Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Rayleigh woke up because somebody was going through his jacket.

He didn't move right away. He was stretched out on the deck at the foot of the main mast, his cheek stuck to a plank that smelled of tar and spilled sake, and the sun, already high, was falling straight onto his left eyelid with an insistence he found frankly personal. His head weighed as much as a full barrel. Somewhere to his right, a pulley creaked with every roll, always the same one, always on the same note, and he promised himself he would grease it personally as soon as he could hold an oil can without getting it everywhere.

The hand in his jacket was making no effort whatsoever to be discreet.

"I know it's you," he said without opening his eyes.

"Obviously. Lift your arm."

Rayleigh didn't lift his arm. Roger lifted it himself, set it back down a little further off the way you move an oar that's lying across the deck, and drew out of the inside pocket the pewter flask Rayleigh had kept against his ribs for more years than he was capable of counting that morning.

"Confiscated," Roger announced.

"You've no right."

"I'm the captain."

"Since when has that been any use to you?"

Roger didn't bother to answer. Rayleigh heard the cap turn, then the little slosh of a liquid being shaken near an ear to judge the quantity. He opened one eye. Roger was crouched beside him, the flask pressed to his temple, as absorbed as a child listening for the sea in a shell.

"There's half left," he noted.

"It was full last night."

"There were three bottles before. Plus half of that one. And then you sang."

"I don't sing."

"You sang the Sabaody sailor's song. All eleven verses."

"There are only nine."

"You made up two. The cook cried at the second one, and not because it was beautiful."

Rayleigh closed his eye again. It was simpler.

He remembered nothing after the second bottle, which was probably a blessing. He did remember, very well, everything that had come before the first. The quay at the last port, ten days earlier, the merchant ship leaving for Sabaody on the evening tide, and Shakky standing on the gangway, her bag on her shoulder and her cigarette in the corner of her mouth. She hadn't turned around. She never turned around, it was one of the things he loved about her, and he had discovered that evening that you could love something about someone and want to hold it against them at the same time. She had said: "You know where to find me, Ray." He had answered "yes," like an idiot, as though it had been a question. She had laughed.

He had held out nine days. Last night, for no particular reason, he had stopped holding out.

"Drink."

Something cool touched his fingers. A cup of water. Rayleigh propped himself up on one elbow, which was a mistake, and drank anyway, in small sips, while the deck pitched rather more than it should have.

"You're not going to lecture me."

"No."

"Good."

"Drink it all."

Rayleigh drank it all. Roger didn't mention Shakky. He didn't ask whether she would come back, or what she had said, or why Rayleigh had watched her go with his arms hanging at his sides, even though Roger was the most incapable of keeping quiet of any man Rayleigh had met in nearly forty years, a man who said everything that went through his head at the exact moment it went through it, and sometimes a little before. He simply stayed crouched there, the flask in one hand, looking at the sea over the rail.

Rayleigh was grateful to him for it, and resented him a little for making him grateful.

He eventually sat up against the mast. The deck took its time settling level around him, then everything went back into place, and he could watch the Oro Jackson do what it had done every morning for two weeks. The cook was peeling potatoes on the hold cover with eyes still red, which proved Roger right about the song. Two men were restitching a sail at the bow. And at the foot of the mizzenmast, in its place, was the chest, and sitting beside the chest, in his place too, was Gaban, his back against the ironwork and his arms crossed, because it was his watch.

The lid was propped open with a wooden spoon. Above it, nailed to the mast, a slate carried the rules of the chest in Rayleigh's handwriting, because Roger had dictated them and nobody let Roger write down the important things.

One. The lid stays open. The spoon stays in the corner.

Two. No coins in the chest. He puts them in his mouth.

Three. We don't take him out of the chest to sleep. He screams.

Four. The milk is tested on the wrist, not on the tongue. (Gaban.)

Five. Everything gets written in the ledger.

And underneath, in handwriting that leaned like a badly ballasted ship, Roger had added a sixth rule one evening when he thought nobody was watching.

Six. We say good mornin to him.

Rayleigh hadn't corrected it.

Fourteen days earlier, at God Valley, Roger had lifted the lid of a chest to see whether it held gold, and it held a baby. Nobody aboard knew whose it was, nobody had come to claim it, and Roger had closed the lid again, tucked the chest under his arm and said "we're taking him" in the tone he would have used for a cask of fresh water. Since then, the crew had learned a heap of things none of them had intended to learn. That a one-year-old can scream for three hours straight without tiring, while the adults around him tire after ten minutes. That he only sleeps in wood that smells of metal, and nowhere else: they had tried a hammock, a biscuit crate, a clean bucket and Roger's arms, and only the chest had worked. That at a port call, you buy the condensed milk before the gunpowder. They had taken forty-one tins. Twenty-one were left according to the ledger, at two tins a day, which gave them ten and a half days to find an island with a grocer's. Gaban maintained eleven, because the little one never finished the evening tin. Rayleigh maintained ten and a half. The ledger didn't settle it.

Rayleigh knew that figure by heart, when he would have been incapable of finding the chorus of the Sabaody sailor's song to save his own life.

Roger had got up. He had slipped the flask into his belt without thinking and he was walking toward the starboard shrouds, and Rayleigh knew exactly what he was going to do before he set foot on the first ratline.

Every morning since God Valley, Roger had climbed halfway up the shrouds and shouted toward the lookout: "Anything?" And every morning, the lookout answered: "Nothing, captain." Rayleigh had counted thirteen mornings. At first he had thought Roger was watching for the Marines. Then he had noticed the course. Every day, Roger laid a finger on a different island on the chart, always small, always deserted, always in the same waters, and he said it was for the pleasure of seeing the country, and Rayleigh hadn't asked, because Roger lied very badly and he didn't like watching him do it.

He remembered all at once, with an unpleasant clarity for the morning after, the end of God Valley. The smoke. The ships leaving in every direction at once, like pigeons when you clap your hands, and Roger leaning on the rail watching them scatter without saying anything, then asking, of nobody in particular: "Where's Newgate?"

Nobody had been able to tell him.

Roger had one foot in the shrouds when the lookout shouted first, for the first time in fourteen days.

"A boat on the beach of that islet over there! There's a fellow sitting in it, he..."

The voice hesitated.

"He sticks out, captain."

Roger was already at the rail with the spyglass. Rayleigh could only see his back, but he had spent enough years following that particular back to read it better than the face that came with it, and he saw Roger's shoulders drop a notch, just one, the way they do when you finally put down a sack you've been carrying too long.

"It's him," Roger said.

Rayleigh didn't ask who.

"You were looking for him."

"I was out for a stroll."

"For thirteen days."

"Fourteen, counting today."

Roger snapped the spyglass shut and turned around. He was grinning from ear to ear.

"I'm going to say hello."

"You're going to fight him."

"Of course. It's Newgate."

"I'm coming," Rayleigh said, and he tried to stand, and the entire deck heaved up to dissuade him. Roger put a finger on his forehead and pushed him back against the mast, without forcing, the way you put a child back to bed.

"You stay there and you drink water."

He had already swung over the rail. Rayleigh heard him go down the rope ladder, jump into the boat, swear because he had jumped too soon, laugh, then row. He rowed standing up, as always, and as always the two oars touched the water at different moments, so that the boat advanced toward the islet in zigzags, like a dog that has caught a scent.

Rayleigh watched him go, the empty cup on his knees.

Roger had kept the flask.

It was the fourteenth day, and Newgate was talking to a gull.

Not to all the gulls on the islet. To one, a big gray one with a yellow-stained beak, which came to land on the gunwale of the boat every morning at the hour when he gutted the fish and which left again with the guts without hurrying. It didn't answer, obviously. It looked at him sideways, out of one eye then the other, with the polite patience of someone waiting for you to finish talking so they can get what they came for, and Newgate thought that was already more attention than he had been given in years.

He hadn't named it. Giving a name to something you were going to leave behind was the sort of foolishness you paid for later.

The islet had nothing for him. It was barely longer than the deck of a galleon, with a beach of gray sand, a heap of black rocks at one of its points and three palm trees that all leaned the same way, like three men listening to the same conversation. But there was a spring that ran between two rocks, cold water with a slight taste of iron, and Newgate had stopped there on the fourth day to fill his waterskins, and he hadn't left again, because he had nowhere to go and the water, at least, was good.

The boat, he had bought the day after God Valley from an old fisherman, on the first inhabited island he came across. He had paid three times its price. The man was shaking so hard as he handed him the line that he had nearly dropped it, and Newgate hadn't wanted to be a man who takes a boat from a trembling old man; he had set the purse down on the quay and left without waiting for change. It was too small. Sitting in it, his knees came above the gunwales and the oars felt like chopsticks to him. At night, he slept on his back in the bottom of the hull, his legs in the water up to the calves, and he woke with crabs between his toes.

He was used to it. Everything was always too small. Tavern doors, chairs, hammocks, staircases, the tables where nobody ever made room for him because he would have taken three places. He had learned to go in sideways, to sit on the floor, to eat standing up, and he didn't complain about it, because there was nobody to complain to.

