The Walrus and the Warwolf Page 9

  All the pirates knew it, and joined in, but Drake could not follow the lyrics, for they were so full of sea-talk, arcane slang, and dialect words native to the Greater Teeth. But the chorus was easy enough to understand: everyone howled like a dog, crowed like a cock, screamed like a cat then barked like a seal. Then clapped hands against thighs.

  Drake suddenly wanted to be part of it: part of the singing, the slapping, the body-huddles, the community. It all seemed, for a moment, positively jolly. But did not dare join in. His recent experiences had left him feeling as wrecked as the Walrus. He closed his eyes, and, eventually, slept.

  Towards noon, Drake woke from muttering nightmares to hear excited talk amongst the pirates. They had sighted a ship. As it came closer, they saw it had green sails. Closer still, and they saw its dragon figurehead.

  Mulps spat, and swore.

  'It's the Warwolf,' said Mulps.

  The masts and rigging of the Walrus advertised their presence, and it was soon clear to everyone except Drake that the Warwolf had sighted them. However, by the time the ship was bulking near the reefs, even he knew that rescue was at hand - not that the pirates seemed glad of it.

  Keeping a prudent distance from the rocks, the Warwolf lowered three boats to investigate. Soon the castaways were sharing their reef with newcomers, a party of grim men tricked out with weapons and looking more than ready to use them. One was, to judge from his bearing, their leader.

  He carried himself like a king.

  He was tall, lean, as black as Bucks Cat and as bald as a hazel nut. He was dressed in brown leather, and wore round his hips a great big leather belt from which hung a waterproof sea-pouch and assorted ironmongery. He looked dangerous. But he had come, nevertheless, to rescue them - so, at the sight of him, Drake perked up.

  'Who's the bald old coot?' said Drake to anyone who might answer.

  Nobody condescended to reply, but the bald old coot was in fact Jon Arabin, the Warwolf himself, an ascetic man with a taste for experiment and challenge. Arabin came onto the rocks like a conqueror. His eyes were a pale, sunwashed blue. Drake was startled to see such blue amidst such black. Steady eyes, yes, and a steady voice, which said:

  'There's space afloat for any who'll swear loyal to me and mine. Even the Walrus. How about it, Mulps, me pretty fopling?'

  Mulps spat in reply.

  'I'll take no murder on my ship,' continued Arabin, unperturbed. 'So you must swear loyal. Mulps, play the man: free the crew from their word.'

  'Done,' said Mulps, nodding a little. 'Any rat in search of a sewer can run.'

  Nobody moved.

  'Loyal is one thing,' said Arabin. 'Stupid is another.' Drake got to his feet. He felt thin, transparent, almost weightless.

  'I'll swear loyal,' he said.

  'That's rape-meat from the last boarding!' said Andranovory. 'Take a swearing from him? He can't stand a deck, far less set sail.'

  Arabin turned his stern gaze on Drake, who felt, for a moment, like dust being weighed against iron.

  'What can you do, boy?'

  T know iron,' said Drake promptly, 'and I know steel. Yes, and rope. Climbing, splicing and knots. It's my father who learnt me ropes.'

  'Aye, boy, and buggery perhaps,' said Arabin. 'But can you cut?'

  'Cut?'

  'Aye. Cut, gut, gralloch and gash. Go nose to nose with a cutlass and swim through smirking. How about it, boy? Come here!'

  Drake reluctantly ventured down to the foam-smothered patch of rock where Jon Arabin stood, careless of the sea lathering his boots. As surf sucked back, Arabin tossed a dirk so it fell between them. Drake stared at the bald man's hard bones, the rough-torn boots, the ugly chunks of callus on the knuckles, the pale blue eyes as cold as the sea and as ruthless.

  T can cut,' he said, and stooped, and grabbed, and jerked the dirk to the challenge.

  Jon Arabin kicked him in the stomach, and he went down hard. Heart scrambling, Drake scuffled to his feet. Sick nausea staggered him, and he knew he was dead meat: but he squared back, panting, knife held tight, and stood ready.

  Arabin gave a little nod.

  'Aye,' he said. 'You've got the makings. Get in the boat.'

  7

  Name: Orfus pirates.

  Description: league of sea-robbers based on islands of the Greater Teeth.

  Language: a dialect of Galish.

  Political organization: oligarchical rule through a limited franchise democracy.

