Red Seas Under Red Skies: The Gentleman Bastard Sequence, Book Two (Gentleman Bastards 2)
4
Just past the second hour of the morning, with Tal Verrar finally shuddering into a drunken somnambulance and the Festa fires extinguished, the Poison Orchid in her costume as the Chimera crept past the Happy Pilchard. She passed the battered, sleepy little ketch at a distance of about two hundred yards, flying a minimal number of navigation lanterns and offering no hail. That wasn’t entirely unusual in waters where not one act of piracy had been reported for more than seven years.
In darkness, it was impossible to see that the Orchid’s deck carried no boats.
Those boats slowly emerged from the ship’s larboard shadow, and at a silent signal their rowers exploded into action. With the haste of their passage they turned the dark sea white. Three faint, frothy lines reached out from Orchid to Pilchard, and by the time the lone watchman on at the ketch’s stern noticed anything, it was far too late.
‘Ravelle,’ cried Jean, who was the first up the ketch’s side. ‘Ravelle!’ Still dressed in his blood-spattered finery, he’d wrapped a scrap of red linen around his head and borrowed an iron-shod quarterstaff from one of the Orchid’s arms lockers. Orchids scrambled up behind him - Jabril and Malakasti, Streva and Rask. They carried clubs and saps, leaving their blades sheathed at their belts.
Three boats’ worth of pirates boarded from three separate directions; the ketch’s meagre crew was swept into the waist by shouting, club-waving lunatics, all hollering a name that was meaningless to them, until at last they were subdued and the chief of their tormentors came aboard to exalt in his victory.
‘The name’s Ravelle!’
Locke paced the deck before the thirteen cringing crewfolk and their strange blue-robed passenger. Locke, like Jean, had kept his bloody clothing and topped it off with a red sash at his waist, a red bandanna over his hair and a scattering of Zamira’s jewellery for effect. ‘Orrin Ravelle! And I’ve come back to pay my respects to Tal Verrar!’
‘Don’t kill us, sir,’ pleaded the captain of the little vessel, a skinny man of about thirty with the tan of a lifelong mariner. ‘We ain’t even from Tal Verrar, just calling so our charter can—’
‘You are interrupting critical hydrographic experiments,’ shouted the blue-robed man, attempting to rise to his feet. He was shoved back down by a squad of leering Orchids. ‘This information is vital to the interest of all mariners! You cut your own throat if you—’
‘What the hell’s a critical hydrographic experiment, old man?’
‘By examining sea-floor composition—’
‘Sea-floor composition? Can I eat that? Can I spend it? Can I take it back to my cabin and fuck it sideways?’
‘No and no and most certainly no!’
‘Right,’ said Locke. ‘Toss this fucker over the side.’
‘You ignorant bastards! You hypocritical apes! Let go—Let go of me!’
Locke was pleased to see Jean stepping in to perform the duty of heaving the robed scholar off the deck; not only would the man be scared witless, but Jean would control the situation precisely to keep him from actually getting hurt.
‘Oh, please, sir, don’t do that,’ said the Pilchard’s captain. ‘Master Donatti’s harmless, sir, please—’
‘Look,’ said Locke, ‘is everyone on this tub an idiot besides me? Why would I sully the soles of my boots with a visit to this embarrassment unless you had something I wanted?’
‘The, um, hydrographic experiments?’ asked the captain.
‘MONEY!’ Locke seized him by the front of his tunic and heaved him to his feet. ‘I want every valuable, every drinkable, every consumable this overgrown dinghy has to offer, or you can watch the old bastard drown! How’s that for a hydrographic experiment?’