Deadweather and Sunrise (30 page)

I stood up.

“I’m going back to the tomb,” I said.

“I’ll come with you.”

“No. I need to go alone.”

I TOOK ALL the blank parchment we had and stuffed it in a sack along with an inkpot, a couple of quills, and a copy of
The Savages of Urluk
, because the cover was big and stiff enough to use as a writing surface, it had fat margins I could write on if I ran out of parchment, and it wouldn’t be much of a loss to burn it when I was done.

Guts came into the kitchen as I was filling a lantern with oil and asked me what I was doing.

“I’ll tell you later,” I said. “Wait here in case Stumpy comes back. If he does, come get me at the tomb.”

On the way up the hillside, I stopped at the woodpile behind the house and got the sledgehammer we kept there for splitting firewood with a wedge. It was heavy, and carrying the lantern and sack along with it was awkward because I had to keep both of them level so the oil and the ink wouldn’t spill.

Managing all of that made for a slow trip up the mountain, and as I climbed through the moonlit orchards, I had plenty of time to think about whether what I was about to do made any sense.

My plan was to memorize the writing on the wall, copying and recopying every hieroglyph and squiggle until I could draw it all from memory.

Then I was going to smash the wall and burn the copies, so there was nothing left except what was in my head.

It wouldn’t solve my problem, exactly. But it seemed to change the rules in a way that would help me. It bound the Fire King’s treasure to me as tightly as if I’d swallowed it whole—Pembroke couldn’t find it without me, and if he killed me, he’d never get it.

Which meant I’d have an advantage over him—and it felt like I should be able to use that advantage to get him to agree to quit trying to kill me. If I could do that, I wouldn’t have to kill him after all.

Which meant I wouldn’t have to lose Millicent.

And I might even be able to keep the treasure out of his hands for good—which, short of killing him, seemed like the best way to avenge my family.

I wasn’t quite sure how to make it all work out in my head—in fact, the more I thought about it, the more confused I got.

But even though I couldn’t figure out exactly how it was going to help me, something about memorizing the map just felt right. I wasn’t spending the night lying around helpless, waiting for the soldiers to march on my home. I was taking action, seizing control of the situation, doing something bold and unpredictable.

There was a little part of it that felt cowardly—the part where, if push came to shove, I could use the map to bargain for my life—but mostly it just seemed clever. So clever, in fact, that I couldn’t even really understand it.

But I’d figure it all out. I was sure of it.

When I got to the cave, I quit thinking about the plan, because I needed all my brain space to memorize the map. If I couldn’t do it before Pembroke showed up with his soldiers, the whole plan was wrecked.

I didn’t know how much time I had—I guessed it was about midnight when I finally got to the cave, but I could’ve been off by an hour or more on either side. And there was no telling how long it would be before Guts came up the mountain to get me.

Making the first copy was agonizingly slow, not only because I had to keep setting down the parchment to raise the lantern and study the wall, but because the markings seemed to have been drawn with a shaky finger, making the lines fat and indistinct. Add this to the fact that I’d never seen such writing before, and it meant that much of the time, I had no idea what I was looking at.

That feather might be a plant stalk… What seemed like a spear could just as easily be a shovel, or an arrow… Two squarish ovals on either side of an oblong one looked like a butterfly at first…
then turned into the eyes and nose of an owl… and then finally, one hopelessly confused minute later, turned back into a butterfly.

And the mess of squiggles, dotted lines, and random shapes in between the clumps of hieroglyphs—what seemed to be the map itself—was even harder to decipher. Was that fat dot actually a circle, drawn too tightly? Was that boxy circle actually a lazy square? That curved splotch at the end of a straight line, next to two nearly identical straight lines: was it a tail? Or a dot? Or just a mistake?

Halfway through the first copy, the uncertainty overwhelmed me, panic tightened my chest, and I had to step out of the cave and lie on the ground for a while, staring up at the stars.

I thought back to a book I’d read about the constellations, one that created absurdly detailed patterns of men and animals by connecting what to me looked like meaningless dots of light in the sky. That helped calm me down, because I realized I didn’t have to choose between an owl’s face and a butterfly’s wings—I just had to memorize the figures well enough to recreate them so someone else could decide what they were.

Eventually, I got through the first copy. Then I made three more, straight from the wall itself, until I settled on what I thought was a fairly accurate version. Then I sat down with my back to the wall and just copied the copy, over and over again, giving whatever names to the figures would help me remember them, giving myself permission not to care if they were correct.

Dash dot feather, cup, two dash dot firebird. Spear, sun eye, jagged line stars, tree. Three dash four dot woman face rays. Arrow down line, skull, snakes circled…

Cornstalks, lightning fist, boat over water, cloud eye…

Three squiggles down left, four dashes up, side bird, three circles straight, X…

Sun eye, cloud eye, circle X. Man under circle. Man in circle.

Check the copy. Do it again.

Dash dot feather, cup, two dash dot firebird…

Check the copy. Do it again.

My hand cramped. A leg fell asleep. I stepped outside and hobbled around the lava field until the tingling stopped.

I wished I’d brought food. I should have. There was room in the sack. Stupid.

The stars were fading. It would be dawn soon. I wasn’t ready yet.

I went back in and started again.

Dash dot feather, cup, two dash dot firebird…

Three copies later, I made a perfect one.

The one after that had two mistakes.

The one after that had six.

It was light outside now. I still wasn’t close to finished.

I ran out of paper. I started on the margins of the book.

Three copies later, I made another perfect one.

The next one had two mistakes.

I heard the crunch of feet on the volcanic rocks outside.

It was Guts and Millicent.

“Stumpy’s back,” said Guts. “Boat landed at dawn. They’re comin’.”

