The Nine Pound Hammer (17 page)

“Yeah,” Conker said.

“Well, he told me about this Pirate Queen who ran a ship called the
Snapdragon
.”

“Yeah, I remember that. You think this is her?”

“I hope not,” Ray said, remembering all the horrible things Hobnob had told him about the Pirate Queen. He
was glad he hadn’t told them to Conker, because the giant looked like he was about to lose his nerve.

“I think they’re stuck,” Conker whispered.

“Yeah, looks like they’ve run aground. May be the right time to get on board.”

“Wh-what?” Conker stammered. “There’s got to be two dozen pirates on that ship!”

Ray pointed into the growing dark. “But they’re at the rear. If we can get on the front—”

“How?”

“Well, I’m not sure yet. I can’t see well enough, but it’s too dark for them to see either. They’ll be too busy to notice us anyway, and if we can get to the front maybe there’s a ladder or something we can use to get on board.”

“What then?” Conker asked, clearly disliking the plan more and more.

“I don’t know! Find Si. Remember when we were talking about your father? You said you weren’t brave enough. But you are, Conker. Now’s the chance to prove it—for Si.”

Conker drew in a deep breath, his chest expanding as he nodded. “Yes, we got to help Si. Can’t imagine that they could keep her anyway. Can’t no lock or shackle hold her.”

Some gruesome images came to Ray’s mind, Si’s dead body among them, but he kept quiet. “Well, even so, we’ll get her out.”

“Ray,” Conker said softly.

“Yeah?”

Conker jabbed a finger toward the dark channel. “We better not find no snakes.”

“We won’t see any snakes,” Ray promised. He looked around. They were in the middle of a vast marsh that had to be full of thousands of snakes. He could only hope that it would be too dark for Conker to see any of them.

Ray led Conker out to the end of the peninsula. It was the farthest point from the pirates. As they began to wade out, Ray asked, “Think it’s deep?”

“Why?” Conker asked.

“ ’Cause I can’t swim,” Ray replied.

Conker went first, as he was head and shoulders taller than Ray. He took a few steps and then descended with a splash beneath the water. Fishing himself out with a jumble of flaying arms, Conker climbed back onto solid ground and spat a fountain of water from his lips.

“Yeah, it’s deep,” he said.

Ray waded back to shore and found a broken log. The two of them dragged it into the water and pushed it before them as a raft. “Can you swim?” Ray asked.

“Good enough,” Conker said, kicking with his feet.

“All right, quieter this time.”

They paddled out into the channel toward the bank of reeds where the steamer was grounded. The engine barked and sent a shower of sparks from the smokestack as the pirates tried to reverse the engine. The steamer shook violently but didn’t come loose. As the din of the engine
receded, Ray blinked in surprise at the creative string of swears the pirates shouted at one another.

Conker suddenly stopped paddling. “What?” Ray whispered.

Conker’s eyes were frozen on a stick coming out from the dark water.

“It’s just a—” Ray said, but Conker exploded in a frenzy of swinging arms and kicking feet. The log rolled beneath him and threw Ray into the water. He sank. All movement seemed to slow as the quiet blanket of water shut off any sense of direction or escape. He looked about but all he saw were the bubbles jetting from his mouth and the black syrup of water that surrounded him.

A hand caught him at the collar and jerked him to the surface, planting him back on their raft. Ray sputtered and lay stunned across the bobbing log. Conker clasped an arm across Ray’s shoulder.

“Sorry, Ray,” he muttered.

Ray was too winded to reply.

“Ray,” Conker said again. “I’m really sorry.”

“It’s okay—”

“No, I’m really sorry.” Ray nearly turned to sock Conker in the arm, but then he saw why Conker was apologizing.

A woman was moving toward them, silhouetted in the light of the steamer. At first Ray thought she was standing on the water, somehow suspended at the surface. She wore a knee-length moleskin coat strapped across with bandoliers
heavy with an assortment of firearms and swords. A silk sash was tightened across her brow, flattening a billowing mane. Hip boots extended up her legs with the cuff folded over her knees. With one hand she removed a cigar from her curling lips. In the other, she clasped a pair of reins.

Ray followed the reins down to the water and realized what she was standing on. It was an ancient, gnarled alligator. Conker saw it, too, and that’s when he fainted across the log.

