Steel (5 page)

“If I may make an observation, you don’t seem much like the pirating type. What was it, you thought you didn’t have a choice?” he said. “So where’d they find you? They’re so desperate now they’re taking girls? You should be in a kitchen somewhere, wearing a skirt and apron and baking bread. Instead you’ve found yourself among true heathens.”

He was right, she didn’t belong here. But he wasn’t any more likely to understand what had happened to her, so she kept her mouth shut.

He leaned forward, dropping his voice to a whisper; she tried not to flinch away. “Here’s some advice—keep your wits about you. This ship won’t sail free forever. When you decide you don’t want to hang with the rest of the dogs, I can help you.”

“Why would you help me?”

“Well—it might be that we can help each other, when the time is right. Think on it, why don’t you.”

She slipped out of the cell, shut and locked the door. She didn’t know what to make of the guy—and she could already tell him she didn’t want to hang with anybody.

She was adrift on an alien world. The clothes they wore, the ship, the work, the smells, the words they used—all of it was wrong, and she was exhausted from trying to figure it out.

Back on deck, the cook had a plate of food waiting for her—and the food didn’t even smell right. She’d have to eat, sooner or later—and what kind of dream would make her eat food like this? Next, she watched the cook fill a tin cup from a tap in a small barrel.

He gave it to her, and she raised it to her face to see what it was. The liquid had an amber tinge to it, and it stung her eyes and made her wrinkle her nose. Not water, then.

“What is it?” she asked Abe.

“What is it?” echoed Henry, who was nearby, laughing, unbelieving. “It’s got rum in it.”

Oh, her mother would be horrified at this. Well, she’d wanted to try it. Carefully, Jill brought the mug to her lips.

This didn’t smell sugary and fruity like those endless rounds of rum punch or her mother’s pretty drinks with slices of pineapple in them. This was acrid and seemed more like rubbing alcohol than something you’d drink. She took a bare sip; fumes filled her sinuses and the liquid burned her tongue. Surprised, she drew back, blinking away tears.

The pirates laughed. One of the women, hair in a braid and scarf on her head, yelled, “That’s no way to take yer grog, you tadpole! Bottoms up!” The woman tipped back her own mug to demonstrate.

Bottoms up. If they could do it, so could she. She tipped back her head and poured the rum into her mouth, figuring if she drank it fast enough, she wouldn’t taste anything.

Her whole mouth—lips, tongue, throat, everything—turned to fire, puckered, went tingling, then numb. She started coughing, which made them all laugh harder, but she was too busy gasping for breath to notice. Then she felt warm. It started as a heat in her stomach, which spread out to her limbs like syrup, thick and sticky. Then she felt very, very relaxed. She might have taken her brain out of her head and put it on a shelf. And that was okay. It meant she didn’t flinch back in a panic like she might have done when Henry put a hand on her arm.

“Think maybe you’d better sit down, eh?” he said.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she murmured, but she let Henry guide her to a convenient barrel, where she reached behind her because the seat seemed to be moving. Or she was.

“Cor, I reckon the tadpole ain’t never had a drink before,” one of them said. More laughter. Jill still had her plate of food, and she was still starving.

The pirates were settled into impromptu seats around the deck, perched on the side or on barrels or on the deck itself. Noisy and eager, they ate with their fingers, and since she didn’t have a choice, so did she. The food didn’t taste too bad—but the rum may have killed her taste buds. Maybe that was the point.

As they drained their rum, the crew grew louder, laughing harder, trading jokes and insults, punching each other until one of them fell over, which made them all laugh even more. Then one of them pulled out a fiddle, and another had a silver pipe, just a little longer than the length of his hand. They began to play.

It was like folk music, bright like birds singing, and soon people began to clap, stomp their feet, and sing along, but so loud and slurred that Jill couldn’t make out words. Her rum was almost gone, and the light from the lanterns had turned to halos in her wavering sight.

This was like a story. Golden lantern light played on wood, rope, and canvas; the ship became a bubble of light and music traveling through a shadowed world. She’d fallen out of her world and into this one, where the words and voices were strange. The stars were huge and bright, and a three-quarters moon rose, turning the sea to silver.

Later, many of the pirates seemed to fall over and sleep where they were rather than make their way to proper beds. She didn’t even know if the boat had proper beds apart from the captain’s, but the way her head was spinning she thought maybe she ought to find out. She could sleep and figure out what to do in the morning. Maybe they’d be at a port, and she could find a phone to call her parents.

