Tigerheart (20 page)

Other braves were joining the dance now, and they were likewise smeared face and body with war paint. They didn’t have totemic symbols upon them but instead merely undefined shapes. The energy that was being generated in this dance was far different from that of the earlier one. It seemed the very air itself was charged with energy that the Piccas were siphoning into their gyrations. Paul wasn’t sure if he was imagining it or not. It might well have been a trick of light due to the flickering of the fire, but he could have sworn that the painted images upon Princess Picca’s body were actually coming to life and moving themselves, leaping and springing across her skin in anticipation of a hunt.

Even Gwenny was letting herself be swept up into the intensity around the fire. As prim and proper as she was, with her hair typically up in a carefully coiffed bun, now she had let her hair down. It swept around her as she tossed her head back and forth, side to side. She had kicked off her shoes and had hiked the hem of her skirt up to a bit higher than what would have been considered acceptable in polite society. She didn’t appear to care, though; and although she sported no paint anywhere upon her, that didn’t deter her from joining the ceremony with as much ferocity as any of the Indians born to their savage life.

It was at that moment that, although naturally Paul considered the pirates to be a fearsome enemy that deserved nothing but extermination, he began to feel just the slightest twinge of pity for the buccaneers. They had no idea what they were in for.

Chapter 17

Confrontation

Y
ou might be wondering at this juncture just what significance there is to allowing the pirates to run about as they see fit upon the high seas. The problem is this: nightmares.

The pirates are the source of all nightmares, of all dreams that are unpleasant and fearsome. You may not recognize them as such, for dreams are very personal and the sleeping mind interprets the images of the pirates as befits the dreams. So in one dream you may find yourself assailed by vampires or other monsters; in another dream, you panic over the loss of your loved ones; in yet another, you find yourself falling from a high place, your arms and legs flailing about as you pray that you’ll awaken before you hit bottom.

In each instance, you have had a brush with the pirates. You have set sail upon the sea of dreams, and the evil ship
Skull n’ Bones
has descended upon you to work its mischief. Certainly the fearsome Suleyman or Agha Bey, coming at you with their gleaming silver or gold teeth and their daggers in their hands, could be seen as monsters. Certainly if your loved ones have accompanied you on your dream voyage (a circumstance that occurs far more frequently than you would think, for dreams are routinely shared, and we simply don’t like to admit it since there are privacy issues involved), the pirates may have scarpered away with your beloved in hopes of obtaining a healthy ransom. Fear of falling? You’ve been made to walk the plank. Yes, it’s only a plunge into water, but drops routinely look much higher when you’re standing at the top of where you’re about to jump from, do they not? A fall of six feet looks like sixty when you’re staring down nervously from up high.

What you would call “nightmares” or “bad dreams” or “night terrors,” the pirates refer to as “a good day’s work.”

The thing is, typically the pirates have other things to distract them, most notably the activities of The Boy and his followers. But with The Boy having been disposed of (so they thought) and the Indians annihilated by the great tidal wave (so they thought), the pirates had decided to focus all their activities on nautical nastiness.

It was not unprecedented. There had been several times previously in the history of man when the pirates decided that they were going to put their rudder to the isle of the Anyplace and turn their attentions elsewhere. It is disturbingly easy to determine what periods of man’s history existed during those times. The rank and file of people lived in greater fear than ever; and, worse than that, those leaders who were of a disposition toward conquest and villainy swelled with heretofore unknown confidence and embarked upon campaigns of terror that were merely reflections of what the pirates of the Anyplace happened to be up to. Even men of blind incompetence who merely aspire to world domination can be driven to make foolish and precipitous decisions that unleash all manner of destruction upon the real world. And as they do so, the pirates of the Anyplace can be heard laughing in the distance.

Now you may be wondering just how far back the pirates of the Anyplace might stretch in the consciousness of man. The answer is quite simple: There have always been pirates in the Anyplace.

There has always been a Boy, and his cohorts, in the Anyplace.

