Ven sighed. “If only I could,” he said wistfully. “But I have to be home in time for tea or my mother will chase me over the sea for the rest of my life.”
The captain laughed. “Well, then, we had best get on with the Inspection, so that you can.”
He walked with Ven around the ship, checking the iron fittings, ropes and sails, the give of the wooden decks and the soundness of the rudder. They did a quick drill of the pump system, which would provide seawater to extinguish a fire if it broke out in the galley where the food was prepared. And they checked the six lifeboats, which hung three to a side.
Belowdecks in the hold they discovered some of the cargo Mr. Witherspoon had mentioned, barrels and crates that had been neatly lined up inside wooden slats and bolted so they would not slide around when the ship pitched. Ven examined the manifest, the list of the cargo, and circled a few things.
“I see you have quicklime aboard, Captain,” he said nervously, eyeing the neat line of barrels bolted in place in the hold. “Magnesium, bitumen. These are flammable and explosive. We do use these in the ship’s manufacture, but they should have been taken off before the Inspection.”
The captain consulted his own list. “Must not have been removed yet. Mr. Witherspoon was in such a hurry to load that he may not have let your father’s team remove all their tools and supplies before they began to bring the cargo aboard.”
“They must have been bolted in by accident. I will make certain it all is taken ashore as soon as we put into port,” Ven promised, making a note on his Inspection sheet. “Because it is flammable, and cannot be extinguished with water, quicklime is hazardous to have aboard, especially so close to the galley. Magnesium is even worse. We will get them off promptly after the Inspection.”
“Thank you,” the captain said. “Otherwise, all looks well down here, yes?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you want to head closer to the harbor? Or a little farther out into open water?” the first mate asked Captain Faeley as they came out of the hold.
The captain considered. “How ’bout it, Ven? Are you feeling brave?”
The excitement roared through Ven, almost setting his scalp on fire. “Yes sir!” he shouted, scratching his itching head.
“Then give Lavery the order and let us return to checking the navigational instruments.”
Now, get the Inspection under way, get it over with as quickly as possible, and be home in time for tea, his father had said. Ven pushed the words out of his mind and cleared his throat. “Take her out, Mr. Lavery!” he said, feeling both excited and guilty.
The first mate laughed. “Aye, sir,” he said, and winked at the captain, as Faeley and Ven returned to the checklist.
Finally after more than four hours they came to the ship’s wheel, where Lewis, the boatswain, had carefully guided the ship out of the harbor and now had taken her out onto the open sea beyond.
“She draws well in the water, smooth as glass,” Lewis said admiringly. “Your father is an artist, Master Polypheme.”
“Thank you,” said Ven, consulting the checklist. “I will tell him so. Any problems with the wheel?”
“None whatsoever,” said Lewis. “Have a go at it yourself.”
Ven leaped forward in excitement and took the wheel from Lewis, running his hands over the smooth wooden handles that stood out like spokes. He marveled at the pull of it, and the strength he had to put into keeping it straight against the tug of the wind.
He glanced to his left off the port side at the coastline and was surprised to see it was entirely gone. All around them the horizon stretched for as far as he could see, with only a shadow at the edge where the land had been.
With a thud, Thomas Lavery landed on the deck, having just climbed down from the crosstrees of the mainmast.
“Everything look good up there, Lavery?” the captain asked.
“Aye, sir,” the first mate replied. “Strong and tight.”
“Good.”
“That’s quite the feather in your cap, Master Polypheme,” Thomas Lavery said.
Ven’s cheeks turned red. “Well—uh—in my father’s cap, actually,” he said in embarrassment. “I really had very little to do with crafting this ship.”
Lavery shook his head. “No, I mean that one,” he said, pointing to Ven’s hat. “Albatross, isn’t it?”
“Oh! Yes,” Ven said. “It flew over me this morning and dropped the feather.”