Even though she was pretty sure she wouldn’t find any phones.

Jill blinked to focus and say something about beds, but the deck was moving at the edges of her vision. Because it was a boat. And the waves rolled, and her stomach flopped. She bent over and lost everything she’d eaten and drunk, right on the deck she’d spent so much time scrubbing clean. She could feel the start of a pounding headache.

“God help you, you are a tadpole.”

People were there, one on each arm, and they pulled her up, and the world flopped again, but her stomach went with it this time and didn’t empty itself.

“I can walk, I’m fine,” she tried to say, but the words came out wrong because her tongue wouldn’t work right. So that was rum. Why had she wanted so badly to try it, again? It turned out she couldn’t walk very well after all, because they brought her to stairs she couldn’t even see. By then her eyes were closed.

She heard the captain say, “Any of you vermin takes advantage of the girl in this state I’ll have his hide. Understood?”

“Aye.”

Still laughing, but softly, they put her in a bed that rocked her to sleep like she was a baby in a cradle. Or it might have been that she just passed out.

J
ill woke up cramped, uncomfortable, with a headache that grew worse, throbbing at her temples, when she tried to sit up, which she couldn’t do very well because she was rolled into a hammock. The ship was still rocking, and the hammock, suspended from the beam above, swung with the motion. Like the rest of the ship, the room she was in smelled of damp wood, salt, and slime, and it was dark. The only light came in through the hatch at one end. Bright sunlight. Even though she was twenty feet away from it, she squinted and turned away. Some dream this was. She ought to be able to skip over this part.

Her head hurt every time she moved.

She was below the main deck. Hammocks hung from every beam, maybe two dozen of them, in a space that didn’t seem very large. Most of those were empty, swaying with the creaking ship. The few bodies that lay sleeping here didn’t seem much better off than she was; they were either snoring in deep sleep or groaning in hungover pain.

“There you are, awake at last!” Henry climbed down the steep stairs and blocked the sunlight from the hatch. Jill wondered how she’d made it down those narrow steps last night.

A couple of the others moaned louder and grumbled insults at Henry, who grinned at them.

Henry came over to her and loomed. She rolled out of the hammock just to keep him from staring down at her. Her balance still wasn’t working right, though; she landed on her knees and had to hold on to the hammock’s ropes to keep from falling further. She glared at him.

“Bright eyed and ready to start the day, I see.”

“I want to go home. This is a mistake.” Slowly, moving her head as little as possible, she pulled herself to her feet.

“Nonsense. You signed on, you’re crew now. Time to get to work.”

She wondered if this was punishment—she’d wanted to get away from her life, and here she’d gotten her wish. Maybe she should just go along for the ride, until she woke up for real.

She wasn’t sure she could let go of the hammock yet. She didn’t seem to be able to stand up straight and kept swaying with the motion of the boat. “What if I say no?”

Henry shrugged. “Then you don’t eat. Or maybe we’ll pitch you over the side.”

Someone laughed. Someone always seemed to be laughing, mocking.

She followed Henry to the steps and up to the deck.

“Is there any water?” she said, thinking a gallon of water would make her feel a tiny bit better.

There was, stored in a barrel on deck at the front of the ship. Henry had recovered her tin cup, which still smelled of rum and sent Jill’s head spinning again. But she drank two cupfuls of water and felt much better.

For another day, she scrubbed decks.

She forgot about being seasick, and forgot about being scared of the pirates. Mostly, it was strange, because they didn’t act like terrifying criminals or happy-go-lucky cartoon pirates. They worked—the chores on board seemed never ending: cleaning, repairing, working on the sails and rigging, working on weapons, sharpening knives and checking pistols. Amidst all that they seemed laid-back, easygoing, enjoying drinking and singing, and they seemed to respect the captain, who stayed on deck most of the day, watching the crew or the sea. Jill supposed that they all had to get along well, or they wouldn’t survive very long cooped up on the tiny ship for weeks at a time.

She kept expecting to wake up from a dream. Being here, among the constant ripple of sails, the forest of mast and rigging, seeing nothing but ocean around them, was so surreal, it couldn’t be happening. When she fell overboard, maybe she’d been knocked on her head and was lying on a hospital bed in a coma. That seemed more likely. But she could smell salt on the air, and she tasted the sea on her lips.

