Chapter 275: An Eggcellent Omen

The cord came down from the pyramid without hurry. It wound itself three times around Zephy’s wrist, bound its own knot, and hummed there, smug as a kettle.

Above them, the sun started to set. The plaza lay open to the sky, encroached by black forest, dusk rose and only the summit of the pyramid kept a smear of gold.

Mary’s neck snapped upwards, and her voice came up dripping with sarcasm. "Walkin’ in at the arse end o’ the day with the dark snappin’ at our heels. Grand start, so it is. Grand and stupid, the pair o’ them, arm in arm like drunks at a weddin’."

Zephy replied over her bare shoulder, serene. "The sun, she must be gone before the work begin, guardian of the door. The work is for de night, always the night. Now you would teach her the clock? Eleven hundred years, and the sibyl, she has never chosen a bad hour."

"Or thirty-four, dependin’ who’s asking’."

James called out as he scraped the moss from the stairs ahead, that rose as steep as a ladder.

He knew this pyramid from picture books, museum halls and wet days in front of the television, in a life that hadn’t happened yet. Stepped tiers, a temple platform, serpents down the balustrades.

Aztec or Maya, he couldn’t have said which, no book he had read put one on this island.

The limestone was cut and fitted without mortar and serpent heads lay swallowed by earth at the foot of the stairs. Rust-scabbed iron brackets jutted from every corner, newer than the rock by centuries, each holding a torch in tarred oakum.

Bonnet’s voice came out thin, his eyes bright as a boy. "My dear fellow! I have seen these engravings, in Papa’s library, great calfskin folios smelling of pipe-smoke and sherry. And I swore upon my immortal soul I’d lay a hand on one of these before I died!"

He let out a giddy, strangled laugh. "Only now the moment’s upon me, I find I should like to die a great deal later. In a feather bed, at ninety, surrounded by disappointed relations."

James rapped a fingernail against the bracket.

It rang dull and flat.

"Aye, you may manage both, Bonnet."

Then he turned, and his voice cracked across the plaza. "Dunk! Pike! Nub! Flint and steel, every bracket round the base and up, and don’t ye stint the oakum!"

Dunk pushed his hat back with one knuckle. "Light her up, Cap’n? Beggin’ yer pardon, but that’s a bonfire fit, every eye in them trees’ll be on us before the first wick’s caught."

"Ah, they’re lookin’ already, lad, so let’s not disappoint ’em."

He let them to work, and then jerked his chin at the stairs, waiting for their show woman.

"Now it’s your stage, lass, and your play. What’s the plan?"

Zephy set one bare foot on the lowest step lightly, and smiled up.

"Mon capitaine, we climb. Up, up, to where the sky, she can watch us."

With a uncertain shrug, James flung the orders down the temple. "Mark! Ring the foot of this heap, shoulder to shoulder! And if it so much as wags a leaf at you, put a shot in it!"

Mary had Bonnet by the shirt, his nose still pressed to the carvings. "Admire the feckin’ carvin’s from the bottom, Bonnet, with a blade in yer fist an’ yer back to the stone. Come away, daft peacock!"

She hauled him off the steps like a sack of flour.

James climbed behind Zephy, one hand on the serpent balustrade. The stairs ran steep as a companionway, and she took it like a stroll through a garden, bare leg flashing, bells chiming, hips swaying beneath the patched skirt.

Below, torches caught in puffs of tar smoke, their light climbing the pyramid one bracket at a time.

Zephy started to speak low and sing-song over her shoulder, and the bells at her ankle gave her the beat. "The key, she sleeps in the stone, chéri, and a sleeper wakes for one currency only. That currency, it must be warm. And it must be crying."

James’s eyes dropped to the sling bulging against her chest, hot and restless as a trapped bird, and he let out a short laugh with no mirth in it.

"Course it’s the bloody egg."

Zephy let the silence come, climbing on, unhurried, her hand brushing the serpent’s carved spine.

Then she eventually explained. "The egg is the purse, chéri. The sibyl, she pays what is inside it, rum and corn and her own blood, because even a sleeper, he likes his table laid, non?"

