Steel (8 page)

She finished, rubbing her hand over her gritty hair, staring out at waves crawling up the beach a dozen yards away, at the blue morning sky. Her eyes stung, but she hadn’t cried. She felt wrung out and tired, though. Like now that she’d told the story, told everything, she was empty. Ready to be filled up by sun, wind, and waves.

“Captain Cooper seems to think it’s all tied up in that broken piece of sword,” Jill said, and sighed. “But as far as she’s concerned it’s not about me, it’s about this Blane guy.”

“Yes. Edmund Blane. Your captain—”

“She’s not my captain.”

Nanny raised a brow and gave her a look. Jill shut up. “Your captain has good reason to hate him and will fight him if she can. If she thinks you have a way for her to get to Blane—she’ll keep you close. You and that bit of sword.”

“Can that little piece really find him?” Jill said.

“I think—I think the sword will want to be whole again.”

“And will that help me get back home?”

Dark eyes shining in a shadowed, sculpted face, Nanny shifted her grip on her staff and looked out at the sea and the crew still scrubbing the hull of
Diana
, and the others working on the beach, slow but steady. Her expression remained wry.

“Sometimes you can’t go back. These people, these stolen slaves, maybe they go back someday. Probably not. So you go forward instead. Don’t find your place in the world, make your place. I was a girl, stolen from home in Africa. I still dream of going back. But here, I have a calling, taking care of these people. I can’t argue that. Maybe you’ll get back to where you came from, but is it really home?”

Jill wiped her eyes, which were threatening tears again.

From the hills deep within the forest, the sudden noise of barking dogs sounded. Activity on the beach stopped a moment.

Nanny looked up and frowned. Planting her staff, she used it to pull herself to her feet. “We’ve got to move.”

“What is it?”

“Plantation foremen’s hounds tracking us.” She called out to her people.

Jill stood, gingerly straightening cramped muscles and aching joints. “What if they find you?”

She chuckled. “They won’t find us.”

“But what if they come here?”

“Oh, they won’t mess with Marjory’s crew. Good luck to you.”

“Thanks.”

“And if Marjory asks you to be her pirate queen apprentice, tell her no. That girl is trouble.”

If Jill hadn’t been so exhausted, she might have laughed. Nanny squeezed her arm with her calloused, bony hand, and strode across the beach where her people had gathered. The Africans stood with them, stretching their muscles, looking into the jungle with a mix of hope and trepidation. At least they had hope. Abe stood by and waved a farewell as they trekked into the trees, and away.

The work went on.

That night at suppertime, the crew gathered around the fire, and everyone moaned and complained about sore muscles and blisters. Some of the crew had gone hunting and killed one of the feral pigs that roamed the jungle, and they celebrated the good roast meat. Even Jill enjoyed the fresh food, though she wasn’t happy seeing the pig butchered. She decided she preferred fresh meat that came wrapped in plastic.

When she had her tin plate of food and mug of rum, she found Henry and sat near him.

Jill leaned close and spoke softly, “Why does Captain Cooper have it in for Edmund Blane? What happened?”

Henry glanced at her. “How much have you heard already?”

“Nothing, really. The captain hates him, from the way she talks about him. I didn’t know his whole name until Nanny told me.”

He chuckled. “Grandy Nanny is a right fierce woman, isn’t she?”

“How does Captain Cooper know her?”

“Not sure, it was before my time. But I know there’s a story there. Nanny was a slave on a plantation, but escaped. She’s been helping others do likewise ever since. You say her name in Kingston, and the white folk’ll curse you down the street.”

“She sounds like a hero to me,” Jill said.

He shrugged. “We don’t get to decide who the heroes are, do we?”

He was right, she supposed. “What about Blane?”

Henry watched the fire a moment and took a drink of rum. “He’s evil. He’s the kind of pirate that other pirates despise. How’s that for a hated man?”

“What’s he done?” Jill asked.

“What hasn’t he? Burned, destroyed, raped, looted. He’ll give a ship quarter, then slaughter everyone aboard. I don’t know what exactly he did to our Captain Cooper, but I do know they started a voyage on the same boat, and when it ended he had the boat and she was a castaway.”

However Jill felt about Captain Cooper, even that shred of story made her angry at Blane on Cooper’s behalf.

“If he’s so bad, how does he even get a crew to sign on with him?” Jill asked.

“Because some men like the kind of power he has. It’s like they hope it’ll brush off on them. But they’ll end up worse than the folk we rescued off that slave ship.”

“And Captain Cooper wants to take revenge on him.”

“I expect so.”

“What’ll she do when she finds him?”

