Tigerheart Read online

  In the past, The Boy and the Piccas had formed a bond of trust and friendship as a result of The Boy’s rescuing their beloved first daughter, Princess Picca, at Rotter’s Rock. In the past, as a result of that bond, they fought a great fight and lost many braves to the cutlasses of Captain Hack and company, all to protect The Boy and the Vagabonds.

  So let us see now what transpired when Simon the Dancer, up in the crow’s nest, called out to The Boy, “Savages, Captain! In canoes! Off the port bow!”

  The Boy, who had been standing at the wheel, staring at his hand, immediately looked up with interest. Sure enough, coming in from the left were two canoes manned by small Picca fishing parties.

  “They mean to attack us, Captain!” Roomer said, slithering within range of The Boy’s ear. “You can see it in the fierceness of their bearing!”

  The Boy pulled thoughtfully at his imaginary beard. He looked quite striking in his splendid garments: a black frock coat with gold trim, white shirt, gray cuffed pants with black buccaneer boots, a plumed tricorn hat, and his sword tucked boldly through a red sash around his waist. He strode to the port bow and studied the braves, the old lady behind him, petting him affectionately on the arm.

  The braves had no weapons on them. Instead, three to a boat, they were sitting there with fishing cable dangling in the water. They had paddled their boats to get into position but now were bobbing in the water, having just the paddles so as not to scare the fish. Upon seeing The Boy staring at them, they waved in leisurely fashion and then went back to the lazy craft of catching fish.

  “They obviously mean business!” The Boy said. “And what sort of lords of the seven seas would we be if we didn’t answer in kind!”

  “Well spoken, my pet, well spoken,” the crooked lady said. She straightened his collar slightly so that he would look his best, taking care not to step upon his shadow as she did so.

  “Roll out the guns!” said The Boy.

  “Roll out the guns!” Big Penny repeated, and the order was chorused one to another to another, until the formidable Suleyman—the best shot of all of them—had the cannon up to the port side and angled directly at the peaceful Indians.

  One of the braves noted the cannon aimed right at them, and began shouting in alarm to his fellows. At first they didn’t believe him, but then they saw, and they very much believed. They grabbed their paddles and quickly started trying to get to shore.

  Too late! Too late!

  The cannon unleashed its deadly burden, and the braves leaped clear just as the cannonball smashed into their canoe, ripping it asunder. The pirate crew laughed merrily at the sport as Suleyman reloaded the cannon. He needn’t have bothered, for the rest of the Indians had already vacated their canoe, swimming as fast as they could toward the shore. This didn’t deter Suleyman, who aimed and fired with terrible accuracy, blasting apart the second canoe.

  Just to drive home the point, The Boy leaped into the air, drew his sword, and flew off the ship. While his crew pointed and chortled and egged him on, The Boy swept down toward the Indians. Then he paused and said, “Oh! It’s you! This is all a vast mistake, my friends! Truly!”

  “Truly?”

  “No, not truly, for I am first cousin to Puck and say what I like to mere mortals.” Swinging his sword at the Indians while hovering just above them, he was out of reach of their hands but they were well within reach of his sword. The Indians kept being forced to dive far under the water to evade The Boy’s sword thrusts, but every time they came up for air, there he was, dive-bombing them while crowing continuously.

  It was a truly tragic day for the Indians. They finally managed to get back to shore with only a few cuts and nicks, and one brave had lost his magnificent braid of hair, since The Boy had swept down and slashed it off with one deft flick of his sword. Once they splashed up onto shore, however, they heard a low growling and saw burning yellow eyes from deep within the undergrowth. The Indians backed up, moving along the shoreline; but they were too slow, for a fearsome tiger came bounding into view.

  He was a great and terrible beast, with the largest head that any of them had ever seen and fangs as long as the arm of any one of them. Had the Indians been armed, they still would have been hard-pressed to defend themselves. Unarmed, they had no chance. The tiger took down two of them beneath its claws and gnashing teeth while the others managed to effect their desperate escapes.