The names change. The circumstances of how they got there and who they might be are constantly in flux. But heroes and villains remain heroes and villains, for such will always be needed to be in conflict with each other. Suffice to say that The Boy and Captains Hack and Slash were merely the latest occupants of roles in the Great Scheme of Things that long predated their arrival in the Anyplace and will continue long after their departure, whenever and however that might be.

The
Skull n’ Bones,
left to its own devices, would unleash a new wave of fear and, most likely, war upon the hapless waking mind of man.

Naturally, The Boy and his allies were unaware of this. For that matter, so were the pirates. All were doing simply what came naturally, with none of them truly comprehending the stakes for which they were battling except in the most general and obscure sort of way. But that’s as it should be. How much pressure, after all, do we need to inflict upon our heroes? The fact that they were in pursuit of The Boy’s shadow and the captured Fiddlefix was certainly of sufficient moment.

We resume our narrative with the
Skull n’ Bones
sailing across a sea as clear as glass in search of new prey. However, since there were no immediate victims for the pirates to ply their trade upon, naturally their interests were turning inward and upon one another.

Caveat, the most intelligent of the Bully Boys, was at that moment endeavoring to unseat Big Penny, the main commander of those Vagabond offshoots. With the reported demise of The Boy, Big Penny had become more swaggering and insulting than ever before. He was given to cuffing the other boys on the backs of their skulls if they didn’t snap to fast enough upon receiving his orders. This didn’t sit well with Caveat; and he was in the process of cozying up to Captain Slash, trying to convince her with as many impressive words as he could muster that she should place him in charge of the Bully Boys. His main method was to try and persuade Slash into thinking that Big Penny coveted her position as ship’s captain. Pirates being a basically fearful lot, it didn’t require much on Caveat’s part to make Captain Slash think that Big Penny was eyeing her captaincy.

Meanwhile, Roomer was working his evil doings from the opposite direction. He was going around, slipping carefully chosen words like darts into the ears of such likely targets as Simon the Dancer. Simon, always on the lookout for all threats, was a perfect person to convince that Captain Slash and Caveat were plotting to get rid of all the Barbary pirates, since Slash considered them a threat to her authority. Why? Because they were such better pirates than she. A cunning plan on Roomer’s part, since it appealed both to pirate vanity and pirate paranoia.

Captain Slash sensed unrest in her crew, and she solved the immediate problem by summoning Yorkers, who hadn’t done a thing to anyone, and, in front of the entire crew, stabbing him. Yorkers pitched forward without a word; and as blood spread beneath him on the deck, Mary Slash said loudly, “Let this be a warning to anyone who talks to anyone about anything that I don’t like!” She didn’t let anyone come near Yorkers for quite some time, and even when she said it was all right to do so, no one did because they were concerned it was some sort of trick.

It was left to poor Yorkers to haul himself across the deck, leaving a most undecorative trail of blood behind him. He managed to pull himself forward and tumble through the hatch that led to below deck. They heard nothing more of him and thus assumed that he’d died.

This sequence of events would likely not have had much impact on the politics aboard ship in the long run; but in the short run, it was quite effective, as both Roomer and Caveat reined in their activities in hopes of a more opportune time presenting itself.

Up in the crow’s nest, Simon the Dancer suddenly shouted and pointed out the latest thing he’d spotted that looked a likely target for the pirates. Mary Slash grabbed her telescope and fixed it in the direction Simon was indicating.

There, out in the middle of nowhere, was a dinghy being piloted by a head of state.

The choice of the dinghy was an appropriate one, since he had been feeling quite adrift and alone lately in terms of his leadership. There was no one he really trusted, and he had no clear idea in what direction he should take his country.

Mary Slash licked her lips, seeing this as an opportunity for some genuine entertainment. Such a small vessel naturally wouldn’t contain much in the way of booty; but pirates sought fun wherever they could, and this looked to provide some.

So that you understand the severity of the situation, this is what was about to transpire.

The pirates were going to descend upon the head of state.

They were going to go directly toward him and not slow their approach at all. He would be forced to abandon his vessel as the pirate ship crashed right through it, shattering it to splinters. He would splash about in the cold water, crying for help, at which point the pirates would fish him out and make merry sport of him. They would strip him to his undergarments, pink him with their swords—all the time with him wondering when the killing blow would strike—and then tie his hands and ankles and send him off the plank. The water would envelop him, and he would sink like a stone; then he would awaken (since, unlike Paul and the others, he had come to the Anyplace in a transitional dreaming state).

