mile ahead as far as the eye could see right up until the sand dunes which obscured the horizon. What lay behind these dunes was a mystery, the only clue being the sprouting of several tree canopies visible from the other side and a near constant plume of smoke coming from the west which obscured the stars in the sky.
Woody instinctively stepped forward ahead of his crewmates to scout out the area. Having grown up as a wild lad, a man of nature and forests, he could read the world around him like words on a page. Every broken twig, every oddly stacked pile of sand, every dead or dying insect provided a clue for him as to if and when someone had gone by here. He slowly scoured the beach to the left and the right, concentration etched on his thin face.
“What do you see, boy?” inquired the Captain.
His answer did not come quickly. His head was too engrossed in his task for him to notice the shout from his captain at first. Yet upon the call he began to circle round back towards his pirate leader, a glum look on his face.
“Nothing,” he confessed. “The stories were true. Ninjas are masters of disguise, able to hide anywhere- and, presumably, also able to hide their tracks.”
“But where did they go?” roared Bluebeard. “We were following them, and they weren’t all that far ahead of us. How in God’s name did they disappear? What, are they hiding in the sand?”
The Captain paused for thought while he calculated what to do, and his assembled pirates began to chatter amongst themselves nervously. He could hear them talking and, though he could not make out every word they said, a paranoid side of his brain came out questioning whether they were doubting his leadership abilities.
Specifically he was thinking of his brothers, Yellowbeard, Redbeard and Greenbeard. All triplets, and all one year younger than him, he had emerged as the natural leader of their small crew. They had set out, all four of them, fifty years back on the Merry Martin (then called the “Bloody Skull) in search of infamy and fortune, adventure and treasure. Along the way they had accumulated more and more crewmates until they had the current number of thirty, but to start with it was just them- and there had been a bitter struggle for who would be the leader. Bluebeard had won in the end due to his great size and strength, but now he was getting older, his mind slower.
He knew his brothers were constantly doubting him, constantly trying to topple him so that they could take his position at the head of the ship. That was why he kept all three of them on board: if they were all there, their time would be spent squabbling among themselves rather than electing one figurehead and planning a mutiny.
They spoke like Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum (and Tweedle-Doo, if there was a third one in that series), and Bluebeard could imagine their conversation.
“He’s not very good, that one.”
“No, not very good indeed.”
“Can’t even hold onto his wench, can he.”
“No, he can’t, that he can’t.”
“We’d do a better job, would we.”
“You mean I would.”
“No, I, say I!”
And at that point in the conversation their complaints would descend into harsh words and squabbling against one another, neutralising their threat.
Still, Captain Bluebeard was in no mood for mutiny tonight. He drew his pistol (which he had snatched from his cabin upon jumping from the window) and pointed it at his brothers.
“If any one of you even thinks about mutiny tonight, it’s a bullet through each of your heads,” he growled ferociously. His crew’s mutterings stopped immediately. He could not be sure that anybody had been uttering mutinous sentiments, but his tired mind was unable to think straight and, with ninjas anywhere and a possible double agent, he could see enemies in every shadow.
“We head towards to smoke,” he declared. “Out west. Let’s go!”
The crew marched in silence towards the plume in the sky: silent partly out of fear for ninjas, but partly out of fear for their own captain. Each was wary, eyeing the scene around them and even the people around them with suspicion. Every hand was hovering close to a pistol or blade, ready for a fight if one was to come.
The beach was indeed long. How the ninjas had escaped along it without being seen, and how they had managed to avoid leaving any tracks, was beyond the intellects of most of Bluebeard’s men for it took them many minutes to traverse the shifting sands and behind them was a clear trail of footsteps and peg legs. Near the shore they had been gifted with the faint glow of the Merry Martin’s lantern light; out here, though, half a mile inland the only illumination came from the moon. The crew were jittery in the darkness: any shadow or movement left them reeling. Ethelred even let fire one of his throwing knives at one point, only to see it land handle-up in a sand dune. He had been startled by nothing more than a rat- which, to his credit, he had managed to successfully skewer. After a quick telling off by the Captain, it was conceded that he had done well to at least get them that morning’s breakfast.
