Читать книгу The Pyrates - George Fraser MacDonald - Страница 13

It was really rotten down i’ the foetid, stinking, dim-lit orlop, where timbers creaked and rats scuttled, etc. Blood and Avery had been fettered wrist and ankle to facing bulkheads, which was uncomfortable enough, but to make matters worse the cleaners hadn’t been in, the straw hadn’t been made up, or the scuppers hoovered, or the bilges refilled, and there wasn’t any Kleenex left. To cap it all, the pirates had taken over the ship’s intercom, and instead of the normal hymns and rousing sea shanties, the muzak now consisted entirely of dirty drinking songs illegally taped from Radio Tortuga. Avery bore it all in stoic silence, the chaotic mess of his tortured thoughts concealed ’neath a cold, imperturbable mask, but Blood griped incessantly; it was just like these swindling foreign tour operators, he said, to grab your money and then forget you existed; he should have read the small print when he came aboard, and so on, and so on, until even Avery’s icy control snapped in one bitter denunciation of his fellow-captive.

“Hear ye, fellow,” said he, and each acidic word was like a blade rasping from its sheath, “wouldst be better employed making peace with thy beastly soul, for mark me, when this hand o’ mine is free again, its first task will be to wring the putrid life out of thy mangy carcase –”

“What the hell are you going on about?” demanded Blood. “Is it my fault we’re stuck down here?”

Avery’s eyes flamed like 1000-watt icebergs. “Base renegade, fink, and traitor –”

“Traitor?” exclaimed Blood. “Me? Oh, for God’s sake, ye haven’t got your galligaskins in a twist over the measly crown, have ye? As if that mattered – they’d ha’ found it sooner or later, and if you’d had your way we’d have been nothing but a couple of shark’s belches by now. Which,” he added unhappily, “is what we’re liable to be anyway, unless you can sweetheart that big spade wench into a happier frame of mind.”

“D’you think I care a jot for that – or even for the crown?” Avery’s voiced quivered like a trampoline with noble indignation. “Aye, though shame, ruin, and disgrace may be my merited portion, forasmuch as I have goofed up my mission and let the side down – what can I think on but my dear Lady Vanity?”

“Well, if it’s any consolation, go ahead,” said Blood. “Although what I always say is, there’s a time to fantasize about blondes and a time to think about getting the hell out of the mess we’re in, and I’d advise the latter –”

“I didn’t mean think on her in that way, ye carnal muckrake,” snapped Avery, his teeth clenched. “Have you no conception of what her fate will be, in the clutches of yon Moorish hellspite? Of what –” and his voice grew all roopy with apprehension “– it may already have been? You know what such heathen do with Christian women captives. You’ve read the colour supplements?”

“Oh, aye,” said Blood carelessly, “‘Au pair milkmaids trapped in harem hell’, and ‘I was a sex-crazed sultan’s plaything’.” He shrugged callously. “When all’s said, it’s just what happens to any married woman on her honeymoon. I daresay she’ll be well looked after … three square meals a day, and that …”

At this point they were interrupted by the little Welsh pirate who, in his capacity as shop steward of the local branch of the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Piratical Operatives and Filibusters and Allied Trades, was eager to see Avery enrolled in that powerful offshoot of the Coast Brethen. His overtures our intrepid captain received with a befitting silent scorn which the suspicious Taffy immediately misinterpreted.