Chapter the Ninth, or The Pool of Life.
by Hunt N. Peck
"I do not like these birds,” said Blue Peter Ceteshwayoo. “They resemble the misbegotten offspring of a vulture and a pelican, and they have a malevolent stare. They look like they ought to have teeth in their beaks.” He aimed a kick at one of the birds, which avoided the blow easily with a sideways hop, stared at him malevolently with a yellow eye, croaked ‘awk!’ then flapped away through the cold drizzling rain towards the river, its orange webbed feet dangling.
“The locals say they are called ‘snappers’, but they are properly called Liver birds,” said Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges. “They are only found around the Liver Pool and nowhere else, so it is a reasonable sort of name. Not a name like ‘warriangle’ or ‘merganser’, which are meaningless. A merganser does not ‘merganse’, does it?”
“The warriangle is the red shrike, also called the butcher-bird, or the worrier, or the throttler,” said Frank Benjamin, trudging behind them, trying to keep his cloak wrapped around himself against the wind and rain. “Warriangle is but a corruption of wurgengel, which is German for ‘destroying angel’. I do not know why they have such a reputation, for they are an attractive bird. Unlike these ugly things.” He waved a walking-stick at another Liver bird as it skimmed past on the wind, squawking.
“They sound the same as the damned inhabitants of this God-forsaken place,” said Blue Peter, “as though they have a head-cold, like the Londoners but worse. I had thought London to be a cold and miserable place, but I see it now as fairly tropical. I am surprised palm trees do not grow on Tilbury Dock.”
The three trudged through the mud. It was unpleasant to be abroad, despite their hats, woollen cloaks and greased sea-boots. A Liver bird hovered above them, its cry mournful and strangely nasal; “Awk! Awk! Awk-la!”
The muddy path of Pool Lane skirted the eponymous pool, and eventually led to the hump-backed Towsend bridge over the stream that emptied into it. They looked back from the bridge at the town of Liver Pool, a cluster of buildings dark in the last of the daylight. The bulk of the Old Castle in the midst of the houses, the church standing out by virtue of its square tower, the grey expanse of the Mersey estuary beyond it occasionally visible through the curtains of cold rain. They carried on over the bridge.
“The fellows in the tavern seemed cheerful and friendly enough, but strangely menacing,” said Mr Benjamin. “I didn’t know what to make of them.”
“It is their way, it seems,” said the Captain. “They distrust strangers, and they are surely not unusual in that, yet must deal with them, and so they attempt to appear both amiable and daunting at one and the same time. In a way it suits my purposes, for they are not overly curious, since they themselves do not welcome scrutiny. I hope my words to them, and my small gifts, will reduce the attempts at burglarising. I do not wish to use stronger measures. Come, we are nearly there, and a glass of rum-grog will cheer us.”
Captain Greybagges had purchased a boat-builder’s yard on the eastern side of the Liver Pool, away from the town. It had been unused and vacant for several years, almost becoming a ruin, its buildings pillaged by the locals for slate from the roofs and wood. The three squelched down the path at the edge of the Pool in the rain.
In the boatyard there was shelter, warmth and light. Light shining from the windows of the yardmaster’s house in the increasing gloom, the gleam of lamps visible from workshops and lean-to sheds. Pirates are sailors nevertheless, and are accustomed to making the best of circumstances, and to the continuous frenzy of repair and cleaning that is life at sea. The residence of the master of the boatyard, empty for years, lacking window-glass, window-frames, doors, floorboards and most of its roof, had stood no chance against the nautical repugnance for disorder, and had been made habitable in two days by a busy fury of pirate work-squads, and made neat and painted in a week, the glossy yellow enamel of the front door a bright gesture of contempt to the unremitting rain. They went gratefully in, but Blue Peter excused himself after gulping a glass of grog and walked around the boatyard on an evening tour of inspection.
A number of wooden huts had been built and the crew had moved ashore. There was light from these huts as the watches were changing. Blue Peter stopped at the huts, talking with the men. A supper of crocks of stew, baskets of bread and jugs of ale was being collected and brought to the huts, each mess going to the kitchen at the house in strict turn, the same as at sea. The men would eat, drink, sing, play at cards and dice, then stow the trestle-tables against the wall and sling their hammocks and sleep the sleep of the just, for the work was unrelenting and hard.
