The Shadow Dragons - James A. Owen [98]
“I am Don Quixote de la Mancha,” the old knight said, bowing deeply, “and these are my companions, the lady Rose, the teacher Archimedes, and the Caretaker Emeritus Professor Sigurdsson. We are on a quest.”
Captain Johnson sneered. “Caretaker Emeritus?” he said to the professor. “I didn’t realize Caretakers could retire.”
“How is it you know of the Caretakers?” Sigurdsson said in surprise.
The portrait blinked. “Are you daft, man? I’m trapped in a painting of myself on the other side of the waterfall at the Edge of the World. I didn’t just fall here by accident, you know. Of course I know about the Caretakers. I know that you, Professor, are the only one of their number who has ever come over the waterfall—just as I know I was betrayed and left here by one of your predecessors.”
“Really?” said Sigurdsson. “Which one?”
“That snake-in-the-grass Daniel Defoe,” said Johnson. “He and I were training as apprentices to Cyrano de Bergerac, along with my best friend, a silversmith named Eliot McGee. Cyrano had his eye in particular on Eliot, whom he thought might make a suitable apprentice for the Cartographer himself.”
“He was a mapmaker?” the professor said.
“One of the best,” Johnson replied. “His father, Elijah, had been approached by a pirate to help him create a map to his own hidden treasures, and he was so successful at it that McGee became the de facto mapmaker to all the pirates in the Caribbean. Elijah trained Eliot in the discipline, and it was then that Daniel and I made his acquaintance.”
“What had distinguished you, if you don’t mind my asking?” said the professor. “Why did Cyrano seek you out?”
“I was compiling a history of the pirates,” Johnson replied. “Basically, as an audition to become the Caretaker after de Bergerac.”
“‘A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates,’” said the professor. “I know it well.”
“Really?” Johnson said, beaming.
“Yes—but I thought Defoe wrote it. Everyone thinks Defoe wrote it.”
“Arrrgghhh,” the portrait growled. “I hate that! He stole it from me, every jot and tittle!”
“To be fair,” Sigurdsson said, “most of the editions carry your name—everyone just thinks it was a pseudonym for Daniel Defoe.”
“Daniel Defoe murdered me in 1723,” Johnson stated. “He and Eliot were working on a companion book they called the Pyratlas. It was to be Eliot’s audition to become the Cartographer’s apprentice, and with me having my own book, Defoe was going to be shut out altogether. So he had me killed, and published the book himself.”
“That’s very interesting,” Sigurdsson said as he made a shushing gesture to his companions out of Johnson’s view. No point in antagonizing the fellow by letting him know they’d just had dinner with his old-friend-turned-adversary. “So how is it you came to be here, in this, ah, state?”
“Apparently, at some point Defoe betrayed Eliot as well, and faked his own death to go into the Archipelago,” said Johnson. “In the years that followed, Eliot’s son, Ernest, had also become a mapmaker, thus continuing in the family trade. What Defoe only discovered later was that the McGees had been hiding secret clues to the pirate treasures in duplicate maps—maps that young Ernest subsequently burned. A few survived, but not enough that Defoe could use them to find the treasures without consulting a second book I had been writing, which I called The Maps of Elijah McGee.
“Somehow Defoe had discovered a process to resurrect the dead by way of painting their portraits—so he commissioned one of me to ask me the whereabouts of the book. The minute I could speak, I spit in his face.”
“You can spit?” said Archimedes.
“Well, I could make the gesture,” said Johnson. “As long as he knew my intent, it didn’t matter if I couldn’t really spit. Anyroad,” he went on, “after he realized I couldn’t be coerced, he sold me to someone who’d just stolen one of the Dragonships—the Indigo Dragon, I think he called it—so I ended up in the possession of actual pirates. Ironic, isn’t it?”
“That would be a correct assessment,” said the professor. “Did any of these