“What in the Seventh Sea is that, do you suppose?” Sly Jez asked me as the man suddenly adopted a hunched-over stance, skirting the crowd with strange, unintelligible noises. “Is it a leper?”
The man stopped in the shadowed doorway of an empty building and twitched a couple of times.
“I have no idea. Is there an insane asylum around here? He definitely looks unbalanced,” I said, unable to take my eyes off the apparition.
“Bedlam, ye mean? Nay, that be on Mongoose Island.”
“Hmm.” I turned back to the ladies gathered around the well that sat in the center of the square. It was the pirate version of the water cooler, and I found to my delight that almost all the women of the town visited at the well at some time or other during the day.
I had spent the remainder of the night before distracting myself from thoughts of Corbin and his extremely talented lips by coming up with a plan of action for grilling the citizens of Turtle’s Back, and had struck what I thought was an excellent idea. Conversation with the ladies of the house had proven that the computer characters, while fully formed in almost all ways and possessed of unique artificial intelligence, had one major fault—they had no past. If I asked one of them what she had been doing a week before, she could tell me in great detail, but when I asked about events in the distant past, all I got was a blank stare and a shrug of indifference.
All I had to do was interview the citizens of the island, gently probing for a past, and eliminate those people who didn’t fit the profile of human players.
“That boil remedy is very helpful, I’m sure,” I told one of the women who had been telling me about the affliction her husband, one of Bart’s crewmen, suffered from. “But how long has your husband been cursed with the boils?”
The woman looked mildly confused. “Eh. Been a long time, now.”
“Amy? I think the leper is trying to get your attention.”
“Hmm?” I glanced over to where Jez was pointing. The leper/madman was doing a deranged sort of twitching dance. I’d seen enough mentally disturbed people huddled on the streets to know that he was probably happier on his own, but made a mental note as I turned back to the woman in front of me to locate the head of the island’s watch and have the man evaluated for his own safety. “I don’t think he wants me, Jez. It’s probably Saint Vitus’s dance or the bubonic plague or malaria or something like that. I’m sorry to be so nosy, Ruthful, but how long is a long time? Weeks? Months? Years?”
The woman blinked at me, her face devoid of emotion, something else I’d noticed happened to the computer characters when they were faced with something their programming didn’t know how to handle.
“Amy, I really think he’s trying to get your attention,” Jez said, tugging on my sleeve, her face concerned as she watched the madman. He seemed to be struck with some sort of palsy now, his head twitching to the side in a manner that had to leave him with a kink in his neck.
“Ignore him,” I told her quietly. “I don’t normally approve of pretending the less fortunate aren’t there, but there are some times when direct attention only exacerbates the situation. I’ll make sure someone takes care of him later.”
I turned a bright smile on the woman next to the wife of the boil man, waggling my fingers at an adorable small child resting on her hip. “What a sweet little girl! She looks a lot like my daughter when she was about two. When is your girl’s birthday?”
The woman’s face went blank. Scraaaaaatch. Another person off my potential villain list.
“Amy?”
“What?”
A shrill whistle pierced the happy chatter of the women at the well. Everyone in the square came to a stop to stare at the lunatic as he stood with his hands on his hips. As I frowned at him, he lifted up the eye patch to glare at me, then beckoned me with an imperious gesture.
The ladies at the well all looked at me. I gave them a tight smile. “Excuse me a moment, please. I’ll be right back to talk some more about . . . er . . . your earliest childhood memories.”
Seven faces went utterly expressionless. Seven pairs of eyes blinked stupidly. I sighed to myself, crossed them all off my list, and went over to where the deranged man was waiting none too patiently.
“It’s about time,” he hissed at me in vaguely familiar tones, then said in a loud voice that was probably audible up the hill at Bart’s house, “Be ye friend or be ye foe? I’m Mad Jack, I am, and I come from the country of the potato people!”
“Mad Jack?” I asked, squinting at the man.
“Good disguise, eh?” The man lifted the eye patch again, and two blue eyes twinkled their enjoyment at me. “I come bearing messages from . . . well, Corbin’s Irish, actually, not Greek, but we won’t hold that against him, will we?”
