behind the crew’s back and bring her out in secret. Now here she was, with the girl, and Woody, Simon, Jawface Jones and Marley all knew where they stood now.
Alice had not been there, and nor had Yellowbeard; yet the latter had been a ringleader of the morning mutiny along with Greenbeard, so he was going to be no help. It was only Alice, and only reluctantly, who joined Bluebeard for the fight- and she was limping and wounded; in short, not much use. Just when he needed them, his shipmates had let him down.
“Come on lads!” he roared. “Or I’ll gut the lot of you.”
“Not if Liu has anything to say about it,” shouted back Woody, and those in the know laughed openly at their captain. They laughed at him. Once their figure of authority, he was now their figure of fun; and yet there was also a hint of sadness, even betrayal, in their laughter. They began to file away from him, uninterested in fighting more battles or sacrificing more lives for his sake.
But they were interested in saving their own skin. Another roar from the mouth of the giant reminded them of their present peril and they drew weapons, ready to fight their way to freedom. So it was that the pirates and the ninjas fought together, yet separately, against a common foe: some, out of love for a woman; some, out of respect for their captain; and some out of a sheer will to survive, all their respect for authority drained from them.
Bluebeard would fight wounded. His neck he could cope with; physical pain was something he lived with on a day to day basis. What he couldn’t be doing with was the wound inflicted on his pride, his authority. He would have taken his emotional hurting out on one of his crew, if only they still had some respect for him. As it was, however, he could tell from the way some of them were looking at him that if he tried that, they would gang up on him. On their own Captain. He had suffered a leaderless mutiny of his own gutless making.
He drew his pistol and fired the first shot. Then all hell broke loose: the great beast roared with rage; ninjas crawled all over his skin, stabbing and stabbing away with their weedy little knives. The pirates fired shots at his chest, or else spent their energy chopping at his legs. It was all no good. The beast was too strong, too thick, too hard; the blades and bullets which would have shorn clean through the soft flesh of a man simply ricocheted off his steely limbs into the melee around him.
Bluebeard ran up the stairs to the first floor and from there leapt from the banister and onto the monster’s head. Sword drawn in his left hand and gun in his right, he began shooting and slashing for all he was worth. It was all to no avail: the beast simply swung its head and Bluebeard went flying, eventually crashing into a suit of armour on the ground floor and laying there winded.
The battle went on; the fortunes did not change. Bullet after bullet and blade after blade could not fell the mighty creature. Greenbeard finally emerged from an upstairs room, in which he had been hiding since before the arrival of Bluebeard and his men, and was met with rapturous applause by the pirates. With sadness the Captain realised that Greenbeard’s mutiny had succeeded; he was now adored by the crew and seen as the logical replacement for Bluebeard’s role.
The heroic replacement did precisely what Bluebeard had done: he leapt from the banister and landed on the creature’s head. Again, it shook itself violently and almost dislodged its rider. Almost: for Greenbeard was left hanging on to its neck and, from there, he could just about reach the monster’s mouth.
Holding on with his left hand, Greenbeard reached up with the sword in his right and tried to stab into the monster’s mouth. His blade flailed this way and that, each time almost reaching its target: now it scrapes the tongue, now it pricks the gums. Yet although this irritated the dinosaur, he succeeded only in enraging it further. It began stomping around furiously, causing all the assembled pirates and ninjas to leap five foot into the air each time, and flung the rude Greenbeard from its neck and into the marble wall, where his unconscious form slid painfully down to the ground.
The beast seemed invincible now and was more dangerous than ever. It began to move into the offensive and use its greatest weapon: its powerful, sharp teeth which could crush a man’s skull with no effort whatsoever. Which is precisely what it started to do. Its tiny claws grasped a nearby ninja and dropped him, screaming, into its mouth, where its mechanical jaws crushed the life out of him within seconds.
The whole hallway watched him horror. Time seemed to stand still for a second, then the battle recommenced: ninjas kept leaping, pirates kept slashing, yet now the dinosaur kept biting and eating.
And as it did so, Bluebeard noticed something curious. It was crying. Given the wounds it had been inflicted and the situation it was in, this was not surprising; yet the pirate captain knew tears well from the many times he had seen them well up in victims’ eyes, and he knew these tears to be ones of regret, not pain. In a flash he realised something monumental which could just win the battle for the pirates and win back their respect as captain.