On Rocks's ship, at least, there had been room. It was a ship built for monsters, and monsters had been put in it. But people didn't eat together there. Each man fetched his share from the galley and ate it in his own corner, back to the wall and one hand free, and the only meal Newgate remembered taking beside anyone was one stormy night when the deck was too wet to sit anywhere else. When a man went over the side, you searched his hammock before you went to look at the sea.

He had talked about his dream, back there. Once. Once only, one night when he had drunk more than he should, to a man who asked him what he meant to do with his share of the world once it had been divided up. He had answered: a family. And they had laughed for a week. Every evening of that week, he had found a rag doll in his hammock, always the same one, and every morning he had thrown it into the sea. He never found out who fished it back out. On the eighth evening there was no doll, because nobody found it funny anymore, and Newgate had never spoken of it again.

He had kept it all the same, that dream. He kept it the way you keep a coin at the bottom of a pocket you never empty, without taking it out, just to feel from time to time that it's still there.

He didn't think about God Valley. It was a rule he had set himself on the first day and kept well enough as long as the sun was up. At night, in the bottom of the boat, it was harder. He didn't know what he had felt watching what happened to Rocks. He knew only that he would have liked it to be grief, and that it wasn't, and that perhaps that was the saddest part: to have spent years on a ship and have nobody to mourn when he left it.

The silence, on the other hand, he knew what he thought of that. Newgate hated silence. He hated it the way you hate a draft you can't find, that comes under every door and follows you into every room. This morning, gutting the fish, he had heard himself say "it's going to rain" to the gull, out loud, and his own voice had startled him, hoarse from so little use. He had been ashamed of it, a stupid shame, the shame of a big man making conversation with birds, and he had carried on anyway, because stopping would have been worse.

"It's going to rain this afternoon," he repeated to the gull, tossing it a fish head. "You'd do better to go home."

The gull swallowed the fish head and went home nowhere.

He saw the sails a little before noon.

He recognized them before he could even make out the flag. He had fought that ship often enough to know the cut of its sails by eye, eleven times, if you counted the one nobody won because the storm arrived before the end. The Oro Jackson dropped anchor off the rocky point, at a prudent distance, and a boat detached itself from her side.

Newgate didn't get up. He had thought somebody would come eventually. Marines, probably, or bounty hunters, or an old hand from Rocks's ship who had decided it was better to settle their old scores while Newgate was alone. He had already decided he would fight whoever it was, without enthusiasm. He hadn't thought of Roger.

Roger rowed standing in the boat. The two oars struck the water at different moments, so that the boat advanced in zigzags, and at every zig he shouted Newgate's name across the water, at full voice, the way you call somebody in for dinner.

Newgate clenched his jaw.

Roger jumped out of the boat far too early, sank to his waist, swore, started laughing, and dragged the boat up to the beach by the line, wading. He was streaming. He had kelp caught on one boot. He looked as pleased as if he had just found treasure.

"Newgate! Ah, there you are!"

"Go away, Roger."

"I've only just got here."

"That's why I'm telling you now."

Roger didn't go away. He walked around the camp, hands on his hips, looking at everything with sincere interest: the boat, the fire, the fish on its stone, the waterskins lined up by the spring, the gull, which was eyeing him sideways.

"Is that your boat?"

"Yes."

"Your knees must stick out."

Newgate didn't answer.

"And who's he?"

"Nobody."

Roger crouched by the fire, tore off a piece of fish with his fingers, burned himself, ate it anyway while blowing on it, and thought it over as he chewed.

"Not salty enough," he said.

Newgate felt a familiar, old irritation rise in him, the one that always rose when Roger was within a hundred meters, and he was almost relieved to recognize it. That was something he knew how to do.

"Fight me," Roger said, getting up.

"No."

"Come on."

"I don't feel like it, Roger."

"You never feel like it, and you always end up hitting harder than me."

He backed three paces onto the sand and drew his sword. His trousers were soaked to the thigh and he had fish at the corner of his mouth, and he was smiling.

"I'll count to three. One..."

He attacked on one.

Newgate rolled out of the boat, grabbed his bisento lying along the hull and parried the second blow on his knees in the sand, so hard that the shock scattered the fire. He was furious. He was also, and that was far worse, glad to have heard somebody shout his name.

The gull flew off.

Fighting Newgate was like going out in a thunderstorm knowing you'd come home soaked to the bone, and going out anyway, at a run, because the rain is warm.

Roger loved it. He had never told anyone except Ray, who hadn't believed him, or who had believed him and pretended not to, which came to the same thing. There were men you fought to win, and men you fought to survive, and then there was Newgate, whom Roger fought because it was the only time he could hit with everything he had without being afraid of breaking something.

For the first quarter of an hour, they said nothing. The bisento passed a hair from his head and cut the first palm tree in two, cleanly, at shoulder height, and the trunk stayed upright for a second before noticing it was no longer attached to anything. Roger jumped over the next blow, came down in water up to his ankles, went up the black rocks of the point in three strides, and Newgate followed. The sand flew. The rocks burst under their feet. When Roger finally parried head-on, with everything he had, with Ace, his sword, the shock went up into his teeth, and above them the clouds tore from one end to the other like old canvas, and the sun fell through the split onto the whole islet.

Roger burst out laughing.

That was when he noticed Newgate was fighting badly.

Not badly for anyone else. For anyone else, Newgate was still a natural disaster with a mustache. But Roger had faced him eleven times and knew the weight of his blows by heart, and these were heavier and slower, especially on the left. He had lost weight. Under the torn shirt, a gray bandage went around his ribs, stained brown on the left flank, redone in a hurry by someone who'd had nobody to hold the end of the dressing.

Roger didn't strike left. He didn't really decide it. His arm decided for him, and he let it.

"Stop that," Newgate growled, blocking a blow that came, once again, from the side where he wasn't hurt.

"Stop what?"

"Sparing me."

"I'm not sparing you. I've got a cramp."

Newgate shoved him off with a shoulder that sent him rolling three meters over the rocks, and Roger got up laughing, his palms grazed.

They ended up back on the beach, near the boat the fight had overturned, blades crossed, so close to each other that Roger could feel Newgate's breath on his forehead. They were both pushing. Neither of them moved an inch. The sand gave way under their heels.

And Roger, because he was Roger, asked the question.

He always asked it. He had asked it of kings and of cooks, of Marines he had just knocked out and who answered him from the bottom of a launch, of children on quays, of old women selling fish, and of a parrot, once, on an island in the South Blue, which had answered "biscuit," and Roger still considered that one of the most honest answers anyone had ever given him. He had never asked it of Newgate. In eleven fights, they had never had the time. There had always been a ship going down, a storm coming in, somebody bellowing orders from a deck.

Today, there was nobody to bellow.

"Hey, Newgate. What's your dream?"

Newgate blinked. The pressure on the bisento slackened by a hair, then by another.

And his face changed.

It started with the jaw, which loosened, then the crease between the eyebrows, which smoothed away, then something at the back of the eyes that Roger wouldn't have known how to name, and the whole face gave at once, like a door swollen with damp that finally opens when you've stopped pushing. Roger had never seen him like that. He hadn't even known that face could do that.

"A family," Newgate said.

He said it gently. He said it the way you say the name of the island where you were born, to somebody who doesn't know it.

Roger noticed he had lowered Ace. He didn't remember deciding to.

He stood frozen there, the point of the sword in the sand, looking at that face he thought he knew. Roger had heard a great many ambitions in his life. He knew what they looked like: they had teeth, they looked over your shoulder toward something they wanted to take, and the men who carried them all had the same hard little glint at the back of the eyes as they said them. A dream, a real one, looked at nobody. It looked ahead. And the ones who had one all wore the same face saying it, the face Newgate wore at that instant, the face of a child who is asked what he wants for his birthday and has always known.

Eleven fights. Eleven times, Roger had left in a better mood than he had arrived in, and he had never wondered why. He knew now. This man was good. Good all the way down, under the bisento and the bad-tempered face. Good as bread.

Roger started laughing.

He laughed because he was pleased. There was no other reason. Roger always laughed when he was pleased, and he had rarely been so pleased in his life.

Newgate didn't react.

He lowered his bisento, planted it in the sand and sat down heavily on the overturned hull of his boat, elbows on his knees. He wasn't looking at Roger. He was looking at the sea, and he was waiting. He was waiting for the laughter to pass, with the patience of someone waiting out a downpour under an awning, because he had seen others and they all stop in the end.

Roger saw it, and his laugh stuck in his throat.

He thinks I'm making fun of him.

He didn't know who had laughed the first time. He suddenly very much wanted to know, and to pay him a visit.

He jumped onto the nearest rock to put himself level with Newgate's eyes, which actually put him a little above them, for once, and he liked that a great deal.

"What kind of family?"

Newgate raised his eyes to him. There was wariness in them, the wariness of a cat being called that doesn't yet know whether it's for the dish or for the bucket of water.

"Brothers?" Roger pressed. "Parents? Children?"

