The Buccaneer's Apprentice Page 6

  Every muscle ached, strained more than ever before in a single day. Though he intended to gather fruit and fill his stomach again before resting for the night, through the overhanging branches of the fruit trees he spied something of size bobbing on the waters. Strangely familiar it seemed, too. Though it was too small to be a ship, it was larger than anything he’d dragged to safety through that long day. With the thought in mind that it might be something of use, or even rations to vary his diet of fruit, he unfolded his weary arms and legs and tramped down to the sea’s edge once more.

  There was just enough light for him to swim out to the object and push it to shore. He recognized its domed lid before he set foot in the water. It was the Arturos’ costume trunk, an ancient carved hulk of wood rumored to have been fashioned by Caza Legnoli before its demise. Like any of the objects blessed by the cazas of the Seven, its primary purpose of containing many objects had been enhanced by the prayers of the craftsmen who had carved it out of a single massive trunk from the royal forests. Its interior could be packed more densely than the average container, and once its rounded lid was closed and fastened, the trunk was far lighter to carry than it appeared. So light and buoyant was it, in fact, that less than half of it was submerged beneath the water.

  As he had with so much other junk that day, Nic hauled the trunk to shore and then onto his makeshift sled. The other bits of wreckage hadn’t meant anything to him beyond mere survival. They hadn’t belonged to the people he’d cared about. He knew that if he wrenched open that air-tight lid, the sights of those dazzling costumes and the lingering scents of the actors’ perfumes and grease paints would flood over him. He would relive that entire glorious year he had spent, out from under the Drake’s thumb, watching the actors play their familiar roles in a dozen different plays. He would remember how, line by line, he had come to learn those plays so well, standing in the wings of every makeshift stage. If he opened that trunk, he’d have to remember the happiness of the Arturos on the day they had received the invitation to go on this sea voyage—and worse, he would have to relive the terror of the night before, and of losing them.

  Only when he had finally reached his camp and pushed his cargo off the sled and into the cave did Nic fall to the sand. On his knees, he leaned forward and rested his arms and head atop the trunk, not caring that its carved curlicues dug into his cheekbone. All day, by the brunt of sheer labor, had he managed not to mourn the loss of his master—his friend, really. All of his friends, gone. Dead, or worse. Gone, without a chance for him to say farewell. “Oh, Signor Arturo,” he said aloud. His choked voice echoed in the hollow of rock. “Signora Arturo! Infant Prodigy. Knave. Ingenue. Pulcinella!” Over and over he repeated the list of players until his voice was ragged and hoarse and he could continue no more. “I’m sorry,” he whispered at the end. “I’m so sorry.”

  He curled his body to the side of the trunk and lay there in the cave’s chill, away from the small fire he’d earlier built, murmuring his sorrow, until at last he slept.

  Nic’s second day on the island began with the sounds of gulls shrilling on the cliffs above. When he opened his eyes, it seemed as if the sun streaming through the barricade of wood and brush was even brighter than it had been the day before. The light was very different here, in the middle of the Azure Sea. In Cassaforte, the sunlight was almost golden. Sunrises and sunsets glowed. Here, in warmer climes, it was yellow-white, blazing, relentless. The temperature made Nic shed the vest he was accustomed to wearing. After a moment’s thought, he loosened the ties of his shirt, but kept it on to protect his skin from burning.

  The tasks he performed afterward were so practical that he could see them becoming his routine. He waded in the warm waters of the Azure Sea and picked small shellfish from the sand. Their meat he placed into the smaller of the Pride of Muro’s fishing traps, salvaged the day before. Once he had set the traps in the water and, using several knotted ropes, tied it to the trunk of a tree growing on the beach, he gathered tinder for a fire, then helped himself to several of the sweet fruit hanging just within reach overhead. He even found an old broadside swept ashore by the tide and dried by the sun. Deftly his fingers began to fold it into triangles, and then swept down the corners, over and under until moments later he had a dish centered with a sail-like pyramid in the center. He set the paper boat afloat in the sea waters lapping the beach, and watched it sail back and forth in the shallows.

