “I can feel it!”

“We are a funeral party, nothing more,” I say calmly, banishing all thoughts of the cargo we carry. I’ve learned to think nothing, care for nothing, in his presence. But if he planted that woman in our path, why come all the way out here, alone, instead of bringing a formal war party of boys to the ship? That’s the way it’s always been.

Unless he doesn’t know.

“But since you’ve come all this way, let’s have a game,” I add quickly, my fingers sliding into my coat pocket in search of one of the many objects I keep about my person to barter with the little magpie. I must turn this moment to my advantage before he can set his own rules. My fingers close round something smooth and hard, which I withdraw. Too late, I recognize the stiletto recently liberated from Dodge. It’s folly to arm the boy with another weapon to use against us, but there’s no time to find anything else. I stand carefully in the stern, leg braced against Burley’s solid bulk, and Pan rises too, giving the men some breathing room.

“This blade says you can’t give me true answers to three questions,” I challenge Pan, holding the closed knife aloft. He’s arrested in midair, watches with birdlike curiosity as I press the metal button to snap out the blade. Slowly, he bares his baby teeth and nods. “How many men in this boat?” I begin, hooking the knife closed again.

“Not enough to beat me!” the boy gloats.

True enough. Pan can’t count past three, but neither does he lie. “Where are your boys?”

“I sent them to the Indians to learn how to scalp.”

No shrieking has been heard on the water that would signal my men are their victims, back aboard the
Rouge
. Surely Pan would not be here, missing all the fun, if they were. In any case, his wild pack of boys will not attack without their leader. But I must gather my wits; an extra question out of turn will forfeit the game. I revolve the prize in my fingers. I’ll not to let it go without something of value in return, if I can play one audacious trump without tipping my own hand.

“For what reason would you ever bring a grown-up woman into the Neverland?”

“That’s a stupid question!” snorts Pan.

“And that is no answer,” I shrug, and begin to lower the weapon.

“I never would! Never, ever!” he shouts indignantly. “No grown-ups allowed in the Neverland, especially no lady! I would never let one come here, and nobody else better, either,” he adds with a furious glare. “That’s the truth!” And he swoops down to snatch the weapon out of my grasp. “I win again, Hoo—”

But Nutter springs up, all yowling impulse and no strategy at all, his giant fingers closing round one of Pan’s mangy boots, and for an instant Pan flails sideways in the air.

“No fair!” the boy shouts. Like all tyrants, he believes he himself always acts with the utmost fairness. Then up he goes in a detonation of fiery sparks, a reek of brimstone, and a shrill cacophony of fairy language, leaving Nutter grasping empty air, and the boat near scuttled beneath us.

“Hey!” Pan cries in irritation from high above us. “Kes!”

Of course his imp is nearby. I throw mysef over Nutter to shield him from the inevitable retaliation, glancing up just as a dazzling flash scorches my eyes. Amid the frenzy of shouting men and harsh fairy noise, hands I cannot see pry me off Nutter and grapple me back to my seat in the reeling boat.

“Nothing happens in the Neverland unless I say so!” Pan’s voice shouts from his magical updraft. “Don’t you forget it, Hook!”

Then nothing but grumbling men and water lapping against our boat. Whatever the fairy threw in my eyes burns there still, although I presume it will not last; fairy spells, like all their humors, are fleeting. But she’d already bustled the boy out of harm’s way, was it necessary to half-blind me into the bargain? The wooden thwart rocks beneath me as the men fight to steady the boat, grunt at their creaking oars. Their acrid man-sweat mingles with the pungency of brine and salt and fish off the water. But the menace I felt in my bones when the boy was about has subsided.

“Gone, Cap’n.” It’s Flax’s voice, directly across from me, clotted with incredulity. It’s always a shock, the first time they actually see an aviating boy.

“Sorry, Cap’n, I couldn’t get a clear shot,” Jesse apologizes.

“Almost had the little wanker,” grumbles Nutter.

At least they still have breath to voice their defiance. No more lives were lost today, and all I had to forfeit was my sight. I might almost count it a victory. To say nothing of the information I gleaned from the boy. No grown-up women allowed? He could not have been more vehement on that point.

If Pan didn’t bring her here, who did?

Chapter Six

PERISH

“It’ll have to be up front, Cap’n,’ mutters Sticks, my carpenter.

“The foredeck?” I echo, peering at him in the gloom belowdecks. “It’s no use to me there. Why not build it where I mean to use it, on the quarterdeck?”

I am deep in the hold in my shirtsleeves as Sticks and I inspect the store of timber we keep on board for building shields. The imp’s spiteful charm has worn off over the course of the day, but my vision is still tender in dark places, and for close work, I must resort to a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles I keep about me these days, left behind by a former crewman who needs them no more. Squinting through them now, I frown at what I see. Our shields are primitive wooden devices that offer my men some protection against airborne blades and arrows in hand-to-hand combat, but these staves are short, to be nailed onto a frame and carried. I’ve something more substantial in mind for this new barricade, a shelter from which to deploy a long-range weapon, wielded by a skilled marksman.

Sticks scratches at the top of his pink pate, where the hairline has begun its retreat, twirls at the stubby yellow pencil behind his ear. “No room t’set up my table and tools,” he shrugs at me.

The fellow was certainly in some sort of building trade back in the world. He’s learned he has nothing to fear from me so long as he speaks sense; I am not unfamiliar with the carpentry trade myself, and he knows it. And in this case, I know he is right. I had my quarterdeck severely chopped for faster sailing, back when the
Rouge
could still call herself a sailing vessel; there’s scarcely room there now for more than my daily pacing. Then too, action on board the
Rouge
always occurs forward, where Long Tom is stationed, or in the waist. It may indeed be best to erect this new battlement in the bows, should any imps or flying boys come snooping about, to conceal our purpose of launching an attack from the rear.