Blue Peter walked on down to the Ark de Triomphe. Upon her arrival at the boatyard the frigate had been stripped and emptied as it lay moored at the end of the wooden jetty. The frigate’s masts had been unstepped and the guns and ballast unloaded with the aid of a sheer-hulk, a floating contraption of great antiquity. Blue Peter had been surprised by the age of the sheer-hulk; its timbers were a patchwork of scarfings and the overlaps of its clinker planks had been undercut a finger’s width by the soft abrasions of flowing water in some long-forgotten past when its hull had actually plowed the seas and not been merely the pontoon for a crane built of old masts and spars. Opinions of the age of the sheer-hulk’s hull had varied, but the ship’s carpenter had assessed it to be one-and-a-half centuries old at least, maybe two. Blue Peter had found himself strangely impressed by this; who knew that a wooden ship could last that long? The stripped-bare, and much-lightened, hull of the Ark de Triomphe had been dragged ashore by the cunning application of rollers and the Spanish windlass and placed on a stollage of wooden baulks in a rectangular pit, where it now sat. The vast labour of digging the pit and dragging the hull ashore into it resembled something, mused Blue Peter, but he couldn’t think exactly what. Israelites in the Bible slaving to build pyramids? Did they build pyramids in the Bible? Except that the semi-naked slaves had been slaving in the pouring rain, splattered with freezing brown Mersey mud, not in the hot sun of Egypt on the banks of the sluggish warm Nile. The accomplishment of such a gruelling task had drawn the crew together, though, in a very powerful way. There had been some tensions on the voyage to Liver Pool, the old pirates being short of patience with the apprentice pirates for their lack of seamanship, tending to patronise them by strutting about as they felt men should who had seen bloody actions, while the new pirates had responded in turn by mocking the old pirates for their lack of education and knowledge of things mechanical. The heroic struggle with the hull of the Ark de Triomphe had made them work together, work to each other’s strengths, so now it was ‘the old pirates’ and ‘the new pirates’, and not ‘the pirates’ and ‘the apprentice-boys’.
Blue Peter continued his walk around the boatyard, checking that the pickets were alert. The locals were very thievish and there had been numerous attempts to steal, some of them worryingly ingenious. The Captain was paying regular bribes to the Lennons and the McCartneys, the main criminal gangs of Liver Pool, to prevent or at least limit pilfering, but the lesser affiliated clans, the Starkeys and the Harrisons, were probably not receiving their fair share of the protection-money and so felt less constrained. The Best gang, having been completely expelled from the Liver Pool underworld to the wilderness of the Wirral, felt no constraint at all, of course, but were relatively powerless to operate on the other gangs’ turf. Blue Peter was determined to prevent a violent incident causing trouble, so vigilance was important, and he was thankful for the tolerant attitude of the pirates to the locals; they were only thieves, after all, and so regarded as a nuisance and not a threat, to be given a clout round the ear when apprehended, not shot, disembowelled with a cutlass or crippled in such a way as might lead to ill-will. There must be some contacts with the locals, of course. These were mostly of a carnal nature, whether procured by payment or by simple affection, and remained a potential source of incidents.
Jack Nastyface joined Blue Peter on his tour of the perimeter, falling silently into step with him, cloaked in a cape of tarpaulin against the foul weather. The young man had become quieter, more introspective, since his friend Jemmy Ducks had left the pirate crew, no longer the giddy youth who had skylarked in the rigging with whoops and catcalls. Blue Peter was sure that if he had not checked the sentries then Jack would have done so unprompted even though he had just finished helping the cook prepare the supper.
“Have you heard from Jemmy at all?” he asked as they approached the house.
“He sent a letter by the tubs,” replied Jack. “He is investing his loot in a brewery in Southall, he says, and in horses and drays for the deliveries. He thinks that the London taverns will gladly forego brewing beer on their own premises as there is then more space for drinkers and more profit to be made. He always did have a clear head for business. He has bought himself a blue broadcloth coat with gold buttons so that he looks more the man of affairs, and he is courting a dressmaker called Edith. He says that she is ‘not entirely pretty, but very jolly’, in his own words.”
The ‘tubs’ were cargo vessels purchased by the Captain and crewed by retired pirates. They had delivered the sawn timber and other materials for the repairs to the house and to build the huts for the crew, the warehouses for the Ark de Triomphe’s guns and other contents, the workshops and the walls of the pit where the frigate now sat on its timber cradle. They had delivered other, more mysterious, cargoes, too, and carried letters for the pirates.
“Jemmy will need a hard head for drink as well as a clear head for business if he wants to be a brewer,” said Blue Peter, laughing.
“He has hired a brewer to make the beer,” said Jack. “I think he got the notion of a brewery from wanting to have a stable and to work with heavy horses. With a brewery he always has plenty for his horses to deliver, and no need to deal with lordly merchants and gentlemen of business, who are known to be tight-fisted and slow to pay. A tavern landlord always pays for the beer and for the delivery on the nail. Jemmy likes his ale, it is true, but I don’t think he will ever be a sot.”
They stood in the rain for a moment, the raindrops of the downpour glinting golden from the light from the windows of the house. Faint snatches of song and concertina came from the crew-huts, and occasional noises of hammering from the workshops, audible above the hissing of the rain. The boatyard was functioning well to achieve the Captain’s plan. But what is that plan? thought Blue Peter. The crew do not ask, they have complete confidence in him. I wish I could feel the same; did he really tell me tales of extramundane creatures on his banyan day, or was that a crazy dream?
Jack Nastyface bid him farewell with a slightly-sad smile and headed around the back of the house to the kitchen, where there would be pots to wash before Jack’s own supper. Blue Peter entered the yellow front door of the house, flapping water from his thick woollen boat-cloak.