“Oh, that’s an easy one. She’ll try to kill him. We’re all headed for a battle with him and his ship. We followed him to the
Newark
, where we found you—and nothing but wreckage. Then he got away from us.”

The singing started again, and the drinking progressed in earnest until Jill could smell the rum on the air. Captain Cooper, out for revenge, was apart, perched on a barrel, looking to the sea, as if she could find Blane just by staring at the horizon.

And what did any of it have to do with Jill?

Maybe you’ll get back
…. And what if she didn’t? She couldn’t think like that—she’d get home somehow. Because she wanted to get home—to get back to her life. She missed her old life, she realized, all of it. But that meant she had to stop sitting around, just another member of the crew, waiting. If they were heading for a fight with Blane, she had to be ready.

Jill said, “I can fight, you know. I am a fighter.”

“What?”

“When we boarded the other ship, you said I’m not a fighter. But I am, even though no one fights for real anymore where I come from. At least not with swords. But I can.”

“You’re not. You’ve never drawn blood.”

“Have you?” she countered. “You didn’t exactly do any fighting on the slave ship. Is it really a battle if no one actually hits anyone?”

“You can’t deny us the victory.”

She couldn’t, but it still seemed like something other than a battle. Then again, they were pirates, not the navy.

“Let’s practice,” she said. She had blisters on her hands and her arms still ached from all the work. Despite all that, she itched to show him that she did know how to fight. At least, she thought she could.

“Practice?” he said.

“Yeah. How else am I going to get good enough to draw blood?”

He seemed to consider her a moment—maybe deciding whether or not to treat her request as a joke. Then, he smiled. “Don’t want to stand around and miss out on the fun next time, eh? When we meet Blane, maybe?”

“Maybe I just want to hold a sword again.” Prove to herself that she still could. Prove that the bout in the tournament was a fluke, and that she could fight. If not back home, then here.

“Fair enough. And you have a good arm, I remember. All right, then. Tomorrow, first thing in the morning, before the sun gets too high and before Jenks or Abe gets on us for slacking our work.”

E
xhausted, Jill slept well that night and woke with a start at first light, wondering if Henry would go through with the practice he’d promised her. She hadn’t held a sword in weeks, and she missed it. She was surprised—but pleased.

She got up, drank a mug of water, rinsed her face and hands, and looked around. Most of the rest of the crew weren’t up yet. The surgeon was awake, sitting with his back propped against a crate, his hands still bound before him. Captain Cooper wasn’t around at all.

Henry, however, was coming toward her from the pile of ship stores that had been brought onto the beach while the
Diana
was careened. He held a sword in each hand.

She smiled for the first time in what must have been weeks.

They stood face-to-face,
en garde
. Jill kept shifting her feet in the soft sand, and nervously rearranging her hold on the grip. Fidgeting. A beginner’s mistake. She could feel every one of the muscles in her arm. She watched Henry, expecting him to jump at her, and wondering if she’d be able to do anything but scramble out of the way. Was she out of practice or just nervous?

“You’ve only ever used practice swords. Baited blades. Right?”

She nodded.

“You’ve got to stand tall. You’ve got to be just as bold with a real sword as you are in practice.”

She wanted to say that she was bold, she was confident, she knew how to use a sword. But he was right—the sharp edge made her cautious. He’d seen her fidgeting, nervous. While this might be practice, if she screwed up she’d slice him open. He could slice
her
open without meaning to. She didn’t know that she trusted him not to slice her open by accident. She was pretty sure she didn’t trust herself not to screw up.

At least they had a doctor on hand.

“Really,” he said, “all you’ve got to do is the same things you’ve always done, but with live steel in your hands. You may not think there’d be any difference, but there is. It makes you careful. Now, let’s start with parrying.”

He didn’t jump at her, didn’t tease her. He drilled with her, slowly and carefully. Straightening his arm, he thrust his rapier toward her, not coming close enough to strike. She could parry—blocking his blade with her own as she took a short step back. Then riposting—thrusting toward him while his sword was off target. Again, not coming close enough to strike. She felt stupid, like a beginner starting all over again. But he was right; this was a different sword, and she needed to retrain her muscles. The only way to do that was to practice the basic moves. Learning how the sword felt, learning how to use it, practicing so that it would go where she guided it, stop when she wanted it to stop. Strike when she wanted it to strike and not a moment later.

They advanced and retreated, following one another back and forth across the beach, kicking up sand as they went, until she wasn’t sure who was leading and who was following, whether he was directing the drill or she was. They both pretended to attack; they both blocked. She learned to anticipate and evade; then he’d step it up a notch. They were nearly moving at speed. But the precision, the control of their movements—it never stopped being practice—calmed her.
This
, she knew. Her muscles understood it more than scrubbing decks and hulls. Her mind forgot about being on an island in the middle of the ocean, a million miles from everything, the strangeness, the slave ship—this whole world.