“Wait!” he called out. “Stop your fighting, you filthy dogs, and listen to me for a moment. You too, dinosaur. I need a word with you.”
The Tyrannosaurus Rex stopped chewing his latest victim almost gladly and spat out the half-dead remains. The whole room was now fixated on the bold Captain and his strange words and the fighters stepped aside to let him through.
He went up the stairs to the balcony so that he could speak to the dinosaur face-to-face; man-to-man, if such terms were appropriate.
“You’re crying, you cad. You cry when you kill,” he announced.
The dinosaur looked bemused for a while; then, as if shrugging its shoulders, it nodded in admittance. The Captain smiled, but only for a second- for its nod was nonchalant and it seemed not to care about the Captain’s words. Maybe it did not even understand. Whatever the reason, the dinosaur decided that Bluebeard should be its next victim and moved its head towards him, its vast jaws open in anticipation.
Bluebeard remained irrationally calm, however. “You won’t eat me,” he boasted. “And I know why.”
He leaned close to the dinosaur- daringly close, near enough that the beast could pluck him from the ledge and gobble him up within a second- and whisper in his ear loud enough for everyone to hear:
“You’re a vegetarian.”
Now in voice louder and bolder, he continued, addressing his audience: “This beast before you is a vegetarian wuss. It eats meat but it hates itself for doing so.”
Some laughed, but others were simply bemused. “What’s this got to do with anything?” called out Woody. He was glaring at Bluebeard with dark eyes; it seemed he was the one most hurt by the alleged betrayal.
“Because, you irritating cad, it tells us how to beat the brute.”
He looked knowingly as Hirosaki, who was presently on the creature’s neck hacking away with a knife. The ninja looked back with understanding eyes.
“Quorn,” he said simply.
“I know someone like you will have some on you,” Bluebeard addressed Hirosaki. “Care to feed our visitor?”
Hirosaki nodded and barked something down to one of his ninjas in Japanese. Immediately he was answered with a plastic bag thrown up from the floor, and he clambered up to the beast’s mouth with it. Once there, he pulled out what looked like a beef steak and threw it into the dinosaur’s mouth.
Hirosaki leapt back to the ground and waited with baited breath as the creature chewed thoughtfully. It took a good while over its meal, but seemed happy with it, before finally saying in a rich, plummy voice,
“I say, that was delicious!”
The crowd of pirates and ninjas gasped in awe.
“What is this delightful piece of meat?” asked the dinosaur.
“Quorn, you great Muppet,” answered Bluebeard merrily. “And it’s not meat. It’s made of soya beans and the like for beasts like you. You can eat it all you like and you won’t have to cry, because nothing needs to be killed for you to eat it.”
The dinosaur blubbered up once more. “Oh my,” he said, “oh my
giddy aunt, how can I ever thank you?”
He plucked Bluebeard from the balcony and cradled him in his claws, eyes streaming with joy. “You have no idea how terrible it makes me feel whenever I eat a poor living thing. I watch the life drain from its face and it becomes a lifeless corpse, and then I eat it. I eat it, all because my existence requires the death of others. And I live day and night with guilt: guilt so pure and profound it swallows me up every second of every day, robbing me of sleep and wakeful happiness. And now- and now you little, violent thieves, who I at first thought to be a terrible misfortune, have shown me a way out! How can I ever, ever repay you?”
“You can let us go free and give us some of your gold,” suggested Bluebeard. “And, if ever the pirates and ninjas fight again, you have to fight on the pirate side, understood?”
The dinosaur nodded happily and rubbed its head against Bluebeard’s side. Hirosaki, however, looked shocked.
“That is an outrageous term!” he exclaimed. “You forget, rash Bluebeard, that we control the world’s supply of Quorn. We own the dinosaur now.”
“I’m not ‘the dinosaur’, you know,” protested the dinosaur. “I do have a name. They call me Steve. Steve the Tyrannosaurus Rex.”
“Nevertheless, Steve, we and the pirates are still at war,” declared the ninja.
Steve looked perplexed. He head