Date: September 19, 2026
Attendance: Barnabas, Chubs, Kiwi, Lucky Joe, Pierre Snaggletooth, Radford “Bull” Carver, Lee Raggedy Carter, Red Shirt, Senna the Whisperer, Eugene Munks
The pirates had heard that the commander of the island kept a menagerie, and that some of what he kept in it ate birds. So before they rowed ashore they put their parrots in cages in the mess hall, made their tearful goodbyes, and left old Lloyd and his hound to mind them.
That was several days ago.
Lloyd came through twice a day with a mop, grumbling about the state of the floor and reminding the cages that they were one missed ration away from the stew pot. His keys hung at his belt and jingled when he swept, and five birds watched them go past and come back, and past and come back.
It was the dog who broke first. He was old, toothless and cut off from the dried sausages since the last incident, and when the birds raised the subject of what the sausages were worth to him, his ear came up off the bed. He gummed at the keys while Lloyd was sweeping, got smacked for it, and waited. The second time he took them clean, carried them the length of the mess hall, and dropped them slick with drool into Chubs’s cage. Chubs got them into the lock, popped it, and passed them down the line without a word from anybody.
Lloyd turned around with a pistol in his hand and told them to get back in the cages, and Barnabas took the bubbling stewpot off the stove in his talons and flung the whole thing across the room into the old man’s face. The shot went into the roof and the splinters came down like rain. Lucky Joe found the cabinet where the sausages hung and threw every one of them onto the floor, and the dog forgot he had ever had a master. Lloyd came off the wall with a cleaver and took a piece out of Barnabas’s already ruined wing, and Chubs flew out through the hole in the roof with three sausages trailing from one foot, and behind them all a voice shouting good riddance, you dirty little dust mops and a second shot going nowhere at all.
It was Kiwi who thought to go back in through the stern window, into a cabin that smelled of unwashed captain and held a rack of holy symbols sorted by country of origin. On the desk lay a sketch of the island, drawn badly, with a longboat on it and three lines going to three different landings, and one large question mark that no one has explained since.
They followed the first line out over the water to a chain of sandbars where the beach appeared to be moving. It was crabs — thousands of them, every size and colour — and at the top of the rock sat one the size of a parrot, pinkish-mauve, with one enormous claw and the other torn off. When he snapped, ten thousand smaller crabs snapped after him. Stay away from us, you birds. This is our beach. Poking up through the carpet of them was a human arm, bones only, bleached and scratched all over.
The king dealt in exchange and nothing else, and Lucky Joe hovered over him holding out a sausage and telling him it was a very tasty snake. That it was salty and cured and perhaps a little rotten settled it. He took his quarter share, threw the rest into the mass of his children, who tore it and then each other apart over it, and he waved his subjects back from the arm like a tide going out. Take as much time as you want, he said. But not too long. When I am finished with this I expect I shall still be hungry.
The arm came free with a shell bracelet on it, hemp and little bivalves, and scratched into the largest shell: with all my love to Maru. At the birds’ asking, the crabs dug deeper and turned up the salt-crusted ribs of a longboat that had been under that sand a very long time.
And then Chubs, on the way out, dropped, took one of the little ones in his talons and ate it. Betrayers! came the cry behind them. Return my child! I should have known better than to trust birds.
They came down the coast as the sun went into the water, onto a beach out of a postcard, and there was their own longboat pulled up on the sand with two sets of footprints leading away from it — most going east, a few going north. And walking the sand, not quite there and then there, was a woman, glowing faintly, in a pirate hat, muttering to herself.
Kiwi went close through the palms and heard it. So many, so many little feet. Where am I? Where could all my parts have gone? So tired. I just want to rest. Then the woman turned, and there was a musket hole through her skull where one eye had been, and she said who goes there, and Kiwi did not stay.
It was Chubs who fixed it, and he did it by singing. He had been raised by a noblewoman who fed him and sang to him and he had not had cause to warble like that in years, and the lost thing on the beach stopped walking and came toward him and said, what a beautiful melody, my dear. I seem to be thinking a little clearer. When they showed her the bracelet she reached for it and her hand went through them and came away cold, and she had to concentrate very hard before she could lift it off the sand — and when she did, she said: Marley. My name is Marley.