She wondered if her parents were looking for her. Or sitting next to her hospital bed, holding her hand, begging her to wake up. Jill thought she should have known what was happening, if that was the case. She ought to hear her mother yelling at Mandy and Tom in the background.

A third day passed, then a fourth. Jill’s skin dried out and browned, and she could now walk across the deck in a straight line no matter how much the ship swayed.

Henry stopped supervising her on every little chore, but they continued talking. He showed her the ropes, literally, teaching her how the rigging worked, how the sails worked, what they all needed to do when the commands were given, working as a team to keep the ship moving. He seemed to be the youngest one on board, close to her own age even, though it was hard to judge ages here. They all might have been young, but worn out from hard work and living in the elements. Like that grizzled, wiry tour guide.

Jill had the impression that the captain was always watching her—like she still thought Jill was a spy for this Blane guy, and that she’d give herself away eventually. Marjory Cooper was intimidating; Jill felt herself grow smaller under the woman’s gaze. But Cooper was better than some of the others who seemed to study her when they thought no one was looking. Jenks, the bald first mate, for one.

According to the articles the pirates had a law against rape—the punishment was being marooned, set alone on a beach with a bottle of water and a pistol with one shot loaded. Jill would rather not find out how well the ship enforced its own rules, and stuck close to Henry, Abe, some of the crew who’d been friendly to her, and even the captain.

Jill was scrubbing the deck near the wheel—the helm, Henry called it—when Abe called the captain over and handed her a telescope—no, a spyglass. A brass cylinder on a lanyard. The captain brought the instrument to her own eye.

Looking out to what they studied, Jill couldn’t see anything. She squinted into the bright sunlight reflecting off the water, all the way to the haze on the horizon, and saw only ocean. But Cooper and Abe saw something.

“On its way to the market at Havana, I’ll wager. It’s off our course,” Captain Cooper said finally, handing the telescope back. She took the broken piece of rapier from her pocket and suspended it on its string. The length of steel swung for just a moment before pointing solidly in one direction—leaning, almost, in defiance of gravity. West, Jill thought, while the object of their attention was southeast.

It was just a chunk of rusted metal. No magic to it at all. But then, how had she come here? No, it was all a dream, she reminded herself. It didn’t have to make sense.

“But, Captain,” Abe said, wearing his constant wry smile. “We must, yes?”

The captain set her jaw and sighed. “I suppose we must.” She turned away from the rail and hollered, bellowing so that her voice carried over the whole ship, to the top of the masts.

“Ready about! Hoist the colors, ye dogs!”

A cheer went up, adding to the noise, until it sounded like a storm, thunder and rain pounding against wood. Then sailors ran to their duties.

Jenks was at the helm and spun the wheel. The
Diana
heaved over, tipping as it changed direction. Jill stumbled a couple of steps but didn’t fall, braced, and considered it a victory.

The vessel, which had been traveling peacefully, cutting through waves on what seemed to be a gentle breeze, became fierce. It slammed into the next set of waves, and water sprayed up, over the railing. Sails slacked and rippled, seemingly confused for a moment, before finding the wind again and filling, wide and taut, sounding like cracks of thunder. The ship raced forward. Hoisted on a line, a black flag rose to the top of the mainmast. It showed an image in white: a leering skull, with a sword and stemmed rose crossed beneath it. Captain Cooper’s flag.

Shouting and calling, members of the crew rushed over the deck. It looked chaotic to Jill. No one seemed to have any direction in mind, but the purpose soon began to emerge: several men came from belowdecks carrying armloads of weapons—swords and guns. Others grabbed the weapons and distributed them, until everyone was armed.

Henry passed by with a sword in hand, and Jill held his arm to stop him. “What am I supposed to do?”

He looked at her, looked out to sea, then at the captain. He seemed to be debating whether to annoy Captain Cooper with such a problem. The answer must have been no, because he said, “Well, we’ve seen you’re not a fighter, so you’d best get below.”

But she could fight, she
was
a fighter, they’d seen her handle a sword and hold her own against Henry. But the captain had been right, and she’d never fought for blood, and she didn’t want to have to kill anyone. So better that she stay out of the way.

Ahead now, Jill could see it—another ship, so far away it looked like a toy, bobbing on the waves. The
Diana
raced toward it. Jill couldn’t tell which way the wind was blowing—the sails above her seemed to be moving in a storm of breeze, sound, and motion. But the direction didn’t matter, because they were definitely drawing closer to the other ship. It was much larger than the
Diana
, with three masts and a crowd of sails. But it was slower. While the
Diana
skimmed over the waves, moving fast and sending up sprays of white, the other ship swayed along at the mercy of the waves.