In the parlour Captain Greybagges and Mr Benjamin were eating beef stew, washing it down with ale from tarred leather drinking-jacks. Blue Peter called for some to be brought for him, too, and warmed his behind at the fire, holding the tails of his coat aloft and to the sides so they would not be singed by the crackling blaze of logs.
“As you know,” he said, “I have always wished for the life of an English country squire, and I have imagined myself warming my arse like this before a fire, and thought it would be a fine thing, but now I have to do it from mere necessity I find that dream strangely sad and misinformed.”
Captain Greybagges laughed, Mr Benjamin grinned. A ‘new pirate’ came in with a bowl of stew and a jack of ale. Blue Peter sat down at the table, tearing a hunk from a loaf, polishing his silver spoon on a napkin, preparing to savour his supper.
“It is unfortunate that your first experience of England should be in winter, Peter,” said the Captain, “especially as you have seen only London and this godforsaken place. There are more congenial spots. The climate on the south coast is very pleasant in the summer. Why the port of Southampton even has black Englishmen!”
“Is that indeed true?” exclaimed Mr Benjamin. “Are they escaped slaves? Begging your pardon, Peter! I speak from vulgar curiosity alone.” Blue Peter waved his spoon dismissively, his mouth full of the rich stew.
“No, Frank, they are not,” said the Captain. “They are Englishmen born and bred. Many of them are fine seamen, and can boast that their grandsires fought with Drake and Hawkins against the great Spanish armada back in the time of Queen Bess. That gives them a better right to be called English than many of the fine lords and ladies, I think. The people of Southampton agree, for they are an easy-going folk and the sea is in their blood. If you doubt me, merely consider that not only blacks but also Jews and even Dutchmen make their homes in Southampton in perfect tranquillity and prosperity.”
“The Dutch!” exclaimed Mr Benjamin. “Is not England presently at war with the Dutch? The burghers of Southampton must be tolerant indeed!”
“Do you know, I am not sure if England is at war with the Dutch!” said the Captain, grinning. “There have been so many wars with them, and so many peace-treaties, I lose count! The citizens of Southampton are united in their appetite for trade and commerce, and so regard sailors and merchants with great esteem, no matter what their provenance. A war is unfortunate, it’s true, but no reason to scupper a fine deal with Myneer van den Plonk, especially as his warehouse is next to the wharf and the Lord Chancellor is far away in the Palace of Westminster. It is an attitude similar to that of pirates in many ways, and laudable to us, if not to the fellows in Parliament. No, I remember now! England is not at war with the Dutch at this time. Perhaps next week, eh?”
“I have much to learn about being a pirate,” Mr Benjamin said. “My mind still tries to apply the laws of logic to the affairs of politics, and to the laws of men, too, which is even more foolish. A pirate has a more pragmatic view, and will not label a man a traitor unless he shall betray his own shipmates or friends. It is perhaps a more human reaction, in the long term. There is a wise fellow, John Locke, who philosophises upon these things, and he suggests that the legal constitution of a nation should be based upon the desires and aspirations of its humblest citizens, for there are many of them, and not upon the prerogatives of its most wealthy and powerful, for they are few.”
“Um, it is a wonderful notion,” said Captain Greybagges, “but I cannot see the wealthy and powerful being at all enthusiastic for it. They are afraid of the many precisely because they themselves are few.”
“The rich will not take easily to the idea, of course,” said Mr Benjamin, “but the needs of the many are surprisingly modest. Locke says that every man, no matter how humble, should be guaranteed ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. If these simple rights were adopted as the basis for a nation’s laws then the rich could keep their money, which is the only real basis of power, but only for as long as they infringed nobody else’s rights. They might also lose their money if they were improvident, but the laws based on universal rights would prevent them from stooping to desperate measures to retain their fortunes. Such a nation might be very vigorous, being based on fairness, and the wealthy might even benefit disproportionately from its prosperity, rather than be murdered in their beds by a howling mob of starving peasants. It is an idea quite close to the democratical nature of a pirate ship, where everyone has their job, knows their worth and is remunerated accordingly, with debate open to everybody.”
“If Mr Locke’s philosophising ever gets translated into French then le Roi Soleil might find himself punctured by a pitchfork,” said Captain Greybagges, “which would not lead to a vigorous nation but to civil war, and I would not wish that upon even the French, much as I despise King Louis.”
“Ah! but France is an old nation, so that the King would be killed by a settling of ancient accounts, not by the mere desire for new philosophy of governance. A new nation, with no old scores or grudges, might prove a more fertile garden in which such an idea might grow, might it not?”
“You argue your case very well, Frank,” said the Captain, “and I say that as a lawyer. I may also hazard a guess that your ‘new nation’ is the north American colonies. Am I right?”
“You are, but not at the present moment or under the present circumstances. I don’t think I shall live to see it, but the spread of an idea is unstoppable, if it is a good idea, so I suspect that it will be adopted when the right moment comes, when it is a useful idea and not a destructive one.” Mr Benjamin drained his ale. “I must bid you adieu. We cast a copper test-piece this afternoon in a mould of sand and china clay, and I wish to observe its rate of cooling, and also to prevent any rogue of an empirical nature from breaking open the mould prematurely through mere impatience or idle curiosity.”
