Greenbeard (9781935259220) (9 page)

“Indeed, and he was right, and that cove Newton, whom I saw at Cambridge but never spoke to, put the whole thing square by identifying gravity - the force that makes the apple fall and the cannonball curve in its flight - with the force which holds the moons and planets on their courses,” said the Captain. “Furthermore, you may have heard of the ideas of the Italian monk Giordano Bruno.”

“I was thinking of him only this morning, and how I was not unduly surprised that the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition tied him to a stake and burned him, by way of a critical appraisal of his work.”

“He was right,” said the Captain.

“What? That the stars of the welkin are suns alike to our own sun?”

“Yes.”

“And that planets may orbit them as our Earth orbits the sun?”

“Yes.”

“And that creatures may inhabit those distant planets?”

“Yes.”

“And that those creatures may be intelligent aware beings, such as we are?”

“Yes.”

“
Ay caramba!
Be you serious? You seem very certain, how can you be sure of that?”

“Because, Peter, I have met some of them,” said Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges.

Blue Peter was silent for some time, then he drained his glass of beer in one long swallow. The Captain stood up and looked in the sailcloth bucket.

“The last two beers,” he said, handing Blue Peter a bottle. He settled his back against the tree-trunk again. “Now you are thinking that I am bereft of my wits, or else engaged in some kind of egregious spoof, or leg-pull. I am neither insane nor jesting, I assure you. You can see why I have kept this to myself for nearly a year.”

Blue Peter poured his beer, a thoughtful expression on his face.

“Pray continue, Sylvestre. I shall reserve judgement for the meantime, although this tale is becoming a little rich to easily swallow.”

“When I rowed around the point into Nombre Dios Bay a year ago, dressed all in black, with my face blackened, in a black boat with muffled oars, I believed myself invisible. I was not. As far as those extramundane creatures were concerned I might just as well have been in a Venetian carnival-gondola, strung with coloured paper lanterns, playing a bugle. They have a device to see in the dark. It sees heat instead of light, and our bodies are always warm. So they caught me, Peter, and I was enslaved.

“The
brujo
who spoke to Bill's pal spoke the truth; it was not the Spanish plate fleet, but the Martian saucer fleet. The extramundanes have ships which sail the empty voids between the stars as we sail our ships upon the oceans. They are called ‘saucers' because they resemble a saucer if seen from below as they fly by in the air. They do not come from Mars - which is a bleak cold lifeless place of nothing but empty deserts, the air too thin to breathe - but they do use it as a base, as we use the island of Recailles. Thus the Martian saucer fleet.”

“What do they look like, these extramundane creatures?” said Blue Peter slowly.

“I did not clap eyes upon the Glaroon at all - it was he who had captured me - He cannot breathe our air, and so resides mostly in a sealed chamber filled with the noxious air of his own home-world. His minions serve him and do his bidding, some human slaves such as I became, some extramundanes of various sorts, some of them slaves, too. One sort are small grey men with slanting black eyes. Another kind is alike to a toad-man, and very strong but not very clever. Another is alike to a lizard with six limbs; the front two being arms, the rearmost legs and the middle two somewhat in between. They are excellent mechanics, those lizard things, as they can work on an engine with four hands, sitting back on their rear legs and their tail. Their speech sounds like the chirm of birdsong, but some of them can mimic our tongues well enough to converse. They are congenial company, too,
unlike the little grey buggers, who are so dreich that they could make a conventicle of Methodies seem like a beano in a bawdy-house.”

“
Congenial company,
Sylvestre? Six-legged lizards
congenial company
? You stretch my credulity too far!”

“I only speak the truth. They are fond of an alcoholic drink, particularly beer; as spirits are too strong for their heads, unless watered. They enjoy a good yarn, well-told. They like to dance and cavort, although their music sounds strange to our ears. They do love a game of cards and are great gamblers. And great cheats, too! With four arms it is almost too easy for them to finesse a deck, d'you see? Actually, they are more alike to chameleons. They cannot change colour - they are a shade of greeny-blue - but they have those woogly eyes that can point in different directions, if you know what I mean.”

The Captain demonstrated ‘woogly eyes' by putting fingers in front of his eyes and waggling them around. Blue Peter got to his feet, walked slowly down to the beach, then ran up and down on the sand, shouting ‘arrgh!' occasionally. He walked back to the knoll and sat down again against the tree.