Upon regaining consciousness, the head of state would feel a sense of weakness and humiliation such as he had never known. It would darken his soul and he would seek to expunge this new and unwanted sensation by taking it out on his own citizens, reveling in their helplessness in order to feel better about himself. People would suffer and people would die, lives would be ruined or ended, with the pirates in the center of it all, like a pebble thrown into a lake and causing a vast rippling effect.

All that because of one bad dream. And it happens more often, and in more varied ways, than you might suspect.

“More speed!” cried Captain Slash as she watched their latest target take notice of his pursuers. He let out an inarticulate scream and tried to row, but it might as well have been a snail trying to outrace a puma. The sails of the pirate ship flared wide, caught by the strong wind that was driving them straight toward their intended victim. The image of the pirate ship had been small on the horizon at first, but it was picking up speed and getting larger and larger with each passing second. The man in the dinghy flailed away at the water with the oars. His panic was impeding his ability to go about rowing in anything resembling an efficient manner. In the end, though, it wouldn’t have mattered, because the pirate ship was simply too big and powerful, and the dinghy had not a chance. Mary Slash herself was at the wheel and was taking great delight in sending her mighty vessel barreling toward their target. Even the shade of her late brother had taken interest and was watching from the prow of the ship.

Here’s a bit of irony.

It was Yorkers’s turn to serve as second watch, meaning that if the crew’s attention was focused on one place, Yorkers was to patrol the deck and keep an eye out in all other directions so that no one could sneak up on them. Since Mary Slash wasn’t in charge of handing out deck assignments, however, she didn’t know this. She’d just picked him at random to drive home her point (no pun intended). With Yorkers very likely bleeding to death below deck, no one else had stepped in to take up the slack. All attention was being paid to the man in the dinghy, and thus the crew of the pirate ship was unaware that it was under attack until the booms of a fusillade alerted them. By then, of course, it was a little late. If someone is setting upon you, you want to know about it before you find yourself under fire.

It was a stray gust of wind that saved them from immediate demolition. Just as the far distant thundering sounds of cannon reached them, an unexpected crosswind hit the sails. Before Mary Slash could make the adjustment, the ship was sent careening to port. Consequently, several cannonballs flew past, missing the mark and splashing harmlessly into the water beyond. What could have been a killing, or at least very destructive, stroke was reduced to a series of warning shots across the bow.

Still, whatever its initial intent, the result of the attack could not be argued with. And that result was to get the attention of the ship’s denizens.

Mary Slash spun on her booted heel, and her eyes widened in shock as she saw a massive man-of-war bearing down upon them, its guns at the ready. To make matters worse, a fearsome storm was rolling in right behind it, propelling it toward the pirate ship with all speed.

Simon the Dancer, from the crow’s nest, said, “Vessel off the starboard bow!”

“Oh, really!” shouted back Captain Slash, sarcasm drenching her voice. She refocused her telescope, wondering who in the world would be daft enough to challenge the most formidable pirate vessel afloat. She got her answer quickly enough when she peered at the oncoming ship and saw none other than The Boy perched in the rigging, gesturing straight at them with his sword. And running about on the deck, obeying his orders with remarkable precision, was a small army of painted Indians, with bows, arrows, and spears at the ready to supplement the array of guns bristling on the forecastle.

Mary Slash let out a scream of indignation and fury.
“The Boy! The cursed Boy!”
Then she saw something else through her spyglass, namely Paul stalking the deck cloaked in the mantle of the white tiger. It took her only the barest of seconds to work out for herself how they’d been fooled, and her ire was almost so much that her body couldn’t contain it.

Instantly forgotten was the small dinghy they’d been pursuing, and the head of state sailed away into irrelevance so far as our story is concerned, except to say that the crisis was averted and he was voted out in the very next election by an electorate that thought him too passive and insufficiently confrontational, to say nothing of having a newfound strange aversion to the yearly yacht races.