Greenbeard (9781935259220) (6 page)

Blue Peter sat by him through the night as he slept and dreamed. The Captain's slumbers were riven by nightmares and he ground his teeth and cried out. Once the Captain spoke in his sleep as though revisiting some scene from the past:

“Welcome, sir! Welcome to the Mansion of the Glaroon! The boy will park your skimmer, sir. Let me take your helmet and cape, sir. Follow the footman, sir, and he will lead you to the festivities. Welcome, sir! Welcome to the Mansion of the Glaroon! Why, Great Cthulu, sir! How pleasant to see you here again! And Mrs Cthulu, too! Why, you are looking in the pink, my lady! Or should I say green, har-har! And your daughter, too! Why, Miss Lulu Cthulu, you look lovelier each passing week, I do declare! Har-har! The Glaroon is in the Games Room, Mr Cthulu, sir, I am sure he will be delighted if you join him there. Welcome, sir! Welcome to the Mansion of the Glaroon! The boy will park your skimmer, sir ....” The Captain's voice trailed off into unintelligible mumbling.

How can this be? thought Blue Peter Ceteshwayoo. He has been away three hours and yet he has been away years. And he has known the pain and humiliation of slavery, too, which I would not have wished on his noble freedom-loving pirate's soul for all the silver in Spanish America. And his beard is turned green. Not dyed green, but
turned
green, for it is growing green out of his skin. How can these things be?

The pirate frigate
Ark de Triomphe
was safe at last, moored to the quay of Porte de Recailles. Blue Peter Ceteshwayoo joined Bulbous Bill Bucephalus and Israel Feet in the officers' wardroom, where they were gloomily drinking rum.

“I believe he is on the mend,” said Blue Peter. “He has slept now for three days, and the colour has come back to his face. He is no longer dreaming nightmares, but sleeps easily and restfully. I think we should leave him until he awakes of his own accord. Loomin' Len is sitting by him, and one of the bully-boys guards the door. It is best that the crew do not know that his beard has turned green just yet. They are naturally restive that a great fortune in silver has disappeared from before their eyes. Anything strange may cause mutiny. A Captain with a long yellow beard is one thing, a Captain with a long green beard is entirely another thing.”

“Iffen it ain't the damnedest thing I ever did see,” said Israel Feet, “an' iffen it ain't you may boil my arse in oil, you may. An' I will lay to that, else, messmates!” He took a drink of rum.

“Indeed, there is much about this whole affair that I find strange and unnatural,” said Blue Peter. “I should have been wary when a medicine-man was involved. We have those fellows back in Africa, you know, and I wouldn't trust a one of them as far as I could throw him uphill. They are always talking to spirits and devils and suchlike, and that cannot be right, no matter which church you worship in.”

“I don't think it were the
brujo
's fault,” said Bulbous Bill Bucephalus slowly. “I was asking some questions of the man Denzil, to try and get this straight.” He sipped his rum. “I think it were more a problem of translation, like.”

“How do you mean?” said Blue Peter, pursing his lips.

“Well, Denzil he reckoned he translated that indian lingo as best he could, and it were a crockery fleet, just like I said at first. T'weren't Spanish, either. Some other bunch I've never heard of. It wasn't the Spanish Plate Fleet,” he sipped his rum again, “it was the Martian Saucer Fleet.”

B
lue Peter Ceteshwayoo rode a Percheron mare down the winding path to Porte de Recailles. The plough-horse was quite old and he had bought it very cheaply, but it was big enough and still powerful enough to carry the weight of his huge frame with ease. A smaller horse would have been overloaded, and Blue Peter abhorred cruelty to animals. It was the early morning and the air was still cool and crisp, which was pleasing to both man and horse. The late-summer day would soon become bakingly hot as the sun rose high over the Caribbean island.