Within a minute, the rusty ache of a winch sounded from the hull of the
Snapdragon
. Ray and a semiconscious Conker were attached to the end of a cable and hoisted from the water by a davit. As they were dropped to the slick deck, a leering mob of men, boys, and even one hard-faced girl surrounded Ray and Conker.

If one had to sum up the crew of the
Snapdragon
, many words would come to mind, but
ugly
would be the most ready response. Their soiled clothes, rotten teeth, and the general stench that hovered about the deck like a swarm of flies could be blamed purely on bad hygiene. However, Ray would have bet that no matter how much you scrubbed and groomed this bunch, not one could keep a baby from crying.

“Two more!” a fish-eyed man laughed from the rabble. He wore a bicorne and poked at Ray and Conker with the butt end of a matchlock rifle. “Tie ’em with the China girl.”

At the mention of Si, Conker came fully to life and sprang to his feet. As he reached his full eight feet, the
pirates gasped and scuttled back, crablike. “Where is she, you scummy bandits?” Hammers clicked back as dozens of pistols, scatterguns, and rifles all leveled in a semicircle around Conker and Ray.

A growl sounded from the midst of the group and several pirates were knocked to the side as a grotesquely oversized man pushed his way to the front. Conker was gigantic, but he was proportioned as any normal man would be. This man had heavy gorilla-like arms and shoulders so inflated with muscle that they consumed his neck.

Although he had to look up to face Conker, the pirate outweighed him by at least a hundred pounds. His lipless mouth twisted into a grin as he marched up to Conker. Conker kept a calm expression, but Ray saw that he was clenching his fists, ready for a long fight.

“You know how to fight?” Ray asked skeptically.

Conker turned and said, “This is for Si! You best just stay out of this—”

Before Conker could finish or even turn around, the pirate plowed his fist into Conker’s chin, spinning the boy giant across the deck. Just like that, the fight was over.

“Tie ’em tight!” the fish-eyed pirate howled, and the rabble rushed forward with coarse ropes. It took eight of them to get Conker to his feet. Conker’s eyes rotated around in his sockets, and he could barely keep his knees from collapsing.

“Best not to mess with Big Jimmie,” the girl pirate said.
“Gets right cranky when he’s tired, and he en’t got a nap in all day.”

As the crew began to lead Ray and Conker, arms tied against their sides, across the deck, Ray turned to the girl to ask, “What will she do with us?”

The girl was wiry and gaunt, with strings of braids dangling from her head. She began eagerly, “Seeing as we lost five of the crew a week or more back—we’s raiding on this town and how’s we to know the marshal and his men was waiting in ambush—suspect she’ll break you in and make you full with the crew.”

“Pirates!” Ray coughed. “She wants us to be pirates?”

“Right fair life if you don’t mouth off around—” but she clamped her lips shut as the winch started up below deck and the pulleys on the davit whirled the cable in again.

The cable had been wound around the belly of the alligator. The Pirate Queen was still riding upon its back. As the davit swung around to place them on board, the Pirate Queen leaped to the deck, taking a last draw from her cigar before flicking it into the dark.

The crew responded immediately to her presence. Cowering like cockroaches in the light, they gave her a wide berth. Eyes were pitched down toward their toes sticking from the holes in their boots, and Ray heard a distinct whimpering from several in the crew. Even Big Jimmie laced his fingers together at his front, meek as a
choirboy. The fish-eyed pirate alone managed the courage to pass by his queen as he hurried to untie her alligator.

“Excellent catch, my lady. Right successful evening, I’d reckon,” he mumbled.

The Pirate Queen took slow, heel-thumping steps around the deck, her eyes surveying her crew. In the light aboard the ship, Ray could now see that the Pirate Queen was fair-skinned, deeply spotted with coppery freckles, and had hair of flame red to match. About her neck was a tangle of necklaces, some with jewels, others with the claws of beasts. Ray saw hidden among them the small black bullet that Hobnob had told him about. The Pirate Queen cast a glance back at the fish-eyed pirate at her side, and he groveled away under her gaze.

“Successful evening?” she snarled. “Are we off the shoal yet, Mister Lamprey?”

“No, my lady.”

“How did I wind up with a crew that’s got the collective wit of a barnacle?”

“I couldn’t say, ma’am,” Mister Lamprey replied.

“Well, have you located our position on a map?”

“Not yet, my lady, but …”

“How are we going to find our way out of the maze?” She batted Mister Lamprey angrily but stopped as her eyes fell on Ray and Conker.

