anything, and there’s nothing you can do to make me. Keep torturing me if you think you have to, but you’ll just be breaking a sweat for nothing. I’m not afraid to sail with the White Captain off the edge of the world. Once I’m dead, I’ll be far beyond your grasp.”
I’d seen men scared of torture try to bluff their way through before, but there was something calm in Marteen when he said this that made me believe him. As a last resort, I said, “Would it help if I said please?”
Marteen looked up at me in astonishment, then began to laugh.
I nodded toward the door. It was time to regroup.
Clift put the wet burlap sack over Marteen’s laughing face and cinched it tight around his neck. Blood from his thigh wound had soaked his pants and started pooling at his feet. Clift brought a belt from his cabin and tied it tight around Marteen’s leg.
We stepped out into the hall and closed the door. I spoke softly so Marteen couldn’t overhear. “Any other ideas?”
“I haven’t even gotten warmed up on him yet,” Jane said. “Wait until that thigh starts throbbing like mine did.”
“I could threaten to hang him right here, before we even get back to Shawano,” Clift said. “We could string up a couple of his dead shipmates, make it look like we’d executed them.”
“That’s an old one, he’d never fall for that,” Jane said. “Now, some pliers to his testicles-”
“If we hurt him too much, he’ll just tell us what we want to hear,” I pointed out. “He’s our only source. If we can’t get real information out of him, we’re at a dead end. Or at least I am.”
I looked around in the shadowy corners to make sure Dorsal wasn’t lurking there. I didn’t want him to overhear anything too brutal.
“What’re you looking for?” Jane asked.
“Making sure the cabin boy’s not here.”
Clift asked, “What cabin boy?”
“Dorsal. You know. His real name’s Finn.”
In utter disbelief, Clift whispered, “You’ve seen Dorsal Finn?”
“Yeah. Why?”
Even Jane asked, “Dylan, what’s wrong?”
Clift could barely speak. “Dorsal Finn died of a fever over a year ago. I was holding his hand when he passed. We buried him at sea five hundred miles from here.”
And despite the heat of the tropical night and the stuffy warmth of the ship’s hold, a shiver went through me.
Chapter Twenty-five
It was near midnight. I lay on Jane’s bunk and stared at the wooden ceiling. The swaying lamp made shadows seem to crawl across the grain. After three days of enforced rest, Jane was far too fidgety to sleep anytime soon, so she was on deck with Clift. With Suhonen still slumbering away in my cabin, hers was the only refuge I had. And I needed it.
We’d ignored Marteen since our earlier session. He sat in the chair in the captain’s cabin, the wet bag still over his head, his injured leg still untended. A guard stood, or rather sat and slept, outside the door. I didn’t blame him; it had been a hell of a day.
Besides, there was no doubt Marteen was still there. He seemed to be running through an unending repertoire of bawdy sea songs:
They were humping on the quarterdeck
And humping on the stairs
You couldn’t see the tiller
For the pile of pubic hairs…
I put the pillow over my head and tried to stuff it into my ears. How many verses did this song have?
Earlier, when we’d come on deck after Marteen’s first interrogation, I begged off from Clift’s questions, claiming I needed time to think. After the revelation about Dorsal Finn, that was certainly true. Clift said, low so no one else would hear, “I think if my ship is haunted, Mr. LaCrosse, I have a right to know.”
“Look, I can’t answer that. Really. Maybe I dreamed the whole thing, or I’ve gotten smacked in the head too many times. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go sit somewhere and try to think of something we missed.” When Jane started to follow me, I said sharply, “Alone. Okay?”
Neither was happy, and I couldn’t blame them, but I was too tired after the day’s battles to deal with it. I found a place by the tiller where I could see the Bloody Angel across the way, lit by lanterns. Shadows moved across the deck as occupying crewmen from the Cow passed in front of the light. There had to be something we’d missed.
We did have one actual, physical clue: that stack of medical crates taken from a variety of ships. Clift had planned to send them back to Blefuscola, but suddenly I wanted to check them before they left in the morning. I got Duncan to row me over, since my shoulder wasn’t up to it, and he lit the lamps in the captain’s cabin so I could see.
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
“The reason why these were all that they took. Think about it: They had undefended ships loaded with goods and money, and they took only the medicine chests. Why?”
“They were old and sick?”
“Old, yes. But did they fight like they were sick?”
“Well, no.” He scowled, thinking.
I opened several of the chests. All appeared completely intact. I began removing the contents of one, pausing to examine each item. There were knives and razors for surgery, irons for cauterizing wounds, pliers for pulling teeth (and, according to Jane, other things), scissors for bandages, needles and line for stitching wounds, and in carefully organized slots, various dried substances that could be combined and reconstituted into medicines.
I pulled one bottle from the box and held it to the light: poxbinder, an herb used to deaden injuries so they could be repaired. It took barely a pinch of it to be effective; slightly more than a pinch would ensure the injured party had no subsequent worries about anything. It was expensive, and could be found only along the tree line of the Galick Mountains. Its drying and preparation were a fiercely guarded secret, and only a licensed buyer could purchase it. That explained why the bottle was so small, and held so little actual poxbinder.
“I don’t suppose you know,” I mused aloud to Duncan, “how common it is to carry poxbinder in a medicine chest?”
“I’ve never been on a ship before,” he said. “And luckily, so far I’ve never needed to see the inside of a medicine chest.”
“Help me check. See how many of these have poxbinder in them.”
With Duncan’s help, it didn’t take long. They all did, some in tiny vials smaller than my pinkie. Many shared some of the other contents as well, but poxbinder was the only thing common to all of them. It might be a clue, or just as likely a coincidence. Because even if I was right, why would Marteen go to all this trouble just to collect poxbinder?
“Did you find what you wanted?” Duncan asked after I’d silently stared at the bottles for a long time.
“What? Oh, yeah. Let’s put things back like we found them.” As we returned the boxes to the stack, I asked casually, “Do you believe in ghosts, Duncan?”
“Ghosts? No. I mean, I’ve never seen one. Some people told me the ghost of my mother roamed the dunes looking for my father, just like in the play, but now I know that’s not true. Why?”
“Oh, I was just thinking about the play, too,” I lied as dismissively as I could. No sense making him think I was a lunatic.
“Do you think the captain of this ship knows anything about my father?”
“Definitely. The trick is getting him to talk. And the better trick is getting him to tell the truth.”