“There is no more beer,” said the Captain, “but here is rum.” He poured a large shot into Blue Peter's glass. Blue Peter took a swallow, and grimaced.

“Captain, if the green of your beard did not tell me
something
strange had happened to you,” he said, “I would have already shot you for trying to gull me with such a ludicrous account. I shall call you ‘Captain' now as your banyan day must be over; if you have gone mad that is serious; if you speak truly that is surely even worse. Pray continue, but perhaps tell me how it is that you were away from the barky for three hours, yet seem to have been away for much longer, having had the time to socialise with six-legged reptiles?”

“Well, I said that I must explain a
couple
of things, but I got distracted,” said the Captain. “The second thing is that time and distance are the same. Some extramundanes, such as the Glaroon, have found the way to travel in the void, in space, but that means also travelling in time, so they have mastered travel both in distance
and
time. From
your
point of view I was away for three hours, but from
my
point of view I was away for about three years. Don't ask me to explain it, as it is not yet completely clear to me, but it has to do with the speed of light not being infinite. It is very quick, but not instantaneous, and that has consequences, apparently. Time is often a fractured mirror, reflecting a bizarre image of reality.”

Blue Peter emptied his glass in a single gulp, and refilled it from the rum-bottle.

“Now please explain about your beard, Captain,” he said, “and how it was made green.”

“It isn't my beard, is how,” said the Captain. “Each filament of it is an extramundane creature, especially bred to replace the hairs of my beard. They draw sustenance from my body, and I can feel them as though they are strange nerves. The Glaroon had them put on me, as I was his butler. They are sensitive to certain emanations, and so could be used to call me, or to tell me things over a distance.”

“I find that very disturbing. Does it hurt?”

“No. It was agony when they were growing into my face, replacing the hairs at their roots, but they don't hurt now. In fact, I am rather fond of them ... or It. I could not have escaped without the Beard. It talked to the library of the Glaroon's mansion on Mars, so to speak, and I was able to learn enough about saucers to navigate my way back through space and time to Nombre Dios Bay. The sun is setting. We must go back to the barky soon enough. Ask the question which is on your lips.”

“The question on the lips of every crewman aboard the
Ark de Triomphe
,” said Blue Peter, “and the one asked in the awful poem; ‘whether anybody knew where he had buried his pelf '.”

“Nowhere,” said the Captain, “and yet everywhere. As the treasure came in I converted it to
financial instruments
- banker's draughts, letters of credit, stocks and shares - as fast as I ever could. You may remember that many of the prize cargoes were goods anyway - flour, wine, whale oil, saltpetre, mercury in greased goatskin bags, even a cargo of porcelain plates! - Eddie Teach would have insisted on payment in gold, if he could even be bothered to take and sell such merchandise, and would have taken a discount for so doing. I traded them instead for shares in cargoes-in-transit and the like until I could get the money safely berthed in a bank, or rather in several banks in several countries. I don't like the idea of burying a chest of gold on an island. It seems a little foolish, especially when one can get two-and-a-half percent at Coutts and the stock-market is booming. Don't tell the Free Brotherhood of the Coasts that I said that, mind you!”

“What are you going to do with the money?” Blue Peter said, pouring the last
of the rum into his glass.

“The influential extramundanes are a mixed bunch, much like your Colonials, I suppose, Peter. There was one, Great Cthulhu, who is the ugliest bugger I ever did see. Alike to a big scaly daemon with the head of a squid, he is. Tentacles waving about like the Medusa's snakey hair. He was a half-decent old cove in some ways, though. Lent me a book by some mad old Arab,
Abdul al
something-or-other. I have a great dislike of the Glaroon, though, and a grudge, too. I was the Glaroon's butler, which was bearable for the most part, but slave-owners are all alike, d'you see? whether they be Colonials or extramundanes. When the Glaroon had parties, he'd put me out the front to greet the guests - ‘Hello, sir! and welcome to the mansion of the Glaroon!' - dressed in a
little blue sailor suit
, and I intend to have my revenge for upon him that!

“I have spent much of the treasure on my plan to avenge myself, but there is plenty left. I have set up a pension fund for the crew, but don't tell anybody yet.”