Newgate looked at him for a long while, visibly hunting for the trap. Then he shrugged, and his shoulders were so wide that the gesture took a certain amount of time.

"Doesn't matter," he said. "I'd love them all."

Roger took a step back.

His heel slipped on the wet rock and he had to catch himself with one hand. He had taken blows from Newgate that had cracked his ribs, he had taken Garp's, Rocks's, the sea's own, and none of them had made him step back like those few words, said in the tone of a man announcing that it would rain that afternoon.

I'd love them all.

Then he smiled. He felt the smile come up on his face before he knew what he was going to say, and he said it anyway, because he had always done it that way and it hadn't served him too badly so far.

"Can I be your first brother, then?" He opened his arms, Ace still at the end of one of them. "Come on, we'll have a great time!"

Newgate looked at him as though he had just grown a second head.

"Come on!" Roger pressed. "You said you'd love them all anyway!"

There was a silence. A real one, long enough for the gull to come back and land on the rocky point and look at them out of one eye, then the other.

And Newgate burst out laughing.

It came all at once, from the bottom of his chest, and it was like nothing Roger knew. It was an enormous, lurching laugh, full of r's that rolled over one another like badly lashed barrels in a hold in heavy weather, gurararara, and the two remaining palm trees shivered with it, and the gull left again in protest. Newgate laughed bent double, one hand on his bandage because it must have hurt like hell, and he laughed anyway.

In eleven fights, Roger had never heard him laugh. He decided on the spot that he wanted to hear it again, and often, and that it would henceforth be one of the aims of his life.

He went through his belt and drew out the flask he had confiscated from Ray that very morning. It was still warm from having been against his side.

"They say legends always have a grain of truth in them, don't they?" He shook the flask, and the sake sloshed inside. "There you go, then. We share sake and we become brothers. What do you say?"

Newgate's laugh stopped dead.

He looked at the flask. Then he looked at Roger, and Roger watched him hunt for the joke in his face, really hunt for it, everywhere, at the corner of the eyes, at the corner of the mouth, where people usually hide it. He didn't find it, since there wasn't one.

"Are you sure?"

He had said it very quietly. Roger would have sworn a man that size couldn't speak that quietly.

Roger started laughing again, because the question was absurd.

"Well, yes! Why wouldn't I help you make your dream come true, if I can?"

He unscrewed the cap and took a long swallow. Ray's sake was dreadful: a harbor sake, harsh and lukewarm, that smelled of varnish and bad decisions. Roger grimaced, wiped his mustache with the back of his hand and held out the flask.

Newgate took it.

He took it with a delicacy Roger had never seen in him, with the tips of his thumb and forefinger, the way you pick up a fledgling fallen from the nest. In his hand, Rayleigh's pewter flask looked like a thimble. He didn't raise it to his lips. He looked at it.

He looked at it for a long time.

Roger had never known how to wait. He talked through silences, he talked through meals, he talked through night watches and he talked in his sleep, Ray reproached him with it often enough. He said nothing. He sat down on his rock, laid Ace across his knees and counted the waves that came to die on the gray sand, because you have to occupy your head one way or another.

At the twentieth, he thought that it couldn't be easy.

Not if that was his dream. Rocks had died fourteen days earlier, a death nobody liked to remember, and Roger had been there, he had seen it. Newgate had spent years on that ship, and that ship no longer existed, and here he was alone at sea in a boat his knees stuck out of, on a rock with three palm trees and a gull. Two palm trees, now. Roger felt a little guilty about the palm tree.

And with his size, on top of it. A man like Newgate couldn't walk into a tavern without the tavern going quiet. He couldn't sit at a table, or sleep in a hammock, or take passage on a merchant ship, or lose himself in a crowd on an evening when he didn't feel like being alone. Everything that other people used to keep from being alone was too small for him.

At the fortieth wave, Roger thought about the end of God Valley.

About the smoke, and the ships fleeing in every direction at once. He had looked for Newgate in the middle of all that and hadn't found him, but he had seen the others go, each his own way, and not one had looked back. Nobody had shouted his name. The question had stayed stuck in his throat for fourteen days, through the thirteen mornings when he had climbed into the shrouds to ask the lookout "anything?", through the islands he had picked one by one on the chart while telling Ray it was for the pleasure of seeing the country.

He had never known what he would say to Newgate when he found him.

He had just said it.

At the sixty-third wave, Newgate raised the flask to his lips and drank.

One swallow. For him it was barely enough to wet his mustache, and the flask came away empty. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, slowly, kept the flask in his closed fist, looked at the sea, and said nothing.

Roger held out for three more waves. It was his record.

"Can I call you Eddy now?"

Newgate turned his head toward him, slowly, and the look he gave him would have made an entire fleet back off.

"Not in your dreams."

Roger tipped backward off his rock and landed in the sand on his back, and he laughed so hard his stomach hurt, arms spread, the sun in his eyes, with Newgate's great lurching laugh starting up again above him, more quietly this time, as though he didn't want to be caught laughing twice in the same day.

When he had calmed down, he propped himself up on his elbows.

"Come aboard."

"Your ship is too small."

"It's solid."

"It's too small for me, Roger."

"You'll duck." Roger got up and brushed the sand off his trousers, which did no good, since they were still wet. "And besides, there's someone I want you to meet."

"I know your crew."

"Not everybody."

They righted the boat together. Newgate rowed, because the two of them in Roger's boat would have sunk it, and Roger sat in the bow facing him, the boat towed behind, and he talked the whole way across. He told him about every man aboard, one after another. About Gaban, who snored on three different notes depending on what he had eaten. About the cook, who cried at songs and whom it was better not to look at while he cried. About the lookout, who had the best eye on the Grand Line and the worst sense of direction. About Ray, who would be in a foul mood because of the flask, and also because of something else it was better not to talk about, and whom he mustn't take personally. He introduced them all, with their habits and their faults, so that Newgate would arrive already knowing who was who and not come aboard a ship full of strangers.

Newgate didn't ask a single question. But he rowed a great deal more slowly than he needed to.

He kept the empty flask clamped against the oar the whole way across.

Roger didn't ask for it back.

He didn't take the rope ladder.

Rope ladders had never been made for him. He moored the boat against the Oro Jackson's side, waited for the swell to lift it, took the rail in both hands and hauled himself over in a single movement, without a jolt, because he had learned long ago that you come aboard a ship that's too small the way you walk into the house of someone who's asleep. The rail groaned under his palms anyway. He let go of it at once.

He set his first foot above a beam, where the deck would bear, never between two. It was the first thing he had learned at sea and the only one nobody had ever taught him. The planks creaked at length, from the forecastle to the stern, like an old bed when you sit down on the edge of it, and Newgate ducked to pass under the boom and stood there, half bent, waiting for the ship to decide whether it would have him.

Everybody had stopped.

The two men restitching a sail at the bow had their needle in the air. The cook, sitting on the hold cover, had red eyes and a half-peeled potato in his hand, and he let it fall into the bucket, where it made a small watery sound. Somebody, higher in the rigging, whispered "it's Newgate" to somebody else who already knew. Hands slid toward belts, without much conviction.

Roger came over the rail behind him, dripping, and spread his arms.

"Lads! It's Newgate!"

"We can see that," somebody said.

"He's with me."

The hands left the belts. Not all at the same time, but all of them.

At the foot of the main mast, a man was stretched out on his back with a wet towel over his face. Newgate recognized him by his hair before he even lifted a corner of the towel: Rayleigh, whom he had fought almost as often as Roger, and who was now looking at him out of one bloodshot eye, from his feet to his head, slowly, without a word. Rayleigh's gaze stopped at his hand.

"That's my flask," he said.

Newgate looked down. His fist was still closed around it; he had forgotten. He opened his hand and held it out to Rayleigh, with the tips of his fingers.

"Thank you," he said.

Rayleigh took the flask, shook it near his ear and heard nothing. He shook it a second time, to be sure.

"It was half full."

"Not anymore." Roger was beaming. "We shared the sake. We're brothers."

Newgate waited for the laugh.

He knew exactly when it was going to come. He could have counted it on his fingers: one second to understand, one second to look at Newgate's size, one second to look at Roger's, and then the laugh, and then the others following. He braced himself, shoulders drawn in a little, the way you brace for a wave on the beam.

Rayleigh didn't laugh.

He looked at him again, longer this time. He looked at the gray bandage under the torn shirt, the knees covered in sand, the salt that had dried in his hair in white crusts, the hand that had held the flask and no longer knew what to do with itself. Then he turned his head toward Roger.

"Is he staying for dinner?"

"Obviously."

"Then he needs a chair."

Rayleigh got up. He did it in two stages, one hand on the mast and the other on his forehead, and the towel fell at his feet, and he didn't pick it up. He crossed the deck to the hold cover walking very straight, like men who drank too much the night before and don't want it noticed, and he shouted down the hatch: "Two full barrels, the heaviest. And the sail-locker door. The one that doesn't shut properly." Then he went down the ladder and disappeared.

Newgate stood there, his head under the boom, his hand still open where the flask had been.

