4 Captured by a Pirate King
Captured by
a Pirate King
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.
― T.S. Eliot
WHEN SILVERFIN CAME TO, it was to find himself very uncivilly shackled to a piece of biped furniture in what appeared to be someone’s residence.
He could not be sure, having never been in a biped’s lair before.
He could tell that they were still on land, and therefore the pirate had not dragged him back to the Orca.
As for the pirate himself, he was nowhere to be found.
“That isn’t very sporting,” Silverfin muttered and decided to use this alone time to get better acquainted with his new “legs.”
He pulled his knees in, one a time, until they made undulating hills for him to marvel at. He straightened them out, followed that maneuver by splaying them open, then wider and wider until it made something else in between his legs pull painfully and caused him to slam them back shut.
“Yowza!” he squealed and shoved his unfettered hand down his breeches to see what had felt so uncomfortably yanked during his experimental acrobatics.
There was his third leg, as Mara called it, lying like a dormant moray eel against his thigh, and below it something else that lay heavy and pendulous in the palm of his hand.
He gently rolled the wrinkly, round objects in his fingers, and discovered the sensation not at all unpleasant. “Huh!” he pronounced.
“Oh, for fuck’s sakes,” Hawk’s voice announced his arrival, followed by the slamming of the door. “Can’t leave you in here for ten bloody minutes without finding you doing something vile.”
“Vile? What am I doing?” Silverfin pulled his hand out of his breeches and gave Hawk what he hoped was a friendly wave. Did his Pirate King have a pair of those bouncy things in between his own legs? He had to wonder if they would have the same beautiful freckles as Hawk’s nose.
“That’s between you and your god, I’m sure,” the pirate frowned, leaning against a heavy desk. “Now, you and I are going to have a little talk, if you don’t mind.”
“Where am I?” Silverfin asked, still studying his strange surroundings.
“You don’t understand. I am the one who’s going to be asking you questions. And then,” Hawk pushed himself off the desk and leaned over Silverfin's crouched form, “if I don’t like your answers, I am going to kill you and feed you to the fishes.”
“You know, most fish would rather eat plankton. Well except sharks, because sharks are assholes. But it’s really the bottom dwellers who eat carcasses. Then again, they’d eat mostly anything...”
“Shut up!”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
Hawk shook his head with an air of exasperation.
“Where the hell did you come from?” the pirate growled at him.
“Tortuga?”
“You don’t sound certain. Come to think of it, you don’t sound French.”
“I could sound more French if that would please you? Voulez-vous?”
The way Hawk was looking at him was not what Silverfin had anticipated when he thought he was at his most giving and charming.
“Fine,” the pirate finally dismissed whatever thoughts he had been having. “How do you know about the Estrela?”
This was becoming more difficult. Silverfin figured he had thought of everything, but he had certainly not planned for this interrogation.
He couldn’t very well tell the Pirate King that all merfolk knew about the Portuguese galleons without betraying his kin.
Then he’d have to worry about two people trying to kill him: Hawk and Mara.
Not to mention, the giant tide that Mami Wata would likely have to send to drown all of Port Royal to keep their secret.
“A man had a schedule.”
“What man? Where’s the schedule?”
So many questions! Good gods! It was exhausting having to think up so many elaborate lies on the spot.
“He was a stowaway on a ship. He had stolen a schedule and I stole it from him.”
“Let me have it,” Hawk demanded again.
“I... can’t...” It looked like the pirate was rearing up to hit him again.
That wasn’t the physical contact Silverfin had wanted when he had bartered his beautiful hair for a pair of dangly bits and legs.
“It’s in my head!” he exclaimed in growing desperation.
“I had to destroy it, so I memorized it! If you keep hitting me, it might just shake right out of my brain, and then where will we two be? Without treasure, that’s where. ”
“You ass,” Hawk groused and slammed his fist against the table.
At that moment, the door slid open again, and a strangely familiar face slipped into the room.
“Does he have it?” the new arrival asked.
Silverfin had recognized her when she spoke.
It was her - Elizabeth Barnes - the reason his sister had abandoned her kin and came to live here, the reason she had become trapped here with humans who had no idea of her true worth or what she had given up to be among them.