Captain Greybagges watched Mr Benjamin leave. Blue Peter finished his stew, cleaning the bowl with a piece of bread, topped up his ale from the jug and selected an apple from the basket in the middle of the table.
“He is a clever fellow, is Frank,” said Captain Greybagges, “and he may well be right about Locke’s ideas. Mind you, Peter, the Dutch do away with their kings, and yet they seem always to get them back again, but under a different name. The present fellow is called the stadthouder, meaning ‘place-keeper’ or steward, but they are a republic so they cannot decide how much notice to take of him. A democratic utopia such as Frank envisages may be hard to build. I like his notion that such a place would resemble piracy, though! An entire nation of buccaneering entrepreneurs giving not a hoot for anything except freedom and happiness, their eyes always on the far horizon, always on the next gamble! What a thing that would be!”
“I am still cold,” said Blue Peter. “I stand by the fire, then eat a tureen of hot stew and drink a stoop or two of strong ale, and yet I am still cold.” Blue Peter crunched the apple. The Captain’s beard glowed green in the light from the oil lamps. It’s funny, thought Blue Peter, but I hardly notice it now. He coloured it brown to go into Liver Pool, but now he has washed it off – the boot-polish makes it itch, he says – and I didn’t really notice until the lamp-light caught it. How easily we become accustomed to the bizarre if we see it every day.
“Do you feel the time is right to reveal more of your plans?” said Blue Peter softly, almost without thinking. Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges looked at him with raised eyebrows, then nodded.
“You are cold, Peter,” he said. “There are too many freezing draughts in here!” He stood up and kicked the thick rug against the gap at the bottom of the door, and stuffed a napkin into the keyhole. “There, the parlour will warm up a little now,” he said loudly, and in a lower voice; “If we talk quietly we cannot be understood from outside the door. I got Izzie to test it by standing outside while I sang ‘Spanish Ladies’. We both pretended to be drunk. Well, drunker than we were, anyway. Sailors, pirates or not, are always nosey blighters, I have found.” He rummaged in a desk, sat down and beckoned to Blue Peter to draw his chair closer.
“So, Sylvestre, you will enlighten me further? I am agog!” Blue Peter murmured, screeching his chair on the stone-flagged floor as he shuffled it next to the Captain. The Captain opened a bottle of Madeira and poured two glasses.
“Indeed yes, Peter. Perhaps it is overdue. I have discussed some of what I am going to tell you with Bill, but only the algebraical and geometrical aspects, which he will need to understand for navigation. Oh, I am not making much sense! It’s difficult to know where to begin. Anyway, the point with Bill is that he knows nothing of the extramundane creatures, but he does have some knowledge of their natural philosophy, which I will now explain to you. Don’t mention the extramundanes at all to anybody just yet, is what I mean to say.”
Captain Greybagges stared blankly for a moment, composing his thoughts. Blue Peter stayed silent, sipping the sweet wine.
"Time is an awkward thing." The Captain took a sheet of paper from the sheaf he had taken from the desk and dipped a quill. "Imagine a tree. Here is the ground" He drew a line across the paper. "Here is the trunk of the tree." A line up from the first line. "Branches, the trunk divides in two, thus, and again, and again, so. But below ground there are roots." A line drawn down from the ground-line. "Roots that also branch, and again, and again, so. Imagine that the air, light and free, is the future, and that the ground, solid and permanent, is the past. The present is the surface of the ground. The tree represents something with a future and a past – you, me, a ship, a rat, a rock – so that the branching represents the choices that are taken in the future, you see? This choice leads to that, that one to this, and so on. In a similar way for the past; these roots represent the narrowing pattern of choices that lead to the present."
"I see what you mean, I think," said Blue Peter slowly. "They are lines in time, leading from the past into the future through the nexus of the present."
"Well put! The Arab scholars wrote of an aleph, where all time and space are coincident, and some necromancers claim that there is one in the pillar of a temple in Jerusalem, and that you can hear it buzzing if you put your ear to the rock. I think that is all hogwash, though, and that the Arab savants really meant the aleph to represent the constriction of choices as the future turns into the past, alike to several streams joining to rush through a culvert."
"It is indeed a compelling picture," said Blue Peter thoughtfully.
"However, it is more complicated." The Captain drew another tree next to the first. "It is a forest, not a single tree. If that tree is you, and this tree is me, then if our futures are entwined so are the branches of the trees, and if our pasts are entwined then so are the roots, and so for a hundred, a thousand other trees."
"Ah, yes, that begins to be complicated."
"Not only that, but although you are one man you are made of parts, so the tree could represent only one of your arms, or a finger, or a fingernail, and so on down to the atomies that compose your corporeality. Each atomie with its own tree, its branches and roots entwined with a million others."
"Hmm, that is complicated. A dance of atomies weaving the present like a tapestry."