In his whole life, nobody had ever wondered where he was going to sit.

He didn't know what to do with that hand. He eventually closed it, around nothing.

That was when he heard crying.

A thin, furious little cry, coming up from the after part of the ship, and like nothing you usually hear on a deck, not a pulley, not a gull, not a man. A cat, he thought at first. His hand went looking for his bisento, which he had left in the boat. The cry climbed a tone and became a sort of shrill, outraged howl, full of reproach.

He looked at Roger.

Roger was smiling. He had the smile of someone who has saved the best for the end of the meal and can't wait to see the guests' faces.

He crossed the deck to the foot of the mizzenmast, where there was a chest with its lid propped open by a wooden spoon. Against the chest, a man was asleep sitting up, his back against the ironwork, his mouth wide open and his hand half sunk into it, as though he had fallen asleep holding something that had eventually got away from him. Newgate recognized Gaban, the one who snored on three notes. He was snoring on the second.

Roger plunged both hands into the chest and pulled out a baby.

A real one. A baby of about a year, in a shirt too big for him, with a tuft of red hair, almost scarlet, planted on top of his skull. He was howling, fists clenched, his face all creased with rage.

"A baby?" Newgate's voice came out far too loud, and the men at the sail jumped. "Are you out of your mind?"

"You wanted a family, didn't you?" Roger was holding the child out at arm's length, under the armpits, like a fisherman showing off his best catch to the whole port. "Say hello to your nephew! This is Shanks."

Newgate found nothing to answer. He opened his mouth, nothing came out, and he closed it again.

Nephew.

Roger came closer and held out the baby.

Newgate didn't move. He looked at his own hands. They were hands that broke things: masts, doors, ships' hulls, half a palm tree an hour earlier. He had never known how to do anything else with them.

"I'll break him," he said.

"You won't."

"Roger."

"Open your hand."

He opened his hand, because he was being asked to and didn't know what else to do, and Roger set the child in it.

He weighed nothing. Less than a sack of flour, less than a full waterskin. He fitted entirely into the hollow of his palm, sitting as though in the bottom of a boat, and his little legs didn't even reach the edge. Good grief, he was ridiculously small. Newgate had never held anything that small that was alive, and warm, and breathing, and he stood absolutely still, arm out, not daring to bend a single finger, while the ship rocked gently under his feet.

For once, there was room.

The baby stopped crying.

He hiccupped twice, sniffed, and raised two big black eyes still full of tears toward Newgate. He examined him very seriously, from bottom to top, taking his time, with the air of a customs officer looking at a dubious passport. Then he reached both arms toward Newgate's face, opening and closing his fingers, over and over, toward the mustache.

He couldn't reach it. He was a good forearm's length short.

Intrigued, Newgate brought his hand closer to his face. Slowly, very slowly, until the little fingers brushed the hairs of his mustache.

The baby grabbed them with both hands and pulled with all his strength.

It hurt. It hurt ridiculously, unbelievably much for something that small, and Newgate made a grimace that creased his whole face and brought tears to his eyes. He didn't pull back. With the tip of the forefinger of his other hand, he set about detaching the fingers one by one, with infinite care, while the child, delighted, caught two more every time he freed one.

Roger exploded with laughter.

He laughed so hard he had to sit down, and he sat down on the edge of the chest, right on Gaban's hand.

Gaban woke up screaming. He tore his hand out of the chest, looked at the empty chest, and his face went through several colors. "Where is he? He was there! He was there a minute ago, Roger, I swear he was..."

He saw the baby in Newgate's hand. He saw Newgate. He stayed with his mouth open, like a man who has fallen asleep on watch and woken up in another country.

"Gaban," Roger said, wiping his eyes. "Meet my brother."

Gaban looked at Newgate. He looked at Roger. He looked at the slate nailed to the mast, as though a seventh rule might appear on it to tell him what to do.

"All right," he said.

Then he pulled out from under the chest a ledger with a cover warped by the damp, opened it to the right page, and wrote something in it in his careful handwriting, his tongue sticking out slightly. Newgate, who was well placed to read over his shoulder, read: Early afternoon. Woke up. Didn't cry long. Held by Newgate.

His name was there, among the bottles and the nappies, between a line that said two tins and another that said a tooth?? (to be confirmed).

Newgate detached the last finger from his mustache.

He looked at the child in the hollow of his hand, and the child looked at him, and Newgate smiled. He didn't notice it right away. He felt it afterward, the way you feel you've left a window open from the air across your face. A very soft smile, like none he knew himself to have.

Shanks had already forgotten the mustache. He had got to his feet. He wobbled, sat back down on his bottom, got up again by clinging to the base of Newgate's thumb, and took three steps, then four, across the palm, laughing out loud. He reached the edge. Newgate's fingers came up by themselves, without his asking them to, to make a fence, and the child bumped into the forefinger, burst out laughing, turned around and set off running the other way, where the little finger was already up waiting for him.

He ran from one edge of his hand to the other as though on a playground built especially for him. And every time he reached the edge, a finger was already there.

My nephew, Newgate thought.

He tried the word out. It was far too big for a fellow that size, or else it was the other way around, he didn't know. He put it away with the other one, at the bottom of the pocket he never emptied.

Roger wasn't laughing anymore. He was still sitting on the chest, elbows on his knees, looking at the two of them without saying anything, which from Roger was worth a speech.

Later, Rayleigh came up from the hold dragging a door, followed by two men rolling two barrels, and he built the chair in the middle of the deck without asking anybody's opinion.

Newgate didn't sit down right away.

His hands were full.

Tom had always judged people by the way they came aboard a ship.

There were those who came aboard as owners, setting foot on the deck as though they had already paid for it, and those who came aboard as customers, eye on the finishing and finger on the joints, hunting for the plank that would justify a discount. There were those who came aboard without looking at all, because a ship, to them, was just a road with planks on it. And then there was Roger, for whom Tom had had to invent a category of his own. Roger jumped. He jumped from the quay, from the boat, from the yard next door, and he always landed in the same place, above the third beam to port, the one Tom had doubled while building the Oro Jackson because he had seen the captain jump once and understood he would never stop.

The man who came aboard behind him that morning did not jump.

He waited for the swell to lift the ship against the quay, took the rail in both hands and went over it in a single movement, without a jolt, and he set one foot above a beam, then the other above the next, never between two. He walked on the Oro Jackson the way you walk in a house where children are asleep. Tom, who had spent his life building ships for people who didn't know how to walk on them, watched him take three steps and decided he liked him.

He measured him without meaning to, because he measured everything. A good two meters taller than the galley door. The boom at nose height. A deck that would bear him, but wouldn't enjoy bearing him for long. And in the middle of the deck, at the exact spot where the beams crossed, there was the ugliest thing Tom had ever seen on one of his ships: a door laid flat across two barrels, with a second door nailed upright for a back, the hinges still on it and the handle sticking out of the armrest.

"Who did that?"

"I did," Rayleigh said from the rail, without turning around.

"It shows."

"Tom!" Roger already had his arms around his shoulders, which was no small undertaking. "Tom, meet Newgate. He's my brother."

Tom burst out laughing, a big laugh that shook his whole jaw. "Tahahaha! He doesn't look much like you."

"You don't choose your family. Well, you do. I chose him."

Newgate sighed. Tom had the impression it was a sigh that had seen a lot of use these past weeks.

They stayed four days at the yard. Tom raised the frames of the galley, the captain's cabin and the heads, that last at the crew's express request. He doubled the beams under the middle of the deck. He replaced the boom with a higher one, by a forearm's length, just enough for Newgate to pass under it by lowering only his head. On the third day, he offered to make a proper chair, in oak, the right size, with a back that wouldn't creak.

"No," Newgate said. "That one's mine."

Tom looked at the chair. He looked at Rayleigh, who was looking elsewhere with a great deal of application. Then he went and got oak battens and brass corners, and he reinforced the door from underneath, and he set a brass corner at each corner of the seat so it wouldn't splinter, and he changed nothing else, not even the handle.

On the evening of the fourth day, Roger came and sat on his workbench.

"I want you to build him a ship."

"Build who?"

"Newgate. A big one. For him and for his family."

"What family?"

"The one he's going to have." Roger had the face of a man stating the obvious. "It's our new mission. We're going to help Eddy start his family."

"Don't call me that," Newgate said from the other end of the workshop, where he was sitting on the floor, his back against a hull under construction.

Tom pulled out his order book and set it on his knees. "What do you want, then?"

Newgate didn't answer right away. Tom was used to it; people who really knew what they wanted always took longer to say it than the others.

"Doors nobody has to go through sideways," Newgate said at last. "A table long enough for everybody to eat together. And a whale at the prow."

"Why a whale?"

"They travel as a family."

Tom's pencil stopped on the page. He set it going again.

"One year," he said.

"A year?" Roger nearly fell off the workbench. "Tom, you built the Oro Jackson in—"

"The Oro Jackson was a ship for a crew that already existed. That one is a ship for a crew that doesn't exist yet. It has to be able to grow with them." Tom closed his book. "That takes a year. Don!"