“Bottle-Neck” Saunders was lagging at the end, still embarrassed by her humiliation in the water. She was avoiding talking to anyone lest they mock her more. Her eyes, though, were as sharp as ever, and her look-out’s instinct was as clear as ever. Any small sound would prick her attention and she would turn her head to see where it had come from. Most of the time it was a small rat or fox like the one Ethelred had caught, but on one occasion, when the crew was close to the dunes, she heard something that didn’t sound like an animal.
She held her hand up to stop her crewmates. When they did not notice, she called out:
“Captain! I think I saw something.”
The party stopped suddenly and examined their look-out. Thirteen eyes all bearing down on her at once- the pressure was heavy on her shoulders; could she redeem herself for her error in getting the ship wrecked?
Bluebeard took out a lantern from his bag. He had implicitly chosen that they should walk in the dark to avoid being seen, yet now they needed light simply in order to see whether a ninja had been spotted.
“Where?” he inquired in a whisper.
She pointed, and he shone a light in the direction she was indicating. It lit up a bare patch of sand in the middle of the beach, totally indistinguishable from any other patch of sand anywhere else. Nobody was there.
“I swear…” she said, her voice trailing off. Even if she had had anything else to say, though, her words would have been obscured by the Captain’s shouts:
“You great blind bat! Pipe down, dog, or I may push you off the plank one more time.”
Bottle-Neck went back to walking silently, hidden, behind the rest of her crewmates, now more ashamed than ever before. Her fellow pirates could be heard mumbling to each other and laughing under their breath.
She had once almost been the Captain’s favourite crewmate- how had she fallen so far? He had rescued her from a brothel in Bristol. Well, “rescued” is a fairly inaccurate term, for the Captain simply wanted his own personal prostitute. Had he followed his intentions, she would have been no better off on board than back home. Yet he had shown mercy upon her when she displayed keen sight and a skill for navigating; he had re-assigned her role from being the ship’s wench to being the ship’s navigator, a much more important and dignified role. Now she was useless, her only reason for being kept on shattered when she did the same to her Captain’s vessel.
Unbeknownst to her, nor indeed to any of the crew, Bottle-Neck had been right. What she had seen had not been a trick of the shadows or a rat or a mouse; rather, it had been the careless form of Jack the Boy, lying hidden with his ninja companions. They, being experts in secrecy, had become successfully invisible; he, trained only as a loud, clumsy pirate, had almost given the game away.
“We must be quiet now, boy,” hissed Hirosaki, the ninja leader. “They cannot see us.”
“Sorry,” Jack had uttered in humble whisper. “I’m not as good at this as you are.”
In the dark and under his mask, Hirosaki’s face was hidden; yet the Boy was sure his new
master was smiling.
“It’s okay,” he reassured. “We’ll train you good. You will be a good ninja. Now, though, you stay with us, hidden.”
A sudden thought struck him. “Unless…”
Ninjas are experts at the poker face. They can not only hide their bodies anywhere in the world; they can also hide their soul and their emotions behind a cold mask of a face. Right now, Hirosaki was doing just that as a plan emerged in his consciousness.
“Jack, I have an idea,” he said, and whispered it into his ear.
That idea would come to haunt and surprise the pirate foe; however, it will not be revealed right here, right now, to either you or the pirates. Instead, we shall return the narrative over to our rum-swigging heroes as they blunder up the sand dunes towards whatever lies beyond.
Presently they came to the top of the dunes and were surveying the scene below. The treetops they had been able to see from a distance were just the stray long hairs in a vast canopy spreading out into the distance: a huge, dense forest with but one clearing in it, and that clearing was the source of the smoke.
Quite what was causing it was unclear for now: a cottage, a factory, a campfire; all of these were possibilities. What it meant for certain, though, was civilisation, life, help in finding the ninjas and their stolen booty, or else a chance to gain extra booty on top.
So the pirates found a new lease of life. They