Chapter 6. A day late and a dollar short.

I've been busy being all crunchy and stuff, so it took me a while to get to actually, you know, posting this. But here it is. I don't have any other cool stuff for right now, but maybe I will next week. Enjoy more pirating.

****
Voosh said, "It's all about the money." But his heart wasn't in it.
This by way of explaining to Reed why becoming a privateer was a good idea.
Voosh said, "Do you know how hard it is to even be a pirate? I mean the ocean's a big place. You've got to find other boats to, you know, pirate."
"How do you do that?" Reed asked.
"It ain't easy."
Mumphrey nodded in agreement.
The three of them sitting on the deck of the "Green Squid" sipping rum and smoking cigars. Voosh had given the rest of the crew a couple of days of leave, so there was no one else even on the boat. They watched other ships crews, legitimate ships, Mumphrey called them, as they worked through the night, loading boxes of cargo and cleaning barnacles off the front ends of their ships.
Voosh pointed one of them out. "See that one? They're loading boxes onto their ship. What do you think is in those boxes?"
Reed craned his neck to watch four guys struggling to get a giant wooden crate up a gangplank. He couldn't see anything written on the side of it. He couldn't tell how heavy it was because the four guys weren't straining, but then again, there were four of them. He shrugged, said, "I don't know."
Voosh looked at him. "Me neither." He said, "Could be anything. Food, grain, paper, gold coins, diamonds. Might be swords or shields. Might be strips of leather."
Mumphrey said, "The whole thing could be filled with dirt. Remember that?"
Voosh rolled his eyes and said, "Ye Gods, what a haul that was, eh?"
Reed said, "Dirt?"
"Boxes full of it." Voosh said.
"Dozens of them." Mumphrey agreed.
"Why?" Reed wanted to know.
"We still don't know." Voosh said. "But that's the point. A ship rolls out of port, we don't know what's on it. Unless you wanna pay someone works in the shipping office a bribe to tell you what every ship's carrying."
"Better be someone you trust." Mumphrey said.
"Damn right." Voosh agreed. "They get pinched they're not going to be so cavalier as to keep your name out of it. Not to mention it's a pain in the ass getting the information anyway."
"Why's that?"
Mumphrey said, "You got to pull into port just to find out. By the time you know the ships are halfway to where they're going. It's a waste of time."
"So you take a chance." Voosh said. "Hit a ship and hope. But sometimes you get dirt."
He took a sip of his rum and looked off wistfully at the moon over the dark ocean. He took a long drag of his cigar and said, "And that's not even the hard part."
"What's the hard part?" Reed asked.
Voosh said, "You hit a ship coming right out of port? You sit out there in the dark and wait? You got to be careful. You come up on em too fast, especially in the dark, you could ram em. Damage your ship and theirs. Not a lot of good being a pirate if you sink your ship."
"So you go slow." Mumphrey said.
"Ah, but then if they see you," Voosh continued, "Then they start firing. They know what you're up to. If you're too close to port the King's Ships start sailing out and next thing you know you're surrounded."
"They'll bust holes in your ship and sink ya." Mumphrey said.
"They don't arrest you?"
"Why should they?" Voosh asked. "You're a pirate. What do they care if you live or die?"
"That's..." Reed had to think about it. "That's not what I thought it would be like."
"Things are different on the sea." Mumphrey said.
"Very." Voosh agreed.
Reed's head was spinning. It was probably the rum. And the cigars. They were pretty strong. But there was a lot of pirating that he didn't get quite yet. The stories made it all seem so easy. All you needed was a sailing background, the ability to fight, and an inability to care about stealing other people's stuff. Seemed there was a lot more to it than that.
Reed said, "How'd you become a pirate?"
Voosh chuckled. "Stupid really. I was pinched for stealing a bag of salt from a local merchant. He was going to cut my hands off, but instead he decided to put me to work swabbing the ship he traded on."
"Swabbing?"
"You know, mopping the deck. Keeping seagull poop off the railings. Basically keeping the ship clean."
"It's a terrible job." Mumphrey said.
"The worst." Voosh agreed. "But I learned all I could. Sailing, knots, navigating by the stars. Everyone on the ship was basically a slave who owed the Merchant, an old guy named Taggart, some amount of money or something. Or was a thief he didn't turn in, whatnot like that."
"So that's how you learned about sailing?"
"Where I learned everything. See, we're out at sea once and one guy had just had it. Taggart had been riding him, so the guy just goes berserk. Kills Taggart, throws his body overboard, and now we're pretty much all free. We didn't know what to do. We couldn't go back to Taggart's home port, cause people would be looking for him. We didn't want to go back where we'd been. They'd ask questions. So we stayed out on the sea. Fished for food, drank all the water and liquor that was on board, and then we decided to become pirates."
"So you just became a pirate?"
"Something like that." Voosh said, "We had to learn on the job. We found out all kinds of things. Like how hard it was to actually overtake a merchant ship. How much harder it was to just get the people on that ship to hand you their stuff. How it was even harder once people got back to port and started saying, 'Hey, there's pirates out there.'"
"Huge pain in the ass." Mumphrey agreed, finishing off his rum.
"So what happened?" Reed asked. "How did you end up here?"
Voosh shook his head. "That was twenty years or so ago. I guess things just worked out."
"What happened to the ship? The merchant's men?"
Voosh looked at Mumphrey and Mumphrey just smiled.
Voosh said, "This is the merchant's ship."
"It is?"
"The very one." Mumphrey said.
"So, what happened to the guy that killed the merchant?"
Mumphrey nodded at Voosh and said, "We made him captain."

