The Game is Carrick

Previously: Exciting and compelling stuff happens, just go read it. Anyway, happy new year to you and yours, welcome to the final stretch of this book, featuring chapters that I am using my vacation time to completely rewrite for your entertainment.

— 60 —

Batya is floating in a sweet black dreamless void, having a terrific time, doing her favorite activity which is thinking nothing, doing nothing, being nothing. But then something emerges from the nothing, something bad, something ruining her terrific time, a smell, a stench, pungent, acrid, so noxious that it’s forcing her to depart this sweet void and open her eyes—

She finds herself seated at the game table, Captain Nia waving a bottle of Snakehair hooch under her nose. She recoils from the odor, which fires off a jagged pain in her recently dislocated shoulder. Her cough is wet and prolonged.

“I’m so relieved you’re alive,” Nia says, corking the bottle. “This is a new concoction which I personally crafted and plan on launching in the new year. Working title is Dead Aunt’s Sulphuric Syrup. I’d love to hear your thoughts.”

“It smells like…” Bat’s synapses spark and short-circuit. “Hospital corpse diaper.”

Nia smiles, looks at the sailors gathered by the bar. “Please note I did not prompt her to say that.”

Bat tries, for the hundredth time today, to get her bearings. She wants nothing more than a good old five-second cry but knows that’s not going to happen anytime soon. So she forces herself to be present in the moment despite wanting to be present in just about any other moment possible.

Let’s see. The pool of Dezzetti’s head-blood on the table is nice and congealed. Next to it is a stack of oddly shaped cards, along with the little envelope she was supposed to deliver. The three weirdo players are staring at her. She looks one way and sees that somebody barred the doors leading into the stateroom and stationed a couple surly palookas there, ready to provide a good drubbing should she try improvising again. Then she looks the other way and sees the hot tub sniper has reloaded her gun and is at the ready.

The ship is slowly rocking back and forth as it heads further out toward the horizon. And even though she’s surrounded by noise, she can hear something beyond the chatter of the crowd there in the room, and the constant thudding of footsteps above her, and the clinking of bottles being filled and moved and dropped, and the muffled yelling and laughing. What she hears is: nothing. The great vast empty nothing of the ocean. No longer the safe place she imagined last night in the sex pod.

With that, she notices the bite on Nia’s neck. She says, “Looks like I left a mark.”

“Indeed.” Nia winks at her with a gold-dusted eye. “Miss Batya, welcome to the game. You are the East. Let me introduce you to your opponents. North is Roger Bagwell, scourge of the anchorage.”

The Harbormaster, swathed in his pea coat, flips open a lighter and goes to work on an incredibly foul cigar. He glares at Bat, his pinkie ring and sweaty muttonchops glistening in the jaundiced light from the too-low chandelier. “We met?”

“Nope,” Bat says, in no hurry to remind him of her failure to protect him from Voletta’s summons.

“Our South,” Nia says, “is my dear colleague Sister Aether, founder and president of Rustic Industries, denizen of Old Town, specter of pure malevolence.”

The woman with the spidery brocade playfully paws away the description. “You’re making me blush.” Bat still has trouble focusing on her, as if she’s behind a cracked pane of glass, or perhaps flickering between two points in time.

“And West here has only identified himself as Jack. He is unknown to us but had the considerable buy-in money, in cash, so.”

The oldest man in the history of the world speaks for the first time, his voice hushed and reedy. “You know that sword?” he asks Bat. He has that clean stench she likes, the smell of a fresh catch still thrashing in the net.

“Yeah I was hired to steal it,” Bat says. “Didn’t go well.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Nia says. “My men lost a handful of hands just getting it on board.”

“Where’d you find it?”

“Some fool discovered it in the woods near the dairy, amongst a bevy of hewn trees.”

Bat doesn’t giggle much but now she’s giggling. She’s envisioning the sword getting knocked out of her hands and spiraling through Donna the Magic Cow’s gulag, slicing through Folly Dairy itself and then out into the world where it takes down some pines before finally ending its absurd journey.

“Then,” Nia says, “this fool crowed about it in the wrong tavern, and he is no longer with us, and there was a very unpleasant auction, and now the blade is mine. And I don’t want it. So I arranged this competition.”

“I do want it,” Jack says. “Been a long while since I seen something I ain’t seen before.”

“I thought I wanted it,” the Harbormaster says. “But I didn’t realize it’d involve a game that would exhaust the rest of my days on this cursed planet. Can we please finally get back to it at long last please I beg you.”

“Yes, if it will muzzle your whining,” Nia says. “The courier goes first, since she’s deepest in the hole.”

Bat picks up her cards and fans them out. She’s alarmed to find no hearts or spades or anything recognizable. Instead, each card features an elaborate illustration with a title at the bottom. She’s got a Maelstrom, a Dingo, a Hussy, something called The Conjoined Twins?

She tells herself to just play along and not say anything but she doesn’t listen. She’s tired of listening to her brain. It’s gotten her nowhere good. She gently puts down her cards and says, “Can someone please tell me what the frig this game is?”

“The game,” Nia says, “is carrick.”

