Chapter 16: John Silver; How He Became a Pirate
The light of Barak's stateroom effloresced in a golden, silken sphere in the midst of the deck's darkness. Mercurius, climbing the companionway with a vivid report of his feet upon the wood, was silhouetted for a moment on the main deck before the chamber, and then he entered the doors of the room into a flood of noise. Silver could hear the pirates' voices from within the interior, and he believed for a moment Barak had composed a celebration to extol the success of the day's raid.
Timeus sighed, lowering the lantern as Silver and he reached the companionway Mercurius had presently scaled before them. "I don't feel good 'bout this," Timeus grieved. "I just don't get th' right feeling…"
Silver exhaled loudly, scoffing with an irate smile. "You don't feel good about anythin', Timeus," he accused, gripping the rope banisters and pulling a foot to the first step. He looked over his shoulder to show Timeus his smile in the lamplight, and said, "I'm not scared, and I'm years younger than you. You're not very much of a spacer, are you?"
Receiving nothing for a response, Silver ascended the stairs, laughing slightly at the coward he was leaving behind him. He reached the main deck and opened the stateroom doors that Mercurius had disappeared through in full spirits, stepping into the oasis of light and cacophony of voices. The cook's voice was the first thing that reached Silver's ears, crying, "'Ere he be, lads! There be the boy we here for!"
In a rushing moment, the pirates turned like one pouncing creature and leapt on Silver with forty hands. Daunted, Silver struggled against them impassionedly before he perceived his panic, but the pirates availed, pulling him to his knees, pulling his head back by his hair, and putting a brown flask of rum alcohol to his lips. Silver inhaled sharply, and tasted the sting of the liquid in his mouth, but harvested no air. His tongue worked over the waterfall, and finally channeled it down his throat. Spilling from both corners of his mouth, the potent elixir blazed down, taking with it the sudden upheaval of fear Silver had amounted, and diffusing it in his stomach. He drank with chokes for air, lustily, for the entirety of sixty seconds, until the flask was pulled from his mouth.
The pirates laughed, as Silver could well hear, but the sound was driven wildly up and down his spinning head as he gasped for air after his ingurgitation. His hair was released, and, seizing his freedom, he bent his head forward and tried to laugh as well, but his ears drummed madly, and he coughed. Rusted fire burned down his esophagus and inflamed behind his breastbone.
"Well, Silver," Barak's voice was above him, "Ye likes rum, do ye? Well, men! Would we grudge this boy 'ny more?" Silver looked up and saw hands reach for him again. He closed his eyes, and his head was brought up once more, and he felt the flask impact his lips. This time, with excitement, he brought his hands up and supported the flask by himself, and he quaffed again, readily. The pirates laughed once more, Barak's rising above the others.
Silver's lungs tightened, and he exhaled furiously as he dropped the container from his mouth. The pirates began to clap the boy on his back and shoulders, to adulate him for his performance, and equally to mollify his convulsions of coughs, laughing at his paucity of forbearance against alcohol.
He recovered at length, and when he opened his eyes again, he beheld Barak looming before him. "So…" Barak grinned, his teeth reflecting the mustard-yellow light in the room, "Ye wants to be a gentleman o' fortune, issat right?"
Silver opened his mouth to answer, but only coughed again, which made the stateroom walls quiver with laughter. The Ursid could feel himself color with mortification, and, angered at himself for such a display, and angered by the pirates' laughter, he turned his eyes on Barak and scowled. "Yes," he answered loudly.
This successful answer brought the congregation to a cheer, but Silver maintained his eyes on the captain, letting a smile spread his lips, showing his teeth to only that man. Barak's eyes, in turn, flickered with mischief, but Silver could still detect the shallow radiation of pride and admiration that he exuded in response to Silver's attestation. Barak's eyes then swept over the conflux, crying over their subsiding acclamations, "Didja' hear that, mates?"
"Aye!" they clamored in return.
"He wants t' be a pirate! Did th' lad say that?"
"Aye, he did!"
"Is he a pirate, lads?"
"Ask it o' Davy!"
