Infidel stared at the Black Swan, then cast one more glance at Aurora, now encased in a shell of ice that resembled armor. Infidel unclenched her fists, her shoulders sagging. I could sense she wasn’t afraid of Aurora; she just knew that she wouldn’t get what she wanted by hitting anyone in this room. She turned toward the door, then glanced back. “I want the balance of the skull in diamonds.”
“Of course, my dear,” said the Black Swan. “I’ve often thought you’d look good in jewelry. This new fashion of yours is a step forward, but could benefit from a few simple adornments.”
Apparently, the Black Swan had never seen one of Infidel’s molar necklaces.
The poker players were back at their table as Infidel stalked across the main room. The hole in the ceiling already had planks laid across it. As Infidel reached the door, Aurora called out to her.
“Hey,” she said.
Infidel paused at the door, but didn’t look back.
“I… I wanted to say that the Black Swan was wrong about Stagger,” said Aurora. “He’d do a lot of things for a bottle. But he’d never sell out a friend. And everyone could tell you were much more than a friend to him.”
Infidel sighed, shaking her head.
“Not everyone,” she whispered, as she stepped outside.
CHAPTER THREE
I felt sentimental as Infidel climbed from the creaking gangplank onto my old boat. She grabbed at rigging and rails as she moved across the slanted deck. I’ve lived my life askew — the mud-locked boat sits at a ten-degree tilt. An objective man would describe the place as a hovel. To me, the place was the closest thing I’ve ever had to home.
If you witnessed my vagabond lifestyle, you’d never suspect that not so long ago my family was wealthy. My great-grandfather was the famous — or perhaps infamous — Ambitious Merchant. Merchant is a family name stretching back generations, and it’s common for followers of the Church of the Book to name their children after desirable virtues. Seldom has a man been more suitably monikered. Ambitious made a fortune in the slave trade, with Commonground as his base. The river-pygmies have enslaved forest-pygmies for centuries, but it was my ancestor who realized that these squat, muscular men could be sold as a commodity to the mines on the Isle of Storm. The trade goes on to this day, though my family no longer has any role in it.
The so-called pirate wars had more to do with the slave trade than with actual piracy. Many Wanderers regard slaves as just another cargo, which doesn’t seem to mesh with their claims to hold freedom as the highest virtue. A band of radical Wanderers had taken a stand against the slave trade, going so far as to raid ships and free the captives. For this, they were branded as pirates, and wound up with every navy in the world united against them. Infidel had signed on to a losing cause from the start.
While I’ve never gone so far as to take up arms to oppose the slave trade, I’ve always had a gut dislike of the practice, and have never been shy about sharing my views. The business corrupts everyone, especially the river-pygmies. They think of forest-pygmies as animals, when anyone can see they’re the same race, just of differing hues. Each of the three major pygmy tribes dye their skin with jungle berries: forest-pygmies are green, river-pygmies blue, lava-pygmies orange. Wash them off with vinegar and they’re all fish-belly white. My grandfather, Judicious Merchant, son of Ambitious, discovered that the bitter dyes were an effective mosquito repellent, which is why I remember him with dark green skin.
Judicious had been trained to take up the family business until he made the mistake of actually talking to the pygmies. They told him tales of the Vanished Kingdom, a once great nation on this island, its monuments now buried beneath roots and vines. My grandfather burned through a great deal of the family wealth with his elaborate expeditions into the jungle. Judicious bore a son by a forest-pygmy woman; this was my father, Studious Merchant. As a teen, Studious aided his father by traveling to the Monastery of the Book, home of the world’s most extensive library. He went to these archives to read everything that had ever been written about the Vanished Kingdom. But, while he was there, he grew to love the prayerful, contemplative life of the monks and joined their order. As a monk, father had his flaws. My existence is testimony to his difficulty with the vow of celibacy.
I’m told my mother was a prostitute who abandoned me on the monastery’s doorstep. I’ve never even learned her name. I was raised in an orphanage run by the monks. My father taught there, but barely acknowledged me. Every three or four years, my grandfather, Judicious, would visit and tell me stories about his jungle adventures. He said that when I was old enough, he’d take me with him. I never saw him after my tenth birthday, when he’d given me the knife. I eventually reached Commonground on my own when I was seventeen, but no one had seen my grandfather in years. The jungle had swallowed him long ago.
My grandfather had owned the sailboat Infidel now stood upon; in his day, it was quite a vessel. As years passed with my grandfather absent from Commonground, the boat had been looted. Pretty much everything that hadn’t been nailed down had been stripped, along with a fair share of stuff that had been nailed down. The husk was still anchored at the docks when I got to town, and no one protested when I moved in.
Infidel pushed aside the torn curtain that led into the small shack I’d built from cast-off lumber. She found the duffel bag of clothes she kept stashed in the rafters and tossed her sarong onto the floor. I’d never seen her naked when I was alive, but this was the second time since I’d died I’d gotten to see her full glory. Yet, her nudity didn’t provoke lust. All my ordinary desires seem muted. Since dying, I haven’t felt hungry or sleepy. Of greater interest is that I haven’t felt thirsty. Perhaps I should be relieved. My afterlife truly would be hell if I were tormented by desires I had no hope of slaking. Still, it seems wasteful to finally look at Infidel’s body and feel only dispassionate appreciation of her symmetry.
She pulled on a pair of canvas breeches, but frowned as she looked through her various blouses. Many were blood stained and torn; she always was hard on clothes. She pitched aside the duffel and picked up one of my old shirts from the back of a chair, holding it to her face to sniff it. At first, I thought she must have found the scent unpleasant; her eyes began to water. Then, she hugged the shirt to her chest as she closed her eyes tightly. After a moment, she composed herself, slipping the shirt on, rolling up the too-long sleeves and cinching up the dangling shirt tails with her thick leather belt. She dug around under the bunk and found an old pair of boots she’d left here. In the jungle, she normally went barefoot. However, the boardwalks of Commonground were littered with things no sane person would want squishing between their toes. She shoved my bone-handled knife into the boot sheath, then rooted under the bed until she produced the scabbard that held my old saber.
For the first time in two days, she ate, raiding my pantry for dried herring wrapped in seaweed and a jar of pickled peppers. She washed it all down with the ceramic jug of rotgut I kept by the bed. Infidel rarely drank anything stronger than cider, but she chugged down the hard liquor like it was cool water. Afterward, she wiped her mouth on her sleeve and belched.
Usually, my shack felt cramped with the two of us. Now that it was just her, the place looked larger than it used to. Infidel scanned the room, her eyes surveying the clutter. There were books everywhere. Like my father, I’m an avid reader. A muddied pair of my boots sat next to the door. The oil-cloth coat I wore during the rainy season was still slumped on the floor next to them.