"What's she going to be called?"

Newgate shrugged, slowly, the way he did everything.

"I'll tell you when I come to fetch her."

Tom left the name box empty.

People always found it when they saw their ship for the first time.

Roger made his first attempt that same evening, in a tavern in the dock quarter, and Rayleigh understood from the first sentence that the mission was going to be a long one.

The barmaid was pretty, red-haired, and visibly tired. Roger leaned on the counter with the smile of a man about to strike a very good bargain.

"Good evening! Do you like tall men?"

She looked him up and down. "Not that much."

"Not me. Him."

He pointed to the back of the room, where Newgate was sitting on the floor, because no chair in the tavern had wanted him, his back against the wall and his knees drawn up nearly to his chin, drinking from a bucket the landlord had brought him without being asked. Newgate looked up, saw Roger's finger pointed at him, and looked straight back down into his bucket.

"He lifts ships," Roger explained. "He doesn't snore. He knows how to gut a fish. And look at that mustache. Look at it."

The barmaid looked at the mustache. Then she looked at Roger, and went to serve somebody else.

In four months, Rayleigh counted seventeen attempts. Roger only claimed fifteen, because he refused to count the baker's wife in Saint Poplar, who was married and whose husband had come out of the back room with a rolling pin, nor the woman officer whose qualities Newgate's he had extolled for a good ten minutes on a quay before noticing the uniform. Rayleigh counted them all. He considered that the flight that followed the officer was an integral part of the attempt.

Roger was hopeless with women. There was no other way to put it. He talked to them the way he talked to everybody, too loudly and too fast, with the conviction of a man selling a ship he's very proud of, and he never noticed the moment they stopped listening. He recited Newgate's qualities in an order that changed with his mood, but the mustache always came first.

And in those four months, Newgate did not leave once.

That was what eventually struck Rayleigh. Newgate hated every one of those evenings, you could see it in the way he drew his shoulders in at the back of the taverns, as though to take up less space, and he would have walked out of any room in three strides if he had wanted to. He stayed. He drank his bucket, he endured the mustache, and sometimes, when Roger came back empty-handed scratching his head, he had a very small smile that he hid in the bucket.

It took Rayleigh a while to understand that Newgate didn't care in the slightest about the barmaids. He stayed because it was Roger doing it, and he was doing it for him.

It was Newgate who put an end to it, one rainy evening, after the seventeenth.

"Roger. That isn't how it works."

"How, then?"

Newgate turned his bucket between his hands.

"I don't know. It happens, that's all."

"Happens how?"

Newgate looked at him for a long moment.

"Like you," he said.

Roger didn't answer. Rayleigh, who had known him longer than anyone, had only seen him at a loss for words four times in his life. That made five.

Then Roger straightened up, looking illuminated.

"So I need to go and attack people at random."

"No," Rayleigh said.

They heard about the base in a fishermen's tavern, from a woman who wasn't talking to anyone.

She was sitting alone at the corner table, in front of a glass she wasn't drinking, and she had said out loud, to nobody in particular, that her son had disappeared from the port two months earlier, and that other children had disappeared from the neighboring islands, and that the Marine ships anchored two days further east sometimes flew a flag you weren't allowed to look at. Nobody had answered her. The fishermen had put their heads down into their glasses.

Roger had got up so fast that he knocked the table over.

They attacked the following night. Newgate split the outer wall with a single punch, and Roger's wave dropped half the garrison without his needing to draw his sword, and what was left of the other half didn't last long. The cells were in the basement, under the quay. The staircase was too narrow for Newgate. He widened the walls with his shoulders on the way down.

He found the office before the cells.

It was a small clean room, with a lamp, a table, a chair, and a ledger open on the table. Newgate knew how to read a ledger. He had watched Gaban keep one for months, with lines that said two tins and a tooth?? (to be confirmed), and he leaned over this one without thinking, out of habit.

There was a column of numbers. No names: numbers. A column of dates. A column of remarks, in a fine, even hand, the hand of a man who takes care: Reaction to fruit: none. Sent on. Reaction to fruit: partial. Sent on. Reaction to fruit: fatal. And on the far right, a column narrower than the others, holding nothing but crosses.

Newgate counted the crosses for the last month.

He counted twenty.

He counted again, because he must have got it wrong. He hadn't got it wrong.

The last number on the page had no cross. Beside it, the careful hand had written: P. Zoan, bird. Blue flames. Regeneration. Priority. Do not damage further.

Further.

He closed the ledger. He closed it very gently, as though afraid of waking something inside it.

They got four children out of the cells. Four out of all the cells in that corridor. There were three girls in the same one, pressed into a corner, one of them in front of the other two, and when Roger came up to the bars with the key, they didn't cry out. They made no sound at all. It was worse than if they had screamed. Roger stopped dead, backed up a step, and set the key down on the floor in front of the bars, and backed up again. Newgate stayed at the corridor door. He was too big to go in, and he had understood that it was better if he didn't.

The boy was alone in the last cell, at the far end. He was ten, perhaps. He wore around his neck a sea-prism stone collar too wide for him, which had worn the skin raw, and he looked at Roger with half-closed eyes, the eyes of an animal that has decided to die biting. Roger found the collar's key on the desk. When he opened it, the boy sank his teeth into his hand until it bled and didn't let go.

Roger didn't laugh. He waited, on his knees, his hand in the boy's mouth, for him to tire.

It was through the corridor's air vent that Newgate saw the boat. It was leaving the quay in the dark, without a lantern, and the man rowing wore a white coat and held a case clamped on his knees. He was rowing without hurrying. Newgate raised his fist. One blow, one, and the quay would collapse with the boat on top of it.

And the ceiling of the cells with it. And the four children underneath.

He lowered his fist.

The boat disappeared into the dark. Newgate went back toward the end of the corridor, crouched in front of the last cell as far as the corridor allowed him to, and waited with Roger for the boy to finish biting.

Gaban had learned to make himself small.

He had learned it for Shanks, in the first days, when every time he leaned over the chest the child screamed as though a cliff were falling on him. He had learned to kneel before coming closer, to speak from below, to move slowly, to keep his hands open and low. It had worked. After three weeks, Shanks held his arms out to him.

With the three girls, nothing worked.

It wasn't a question of size. Gaban could make himself as small as he liked, he was still a man, and that was enough. They had settled in the aft cabin, the only one that locked, and when somebody went along the passageway they went silent all at once, all three at the same time, and the silence that came out from under the door was so thick that Gaban slowed his step without meaning to.

Roger did his best. Gaban had never seen him make so much effort over anything, and Roger made considerable efforts over a great many things. He tried talking softly, which he didn't know how to do, and it still came out at half voice as though shouted from a distance. He tried kneeling at the door, and they backed to the far end of the bunk. He tried holding their bowls out to them, and they didn't touch them. On the third day, he set the bowls on the floor on the threshold, backed off to the end of the passageway without turning around, and waited. A hand came out. A bowl disappeared. Roger came back up on deck with wet eyes and said nothing to anybody all evening.

The crew learned fast. You knocked before approaching. You spoke from the end of the passageway. You never stood between them and the door. You never handed anything over hand to hand. It wasn't enough, but it was what they knew how to do, and they did it.

On the fifth day, Roger went to Rayleigh, and Rayleigh went to fetch the Den Den Mushi.

Shakky arrived nine days later, on a merchant ship she had persuaded to make a detour by means nobody asked her about. She came aboard, looked at the crew, looked at Roger waiting for her at the end of the passageway with a bowl of rice in his hands, and took the bowl from him.

"Thank you, Roger. You can go."

The first evening, she tied a red ribbon around the aft cabin's handle. The next morning, she gathered all the men on deck and explained the rule to them. If the ribbon was on the handle, you didn't knock. You went on your way. You asked nothing.

"You haven't done anything wrong," she added, lighting a cigarette. "You're men, that's all. For now, that's enough."

Gaban took it badly for an hour. Then he understood.

What had been done to the three girls, Shakky told nobody, and nobody asked her.

Gaban opened a new page in the ledger. He wrote in it only what Shakky told him through the door, in the evening, when he passed the end of the passageway: ate, slept, ate everything. Once only, after three weeks, she told him something else, and he wrote it carefully, his tongue sticking out slightly.

Laughed.

He underlined it twice.

The boy bit everybody.

He had bitten Roger, then Gaban, then the cook, who had only wanted to give him a second helping. He threw plates. He slept in the hold, between two barrels, and anybody who went down for fresh water found him crouched in the dark with shining eyes. On the first day, when Gaban had tried to wash his neck where the collar had worn the skin away, flames had leapt from his shoulders, blue flames, and Gaban had backed off, dropping the cloth. They hadn't burned him. That had seemed to make the boy even angrier.

He didn't talk. He didn't even give his name.

There was one person aboard he didn't bite, and that was Shanks.

Shanks was two now, or thereabouts, and he ran everywhere, badly, falling over every ten strides, and since he had seen the blue flames he followed the boy everywhere shouting "Fire! Fire! Fire!" in a piercing voice. The boy didn't bite him. He didn't push him away. He simply looked at him, in an odd way, with an expression Newgate couldn't read, and then he walked off, and Shanks followed, and fell, and got up, and shouted "fire" a little louder.