Jill couldn’t quite bring herself to go belowdecks.

The crew gathered, preparing to attack, and it wasn’t what Jill was expecting. They didn’t look like warriors ready for battle—trained, lined up, weapons prepared. Instead, they stood on the side of the ship, or clung to parts of the rigging, baring their teeth and shouting curses. Some of them fired their guns, making noise and putting black puffs of smoke in the air, which began to smell like burned sulfur. A pair of the cannons had been rolled forward, and doors in the side of the ship opened so the mouths protruded, visible to the other ship. A couple of men held lit torches, waving them over their heads, which seemed like a terrible thing to do on a wooden boat. Others shook their swords, held daggers in their teeth, jumped from mast to deck and back again, and screamed with laughter. A few had smeared lines of soot on their cheeks; a few others had taken off their hats and shaken out their hair to make it wild and tangled.

They looked like madmen.

As they drew close to the other ship, Jill could see the other crew running in a panic. Men on the masts began loosening lines, letting sails hang heavy and useless, leaving their ship effectively helpless, dead in the water. A flag that had been flying on the central mast—it had a red and white pattern, but Jill couldn’t identify it—disappeared.

A man in a fancy, decorated coat stood by the side closest to the
Diana
and waved a white handkerchief over his head.

The other ship was surrendering without a fight.

The crew of the
Diana
cheered and fired another round from their pistols. Captain Cooper, who’d been watching the other ship through her spyglass, Abe at her side, lowered the instrument and gave a nod of satisfaction.

“Jenks, prepare for boarding. Let’s put on a good show for them,” she said. The first mate shouted orders. Ropes and hooks appeared, the helm turned, and the sails went slack as the ship slowed and came up alongside the other.

It was all a show. Side by side, the
Diana
was clearly smaller than the other ship, which was wide, large, and presumably packed with cargo. But it didn’t seem to have any cannons or as many crew members—only a dozen stood on the deck. Maybe it could have outrun them, but it hadn’t even tried. The
Diana
’s crew had won by intimidation. Somehow, it made them even more frightening than if they had won by force.

The crew who were involved with throwing ropes and hooks over to the other ship continued hanging on the side, brandishing weapons, shouting war cries and insults to the other crew, who watched, backing away from the side, wide-eyed and cowering.

The
Diana
’s crew put woven mats over the side to buffer and protect the hulls and used the ropes to pull the other ship close and secure it. A group of the pirates—still armed, still wild and cackling—escorted their captain over the side and to the other ship. Abe, Jenks, and Henry were among them. Jill moved closer to the side to watch.

The other crew stumbled and scurried away from the approaching pirates. The other captain, the man in the fancy coat—bright green material, with gold braid and buttons—approached, though warily. When Captain Cooper emerged to greet him, the other captain quailed.

“Oh God, it’s you!”

“That’s right, sir, you have been captured by that bloody pirate queen, harridan of the waves and witch of the sea. And you are very, very wise to offer yourselves so freely. Though I rather wish you’d put up a fight—I’m disappointed I won’t be murdering you and sinking your boat. Now—one word of argument from any of you and I will.” She made a stunning picture standing before him, hands on hips, her coat buttoned, her high boots polished, her hat firm on her long, curling hair, and her face like that of an avenging goddess. Her mob of demons was arrayed around her.

The other captain was on his knees now. “Please, have mercy, I have a wife at home, small children—a daughter! Be merciful, they’ll be lost without me!”

“On the contrary I rather suspect they’d be better off, given what you are.”

“What—” the captain stammered, then went silent.

Jill straightened, curious, as if the movie in front of her had just gotten to the good part.

“Abe. Bring ’em up,” Marjory said, never looking away from her captured counterpart.

The quartermaster called to several of the crewmates, who followed him down the dark hatch into the ship’s hold.

Just as they’d captured them, the
Diana
’s crew held back their victims by intimidation and possibly reputation. Their seeming madness inspired fear. The other crew cowered, shoving at each other to get farther away from the pirates, and never made a move to resist.

Jill expected Abe and the others to carry up crates, boxes, barrels. Maybe even sacks of gold. The treasure from a million pirate stories. But that’s not what emerged from below.