  By the light of day, his prospects seemed sunnier. He was alive and in one piece. He had shelter and the means for fire. He had food aplenty. Save for the issue of water, Nic had in possession more worldly goods than ever before all at once. He knew that he could survive. Yet for how long would he want to?

  The lack of water worried him. He’d passed the day before with only a few swigs of weak wine at the bottom of a flask. Though the fruit’s juice had slaked his thirst somewhat, Nic knew that under the relentless island sun, he couldn’t continue to live on the squeezings of fruit alone. With the abundance of plant life growing on the cliff’s face, as well as the visible growth waving atop it and far in the distance, there either had to be a source of water to keep it green, or else rain fell in abundance. With that in mind, Nic fashioned a length of net into a harness. Once slung over his shoulder, it carried one of the emptied flasks as well as a wrapped portion of hardtack salvaged the day before. His short sword in hand, he was ready to explore.

  Once Nic had walked a goodly distance toward the island’s interior, the rock wall began to decline in height until at last it was only three times his height, then two, and finally low enough that by standing on tiptoe, he could see a gentle incline rising from its top. “Well then,” he said aloud, entangling his sword’s hilt into the netting, so he could use both hands to climb. “Let’s see what’s up there.”

  What was up there was more island than Nic had suspected from his limited view on the beach. Nothing in all his ventures with the poacher into the royal forest had prepared him for the panorama before him. Wild and utterly untamed, it was. A vast sweep of waist-high grasses ran down to the island’s other edge, perhaps a half-hour’s walk away. Nic’s own encampment appeared to be at one end of the long and narrow strip of land, while the other lay out of sight, hidden from view by the sun’s dazzling reflection upon the sea.

  Curiosity prompted him to investigate the rest of the island, but something else made him hold still. The solitude and the quiet made him realize something that filled him equally with as much excitement as it did fear. He was his own master here. In this place, on this island, he had no indentures. While he remained, he was no man’s servant, no dogsbody to be ordered about. He had no schedule to keep. No chores to perform, save those he chose. Much as he had loved working for the Arturos—and that had scarcely seemed like work at all—he was now at no one’s mercy, or pity. “I’m king here,” he murmured aloud as he gazed across the horizon. For the first time, he was the only person in control of his life.

  It was with a buoyed sense of purpose that Nic looked thoughtfully at a clump of trees toward the island’s center. Trees needed fresh water to survive, he reasoned. They might be clustered around a spring or some kind of hollow that collected the rain. Sword once more in hand, Nic took a deep breath, decided to make the best of his situation, and set off on the hike.

  His short time serving the fence with a taste for poaching was proving more valuable than Nic would ever have suspected. One of the tasks for which Nic had been responsible during those ventures into the royal forests had been to cover the tracks of both his master and himself, ensuring that none of the king’s rangers might suspect their illegal treks to capture game from the sacred lands. He had used fallen tree branches to rearrange the grasses they had trampled, cleared and buried all traces of their camps and blinds, and made very certain to fix anything that a sharp-eyed ranger might spot.

  However, someone else had taken no such precautions.

 
There was another person on the island. Of that Nic was suddenly certain. His eyes could trace an irregular path in the field that wended from the shore inland, tromped down as if not only by heavy steps, but by something heavy dragged all the way from the beach, up the slope, and through the tall grasses. The deep trail ended at the edge of the wooded area. Sword at the ready, Nic dropped his sling on the ground and followed.

  The trail was definitely not his imagination. Whoever had traipsed through here had made no effort to cover his tracks. Low-level twigs lay on the ground, broken from the surrounding trees. Their leaves were still green, indicating that the stranger’s passage had been not long ago. Nic’s hand shot out to touch two of the fresh wounds on the bark. “Dry,” he murmured, sniffing his fingers. The trespasser had not been too recent. Perhaps two or three hours at least.

  Nic’s eyes remained alert as he followed the path into the glade. His ears prickled for the slightest noise, but all he could hear was the pounding of his own heart and the sudden rasp of his lungs as they tried to draw in air. He took a moment before every step, edging into the shaded woods sideways, sword ready to strike out. It was obvious where the path was leading him. As he’d suspected, deep within the overhanging trees lay a small pond. Beyond it, a stream flowed in the direction of the island’s far end, splashing along mossy banks with a playful sound. A lone bird dove through the enclosure. Its cry cut through the silence, setting Nic on edge. Of another person, there was no trace.