Someone had killed her, she said. She could not remember why. She could feel the rest of herself out there, spread across the island: one part at a fort, one in some kind of cave, one at the highest point, one down at the docks. She could not leave the beach to fetch any of it.
So they flew back to the crabs. They came in over a beach that squirmed, and the king was up on the high rock, and he saw them coming and turned his face to the sky and called for the rubber band men. Half his subjects had bands strung on their claws, and the air filled with stones. One of them hit Chubs square in his considerable gut and did not kill him, which surprised everybody. Kiwi went down through it and got both hands on the arm and came up with baby crabs swarming up its length; Lucky Joe cut one in half in the air like a swordsman; Pierre bit another through the middle and ate it and felt better for it. They flew off into the dark with the king shouting next time, bastards after them and the last of the stones falling short.
Marley took the arm and stood a little more solidly in the world, and remembered her crew, and pointed them toward a fort, a cave, a mountaintop and the docks.
They took the fort first. Below it, in a barracks of mud brick and palm logs, fifty redcoats were cooking their suppers and playing dice, and Lucky Joe sat by a window and listened to one of them explain that he was turning in early because he had been promised the lever in the morning, and that he loved to see them dangle and hear their necks break. On his way past the door Lucky Joe threw a voice into the room, and by the time the man worked out that nobody had actually said it he had already decked a colleague and walked out into the dark.
Up at the fort the gallows were half built in the courtyard and Radford Carver was in a cage of driftwood and bamboo beside them, in manacles, cursing under his breath with a tic going in his cheek. Then Barnabas landed on the bars, and the hardest man on the island picked up a molting parakeet, held him against his chest, and stopped being angry.
What got him out was the bell. Pierre flew up to the great brass thing on top of the tower, held the clapper still with one claw so it could not ring, snipped it loose and brought it down, and Carver jammed it into the padlock and broke the lock rather than picked it. Below him Chubs had landed on the rum barrel and begun to sing, and a man who had been raising a mug to swat him lowered it instead and said he had never heard a bird warble in such tones; and while both guards were watching, Kiwi took the key ring off one of their belts and was gone before he felt it. Then Lucky Joe fluttered down beside Chubs and started working them like a carnival crowd — good evening, ladies, gentlemen, anyone who may be watching this fine performance by my esteemed colleague Mr Chubs — and Carver walked out through the open portcullis past two laughing men and down the path into the jungle.
The cage they had built for him had a piece of Marley lashed into its frame. He took her arm with him into the trees.
He told the birds what he could before he went. They had landed, argued about where to search, and split; part of the crew went north and part went south, and the southern party had run into a patrol and been taken. He had been brought to the fort because he was the captain. The rest, he thought, were down in the village.
Out along the coconut palms six fruit bats were gorging on insects and were extremely unwilling to share, but they were happy to complain: some man was holed up in their cave making a racket and keeping them awake all day, and would the birds kindly go and get him. Lucky Joe, who did not need anything else from them, mentioned on his way out that crabs are a great deal like bugs, and that one can be carried up high and dropped on a rock. They looked at him as though he had invented fire and left at once, and no one told them about the artillery.
The docks were worse. A frigate lay at the end of the longest jetty with men on her deck at midnight, and on a post above the boards hung an iron gibbet under a sign that read the fate of all pirates, and in it were two legs and a pelvis. A very large rat was sitting in it and informed them the place was taken. He dealt in gold only, he said. He was a made man. He had twenty brothers and sisters behind him. Barnabas spread his wings to look enormous, put his weight on a rusted bar, and fell into the sea.
Chubs pinned the rat flat, and the rat’s terms changed. His name was Sebastian. The jail, he said, was where they would find their pirates — a fine place for crumbs, and for the occasional gnaw on a dead prisoner. He objected on principle to the assumption that every rat can pick a lock, and then produced a full set of picks from somewhere inside his own fur. He got airsick on the way over.
