Yiddish for Pirates(92)

Again, the dark shape through the woods and Moishe raised his musket and fired. The forest echoed with the shot. A Gotenyu wail and then the fshhht of an arrow.

“Gevalt,” Shlomo cried. And he fell, his shoulder punctured. The arrow had stuck him through the scar of the “Thou shalt not kill” commandment cut across his chest. Around the rough wood shaft, a tsitseh of blood began to thread down his side.

“So that settles it,” Samuel said. “Man, not animal.”

“But Spanish?” Luigi del Piccolo said. “With bow and arrow?”

“No matter who or what makes you bleed, the blood is still red,” Moishe said.

“If your blood is red,” Samuel said.

“Azoy, I’m not looking to have this confirmed,” Moishe said. “And maybe we should stop so much of it spilling from Shlomo.” He made a bandage from his damp clothes and bound the shoulder.

Two of the remaining able-bodied—Trachim and Yankel—helped him up and we continued toward the tree.

We shlepped on, our flesh made torpid in the heat as if replaced by a ballast of sand. The forest was a shvitz—a steambath—so thick, heavy and sluggish was the air. At this point, treasure hunting was 1 percent slogging and 99 percent perspiration.

We leaked with heat.

Ach. What am I saying? What do I know from shvitzing?

Leave it to those who have sweat glands. I panted like a dog and fanned my wings.

Our less-than-a-minyan trudged on through several grim hours. There was no joy in the honeyed shafts of light that penetrated the dark canopy. Only the gloom of overshadowed distances. From time to time, Shlomo moaned. It wasn’t kvetching, but rather pain weeping from his damaged body. We felt ourselves bewitched, severed from everything we had once known—somewhere, far away, in another existence perhaps. Nu, maybe the existence where we weren’t spooked.

What we remembered returned to us with the shapeless unrest of a dream, a dull and unsettling ache. We shlepped through this strange green world of unfamiliar plants and silence. Yet this stillness did not resemble peace, but the beyzeh evil redaction of an implacable force brooding over a retenish inscrutable intention.

We had thus proceeded for about half a mile and were approaching the brow of a plateau when Luigi del Piccolo, who had already ascended, began to shriek and kvitch. “Ayyy …”

Surely scorpions sawed his nuts while crabs made hand-shadows in his alimentary canal.

The others began to run in his direction.

“He can’t ’a found the treasure,” Samuel said, hurrying past us from the right, “for that’s still a shlepp past the tree, and the tree is surely a good plod yet.”

Indeed, as Moishe and I found when we reached the spot, it was something very different. At the foot of a big pine veined in creeping vines that had partly lifted some of the smaller bones, there was a human skeleton, with a few shmatte-shreds still clinging to its ribs.

“Once, he was a sailor,” Samuel said, examining the rags. “Nu, this is good sea-cloth.”

“Azoy,” Moishe said. “Who were you expecting? Meshiech—the Messiah—maybe?”

“B-b-but what sort of a way is that for bones to lie?” Luigi said, still tzitering trembling in fear. “It’s unnatural.”

And nu, indeed, it was uncanny: but for some disarray (the work, perhaps, of the creatures that had noshed upon him or of the vines that had gradually wormed through his bones) the poor shlepper lay perfectly straight—his feet pointing in one direction, his hands, raised above his head like a diver’s, pointing directly the opposite way.

Moishe stood over the bones. “What’s this dead shmendrick telling us?”

“H-he’s marking half past twelve o’ the clock?” Luigi said.

“Could as well be quarter past nine, or any other time,” Moishe said.

“As always, it’s hard to know which way is up.”

“That’s the emes truth,” Moishe said. “But this is a compass. And there,” he said, pointing to a mountain crag that appeared through the trees, “is the tip-top o’ the left tuches, sticking up like a fat bialy bun. Take a bearing along the line of them bones.”

Samuel removed a compass from the leather bag that hung across his chest. He wiped it dry then held it over the skeleton and aligned it with the peak of the exposed tuches.

“N of NNE,” he said.

“Nu?” said Moishe.

“Nu what?” I asked.

“Fly up and look for the tree.”

I did. There was only one tree that stood out along the bearing marked by the skeleton.

“Nu?” Moishe asked.

“Nu.” I said. “This way.” I pointed with my beak.

And so we marched toward the tree.

“So,” I asked quietly. “This skeleton—Spanish, I wager—is it a trap?”

“Ech. Probably a trap. But if you don’t know where else to go, go toward the tumel—the action.”

We came to another large tree.

But it was just a tree.

We continued descending into the valley between the two hummocks of tuches. The forest began to thin. Rainforest pattern baldness. The way ahead became increasingly clear as more island scalp was revealed.

Then before us: a behemoth of a tree, a darkwood steeple rising halfway to the sky. Hollowed out, we could have made a carrack whole from its Brobdingnagian trunk.