Her skin grew sticky with sweat, her hair sticking to it, so that she had to pause to wipe her face on her sleeve. She’d have rather not stopped at all.

She backed off and lowered her sword to signal the break. Chest working as she caught her breath, she scrubbed her cheeks on her shoulder. She smelled like salt and sweat and badly needed a shower—not that she’d seen a real shower in weeks.

Henry had bent over, letting his sword hang loose in his hand and leaning on his knees. His mouth was open in a wide grin, and he had to pause between words. “That’s bloody brilliant. Been ages since anyone’s given me a go like that!”

People were shouting. They’d collected an audience. Sailors had gathered in a circle around where Jill and Henry had been practicing. Now that the fighters looked up, their audience was raising fists and voices, cheering, like they’d been putting on a show.

“How’s that, eh? They think you’re pretty good!” Henry straightened and slapped a hand on her shoulder. She was so tired she nearly fell over, but she managed a smile.

Captain Cooper had moved to a place at the front of the crowd and seemed to study her with a narrowed gaze. Jill couldn’t tell if she approved or not. Then Cooper turned back, walked away, and people closed in behind her.

Someone put a mug in Jill’s hand. She could smell it without bringing it to her face—rum, of course, mixed with something fruity, lime juice maybe. She’d rather have had a bottle of Gatorade, but she drank it anyway. At least she’d be getting some vitamins.

After that, in addition to working on the ship, Jill and Henry practiced every day. He taught her new tricks—like not fighting in a straight line. “In a real fight,” he said, “You’re not going to stand in the same place. Your opponent won’t stand in the same place while you move back and forth like toys. You’ve got to go ’round, ducking and dodging. You might be on sand or rock or the deck of a sinking ship. You’ve got to go anywhere.” He sprang to the top of a barrel, balancing there, nearly causing her heart to stop because he was only a step away from falling. But he didn’t. He cut the air a couple of times, and sprang away to a set of crates, which he used as a shield. “This is real fighting!” he said, laughing.

As if all the hundreds of bouts she’d fought at her fencing tournaments weren’t real. But he was right; they weren’t. A fight for a medal wasn’t anything like a fight for life and death. Until now, all her fights had referees and rules about scoring, about what parts of the body you could hit. All with baited blades with no edge. Here, their only spectators were pirates hoping to see blood.

Then he gave her a dagger and showed her how to fight with two weapons at once.

“Where did you learn all this?” she asked him. They’d taken a break, rinsing off in the waves before sitting in the shade. Chores waited for them; she was delaying the inevitable.

“Now, that’s a story,” he said, leaning against one of the stacked barrels. “It was a pair of Englishmen, naval officers stationed at the fort at Port Royal. They did it as a joke at first, thinking, here’s this scrawny mulatto kid hanging about, wants to play with swords. Thing is, they didn’t expect me to keep coming back for more. I found myself a rapier—”

“Found, or stole?” Jill said, lips curled in a smile.

He tipped his head, conceding the point. “All right, I
acquired
one. Learned as much as I could convince them to teach me. Practiced all I could. Started picking fights. I knew I was getting good when people started placing bets on me. Then I put to sea thinking I could find my fortune, like lots of blokes. Haven’t done too badly, I think. I’m not starving and I’m not in chains.”

Those were pretty low standards, Jill thought. But around here they didn’t exactly have the Olympics to aspire to. “And that’s it? You’re a pirate for the rest of your life? Fight duels until you go up against someone better than you?”

“I just have to make sure that never happens, right?” he said.

A fraction of a second, she thought. It could happen to anyone.

The work would never be over. They’d cleaned one side of the hull; then they needed to clean the other. Moving the ship took almost a full day and involved rearranging the rigging, untying countless knots and reassembling winches and pulleys. Part of the crew climbed on board the listing ship to shift weights. They waited until the tide came in; the ship floated again; then with a great heave, and much of the crew pulling on ropes, they rolled her over. The tide went out again, exposing a fresh expanse of barnacle and slime-crusted wood. Once again, Jenks called for them to start scraping. Jill nearly cried. Her hands were chapped and bleeding. Rough rope had left splinters of fiber in her skin. All of it stung when she washed her hands in seawater, but the stinging was better than the aching, simply because it was a change.

It was only slightly heartening that many others of the crew also groaned and whined. “You want your shares, you get up on the hull and pull your bleeding weight!” Captain Cooper hollered.

