Necroscope: Harry and the Pirates: and Other Tales from the Lost Years (24 page)

“For a moment—one moment only—the tableau was frozen . . . then with his shortsword held high, with his dark eyes blazing and crooked teeth grinding, Black Jake rushed upon the pair. Young Will managed to put himself between his former master and Zhadia, the while fumbling a pistol from his silken sash—only to have it tumble from his palsied hand! Incredible, when with a twitch of just one finger he could have shot Black Jake Johnson stone dead! Ah, but Will’s hands weren’t what they used to be!

“Then Jake was upon him: with a ‘Hah!’ he raised his sword higher, and with a ‘Ho!’ brought it down on Will’s head. It cut him deep, flattening him to the floor with a great bloody gouge in his skull. And now Jake straddled him, and up went his shortsword one more time. At which—

“—The strangest thing! For that was when ‘Mister’ Billy Browen
shouldered Black Jake aside away from the more than half-stunned youth, and met his downward-hurtling blade with that of his own weapon, which causing sparks to fly and Jake to curse! And before the astonished Captain could explode in fury:

“ ’Now hold!’ cried Billy, backing off beyond the immediate reach of his gape-mouthed master’s wrath. And: ‘Cap’n darlin’,’ he continued, ‘Will’s no more than a lad! Don’t go killin’ him, Jake! For there’s nothin’ to be gained—no fame or glory in it for you—naught but shame if it get out that you killed a mere whelp, and for nothin’ more than to spite a treacherous woman!’

“All of this from young Will Moffat’s mouth, you’ll understand, just as he repeated it to me while he hung there rotting on a gibbet’s arm; he having been aware of Billy’s pleas on his behalf, where he’d writhed on the floor in a bloody daze.

“Now through all of this Zhadia had stood there, pale as a beautiful ghost, looking this way and that but blankly, with no expression whatsoever; she had to be in shock: which Black Jake and his men must surely have believed was the case. And now the cuckold—the cheated Captain—turned his rage upon her.

“He went to cut her down, barely in time checked the blow, and very nearly choked on the word as he called her a whore! He snatched at a loose corner of her golden gown where it lay flat to her shoulder, snarling: “All covered in gold, are we? And is yer body so very precious when a mere boy can have it for his pleasure whenever he fancies it, eh? And what of all those rum-soaked swabs down below? . . . How many of them have seen what’s under that glitterin’ rag?
Ye treacherous whore!

“With which he yanked on the sky-stuff to rip it from her. But instead of tearing it simply
unwound
from Zhadia, as of its own accord; which with the force of Jake’s tugging set her spinning, then staggering and toppling, as naked as a newborn child but by no means as pure, as the shimmering robe floated free of her. Naked she was, aye, poor creature . . . a poor lost soul,
in a body that was no longer beautiful but hideously transformed
!

“Moving in and out of consciousness, Will saw her and realised that what he’d been imagining ever since Zhadia first wore the golden thing—or ever since it first wore her!—was now reality. Black Jake saw it, too; he snatched back his hand in a frenzied attempt to break free of the weird mesh that was burning him like slow fire! He went to slash at it, cut it with his sword’s sharp blade, but it wouldn’t cut! And now as he cursed, stumbled, stamped, and hauled on his trapped hand, so the languidly wafting sky-stuff suddenly quickened and became imbued of a terrible purpose! In another moment it had wrapped Black Jake as in the scaly coils of some weird sea serpent!

“As Jake staggered to and fro with his black eyes starting out, down from within the golden sheath which now enveloped him fell the smoking ruins of his customary garments: scraps of his leather jacket, sailcloth trousers, melting silk shirt and sash. Also his weapons: all tumbling free from where he’d lodged them about his person, all black and smouldering as if painted with hot tar!

