"I noticed that too," Harkat nodded. "He tells all sorts of lies last night he said he'd been engaged to a Japanese princess but it's only when he talks about his job on the Prince of Pariahs that he gets thereally shifty look."
"What do you think he's hiding?" I asked.
"I've no idea," Harkat replied. "I doubt it matters there are no pirate ships here."
"At least none that we've seen," I grinned.
Harkat studied the sleeping Spits he was drooling into his unkempt beard then said quietly, "We can leave him behind if you'd prefer. He'll be asleep for hours. If we leave now and walk fast, he'll never find us."
"Do you think he's dangerous?" I asked.
Harkat shrugged. "He might be. But there must be a reason why Mr Tiny put him here. I think we should take him. And his net."
"Definitely the net," I agreed. Clearing my throat, I added, "There's his blood too. I need human blood and soon."
"I thought of that," Harkat said. "It's why I didn't stop him drinking. Do you want to take some now?"
"Maybe I should wait for him to wake and ask him," I suggested.
Harkat shook his head. "Spits is superstitious. He thinks I'm a demon."
"A demon!" I laughed.
"I told him what I really was, but he wouldn't listen. In the end I settled for persuading him that I was a harmless demon an imp. I sounded him out about vampires. He believes in them, but thinks they're evil monsters. Said he'd drive a stake through the heart of the first one he met. I think you should drink from him while he's asleep, and never tell him what you really are."
I didn't like doing it I'd no qualms about drinking secretly from strangers, but on the rare occasions when I'd had to drink from people I knew, I'd always asked their permission but I bowed to Harkat's greater knowledge of Spits Abrams's ways.
Sneaking up on the sleeping sot, I bared his lower left leg, made a small cut with my right index nail, clamped my mouth around it and sucked. His blood was thin and riddled with alcohol he must have drunk huge amounts of poteen and whisky over the years! but I forced it down. When I'd drunk enough, I released him and waited for the blood around the cut to dry. When it had, I cleaned it and rolled the leg of his trousers down.
"Better?" Harkat asked.
"Yes." I burped. "I wouldn't like to drink from him often there's more poteen than blood in his veins! but it'll restore my strength and keep me going for the next few weeks."
"Spits won't wake until morning," Harkat noted. "We'll have to wait until tomorrow night to start, unless you want to risk travelling by day."
"With dragons roaming overhead? No thanks! Anyway, an extra day of rest won't hurt I'm still recovering from our last run-in."
"By the way, how did you get it to drop you?" Harkat asked as we settled down for the night. "And why did it fly away and leave us?"
I thought back, recalled yelling at the dragon to let me go, and told Harkat what had happened. He stared at me disbelievingly, so Iwinked and said, "I always did have a way with dumb animals!" And I left it at that, even though I was equally bewildered by the dragon's strange retreat.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ITHOUGHTSpits would have a sore head when he awoke, but he was in fine form he said he never suffered from hangovers. He spent the day tidying up the shack, putting everything in order in case he ever returned. He stashed a jug of poteen away in a corner and packed the rest in a large sack he planned to carry slung over his shoulder, along with spare clothes, his fishing net, some potatoes and dried fish slices. Harkat and I had almost nothing to carry apart from the panthers teeth and gelatinous globes, most of which we'd managed to hang on to so we offered to divide Spits's load between us, but he wouldn't hear of it. "Every man to a cross of his own," he muttered.
We took it easy during the day. I hacked my hair back from my eyes with one of Spits's rusty blades. We'd replaced our handmade knives, most of which we'd lost in the lake, with real knives that Spits had lying around.
Harkat stitched together holes in his robes with bits of old string.
When night fell, we set off, heading due southeast towards a mountain range in the distance. Spits was surprisingly morose to be leaving his shack "'Tis the closest thing to a home I've had since running away t' sea when I was twelve," he sighed but several swigs of poteen improved his mood and by midnight he was singing and joking.
