“I’ve no idea,” Harkat replied. “I doubt it matters—there are … no pirate ships here.”
“At least none that we’ve seen,” I grinned.
Harkat studied the sleeping Spits – he was drooling into his unkempt beard – then said quietly, “We can leave him behind … if you’d prefer. He’ll be asleep for hours. If we leave now and walk … fast, he’ll never find us.”
“Do you think he’s dangerous?” I asked.
Harkat shrugged. “He might be. But there must be a reason why … Mr Tiny put him here. I think we should take him. And his net.”
“Definitely the net,” I agreed. Clearing my throat, I added, “There’s his blood too. I need human blood—and soon.”
“I thought of that,” Harkat said. “It’s why I didn’t stop him … drinking. Do you want to take some now?”
“Maybe I should wait for him to wake and ask him,” I suggested.
Harkat shook his head. “Spits is superstitious. He thinks I’m a demon.”
“A demon!” I laughed.
“I told him what I really … was, but he wouldn’t listen. In the end I settled for persuading him … that I was a harmless demon—an imp. I sounded him out about vampires. He believes in them, but thinks they’re … evil monsters. Said he’d drive a stake through … the heart of the first one he met. I think you should drink … from him while he’s asleep, and never … tell him what you really are.”
I didn’t like doing it – I’d no qualms about drinking secretly from strangers, but on the rare occasions when I’d had to drink from people I knew, I’d always asked their permission – but I bowed to Harkat’s greater knowledge of Spits Abrams’s ways.
Sneaking up on the sleeping sot, I bared his lower left leg, made a small cut with my right index nail, clamped my mouth around it and sucked. His blood was thin and riddled with alcohol – he must have drunk huge amounts of poteen and whisky over the years! – but I forced it down. When I’d drunk enough, I released him and waited for the blood around the cut to dry. When it had, I cleaned it and rolled the leg of his trousers down.
“Better?” Harkat asked.
“Yes.” I burped. “I wouldn’t like to drink from him often – there’s more poteen than blood in his veins! – but it’ll restore my strength and keep me going for the next few weeks.”
“Spits won’t wake until morning,” Harkat noted. “We’ll have to wait … until tomorrow night to start, unless you … want to risk travelling by day.”
“With dragons roaming overhead? No thanks! Anyway, an extra day of rest won’t hurt—I’m still recovering from our last run-in.”
“By the way, how did you … get it to drop you?” Harkat asked as we settled down for the night. “And why did it … fly away and leave us?”
I thought back, recalled yelling at the dragon to let me go, and told Harkat what had happened. He stared at me disbelievingly, so I winked and said, “I always did have a way with dumb animals!” And I left it at that, even though I was equally bewildered by the dragon’s strange retreat.
I THOUGHT Spits would have a sore head when he awoke, but he was in fine form—he said he never suffered from hangovers. He spent the day tidying up the shack, putting everything in order in case he ever returned. He stashed a jug of poteen away in a corner and packed the rest in a large sack he planned to carry slung over his shoulder, along with spare clothes, his fishing net, some potatoes and dried fish slices. Harkat and I had almost nothing to carry – apart from the panther’s teeth and gelatinous globes, most of which we’d managed to hang on to – so we offered to divide Spits’s load between us, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “Every man to a cross of his own,” he muttered.
We took it easy during the day. I hacked my hair back from my eyes with one of Spits’s rusty blades. We’d replaced our handmade knives, most of which we’d lost in the lake, with real knives that Spits had lying around. Harkat stitched together holes in his robes with bits of old string.
When night fell, we set off, heading due southeast towards a mountain range in the distance. Spits was surprisingly morose to be leaving his shack – “’Tis the closest thing to a home I’ve had since running away t’ sea when I was twelve,” he sighed – but several swigs of poteen improved his mood and by midnight he was singing and joking.
I was worried that Spits would collapse – his legs were wobbling worse than the jelly-like globes we were carting – but as drunk as he got, his pace never wavered, though he did stop quite often to “bail out the bilge water”. When we made camp beneath a bushy tree in the morning, he fell straight asleep and snored loudly all day long. He woke shortly before sunset, licked his lips and reached for the poteen.
The weather worsened over the next few nights, as we left the lowlands and scaled the mountains. It rained almost constantly, harder than before, soaking our clothes and leaving us wet, cold and miserable—except Spits, whose poteen warmed and cheered him up whatever the conditions. I decided to try some of Spits’s home-brewed concoction, to see if it would combat the gloom. One swallow later, I was rolling on the ground, gasping for breath, eyes bulging. Spits laughed while Harkat poured water down my throat, then urged me to try it again. “The first dram’s the worst,” he chuckled. Through wheezing coughs, I firmly declined.
It was difficult to know what to make of Spits Abrams. A lot of the time he came across as a funny old sailor, crude and coarse, but with a soft centre. But as I spent more time with him, I thought that a lot of his speech patterns seemed deliberately theatrical—he spoke with a broad accent on purpose, to give the impression he was scatterbrained. And there were times when his mood darkened and he’d mutter ominously about people who’d betrayed him in one way or another.
“They thought they was so high and mighty!” he growled one night, weaving drunkenly under the cloudy sky. “Better than dumb old Spits. Said I was a monster, not fit t’ share a ship with ’em. But I’ll show ’em! When I gets me hands on ’em, I’ll make ’em suffer!”
He never said how he intended to “get his hands on” whoever “’em” were. We hadn’t told Spits what year we’d come from, but he knew time had moved on—he often made reference to “yer generation” or said “things was different in my day”. I couldn’t see any way back for Spits, and he couldn’t either—a common refrain of his when he was feeling sorry for himself was, “Here I is and here I’ll die.” Yet still he swore to get his own back on “them what done me wrong”, despite the fact that the people he disliked would have been dead and buried decades ago.
Another night, while he was telling us about his tasks on board the Prince of Pariahs, he stopped and looked at us with a steady blank expression. “I had t’ kill every now and then,” he said softly. “Pirates is vagabonds. Even though we didn’t kill those we robbed, we sometimes had t’. If people refused t’ surrender, we had t’ put a stop to ’em. Couldn’t afford t’ let ’em off the hook.”
“But I thought you didn’t board the ships you attacked,” I said. “You told us you fished out people who jumped overboard.”
“Aaarrr,” he grinned bleakly, “but a man in the water can struggle just as much as one on deck. A woman too. Sometimes I had t’ teach ’em a lesson.” His eyes cleared a little and he grinned sheepishly. “But that was rare. I only mention it so ye know ye can rely on me if we gets into a tight spot. I ain’t a killer, but I’ll do it if me back’s against a wall, or t’ save a friend.”
Harkat and I didn’t doze much that day. Instead we kept a wary watch on the snoring Spits. Although