Chapter 14: John Silver; His First Act of Piracy
An excitement throbbed down the deck as the hands swept over the planks to prepare the ship of its impending assault. The red nebula burned silently, watchfully; stroking the hull of the Oeil de la Mer with approbatory demur. The white shimmering sound of cutlasses withdrawing from hilts rang sporadically in the air. The men shouted and laughed underneath the tension that expanding on the ship. Bullets exploded with a splintering crack into the scarlet mist hanging in the thickness swirling around the sails. Barak called for the Jolly Roger, and the eye of his telescope flashed white, and the flag flew up the mainmast like a crow, with a ripping sound as it threshed in the unheard wind.
A flutter of feet on the deck wood, and Timeus stood beside Silver before the bulwarks. "Lord 'elp us," he groaned softly, "I hate it when this 'appens."
Silver, unresponsive, trained his eyes and squinted through the inflamed silence of the nebula and caught the ship in his sight. The sails were blooming, consecutively, down the rows of masts. They had seen the pirates' flag. "I think they're trying to escape," Silver observed with apathy, very low in his throat. His palms were sweating on the wood of the bulwarks. He removed them.
"I hope they do!" Timeus rejoined passionately, with a strain in his voice to avoid becoming louder than a whisper. The deck was very quiet. Silver still watched the sails of the Aquanog ship. Timeus continued shrilly, "I don't want to kill anyone anymore."
The rest of the crew, however—Silver knew—wanted to kill as many of these Aquanogs as accessible. Silver's eyes slid sideways. "I've never been allowed to board the other ships' decks when we attack like this," he observed again, turning toward Timeus, but his eyes distant. The wind rippled lightly through his hair. "I've always been ordered to the roundhouse."
"I know. 'T's not fair, I say! Why is it that you're not allowed t' 'elp fight?"
Silver knew the answer. "Barak doesn't want to lose his boy."
The ship groaned to port, and the finger of the figurehead tilted toward the light of the Galampaler sun—toward the Aquanog ship. The two watched this—Timeus very ill at ease; Silver quite distant and strangely indifferent—as the claret bow wheeled toward the pirates' prey in silence.
Laughter. Very soft at first, but then, slowly, climbed up and up and up towards the peaks of the masts as the pirates began to watch the ship as they approached. Silver felt Timeus move behind him, but his eyes fell on Barak as he peered gleefully into his spyglass, still seemingly aflame in his red coat. Silver's brow fell.
"Silver," Timeus whispered behind him, miles away. "D'you see that?"
Silver turned around. He saw Timeus leaning over the side of the ship, staring. "See what?"
"That, there."
Silver followed Timeus's gaze and found the Aquanog ship had unfurled their sails and were now struggling to flee from the Oeil de la Mer's threat. It's getting away; he thought fleetingly, we've got to go faster…
Barak jerked down the companionway from his perch on the main deck, in his crimson shadow, and cried for Ponton to speed up the ship, as though he had shared Silver's thoughts. "So, it's a chase they want t' give us, aye?" Barak thought aloud with a spectacular oath, echoed by Ponton's distant orders to the specialist below deck to increase the solar power intake, "They'll get themselves a chase then, by thunder!"
The ship heaved upward, a groan creaking out through the planks. The men went up and down like birds, blindly, running up shrouds and companionways; their weapons in their teeth; their hands straining on the rigging, bringing the figurehead to face the reeling, unreachable skies above them. Like this they climbed, while the sails inhaled the scarlet light, and screamed in the direction of the extended arm of the figurehead, as the whole of the ship whistled against the air.
Silver's clothes and hair whipped about him, stinging his arms as the cloth clawed about him in the wind. Leaning far over the bulwarks, he saw the Aquanog ship slide twenty feet beneath the Oeil de la Mer's hull. Timeus stiffened, his white shirt boiling about him, making him only just visible. Silver, still hanging over the bulwarks, hanging over the Aquanog ship, could see the flecks of the crew bestirring across their deck, and looking up at him.
The Aquanog cannons were being fired, and Silver was inflamed with fear, but knew the Aquanog ship could not aim above them, and the Aquanogs knew it, too. Silver spun on his heel, suddenly burning with efficacy, and faced the ship's starboard side just as the pirates began laughing at the ship below them, and singing, "Let them shoot! We'll catch 'em still! They're already dead!"
