Deadweather and Sunrise (19 page)

A short way from the pigpens was a cluster of buildings, connected by a stretch of dirt road to a dock that jutted out into a horseshoe-shaped bay.

There was a cargo ship half a mile offshore, sitting high in the water. Guts pointed to it.

“She’ll come in on the tide,” he said. “Load up, go out on it in the morning. Just gotta get aboard.”

I wasn’t too thrilled about stowing away on another ship, but I had to admit it made more sense than trying to build a seaworthy raft.

“How do we know she’s not headed to the Continent?” I asked him.

“Don’t ship pigs ’cross no ocean. Next port she makes, we’ll jump ship to Deadweather.”

He gave a twitchy shrug, then stepped back off the top of the ridge. “Jus’ need to wait fer dark.”

We found a good shady spot just inside the forest and lay down on the grass to wait out the sun. Even though I’d slept plenty the night before, I dozed off pretty fast. When I woke up a while later, Guts was standing nearby, bare-chested. He was so skinny the sun practically shone through him, and I could see every one of his ribs. He was holding up his stump, squinting at it as he turned it at various angles. Then he feinted with it few times, like it was a knife he was using to attack someone.

He smiled, pleased with his fantasy. Then he noticed me watching him and grimaced, dropping his arm quickly to his side as he looked away.

“What’s that about?” I asked.

“Shut up.”

“What were you doing?”

“Nothin’!”

“Aren’t we partners?”

“So?”

“So you can tell me.”

“Not ’ardly.”

“I’d tell you.”

He snorted. Then he sat down on the grass.

After a few moments of quiet, he said, “Want to get a hook.”

“For the end of your hand?”

He nodded.

“So why don’t you?”

“Need a blacksmith. Money to pay ’im.”

“A third of a treasure would probably take care of that.”

“’Pends on the treasure.”

He reached over to where his shirt lay on the grass. He must have taken it off to use as a pouch, because there was a large pile of berries on top, picked from a nearby bramble. He scooped up a handful and then motioned for me to take what I wanted.

“Wot is it?” he asked through a mouthful of berries.

“What?”

“The treasure.”

“Oh… I don’t know, exactly.”

“Gotta know somethin’.”

“It’s Native. There was a ruler, a hundred years ago. I forget the name. They called him the Fire King—”

Guts made a strange choking noise that I gradually realized was a laugh.

“What?”

“The Fire King? Tell another!”

“What?”

“It’s bunk! Don’t exist!”

“How do you figure?”

“Wot, never heard the jokes?”

“No. What are they?”

“Like… if a pirate’s spoutin’ off, like, ‘I can whip this whole crew at leg wrestlin’,’ another’ll say, ‘That an’ a map get ye the Fire King’s treasure.’ Or he says, ‘Ten more cannons, we could outgun Burn Healy,’ an’ the other one says, ‘Yeh—an’ if I ’ad the Fire King’s treasure, I could retire.’ It’s a joke!”

“That’s not a joke. Just says it’s valuable. Doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”

“Yeh, it does.”

“If it’s all a joke, then why’s my family dead?”

“Dunno. ’Ow’d they die?”

I told him the whole story from the beginning, starting with Dad coming down the hillside acting funny and ending with Birch trying to throw me off the cliff. By the end, he wasn’t laughing anymore.

“Gotta be somethin’ on that land,” he said. “Don’t make sense otherwise.”

“So what do they say about the Fire King’s treasure?”

“Who?”

“Everyone. The men who joke about it. What do they say is in it?”

“Dunno. Just… big.”

Then he scrunched his eyes until they were nearly shut, like he was thinking hard about something.

“And more’n that… Magic, too.”

“What kind of magic?”

He thought some more.

“Killin’ magic… Power o’ the Gods.”

“How?”

“Dunno.”

One thing that hadn’t really made sense to me—if Pembroke was already rich, why go to so much trouble just to get richer?—suddenly got a lot clearer.

It wasn’t just treasure he wanted. It was power.

But Guts was shaking his head. “Bunk.”

“Why’s that?”

“If the Fire King ’ad magic power… wouldn’ta lost.”

“Who says he lost?”

“Ever see a Native?”

“Not up close. Just in the distance. Working the silver mines on Sunrise.”

“Yeh. Bunch of slaves.” Guts shook his head, twitching with distaste.

“I’m not sure they’re slaves,” I said, remembering what Pembroke had once said about slavery being illegal.

“Close enough.” He gave a twitchy shrug. “So much for magic.”

FROM A CONCEALED SPOT on the top of the ridge, we watched the ship dock—two of the men from the island, no bigger than ants in the distance, met the boat and tied up the lines thrown onto the dock by the ship’s small crew. Then the crew disembarked, and they all disappeared into one of the outbuildings.

A few men reappeared an hour before sunset and made their way to the pens as the pigs crowded in a throbbing pink swarm around what must have been their feed troughs. Then the men went back inside. Smoke began to curl up from a chimney in the main building.

Once it was good and dark, I nudged Guts.

“Should we go now?”

He shook his head. “Just ’ave to wait in the ship longer.”

So we stayed there, drifting in and out of sleep, until Guts shook me awake in the middle of the night and we made our way down the hillside to the dock. We skirted as wide of both the humans and animals as we could, taking a roundabout route along the shoreline.

The closer we got, the worse the smell was. I nearly gagged on the approach to the dock, but I told myself (why, I don’t know,
because it was particularly stupid thinking) that it would get better once we were on board.

The crew were all bunked on land, and we crossed a gangplank onto the deck with no trouble. Guts searched until he found a hatch in the flooring with a big iron ring, which he managed to lift with his good hand.