  As for The Boy, he returned to his ship, where he danced merrily upon the deck, playing his pipes and singing praises of himself while the others joined in. There had been no plunder in the harassment of the Piccas, but at least it had provided some sport.

  So it went, day after day and night after night. Sometimes they made life miserable for the various residents of the Anyplace, and other times they sailed away from the immediate area in order to plunder and steal from other realms. We will not go into detail here, although we will mention that The Boy’s confrontation with the Flying Dutchman was particularly memorable and deserves a book unto itself.

  Still, there were times when The Boy was unsettled and disturbed, which was neither a familiar nor a pleasant sensation for him. At those times he would take up residence in his cabin and stare at the wall. We will now be a fly upon that wall on one occasion when the crooked old lady—the only one who could approach him at such times—spoke to him. Stroking his hair lovingly, as moonlight filtered through the cabin windows, she asked him what ailed him.

  “This morning,” The Boy said, “the Turk and Agha Bey were complimenting me on the previous night’s assault on the merchant vessel Drake. They said I was particularly fierce, my sword work formidable and terrible to behold. They said I had rarely seemed so evil and piratical.”

  “What of it?”

  He looked up at her, concern crossing his face. “I don’t remember it,” he said.

  “And so?” The old lady laughed. “Why should that disturb you? You forget things all the time.”

  “Yes, but not that quickly,” The Boy said. “From one night to the next morning? And there have been other nights, or even days, other occasions, when the men talk to me about some special bit of nastiness that I embarked upon, but it’s gone from my mind. Also…”

  “Also what?”

  “When I forget things, it’s because I didn’t think of them as being important enough to remember. I remember what’s important.”

  “Of course you do. After all, you never forget your own name, nor your own magnificence, nor how to fight or fly—”

  “Yes, yes,” The Boy said. “I know that. The thing is…I feel like I’m forgetting things that I should be remembering. And here is the most curious thing: It’s not like I’m just forgetting these things. It is as if…I never did them at all.”

  “But, pet,” said the old lady, “of course you did them. They say you did them. They saw you do them.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “No ‘yes, but,’” the old lady said firmly. “I tell you, there’s naught to worry yourself about. Have I ever lied to you?”

  “I do not know,” The Boy said honestly. “I do not remember how we met, or where you came from, or how you came to be here. Maybe you have lied to me.”

  “I would tell you if I had,” said the old lady.

  The Boy accepted the assurances, because, despite her outwardly fearsome appearance, she spoke with an amazingly soothing and mellifluous voice, honey dripping from every syllable.

  Yet, even though he accepted them, there were things that still niggled at him, like insects buzzing about your face in such a way that you can’t quite swat at them. Furthermore, there were times The Boy would drift to sleep and have strange dreams about himself. This made a certain degree of sense, for The Boy’s own Anyplace was simply a reflection of what already existed, folded in and back upon itself like an envelope turned inside out. And if we tend to forget our dreams upon our own awakening, then naturally The Boy would forget his even faster. The sense of them remained within him, however; an
d that sense of them was that somehow, in some way, he was endeavoring to summon aid, even though he did not think he was in trouble and did not believe that—even if he were in trouble—he needed any succor beyond that which his good right arm, keen blade, and dazzling flight could provide.

  So was the uneasy balance upon the Skull n’ Bones, and now we come to the flash point of events.

  It so happened that the pirates were getting restless from recent inactivity, and the Terrible Turk had suggested to the crooked lady that the time had come to wipe out the Indians once and for all. This notion intrigued the crooked lady, and she in turn took it to The Boy, who considered it. At first it seemed a rather pointless exercise in cruelty, but then he felt a distant scratching along the bottoms of his feet, and somehow after that it all made more sense.

  “Best of all,” said Caveat in his superior manner, “the mission can be accomplished with minimal muss and fuss, at absolutely no risk to us. In one stroke, we will be able to administer the koop dee grace.”