Mister Lamprey scurried forward, holding his hands over his head. “The big one, he’s feisty. If I might recommend, we ought to keep them tied, too. The China girl ain’t
going to slip her ropes no more now that we got her hand”—he shivered as he mentioned Si’s hand—“locked up.”

“Why are you clucking around like a gaggle of geese?” she shouted at the pirates. “Avast! I want a draw beneath this ship and I want it now! All hands—outboard—now!”

The crew snapped into a frenzy of action, pushing and shoving their way to the rear of the ship. Mister Lamprey squeezed his hands together as he approached the Pirate Queen’s side. “What of the … prisoners, my lady?”

Looking over her shoulder to Ray and Conker as if they were a nuisance she had tried to forget, she said, “Joshua, Piglet, tie them with the girl.”

Joshua turned out to be the most elderly of the pirate crew, a rheumy-eyed old man, seemingly too old to help pull the cables. Piglet, the girl who had spoken to Ray, was surely the youngest, maybe only a year older than Sally.

She and Joshua pulled Ray and Conker along by their bound hands to the quarterdeck. Si was tied to a crane extending from the center of the quarterdeck. Like Ray and Conker she was tied about the waist, but the pirates, having discovered her tattooed hand, had placed it inside a five-sided lead box and bolted it over her head. As the Pirate Queen passed her, Si’s eyes remained fixed upon the woman, hatred brimming at their edges.

The pirates tied Ray and Conker on either side of her, each of their backs to the crane, and ran to join the others with their grappling irons, desperately attempting to get the
Snapdragon
back into open water.

As the Pirate Queen moved away, Si said, “How did you idiots get caught?”

“Well, I found Ray and we … arrgg!” Conker howled as the ancient alligator lumbered up the deck past them.

Even Si drew in her feet, pulling back from the beast. The alligator turned slightly as it passed, its gaze seeming to linger on Ray. It reached its mistress’s side, and the Pirate Queen knelt to rub its jumble-toothed snout. “That’s a good Rosie,” she cooed. “Good girl.” In between the love talk with her alligator, the Pirate Queen barked orders and curses at the crew.

“Snakes, gators, even snappers,” Conker moaned. “I hate anything with scales.”

“Turtles don’t have scales,” Si argued, but Conker, not in a state to argue about the distinction between snakes and snappers, only whimpered.

Ray cocked his head in a whisper. “Si, can you reach your hand to my back?”

“Oh, sure,” she said wryly. “Where’s it itch? We’ll give each other back rubs.”

“No, I’ve got a knife on my belt.”

Si squirmed for a second and then replied, “No, can’t get my hand over there.”

Keeping an eye on Rosie the alligator, Conker tried. “I think I got it, Ray.”

“Stop!” Si hissed. The Pirate Queen peered around at the three.

Si growled in an undertone, “I was sure that copper nob
was going to kill me. Now at least I won’t go alone. … Conk, what’s the matter?”

Ray turned his head sharply to peer around at Conker. The giant had an odd expression on his face, and Ray could not tell if it was pain or fear or something else.

“I … feel strange,” Conker murmured.

“You sick?” Ray asked.

“No, not like that.” Conker shook his head and seemed clearer again. “I can’t describe it, but I feel like … I don’t know.”

As Ray was trying to puzzle this out, his gaze caught something bright nailed to the side of the galley. It was a yellow hat, made of dandelion petals.

Si said to Conker, “Maybe you feel your brain finally starting to work—”

“Hush,” Ray said. “I’m working on a plan.”

“What?” Si said. “Going to cut our ropes? Sure. The three of us will fight off a ship full of pirates armed to the teeth and drive the boat back to Nel. Great plan! Keep that knife hidden, before she sees it and guts us for her gator’s supper.”

“Hey!” Ray shouted to the Pirate Queen. Some of the pirates nearby cast anxious glances at Ray.

“What are you doing, Ray?” Conker whispered.

“Hey!” Ray called again. The Pirate Queen ignored him and unleashed a string of profanity upon the pirates to work faster.

“The ship’s stuck, right?” Ray asked. Her fingers went
to the handle of a particularly large-barreled pistol and tapped the hammer with agitation.

“Well, we can help,” he said. “We can get you free.”

She tossed her fiery hair about her shoulder and gave Ray an icy stare. “You’re about one breath away from your last. Why don’t you save it?”