Newgate slept in his chair. He had tried the cabin Tom had enlarged for him, but he preferred the deck, the sky, the sound of the water against the hull. The chair held. The brass corners shone a little under the moon.

It was on a windless night that he saw them.

There was a glow near the chest, at the foot of the mizzenmast. A small blue glow, the size of a candle. Newgate opened one eye without moving his head. The boy was crouched in front of the chest, and Shanks was sitting in it, awake, hands on the rim. Between the two of them, in the hollow of the boy's palm, there was a flame.

Shanks wasn't shouting. For once in his life, he was quiet. He was looking at the flame with enormous eyes, and the flame was reflected in them. Then he burst out laughing and clapped his hands, clumsily, off target, as always, and laughed again.

The boy looked at the flame. Then he looked at the child.

And he began to cry.

He made no sound. He cried the way children cry who have learned that noise is expensive, shoulders shaking, mouth closed, the flame trembling in his hand. Shanks stopped laughing. He reached both hands toward the boy's cheeks, clumsily, and missed, and tried again, and eventually caught one, all wet, which he patted.

The boy put out the flame. He took Shanks in his arms, chest and all nearly, and held him against himself in the dark.

Newgate didn't move.

Something had broken in his chest watching them, and he knew exactly what. That boy had been locked up, tortured, given a number in a clean ledger, and then pirates had torn him out of his cell and dragged him onto a ship where he knew nobody, where everybody was bigger than him and stronger than him, where everybody laughed too loudly, and the only person he had found the courage to show anything to was a two-year-old who couldn't yet say his own name.

Newgate kept his eyes shut until morning.

He didn't move all night, so that the chair wouldn't creak.

"Co! Co! Coooo!"

Roger was holding Shanks out at arm's length and Shanks was howling, red as a crayfish, kicking at the air.

"Coco? You want a coconut? We haven't got any left, Shanks, you rolled them all into the hold."

"Co!"

"A cockerel? We haven't got a cockerel." Roger thought about it. "The chest? You want your chest?"

He put him back in the chest. Shanks howled twice as loud, which Roger wouldn't have thought possible, and started hitting the ironwork with his fists.

"Co! Co! Co!"

Roger took him back out. He tried "coney," "cobnut," "collar," "cockle," and "coming," the last out of despair. He tried bouncing him on his knee. He tried singing, which made things considerably worse. He was beginning to consider throwing himself overboard when an enormous hand came over his shoulder and took the baby from him.

Newgate said nothing. He crossed the deck with Shanks in his palm, walking on the beams, as far as the port rail, where the boy was sitting on the floor, knees against his chest, looking at the sea. He stopped in front of him. The boy jumped violently, flattened himself against the rail, and raised his eyes to Newgate the way you raise your eyes to a wave that's about to come down on you.

Newgate crouched. It took a certain amount of time. Then he held out his hand, with Shanks in it.

The boy looked at the hand. He looked at the baby, who was still crying and holding his arms out to him. And after a long moment, he held out his arms in turn.

Shanks went quiet at once. He let himself slide into the boy's arms, settled against him, sniffed, and then turned around toward Newgate and burst out laughing, clapping his hands, with the delighted air of a child congratulating somebody for finally understanding. Roger, in the middle of the deck, felt a twinge of jealousy he never admitted to. Newgate always understood Shanks the first time. Roger only understood Shanks on the day he learned a new word, and barely then.

"I take it you're Co," Newgate said.

The boy glared at him.

"Marco."

He had said it nastily, almost spitting the word, as though it cost him to give it. Newgate nodded, very serious.

"Pleased to meet you, Marco. My name is Edward."

Roger opened his mouth. He closed it. Edward?

Marco raised his eyes, high, very high, to meet Newgate's. He held them for two seconds. Then he looked down at Shanks, stood up, and went off toward the cabin they had left him, the baby in his arms, without another word. Shanks waved over his shoulder until the door closed.

Roger sighed so hard his shoulders dropped with it.

"You really are better than me with children."

"You are a child, Roger."

Roger shoved him. Newgate, still crouched, shoved him back with a shoulder, not hard, really not hard, and the entire Oro Jackson heeled to port. Roger shoved him with both hands. Newgate pushed him off with the flat of his palm. The ship rolled the other way. Somebody, forward, let out a cry of distress.

"Oi, you two!" Rayleigh had come out of the chart room with a compass in his hand. "We said no brawling on the ship! Spencer's going over the side!"

They turned around. Spencer, who had been fishing off the stern, was hanging from the rail by both arms, legs over the water, his rod clamped between his teeth.

Roger and Newgate lowered their heads at the same time.

"Sorry."

Rayleigh looked at them a moment longer, turned on his heel and went back into the chart room, slamming the door. Roger and Newgate looked at each other. Roger held out for two seconds. Newgate held out for three, and then the great lurching laugh went off, and Roger went with it, and Spencer, who had just hauled himself onto the deck, watched the two of them laugh with the fishing rod still between his teeth.

"Edward," Roger muttered when he had got his breath back. "He got Edward."

"He's ten."

"So?"

Roger sulked until dinner.

He sat down next to Newgate anyway.

Marco never came near Roger.

Newgate noticed it after a week. Marco had started circling the chair, from a distance at first, then from less of a distance, and he sometimes sat at the foot of one of the barrels, his back against the wood, with Shanks on his knees. But Roger only had to come up on deck for Marco to get up and leave. When Roger laughed, Marco flinched. When Roger sang, Marco went down into the hold.

One evening when they had anchored off an island, Marco went ashore alone, without telling anybody. Newgate followed him at a distance. He found him on the beach, sitting on a rock facing the sea, and he sat down in the sand a few meters away, without a word. He had come to be there, not to talk. He had learned that from somebody, he no longer knew who; perhaps from himself, on an islet with three palm trees and a gull.

The moon rose. Marco eventually spoke without turning his head.

"Why do you stay with him?"

"With Roger?"

"He's too pleased. He makes too much noise."

"That's true."

"It draws trouble."

Newgate didn't answer. He had understood, from the way Marco had said it, that it wasn't an opinion. It was a rule, and somebody had paid for him to learn it.

He let the silence last. Marco picked up a pebble, turned it between his fingers.

"Back there, there was a boy," he said. "Thatch. He was eight. He'd arrived after me."

He threw the pebble into the water.

"At the beginning, he laughed all the time. He laughed at nothing. He laughed when we were hungry, he laughed at night, he made faces at the guards. They punished him. He laughed again, so they punished him more." His voice wasn't trembling yet. "After that, he stopped laughing. He started biting. And after that, he stopped talking. He didn't say anything to anybody anymore. Not even to me."

He picked up another pebble. He didn't throw it.

"Once, the doctors pulled my feathers out. To study the fruit. They wanted to see if they'd grow back." The pebble turned and turned between his fingers. "Thatch attacked them. He threw himself at them. He hadn't said anything for weeks, and he threw himself at them screaming."

The pebble stopped.

"They threw him against the wall. He died straight away."

And the voice gave way. Marco doubled over on his rock and began to cry, and this time it wasn't the soundless tears of the night with the flame, it was great sobs that shook his whole body and that he couldn't stop anymore, that came out of him as though they had been waiting behind a door for months. He cried so hard he couldn't breathe. He cried Thatch's name, and words Newgate didn't understand, and he cried on.

Newgate got up. He came closer, very slowly, and when Marco didn't back away, he slid a hand under him and lifted him, rock and nearly all, and held him against his chest.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm truly sorry, Marco. I'd have liked to get there sooner."

Marco clung to his shirt with both hands. He cried against him until he had nothing left to cry, and then a little more, and then his sobs came further apart, and his breathing slowed, and his hands loosened.

He fell asleep. And as he fell asleep, he caught fire.

Newgate nearly dropped him. Blue flames ran over the child's skin, over his arms, over his face, and the whole body folded in, shrank, changed shape in his hand, and it was a bird he was holding against his chest, a little bird of blue and gold flames, no bigger than a chicken, its head under its wing. The flames didn't burn. They were warm, like a blanket just taken from in front of the fire.

And by their light, Newgate saw the rest.

There were holes in the plumage. Not one or two: dozens. Places where the feathers weren't growing back, where the skin was bare, pink and shiny, with little round marks where each feather had been pulled out. There were lines, fine, parallel, along the flank, the kind you make with a blade when you want to take measurements. There was a ring around the neck, where the collar had been, a ring with no feathers at all. And under the folded wing, a scar wider than the others, star-shaped.

Newgate looked at the flames running gently around all those marks without touching them.

He didn't understand. A fruit that regenerated, the ledger had said. So why this? Why did that healing fire pass beside those particular wounds without closing them? Was it the collar, months of sea-prism stone against the skin, that had let the wounds close on their own, without flame, as best they could? Could the fruit only heal what was new? Or was it something else, something Newgate couldn't name, that a child doesn't heal from what he believes he deserved?