  “The what?” said Yorkers.

  “It’s Italian,” Caveat said airily. “It means ‘the final blow.’”

  “What’s that have to do with Grace? Who’s she, anyway?” Yorkers said, looking to Roomer for clarification. Roomer simply shrugged.

  “If you want to say ‘final blow,’ then just say it,” Big Penny snapped at Caveat, fed up as he always was with Caveat’s dazzling command of so many complicated languages.

  The Terrible Turk glowered at the Bully Boys. He and the other Barbarys made little secret of the fact that they felt infinitely superior to them and had no patience for the boys’ discussions or boasts. He strode across the deck, snagged Caveat by the front of his shirt, and lifted him off his feet. Caveat let out a squeal of alarm. The Boy, testing his balance by standing atop the steering wheel while not moving it, paid them no mind, far more interested in his exercise in equilibrium.

  When the Turk spoke, it was always in a frighteningly soft voice, the sort that made you stop doing whatever you were up to and work hard to hear everything he was about to say. “How would we go about this?” he said. The other Barbary buccaneers scowled fiercely behind him.

  “Their camp,” said Caveat nervously. “It’s around on the back of the island, up on a cliffside. We simply fire into the side of the cliff, blast it apart, and send the entire cliffside crashing to the ground along with the Indians.”

  “And if they have valuables,” Suleyman said, “we can pick them out of the rubble.”

  “Makes sense,” Yorkers piped up, and received a glare from Agha Bey for his contribution.

  The crooked lady turned to The Boy and said, “What say you, Captain?”

  “Aye!” said The Boy, who had not heard a word of the discussion and had to be filled in later as to the specifics of the plan he had just endorsed.

  The Skull n’ Bones set out. The wind puffed against her sails; and with The Boy’s firm hand on the tiller, the ship cruised briskly around the coast of the Anyplace. The Boy watched the shoreline move past him, and was vaguely aware that he had once cavorted and frolicked upon those shores. But those days were long past, as if belonging to another person who shared his name but had gone on to other, greater things.

  Soon they drew within range of the cliffside to which Caveat had alluded. The Bully Boy had been completely correct. There, high at the top of the cliff, was the peaceful Picca camp. Pulling out his telescope, The Boy gazed upward and was even able to see Princess Picca in the midst of her people, engaged in a ritual dance that he recognized as asking for a successful harvest. Well, what a crop he had to share with them, eh? A crop of cannonballs, sure as shooting.

  “Roll out the carronades! All of them!” The Boy said, and the Bully Boys and pirates worked together swiftly as a team, dedicated to the single goal of wreaking a glorious day’s havoc. As per The Boy’s orders, four fearsome eighteen-pound guns were positioned, poised to be armed, readied, and to perform dazzling feats of destruction. The Barbarys braced them in position.

  Everything was ready. The Boy sailed through the air, landing on the mainmast, grinning in a most fiendish manner that didn’t seem anything remotely like play. “Ready!” he said. “Aim!”

  “Captain!” said Simon the Dancer, the most eagle-eyed among them. “Floating toward us from the direction of the cliffside, coming ’round the island from the far side…it’s a raft!”

  “A raft?” said The Boy. Instantly the Indians, if not forgotten, were at least a distant second in his priority as this new curiosity presented itself. “Heading toward us? Not away from us?”

  “Madness,” growled the Terrible Turk. “Have they no idea who they’re dealing with?”

  The crooked lady looked in the direction of the small vessel that was indeed moving on a straight intercept course with the fearsome pirate vessel. “The nerve of them! We’ll have their guts for garters, we will.”

  “We?” The Boy said, looking with a faint aspect of danger at the old lady.

  She turned to him, smiled, and said silkily, “You will, my dearest. Only you.”

  The Boy could, of course, have flown out to the raft to see what was what or to harry the people upon it as he had the Indians. This time, however, it struck his fancy to remain on his ship and play the part of pirate captain to the hilt. He bounded to the foredeck, calling for a megaphone. Roomer tossed one to him. The Boy caught it deftly, brought it to his mouth, and said, “Ahoy the raft! Who goes there?”