Carrick is a card game for four players and a dealer. It was originally a pretty basic variant on trick-takers like whist or maw, something simple enough that even the besotted buccaneers who played it in olden times could keep track of the rules. But then one player made a desperate bluff that nudged the game into its modern version. It went something like:

Four ill-smelling rogues (NORTH, EAST, SOUTH, and WEST) sit upon the deck of a ship at midnight, playing a game of carrick. There is not enough food to feed them all, so it has been decided that the loser shall be escorted into the sea via an abbreviated length of timber.

NORTH: ’Tis your play, East, you pestilent muck-spout.

East looks at his hand and perspires, knowing he is about to lose. He is then struck by inspiration.

EAST: I say, I have yet to see the Kraken.

SOUTH: What? Were you expecting a visit from the sea monster of legend?

EAST: The Kraken card, sirrah. It has not appeared despite numerous shufflings. O do not tell me this Deck is incomplete!

WEST: Your gibbering is dizzy, and bilious, and I pray for it to end.

EAST: Hearken, a proper carrick deck must include the Kraken. Surely you are familiar with it. Black as night and depicting the awful visage of the Creature itself? With myriad tentacles and a leer of Evil? Have I gone mad?

NORTH: I’m afraid so.

EAST: Gentlemen! I am recently from civilised lands, and there the Kraken card is the very lifeblood of this game!

West unsheathes his cutlass.

WEST: Speaking of lifeblood.

EAST: Stay your hand. I shall fashion a makeshift with this scrip.

NORTH: You’ll not. What is the function of this imaginary card, I wonder?

East sighs with affected exasperation.

EAST: Just as the seas turn to blood when the Kraken attacks, thus the appearance of the Kraken card means all suits are to be considered Red for the duration of the Turn.

SOUTH: That would certainly be convenient for you!

EAST: Thus my consternation over its suspicious absence!

WEST: Are you accusing me of concealing your fabulous card!

EAST: That pocket in your waistcoat has a curious bulge!

WEST: I beg your pardon!

East unsheathes his cutlass. 

EAST: Perhaps my blade will reveal the truth of its contents! And…there!

East stabs West. West dies.

EAST: Alas, in all the excitement my stroke was too powerful and my blade has gone right through the waistcoat, and the waist, of that sodden profligate who called my integrity into question. Is there another here who doubts the existence of the Kraken?

North and South, frightened, shake their heads.

EAST: Then we all agree that this scrap of parchment shall represent the Kraken henceforth? And our suits shall be as crimson as the fluid which even now issues forth from our deceased shipmate?

North and South nod furiously.

EAST: Then let us play on!

As you might imagine, this innovation—pulling a card from one own’s buttocks to help one cheat—lit a fire within the fevered brows of every salt up and down the coast. And so today we have a game that is played with thousands of unique cards, each with the power to alter a rule.

So, basic things like what beats what, who plays next, how many cards can be drawn or played, the value of each card, et cetera, are always in flux, and often determined by things like the current time and season, personal attributes of the player (which can get problematically intimate), local variants (this game is being played Hook Style, named after the city in which we find ourselves, which means things like moon phases and tides need to be taken into account), et cetera. And for scoring purposes you need to factor in the point and/or dollar value of each card (carrick does not use cash or chips, instead using the cards themselves as betting tokens), plus fluctuating bet percentages, impromptu swaps, false reverses, cut auctions, you get the picture.

All the literature I’ve read on carrick mentions this old saw: a lifetime to learn, a moment to master. In other words, you will never fully understand the game, but when you do, which you won’t, it’ll all suddenly fall into place and seem as simple as Old Maid. This is known as getting the wisdom and supposedly only happens on your deathbed, right in the middle of saying your last words, when wisdom no longer matters.

“The date is 31 October,” Nia intones. “The moon is a waxing crescent. Wind out of the northwest. We are playing Hook Style, and the dealer’s decisions are final. Any unresolved issues will be handled by the Mantis.” She nods toward what looks like a homemade cattle prod hanging from a hook on the Employee of the Month wall.

“Courier leads,” the Harbormaster says. “She’s deepest in the hole.”

“I don’t know how to play this game,” Bat says, her shoulder throbbing. “I don’t know how to say that any plainer.”

“Just dive in, darling,” Nia says. “I’m sure you’ll pick it up.”

Bat looks at her hand, selects a card at random (The Atlas), slides it toward the center of the table. Jack lurches forward and stabs a boning knife right in between her middle and ring fingers.

She can’t jerk away without slicing her hand open, so she just gives the extremely old man a steady look and says, “Is there a problem?”

“Yes,” he says, twisting the knife just enough to make the wood squeak.

“Is there anyone here who doesn’t have a weapon?” Nia says.

“My body’s a weapon.” Bat likes to say that whenever the opportunity presents itself.

“What is your concern, grandpa?” Sister Aether asks.

“That,” he says, pointing at the little envelope. “The courier has a masked card. Against the rules.”

“I almost forgot,” Nia says. “Let’s open it, shall we? Let’s see what that treacherous cowboy died for.”

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