The ship fell. Upon Barak's orders, the sails shrank and the ship fell, like a bomb, and dropped down to the front of the pirates' prey, hovered at the face of their bow—the sails ringing with wind—and the pirates chanting, "Let them fight! We'll catch 'em still! They're already dead!"
Silver was in the center of the deck, turning. His eyes fell on Barak, who seemed to be the source of the red nebulous fire, and called for him soundlessly among the chants and singing and running. Barak looked as though a sparkling red fish underwater, moving brokenly against the flurries of pirates running for the bulwarks, and he looked at Silver. "To th' roundhouse with ye, boy!" the captain resounded, and Silver spilled inside the roundhouse in a dizzy blur.
The sounds of the attack could not be heard in the roundhouse when the pirates breeched the ship they were raiding. Silver had encountered such raids before this, and had always secured himself in the roundhouse as Barak had wished him to. Overwrought, Silver would bide insufferably in the small compartment, with the silence drumming about in his ears, his mind thinking relentlessly of the battle raging on the ship next to his. He often heard the pirates blather and slither the raids on their tongues after one of them occurred, telling the other of how they counted up to ten of them that they killed, or telling of how much gold was uncovered on one body alone. Silver listened to them with fervid horror, listening of the thousands of men or space creatures who died under the slash of the pirates' swords, or who shattered at the sound of a gunshot. But none of that could be heard in the roundhouse where Silver braved the battle—not the screams of pain the victims sang, nor the explosion of powder that caused immediate death, nor the sound of the blade slicing lustily at the throat of some poor man—but Silver could easily see, every hour he concealed himself in the roundhouse during another attack, the fire-red blood cascade down the decks and march down into the scuppers, bleeding into the nebula as it swirled in its pernicious avidity. The sounds themselves, however, could never be heard, and his temples pulsed with the relief that they could not be.
They could never be heard. Silver had learned they could not be; as much as he strained his ears, as much as he tried to grasp the faintest whisper of the death that sluiced out of the ship and from the wounds the pirates induced—and as hard as he tried not to hear it—no sounds transuded into the roundhouse. He had learned it was impossible to hear them.
Yet there they were.
The sounds.
Inside his mind. The chanting…
Let them fight, we'll catch 'em still, they're already dead!
Silver heard the pirates drown and drawl on the words, eating them, fawning them, falling and rising, swelling and deflating, and chanting still…
Let them fight, we'll catch 'em still, they're already dead!
Silver looked around and searched for them. There were not there. Of course they were not there—they were fighting on another ship. The pirates had breeched over their enemies' bulwarks and were now worlds away, some butchering, some dying, some laughing, some chanting…
Let them fight, we'll catch 'em still, they're already dead!
Silver sat on the center table and hugged his knees. He buried his face in his knees, moved it over, and replaced it between them again. Before long, he felt watched and so moved to a corner and hugged himself there, his eyes closed so tight he could see the blood run down the wooden decks…
Catch them, kill them, open their veins!
Silver's head lifted.
The pirates were still on board the Oeil de la Mer, chanting.
He could hear them. Silver's blood froze. His arms numbed. He stopped breathing.
Kill them! Open their veins! They're already dead!
Silver could hear them. But they could not be heard! He had learned they could not be!
He crossed the roundhouse floor in a sweeping leap, jumped onto the far table, and unhooked the skylight hatch. A gunshot shivered into the air. Silver's legs threatened to faint underneath him, and his teeth rattled in his head. With a hazy hand, he lifted the window slightly, slowly, cautiously, and raised himself so his eyes overcame the sill and overflowed beyond the wood.
The blood did not march, as Silver had imagined, but was scarlet ice on the wooden deck, still and standing stiffly in masses. The pirates flickered like flies in their imposing clothing, running their swords through the Aquanogs and leaving fountains of fire littered arbitrarily across the deck. Flowing, ducking, jumping, roaring, screaming, chanting; in a haze they scintillated down the deck and into the spilled cruor—both Silver's crewmates and the Aquanogs—sending droplets high into the air like sparks of fire. Silver flew down the deck with his eyes, and caught the port bulwarks flooded with Aquanog fronts, crossing to the Oeil de la Mer's deck by planks lain across the opposite bulwarks.
Let them die! Rip them open! Smear their blood!
The pirates howled. All of them smiled senselessly. Barak stood near the main deck, his red coat gleaming ensanguined.