  A voice floated back to him, apparently without aid of a megaphone; but it was firm and strident and The Boy was stunned to hear it.

  “Boy!” came the voice of Gwenny. “Is that you?”

  The Boy blinked in surprise, than rallied himself and said, “No! I am Captain Boy, the deadliest pirate ever to menace the Spanish Main! I am he who the Sea Cook feared! I am—”

  “Boy, this is nonsense!” Gwenny said. “The Anyplace is abuzz with your actions! We made this raft to come fetch you home and away from this—this terrible environment you’ve put yourself in.”

  “Ignore her,” said the crooked old lady. “She is simply angry that you have found a more entertaining game to play than being husband to her and father to a brood of brats.”

  “Away with you,” The Boy said to Gwenny, “before I give you a taste of the round shot! Avast, arrrh!” he growled to add piratical authenticity.

  As the raft drifted closer, he could see that Gwenny was not alone. Irregular and Porthos were with her. He was pleased to see, even from this distance, that there was terror etched on their faces. Why shouldn’t there be? They knew who was the true power in the Anyplace, and it was most definitely not the bold girl perched in the middle of the raft.

  Yet Gwenny was not acting in the manner of someone who knew the truth of things. Instead, her attitude was defiant, as if she were holding vast amounts of power instead of none.

  “Boy,” she said firmly, “you have responsibilities to me and to these brave lads. I will not see you gallivanting about, deep in the midst of your games, ignoring those who count on you. You must accept those responsibilities, Boy, and come back to us. It’s not right to do this to your family. To just—just pretend that we don’t matter.”

  “It’s not right,” Big Penny said mockingly; and now the other Bully Boys joined in, pitching their voices in a feminine manner and throwing Gwenny’s words back at her. The Barbary pirates picked up on it, and they mimicked her as well. In short order, the entire Skull n’ Bones was echoing with contemptuous imitations of Gwenny.

  If they were endeavoring to make her lose her temper, they were not succeeding. In fact, if we are to be embarrassed for anyone, it is for the crew of the Skull n’ Bones, jumping about like foolish apes. Gwenny never lost a shred of her dignity; and the pirates kept at it for some time before they realized that she was not breaking into tears or pleading with them to stop holding her up to ridicule. Like the infinitely tolerant mother that she was—or would be or played at being when in
the Anyplace—Gwenny simply took the jibes in the endlessly patient manner of one who knew that boys will be boys no matter how old or how cruel they were, and that this, too, shall pass.

  In time it did pass, as the crew felt increasingly foolish in failing to garner the response they wanted. Their catcalls and howls tapered off; and Gwenny said sternly, “Boy…it’s time to come in now.”

  For one of the few times in his life—perhaps the only time—The Boy hesitated. He had not budged from the foredeck, but he was teetering slightly, as if his sea legs were losing some of their security.

  “Kill her,” whispered the crooked old lady, little drips of poison flecking from her lips to his ear. “Kill them all. End it now. End it clean. You know it’s the only way.”

  “Let us blow them out of the water, Captain!” said the Terrible Turk, beard bristling as fiercely as ever. Suleyman was ready to light the nearest gun, waiting eagerly for his captain’s order.

  “Kill them,” repeated the crone; and the urging was taken up by the others until it was a chant, over and over. The Boy felt a pounding in his head, and he desperately wanted to lash out but could not decide at whom.

  A cold chill gripped his spine and straightened it, and he turned. “Back away from the carronade,” he snapped to Suleyman. “You are not to fire on them.”

  “But, Captain!” said Suleyman.

  The Boy strode from the foredeck, shoved Suleyman away, and snatched the match from his hand. A grim smile spread across his face. “I’m going to do it myself.” He turned, readied the cannon as the raft floated helplessly within range, and said, “Gwenny! Consider our marriage at an end!”