“He tottered there, obviously in agony, but such was Black Jake’s enormous strength that he refused to go down! And all he said was this, which young Will heard clearly enough, before he passed out from his wound:

“ ‘Look after me, Mister—and look after this young
bastard,
too—’ With a kick in the ribs for Will. ‘Aye, for I’m not yet done with this one. Ooh!
Argh!
’ With which Jake’s eyes sort of glazed over, and his mouth went slack; the pain was gone but so was his mind, most of it. And that was all young Will Moffat knew of things for a while, except that before he passed out he looked again at Zhadia where she’d fallen to the floor, and saw what he’d been caring for ever since the first time she dressed herself in the sky-stuff:

“From her neck up she was the same as ever, likewise from her knees down; but the shape she’d shown when swathed in gold, that had been a disguise, as false—or as normal?—in appearance as that sky-stuff had wanted her to look! For now she was a hag! No more the ravishing Zhadia, not in that ravished body, but an old, old woman: indeed a hag! Her breasts like withered, tattered
sacks lying flat on her ribs, several of which showed ivory white and yellow where the sere skin had shrunk back from them. Her belly: blotched, blackened, and wrinkled; shriveled to leather like a dead thing laid out in the sun too long. And Zhadia’s once-seductive, once-supple thighs and softly curving rump: now no more than skin over bone—and lacking even skin in more places than one!

“Young Will Moffat saw her like that, aye, and knew that his worst fears for her were realised. For in all those months since she first donned that robe—or thing, whatever it was—he had never been able to touch her. Oh, he’d tried, which accounted for the ruined claws he now wore for hands! And he also knew it for an act of mercy when Billy Browen cried his horror and loathing, then did for Zhadia what his Captain should have done, taking her head with his cleanly shining sword . . . !”

The Necroscope felt torn two ways. Now that Erik Haroldson had lost much of his bluster his manner of expression and deadspeak phrasing had acquired a genuine eloquence; there was no denying that he knew how to tell a tale. Nor could there be too much of Erik’s—or young Will Moffat’s, or Billy Browen’s—story left to tell . . . and yet Harry felt a powerful compulsion, an urgent need, to return to the old graveyard and the last-mentioned ex-pirate.

These were the Necroscope’s thoughts during the short interval while Erik paused and considered the best way to continue his narrative: unshielded thoughts that issued into the psychic aether as deadspeak, of course; to which, in such close proximity, the incorporeal Viking was privy. And something in what he had heard at once goaded him to a sharp enquiry:

What? Is it really so, Necroscope?

The tiny harbour’s promenade and sea wall in the immediate vicinity were deserted, prompting Harry to use common speech as he gave himself a shake and replied: “Eh? Is what so?”

Why, that you’re feeling a strange compulsion to return to that old graveyard! If so, I beg you not to be in such a hurry. I fear there’s danger in it, which the rest of this story might in part explain.

Harry gave an impatient sigh, shuffled about to adjust his position on the cold stone wall, and finally said, “Very well—but I’m pretty sure Billy Browen will think it unfair of us. He commenced this story, after all; you’ve continued it . . . surely he should be the one to finish it! Don’t you think so?”

What I think,
the Viking answered,
is that you should hear the rest of it from me. Or at least enough that you can make up your own mind.

And now it was Harry’s turn to query: “But make up my mind about what?”

Ah, if only I knew for sure!
the other answered, in such a way that the Necroscope could sense the frustrated shake of his head.

Then, before Harry could change his mind, the Viking continued the story. . . .

“Billy Browen’s party was now reduced to himself and two others from the
Sea Witch
’s crew, so how exactly they contrived to get wounded Will Moffat and the bereft Black Jake Johnson through a tropical jungle and back to the beached vessel is beyond my ken. Young Will himself—after he regained something of his senses to find himself aboard the
Sea Witch,
with ‘Mister’ Billy Browen in command—could remember nothing of it, which should explain my own uncertainty.

“However, from then on the strangeness grew and grew. What strangeness? Why, the evil power of the golden garment from the sky, of course! By day, the mazed and often-babbling Black Jake—pale Jake now, and vacant eyed—stayed in a locked room just above the bilges; but by night . . . well, who can say? If he got out, and we must assume he did by reason of what occurred, then how? Perhaps someone let Jake out, but why? Or maybe that weird sky-stuff simply unwrapped itself to slip out on its own! Young Will couldn’t even hazard a guess, and neither can I. But for a fact
something
got out—Jake or the golden garment, one or the other—and as for what occurred:

“At first they called it ‘the scourge’: a lethal strain of scurvy which they’d witnessed just once before, except now they had their doubts. And after four of the crew went down with it, night after night on four consecutive nights, then they considered their doubts confirmed. And aye, I have read it in your mind, Necroscope, that you have knowledge of this thing: from Billy Browen, no doubt? What, the scourge? A kind of scurvy? This shrivelling horror, that warped strong men to bags of bones, killing each one of them in a single night . . . ?