This reply ignited a new vociferation of glee, and the pirates behind Silver, to Silver's astonishment, lifted him from his feet and carried him to the center of the room. They dropped him in a heap before Barak, who had moved to the location as well, and, as Silver regained his position, Barak demanded, "Ye knows of Davy Jones, don't ye, Silver?"
He said he did. The sailors who had employed him at the docks before Jonas had been imprisoned had told him of the term.
Barak's face shone with devoutness for Silver—as Silver had intuitively deciphered—while he addressed the stateroom once again, his arms open. "Then, gentlemen," he cried, "let's nay dawdle!"
The room seemed to heave into its lemon middle, and Silver, as his eyes flinched, found himself completely in darkness. The sound of the men laughing accumulated anew, and Silver, opening his eyes again, was bathed in an impetuous throng of liquid. Stunned, Silver stood erect and stiff, dripping the substance from his hair and clothing, his arms arched like willow branches. He looked up, and saw Barak's face—the ever-smiling teeth—watching him in an imperious ambiance. Silver straightened with a start, only to be collided with a second interval of the pirates' aqueous missiles, this time from the opposite direction of the preliminary onslaught. Then he smelt it. It was rum.
Smitten torpid by dull consternation—although not rendered so much by fear as stupefaction—he stood acquiescently as the pirates pursued their onset against him and discharged the alcohol. In the center of this empty bewilderment, his head seemed inconsequentially unsound upon his shoulders, and his temples beat a silent tattoo on either side beneath the surges of sound in the stateroom.
The impaction made by the alcohol gradually was accompanied by the pirates driving their palms into his shoulder blades in order to throw him off balance, and, because of this additional ordeal, the collisions became increasingly heavier to withstand and still remain on both feet. Thusly, Silver—with what he considered his unsecured head rocking up and down the valleys and peaks of his shoulders—began to falter and reel each time a new effusion shattered against his back as he desperately tried to conserve his balance.
The pirates continued to laugh and enjoy themselves as they poured the rum onto Silver's head, which confounded the Ursid, and caused him malicious indignation as he sustained their amusement for them—for the abortive price of sacrificing his own person, nonetheless—but he bore it reticently, partly because he desired to ascertain to the rouges that he was capable of prevailing over any grievances they could offer, and partly because he was half intoxicated by his earlier carouses, and could no longer successfully stay on both his feet.
Presently, Silver's balance was obscured to him for a moment, and the brown wood stood up and met his right shoulder with a severity that burst a cry out of him in his stupor. This offense earned double the peals of chortles from the pirates he had assumed for the previous few minutes of his ordeal, and again his face burned with angry ignominy, but he was not given the opportunity to recover his bearings, for as quickly as he had collapsed, the pirates swarmed above him to pour their alcohol on him even more.
Silver thought of the cabin boy who had not endured the keel hauling, and for the last hours of his miserable life he was forced to choke on the pirates' rum as they poured it on his head while he dangled off the ship's stern. Barak had said it was discipline and resolve alone that could have been the deciding attributes to preserve the cabin boy's life, and the lack of them were the deciding factors that killed him. Silver's heart of hearts, as wretched as he was, prayed that he was more so endowed with these attributes than the cabin boy that now drifted lifelessly in the depths of the Etherium.
A brown flask cracked against his back. Reacting instinctively, Silver again could not regain his feet, for the spilled rum now resided fatally beneath him, and so he suffered another collision with the floor when he attempted to flee. Just as he landed crookedly against the wood, another flask—one of the ones that had been emptied of the alcohol it was carrying—fell next to his head, grazing his ear, with a great clamor.
The second interval was a hail of flasks that were empty of the pirates' original weapon, and although considerably more succinct in time constraint, this additional assault rendered exceedingly more pain than the first. Silver endeavored to elude the rain of these new missiles as much as he could, but his vision was slightly blurred from the intoxication, and if he succeeded in avoiding one flask, he often only intersected with another.
He then suddenly felt two strong hands lift him to his feet, where they remained until he found his balance, and then he was released. Silver ran his hand over his face, his chest tight with humiliation and fury, and looked up into the smiling teeth of Barak.
Barak raised his voice in a congratulatory manner. "Th' boy's proven himself t' be strong!" he announced, but, to Silver's inwardly dismay, he added, "but is he brave?"