  History: dates back several centuries to the Summer of Three Comets, when the delinquent Harla clan of Galish traders set up as pirates on the island of Drum, a base later abandoned after a severe dispute with the local sea dragons.

  Once back aboard the Warwolf, Jon Arabin ordered a raft to be cut loose and thrown overboard. He was obeyed.

  'That's their chance,' said Jon Arabin, as the bamboo raft splashed into the sea. 'They can swim for it, if they wish.'

  'Why give them a chance?' said one of his men. 'Are you in love with friend Walrus of sudden?'

  'Nay, man,' said Arabin. 'But Whale Mike's on that reef. He gave me a chance once, aye, when the Walrus was set to drown me. I owe him the same in return.'

  'What's with the boy?' said a man.

  'New meat,' said Jon Arabin. 'Get him some soup. Then to bed.'

  'We've no bunk spare.'

  'Then he can sleep on the floor. He's tired enough

  aren't you boy? Aye. You'll nod away to never in an instant.'

  Drake was in no state to argue otherwise. Jon Arabin knew what he was talking about.

  The Warwolf stood off from the Greater Teeth that night, and put in to Gufling the next day. A slow and weary business it was, with much sounding, towing and warping before they eased the ship in to a sea-cleft which fitted them as tightly as a virgin. Gufling, Drake learned, was the smallest Tooth where a ship could berth; Jon Arabin had been exiled here by debt.

  From the deck, Drake looked around with eyes which had widened to accommodate the gloom. Overhanging cliffs tossed around the echoes of boots on stone, harsh laughter and shipwork hammering. The place stank of sewage, smoke and fish heads. Dogs were barking, babies bawling, and fat women yelling in a Galish patois at times scarcely comprehensible.

  'Come along, boy,' said Jon Arabin, striding down the gang-plank. 'What are you waiting for? A whore-money proposition?'

  Dumbly, Drake followed his new master - wishing, for a moment, that he was a fish, free to take the sea-path back to Stokos. They fumbled their way down cockroach-haunted tunnels to Arabin's living quarters, where a confusion of women and children filled the air with tears and laughter.

  Drake was shown a place where he could sleep, a side-kennel in Jon Arabin's cave complex. It was a warehouse of sorts, holding baulks of spare timber, buckets of tar, lobster pots, fishing floats, harpoons, chunks of cork and hundreds of odds and ends of rope.

  'You say you know rope, boy,' said Arabin. 'Well, have we got work for you! Look on it as a challenge. Do you accept?'

  'Plen pro!' said Drake in his native Ligin, meaning 'avec plaisir'.

  And he sat down on the spot and began rummaging through the ropes. Jon Arabin laughed.

  'Lunch first!' said he.

  Lunch was three different kinds of seaweed, assorted seaslugs, lobster, whore's-eggs, raw fish and roast seal, all obtained locally. Drake was glad he had learnt that raw fish was safe to eat - otherwise he might have disgraced himself by accusing Jon Arabin of trying to poison him.

  'Good fish,' he said.

  ' You' 11 find, boy,' said Arabin, 'that the Teeth must feed themselves, more or less. You'll be busy enough when the Warwolf's home. Aye. Working sealing boats and fishing.'

  'Do I start that after lunch?' said Drake.

  'Nay,' said Arabin, with another laugh. 'After lunch, it's ropes. Rope is your future, boy, till I say otherwise.'

  Drake was glad he had not been bluffing about rope. He knew knots and splices, and used them well, fashioning serviceable rope from the wrec
kage he was given to work with. At first he worked without ceasing, thinking himself a slave. But Jon Arabin paid little attention to his rope production, so Drake soon eased up.

  And, before very long, he discovered that they practised religion here, too, albeit in a fairly disorganized fashion.

  Jon Arabin gave Drake some beer money. Once he had mastered this strange coinage - a mixture of brass triangles, bronze hexagons and copper squares, all written over with alien hieroglyphics - he multiplied it through cards. No pirate played without cheating, but, as the saying goes on Stokos, 'The Demon takes care of his own.' Drake reaped the rewards of the truly devout.

  After scarcely five days on Gufling, he had made himself so unpopular by his large-scale winnings that nobody on the island would play with him.

  'Never mind,' said Arabin, when he heard of Drake's plight. 'After our next trip, we'll buy back into Knock. There's ten times the people there.'

  Knock, Drake learned, was the largest of the Teeth.