Nearly a year had passed since the beard of Captain Greybagges had been turned green by the horrors he had encountered in Nombre Dios Bay, and these months had been very good to the pirates of the frigate
Ark de Triomphe
. The disaster in Nombre Dios Bay – the sad failure to take the Spanish plate fleet, the mysterious greening of the Captain's beard – had seemed like a terrible portent, but the pirates had been extraordinarily lucky in the aftermath. Captain Greybagges's bright green beard had not made him an object of mockery, but had instead given him a fell and perilous aura of the supernatural. Ships that could easily have out-run or out-fought the
Ark de Triomphe
had hove-to at the first sight of Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges standing grim-faced on the quarterdeck, his sombre all-black clothes emphasizing the brilliant grass-green of his long beard. The mystery of how his beard had become green was now a legend across the Spanish Main, and he was feared in a way that no ordinary captain of buccaneers could emulate. The fortunes of the
Ark de Triomphe
had prospered accordingly.

The horse whickered and tossed its head, and Blue Peter patted its neck affectionately.

Blue Peter Ceteshwayoo had invested a small part of his treasure in a cottage high in the hills above Porte de Recailles. He spent time there when the frigate was in port, adding to his growing collection of books, improving his grasp of Greek and Latin. He even wrote poetry occasionally, seated at an inlaid oak escritoire by a window with a view down onto the smoking chimneys and the squalor of Porte de Recailles, over the forest of masts in the harbour and out over the clean blue of the sea. In a small way this satisfied his desire to be a gentleman; a true gentleman
would surely have such a refuge in which to write and to study, away from the cares of the world. A true gentleman, thought Blue Peter, might also have a groom, so he wouldn't have to chase his own carthorse up and down the field himself, for the old mare had been frisky that morning. He patted its neck again.

The larger part of Blue Peter's treasure remained in the keeping of Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges, as did the bulk of the treasure of the rest of the
Ark de Triomphe's
crew. This was unusual, to say the least. Buccaneers were not by nature or experience trusting creatures, and would commonly demand that all plunder and loot be divvied up as soon as circumstances allowed. Captains of pirates who kept all the boodle, telling the crew with a wink “I'll keep this safe and sound fer yez, shipmates, and there's my affy-davy on that, wi' a curse!” were viewed with darkest suspicion, for amongst the brotherhood of pirates the Seven Deadly Sins were not unknown, and Greed was almost a celebrity.

But when Captain Greybagges had given each man only a portion of his share of the loot nobody had complained. The pay-outs had been substantial, it was true, but the Captain had not pretended that they were complete. Nor had he offered an explanation.

Blue Peter mused upon this as the old padnag plodded on down to Porte de Recailles in the cool morning air. There was no doubt that Captain Greybagges had been changed by his strange and unearthly experiences in Nombre Dios Bay, and not just in the colour of his long beard. The Captain had possessed a whimsical sense of humour and an almost boyish sense of mischief, but now he was grim and distant. In the times before the Captain's beard had been turned green he would not have been able to hold back treasure from an open division of the spoils under the strict rules of the Free Brotherhood of the Coasts. If he had tried then it was certain that a voice from the back of the assembled crew would have made a smart-alecky comment, Captain Greybagges would have made a witty rejoinder and so the reasons for keeping back the loot would have been teased out of him with good humour. But now the crew - and a crew of lusty pirates, too – accepted it without question or comment. It was very odd. The crew of the
Ark de Triomphe
were more disciplined, more efficient, under the cold grey eyes of this grim new Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges, but Blue Peter Ceteshwayoo found this unsettling. In truth, he feared for his friend.