I was worried that Spits would collapse his legs were wobbling worse than the jelly-like globes we were carting but as drunk as he got, his pace never wavered, though he did stop quite often to "bail out the bilge water". When we made camp beneath a bushy tree in the morning, he fell straight asleep and snored loudly all day long. He woke shortly before sunset, licked his lips and reached for the poteen.
The weather worsened over the next few nights, as we left the lowlands and scaled the mountains. It rained almost constantly, harder than before, soaking our clothes and leaving us wet, cold and miserable except Spits, whose poteen warmed and cheered him up whatever the conditions. I decided to try some of Spits's home-brewed concoction, to see if it would combat the gloom. One swallow later, I was rolling on the ground, gasping for breath, eyes bulging. Spits laughed while Harkat poured water down my throat, then urged me to try it again. "The first dram's the worst," he chuckled. Through wheezing coughs, I firmly declined.
It was difficult to know what to make of Spits Abrams. A lot of the time he came across as a funny old sailor, crude and coarse, but with a soft centre. But as I spent more time with him, I thought that a lot of his speech patterns seemed deliberately theatrical he spoke with a broad accent on purpose, to give the impression he was scatterbrained. And there were times when his mood darkened and he'd mutter ominously about people who'd betrayed him in one way or another.
"They thought they was so high and mighty!" he growled one night, weaving drunkenly under the cloudy sky. "Better than dumb old Spits. Said I was a monster, not fit t' share a ship with 'em. But I'll show 'em! When I gets me hands on 'em, I'll make 'em suffer!"
He never said how he intended to "get his hands on" whoever "em" were. We hadn't told Spits what year we'd come from, but he knew time had moved on he often made reference to "yer generation" or said "things was different in my day". I couldn't see any way back for Spits, and he couldn't either a common refrain of his when he was feeling sorry for himself was, "Here I is and here I'll die." Yet still he swore to get his own back on "them what done me wrong", despite the fact that the people he disliked would have been dead and buried decades ago.
Another night, while he was telling us about his tasks on board thePrince of Pariahs , he stopped and looked at us with a steady blank expression. "I had t' kill every now and then," he said softly. "Pirates is vagabonds. Even though we didn't kill those we robbed, we sometimes had t'. If people refused t' surrender, we had t' put a stop to 'em. Couldn't afford t' let 'em off the hook."
"But I thought you didn't board the ships you attacked," I said. "You told us you fished out people who jumped overboard."
"Aaarrr," he grinned bleakly, "but a man in the water can struggle just as much as one on deck. A woman too. Sometimes I had t' teach 'em a lesson." His eyes cleared a little and he grinned sheepishly. "But that was rare. I only mention it so ye know ye can rely on me if we gets into a tight spot. I ain't a killer, but I'll do it if me back's against a wall, or t' save a friend."
Harkat and I didn't doze much that day. Instead we kept a wary watch on the snoring Spits. Although we were stronger and fitter than him, he posed a worrying threat. What if he got into a drunken fit and took it into his head to kill us in our sleep?
We discussed the possibility of leaving the ex-pirate behind, but it didn't seem fair to strand him in the mountains. Although he was able to keep pace beside us during our marches, he had no sense of direction and would have become lost in no time if he'd been by himself. Besides, we might have need of his fishing skills if we made it to the Lake of Souls. Both of us could catch fish with our hands, but neither of us knew much about angling.
In the end we chose to keep Spits with us, but agreed not to turn our backs on him, to take turns sleeping, and to cut him loose if he ever threatened violence.
We made slow but steady progress through the mountains. If the weather had been finer, we'd have raced through, but all the rain had led to mudslides and slippery underfoot conditions. We had to walk carefully, and were often forced to backtrack and skirt around an area made inaccessible by the rain and mud.
"Does it normally rain this much?" I asked Spits.
"T' tell the truth, this has been one o' the better years," he chortled. "We gets very hot summers long, too but the winters are dogs. Mind, it'll probably break in another night or two we ain't hit the worst o' the season yet, and it's rare t' get more'n a week or so o' nonstop rain at this time o' year."