  'And when is the next trip?' he asked.

  'We leave tomorrow,' said Arabin.

  That night, Drake indulged himself with wild imaginings in which rape, slaughter and pillage took pride of place. However, the next day, as they laboured at the tedious business of putting the Warwolf to sea - more warping, towing and sounding - he learned, to his disappointment, that on this trip they were to be engaged in strictly legitimate trade.

  To be precise, they were going to make the pearl run down to Ling, about a thousand leagues away, in the Drangsturm Gulf. Few would dare the pearl-run risks, not even pirates. But Jon Arabin, who had chanced it first a decade ago, risked it every second year.

  After much labour, they cleared Gufling and set a course for the south. As pirates nimbled through the rigging, Drake wondered when he'd be taken in hand and shown how it was done. He was sure he'd manage splendidly. He was still wondering when a filthy mumbling old man confronted him. The ancient looked Drake up and down with rheuming eyes that were three parts blind, bared his lips to show toothless gums, and said:

  'You Drake?'

  T do have the honour of being Dreldragon Drakedon Douay, a pirate of the Greater Teeth and a henchman of the honourable Jon Arabin, whom I hope to serve well,' said Drake, with all the dignity he could muster.

  'Aye,' said the old man, with a cackle. 'You'll serve him well enough. Come with me!'

  Drake, not knowing what to expect, followed warily, a hand on the hilt of the dirk Jon Arabin had let him keep after their brusque introduction on the Gaunt Reefs. The old man mumbled to himself as they ventured into the fumbling gloom below decks. Drake caught snatches of his monologue:

  '. . . yes . . . valley . . . she and her twat. . . good gold and biting. . .oh you were pretty. . . hot bread for forking . . . dragons may say. . .what's with the warthog. . .'

  And more of the same, punctuated with cackles of laughter and the odd bit of shadow-boxing.

  Down and down they went, until they came to the deepest, darkest, dirtiest bit of the ship, where a guttering seal-oil lamp fouled the air with smoke, where rats sat on their hind legs screaming defiance, where the scuttling cockroaches were a handful apiece, where the air stank of stale cheese, grease, old fish, dead cat, offal, soft carrots and rotten potatoes. Four charcoal stoves were burning, so it was hot - as hot as sharing a bed with five fat whores and fifty pairs of woollen socks.

  'Where are we?' asked Drake with something very much like dread, fearing that he knew the answer already.

  'We're in the klandlay, boy.'

  'The kitchen?'

  'Aye, that's a name for it.'

  'And what - well, what am I meant to do here?'

  'Why so many questions when you already know the answers?' said the ancient.

  He plunged his hands into a bucket of white fluid -milk? - and retrieved half a dozen eggs. What happened next would not bear description - but the crew ate the results at meal time.

  So Drake abandoned dreams of larking in the rigging, of swashing onto merchant ships with cutlass in hand, of blooding virgins and breaking into treasure chests. He settled, instead, to life as the cook's boy, helping prepare and dish up meals of salt pork, seal meat, sea biscuit, salted cod, stockfish, bacon, grey peas, and rye-flour cakes fried in whale oil and served with a dole of vinegar.

  As the ship ploughed south, Drake adapted to life in the fo'c'sle, a crowded bunkroom continually damp with sea-gear and loud with coughing, snoring, sneezing, scratching, farting, gossip and argument. He found it hard to make friends as the crew blamed him (not, it must be admitted, entirely without justification) for some of the more appalling culinary disasters they endured.

  In the fo'c'sle there were, amongst others, a huge foul-mouthed muscle man called Quin Baltu; Jon Disaster, who liked to be thought of as hard and dangerous; Raggage Pouch, who stole anything and everything that was not nailed down; Harly Burpskin, who had more money than sense, but was evening up the balance by playing cards with Drake.

  There was also Ika Thole, a red-skinned red-haired harpoon man from the Ebrell Islands. Naturally, he reminded Drake of the high-breasted Zanya Kliedervaust, whom he had last seen at Cam's leper colony. Drake, homesick, lovesick, was eager to learn all he could of Zanya's homeland. He asked Thole to speak of the Ebrells - but Thole slapped him down, called him 'you greasy little quat', called him worse, and refused to have anything to do with him.