“But Billy Browen was alert now, watching how things went: seeing members of the crew sidling off—going down below decks one by one, somehow
lured
down there—to gaze in rapt fascination through knotholes and gapped boards at their once-Captain in his golden kirtle. Or maybe it wasn’t so much Jake that they stared at as the sky-stuff.

“As for Billy himself:

“So far he’d done as his ‘darlin’ Cap’n’ requested of him; he’d looked after both Black Jake and young Will when they were incapable of taking care of themselves. Now, however—despite that the gradually mending, occasionally lucid youth would show Billy his blackened, withered hands—‘Mister’ Browen found himself ever more frequently lured below decks, just like the rest of the crew, to stare at a glassy-eyed Black Jake in the coldly glittering glow of the thing he wore . . . or rather, to stare at the thing that wore Jake as once it had worn Zhadia. . . .

“Then one morning it was discovered that another four crew members, probably four of the strongest willed, had seen and so feared what was going on that they’d stolen a recently acquired rowboat and jumped ship; by which time the entire crew—or the handful that remained—had fallen into this dreadful malaise, no longer carrying out their rightful duties but forever sneaking belowdecks to look at the man in the golden robe.

“Which was how things stood when a naval warship, creeping
up on the
Sea Witch
one night, blew a hole in her hull right on the waterline and finished her off for good.

“Will Moffat, while he would never more be entirely whole, at least had certain of his wits about him that night; or so he told me. Enough that as the vessel began to settle in the water he followed Billy below to warn him against what he believed he was about to do. For Billy was now so mazed in his own mind, so enamoured of the sky-stuff, that he wasn’t about to let it founder with the
Sea Witch;
while Will—for all that he was a mere lad—had resisted the sky-cloth’s attraction for so long that he was now mainly immune to it. But still he knew what it could do to others . . . and Billy Browen was the only man in the world who had ever shown him anything of real friendship.

“And so as Billy came to Jake’s cell, already knee-deep in water, young Will caught up with him. The two looked in on Jake standing there with a cocked pistol to his head; where he’d got the weapon, who could say? Stolen on one of his outings: it had to have been.

“Billy knocked the wedge from the door, yanked it open and reached for a corner of golden weave. Will rasped, ‘Mister Browen, take care!
Leave it be!
’ Black Jake cried, ‘Mister, I’m all done in, so to hell with you and everybody else!’ With which he squeezed his trigger, blew his ear off and a hole right through his head.

“Shocked into his right mind, and gibbering in his terror, Billy clambered up towards the tilting deck; but before he could get there the sky-thing came wafting after. Having left Jake it now wrapped Billy like a shroud, stunning him with the agony of transition.

“As for young Will Moffat: when he saw Billy stagger, stumble, and tumble overboard, he just lay down in the rising water and prayed for an easy death—

“—Which as it happened wasn’t in his stars.

“Will and Billy—the only survivors of the old
Sea Witch
—they were plucked from the briny, thrown in the man-o’-war’s brig, and were delivered to justice in Hartlepool when the ship got blown off course for London in a storm. Since both men were mazed and
lacking finances they could neither defend themselves nor purchase a lawyer; and in any case they were pirates from a notorious ship, the sole survivors of Jake Johnson’s
Sea Witch,
and there had been a price on Billy’s head for almost a decade. All of these terms are Will Moffat’s, of course, which I’m sure you will understand far better than I did.

“Anyway, to get done with this:

“They were hung high right here on the harbour wall, young Will in a metal jacket to keep bits from falling off and stinking in the nostrils of the people, but loose enough so the seagulls and crows could feast on him; Billy Browen in his ‘cloth-of-gold’ robe, probably because it scarred the hands of any who tried to relieve him of it. . . .

“And that’s that, Necroscope: as much as Will Moffat remembered of his life up to the point where he and Billy Browen got strung up on the sea wall. But for all Will’s time as a pirate, the lad’s suffering must have counted in his favour; there must have been lots of goodness in him for the Valkyrie to carry him off so quickly, while me and mine have spent all these hundreds of years here.