She laughed low in her throat. "Now listen. You take a bell from a church, and that church, she rings for the thief all the night long, ring and ring and ring. The green, she is a very old church. She will cry out through every leaf, every root, and all who hear, they will wish to stop the one who work, so you stand, capitaine, between the hush and the sibyl till the egg is spent. Do that, and you have done everything."

James hauled himself up, blowing like a winded horse, sweat running inside his shirt.

"Simple enough, when you put it like that, lass. And just what is it we’ll be standin’ against?"

Zephy laughed, one low note. "Eh, now you tell me. What come into a ship by every seam at the same time, and can’t be bailed? Hmm?"

Her bells chimed once, sly.

"Ask a sailor, chéri. Ask the one wearin’ your boots."

James had the feeling he would have to wait for the answer.

The peak of the pyramid was a floor of swept flags split by silk-cotton roots thick as rope. In the middle lay a slab as long as a person, with channels cut across its top and down to a stone basin stained dark.

Zephy knelt and laid out her work, the cornmeal drawn in a cross, calabash of cane spirit, shells and bones plucked from her hair, a gourd rattle, and a pouch of salt. The egg stayed in its sling, hot and shifting against her ribs.

James peeled the oilcloth from [Counterargument] and thumbed fresh priming into each pan.

"The price came due when the work was half done, Zephy. I reckon we’re there."

Zephy rolled the words on her tongue.

"Oui. So it is."

She permitted a pause, to let the torches crackle. "A voyage, first. The sibyl, she has watched the ships leave Tortuga, and not one has ever ask her aboard. She wishes to sail. Hah! And then a measure of the life that moves in you, one cup from the well that never runs dry, she will take it when all is done."

"Will it hurt, lass? Not that I’m squeamish, just curious. Professionally."

"Chéri, chéri. The well, it does not feel the cup."

James’s grin split wide as a stove-in hull, wolfish in the torchlight.

"Done! Done and done, and write it in blood if you like."

By then, the last rays of sunlight went out of the sky.

Dozens of torches climbed the steps, and the pyramid blazed in the night like a ship dressed for a feast, every port alight. The smoke spread upward in black pillars, blotting out the stars, and past the light the forest stood black, while the darkness leaned toward the fire.

James took position at peak of the pyramid, captain on his quarterdeck. Mary stood at the stairs foot, hat low, pistol primed, cutlass ready. Bonnet stood beside her, holding the cutlass he had bought off in Port Royal as Captain Kidd’s, or Avery’s, or whoever.

Concordia’s workshop district had given it a blade like a strip of moonlight, a black iron guard, and a grip of fresh sharkskin. The torchlight flashed from it so brightly that Bonnet stood in a halo, a majestic weapon.

Dunk had one side, hat tipped back, cutlass over his shoulder, Pike had another with a pistol in each hand and his mouth clamped shut, Nub had the third, cutlass out, his whistle swallowed behind his teeth.

Each lifted a blade or a hat, and not a soul spoke.

James touched [Verdict]’s hilt and nodded to Zephy.

She drew a shell’s edge across her palm, let the blood run dark down the channel, lifted the egg from its sling, hot in both hands, and cracked it against the slab.

It was the loudest crack the place had heard in a thousand years.

A smudge of blood slid out first, then a clot of yolk, and in the middle of it lay the thing, alive.

Its skin was grey-violet stretched over a keel-bone sharp as a knife. The skull swelled like a gourd, thin as wet paper, with a dark mass behind it, and the beak hooked down, a forked tongue flickering through the gap.

Both milk-blue eyes sat on one side of the head. The tail was a chain of bare-knuckled joints, coiled and scaled at the tip, and long toes webbed in thin skin, and the thing opened its beak on a shriek the hush swallowed whole.

Then the jungle answered.

Leaves trembled without wind and the silk-cotton tree shivered. Every torch flame leaned toward the slab, the ground shook up, the hum climbed to a whine, and the jungle began to quiver.