Pirate King by Laurie R. King Page A

“ Mr Fflytte does not have thirteen daughters. There are thirteen girls in the story. ”
    The pirate king craned back to look at me, then again at Fflytte. “ Entendo . Thirteen girls. And they need ’usbands, yes? Then thirteen piratas. ”
    “Just twelve,” Fflytte insisted. “Mabel is already taken by Frederic.”
    Hale spoke up. “Frederic is the apprentice pirate.”
    “ ’Prentice? What is this? ’Prentice?”
    “ O aprendiz de pirata ,” Pessoa contributed.
    The black eyes swept each of us in turn, silently, before La Rocha showed me his back and returned his gaze to the stage. “Aprendiz,” I heard him mutter. “De pirata.”
    The current would-be pirate on the stage resumed the monologue from his printed sheet, but I found it hard to pay him any attention, distracted as I was by the man ahead of me.
    I rather wished I had come in by the other door, which would have put me on Pessoa’s right: At this angle, my view was entirely dominated by La Rocha’s terrible scar. Temple to larynx, the thing must have spanned ten inches. The heavy red-gold earring winking above it made for an eccentric contrast. Why didn’t the man grow a beard to conceal the injury? One’s own throat went taut, seeing that shiny raised track.
    “No,” Fflytte said, sounding as if he had been contemplating some profundity. “The colour’s wrong.”
    “Clothes can be changed,” La Rocha declared.
    “Not the clothing, the skin.”
    “This, too, can be changed.”
    “No, he’s just too light. These are Barbary pirates. This man looks Swedish.”
    It was an exaggeration, but not by much. The other men trying out for the parts of pirates were swarthy, hard-looking men with nicely photogenic moustaches or beards, but the person currently at stage centre would have looked more at home in a European counting-house than as a high-seas privateer. He wore elderly but well-polished shoes, his shoulders were stooped, and his hair was not only thinning, but a most unthreatening light brown colour. His facial hair consisted of an apologetic line above his lip.
    “He’s just not … swashbuckling enough,” Fflytte said. La Rocha cocked his ear back, and Pessoa struggled for synonyms.
    “Er, romântico. Exôtico? Swashbuckling.”
    “Ah. Swashbuckling . He can swashbuckle.”
    “I really don’t think so,” Fflytte said. “He looks like my book-keeper, Bertram, who’s the least exotic person I know.”
    “Next,” Hale called.
    “No!” The syllable echoed through the empty theatre like a crack in glass; the entire theatre stopped dead. The balding Swedish accountant looked near to fainting. I fought an impulse to leap for the aisle. Hale, veteran of the trenches, appeared to be wrestling the same urge.
    Fflytte, on the other hand, turned to peer up at the source of the countermand, frowning in disbelief. “Mr. La Rocha, are you making this picture, or am I?”
    I had thought the silence profound before; now one could have heard a hair settle on the floor. The cracked pane trembled, preparing to shatter in an explosion of deadly shards—until La Rocha looked back at the stage.
    “Go,” he squeaked. The accountant fled. Fflytte sat back in his seat. The rest of us drew breath. Hale settled more slowly, but within a few minutes he, too, was wrapped up again in the casting process. Pessoa’s shoulders gave a motion that was halfway between a shrug and a shiver, as if to shake off an idea he could neither justify nor account for.
    It took somewhat longer for the hair on the nape of my neck to go down. Something large and dangerous had flitted through the theatre. I did not know who or what La Rocha was, but the man’s potential for violence had snarled at us, just for a moment. That he had so easily shut it away again was perhaps the most unsettling part of all: Having this man play the pirate king was like hiring a lion to play a tabby.
    I studied his scar, and was struck by the image of the man standing before his