The sailors exchanged a pleased glance. “Well, then, surely our voyage is blessed,” said Lewis. “Sighting an albatross before sailing is always good luck.”
Ven opened his mouth to explain that he actually hadn’t seen the albatross. His mouth remained open, but no words came out, as a black and orange streak blazed across the upper deck from the right and slammed into the mainsail.
The sail and all its riggings burst into flame.
Off the prow a ship appeared, a moment before hidden within the wind itself. It was a smaller vessel, dark and fast, that flew a flag of a skull in flames. Ven had never seen that flag before, but he had heard tales of it from his brothers, whispered stories that had given him nightmares for years.
The symbol of marauders who attacked mercilessly, and never left a single victim alive.
It was the flag of the Fire Pirates.
3
The Fire Pirates
* * *
If only my father had let Luther teach me to fight!
If only he had let me become good at anything at all.
My darkest secret is that I seem to have been a failure at everything I’ve ever tried in the shipbuilding business. My father never said so, but his disapproval was apparent in the fact that he wouldn’t leave me in one place long enough to master the skill.
Just as I felt I was getting the hang of something, where I finally knew what I was doing wrong and how to fix it, he would pull me off and set me to studying in another place in the factory.
I started in sales as a small boy of twenty, trailing after my father or Petar, my oldest brother, lugging a model or a packet of numbers. At their heels I learned what Pepin Polypheme called “the hammered truth,” facts that were not varnished or hidden, but shaped straight. “Tell people the hammered truth, and it will ring like steel against an anvil,” my father would say.
But just as I got to know all the names and faces, just as I earned a greeting from the old men we dealt with, my father took me away from the public side of the business to the model shop.
My brother Alton was our master modelmaker, and he let me do everything in his shop but carve the actual molds. I thought I was getting fairly good at this, but just as Alton was having me choose the wood for my first try at the model of a fishing galleon, my father pulled me off and sent me to Alton’s twin, my brother Dalton, in Drafting.
From there it became a depressing cycle: from Alton to Dalton, to making sails with Matilda, to Jaymes for painting, to Jasper in Accounts, where all the records were kept, every ounce of metal, every copper coin kept in order by my brother’s careful recordkeeping.
Each one of my siblings was expert at something, and I was doing my best to learn from them. But no sooner was I beginning to feel that I, too, might be able to do a job well, or maybe even have a specialty, than my father would appear at the doorway, beckoning for me to pick up my leather apron and follow him. I was working with Vernon in the foundry, where Pepin’s belief was that whatever iron we received from a supplier wasn’t good enough, so everything needed to be resmelted and reshaped, when my birthday came around and I drew the short straw.
And so I never got to train with Luther.
Luther is the third-oldest Polypheme son. He had been dropped on his head as a baby by Nigel, who was using him as a ball at the time. Luther never really was able to be trained reliably to work in the factory. Like Old Max, he could not read, so he had little else to do but eat and grow muscles. When he came of age, my father sent him to a fighting school, where he excelle
d and soon became the best guard the town had ever seen. He was put in charge of security for the factory, and from the time he took over there was not a single break-in.
This might be because Luther had once bitten off the thumb of someone who was bothering Matilda. His reputation had quickly spread. He was the only one of the Polypheme boys who would not fight with the rest of us. None of us were crazy enough to provoke him.
So I was looking forward to learning from Luther. While my other brothers got teased a lot growing up—our family is considered odd even by the Nain of Vaarn—no one ever bothered me, because I am very tall for my race. A little paunchy around the middle, too, but at least I look strong. And I am related to Luther, so everyone leaves me pretty much alone. The only people I had to worry about bothering me were my own brothers.
If only I had gotten the chance to learn how to fight like him, maybe it would have saved us from the pirates.
* * *
THE SHIP FLYING THE SKULL-AND-FLAME FLAG HOVERED FOR A MOMENT broadside before the prow of the new ship, forming a T in the sea.