  A series of upturned stones and trampled grass betrayed the path’s end at the edge of the nearly still pond. After gazing carefully to all sides, Nic knelt down by the pool’s edge and helped himself to a handful of the water. It was sweet and cool to the taste, and fresh in his mouth, free of any stagnation. That was a relief, then. But about the stranger somewhere in the vicinity … could he have been in search of water as well, dived into the pool, and emerged on the other side? Possibly. Nic was no expert in tracking, though, and picking up a cold trail might take him hours.

  “Vyash tar! ” The sound of a human voice made Nic nearly jump out of his skin. Sword ready, he spun around, only to see no one behind him. “Allo! ” said the voice again, sounding like iron pincers scraping against blocks of ice. “Allo! Tuppinze yere! ” Nic’s head spun in every direction except for the one from which finally he realized the noise was coming—up.

  A man hung above him, his fingers grasping in Nic’s direction. One of his legs was tied with rope that suspended him upside down, so that his long black hair spilled toward the ground. The man’s face had been painted blue, though much of the dye had flaked off or had been sweated into his hair since his capture. He was from Charlemance, Nic suddenly realized—or at least had adopted that far-flung country’s habits of bluing one’s skin. His garb was more tattered and begrimed than Nic’s own. Nic judged him to be a pirate, rather than a fine ritter or even a commoner of Charlemance.

  The man seemed to be trying to communicate, begging Nic with gesture and strangled sounds to release him. He made sure the man saw his sword before speaking. “What are you doing up there?” Though the stranger was twice his age, Nic spoke with authority. Then he remembered that the pirate more than likely wouldn’t understand a word he said.

  To his surprise, however, the man did seem to comprehend. His lips worked a moment before replying. “Cassafort?” he asked, and then at Nic’s expression of amazement, “You are from Cassafort City?”

  “I am from Cassaforte,” Nic replied, suspicious. The stranger had been caught in some sort of trap. The rope suspending him had been tied to the top of a young but sturdy tree that even now bobbed and flexed as the man struggled. He took a step forward, so he could see better. “What are you—?”

  Too late did Nic hear the warning crack beneath his feet. He did not see the stones fly that he had disturbed with his step. Had he noticed the lithe tree bent almost double among the other tree trunks, he might have been more wary, but the second trap caught him completely off-guard. In mere seconds, all the blood in his body seemed to be rushing to his head. His world was upside down. He watched, dizzy, as his sword fell from his hands and onto the ground, six feet below.

  Worse than being tricked in such a way was the man’s reaction. “Ah-hah-hah-hah!” he howled, his laughter echoing throughout the wooded area. For a long minute he laughed and laughed. Tears ran from his eyes onto his forehead and into his hair, carrying more of the blue dye with it. So hard did the man shake and guffaw that he began to spin at the end of his rope. Slapping his knees with mirth didn’t help to slow him down.

  “Oh, shut your mouth.” Now that he was face-to-face with the man, although upside down, Nic was certain he was a pirate, probably escaped from the conflagration two nights before. Nic was trapped, and it was his own fault. The rope that had captured his leg was knotted in a complicated pattern that clutched his ankle like a vise. He couldn’t even find the beginning or end of it. “What do you know about Cassaforte, anyway?”

  “Cassafort City,” the man said again, almost as if correcting him. “She too is from Cassafort City.”

  “Who?” Nic might have understood the man’s words, but he made no sense. “Who is from Cassaforte Cit … Cassaforte?”

  “She.” When Nic shook his head, the man pointed down. “She.”

  A girl stood on the ground below Nic, her eyes blue and her hair long and golden. In her hands she carried a long club, heavy and blunt. She swung it hard at Nic’s head before he could think to dodge. He had only one coherent thought as he sank once more into unconsciousness: that the girl was the loveliest pirate he was ever likely to see.