“Do the pirates know?”

Guts nodded. “When we left, they was handin’ out the guns.”

I gathered the book and the parchment into a little pile in the corner. They watched me.

“Did you memorize it?” Millicent asked.

“Pretty much,” I said. Then I lit a match to the paper.
The Savages of Urluk
’s cover peeled into sections as the flames consumed it.

I picked up the sledgehammer.

“It’s in yer ’ead? All of it?” Guts asked.

“Hope so,” I said, and swung hard at the wall.

It was strange how easily it all fell to dust. That map had stood undisturbed for a hundred years, and I shattered it beyond recognition in half a minute.

The little fire died out, and we left the cave. The bright morning sun made me blink.

I started down the mountain with Guts, but Millicent hung back at the cave entrance.

“I’m staying here,” she said.

I stopped and looked back at her. She was leaning against the rock wall, arms crossed. Not angry, exactly. More sad. And frightened.

I wanted to tell her I loved her. But it was too big a risk. At that point, it was better to live with the question than press for an answer and get the wrong one.

“Wish us luck,” I said.

She shook her head. “How can I?”

Guts and I walked away. When we got to the edge of the field of wildflowers, I looked back. She’d disappeared inside the cave.

“Don’t worry,” said Guts. “She’ll be down in a few.”

“How do you know?”

“Not gonna miss it. ’Ow could she?”

“Then why didn’t she just come with us?”

“’Cause she don’t know what side she’s on.”

T
ook courage, memorizin’ that map,” said Guts. We were at the edge of the upper orchard, moving at a pretty good clip down the hill.

“It’s not about courage,” I said. “If anything, it’s cowardly.”

“Wot ye mean?”

“I mean, he can’t kill me now. If he does, he’ll lose the treasure.”

“Nah. Just kill ye later. After he tortures ye.”

“Why would he torture me?”

“Make ye draw the map.”

I hadn’t thought about that.
Why didn’t I think about that?

Guts looked back over his shoulder at me. “Why ye stoppin’? Gotta hurry.”

“I’m thinking.”

“Think and walk, then!”

I started moving again, slower than before. A little knot of worry was growing in my stomach.

“The point is… he can’t kill me—”

“Not till he tortures ye.”

“Stop saying that! Look… I memorized it because I want to avoid killing him—”

“No avoidin’ that.”

“There’s got to be a way—”

“How?”

“I haven’t figured it out yet.”

“’Cause it’s impossible.”

The knot of worry was spreading through my entire body. I was starting to feel shaky.

“Oh, God… was I just incredibly stupid?”

“Not stupid! Genius!”

“How?”

“’Cause now ye
can’t
run. He’ll follow ye to the end of the earth. Can’t surrender, or he tortures ye. Yer all in, man. Gotta fight him to the death.” Guts finished the sentence with a jubilant-seeming twitch of his whole head. “Brave, that is.”

“I wasn’t trying to be brave,” I said in a small voice. “I was trying to be clever.”

“Stick with brave. Better at it.”

I TRIED NOT TO THINK about the fact that my brilliant plan to salvage my future with Millicent had not only guaranteed its destruction, but probably my death as well.

Fortunately, I didn’t have much time after that to think about anything. When we got back to the house, the last of the field pirates were disappearing into the lower orchard with their weapons. A dozen men, Mung and Quint included, had stayed behind
to man the fortifications on the porch. Quint had brought out his stew pot and turned it upside down to use as a perch so he could shoot over the dirt-bushel fortifications.

Guts cursed when he realized the pirates had taken all the grenades into the fields. Then he cursed even more bitterly when he stepped onto the porch and saw that someone had pushed the cannon to one side to clear a path down the porch steps.

“I had her locked in on the middle of the road! Gotta aim her all over again!”

As he hauled the cannon back into position, I found Stumpy. After two days of shuttling back and forth from Port Scratch, there were baggy dark circles under his eyes.

“How many soldiers?” I asked.

“Hundred twenty. Plus a few what don’t wear uniforms.”

“Is Roger Pembroke one of them?”

“Dunno. What’s he look like?”

“Tall. Handsome. Rich.”

“Yeh, think it’s him. Leadin’ the pack.”

Guts aimed the cannon as best he could, and we were about to fire it to test its range when we heard the drums. They were surprisingly close—probably no farther than the edge of the property line a couple hundred yards down the hill.

We all got into position, crouched behind the dirt-filled bushels along the length of the porch. Guts and I were in the middle on either side of the cannon, its barrel peeking out over the bushels at the top of the steps. Mung was to my right. Quint was on the other side of Guts. Everyone kept his head and rifle down.

The drums were getting louder. Their relentless, pounding rhythm must have been meant to scare us into giving up.

They didn’t scare me exactly, but they did make my head hurt. I felt dizzy and weak, and I wished I’d eaten breakfast and gotten some sleep instead of staying up all night and memorizing the map like an idiot.

But Guts was right—there was no chance of my running now. I was going to defend my home to the death. And even if I failed, Pembroke wasn’t going to get that treasure.

Maybe that was why memorizing the map had felt like the right thing to do.

Maybe it was brave after all. Stupid, but brave.

The drums rose to a wall of sound, overwhelming everything. They were close.

I got up on one knee, raised my rifle over the bushel in front of me, and sighted down the barrel to the point where the road first broke through the trees.

If Roger Pembroke was leading the pack, I was going to shoot him the moment he came into range.

The first line of troops appeared, in crisp blue uniforms crisscrossed with black ammunition belts. Ten men across, rifles at the ready, bayonets fixed. Pembroke was nowhere in sight.

The first line was followed by a second. Then a third. Then a fourth.