The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [74]
Article Seven – That man that shall not keep his arms clean, fit for an engagement, or neglect his business, shall be cut off from his share, and suffer such other punishment as the captain and company shall think fit.
Article Eight – If any man shall lose a joint in time of engagement, shall have four hundred pieces of eight: if a limb, eight hundred.
Article Nine – If at any time you meet with a prudent woman, that man that offers to meddle with her, without her consent, shall suffer death.
The captain's voice carried the words, hard and clear across the warm night air. Orphan, repeating them, felt himself a member of a religious congregation, a part of a new, strange tribe, a world exclusively of men.
And lizards?
"We are a society without division," Captain Wyvern said when they had finished reciting the oath. "Where who you are, who you have been, no longer matter. It is a harsh society, a difficult, dangerous life – but it is just, too. It is equal. I," he said, and his tongue hissed out and tasted the sea air, "who could have been a governor, perhaps, or an idler in any number of the great cities of the empire, I have chosen this life, amongst you, so I could be free. This is what I offer you now. A freedom. A freedom from oppression, a freedom from the rules that exist to govern a society into civility, which is the ruling class's name for keeping the hordes in their place. I did not want civility. I did not want the glory of running the world, of becoming a bureaucrat, of administering the affairs of men for the benefit of my people. I wanted freedom, as harsh and dangerous and short-lived as it may be. This is the choice I give you today. The choice to be free. Will you take it?"
"Yes," the engineer, Mohsan Jaffery, said. His eyes shone in the lantern light.
"Yes," Orphan said, softly, and with him the rest, their voices coming louder now, surer. There is no other way, Orphan thought. And the thought made him suddenly happy. To abscond responsibility, to forget the affairs of the great, which need not concern him. To sail the sea, living by wits and strength, in a society where all are equal, and all have an equal share…
"Yes!" the sailors of the Nautilus all cried, and the ring of pirates around them grinned and joined the shout, until the whole of the Joker seemed to shake with their cries and the stamping of their feet.
"Then swear!" Captain Wyvern said, and he nodded to the boatswain, who nodded in turn and approached the men, a long, straight knife in his hand.
"Put your right hand forward," Mr. Spoons said.
They did.
He came to them, Orphan first. The knife touched the skin of his open palm with a gentleness that surprised him. Then the knife moved, slashed, and blood flowered in his palm.
Mr. Spoons nodded, and moved to the next man. Silence, expectant and heavy, lay on the ship. Soon, all the survivors had a cut in their palm.
Mr. Spoons barked an order, and two sailors hurried away and came back with a barrel filled with sea water.
He motioned for the men to come close. They gathered around the barrel. Looking into the water, Orphan saw his own reflection, blurred and ghostly. Mr. Spoons put the knife in the palm of his own hand and made a fist. He pulled the knife out, grinning, and plunged his bleeding hand into the barrel.
The others followed him.
The water stung, but not too badly. It was, in fact, almost soothing. Their blood mixed in the water, making their reflection appear as through a dirty lens. Then the captain himself approached, and stood beside his boatswain, and he did something that Orphan had never seen before, and so shocked him that he almost called out loud: Wyvern's eyes blinked and grew small, his face muscles contracted, and suddenly, shockingly, a long squirt of blood erupted from his eyes (the area around them, Orphan later found out) and shot into the barrel of sea water, to mix with all the others.
The pirates cheered, and the