"Precisely! The next part you will have to take more on trust." Captain Greybagges refilled their glasses.
"Why?"
"Because I don't really understand it myself. The whole notion of atomies was thought up by the old Greek cove Democritus. He thought it unreasonable that something could be divided up infinitely. Cut a piece of string in half, cut the half in half, and so on. He deduced that sooner or later one would encounter an indivisible particle, or atomon, and be able to cut no more."
"That does indeed sound reasonable," said Blue Peter, sipping the Madeira wine.
"Ahh! But that implies a general principle!" said Captain Greybagges. "If matter is granular, then maybe everything else is, too. Time. Distance. Heat. Nothing continuous, but everything doled out as in coinage, with no change from a groat. A groat, or no groat. No half-groats."
"These small increments of time, distance or heat," said Blue Peter, "must be very tiny, or we would notice them. The tick of a clock seems to chop up time, but that is an illusion, time itself seems continuous."
"They are very small, but they have an effect nevertheless." The Captain held up his hand. "No, let me finish. I said I did not understand it fully myself. The granular or grainy nature of everything on a small scale has the effect of making the present a little elastic, or deformable. Since there are no half-groats, then at the moment of reckoning – the present – things must be rounded up or rounded down, and that is a roll of the dice, not a calculation. Imagine the atomies as soldiers running out to the parade-square to form up in ranks; they shuffle into lines, they stand to attention, then break up again and run off for their breakfast. Just before they form up, though, there is a period of pushing and shoving – 'this is my position', 'no, it's mine', 'budge up a bit' and so on – then every soldier finds a place and the parade is perfect. That instant of perfect order is the present, but either side of it there is chaos, and the precise position of each soldier depends partly on chance."
"But that is only one instant in time, surely?"
"Yes, but time itself is grainy, so the flow of time is an endless succession of such moments. There are more atomies than are apparent, too. As in a play on a stage, for example, you see the play, but you don't see the actors waiting in the wings, or the stagehands, yet they are there. If you took a bottle and pumped the air out – like that fellow did in Magbeburg, Otto von Guericke – then inside the bottle is nothing, yet little miniscule atomies pop up in there all the time from out of nowhere just in case they are needed. Pop up, say 'anyone need an atomie? No? Oh, well, I'll be off then,' and disappear again back to the dressing-room, or wherever it is that atomies go when they're not here, or there. The constant but fleeting presence of atomies means there is empty space in the bottle’s vacuum, but not nothing. Think of it as alike to moonlight on a dark and choppy ocean; one sees the white foam, but not the vast dark ocean upon which the foam floats. There is no foam in the empty bottle, but the dark ocean is still there."
"My head hurts, Sylvestre," said Blue Peter, "and this Madeira isn't helping. Have you any brandy?"
Captain Greybagges rose from his armchair, put another log on the fire and rummaged through a chest. He came back with a bottle of brandy, and poured two glasses.
"Your head will only hurt, Peter, if you try and understand it, for common sense does not help very much. Anyways, the effect of it is that the present is slightly plastic or elastic. Given that time and distance are the same thing, too, it is possible to tinker about with time to some extent. The extramundanes, or at least the influential ones like the Glaroon, have discovered how to do this. The lizard people and the little grey buggers have not, so they are as much their victims as us. There are constraints on messing about with time, though. If one went back one hundred years in time – which is quite possible – and murdered one's grand-sire, then there would be no consequences when one returned to the present, one would only have created a dead-end time-path, and that would heal itself and disappear. By the same token, if one went a week into the future, found the result of a horse-race and came back to the present and wagered on it then one would surely lose, because one would only have seen a possible future, one of many."
“Then there is little point in moving through time, surely?”
“Not entirely. It is still possible to cheat a little bit, if one goes with the natural fall of events. For example, I myself was away on Mars for about three years, but I travelled back in time to the very point at which I left. This was a breach of the laws of time, so to speak, but me being displaced from my normal time-line was a bigger one, so I continue with my existence here and the closed loop in the time-line which I took when I was abducted to Mars is what shall wither away from history, or it would except that it is kept open by my beard, which is in contact with the Glaroon’s library.”
“I’m not sure I follow that,” Blue Peter sipped brandy.
“Nobody could. As I say, common sense is inadequate to deal with these matters. I will give you another example.” Captain Greybagges handed him a piece of coal. “Note that this lump of sea-coal has the impression of a leaf in it, where it has been split.”
“I see it quite clearly.”
“The leaf is several tens of millions of years old, yet it remains recognisable, for not much has happened to disturb it. If one were to travel back in time and collect a leaf and bring it to the present then it would be only slightly wilted because it would be travelling in the rough direction of its own time-line, much as that more-decayed leaf has done, and so not much harm would be done by that. It would not, of itself, create an anachronistic problem.”
“Tens of millions of years?”
“Yes. The world is much older than is currently assumed.”
“Not an anachronism?”