Even worse smells wafted out of the opening as he beckoned me in. It was pitch-black down there and impossible to tell how far down the floor was. I started in feet first, my upper arms braced against the deck, and slowly lowered myself, hoping to find the floor with my feet before I had to let go.

I got as low as I could manage, but my legs were still dangling in air.

“Drop!” Guts muttered.

“It stinks in there!”

“Come on, fancy,” he growled as he shoved me off.

It wasn’t a long drop—the hold was maybe six feet high—but I landed in a squish of straw and manure that made my feet slip out from under me, and I fell backward onto my rear with another heavy squish.

I was gagging from the stench and the general disgust when I heard Guts whisper, “Heads up!”

His feet slipped as he landed, and he fell just like I did—only I was already there, so he plopped right on top of me. There was more squishing, and I suddenly wished we’d built a raft instead. If this was better than drowning, it wasn’t by much.

“Disgusting!”

“Wait till the pigs come in.”

I tried to get used to the light, only there wasn’t any.

“I can’t see a thing.”

“Find a wall. Feel along that.”

“This is stupid! When somebody comes in, they’ll see us.”

“Not if we’re in the straw.”

“You can’t be serious!”

“Who’d go lookin’ for us?”

“What a stupid idea!”

“Too late now.”

It took some doing, but we managed to feel our way to a corner and pile up straw on top of ourselves. After a while, a few cracks of bluish light started to appear overhead as the sun came up and the light began to filter through the seams in the ceiling planks.

And so began the longest day of my life. I never got used to the smell—or, for that matter, the sensation of lying in a bed of manure—and Guts turned out to be right: when the pigs showed up, it got worse.

They came in squealing an hour after dawn, through a door in the side that flooded the room with light when it opened—and revealed that we’d done a lousy job of hiding ourselves under the straw. Fortunately, none of the men herding the pigs had any more interest in looking inside than I had in being there, so we went unnoticed.

The pigs ignored us, and we did our best to ignore them. But once the door closed and everything went dark, they started to squeal in fright, and as the ship got under way and began to lurch with the waves, they got even more scared, which made them squeal all the more. Finally, someone opened the overhead hatch,
giving the pigs (and us) enough light to see by, and the noise died down a bit.

Sometime around late afternoon, we docked. Guts and I had burrowed in pretty good by now, but even so there were some tense moments when a herder came in to hustle the less cooperative pigs out the door. After they were gone, I looked to Guts, my eyes begging him to let us stand up.

He shook his head.

“Wait till dark,” he whispered.

We lay motionless until the daylight faded away. Then we lay there some more. Finally, Guts nudged me. We got up and felt our way along the wall to a ladder on the opposite side of the hold, then climbed up to the deck.

The ship was moored at a dock on the edge of a good-sized port—a forest of masts and rigging surrounded us. At the rear of the ship, the crew were playing cards and drinking around a barrelhead. We moved away from them, monkey-climbing a mooring line to the dock. I was taking my first step toward the port when Guts suddenly pulled me back behind a pile of crates.

I peered around the crates and realized what had concerned him. Standing at the end of the dock was a pair of armed soldiers. They were facing away from us, but there was no way to get off the dock without going right past them.

We had a brief, mostly silent argument, making our points with hand gestures. I wanted to jump in the water and swim for the shore, but Guts was worried the splash would attract the attention of the soldiers.

Guts eventually gave in, and we jumped. But he was right—the
first thing I heard when my head broke the water was the sound of feet running on the wooden planks overhead. I took cover behind the closest piling under the dock, out of view of anyone peering over the side, and tried to stay as still as possible.

Guts was doing the same at the next piling. We listened as the soldiers debated what they’d heard and whether it was important enough for them to look closer. Eventually, they shrugged it off and returned to their position at the head of the dock.

We waited awhile and then began to swim the length of the dock toward the sea, working our way slowly down a line of moored ships until we figured we were far enough from the soldiers to move out across the adjacent docks and into the bay of open water between the last dock and the shore.

I was so preoccupied with being quiet, and so glad to be out of the filth, that at first I didn’t pay attention to the outline of the island ahead in the moonlight, with its long stretches of beach that ended in a pair of cliffs slowly rising along the shore to either side of the port.

Then I noticed the silhouette of a fortress sitting atop the nearer cliff, and I felt a pang of recognition in my gut. I turned in the water to look back at the town, which was slowly coming into view as we cleared the line of ships along the dock.

There was no mistaking the familiar spread of the buildings.

As the pang turned to fear and spread through my body, I uttered one of Guts’s pirate curses.

“What?” he whispered.

“We’re on Sunrise,” I said.

D
unno why yer all in a twist.”

“Because there are people on this island who want to kill me!”

“Yeh, but
yer
gonna kill
them.
”

“I can’t kill anybody like this! I’m half naked!”

We were huddled in our underpants behind a large rock on the dark, empty beach north of Blisstown. The rest of our soggy clothes lay in a pile nearby. We’d stripped them off when we reached land, and once I realized how disgusting they still looked and smelled, I knew that was it for them.

Guts was harder to convince. “Put this lot back on.”

“It’s all covered in pig dung!”

“I’ve worn worse.” He shrugged, or maybe just twitched. It was hard to tell with him.

“It’s no good. We’ve got to find new ones.”

“Ye can take ’
is
clothes. Soon’s ye kill ’im.”

Once I’d told him where we were, Guts had gotten it into his
head that this was a perfect opportunity to kill Roger Pembroke. Just the thought of it filled me with dread, but I couldn’t exactly tell Guts that, because it had been my idea in the first place. So I had to make do with more limited objections.

“I’d never fit in his clothes! He’s very tall. Anyway, I can’t kill someone in my underwear.”

“Course ye can. ’Appens all the time.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “I seen it. More’n once. Get to it! Which way’s his house?”