absorbing the wisdom and practical advice of deep thinkers.
Altogether her pirate navy had so far collected twenty vessels of various sizes and conditions, including her own flagship, the sloop with the blood red sail. Tsunamis had cast numerous yachts up on the shores of Madagascar, along the south coast where the main body of the survivors were living, and some of the vessels had survived with little serious damage. They were there for the taking, which is what the queen’s people did, moving them downhill and into the water.
She divided her command among four experienced seamen, each with a lengthy resume as a career criminal (including prison time in virtually every South Asian port between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean). These men were both her subjects and her teachers in the ways of piracy. She respected and feared them, listened to their counsel and watched their every move.
The Indian, Raman Patel, was small in stature, and slight enough to be blown off deck in a strong wind; but his fierce black eyes revealed the hard character of a man who had sailed rough seas for forty of his forty-seven years. He was the son of an unknown sailor and a prostitute mother from Goa. His mother had tried to put a Christian imprint on her wild son; but he spent all his time at the docks watching and learning from men of the sea. When she died, he signed on as a mess boy on a British steamer. Within two years, he joined the crew of a pirate ship based in Zanzibar.
Yook Louie was a fifty-year-old Taiwan native, tall and lank as a board, with gray-yellow skin. His hair was stiff and steel gray, his brows black, and he grew a wispy goatee, rarely trimmed. He had once been married and was certain that he had fathered three or four children by his wife… now, in the aftermath of the Event, all certainly dead.
Jama Chaudri was a true mongrel, and he boasted of it: half Indian, part English, a little Chinese, perhaps as much as a quarter Indonesian, with an Arab or two and even an Irishman somewhere in his family tree—and he’d fight any man who mocked or criticized any of these racial or national groups. So, he was a skilled fighter, with fists or knives, and had by his own count killed at least twenty men. He was no mathematician, though, so the number— including those he had murdered in sea raids—was possibly double that. He had been a pirate for at least twenty- five years.
Then there was Errol Waddell, the big, ebullient Australian ex-con and “retired” bosun of Her Majesty’s Navy. Now in his fifties, with weathered brown skin and a shock of white-blond hair, he had seen service in the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, when his countrymen fought alongside the U.S. military services. He had spent a decade as a merchant seaman in the busy trade corridor between Singapore and Hong Kong. But he had been caught smuggling drugs and weapons into Sydney and spent another decade in national prison. The Event set him free.
Together, these four men were Queen Ranavolana’s senior command structure, her seagoing Praetorian Guard. They had, among them, more than a century of experience in piracy in the “dark alleys” of the seas east of Africa and south of Asia. They had little regard for human life—their victims’, their men’s, even their own—and in this weird new post-Event world, they were pledged to serve their pirate queen with all the skill and ferocity they could muster. They had absolutely nothing to lose, and thus were incredibly dangerous to everyone else.
The queen’s dilemma, then, was what to do with the resources at her disposal.
“We will send out a reconnaissance patrol to determine the enemy’s strength and ability to defend himself.” She announced this to her commanders matter-of-factly, and they received the information without visible reaction.
“Yer Highness,” said Waddell, the big Aussie, “I think that is exactly what we ought to do, but—er… well, I think we also should patrol to the east to see if there’s anyone, or anything, out that way.”
“Our forces are limited,” Ranavolana rejoined. “There’s only so much we can do. We need to keep an adequate defense on hand here.”
“Lady, we can do both,” Patel put in. “And we might find some more ships that have foundered or are lost at sea. We can always make use of more.” “ He smiled, showing his small brown teeth.
Queen Ranavolana did not smile. She steeled herself not to show any softness or humor—potential signs of weakness in the company of these men of action. She sought the opinions of others of her council. Some of them were more concerned with “internal security,” that is, unrest among the Malagasy survivors than defenses—against whom? they asked. There had been no other sign of human survivors since the fishing boat encounter. She listened, absorbed what the men said, then suspended the meeting so that she could consider her decision.
The queen of the pirates retreated to her private quarters, sparsely furnished with a pallet, a makeshift desk, and a chair. On a small table in one corner of the room, there was a large candle that flickered with golden light. Here she could read and meditate and relax, dream her grandiose dreams of power. Here, in her sanctum sanctorum, anything was possible, and she could be anyone she chose: she could even be Anne Marie Appleton, the lost soul who had wondered across the world to find… what? Herself? The meaning of life? The ultimate high? To find… to be the woman her now-dead family always hoped she would be?
Now there were many people—hundreds, if not thousands—who looked to her for life and death decisions on their survival and well-being. She gazed at the candle. It had been a gift from a young woman who came to her to ask for the queen’s favor upon her children who needed food and shelter.
It was still afternoon in this strange new world, but the sky was gravid with clouds that obscured the giant red orb of the sun. Night and day often melded together in a dull iron sky that gave sadly inadequate light or heat. On some rare occasions, it rained; but it was not the same rain she had known before the great disaster. It was a hard, almost steely rain—cold and piercing, blessedly brief. It was enough to dampen the earth and keep the inland plants and trees in flower, enough to provide potable water for the survivor community, enough to sustain life— barely. But, to what end? she wondered. Were these people, her people, better off for having survived?
She kept herself semidetached from them—the citizens of her isolated empire. She attempted to maintain an image of godlike dispassion, the calm of a remote ruler. Her commanders and henchmen did whatever dirty police work was necessary. The people themselves kept busy with the grim business of everyday life. There was another reason for her self-imposed aloofness. She could not bear to see so much misery close up. As much as she had, during her vagabonding years, seen suffering and death, she no longer had the stomach for it.
Her thoughts were interrupted by sounds of shouting and scuffling near her private quarters. A burly guard burst into the room and informed Queen Ranavolana that she was needed urgently by the council. She rushed out to see what the commotion was all about, heading directly for the pavilion on the beach where a large crowd was gathered. She pushed her way into the middle of the meeting area.
The council rose to greet their leader. “What is happening?” the pirate queen asked.
The tall Taiwanese captain, Louie, said, “The motorboat is missing—along with some fuel. There are two men unaccounted for, as well as some weapons and ammunition.”
An ominous silence fell over the assembly, and all eyes turned to Queen Ranavolana. Her eyes burned angrily as she demanded, and received, the details. The men must have slipped away the previous night, loading the fifteen-foot motorboat with as much extra fuel and other supplies as possible. They probably rowed it out to sea before starting the motor. That was many hours ago. There was no hope of catching them now.
“Who is responsible for this outrage? Who was guarding my boats?” she asked in a low voice, her head swiveling slowly as she looked into their frozen faces. No one answered her.
The Australian spoke up: “The men who were on guard at the time have been arrested. They—”
“Bring them to me.”
“But, Queen—”
“Bring them to me. Now!”
It took several agonizing minutes for the word to be circulated and the men brought forward. Their hands and feet were bound, and they were dragged before the queen and her lieutenants. The two men, who seemed pitiful and small, fell to their knees. They had been beaten severely, their eyes swollen closed, their faces broken and bloody. They trembled, speechless.
To the assembled crowd, Queen Ranavolana announced: “These men are criminals of the worst order. They have endangered all of our lives.” Glaring furiously at the wretches before her, she said: “I sentence you to death, at dawn.”
The evening after the artists’ parade, the Focus Group held a special meeting of their own to celebrate the