“Not really. Other leaves have made the journey, you have one in your hand, so what odds does it make if another one does? If one was to take something back in time, then there could be a huge consequence, even if the something was only as insubstantial as a mere idea. Take the secret of gunpowder back in time and give it to the ancient city of Carthage, the Romans lose the Punic wars and the whole of history would be different from then on. It’s too much disruption, so it can’t happen and won’t happen. I travelled back three years, but it was a small anachronism as it restored a timeline, which is a good thing, and it was only three years so the past wasn’t properly hardened, and so it did happen, and so here I am.”
“How does this affect your plans?”
“Now we get down to it, Peter. The Glaroon, having mastered the laws of time, can travel back and bring things forward, and so it does. Inanimate things are best – objects of marble and bronze, jewellery of diamonds and gold – they can be stolen from the past with ease because they could have been lost or buried and then found again, so no problem with them arriving in the present. The Glaroon, as you may imagine, has a large collection of such things stolen from the past, a collection worth more than all the money in the world’s coffers, bank-vaults, exchequers and treasuries put together. Is that not a cheery thought, shipmate? We go to plunder the biggest treasure of all!”
“Um, how do you plan to get to Mars?”
“You will see! But there are other things that the Glaroon steals from the past, thefts that are less easy to forgive, for they are thefts of people, men and women like ourselves. We not only go to take a vast fortune, but also to free the Glaroon’s slaves, to liberate his menagerie of humanity. That should make you proud and glad, Peter! Mr Benjamin too, I should think.”
“People stolen from the past, you say?” Blue Peter gulped brandy.
“Well, not in person. The principle of minimum disruption still applies, and people are more fragile than bronze statues. The Glaroon instead steals a fragment of a man or a woman – a flake of skin, a hair, even a drop of saliva, I believe – brings it to the present and by some process can recreate the whole corpus and animate it. That of itself it not a particularly wicked thing to do, but the copied people – the artificial identical twins, if you will – do not then have the freedom to make their own time-line, but are kept as slaves in durance vile. Worse than that, their real memories are erased and replaced with artificial memories, so that the Glaroon may converse with Ghenghis Khan if he so wishes. I think the Glaroon does it to ease his boredom, the crushing ennui resulting from the millenia of its unmitigated selfishness. The wretched slave is not commander of his own destiny and is not even master of his own soul. Poor Ghenghis! How captivity grates upon his noble warrior’s spirit, even though it is not truly his! Yet he is a cheerful fellow, and witty. I shall be pleased to see him again!”
Blue Peter was silent for some moments.
“This Glaroon thing, it has many people such as Ghenghis Kahn?”
“Why, yes! People from the recent past and from antiquity, even from pre-history. There was a fellow there who had supposedly invented the wheel. He was a glum cove, but then the Glaroon would force him to make wheels all the time, copies of his original wheel, so that he could give them as amusing gifts to other influential extramundanes, and that must have been galling. The poor fellow would often curse the day he thought of making a wheel-barrow, and bewail the fact that the mere desire to ease his aching back when taking his melons to market should have caused him such torment. Yet if that tormented slave should end his own life, well, then – abracadabra! – the Glaroon would just make another copy of the poor fellow and carry on. It must be stopped, you see. Also, all the going into the past and shifting things forward does have a cumulative effect, so the history of these regions is currently a little scrambled-up, with broken and stretched time-lines all over the place. There are things happening now that should not happen for years yet, and things that should have happened which haven’t. Sooner or later it will mend itself, of course, but that won’t be a good thing, not unless the Glaroon has been stopped by then and some repairs made to the time-fabric so that the unravellings and the re-ravellings end up creating a past that’s much like it ought to have been. The Glaroon is just amusing himself at the expense of the whole human race – and the races of the lizard people and the little grey buggers, too – and at the expense of the past, which is our past and which should not be used as a play-thing for such as the Glaroon to diddle with …” Captain Greybagges swallowed some brandy. “… the bastard. It is personal, too. I told you that, Peter.”
“What are these creatures, creatures of the the Glaroon’s breed? Where do they come from?”
“Creatures such as the Glaroon call themselves the Great Old Ones, or the Great Ancient Ones, but I think that's just pure conceit, alike to a French count who traces his ancestry back to Jesus's cousin Freddy by way of Alaric the Goth. There’s no doubt that they are old, very old, but they are still just creatures. It is said that the great turtles can live for centuries, but they are still just turtles, are they not? I don’t know much about the Old Ones, really. I don’t know where they hale from. I don’t know how they reproduce, or if they have emotions as we do. I don’t know if they are all the same breed, distantly related or all entirely different, being only similar in their great age. I don’t know if they are allied with each other, although I do suspect that they are like the Italian princes of old who would smile courteously while plotting each other’s doom, the kind of sly fellows for whom Machiavelli wrote his Il Principe, that vade mecum of treason and betrayal. I have never seen the Glaroon, never actually clapped eyes on it, but I have seen some of the other ones. They are pretty ugly and weird for the most part, although I did find a very few of them congenial. Great Cthulu was always pleasant to me, and his daughter Lulu has a mischievious impish sense of humour that lightened some moments of my imprisonment.”