Lee Raggedy Carter was in a cell in the village jail, picking his teeth. The lock came open and the guard came round the corner half asleep with a flintlock, and Kiwi knocked his hand as it fired so the ball went into the ceiling, and Lee put a shoulder into him hard enough to empty him and took the cutlass off his belt. Lucky Joe opened his Achilles from behind. The man threw down his gun and yielded and begged them to call off the birds.
He told them that the commander had been turning the island over for a month looking for a treasure the last pirates had buried, and had stopped believing in it. And that the commander had killed the last pirate who might have known where it was — shot her right in the face.
Lee had said he would not kill him, and he did not. He cut out his tongue so he could not shout, dragged him into his own cell and locked the door on him.
They were still standing there when the tavern window came out into the street and Senna the Whisperer came with it, in a shower of glass and silver coins and playing cards, with a redcoat over her thumbing back a flintlock and telling her to say goodnight. Lee shot the back of the man’s head off. Barnabas took an eye out of a second man’s skull and left it hanging by the nerve. Senna got up, put her musket under that man’s chin and finished it, and stood in the spray with her face turned up into it, thanking her god. Chubs put a Mega Poo through a third face and it came away a bare skull. Kiwi and Barnabas got the legs and the pelvis up out of the gibbet while the ship’s bell started ringing behind them.
They ran for the jungle with the whole village waking up, and out over the trees a musket cracked from somewhere high up on the mountain and Chubs felt the ball go past his chest and take feathers with it. The second shot found Lucky Joe. He dropped the voice and the flourish he had carried all night and said, I really do regret my life choices, and then he burst — protoplasm and small pale bones and spectral feathers coming down slowly through the leaves.
Far away, in a cave he had not left in days, Red Shirt felt something lift off his shoulders that had been there since the night the lightning took the mast. He said that this was a very unexpected predicament and that he would need a cup of tea to consider it, in an accent he had never had before, and he began to wonder whether there had ever been a bird there at all.
They found Carver in the treeline holding a skeletal arm and waving it at them like a flag. Where have you two been? Somebody said that the quest had changed, and that they were going to go and kill some sons of bitches up in that tower. This one, they said, is for Lucky Joe.
The climb was hard on the men. At the top, on a shelf below the summit, were a tent and a fire and two lanterns and two redcoats, and Eugene Munks chained by the leg with his face painted and somebody else’s fine hat on his head, dancing while they fired into the ground at his feet. Between rounds they shot at whatever flew over the jungle.
The first two shots out of the dark took a hat off one man’s head and knocked a lantern into the tent, and the whole camp went up orange. Lee’s pistol hit the second man in the chest and lifted him off his feet and over the edge of the cliff. Pierre went into the first one’s face and took both his eyes; Senna charged him with her musket held like a club and could not land it; Kiwi came down on his throat and opened it, and he went over gurgling.
On a post at the edge of the firelight sat a skull with a hole punched out the back of it and two black empty sockets.
The cave was below them, loud with bats, and Red Shirt was inside it in the dark with a small chest he had found and could not open, building little houses out of a thousand silver pieces. Under a broken mast on the cave floor lay a rotting spine.
They carried all of it back to the beach. Marley was sitting there humming to herself, and a ghost crab crawled out of her empty eye socket, around the back of her head, and inside again. As each piece went down beside her she thickened, and then she said: yes, yes, I remember my crew. We buried our treasure right on this very beach. She turned and pointed into the bushes behind her, at a place where some stones lay stacked over the sand. Thank you for putting me at rest. And she went out like a lamp.
It had been twenty feet behind her the whole time, and the commander’s men had been digging up an entire island for a month.
Under the sand were planks, and under the planks two chests and four cases of rum, and in the chests a mixed heap of cut emeralds and rubies and diamonds — five thousand silver if it was a penny, enough for a better ship or one extraordinary week in Tortuga. Carver went down on his knees in the sand and began praying in Creole and nobody could follow a word of it. Senna cracked her one bottle of good rum and drank the whole thing and lay back.
There were still boots coming through the jungle behind them. They took the longboat out to the ship and were gone before the sun came up, and the first cup went over the side for Lucky Joe.