“What shares?” Jenks muttered. “We ain’t hauled ourselves a prize in weeks, since you wouldn’t sell that last lot!” Grumbling murmurs supported him. Jill needed a moment to realize they were talking about the Africans.

She also would have sworn that Cooper was on the other side of the ship, far up the beach, totally out of earshot, and that she couldn’t possibly have heard. But there she was, as if she’d been coming this way on a different purpose, just in time to hear the dissent. Without hesitation the pirate captain shouted back, “You keep talking like that, you mangy hound, and I’ll sell
you
in the Carolinas next time we sail that way. Don’t think I need you on this ship!”

Jenks didn’t have a response for that, but he was still muttering to himself when he grabbed hold of a rope to haul himself up the side of the hull. The threat sounded like just a threat, but by the way the men reacted, Jill had to wonder if such a punishment had happened before. And she wondered how much trouble she’d have to get into before the captain decided to sell her off in the Carolinas.

That didn’t bear thinking on.

Scraping the port side of the hull wasn’t any less gross or smelly than the starboard side had been. Jill thought about doing this three times a year, every year, with endless days of sailing in between. The only dubious reward for it all seemed to be the rum at the end of the day. And the stars over the ocean at night.

They’d been onshore a week and were on their second day of cleaning the other side of the hull. Nanny and her people had left four days before, and Jill and Henry had been practicing all that time. Jill was almost proud of the work, of being able to see the actual planks of wood and layer of tar that made up the hull and had been hidden by all the gunk. Maybe she was only relieved that it was almost over.

She was on the shore, helping coil line and waiting for the tide to roll in and set the
Diana
upright again, when Captain Cooper yelled.

“Dirty lizards, move! We sail with the tide! Get those lines, rig sails, clear this beach, dammit, before I skin the lot of you and use your bones for ballast!”

“Captain!” Abe, who was on the other side of the beach, helping with the ropes that kept the
Diana
on her side and secured, put his hands to his mouth and called back to Cooper. “What is it?”

“It’s Blane! He’ll not get away from us!”

Frowning, Abe shaded his eyes and looked out to sea. Jill followed his gaze and saw a shape moving parallel to the shore, far in the distance. It might have been a ship—if it was, it was far enough out that it wouldn’t see the
Diana
in her hidden cove. Jill wondered how Cooper could not only identify it as a ship, but as the
Heart’s Revenge
specifically—then saw her, once again, holding up the broken rapier piece on its string. Not only did it point toward the distant object, it jumped and shook, pulling on the string in Cooper’s hand as if trying to break free.

Abe was still frowning. He didn’t like this quest, Jill suspected. While the captain was yelling at the crew to get the ship rigged, Abe turned to Jill, Henry, and several of the others close by.

“Make sure all the fresh food and water we gathered is aboard. Get as much as you can up before we go running. And somebody drag on that useless surgeon.”

“And that’s why Abe’s the quartermaster,” Henry murmured as Abe went to give orders to haul gear back on board the ship. The others chuckled in agreement.

Working together, passing casks, crates, and baskets forward to where Henry pulled them aboard using a rope and pulley, they loaded the ship while Captain Cooper drove the rest of the crew to setting her upright and arranging the rigging. It took an hour to get the cannons on board; Cooper told them to wait and stow them properly when the ship was under way. Every minute that passed grew more urgent.

Finally, they were ready to go, but in this inlet, no wind blew to fill the sails, and the tide didn’t give enough current to push them back to sea. That was the price for wanting a spot that was sheltered from wind and weather. But the pirates had a solution for everything: they towed the
Diana
. A couple of the crew went out in one of the rowboats, carrying an anchor and line with them. Out in open water, they dropped the anchor—the end of the line was still on the
Diana
. Back on deck, the strongest sailors in the crew hauled on the line. Jenks called out orders in rhythm. “Heave! Heave!”

Slowly, the ship began to move.

Jill watched, amazed, sure they wouldn’t be able to budge the
Diana
from where she rested, her bottom just touching the sand, the waves of the incoming tide lapping against her unmoving hull. But they did, towing her, dragging against the anchor snagged at the bottom of the inlet. Jill leaned over the bow to watch. When she looked to shore, the trees of the jungle were moving, sliding past, however slowly. The swath of water between ship and shore grew wider.

When they passed over the anchor, the crew hauled it up. By then the current had caught them and carried them out past the sheltering sandbar that formed the inlet. The captain shouted orders about raising topsails and setting yards, and crewmen climbed the masts and shrouds like nimble squirrels to release the crackling sound of unfurled canvas.

The wind caught the sails, and the ship lurched, rising and falling as she rode the first big waves of open ocean. The slap of water striking the hull sounded like thunder.