He didn't know. He knew nothing about fruits except his own.

He carried Marco back to the ship in the hollow of both hands, wading waist-deep rather than taking the boat, so as not to wake him. He laid him down in his own cabin, the one Tom had enlarged and where he never slept, in the great bed far too big for a bird, and he drew the blanket up under the wing. The bird sighed in its sleep. A flame shivered and fell back.

Roger was waiting for him on deck. He had seen him go.

Newgate told him everything. He sat down in the chair, Roger sat on the deck beside it, his back against a barrel, and Newgate told him about the laboratory, and Thatch, and the wall, and the feathers, and the ring around the neck. Roger didn't interrupt him once. He didn't laugh, he didn't swear, he made no grand speech. He stayed serious from beginning to end, which Newgate had never seen him do for that long.

When it was finished, Roger stayed silent a long while.

"I'm sorry about the little one," he said.

Then he got up and went to bed.

The next day, Roger talked more quietly.

It lasted almost a whole morning.

Marco settled in on his own, like cats that decide one day the house is theirs.

Rayleigh wouldn't have been able to say when it had started. He knew only that one morning, passing the chest, he had found Marco reading the ledger over Gaban's shoulder, and that another morning he had found Marco correcting the ledger, and that after three weeks it was Marco who kept it. He tested the milk on his wrist, not on his tongue. He counted the tins. He noted the teeth. He corrected Gaban's figures in a dry voice, with a little "yoi" at the end of his sentences that nobody knew where it came from and that nobody ever dared point out to him.

With Shanks, he was solemn as a pope. He stopped him climbing the shrouds, eating coins, going near the edge. He carried him everywhere on his hip, and Shanks, whose head was harder than a mast, obeyed Marco the way he obeyed nobody else. Rayleigh once saw Marco plant himself between Shanks and a sailor who had shouted too loudly, fists clenched, with blue flames rising to his ears. The sailor, who was three times his size, apologized.

And he stuck to Newgate.

He walked in his shadow. He sat on the arm of the chair, legs dangling, and stayed there for hours, and Newgate was careful not to move that arm. He fell asleep against the barrel, and sometimes, in the morning, he was found asleep on Newgate's knees without anybody having seen him climb up.

Rayleigh noticed the bread in the third week. Marco was hiding food under the chair, between the two barrels, where nobody would look for it since nobody but Newgate ever sat there: crusts, biscuits, once a piece of cheese that eventually announced itself. Rayleigh said nothing. Nor did Newgate. But in the evening, when he thought everybody was asleep, Newgate would lean over and set an apple on the pile. In the morning, the apple was gone. It went on for weeks. Neither of them ever mentioned it.

And then one morning, Rayleigh saw an apple set on the arm of the chair. Polished, rubbed on a shirt until it shone. Newgate looked at it a long time before eating it.

Marco didn't fly well. He had too many holes in his wings. He tried anyway, from the boom, from the lower yard, from the roof of the chart room, and he fell, and every time he fell, Newgate's hand was underneath. It took Rayleigh a while to notice that Newgate moved his chair according to where Marco meant to jump from. He never watched him do it. He watched the sea, or his glass, or Roger doing something stupid. But the hand was always there.

One evening, after one of their scuffles, Newgate had grazed his knuckles on Roger's head, which was hard. Marco took his hand without asking, pulled it toward him, and laid a flame on it. A tiny blue flame, the size of a candle. The skin closed.

Marco looked at the closed skin, astonished.

"Thank you," Newgate said.

Marco went red to the ears and went off to check the ledger, which had no need of it.

The dinner where it all came out was like any other. Roger, his mouth full, passed the fish dish along, saying: "Here, nephew, help yourself." And Marco helped himself, noticing nothing, but Rayleigh looked up.

"Why nephew?"

"Well." Roger pointed at Newgate with his fork. "He's like his son."

Silence fell on the table.

Marco looked at Newgate. Newgate looked at Marco. And the two blonds went red at the same moment, exactly the same color, from the neck to the hairline, and began looking at their plates with admirable concentration.

Roger, Rayleigh and Gaban made fun of them for a week.

Gaban, in particular, opened a new column in the ledger, next to the tins and the teeth, headed Blushes. He noted every occurrence with the time, and Marco, who now kept the ledger, crossed the column out every morning, and Gaban rewrote it every evening. After seven days they were up to twenty-three. Marco maintained twenty-two, because Tuesday evening's was due to the sun.

It was at the end of that week that Rayleigh proposed Amazon Lily.

The three girls were better. They came out on deck now, when Shakky was with them, and the red ribbon sometimes went whole afternoons untied. But they would never be at ease on a ship full of men, and he knew an island where there weren't any. Shakky agreed. The five of them left on a small fast ship, one calm morning, and the three girls waved from the stern until they couldn't be seen anymore. Roger waved for far longer.

Rayleigh came back eleven weeks later, alone. Shakky had gone home to Sabaody. He didn't drink.

Tom's letter arrived the same month, by a bird that looked as though it had been through a storm. It came to four lines. The ship was ready. The whale was magnificent. The name was missing. Don!

Newgate read it three times. Marco, standing on the armrest, read it over his shoulder, and Rayleigh heard him ask quietly, without looking at him, whether he could come on the new ship.

"If you like," Newgate said.

Marco nodded. He said nothing else. He climbed down off the armrest, went over to the chest and began explaining to Shanks, very seriously, that he would come and see him often, and that Uncle Edward would too, and that it wasn't far, an island or two.

That night, Newgate fell asleep in his chair with Tom's letter clenched in his fist.

Like the flask, on the first day.

They were three days from Water 7 and Marco wasn't sleeping.

He never slept well when there was fog. Fog was the sound of the water against the hull becoming louder than everything else, and the lanterns being no use at all, and the world stopping two meters past the rail. The laboratory had been like that, a world that stopped two meters away. So he had sat on the arm of the chair, knees against his chest, and listened to Edward breathe.

Edward was asleep. He breathed slowly, deeply, and every breath made the back of the chair creak a little, always on the same second, and Marco counted the creaks. Shanks was asleep in his chest, thumb in his mouth, spoon in the corner. The dawn was beginning to whiten the fog without piercing it.

Marco heard the ships before he saw them.

It wasn't a sound of sails. It was a sound of wood, of great timbers, enormous hulls creaking in the swell all around them, ahead, behind, to port, to starboard, hulls doing nothing to hide themselves because they didn't need to. Marco stood up on the armrest. He could see nothing. He could hear everything.

And then a voice came through the fog, amplified by a speaking trumpet, calm and polite.

"Good morning, P. You've grown."

Marco stopped breathing.

He knew that voice. He knew it better than his mother's, which he no longer remembered. It was the voice that said don't move, it'll be quicker, the voice that counted the feathers one by one, the voice that had said note the time while Thatch stopped moving against the wall. His body remembered before he did. His hands began to shake. His legs refused to carry him, and he fell back sitting on the armrest.

"The specimen is on deck," the voice went on, elsewhere, further off, as though speaking to somebody else. "Alive, if you please. As for the rest, do as you like."

There was a whistle. Then ten. Then Marco stopped counting them.

Edward was awake. Marco didn't see him wake; he saw only that Edward's hand was above him, and above the chest, and that Edward had leaned forward, bent double, his back rounded like a roof, and that Marco and Shanks were underneath.

The harpoons struck.

Marco heard the sound they made going in. One, two, three, four. Not into the wood. Into Edward. He felt the shock through the hand held above him, and the hand didn't move.

And then he felt the cold.

He would have known it among a thousand. It was the cold of sea-prism stone, the cold that didn't come from the temperature but from inside, that emptied your arms and your legs, that put out something at the back of you and left you breathing anyway, just enough for you to feel everything. He had worn it around his neck for months. He felt it now through Edward's skin, and he heard Edward's breathing change, grow shorter, heavier, like that of a man carrying too heavy a sack up a staircase.

"Don't move, Marco."

Edward's voice was calm. The chains went taut.

They pulled him backward all at once, all four at the same time, toward ships nobody could see. Edward planted his feet on the beams. The deck screamed under him, the planks burst around his heels, Rayleigh's chair slid two meters, and Edward didn't give an inch. He stayed bent over them, his back pulled by four chains, his hand above their heads.

There was a flash of steel. Roger. The chains fell on the deck with a clatter of scrap iron, cut clean through, and Roger was there, Ace in hand, his face white with rage.

"Gaban!" Rayleigh shouted somewhere. "The little ones!"

Marco didn't move toward Gaban. He threw himself onto Edward's back. There were four shafts of metal driven into his flesh, between the shoulder blades, in the shoulder, lower on the flank, with lengths of chain hanging off the ends, and blood running all around them. Marco put his hands on the first wound and called the fire. He knew how. He had closed Edward's knuckles. He could close this.

His fingers touched the harpoon point.

The flame went out before it was born. The cold came up his arms to the shoulders, and his hands went limp as rags, and he fell to his knees on the deck, winded, with the taste of the laboratory in his mouth.