“Holder, what are you doing in those awful clothes? Why are you in disguise? What are you doing here? And what was with the dog and pony show? I thought you were a mentally deficient pirate street person.”
“Bart’s men are back from their foraging trip. If they caught me, they’d hang me. Hence the necessity of bringing out old Mad Jack, island idiot.” He grinned, clearly not too upset at the thought of being within reach of Bart. “As for what I’m doing here, his majesty commanded I bring you a message. Just think of me as the virtual pirate version of instant messaging. I’m duly authorized to hang around and wait for you to write up a reply, even.”
“Oooh, a note from Corbin?” I asked, watching avidly as he dug in the pockets of his jacket. “Did you guys find Paul?”
“Nay, not yet. But we’re looking. Ah, here it is.” He paused for a moment, giving me a smile filled with all sorts of speculation. “I’ve known Corbin all my life, you know.”
“Have you?” I asked, trying to snatch the piece of folded parchment from his fingers. He held tight.
“Aye. Known him since we were two. We lived next door to each other growing up. He’s a nice guy. Solid, dependable, no major bad vices, although he has been known to put ketchup on his scrambled eggs, which we all know is a sin against nature, but other than that, he’s primo, grade A marriage material.”
“Marriage,” I said, startled by the blunt matchmaking. Holder released the parchment, which I noticed had been sealed with a big blob of red wax.
“Did Corb tell you about the in-game marriage feature? We anticipate it will be a big success. It allows players to have access to the items in the spouse’s inventory—ship deeds, money, jewels, etcetera. Very handy thing, all things considered, and in no way binding in the real world”—he paused for a quick grin—“unless you want it to be binding, of course.”
I smiled, touched by Holder’s devotion to his friend and despite the ludicrous nature of the conversation. I wasn’t against marriage, but I certainly wasn’t going to commit myself to a man I’d known for just a few days . . . or hours, as it was in real time. “Thank you for the sales pitch, but it’s not really necessary. For one thing, I already like Corbin, and for another, I don’t need his money or his ships or whatever else he may have in his inventory.”
“You may change your mind about that once the blockade strikes and there are no supplies coming in or out of Turtle’s Back,” he answered.
“Blockade? What blockade? What exactly
is
a blockade?”
Holder’s grin slid a couple of notches as he glanced over my shoulder. I turned to see what had disturbed his cocky attitude. A group of four men I recognized as Bart’s crewmen swaggered into the square, making rude comments about the women gathered at the well, snatching wares off the fruit vendor’s cart, and generally behaving in the age-old manner of men.
“Thank you for . . . oh.” I turned back to tell Holder how much I appreciated his bringing the note from Corbin, but he had disappeared into the crowd. I couldn’t blame him—I knew enough from the limited association I’d had with my new crewmates to know they were a rowdy bunch, and not at all the sort of men I’d like to cross.
I was in the process of carefully breaking the wax seal on the letter from Corbin when a shout had me stuffing the note in a pocket in my striped knickers.
“Ahoy, lass,” one of Bart’s men shouted as he caught sight of me, waving an ill-gotten, half-eaten apple at me. “The captain sent us to fetch ye back. He’s wantin’ to have a talk with ye.”
“Hoy, guys. Oh. Bart wants to see me right now? Er . . . Ben, isn’t it?”
“Bent Ben, aye,” the pirate said with a lascivious leer that left me wanting a bath and a strong scrub brush.
“Ask him what’s bent,” his mate hinted.
“Er . . . thanks; perhaps another time,” I said with what I hoped was a smile that was crewmatelike and yet didn’t encourage confidences of an intimate nature. “Um . . . I can’t help but notice the pockmarks on your face, Ben. Did you have chicken pox as a child?”
Ben just looked at me. I heaved a mental sigh and turned to his two companions. “How about the two of you? Did you have chicken pox when you were little boys? Say, when you were about five or six?”
Two pairs of expressionless eyes gazed at me.
“Right, I think that just about answers that question. I’ll go see Bart now.”
Life returned to all three men’s faces as I spoke. I started up the hill toward the governor’s house, pausing briefly when one of the men made a comment about my stripy knickers. Or rather, the contents of the stripy knickers.
