Nation - Пратчетт Терри Дэвид Джон - Страница 52

It started to get bad. The captain got humpty. Crew who’d served with him for a long time said he was a decent man and a good captain, and they’d never seen him get humpty before. Everyone suffered under a humpty captain, who’d find fault with everything and turn every day into a chore. Daphne spent a lot of time in her cabin.

And then there was the parrot. No one was ever sure who taught the bird its first swear word, although the wobbling finger of suspicion pointed at Cox, but by then the whole crew was ill at ease. Cox had his supporters, and the captain had staunch allies of his own. Fights broke out, and things, small things, were getting stolen. That was terrible, according to Cookie; nothing broke up a crew like the thought that a man had to watch his possessions all the time. Dooms and reckonings would be upon them all, he forecasted. Probably more dooms than reckonings, he added.

And the next day Cox shot the old man in the canoe. Daphne would like to report that every sailor in the crew was angry because the old man had been shot, and in a way it was true, but many of the men were less concerned about the sanctity of souls than they were about the possibility that the old man had relatives nearby with fast canoes, sharp spears, and an unwillingness to listen to explanations. And there were even a few who held that one old man more or less didn’t matter, but Cox and his cronies had been shooting at dolphins, too, and that was cruel and unlucky.

In the end there was a war, and so much bad blood had been bubbling that there seemed to Daphne to be more than two sides. She sat it out in her cabin, seated on a small barrel of gunpowder with a loaded pistol in her hand. The captain had told her that if Cox’s men won, she should fire the pistol into the barrel “to save her honor,” though she was uncertain how much a saved honor would be worth when it was falling out of the sky in tiny pieces, along with the rest of the cabin. Fortunately she did not have to find out, because Captain Roberts ended the mutiny by detaching one of the Sweet Judy’s swivel guns and aiming it at the mutineers. The gun was intended for firing lots of small lead balls at any pirates who might try to board the ship. It was not intended to be a hand cannon, and if he had fired the thing, the recoil would probably have thrown him into the air, but everyone in front of it would have died of terminal perforations. There was a fury about him that even Cox took note of, Cookie had told her. The captain had the look in his eye of the Almighty confronting a particularly wicked city, and maybe Cox was just sane enough to recognize that here was someone who might be even madder than he was, at least for the time it took to turn Cox and those around him into much smaller lumps. Or, Cookie said, the captain may have been about to commit wild murder right up until he realized that this was what Cox wanted, and the devil of a man would drag the captain’s soul to hell along with his own.

But the captain didn’t fire the gun, said Cookie. He laid it on the deck. He straightened up with his arms folded and a grim little smile on his face, and Cox just stood there, looking puzzled, and then every single loyal crewman pointed a pistol at his head. The steam got knocked out of the mutiny. Cox and his chums were herded into the ship’s boat with food, water, and a compass. And then of course there was the matter of the guns. The mutineers still had friends among the crew, who said that leaving them in uncertain waters without weapons was a death sentence. In the end the guns were left for them on a little island a mile away, despite Captain Roberts declaring that in his opinion, any pirate or slaver who ran into Cox and his men would have a new captain in very short order indeed. He ordered the swivel guns primed and ready day and night, and said that the boat would be fired on instantly if it was ever seen again.

The boat was set adrift and sailed, her crew silent and worried except for Polegrave and Foxlip, who jeered and spat. That was because they were too dumb to realize, said Cookie, that they were heading off into bad waters with a murderous madman in command.

The Judy never really recovered, but she kept on course. People didn’t talk much, and kept to themselves when they were off watch. She wasn’t a happy ship at all. Five men had previously jumped ship at Port Henry and so, without the mutineers, there weren’t enough men to crew the ship properly when the wave came.

And that was the story Daphne told. She tried to be honest, and where she’d relied on Cookie’s rather excitable stories, she said so. She wished she had Pilu’s talent; he could make tripping over a stone sound like a desperate adventure.

There was silence when she finished. Most people turned to look at Pilu. She’d done her best in a foreign language, but she’d seen the puzzled looks.

What Pilu gave them was the story all over again, but with acting, too. She could make out the character of Captain Roberts, heavy and pompous, and surely the one who sidled around was Polegrave, and the one who stamped and roared was Cox. They shouted at one another all the time, while Pilu’s fingers popped like pistols and somehow, in the middle of the air, the story unfolded.

A certain extra touch of slightly mad realism was added by the parrot, who danced madly in the top of a coconut palm and shouted things like, “What about Darwin, then? Waark!”

Pilu’s translation lagged behind Daphne’s account, but when he was about to deal with the old man’s shooting, he stopped for guidance.

“He killed a man in a canoe because he was not a trouserman?”

She was ready for this. “No. The man I kill — the dead man would have done that, but I think Cox just killed the old man because he couldn’t see anything else to shoot at.”

“Er… my English is no so good — ” Pilu began.

“I am sorry to say you heard me correctly.”

“He kills for Locaha and adds glory, like the Raiders?”

“No. Just because he wants to.”

Pilu looked at her as if this was going to be a hard one to get across. It was. From the sound of it, no one thought he was making sense.

He went on doggedly for a few more sentences and turned to Daphne. “Not dolphins,” he said. “No sailor would kill a dolphin. You must be wrong.”

“No. He really did.”

“But that is killing a soul,” said Pilu. “When we die, we become dolphins until it is time to be born again. Who would kill a dolphin?” Tears of puzzlement and anger raced down his face.

“I’m sorry. Cox would. And Foxlip shot at it, too.”

“Why?”

“To be like Cox, I think. To seem like a big man.”

“Big man?”

“Like the remora fish. Er, you call them suckfish. They swim with the sharks. Perhaps they like to think they are sharks.”

“Not even the Raiders would do this, and they worship Locaha! It is beyond belief!”

“I saw them. And poor Captain Roberts wrote it down in the ship’s log. I can show you.” Too late, she remembered that Pilu didn’t so much read as recognize writing when it was pointed out to him. His look now was a plea for help, so she stood close to him and found the right place: “Once again Cox and his cronies have been discharging their pistols at the dolphins, against all decency and the common laws of the sea. May God forgive him, because no righteous sailor will. Indeed, I suspect that in this case even the Almighty will find his mercy overly strained!!!”

She read it aloud. In the circle, people were getting restless. There was a lot of loud whispering that she couldn’t understand, and it looked as if some sort of agreement was being arrived at. The nods and whispers ran around the circle of people in opposite directions until they met at Mau, who cracked a thin smile.

“These were men who would shoot a brown man for no reason,” he said. “And they would shoot dolphins, which even trousermen respect. You could see inside their heads, ghost girl. Isn’t that right? You could see how they thought?”