Captain Greybagges was reading some very unusual books, too. The Captain
was a literate man, and had always enjoyed reading a good rollicking yarn – Tobias Smollet was a favourite, or that hussy Aphra Behn (a
woman
writing books, what a disgrace!) – but lately the Captain had been nose-deep in Professor Newton's
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica
, Robert Hook's
Micrographica
and other such rum stuff. He had even been reading the works of the heretical monk Giordano Bruno, who had claimed in his
De l'Infinito, Universo e Mondi
that the stars in the night sky were suns like the sun of daytime, but very far away, and who had been burned at the stake for cherishing such offensive and blasphemous thoughts. Blue Peter recalled that the deranged monk had even suggested that those faraway suns could have planets like the Earth itself and that creatures might live on them, even races of intelligent beings. Blue Peter had seen many wonders since leaving Africa as a child, and learned many things in his extensive reading, but planets of strange beings orbiting distant stars? That was such a disturbing idea that he wasn't really surprised that the Inquisition had torched the monk. Why was the Captain delving into such arcane stuff?

Blue Peter's conscience prodded him; it was not just Captain Greybagges's loyal and thievish crew,
you
did not
yourself
object when he didn't share out the loot, it said. It is true, thought Blue Peter, but I felt that if I had, then I couldn't be sure if he'd burst out crying, shoot me, or curse me with the evil eye.

The old plough-horse plodded on down the path to Porte de Recailles, with a thoughtful Blue Peter Ceteshwayoo riding bareback upon it.

 

 

Two of the smart-alecky voices that might be heard from the back of any assembly of the crew of the
Ark de Triomphe
were conversing companionably, sitting on the cross-trees of the frigate's mainmast, high above the deck. Jemmy Ducks, keeper of the ship's ducks, chickens, pigs and goat, and Jack Nastyface, cook's assistant, both holding honorary job-titles in lieu of their real names, were skiving-off, and their idle discussion had been following the same path as Blue Peter's thoughts; what was the Captain doing with the loot?

“Ay-yoop! ‘Tis the Blue Boy!” said Jemmy Ducks, “on his trusty charger.”

“Where away, cuz? Where is the dark knight on his Arabian steed?” said Jack Nastyface, whose eyesight was poor.

“End o' quay. Just come round corner o' timberyard,” said Jemmy Ducks,
slithering from his perch onto the ratlines. The pair climbed down, warning the other foremast jacks of the Master Gunner's approach and bickering, Jemmy Ducks averring that Jack Nastyface's myopia was the result of onanistic practices, Jack Nastyface replying that he did indeed practice onanism but only once a day and only to spill his seed into Jemmy Duck's morning porridge.

Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges, sitting at his desk in the Great Cabin in the midst of a chaos of account-books and ledgers, heard the two still bickering as they went down the companionway, and heard his servant Mumblin' Jake mumble at them to shut up and not disturb the cap'n, look'ee. Blue Peter will be here presently, he thought, knowing that the livestock-keeper and the cook's assistant would not otherwise have ended their mid-morning smoke and yarn. He called to Mumblin' Jake to make fresh coffee.

Blue Peter knocked and entered the Great Cabin, followed by Mumblin' Jake with a tray bearing a steaming tin coffee-pot, mugs and a plate of biscuits. Jake set out the mugs and poured the coffee, placed the plate on the edge of the desk, and mumbled off to his lair in the Captain's pantry. Blue Peter sat down opposite Captain Greybagges, who smiled a grim smile at him in welcome, his grey eyes far-away.

“Let me finish with these damn' books, curse ‘em. I'll be a whore's half-hour, no more. Here, read this while I figure.” The Captain handed him a printed broadsheet, folded in the fashion of the stock-jobbers in crowded London coffee-houses to show only the article of interest. Blue Peter unfolded it to find the broadsheet's name; the
Tortuga Times
. He refolded the broadsheet, and glanced at the Captain, who was in his shirtsleeves, checking entries in the ledgers, clicking an abacus and writing,
scritch-scratch
, with a quill, his face impassive.

Blue Peter turned his attention back to the newspaper. The article was a poem. Blue Peter read it through with mounting amusement, having to choke back guffaws of laughter as it was so bad. He looked at the Captain, but the Captain's eyes were on the account-books, and his pen went
scritch-scratch
. Blue Peter could bear no more; he snapped the folded broadsheet to flatten it, cleared his throat and, in his deep voice, with an artful theatricality, read the poem out loud...