Silver fell on his knees, and scrambled in hysteria back to the corner table, where he hid his face amongst the wooden chairs, giddily and aberrantly delirious. Sweat dripped from his face. He wiped it from his eyes and thought it blood.
Silver saw for the first time during one of these raids the impossibility of his environment. A great anger and horror filled him, for he wanted more than anything at this moment to be able to do something. But do what?
Now, as if he had just discovered the horror—or perhaps in an answer to his desire— he began to scream. In a nightmare, he saw Barak in the crimson raiment, amidst the battle. For what purpose would any man wish to kill another and drink away their life? Why would the pirates smile and laugh and chant so like demons during the act?
"Stop it!"
Silver's screams were smothered in his tongue. He thought idiotically that perhaps the voice was his father's, and he had come with a glimmer of golden sun to pull him loose from the tables and massacre…
A fallacy. His screams transpired from his throat once again upon facing the owner of the voice, and finding an Aquanog standing over him, drawn by the noise and having entered by the unlocked skylight. Sunlight surged into the room after him.
"Stop that, now!" The Aquanog roared, over Silver's moans, as he lifted his cutlass over his knees.
Silver's mouth shut with a clamor. Get away!
The Ursid flung himself over, and banged his knees against the planks. He clawed and thrashed forward, like a drowning swimmer, down further beneath the table. The cutlass came down against the floor. He's going to kill me!
An insane panic throttled up his legs and chest. Silver felt his entire body flutter with it when the Aquanog slid the table away and revealed him underneath it. His skin crawling on his bones, Silver lurched forward onto his feet, close to the creature, and then down he fell from his bearings passed the alien's arms and weapon, and leapt up behind him. The Aquanog whirled around, and Silver saw he would have been close to his fingertips had he reached out.
Breathing brokenly, Silver projected himself out at his attacker, landing with a crash of piercing cries on the impaction, and sent the Aquanog against the wall with a thundering blow. Silver reached out and caught both the Aquanog's wrists in his hands, and shrieked dismayingly, "Were you going to kill me?"
The Aquanog only struggled to free himself from Silver's constriction.
"You were going t' kill me!" Silver cried, shaking profusely.
The Aquanog stared at him, contemptuously. Bitterly. He fell to stillness, breathing, in a crack of silence.
Silver's face contorted with a sudden, ferine infuriation. He inhaled sharply, snarling. Silver would not let this creature kill him! No one would kill him! He was not going to die on his back with his feet in the air, weeping vacuously. It would not happen! "You think you're going t' kill me?" he breathed, "I'll kill you first."
The Aquanog's eyes widened as Silver relieved the cutlass from one of his hands that were trapped above him. Silver released the Aquanog's hands, which came down in a gale of working, protesting fingers. The white sliver of that mercurial blade entered the Aquanog's belly easily, and in effect the hands followed the blade into it in an attempt to prevent it. It was as though dipping a stick of wood into a cold pool of calm water. It made the foreign, isolated, tantalizing crackle of dry leaves. The fluid fingered down the sword, crawled down the neck, and dripped from the steel onto the ground with a vacant percussion. Silver's eyes, blue and brilliant, searched and found the eyes that peeked from the loaf of flesh that his sword now agilely bore the weight of. They shone with confusion, shock; void of emotion, void of understanding. Silver could feel the warmth spread from the wound. Silver pulled the blade from the Aquanog—a dull whistle of a hatchet snapping a tree—and the liquid gleamed radiant on the floor.
I have the power to kill him.
The sword sank into the warm body again, this time more forcefully, zealously, above the first, in his shoulder. The same quiet crackle played euphorically inside Silver's head, and the red fingers danced and traced down the blade and the clothes, florid and effulgent.
This must be why they like it so much. Such power you have over everyone. Think of it! Already fifteen years old and only now realizing I had such a power!
Again the sword was removed and again it plunged, for a third time. Only fifteen years old and only now discovering that rare living executioner; that homicide, dark-eyed and piceous, wrapped and mummified and found in the roundhouse; the place Barak thought to be the best location to protect Silver from this education! The eyes inside the Aquanog's head clouded with a yellow, like fractured lemon glass. A cough drained from inside the creature's throat, and the body jerked upon the steel. Silver removed it, and the Aquanog fell into a heap of smoldering red.
Barak was reverent when he saw the corpse.