Chronicles of the Dragon Pirate (62 page)

Captain Hawkins gave her a hard stare in return before he turned to me and regarded my face for a long moment. “While I’m aboard the Davy,” he finally said, “I will be her captain. You will still act as my apprentice and learn everything I’m going to teach you, even if we don’t swear an oath. You’re going to learn discipline; in fact, I’m going to start running the Davy the same way Sir Francis did his ship, with discipline.”

“Only if it’s also run with fairness and honor,” I replied. His eyes narrowed but I matched him stare for stare. “I won’t do this any other way.”

I thought he’d get angry, but instead he suddenly smiled. “You truly are Sir Francis’s son. With fairness and honor, then,” he said as he held out his hand.

“With fairness and honor,” I said as I shook it.

Then Master Le’Vass stepped forward. “If we are to be at war with Olde Roger, we should enlist ze help of ze French. Which means travelling back to the court of the duke of Anjou, and...”

“England will be the first country we plead our case to,” Captain Hawkins shot back, “and another thing: if you believe I’m going to tolerate any more eroding of my authority...”

They began shouting at each other as the Mulatto called out, “We should work out how the shares will be divided among Tomas’s brothers, as I’m about to become.”

“Tomas has all the brothers he needs,” Jeremiah yelled at him. “He doesn’t need fair weather friends.”

The Mulatto’s men began yelling and the Africans yelled back as the crew began arguing. Redbeard helped Pepper ease to her feet while Sally hovered like she was her child, and as Pepper wrapped her arms around me, Redbeard chuckled. “Be like old times again. Lad, they be saying the days of the Dragon pirates died when Drake did, but I be thinking those days be only a shadow of the days to come.”

Glancing at the crew shouting at each other all around us, I gave Pepper a helpless look. She smiled. “It’ll be alright in the end, Swamp-rat. You’ll,” and we finished together, “figure it out.”

Then she kissed me.

The genesis for this story was a novel by the author Lois McMaster Bujold, titled ‘The Spirit Ring’, set in renaissance Italy, where magic was not only accepted but also used by the Catholic church (among others). However, I wanted to set the story in the New World and give it more grounding in reality, so I came up with the idea of Atlantis being a colony for a group of aliens, who met with disaster (obviously not an original concept), and the dragons who died during that calamity being the basis for the world’s ‘magic’ system. In the next books (at present I want to cap this at three books total) there will be more to say about the Atlantian’s and the organizations that sprang up after their fall.

For the world of the 1600’s and especially the pirates, I decided acceptance of the Dragons (especially their dragon-ghosts) had not been around long enough to make a serious difference in the way the world operated (except for places like China), so life goes on much as it had in our own world (though change is in the air, like gunpowder becoming obsolete). The pirates were either based on actual people (Thomas Tew, the Mulatto), or came straight out of my own warped imagination (Redbeard). All errors in logic, research, or translation I take full responsibility.

As for myself, I grew up in Chicago, served in the U.S. Marine Corps as an infantryman, and now live in Asheville, NC. You can find me on Facebook as well as on the web:
davidtalon.net