Silverfin caught himself scowling openly at the woman who fancied herself a queen among pirates.
“He says it’s in his head,” Hawk shared quietly.
So, Silverfin thought, Captain Hawk could be civil and gentle when he wanted to be.
Just apparently not with him. It did not make any sense.
Surely, he was far more beautiful than Elizabeth Barnes with her stick-straight dark hair all unattractively pinned up to her head.
Even without his magnificent, sacrificed mane.
“I think there’s something...” Hawk made an odd gesture with his finger by his temple. “... wrong with him.”
“Not all there?” Elizabeth whispered back. “I told you he was a lunatic, but that doesn’t mean he’s a liar.”
“Do you two mind? I’m right here. It isn’t right to talk about a man as if he wasn’t there, when I am very much there, all there even.
An impressed silence greeted Silverfin’s outburst. Things were definitely not going according to his brilliant plan. He had to do something desperate to keep his dream alive, at least a little while longer.
“I beseech you, Captain Hawk,” Silverfin spoke with ardent sincerity, “if you take me with you on the Orca, I will lead you to the treasure galleon. I won’t let you down because I’m just as interested in finding that gold as you are.
And I am very familiar with the winds and currents in the area.
Who knows? I might be more valuable to you than you think, if you just give me a chance! ”
Hawk and the Barnes woman exchanged a look. She shrugged. Her hand brushed over Hawk’s shoulder in a way that was overly familiar and it sent a jolt of jealousy igniting in the pit of Silverfin's belly. Or was it hunger? He probably was quite hungry, come to think of it.
“I’ll try you out for a week,” Hawk finally spoke and Silverfin felt his own eyes light up with excitement. “We’ll see how you get on with my crew. But at the end of the week, if I don’t like you, or they don’t like you, or Millie the cat doesn’t like you - you walk the plank.”
“What about the Estrela?”
“I’ll survive without it,” Hawk replied with a deepening frown.
Liar, Silverfin thought, bitterly.
The crew of the Orca hated him briefly, as they would any newcomer, but soon enough, he had made sure that they would grow to love him.
Bipeds - men, Silverfin corrected himself - it turned out, loved reasons to ridicule their own kind, and all his time spent watching the crew through the portholes of the ship gave him plenty of fodder to amuse them.
There was the one man who liked to expose himself to sea birds when no one was looking.
And the one who got his third leg stuck in a bottle of rum, trying to do something drunken and incomprehensible to it.
And they hung on his every word just like they had when he'd first come to Port Royal to find Hawk.
Who was he to hold back such truthful information?
Millie the land-crab was turning out to be a much more difficult creature to access the heart and mind of, much to Silverfin's chagrin.
Speaking to her didn't seem to elicit a response and bribing her with scraps of food did not seem to endear her to Silverfin either.
Were land creatures simply stupider than those in the ocean?
That would, he mused, explain the majority of the crew.
Now that he was among them, it was painfully obvious from the odor that for men who spent most of their time on the sea they spent very little time in it.
There were a few exceptions, of course. Hawk's right-hand man, a barnacled old Spanish sailor named Ruiz who eyed Silverfin like he expected him to make off with the ship, was at least well-groomed and clean.
As was that lovely piece of man flesh, Hank the bosun, with his arm muscles worthy of a MerSir.
He didn't seem to trust Silverfin any more than Ruiz, which rather annoyed him.
How could they think so lowly of him when he was offering them treasure beyond their wildest dreams?
"I don't see why I have to be the one to muck out the goat’s stall," he complained to Hawk that night, pushing his way into the cabin at the rear of the ship. "Do you know how unfair it is being stuck in that dim hovel of a hold all day cleaning?"
Hawk's lips twitched into what might have almost been a smile. Despite how annoyed he was at how menial the day had been, Silverfin's heart skipped a beat. "That hovel of a hold you're talking about is my ship."
"Perhaps not quite a hovel," Silverfin quickly tried to backtrack. "But when one is used to feeling a fresh sea breeze on one's face...."
This time Hawk actually smiled, a wry quirk of one of the sides of his mouth. He seemed to be in a much better mood out on the open ocean, Silverfin couldn't help but think. "We all must do our part on this ship, Mr. Silver. And we all must eat."