  It was due to a tiresome error on the part of a housemaid that we received tickets to see not the Marvelous Theatre playing near the city’s center, but to see some third-rate, attenuated troupe called the Theatre of Marvels appearing in the southwest. My ears are still ringing from the two hours of mugging we had to endure, and I have taken steps to dismiss the housemaid.

  —Palmyria Falo, of the Thirty, in a letter to her mother

  When Nic’s eyesight had begun to focus on the rocks above his head a few hours before, he first wondered if he’d been dragged back to his own shelter. He was in another cavern of sorts, but its craggy ceiling was higher and the sand rockier beneath his feet. Not that he could move his feet. They had been bound fast with rope and tied to his similarly restrained wrists, so that he was curled into an uncomfortable ball, only able to lie on either side, or to pull himself up and sit on his behind. He’d had a brief notion of rolling himself around the crates and sacks and out from the cave mouth to escape, but a mouthful of sand and an uncertainty of who might be out there had so far prevented him. The back of his head throbbed. He wished he had a little more freedom with his hands.

  What he wished had been tied—gagged thoroughly, in fact—was his companion’s mouth. The blue-faced pirate with whom he’d been captured hadn’t stopped talking since Nic had woken. “When you making the pirate? Eh? Eh?” he was asking now. His attempts to speak in Nic’s tongue were heavily accented. Nic knew nothing about the language of Charlemance, but apparently the inhabitants of the city of Longdoun all spoke as if they had mush in their mouths. When Nic didn’t reply, the pirate prompted him once more. “Eh?”

  “I didn’t make the pirate,” Nic growled back, pulling himself from his near-fetal position until he was sitting upright, with his back against a barrel marked possoins salés. “I mean, I’m not a pirate.” He tried to peer at the cavern’s other occupant, who had been unconscious since Nic had come to. All he could tell was that the unknown man was very old and frail. Like a bundle of broken sticks, he lay atop a pile of burlap sacks stuffed, by the smell of it, with dried grasses. His mouth was open, and his jaw limp. He breathed shallowly, like a sleeping baby. Unlike either of the conscious prisoners, the old man’s hands were not bound. “Signor,” he hissed, trying to awaken the man. “Are you awake?”
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  “Maxl, he making the pirate when he less than you.” The pirate thumped his chest with his chin, to show that he was the Maxl in question. Not even his loud voice awakened the sleeping captive. “How many years you having?”

  Nic had learned that not responding didn’t shut the man up. It merely made him inquire more aggressively. “Seventeen,” he said, trying to sound as uninterested as possible. To the old man he called out once more, “Signor!” He still received no response. Perhaps the girl had done a sight more harm to his skull than she’d managed on Nic’s own.

  “A-ha! Maxl have four and ten years when he go to sea first time. Less than you!” The pirate’s blue face twisted with gleeful triumph. If this were a competition, Nic thought, it was one of a highly unusual nature. “Maxl live in …”

  “Maxl live in Longdoun then,” Nic said along with him. He’d heard several stories so far of Maxl’s upbringing in Longdoun city. Between the descriptions of the riverside town’s docks, Maxl’s humble beginnings as a pickpocket, and the allegedly rollicking tales of his drunken aunt known far and wide as “Fat Sue,” he didn’t think much of it.

  “Yes!” said Maxl, his face sunny. “Maxl live in Longdoun then. Fat Sue tell Maxl no go out after dark, bad men be around. But I go out, and am taken up by, what you call, uh, uh?” Nic shook his head and stared out into the darkness beyond the cave mouth. He could see sparks from a small fire flying into the air, but nothing of whoever might be warming themselves at it. Maxl made herky-jerky motions with his shoulders. “Gang. It kind of gang. They walk night streets, kidnap men, make men into sailor. If they not wanting to be sailor, too bad! Hah! Hah!”

  “Press gang?” Nic said. He’d heard of such things before, these illegal gangs that delivered unwilling yet able bodies to captains, depriving them of their freedom and families. One of Nic’s own masters had made idle threats to sell Nic to a press gang, but Nic had always hoped they were fictional conceits, made up to scare the young.