“Are you not afraid that attacking the Glaroon may earn you the emnity of the others?”
“I must risk that, but I think that they will be secretly amused if I succeed, much as a tyrannical potentate might be delighted by another such being scragged by his peasants, as indeed Louis was mightily pleased when the father of the present King Charles was beheaded, despite his pompous protestations to the contrary.”
“Politics would seem to be the same everywhere, even on faraway worlds. I am not sure if that is a very depressing thought or a richly amusing one.” Blue Peter shook his head sadly, then drained his brandy.
A pirate knocked on the door, opened it against the dragging rug, and brought them mugs of hot cocoa, which they laced with brandy as a nightcap.
The next morning Blue Peter Ceshwayoo rose early, as was his custom, and shaved and dressed by the light of a candle in the pre-dawn darkness and cold. In London he had purchased long woollen underwear, and he blessed his foresight. He loathed the late rising of the sun in these northern latitudes, but found his pocket-watch oddly reassuring as he wound it and stowed it in his waistcoat pocket; it was light and warm somewhere, the watch proved that, just not here. He ate a bowl of oatmeal burgoo and drank a cup of black coffee in the kitchen, in the hope that it would ease his slight hangover, and went on another tour of the boatyard, wrapped in a boat-cloak against the unceasing rain.
He found Mr Benjamin in his copper-foundry, red-eyed but happy. The castings he had poured the previous afternoon were solidified, he had been breaking open the moulds at intervals throughout the night to obtain knowledge of the cooling, and was satisfied, he said, clambering out of the smoking casting-pit, peering through his pince-nez spectacles as he scribbled in a note-book. Now he was ready to cast some proper pieces, not test-specimens, and he was quietly eager.
“Go and get some sleep, Frank,” Blue Peter said kindly. “Your men can finish up here.”
Copper ingots were stacked in the foundry ready for the crucible, and laid on the stone floor against the wall were dozens of rods of copper the thickness of a pencil and four paces long, tied together in bundles with split-withies. When did they come? he thought. No wonder we have burglars What are they for? The foundry was wonderfully warm, but Blue Peter continued his tour in the dark and the cold rain.
At the edge of the dry-dock pit he stopped and watched the work on the Ark de Triomphe. Four pirates, supervised by Israel Hands, were carrying a long forged-iron plate into the stripped shell of the hull by the light of oil-lamps. All rotten timbers – and a wooden ship always has some – had been cut out and new timber scarfed-in, and the whole hull re-caulked. Now these long plates were being bolted to sandwich the keel-timbers and create an iron spine. Blue Peter had no idea why.
He paced on in the darkness, considering the implications of fornication and heaps of copper on his anti-pilfering strategies. The sky would not even begin to lighten until the repeater-watch snug in his pocket struck nine, but then he should have breakfast in the warm parlour. A Liver bird somewhere in the dark went ‘awk!’
During the winter months the work continued on the Ark de Triomphe. The iron backbone was completed and curved iron members and angled plates were added to lock it to the wooden ribs of the hull. Three flat iron plates were bolted like tables onto the backbone deep inside the hull; one for’ard, one aft and a larger one in the middle. The outside of the wooden hull was covered in tarred canvas then sheathed in a gleaming jacket of thin copper sheet nailed to the planks with copper nails. The thin copper rods in the foundry were bent into wiggled shapes and brazed together with sleeved junctions, the sleeves cast by Mr Benjamin in his foundry. The fitting of the copper rods into the hull recesses was brutally difficult work. In some places the rods had to be threaded through restrictions, each foot of the rod being bent to pass then straightened to continue – bend-and-straighten, bend-and-straighten – and only those with the most powerful hands and arms could do it, so Blue Peter, Bulbous Bill and Loomin’ Len and his bully-boys were recruited to assist in the work. Blue Peter had painful memories of struggling with the unwilling rods, and of taking a break, massaging his aching fingers with tears in his eyes, then returning below decks to do another stint. The work was made more difficult as the rods were wrapped in three layers of tarred linen ribbon and tight-bound with hemp cord, so too much force or abrasion and the covering would tear and everything must start again. The strong-arm crew cursed those copper rods, especially as none of them knew what they were for, and yet Captain Greybagges and Mr Benjamin were very particular as to how they should be laid out and connected.
In the end it was done, but while it was ongoing Blue Peter and Bulbous Bill had lost focus on discipline in the crew, and there was a tragic consequence. Two young pirates had argued over a local girl, and one had stabbed the other. At a drumhead court, convened according to the strict rules of the Free Brotherhood o’ the Coasts, the guilty pirate had nearly been sentenced to hang, but doubts remained over whether he had intended to kill his friend and so he was sentenced to be expelled and cast ashore. He went from the boatyard white-faced after being quietly warned by Captain Greybagges of the consequences of unguarded speech. The crew felt that being marooned for ever in Liver Pool would be punishment enough.