"Ask it o' Davy!" The crew shouted, crested around Silver's dripping body.
"Aye, Davy'll know," Barak agreed, looking provokingly into Silver's eyes. Again, Silver was lifted and carried to another area in the stateroom, but this time Silver was pulled away from Barak's presence, giving the captain a glare the boy considered so fiery, that he felt it blazed in that identical spot long after he had gone.
Silver was replaced on his feet across the stateroom from where he had been tortured with the rum and flasks, but no sooner was he on his feet than the pirates were pressing against his forehead and pulling his shoulders, dragging him onto his back so that he lay on the floor staring at the ceiling. Fright and his already flickering anger boiled inside him, and he fought with great cries of protestation and flails to prevent himself of being lain out on the floor. It was in vain, however, for with some strength greater than his, the pirates availed and immobilized him. Silver lifted and strained his neck to see in front of him, and saw five pirates restraining his limbs, and a sixth approaching his left side with a hammer and nail.
A hand reached out and pulled Silver's head down against the wood floor, forcing him to relax his neck or else suffer severe pain. Silver's eyes watched the man with the hammer and nail intensely, and writhed against the confinement of his arms and legs once more. It did nothing, and the man with the hammer knelt down beside the left side of Silver's head, his hands and his equipment disappearing out of Silver's eyesight.
All of Silver's limbs tensed, and he would have been altogether acutely rigid and unmoving, had his chest not have risen and fallen with such savagery. Silver closed his eyes and could feel his earlobe being washed with a liquid that had no odor of which he could detect, and then the cold point of the nail being placed on the skin. His eyes opened on a command he did not issue, and Silver's breath drew in like ice as he saw the hammer rise back into his peripheral vision and then disappear again, and his breath raked out as fire as the nail pierced the lobe with a putrid, sandpaper sound.
He felt the nail slip out of the indenture it had created, and something else slip back into its place, but he only removed his eyes from the ceiling when the convivial cheers and exults from the pirates who surrounded him rose to a decibel of sound that compelled him to look the men in their faces.
The pirates freed his limbs, and he raised from the floor, slowly, as the men cheered plaudits all around him. Some clustered about his left side in the noise and celebration, smiling and slapping his back as they mopped the blood from his ear with their handkerchiefs.
"Good job, lad," one said, very close to him, to Silver's right.
"Yer a real ol' salt, ye is," another observed, with a chuckle.
"He's a point o' va' sea devil, h'ain't he?" one laughed, where Silver could see him.
"Does it hurt, lad?" one asked with mirth, to his left.
"It does, terribly," Silver answered, weakly, but spurred to relief and gladness by the pirates' felicity. "What happened?"
The man laughed, quiet in the midst of the others' combined. "We pierced ye a lil'. It's whot pirates get when ye become inducted. Ye git an earring on yer left lobe."
Silver's eyes widened, and the pirate he was conversing with must have noticed, for he continued with, "she's nay a pretty sight t' see just now, but she'll be a beauty when yer lobe's done bleedin'. That should stop soon, 'ere."
Silver raised his voice over the room's cries of exaltation. "Am I now officially inducted?"
Another, from the right, answered. "No, boy," he cried, "but th' last part's easiest!"
"What will I have to do?"
"Ye've got t' pay homage to Davy Jones!"
After this answer was issued, Barak leapt into the center of the room and demanded silence with incredible oaths and name calling. When the congregation obeyed, Barak straightened himself and, as he adjusted the cuffs of his great coat, he cried, "Who here'll represent Mr. Davy Jones t'night fer this lad, John Silver?"
"Mercurius!" the whole of them replied, and the very man stalked next to Barak, which led to the initiation of a new round of ovations. Barak again had to command order before he was able to continue.
"Silver," he called when they quieted, "stand up!"
Silver rose quickly and hurried to Barak's side.
"Boy, th' next n' last step o' this induction ceremony is t' pay homage t' Davy Jones. Are ye ready, Silver?"
He asserted confidently that he was, although he was not as confident as he seemed.