“We can build ’em in sections,” Sticks offers.

“Hinged together,” I agree, absently pushing the spectacles up my nose. “Lightweight, for easy transport later. Excellent. Make your preparations.”

He stops playing with his pencil, ducks his head slightly. “Aye, Cap’n,” he murmurs, and turns away to tot up what he’ll need.

Wan daylight seeping in from the hatch provides the only illumination as I slide off my spectacles and fold them into my hand. Heading for the hatchway, I step gingerly through rank bilgewater, round the shadowy shapes of casks, crates, and forgotten ancient plunder that’s served as ballast for centuries. I near leap out of my skin when one of the shadows presumes to speak.

“Cap’n? Fink I could ‘ave a word?”

“Yes, Filcher?” I command myself to resume breathing. He’s scarce more than a wraithlike silhouette in the gloom.

“Well, you always want to know wot’s going on below decks, like,” my first mate reminds me.

I nod. That is the chief commission of his office, one to which his life of petty crime has made him particularly well suited.

He fidgets with a wisp of his limp, straw-colored hair. “Well, it’s the lads. They fink we ‘adn’t oughter ‘ave ’er aboard, Cap’n.”

“Ah.” The men have been restive on this point all day, ever since I had the woman stowed in one of the smaller cabins adjacent to mine, where a great litter of empty bottles, spare cordage, fouled, moldy canvas and the Devil only knows what other disgusting flotsam have been abandoned for centuries. At present, she is still too stuporous to tell me anything, but I can wait. We’ve nothing but time in the Neverland.

“Fink it’s bad luck, like,” Filcher goes on, uneasily. “A Jonah.”

So it always is in the stories, whenever a Wendy is brought on board as a hostage, else how would these lubbers even know the word? “On what grounds?” I prompt him carefully.

“No women allowed,” he reminds me. “We all ’eard the little brat. She opened all our traps. And what about Dodge?”

“Dodge?” I frown at him. “Are they saying—”

“Nobody’s saying nuffink, Cap’n,” Filcher rejoins quickly. “But Dodge were pretty sharp up in the, um, you know…”

“Yards,” I remind him patiently.

“Yeah, and the ropes ‘n’ all.”

“And he were pretty drunk,” I point out.

“I’n’it odd, though, that she shows up the very day we lose Dodge?” Filcher persists, with an emphatic nod.

I fail to see this connection, exactly, but I know how idle minds crave a scapegoat for all their ills.

“And them bleedin’ drums last night.”

This is a point worth taking. Should there be some new game in play, the Indians might well be involved. Was their infernal drumming a warning meant to cow us, or a rehearsal for victory meant to mock us? But there is no one among my crew to whom I might unburden myself of these thoughts. They must be led or they will be twice as vulnerable.

“Mr. Filcher,” and I drop my voice to a low, conspiratorial tone, “do not imagine for one moment that Hook does not have a reason for everything he does. This woman may harbor information we can use against the boys, something that could save our lives. You would oblige me by telling the men that for all our sakes, she’s not to be harassed or provoked until I get it out of her.”

“Aye, aye, Cap’n,” Filcher agrees, perkier now to think he’s privy to an important confidence, and he melts back into the shadows.

If this woman is a chit in some hideous new game, I will know it soon enough. But if she is here in spite of Pan’s wishes, that too is worth knowing. If the boy’s power over all in this place is not absolute, if there is a chink in his glamorous amour, I must be prepared to bend events to my advantage. To seize my chance.

The tinkling of a tiny bell.

Don’t be afraid.

An unseen companion almost near enough to touch.

There is always a way out. Take my hand.

And there in the darkness, a fleeting smile in a face I still can’t see, yet warmth floods into my blood, and I am on board a ship sailing straight into the sky, under a blood-red moon, over a dark sea that sparkles like stars, and I am rising with it, surging toward something wonderful. Yes. Please. Sail me all the way this time …

Then the dull thud of my hook against the bedpost rattles me awake, as if I were attempting to flap into the air like some deluded albatross, and I sink back into the bedclothes, disoriented, aching. Betrayed, yet again by my infuriating dream. More real than ever tonight, and thrice as terrible, beguiling me with a ghostly smile. A lamp burns on the bedside table, next to another bottle my steward must have brought in while I slept. My stomach churns at the very thought. Wine is no proof against dreaming.

Children find the Neverland in their dreams; their longing bores through the barrier between their world and this one, and in they tumble. My men, too, return in this way. For ages I deluded myself it must be possible to dream a way out. But my dreams were coy and would not come at all, or else plagued me with dark and muddled shades of my old world, bitter memories to which I have no desire to return—my heedless youth, the cruel circumstances by which I turned to piracy, the sorcery that brought me here. Or else I dreamed visions of appalling violence, cities in ruins, fire raining down from the sky. These are my dreams: savage nightmare or mocking torment, a phantom ship that never quite bears me away.

I stagger up from my bed, and a length of silk rustles over the side in my wake, a waterfall of peacock, gold and burgundy that glistens in the firelight, puddling at my feet. It’s still dark night out my stern windows. I turn to my ancient sea chest at the foot of my bed, the deck cold against me bare feet, my linen shirt sweat-drenched and reeking, throw back the lid of my chest and fall to my knees before it. My shoulder aches inside my harness as I hook aside more shirts and cravats, braided breeches of ancient vintage, my fingers probing the mustiest hidden crevices of the chest for any packet I might once have squirreled away and forgotten.