The ‘tubs’ came and went, delivering boxes and crates of various sizes, and other mysterious objects, including a number of what appeared to be large bottles made of gun-bronze. Blue Peter had given up trying to make sense of it. Even the Captain and Mr Benjamin were overwhelmed at times, Mr Benjamin wishing plaintively for an apparatus to duplicate drawings. No such thing existed, but several local girls and women were brought in to act as secretaries and copyists. For once the pirates’ romantic urges proved beneficial, for the former apprentice-boys had been discreetly industrious and very ingenious in finding young women who could read and write, disguising their carnal intentions as yearnings for cultured conversation, and these social contacts had proved very useful.
One morning trenches were dug to the Mersey to flood the pit. As the water rose the hull of the Ark de Triomph creaked histrionically, until it finally floated free and swam again. The baulks of timber of the cradle bobbed up and were snagged with long boat-hooks and pulled to the sides, lest the turbulent currents flooding into the pit hurl them against the bright copper sides of the reborn ship. When the level in the pit reached that of the river the wedges were knocked out of the wooden wall at the end until it floated free and was pulled away, the remaining earth-banks collapsing into the water. The Ark de Triomphe was drawn out of the now-flooded dry-dock by the whaler, the bully-boys at the oars red-faced with exertion despite assistance from ropes ashore. The Ark de Triomphe’s hull, light-loaded and high in the water, bobbed and danced like a mettlesome horse being led from its stall, but it was moored at the jetty before the tide turned to the ebb, to everyone’s relief. By a pleasant coincidence the endless rain eased and a watery sun appeared through the clouds as the last of the mooring hawsers, the quarter-steady, was looped around its bollard. Captain Greybagges made a short but stirring speech from the quarterdeck rail and ordered a double ration of rum, the pirate crew gave three cheers, and some chaffering cat-calls, and then set to work again.
Over the next weeks the pirates worked steadily to refit the frigate. The iron skeleton inside the hull had added weight, but ballast was still needed. Lead ingots were used instead of rocks. The crew were amazed and impressed by the sheer profligacy of this; even the king’s own flagship did not have a ballast of pig-lead! The ancient sheer-hulk was warped over and the Ark de Triomphe’s masts re-stepped. The tops and cross-yards were swayed up and the frigate re-rigged with new cables, ropes, stays, halliards and rat-lines. The pirates swarmed over the upperworks singing pulley-hauly shanties and joyfully shouting to each other as the Ark de Triomphe slowly took its sea-going shape once again.
Blue Peter watched her take shape, frequently pausing on his rounds just to observe her being clothed, put in harness for war. Her shape to a yokel landsman’s eyes merely meant that she was a ship, yet to a sailor’s eyes she was a predator, a predator as lairy as a wolf, but to a pirate’s eyes she was lovely. Her hull was long and lean and low, the foredeck and the quarterdeck barely shoulder-height above the waist-deck – much, much, lower than a frigate of the Royal Navy – the easier to board another boat from, the true mark of a pirate-ship. Yet after the rebuild the low deck was no longer an obvious modification, the decks hacked level more-or-less in haste. Now she looked as though she had been built that way from the keel up, and, more than that, she was a pirate-ship made for piracy with no constraint of expense, and she looked it. Blue Peter was minded of a leopardess. She had always had a wiggle of her stern when tacking, just like the twitch of that animal’s hindquarters when she jinked to cut off her prey, and now that little quirk seemed so fitting that it was eerie. The Ark de Triomphe was a dangerous lady, a femme fatale.
Blue Peter, as Master Gunner, had overseen the mounting of her new guns, whose black snouts now protruded from her gun-ports. The latest cast-steel eighteen-pounders from the Carron Company, none finer, equipped her single lower gun-deck, with twenty-four-pounder iron carronades on her upper decks. He would miss the short bronze Portugese thirty-two-pounders from the foredeck, though; he had been fond of those old smashers. As each new gun-barrel was dragged to the frigate on a sledge the crews had stopped to introduce it to its predecessor, laid on timbers in a shed, to splash them both with rum and ‘marry’ them so that the new gun would carry the same name as the old one. Sailors are superstitious, and pirates perhaps even more so.
The only thing that looked odd about the Ark de Triomphe was the small platform mounted between the foremast and the mainmast on a diagonal spar, at about one-half of the mainmast’s height. Blue Peter had no idea what it was for, but his fingers still ached from the fitting of the five thin copper rods that ran to it, the last of the copper rods to be installed, he hoped. The Ark de Triomphe is not just a leopardess, he thought, there is more; she has bones of iron now, and yet more, her claws are guns of steel, and, yet more again, her nerves are copper rods made to carry lightning. What is he making here? What kind of beast has he built as his steed for his monster-hunt? And Blue Peter Ceteshwayoo was suddenly cold, and very afraid.
Although it was still freezing cold, there were faint signs, if not of Spring then of the imminent arrival of Spring, and the low sun was occasionally shining apologetically through the scudding clouds. As Blue Peter stood on the bank looking at the frigate’s mysterious platform a Liver bird settled on it, flapping its wings whop-whop before folding-up like an old umbrella. In the brief calm between gusts of breeze Blue Peter heard its call, “awk! awk-la! AWK!”