  Even Burpskin, though he was prepared to challenge Drake at cards, could scarcely be counted as a friend. Drake sensed that there were strong bonds of trust and friendship between the crewmen, however much they quarrelled and fought. Working the canvas, riding out whatever weather the Central Ocean assailed them with, they relied on each other for their very lives. Drake, working as he did in the galley, was excluded from this great partnership. He was a lower order of life entirely.

  He started to lust for the day when he too would be a sailor, hauling on ropes, running out along the yard-arm, standing watches at night, spitting on his fellows from the crow's-nest. . .

  But when he asked Jon Arabin for permission to get started on real sailor work, his captain just laughed, patted him on the head and said:

  'Wait till you grow to man-height.'

  Which, naturally, infuriated Drake almost beyond measure. He would have consoled himself by getting drunk. However, with the exception of gambling, the consolations of religion were unobtainable on this dry ship. Consequently, their voyage seemed to last forever. But they were scarcely twenty days from the Teeth when, by night, they sighted a glow on the eastern horizon.

  Drake saw it when he went to relieve himself at the ship's head, a perilous place built out above the water. He met Ika Thole, there for the same purpose.

  'That's Drangsturm, boy,' said Thole, feeling congenial because he had just come off watch.

  'The flame trench,' said Drake, to show that he knew what it was all about. While he resented being addressed as 'boy', he,was glad Thole had condescended to speak to him at all.

  'Aye,' said Thole.

  And they said no more about it, but stood for some time watching those barbecue skies. The ever-burning fires of Drangsturm ran from west to east across the narrow isthmus which separated the Drangsturm Gulf from the Inner Waters. In strongholds such as the Castle of Controlling Power, members of the Confederation of Wizards stood guard, ready to repel any monsters of the Swarms which managed to get beyond Drangsturm.

  Both Thole and Drake knew the easy motion of the ship was taking them steadily toward the horrors of the terror-lands beyond the protection of the flame trench. Shortly, the ship changed course. Near Drangsturm, the coast made an elbow and ran west. Ling lay some seventy-five leagues (as bird-flight measures distance) along that coast. So west ran the Warwolf.

  That night, in his dreams, Drake did battle with the monsters of the Swarms, which he knew well enough from songs and legends common on Stokos. He dreamed that the awesome might of the flame trench failed; that the fantastic wizard-castle
s fell to ruin in war; that the Swarms came north; that the ancient enemy marched on Narba, on Veda, even on the towers of Selzirk the fair.

  Drake woke when Shewel Lokenshield thumped him in the face with a dead fish.

  'Grumph!' snorted Drake, waking in a great hurry.

  'Keep the noise down,' growled Lokenshield. 'You were groaning like a sow in heat.'

  'Nightmares,' said Drake, by way of explanation.

  'Man,' said Lokenshield, in disgust, 'if you're having bad dreams already, you'll be sleeping screaming by the time we get to Ling!'

  Moments later, Lokenshield was asleep again. But Drake lay sleepless, sweating in the hot, dank fug of the fo'c'sle. Worrying about Ling. Now it was so close, he was truly beginning to realize the risks they were running.

  By dawn, theNvind had died away to almost nothing. The Warwolf floated in sunlit seas with only the lightest of airs to gentle her sails. They were running - well, idling - some twenty leagues north of the coast, a featureless blue-green line on the horizon.

  'The terror-lands,' said Jon Disaster grandly, indicating the coast to the south. 'Home of the Swarms.'

  T suppose,' said Drake hopefully, 'that the Swarms couldn't get to us from the shore.'

  'Oh, the greatest of them,' said Disaster, 'they could fly, well, they could damn-near fly from here to Stokos.'

  'Oh,' said Drake, feeling younger and less certain than he had for years, and hurried down below to the comparative security of the galley.

  The Warwolf cruised along the coast to Peninsular Quanat. She rounded Cape Songala then dared the narrow strait between Quanat and Island Va. Then ran by night for Ling. Drake was up bright and early, curiosity defying fear.

  'What's that island?' he said, pointing to a considerable chunk of offshore rock.

  'That's Ko,' said Jon Disaster. 'That's where the pearls are.'

  'If we know where they are,' said Drake, 'why do we trade for them? Why don't we go get some for ourselves?'

  Jon Disaster laughed, and made no answer.

  Shortly, the anchor slid away to the sandy bottom of Ling Bay. Drake scanned the daunting cliffs, which were punctured with holes, caves, tunnels, shafts, windows, embrasures and vents.