There were so many pirates aboard the dark vessel that they looked like a swarm of ants scurrying about on the deck. They were busy loading three small ballistae, weapons resembling huge crossbows that flung objects great distances, while lines of archers took their places along the rail.
Ven could only stand and watch in horror as barrels of smoking oil were heaved overhead, onto the deck and into the sails, followed by a rain of flaming arrows.
Lewis the boatswain was the first to recover his voice.
“We’re under attack!” he shouted to the sailors aloft, trapped between the deck and the crosstrees by the burning sail.
A gourd shattered at Ven’s feet, spilling a thick, oily substance onto the planks of the deck, which ignited a moment later.
“Lavery, Ven, go belowdecks to the hold, and then to my quarters,” Captain Faeley shouted, directing the sailors trapped above in the crow’s nest to rigging ropes that were not yet burning. “Gather whatever weapons you find and anything else we can use—go!”
Blindly, Ven followed the first mate through the oily black clouds of smoke and into a dark doorway that led below to the hold, where the cargo of the ship was stored. Thomas Lavery grabbed a length of burning rope as he went by and held it up for light.
“Look around—what have we got down here?” he said, running to the dark recesses of the hold where lines of barrels and crates stood.
Ven’s mouth was full of sour spit, and his stomach felt like it was being squeezed in a vise. Above him he could hear thumping on the deck as the sailors jumped down from the burning riggings and began to take cover, positioning themselves to defend the ship.
He grabbed hold of the nearest crate and lifted the top off. It was full of dry cloth sacks. He continued to tear through crates and barrels, finding apples, iron bolts, dried peas, pinecones, and water.
“Food and dry goods, nothing useful,” he gasped, wading through the barrels to the next row of supplies, which was covered with canvas sheets. “Over there?”
Lavery had gathered an armload of rope. “Not much—I have to go get weapons,” he said. “Stay here, Ven. Find a place to hide, but stay away from the stores and the galley. They will ransack those places first once they take the ship.” The first mate started back toward the door.
“I—I don’t want to hide,” Ven said shakily. “I want to help.”
“Can you fight?” Lavery asked, still walking.
“I haven’t been trained, but I can try,” Ven said, still pulling tops off of crates. Now he was finding the materials he had seen on the manifest that had gone into the making of the ship: pitch-paint, the lacquer for the deckboards, quicklime used to clean the metal fittings and for signaling, and a full barrel of magnesium.
“You’re better off hiding,” Lavery said over his shoulder. “You’ll just die quicker if you fight.”
Ven slammed the barrel of quicklime shut. “I am going with you. If we don’t fight, we’re all done for.”
Thomas Lavery stopped and looked back at Ven.
“We’re all done for anyway, lad,” he said sadly.
Then he stepped through the smoky doorway that led back up onto the deck.
Ven followed him up to the top deck, to the captain’s quarters in the fore of the ship, where the few weapons that had been brought on board were stored. Lavery tossed him several swords and grabbed whatever bows he could carry, strapping on quivers of arrows and crossbow bolts. They hurried back to the main deck, steadying themselves as the pirate ship, now alongside them on the starboard side, fired another round from their heavy ballistae.
Instead of burning oil this time, however, the ballistae were firing grappling irons, metal hooks that looked liked giant claws attached to long ropes. They shot over the deck rail and onto the floorboards, then were pulled back, toward the pirate ship, anchoring themselves in the new ship’s wooden rail.
The new ship lurched violently. The wood screeched as the iron fingers of the claws sank into it.
The pirates were pulling the nose of their ship closer to the bow of the new ship.
Ven, who was passing swords out to the dozen or so crew members, caught a glance between the captain and the first mate.
“They’re grappling us—they just burned the sails so we couldn’t get away,” shouted Thomas Lavery above the noise of the screaming wood, tossing bows to the crew as well. “It’s the ship they’re after.”
