***
“It’s gone, Captain!”
“What is? What are you talking about?”
Jack the Boy had rushed into Bluebeard’s office on board the Merry Martin in a hurry. He had forgotten to knock, which was pirate custom (for the Captain could have been in the middle of some secret or important business), so Bluebeard was naturally annoyed. And drunk. He was on his third bottle of Whiskey that day in celebration of a recent successful raid. They had stolen into a Scottish village under the cover of darkness and taken whatever pleased them: gold, jewellery, wood, whiskey. Mainly whiskey. Most of the crew were now lolling about the deck, unconscious, and most of the whiskey was gone.
It had been excellent Whiskey. They had chosen a town famous for its own distillery and stolen all of its produce, including the good stuff: bottles of four, six and twelve year old fire-water were strewn all over the ship in a haphazard manner, with crew members distributed equally as randomly. Jack the Boy had had to leap over the groaning forms of Woody, Tom “Bomb” McCluskey and Jake the Peg on his way to see the Captain.
“The gold, sir! It’s gone!”
Despite his inebriated state, Bluebeard understood immediately. He leapt from his seat- a foolish thing to do in his condition, for he consequently fell over and banged his head on an empty goblet. Even if his body was still inebriated, his mind was now sober: he stared at Jack the Boy with piercing, calculating eyes as he forced his brain into action.
“How can it be gone? We’re fifty miles from land, for God’s sake!”
“I don’t know, sir,” confessed the Boy. “But it is. I can tell you it is.”
The captain’s eyes narrowed. The gold could not have been taken by someone who wasn’t on board, so it must have either been moved or thrown overboard by one of the crew. A thought suddenly struck him.
“Jack. Boy,” he grunted. “Why aren’t you drunk?”
“I’m… I’m allergic, sir,” he admitted. “I can’t drink. If I do, I get ill.”
“Ha!” yelled the captain. “A likely story.” He pulled himself up into a standing position and glared at the lad. Jack was a new recruit, picked up only one month previously at a port in France. His English, though poor at first, had quickly improved until the point now where he was practically fluent. Bluebeard had seen him as a bright spark, hope for his ship’s future. Truth be told the rest of his crew were rather dim-witted, so it was useful to have someone intelligent on board, especially in skirmishes or times of war.
Now, though, he distrusted that intelligence. Through the cloudy thinking of a drunken man he saw a plot and saw it clearly: the Boy had deliberately stayed sober while his shipmates were drunk so that he could hide the gold and take it for himself!
Rage boiled up inside him and burst out in a terrible roar:
“You lying cad!” he slurred. “You took the gold, didn’t you? Confess! Where is it?”
“N-no I didn’t, sir,” he stammered, terrified of the captain’s fury. “Honest to God, I didn’t.”
“I’ve seen you drink before and you’ve never been ill. Where is it?”
The Boy did not answer; fear backed him up against the wall and he stood there, frozen. He was lucky: three bottles of Whiskey had damaged the Captain’s co-ordination. When he reached for his cutlass, his hand missed the first three times and when he finally grasped its handle, his hands could not work out where to point it. The Boy was left watching in bemusement as the Captain flailed his weapon this way and that, only rarely coming within two metres of his target.
The Boy saw his chance and ran. The door slammed behind him, but the Captain was too inebriated to notice; he kept flailing his shaft about the place for a further two minutes before he realised his quarry was gone.
“Come back, you coward!” he yelled out. “Don’t run away from your Captain when he’s trying to…”
The words slurred and eventually stopped. He cursed the slowness of his speech and thought and realised that the Boy possessed all the advantages of soberness: quick wit and quick feet, which would give him the edge in any pursuit or battle. Bluebeard slumped down into his chair reluctantly and sighed bitterly.
“Woody! McCluskey!” He called out.
It was a moment before anything happened. Then, with a crash, two bodies fell through the doorway in a heap in the corner of the room. Woody, a tall, skinny fellow with only a scraggly goatee, was out cold; McCluskey was lying on top of him, almost unable to stand but still possessing the power of speech.
“You wanted me, sir?” He managed to say clearly enough to be understood. His voice was deep, baritone, and came from somewhere under the magnificent bush of hair that obscured the lower part of his face.
