The Dust of 100 Dogs - A. S. King [65]
In that year at sea, plundering ships southwest of Havana, Emer made seven capes. Her first two were dedicated to her mother. They had Celtic crosses, two feet high, in green and red thread. Each cross was a maze of tiny, decorative knots, hundreds of thousands of them. But they were mere practice pieces, reminders of the days when a thin-haired five-year-old demanded things she couldn’t have.
As Emer stitched these pieces, she practiced the art of sea battle. Never too much double shot, or you’d sink the whole lot to the bottom. She taught her marines new strategies and shared her memories of Oliver’s Roundheads to show how fast, loud action can stop the bravest of men in their tracks. As she sewed, she prepared for future misfortune by slipping gems into the lower hems. In her first cape, with the green cross, she included several tiny pearls from her very first take. In the second, she sewed her first cut stones, a dozen pink rubies.
Her next cape was Spanish colored—red, orange, peach, and lemon—with an image of a crimson dragon breathing fire. It didn’t disturb her anymore, the sight of a dragon. They surrounded her on this hunting ground—Spanish dragons in each direction and her own, tied in knots, in the belly of her memory. She added opals and emeralds in the hems, sewing each jewel in place with a pair of minute red stitches.
Her fourth cape was an experiment: bright blue wildflowers intertwined with lightning bolts and skeletons, each bone a hundred stitches at least. She made this one as a penance. Sure, these were Spanish bastards who’d just killed, raped, and enslaved natives to pilfer their gold, but they were flesh and blood, too. No amount of praying would cleanse the shipful of sins she carried. To further clear her conscience, she didn’t sew any booty into this cape, because it seemed insincere.
Her fifth and sixth capes were quite like the third: Spanish colors and fire-breathing beasts. But instead of confining the embroidered image to the back of the cape, Emer tried something new. She stitched right round the garment with licks of fire, covering three quarters of the wool with tiny specks of flashy thread and finishing the edges with blood-red knot work. She added extra knots after battles, one for each man she killed. These capes were longer than the others, extending past the knee with a mix of tassel work and fancy pleated edging. Emer had a difficult time choosing what to hide in them. Her treasure chests in the captain’s quarters were stuffed. She finally decided on diamonds. And since she was growing more paranoid, she decided also to sew the precious gems into each seam along the main body of the garment as well as into the hems. This made these capes not only the most beautiful, but also the most valuable.
Emer took a break from stitching during the late summer of 1662, and began work on her seventh cape as autumn approached with its hard storms and lethal winds. This was another long cape, falling just below the knee. The evil design had come to her after a bloody sunset battle with a Spanish privateer. The top of the cape would resemble a sky at sunset, the rays jutting from a large red fireball. The bottom would picture a thousand dead men, legs and boots in the air. Tiny legs and boots specked with red stitches, protruding swords, and detached heads and eyeballs. Thousands of eyeballs. Another dragon breathing fire, white-hot specks of breath overpowering the sunrays, red drips of blood down its jaws.
She had scored a small sack full of blackberry-sized sapphires from her last plunder. She sewed these, along with the rest of her stash of diamonds, into every cranny of the cape’s soft black lining.
Emer wore her frightful cape everywhere she went. By this time, she and her crew had become infamous. Just the sight of the Vera Cruz forced large vessels to surrender or tack quickly in the opposite direction, which ensured a chase. And yet no one seemed to be searching for them, the way other famous pirates were hounded and hunted by