“Right,” said Captain Faeley, fitting an arrow to his bowstring. “We can’t let them have it. We have to scuttle her.”
Ven heard the words thud against his eardrums as he fought back tears of dismay and panic. They were about to be boarded by Fire Pirates, who always killed their victims. Understanding this, the captain had decided to sink the ship intentionally rather than let it fall into the pirates’ hands.
It’s probably just as well that I am going to die now, he thought grimly, watching the wickedly grinning faces of the sea bandits draw closer as they tugged on the ropes, pulling the ships together side by side. It’s better than having to explain to my father that I intentionally sank his new ship. Especially since I’m the one who decided to go out into deeper water.
He could hear his father’s voice in his memory.
Let’s have no problems, now.
I wonder if this counts as a problem, Ven thought.
“Tayne, loose the lifeboats,” the captain called to one of the sailors. “That might draw their attention away for a moment or two. Krebs, get down to the galley and turn the fire pump system on full blast. Fill that kitchen with as much water as you can. Ven—help him; you know how the pump works. Lewis, go below to the galley and burst the seams of the hull with whatever you can find. The rest of us will defend the hold to give you all as much time as possible to scuttle the ship. Everyone into the stairway and close the hatch. Godspeed, gentlemen. It’s been good to know you.”
Amid a chorus of aye, sir, the sailors scattered to their posts.
Ven ran down the stairs behind Krebs, clutching a crossbow he barely knew how to fire, heading through the hold and into the galley. As he opened the large doors where the fire hose was kept, coiled on big hooks, he could hear the sound of the empty lifeboats hitting the water off the other side, the port side, of the ship.
With shaking hands he set down the bow and tossed the nozzle of the canvas-wrapped hose to Krebs, lowered the other end of it out the porthole, then began working the pump, drawing water from the sea into the galley.
“A lousy way to die,” Krebs muttered, unwinding the hose and holding it where the water could flood the ship’s kitchen most easily. “If we’re gonna go down, at least we could go down fighting.”
“There will be plenty of fighting, I’m sure,” Ven said, pumping the handle as hard and as fast as he could. “But the captain is right. There is no way a skeleton crew can hold off a hundred pirates, or even run, since they burned our sails first
.”
“Bah,” said Krebs grumpily. “We ought to stuff their bloody fire right back up their backsides, if you ask me. You gotta fight fire with fire. Instead we’re drowning ourselves. Ain’t right.”
Ven stopped short for a moment, his father’s voice ringing in his ears.
You know what you’re doing, Ven. Just keep all your lessons in mind.
Just then the ship shuddered violently. Ven and Krebs were thrown to one side and slipped beneath the knee-high water that was now flooding the galley. Ven’s head popped to the surface amid floating pots, pans, and vegetables. He struggled to get back to his feet, made his way to the porthole and peered out.
The pirate ship was now directly alongside them, its hull so close that Ven could have lobbed an apple into the nearest porthole. He could see the pirates on the deck above beginning to climb over the ropes from their ship to the new one.
Keep your lessons in mind.
Osgood had been the one who instructed him in chemistry.
Ven dropped the hose, startling Krebs.
“You want to fight fire with fire?” Ven asked, grabbing a meat axe and starting back into the hold. “Come with me!”
“Are you daft, boy?” Krebs demanded. “We have orders to flood the galley.”
“And we will,” Ven promised, beckoning to the ship’s cook. “The hose is running on its own. But I have an idea. Come on!”
Reluctantly Krebs followed him back into the hold where the barrels and crates stood, secure in their wooden moorings. The sounds of fighting could now be heard through the hatch. The sailors were defending the entranceway, trying to buy Ven and Krebs as much time as they could.
Ven stopped long enough to dip the crossbow bolts Thomas Lavery had given him in the barrel of pitch, then went to the barrel that held the quicklime. He bashed the wooden mooring with the axe over and over until the barrel rolled free, while Krebs stood, dumbfounded.