"When Althena brought forth life on Lunar," Ace groused, "did she absolutely have to be so enthusiastic about it?" His complaints were punctuated by a heavy, wet chopping sound as his cutlass hacked through the tentacle-like vines of a flytrapper. "I can understand carnivorous plantlife--eating meat is part of the natural order of things, the food chain and all that--but does it really have to be able to move around after us?"
"Consider it a way to keep the giant bug population in check," Mel joked. His huge axe, which he could wield freely now that he was in the relatively open ground of the forest path, tore apart the creatures with little trouble. To the well-armed pirates they were, in fact, no serious threat, though I did not fancy my own chances if I was caught without an escort. The good news was that they were the only hostile wildlife we had encountered thus far, and only the single pack. Probably there was not enough food on the island to support a large population of them, for which I had no complaints whatsoever.
"Not a lot of 'em, though," Scrope grunted. Using a boarding pike, he'd managed to transfix the last of the creatures and keep it well away from himself where neither its lashing tentacles nor its envenomed maw could hurt him. As it hissed and spat in frustration, Mel moved in on it from the side. His great axe flashed once, and the monster lay still, all but hacked in two. "Usually wilderness forests are crawlin' with critters."
Mel nodded as he cleaned the edge of his weapon. Actually seeing him in battle, I had to admit, was amazing. The single-minded ferocity of his whirlwind attacks were less like that of a fighter and more reminiscent of a force of nature, an avalanche or tidal wave sweeping aside everything in its path. The epithet "Hell Mel" was well-deserved, not for his personality but for the seemingly superhuman power and skill he displayed in battle. I was very glad to be with him here in these misty woods!
"That's true," Ace noted. "But then, this is a small island, and there might not be enough food for a bunch of monsters to eat. Nature kind of seeks a balance--or it just dies out."
Hey! I'd thought of that first!
"Maybe. Wildlife does seem pretty thin," Mel agreed.
"The woods seem quiet," I said nervously. "I'd expected there to be birds chirping, insects buzzing, all kinds of natural sounds. The first thing I've heard is when those things attacked."
"Just stay close to me," Mel advised. "Anything comes looking for ya, it'll still have ta go through me first."
"How gallant--ew!"
His ears drooped, momentarily thinking my exclamation of shock was out of revulsion at him, but when I pointed a trembling hand towards what I'd seen, he realized his mistake.
"What is it, lass?"
"There, by that tree." Even turned to its side, a grinning skull could still send sparks of fear through me. It wasn't threatening or disgusting, but creepy.
"Let's be taking a look at that," Mel said.
"Do we hafta?" Scrope asked.
"Yeah, we do. The Balthasar's crew be the only people ta come here, s'far as we know. That do be a human body, meaning it's either Van Dierken or his mate, or instead one o' their victims."
"And if it's the latter we must be near the treasure!" I exclaimed. "He and Colvin wouldn't murder all their diggers and bearers, then carry the bodies off somewhere else for disposal. Ick." The last exclamation destroyed what had otherwise been a fairly sound piece of deductive reasoning, but I couldn't help it, when the image of the two men carrying corpse after corpse through the woods came into my mind.
Goddess's grace, it even makes me shudder to write it! We each have our weak spots, and this sort of grisly business is clearly mine.
"They wouldn't shirk such a task, Amelie," Ace said, responding (as I'd been afraid someone would) to my tone and apparent revulsion instead of the thought behind what I'd said. "Men like Van Dierken don't have any fine sensibilities or respect for the dead. They'll kill for the pleasure of it, then make whatever use of the bodies profits them most."
"I know," I said with another shudder of disgust, "but that isn't what I meant. I only thought that carrying all the bodies, one by one or even two by two, to some location far enough away from the treasure site as not to be a clue, would be a great deal of effort for a very speculative profit."
"And if he meant ta do that much work ta begin with, he'd have just buried the bloody treasure himself and not bothered with the prisoners in the first place. There always was the chance they'd turn on him and get lucky with a shovel or pick ta win their freedom. So's unless he was the kind o' bastard who kills fer the fun o' it, Van Dierken weren't going ta get his hands dirty with more manual labor than he had ta."
Mel's argument pleased me--more, indeed, than it probably should have. I had much the same reaction to what Ace next said.
"I'm sorry about that, Amelie; I didn't realize you'd thought it all through."
"Well, we fine ladies ought to be good for something," I replied sassily, my fears banished momentarily by their approval. "Even if only to truly confound Jack's opinion of my social class."
Ace grinned broadly, showing pearly white teeth. How he managed such good dental hygiene during a life at sea I will never know.
"If you can manage that, girl, than Althena will have to move over and make room for another goddess!"
"'Ey, enough chatter!" Scrope put in. "Ye kin gab all ye wants ter after we get rich."
"He has," Ace admitted, "a point."
The good feeling went away very quickly as we turned our attention back to the remains. I conjured up any number of grim details in my imagination, from scraps of leathery flesh clinging to the bones to rotting shreds of clothing stained by old blood, so I was quite relieved when the men cleared away the undergrowth to reveal only the bleached white bones of a skeleton, nothing more.
"No way ta tell who he'd be, now," Mel grumbled.
"Well, he must have been a pirate," I said, pointing to its only distinguishing feature, a badly rusted saber beneath the bones of his right hand. "A prisoner wouldn't have been armed." I held out my own empty hands as an example.
"Harrr, ya be right, lass. And look here." Mel pointed his big finger to the inside edge of one of the neck vertebrae. There was a deep groove running horizontally in the bone. "His throat's been cut, and not kindly, either, ta go so deep."
I had to fight to keep my stomach contents in place, which let the much less easily disgusted Ace voice his conclusions first.
"That means he's one of the novices Teach told us about, new crew members who didn't know that only Van Dierken and his crony ever returned from Dead Man's Isle... if you'll forgive the melodrama."
"And if that's the case, the treasure can't be far!" Scrope said.
"Something's strange about that, though," Mel said, his grim tone a sharp contrast to our rising excitement.
"What is it?" I asked.
"The body be too perfect, ya see."
"Um, no, I don't see."
"When ya've been a pirate fer as long as me, ya get ta see yer fair share o' bodies and more. None too many o' them are as neat and pretty as this one. There's nothing here but his sword. Now, it do have been forty-five years, so's I can see how the flesh and clothing be gone, but what about metal?"
"The saber's metal," Ace said, but he was starting to get the same look as his captain.
"But so would be belt buckles, earrings, finger-rings, parts of weapon sheaths, loose change in his pockets, and possibly other things," I said, following Mel's reasoning.
"Stolen? Nah. Bloodheart'd loot the bodies by all accounts, but he wouldn't have left the saber. Back when it was in decent condition it could have fetched a decent price, or the crew might have used it--there's always somebody on a pirate ship that could use another weapon."
"So's he wasn't looted, and the body's all here, laying out nice and pretty, so's he weren't..." Mel glanced at me, then broke off, leaving Scrope to finish up the thought.
"Chewed up by some monster, clothes an' all?"
I was getting better; the thought made me decidedly queasy, but that was all.
"Damn yer eyes, Scrope!" Mel bellowed. "Can't ya see there's a lady present who don't appreciate yer rough tongue?"
"You're getting a mite protective of Amelie, aren't you, Captain?" Ace murmured, causing me to blush and Mel to get an odd kind of poleaxed look. I don't think he knew whether he was supposed to get mad or whether that would just sink him in deeper.
"Never mind all that," I said quickly. "Come on, let's get looking for that treasure. We can solve the mystery of just how that skeleton came to be as it is later."
The phrase "famous last words" would apply to that, as you no doubt have realized already.