***

It was almost dawn. Reed was leaning against the main mast, snoring, and Mumphrey was starting to doze off.
Voosh said, "Here they come."
They could see the torches coming down the road, heading to the docks. Three of them. The only people awake this time of night. They made their way to the pier and started coming up the gangplank of the "Green Squid".
Voosh said while they waited, "What do you think of the kid?" Nodding at Reed.
Mumphrey said, "He looks familiar to me, somehow, but I can't place it."
Voosh just said, "Hm."
"He'll be all right, I guess."
The three men were at the top of the gangplank now, looking around. Voosh decided he'd better take care of things. He said, "Keep an eye on my back."
Mumphrey said, "Aye."
The guy in front was tall, with a long black beard that he kept braided neat. He stood nearly a foot taller than Voosh, making Voosh have to crane his neck to look in the man's eye. He had two body guards with him, all of them carrying torches. The bodyguards were big, Voosh thought. But not tall.
Guy liked to keep people around he could look down on.
The guy looked around the ship, glanced at Mumphrey and the sleeping Reed and then back down at Voosh.
He said, "You're the captain?"
It was the tone Voosh didn't like. Such disdain. Like the guy was mocking him.
"What do you want?" Voosh said, deciding there was no reason to be nice about this.
"Here." The guy stuck out a parchment folded and sealed with wax. Voosh looked at it. No seal in the wax. Nobody wanted their sign on a paper for some Privateers. Especially if things went bad.
Voosh said, "There's money too, right?"
The tall man looked down at him. He said, "Oh yes. Pirates."
One of the bodyguards handed the tall man a bag that jingled with coins. The man passed it to Voosh.
Voosh said, "It's all here."
"I'm not going to stand around while you count it."
Voosh eyed him warily.
The tall man sighed. "If it's short then consider it free money and you don't work for us. That's how confident I am in it's contents."
Voosh said, "Fine."
They stood there a moment longer.
Voosh said, "Is there a reason you're still on my ship?"
The tall man smiled at him. Voosh wondered for a moment if they guy was going to do anything, but at the last minute he appeared to decide to let it go. He turned and walked back down the gangplank, followed by the two bodyguards.
Mumphrey walked up to him and said, "What was that all about?"
"That was Guard Captain Varin." Voosh said.
Mumphrey looked off into the darkness at the torches. "Really?"
"It really was." Voosh said. "I guess they're serious."