Captain Greybagges stood up, stretched, and started packing the picnic things.

“It is in my mind to tell the crew about the money soon, at a share-out meeting. I think they will be pleased with the arrangements that I have made - if I can get the wooden-headed sods to understand what I have done for them - and will consequently be easily enthused by my plan to punish the Glaroon, about which they need to know nothing just yet, not even that there is a plan. If my plan succeeds there will be more loot, more pelf, more boodle, more
treasure
than even Croesus himself ever dreamed of. Enough to make Morgan's raid on Panama seem mere apple-scrumping. I'll have to tell Izzie and Bill something of this business, too, but I think that must be slowly, as we go, lest they become ... unsettled. I welcome your advice on that; on what, how and how much to tell them and when, but sleep on it first, it's a lot for you to comprehend. Come on, let's go!”

Blue Peter was silent as they loaded the skiff and pushed it into the sea, small waves lapping around their bare feet.

“I'm sorry I've been obliged to tell you all this, Peter - ignorance is bliss, indeed! - but I need your help with this, your
involved
help. And who else could I tell first? I nearly told Bill once or twice, for the navigating has given him a fine head for the arithmetic and the geometry, so the time-and-space stuff might be easier
for him. Izzie? He is my oldest shipmate, and before that my articled clerk when I was in chambers, but any notion of six-legged reptiles would drive him straight to the bottom of the nearest rum-bottle. You are the cleverest of us four, Peter, so it had to be you.”

The Captain pulled the oars. Blue Peter remained silent for a while. The sun was setting against a mauve sky, its orange light dappling the ocean like a fiery path to the horizon.

“Captain,” he said at last, “what are these lizard-creatures called?”

“Why, we called them ‘lizards', or ‘the lizard people', Peter.”

“Do they have a name for themselves?”

“I'm sure they do, but I don't know it. Anyway, I can't do bird impressions.”

 

 

They clambered up the side of the
Ark de Triomphe
in the quick-growing dark. The pirate crew had lit lanterns, casting yellow pools of light in the purple twilight. Some of the pirates were sprawled on the deck, or sitting on bollards or guns, eating their supper. They muttered ‘good evenings' to the Captain and Blue Peter, intent on their beef-stew, bread and beer.

“Arr!
Bon appetit
, shipmates, wi' a curse!” answered the Captain.

The rest of the crew would be below, eating their meals between the cannons in the gundeck messes, on boards hung from the deckheads on ropes. When the wooden bowls were scraped clean with hunks of bread and cleared away greasy packs of cards would appear, and draughts-boards made of canvas squares, and sly rum-flasks would pass from hand to hand. Captain Greybagges could smell the aroma of the stew, the smoke from the cook's charcoal oven, tar, sweat, sawn timber; the frigate's reassuring fragrance. He turned to Blue Peter.

“A toddy, Master Gunner?”

“No, Captain. I find that I am weary, and you've given me much to think about. I shall go to my cottage.”

“I shall set sail tomorrow, on the afternoon tide. We shall be away from Recailles for some months, so make arrangements for your horse. Good night, Peter.” The Captain went down below to the Great Cabin in the stern.

Blue Peter Ceteshwayoo rode the old Percheron mare up the winding road away from Porte de Recailles, the sky now inky-blue above him, the moon yet to
rise. The horse seemed to know its way in the dark, so Blue Peter let it plod, and mused as he rocked gently on its back, looking up at the bright stars. There is Venus, he thought. Are there strange creatures dwelling upon it? Or upon Orion's belt? All this is madness! Yet there is the indisputable fact of the Captain's green beard. His account is not without points of reference, either. There are tales of fellows spirited away to the Land of Faerie, returning years later, no older. There are tales of men and women aging overnight; one day young and hale, the next morning ancient, sere and white-haired, and sometimes babbling. The myths of the Greeks, also, full of monsters, ‘tentacles waving about like the Medusa's snakes', as the Captain himself had said. Legends of flying chariots, too, and all kinds of supposedly-mythical beasts; daemons, hobgoblins, ogres, kobolds, fetches, lemures, dragons, wyverns, basilisks, yales, golems, bunyips and bugaboos ... The Captain's teratological narrative provided a possible basis for these fables, an exegesis of their provenance, at least...