"Not that, Marco." Edward hadn't turned around. "Go with Gaban. Take Shanks."

"I can—"

"Go."

Gaban scooped him up under one arm and Shanks under the other, and carried them toward the hold cover at a run. Shanks was howling. Marco struggled without strength. Over Gaban's shoulder, through the fog that was finally tearing open, he saw the ships, dozens of sails, a circle of gray hulls all around the Oro Jackson. And in the middle of the deck, he saw Edward.

Four cut chains hung down his back. He picked up his bisento.

He stood up anyway.

Ten ships. Roger counted them while Gaban went down the hold ladder with the little ones. Ten warships in a circle, within cannon range, and on the deck of the largest, three white vice-admirals' coats snapping in the wind. And a man in a lab coat beside them, with a speaking trumpet.

Roger let go of everything.

The wave went out of him like a thunderclap without sound, and on the two nearest ships the sailors dropped like skittles, in whole rows, their eyes rolled back. On the others, they staggered. On the big ship, the three white coats didn't move.

Newgate raised his fist and struck the air.

Nothing happened.

Roger saw him look at his fist, for a second, with an expression he had never seen on him. A child's surprise. Like somebody reaching for a stair rail that has always been there and finding only empty space.

"Don't pull them out!" shouted Rayleigh, who had seen the harpoons. "The heads are barbed, there's one near the artery, he'll bleed out! We'll get them out aboard, with pincers, not now!"

"I don't need it," Newgate said.

And he fought like that.

Roger would never forget it. He didn't yet know how completely he would never forget it, but he already felt it, watching him. Newgate fought with four points of sea-prism stone in his body, without his fruit, with the blood running down his back and pooling under his feet, and he was still the most terrifying thing on that sea. The bisento mowed down the Marines coming over the side in clusters. He stopped a cannonball bare-handed, and the hand kept its shape for a minute. But he was slow. He was slow, he was heavy, he was breathing badly, and with every blow he struck, Roger watched the color leave his face a little more.

The Oro Jackson was taking hits from everywhere. The foremast lost its upper yard. A cannonball went through the chart room from one side to the other. Rayleigh held the stern with half the crew, Roger ran from one side to the other, and they couldn't leave, they couldn't force the circle, because the wind had dropped with the fog and there was nothing left but the swell.

The big ship came alongside their starboard flank. The three vice-admirals jumped aboard.

Roger took two of them for himself. That was what he knew how to do. He drove them forward, away from the hold cover, Ace against two blades black with Haki, and he was laughing, because he always laughed when he fought, but it wasn't a pleased laugh. The third vice-admiral stayed back, a long spear in hand, and waited. Roger didn't understand what he was waiting for.

He understood when the hold cover opened.

Marco was coming out. Of course he was coming out. Gaban must have let go of him for a second to catch Shanks, or he had slipped between his legs, or he had simply pushed the cover up with his head because he couldn't stay down there while Edward bled on the deck. He emerged on all fours, his eyes hunting for Newgate, and on the big ship the man in the lab coat raised his hand.

"The net."

The net went out from the big ship's rail, a weighted net with gray mesh, which opened in the air like a flower above the child.

Roger didn't think. He never thought at moments like that. He let go of the two vice-admirals, jumped, and threw himself between Marco and the net, Ace raised, and he cut. The net fell in two halves on either side of Marco.

And Roger, his arm still in the air, his guard open, saw the spear.

The third vice-admiral had been waiting for that. The net wasn't for Marco. The net was to make Roger jump. The spear came in from the side, black with Haki to the shaft, straight at his chest, and Roger knew, with total clarity, that he wouldn't have time to bring his sword back.

He didn't close his eyes. He never closed them.

Newgate stepped in front of him.

Roger didn't see him arrive. He didn't know how it was possible, with that blood, with that sea-prism stone, with those legs that only half carried him anymore. There had been the spear, and then there had been Newgate's back, that great back with four lengths of chain hanging off it, and then there was the sound.

The spear came out the other side. It stopped a hand's width from Roger's chest.

Nobody moved on the deck.

Newgate closed his hand around the shaft. He pulled on it, slowly, and the vice-admiral, who was still holding the other end, was pulled along with it, and when he was close enough, Newgate raised the bisento in his other hand and brought it down. The vice-admiral didn't get up.

Then Newgate fell to his knees.

Roger caught him. He couldn't catch him, Newgate was three times heavier than he was, so he fell to his knees with him, his arms around what he could reach, his hands full of blood.

"Roger."

"I'm here. I'm here, don't talk, Ray's going to—"

"Pull them out."

Roger took a second to understand. The harpoons. The four points in his back.

"You'll bleed out."

Newgate turned his head. On the big ship and on the two others that had just drawn up against them, the gunports were open. The guns were run out. They were aimed at the deck at point-blank range. The deck, and the hold cover, and Marco who was still on all fours in front of it, and Gaban coming out behind him with Shanks.

"The little ones," Newgate said.

Roger put his hands on the first point.

It was he who pulled them out. He would remember it all his life, and after his life, and after that again. It was he, with his hands, one by one, pulling with all his strength against barbs that didn't want to come. The first gave with a sound he never wanted to hear again. The blood leapt. Newgate didn't make a sound. The second. The third, the one near the artery, and Roger felt the blood run down his forearms to the elbows, warm, far too warm, far too much. The fourth.

Newgate breathed in.

And he stood up.

Roger would have sworn it was impossible. He saw him stand anyway, with a spear through his chest and four holes in his back, he saw him plant his feet on the beams, and he saw the world remember who he was. Newgate raised both fists, one on each side, and struck the air.

The air split like a window pane. The crack went all the way round the horizon. The sea rose, all of it, under the circle of ships, and the circle stopped being a circle. The gray hulls went over like toys in a bath being emptied. The big ship broke in two across the middle, and Roger saw the white coat disappear between the halves. And under the Oro Jackson the sea rose, and rose again, and an immense wave took them from beneath and carried them far from the circle, far from the fog, far from everything, while Rayleigh threw himself on the wheel shouting orders nobody heard.

When the wave set them down, there was nothing but the swell and the sun.

Newgate took three steps. The chair was there, two meters from where it should have been, askew, but upright. He sat down in it. The chair creaked at length. The brass corners held.

Marco got there first. He climbed onto the armrest, then onto his knees, and he put both hands around the spear, on the chest, and he called the fire. The flames came, this time. Blue, small. They ran around the wound and Roger saw the edges draw together, by a hair, then open again. Marco called them again. The flames grew a little. Not enough. They were made for grazed knuckles. For a cut. For a candle.

"It's going to work," Marco said. "It's going to work, yoi."

"Marco."

"A bit longer."

Newgate laid a finger on his two hands. One finger, which covered them entirely.

"That's enough."

"No."

The flames sputtered. Marco clenched his teeth and called them back, and they came back, smaller, and he called them again.

There was a sound of little footsteps on the deck. Shanks had escaped Gaban. He crossed the deck at a run, badly, falling twice, he scaled the barrel using Newgate's foot, and hauled himself onto his knee beside Marco. He looked at Newgate with very round eyes.

"Tache!"

He grabbed the mustache with both hands and pulled with all his strength.

Newgate didn't grimace.

Roger saw it, and that was when he knew. Not before. Not seeing the spear, not pulling out the harpoons, not looking at the blood. In a year, he had seen Shanks pull that mustache hundreds of times, and every time, without exception, Newgate had grimaced from ear to ear. He wasn't grimacing. He was looking at Shanks, and he was smiling, and the mustache was slipping through the little one's fingers without his seeming to feel it.

His hand came to rest on Marco's back. It covered the whole of Marco's back, from the shoulders to the small of it.

Marco looked up. The flames were trembling between his fingers.

"Papa," he said.

Newgate's thumb moved on his back. Once, from top to bottom, slowly.

Then he turned his head toward Roger. Roger was on his knees beside the chair. He didn't remember kneeling.

"Roger."

"I'm here."

Newgate looked at him for a long time. He had the face from the islet, the face of the door that gives when you stop pushing.

"Thank you, little brother."

Roger laughed. He laughed and he was crying at the same time and he no longer knew which was which.

"I'm the elder, idiot. I'm three years older than you."

The great lurching laugh went off from the bottom of Newgate's chest, the way it always went off, all at once, gurara—

It stopped halfway.

The hand slid off the armrest. Marco caught it. He caught it with both hands, in midair, before it touched the deck, and he held it against himself, a hand bigger than the whole of him, and he didn't let go.

Shanks was still holding the mustache. He wasn't pulling anymore. He was looking at Newgate, waiting for the grimace.

Nobody moved on the deck. Rayleigh was at the wheel, both hands on it, his head down. Gaban was standing in the middle of the deck with the ledger against his chest. The wind had got up, at last, now that nobody needed it.

Roger's hands were red to the elbows.

"Eddy?" he said.

He waited.

Nobody told him not in your dreams.

Three days from there, in Tom's basin, there was a ship with a whale at the prow, doors nobody had to go through sideways, and a table long enough for everybody to eat together.

She had no name.