"Good, lad. Now," Barak stated, "t' pay homage to Davy Jones by new pirates bein' inducted like ye in yer same position, th' traditional way it's done is th' new pirate must get down on his knees and kiss th' belly of the fattest man on th' ship."
"That's me," Mercurius inserted, with such ironic pleasure, that if he had had a tail to wag, it would have been waving behind him at that moment.
Silver's nose wrinkled, and his brow fell over his eyes.
Barak cuffed Silver on the back of the head. "Yer s'posed t' be payin' Davy homage, and ye don't do that by crinklin' yer face up that way!" Silver relaxed his muscles, and Barak continued. "His belly is smeared with lard, boy, but ye on'y have t' kiss it once t' give plenty o' homage. Ye c'n do it, can't ye, boy?"
Silver did not answer, but ran his tongue along his teeth underneath his lips. He eyed the excess flesh that rested around Mercurius's waist and belt, which gleamed with lard, and his own stomach jumped. His eyes strayed to his left, and he saw all the pirates gathered around the area, absorbed with wide-eyed suspense and little sound or movement. Silver, looking over at Barak with a quick glance, concluded decisively that he would kiss Mercurius's stomach very quickly and very lightly, and the act would be done in a matter of seconds.
The Ursid knelt down and crawled to the man on his hands and knees, with the silence rattling in his ears, reached the flesh, swallowed, pursed his lips, brushed it with them, and then fled across the room. The whole congregation roared with laughter—Barak's great, imperious laughter also ringing aloud—and Silver was again extolled by all present.
"Yer a pirate, now, Silver!" He heard Barak resound, the last comprehensible words he heard that night, for the rest of it was drowned by the incessant consumption of rum, cheering, laughing, and singing until it swirled into a colorful wheel that spun merrily into unconsciousness.
When Silver awoke again, it was early morning, and seemed very much like it, too, for the ship had sailed into the crisp light of a new star, and the stateroom was bathed in its soft, white glow.
Silver rose from where he laid strewn out on the floor, his head pounding with every pulse, and he staggered silently out of the stateroom where many of the pirates still lay sleeping in their ignominy. Outside, Silver observed himself tenebrously in a nearby window looking into the forecastle, and fingered the earring that now clung to his left ear. Although blood had dried around it, Silver considered this to be the loveliest thing he had ever adorned himself with, including his little blue coat with the velvet facings.
Although, as he looked at himself, he chest still grew sore with unwonted grief and it could not be assuaged by any admiration of his jewelry, so he left the window and his reflection, and ran across the deck.
He climbed for a little while on the shrouds, restlessly, but he longed for something he could not name, and knew it was not placated where he was, so he jumped back down on the deck and pursued a winding course to the aftcastle. He placed a hand on the wall of this compartment, and drifted close to it, following it with his hand. His shadow billowed and compressed underneath his moving feet in the white star light, and his hand on the wall cast a long shadow that broke on the vertex of the wall and floor. He realized that he could hear his feet tap against the wood in silent morning, and then he could not forget it.
He left the aftcastle and wandered unhappily underneath the bridge, where his shadow was swallowed by the one cast by the upper deck, and then he shuffled to the starboard bulwarks. There, he began to cry. He had not been able to cry before; he had not cried even during the most dismal events of his life, and now, with a rush of emotion, he cried for everything at once. He wept with rage, beating the bulwarks, pulling at his hair, and pounding his shoulders. He chewed the insides of his cheek to keep himself from shouting with fury, and clawed at his arms, until he finally sank onto the ship's side and sobbed heavily.
He acted so for a long time, until it was completely exhausted from his body. His respiration slowed after a time, and peace gradually settled inside him again. He choked occasionally with relapses, but at length Silver calmed, and merely stared out over the silent Etherium, watching the blue nebula roll and toss, and wake with the star's light.
After such a cleansing of his constrained despairs, Silver was now left feeling lighter as he gazed beyond the nebulous clouds of what was now his home. His burdens had been alleviated, and, as he reached up absently and held his new earring in his hand, he at last felt contented, motivated, and confident—prepared to follow in the century-old footsteps of Captain Nathaniel Flint. He would have the loot of a thousand worlds, and be as rich as a king.
The End