Slate was up before the other men and already halfway down the crumbling footpath from the camp to the beach when the purple sky began to spray a light mist on the island. The pirate sloop bobbed in the bay next to the earliest trading ships to have arrived. It occurred to Slate that he and Pilotte may show up at the sloop and find Hatty had ignored his promise to help, but he had to act on the notion that the pirate was going to keep his word.
Upon reaching the beach, Slate turned the wrong way at first, and got lost in some sticky ferns for a short while before realizing his error when he bushwhacked himself into a stony corner. He re-entered the brush on the other side of the beach after a brief jog through a warm rain, and then, after stowing his pack beneath a frond, found the trail he was looking for.
It led him to what could only mockingly be called an arena, a muddy scrap of land surrounded with rotting seating where the pirates held their sick games. Just behind this space were the rusty iron and wooden cages that held the poor contestants. Slate found Pilotte wheezing in the dirt in one of the cages. The wulf recognized Slate and began to whimper and thrash.
“Shhh!” Slate whispered, to little effect. He found the latch to Pilotte’s cage and opened the gate. The wulf got up on shaky legs and staggered to Slate, to nuzzle his neck with his cold nose.
“What’d they do to you? Come on friend, we’ve got to go,” Slate said, scratching Pilotte’s matted fur.
As the two were about to leave, Slate noticed a matterwall in the cage next to Pilotte’s. The creature looked barely alive. Its left eye was missing, the socket scarred over, and its fur was clumped with dried blood and mud. Slate reached a hand into the cage to try to get the matterwall’s attention, but the animal could barely lift a paw from the rain puddle it sat in. Slate did manage to attract the attention of a woodbear across the walk that ran between the two rows of cages. The woodbear roared something terrible, not so much in anger but as a statement of indignation. It charged at the front of his cage, slamming against the bars violently, only to get up and do it over and again.
“Poor things. We can’t leave them here, Pilotte,” Slate said.
The cages all had locks. After an unsuccessful search for keys in a hut at the end of the row, Slate went to inspect one of the locks further and realized that they were simply hanging on the cages from the inside. None were activated.
As Slate was testing one of the cage’s latches to see how it opened, a clovoxen appeared as if from nowhere and crashed into the almost-open door. The jolt threw Slate back into the mud, and the latch slammed back down. And then the clovoxen charged again.
Slate was forced to think: he couldn’t just set the delirious animals free, as they might trample or kill him unintentionally. Or maybe intentionally. He didn’t see why they should have anything but contempt for human beings. Searching around for some idea of what to do, Slate looked up to see that the tops of the cages had slats he could probably walk on. From there, he reasoned, he would be able to loose the animals without endangering himself.
“You’ll protect me, right, Pilotte?” he asked his wulf.
Pilotte stood up a bit taller to show he would.
Slate climbed a tree growing next to one of the cages, jumped onto the closest one, and then lay down on his stomach and undid the door latch. The cage swung open, and a sickly-looking raelwulf with his tail between his legs slipped out and disappeared silently into the jungle.
The next cage contained a dalcrag, a hairy creature with a great hard plate for a forehead that was circling its cage in a rut it had worn into the mud. The dalcrag ran at the door of its cage once Slate opened it, knocking it clear off its hinges. The animal then began a wild charge, all about the arena and the holding area. It smacked its head into the other cages and tore down the hut at the end of the pathway before hurtling into the jungle brush after the raelwulf.
Slate released a jix next, which raced after the dalcrag. Then there was the poor matterwall that couldn’t even bring itself to stand when offered freedom. Slate swung down to the ground from atop its cage and tried to urge the animal out, but soon realized that it was probably too late. He wished he had some way of putting the creature out of its misery, or that one of the hungry other creatures would make a noble end of its life and eat it.
The dalcrag Slate had freed reappeared in a charge straight toward him, pursued by the jix. The dalcrag came so quickly that Slate wasn’t able to move out of the way, and the creature collided with him, hard. The blow was so intense that Slate was lifted clear up off the ground and thrown a good five feet. The dalcrag disappeared into the jungle once more, honking, as the jix sank down and coiled its massive back legs. It growled and flashed its fangs. Slate’s heart began to beat so hard that he could hear it. The jix sprang forward. In those few milliseconds that felt like an eternity he stood petrified watching the jix, a creature three times the size of Pilotte, float through the air toward him with its jaws wide.
Before Slate had even begun to think of how to save himself, he saw his best friend appear and sink his teeth down into the jix’s neck. The jix howled and landed twenty feet away, thrown by Pilotte like paper waste. Pilotte exhausted himself with the throw, and collapsed.
Slate scrambled up, his back burning with pain from the dalcrag blow. There couldn’t have been much time left now; he could only swallow hard and run the entire length of the holding area, screaming to drown out his fear and throwing open the latches as he went. A menagerie of animals, in all states of health and anger, sprang from their captivity as he did so, some to briefly quarrel with one another, most to disappear out through the jungle onto the beach.
When Slate had managed to regain his breath, he and Pilotte headed down the path toward the beach themselves. A few pirates had made their way to the beach, Slate discovered, to be surprised by the wild creatures running rampant. Some of the animals were washing their wounds in the salt water, others were just running, without direction, stretching their sore legs in the morning sunlight. And others still were setting on their captors. Slate watched a walecat overtake one of the men, pushing him down to the ground with his massive paws and then making ground meat out of his back. A dalcrag was following behind another of the men, looking like he was enjoying knocking his toy back down every time he got up to run away.
Slate watched as more and more of the pirates flooded the beach and the scene grew increasingly gruesome. The men on the decks of the arriving trading ships looked on in confusion as the terror unfolded. Amidst the carnage, Slate espied what could only have been Hatty, charging right through the carnage and diving into the water. He was headed for the sloop, it seemed. Surprisingly, it looked as if he were actually going to uphold his end of the plan.
Some of the quicker-thinking pirates took to the salty water of the bay after Hatty, and a few had even thought to head for the sloop that he had reached and begun to ready. Slate watched a well-placed kick from Hatty dislocate one of the pirates as she was trying to scale the side of the craft. When Slate next saw the main sail fall, he knew it was his cue.
He and Pilotte ran full-speed across the beach, dodging a charging ginkoiz and diving outstretched into the water when they came to it. They swam furiously, and managed to reach the sloop. Hatty helped pull Slate aboard, and then Slate Pilotte, and then it was left to Slate to throw off any of the pirates that should try to board their sloop as Hatty finished preparations. Slate grabbed loose a plank and swatted at the hands of the men and women attempting to board while Pilotte roared. The steady stream of island refugees looked poised to become unmanageable when Hatty finally announced the sloop was ready.
He loosed the mizzen sail and the craft spun around in the wind toward the end of the bay and the open ocean sparkling beyond. Slate had racked up quite a score of thwarted pirates and was a little disappointed when boat began to move and leave the rest behind. The freed animals were still wreaking havoc on shore, the pirates still running for their lives and losing the race. Slate laughed, b
id them good riddance, and nodded a farewell to the island as the ship passed beside an arriving trading vessel, out of the bay, and into the rougher swells of the open ocean.
Chapter 13