“Ham in a cloth sack, my as . . . er . . . bah,” I grumbled to myself as I marched along. I waited until I was past the tiny church that sat at the edge of town, then ducked behind the back of the church to the small cemetery to read Corbin’s note. He must have had something of importance to say if he went to all the trouble of sending his first mate with it. I perched on the edge of a crumbling headstone, making a quick apology to the stone’s owner before opening the parchment and spreading it out.
Dear Amy,
the note read, written in a bold hand in indigo ink. I had a brief moment of warm fuzziness over the word
dear,
then decided I had been without a man for way, way too long and I needed to move on before I started indulging in the same sorts of fantasies that had kept me up half the night.
Dear Amy
. . .
“Do ye like to come here, too, then? Bran and me, we likes it here.” Bas’s silhouette blocked the sun, the long black fingers of his shadow spilling across the parchment. The boy had cleaned up remarkably well, considering what there was to work with. He had been scrubbed clean (within an inch of his life, to his way of thinking), his hair had been trimmed, and he’d been given new clothing, faded and worn, but serviceable, and most of all, clean. Even Bran the raven—who had also received a bath to rid him of suspected lice and other parasites—looked less like something out of an opium-muddled Poe poem, and more like a proper bird. “We likes to talk to the dead people. Are ye here talkin’ to ’em, too?”
“Eh . . .” I tried to formulate a rule against speaking to dead people, but after a moment of consideration, I decided it was a relatively harmless pastime. “No, I’m not here to talk to dead people. I have a note I want to read.”
He nodded. Bran squawked and bobbed his head in a nod, too. “Captain Bart’s men be lookin’ for ye.”
“Thanks, I’ve already chatted with them.”
“Ah,” he said, his head tipped to the side as he watched me like I was about to stand up and start tap-dancing. “I polished me hook.”
I admired the rusty iron implement that had been crudely attached to a leather strap he wore bound around the remains of his arm, and made another note to myself to have a talk with the blacksmith about crafting the boy something a little more serviceable. “So you did. Um . . . Bas, I don’t want to bring up a painful subject, but how exactly did you lose your arm?”
His face went blank. I hadn’t really thought he was Paul, but he had remembered his mother’s death, so I had to consider him.
“That’s okay; don’t worry about it. Off you go, then.”
“Wot?”
“Go talk to dead people.”
“Aye, aye,” he said, animation returning to his face as he flashed a smile at me. He and Bran walked off to the other side of the cemetery, pausing to talk to the headstones, looking like nothing so much as a miniature grim reaper and his pet raven.
Dear Amy
. . .
“There ye be. Whew! I’ve just come up from the fishmonger’s. ’Tis not a place for anyone with a workin’ nose on a day as hot as today,” Renata said as she plopped herself down on a headstone a few feet to my left. The tail of some newly deceased fish protruded from the covered basket she set at her feet. “But I got us a nice bit of mackerel for our supper. I do like a taste of mackerel pie now and again.”
“Sounds . . . delicious. Did you barter the elderberry wine for the fish, as I suggested?”
“Aye, that I did,” she said brightly, looking pleased with herself. “And a right good idea it was. Mr. Thomkins was that pleased to have the wine, and he gave me first choice of fish, somethin’ he hasn’t done afore.”
“Excellent. Since you make that wine at little cost but your time, it makes sense to use it to acquire more valuable commodities. I have some ideas for further cottage industry projects that will provide you with even more creature comforts, but we’ll leave that talk for the next budget review.”
“Aye,” she said, her eyes suddenly not meeting mine. “Are we to be havin’ another of them budget reviews soon?”
“I told you—weekly until we get a nice nest egg to pad the lean months, then we’ll go to a bimonthly system.”
I could have sworn she crossed herself, but the sun was in my eyes, so I couldn’t be sure. “I have a nice profit-and-loss graph I want to draw up for you ladies to study at the next meeting,” I added.
“What’s that ye have yerself there?” she asked quickly.
I looked down at the still-unread parchment on my knees. “It’s an IM,” I said without batting an eyelash.
“A what now?”
“An instant message, although I suppose the instancy of it could be debated.”