“Yes,” uttered the Captain. “Jack. He’s got the gold. He’s stolen it. Get after him!”
It took a few seconds for McCluskey to comprehend the situation, but when understanding struck him it hit him like a knife. His whole face collapsed and then reconstructed itself into something ugly and full of rage at the betrayal they had suffered.
“The scoundrel!” he roared and tried to lift Woody from his deep sleep. Yet Woody was out cold, napping peacefully with the help of three bottles of Scotch, and would not recover until the morning. Woody was famed for his deep sleeps even when sober, so any attempt to wake him now would have been fruitless.
McCluskey’s rage and drunkenness was such that Woody’s condition was beyond his understanding, however, so he yelled and prodded and pushed and yanked with all his might in a desperate and violent attempt to rouse his sleeping crewmate. He seemed even to have forgotten about why he was angry and was almost using Woody as a punch bag to vent primal rage now aimed at nothing in particular.
“McCluskey!” called Bluebeard groggily. “What are you doing? Get after the boy!”
“The boy?” queried McCluskey, as if waking from a deep sleep and unsure what had been happening. “Jack the Boy? He- he stole out booty? He stole our booty!”
In a wave of remembered realisation he forgot his beaten colleague and dashed for the door. Unfortunately he forgot to open it and banged headfirst into the rusty nail that was used to hang jackets and gowns on. He was knocked out cold, blood dripping slowly from a deep gash in his forehead, and fell with a crash onto the sleeping form of his friend.
The captain sighed. He would discipline the rogue after sunrise, but for the moment it fell to him to find the lad.
He stood up from his perch beside his desk and stumbled hesitantly towards the door. It was a difficult journey: along the five feet of wooden decking he had to cross were strewn bottles and papers, broken glass and odd trinkets which would have been described as “miscellaneous”: one golden ring from a raid in India; an oval shaped mask stolen from an African tribe; several mysterious metal objects of unknown usage presented to them as gifts by foreigners from afar. These objects and more lay before him like a veritable assault course which his feet found difficult to navigate. He shrieked at one point when his left foot landed on the sharp end of a pin and winced when his right foot appeared to crush the nose of the sleeping Woody.
Nonetheless, he eventually reached the door and pushed it open with an almighty effort.
The cold night air gushed in immediately, putting out half the candles in his room. It knocked the old pirate back and nearly made him add his own body to the pile-on behind him. He kept his balance, though, by grasping hold of the doorframe and peeling his eyes at the scene before him.
It was night. The stars glimmered brightly above him like gods guiding him and his ship safely through the brine. He had been a pirate now for fifty years and had never suffered one shipwreck: this he put down to the guidance of those above him, the kind watchfulness of those who gazed down from the heavens nightly. He was a firm believer in astrology even to the point that he had assigned a spiritualist to his ship, an oriental woman by the name of Liu. She was one of his closest advisors yet seemed to earn the hatred of the rest of the crew, who both feared and do
ubted her in equal measure. It was a strange mix of feelings they possessed, and they could little understand it. Whenever the enigmatic Liu passed through their ranks- and it was, to be fair, quite a rare occasion- they would eye her suspiciously, always wondering whether her predictions were nonsense, yet fearfully too: for if they were true, then she could be a woman of the gods with powers not to be reckoned with by mere mortals.
Liu was stood by the ship’s mast in the centre of the deck. Though inebriated like the rest, she could still read the stars and was doing her usual weather-check to see what the gods had to say to her tonight. Her face looked puzzled, fraught, and her gaze was fixed unmovingly in one direction.
The captain surveyed the rest of the deck. As far as his eye could see (at least until where the boat met the sea) were bodies collapsed in heaps, with faces frozen in stupid grins after the all-day party of whiskey and gin. There was no sign of Jack and Liu was the only person he could see awake.
“Liu,” he called out with slurred voice.
The woman turned to see who was calling her. Upon hearing her Captain, her puzzled expression vanished, wiped away, and was replaced by something friendly yet distant.
“Yes, my captain?” she requested of him. “Why do you disturb my studies so late at night?”
“The boy. Jack,” he grunted. “You seen him?”
“No,” she said simply, before