Steel

8 ALLEZ

Exhausted, 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.

Jill leaned on the rail, face into the wind, feeling salt spray kiss her skin after it splashed against the hull. She could almost feel the Diana moving faster, cutting through the water more smoothly without all the gunk on the hull. And she found herself smiling, actually happy to see the island receding, blue waves rolling away in every direction, to hear canvas rippling and ropes creaking. Happy to be sailing again.

Captain Cooper continued shouting orders, and the crew continued scrambling. More sails unfurled, more rigging came into play, and the ship picked up speed, almost leaping over the waves.

“There she is! Ship ahoy!” Henry shouted from the lookout at the top of the mainmast. He pointed off to starboard. Jill looked to the horizon but didn’t see anything. As she squinted against the sun, the scene all looked like water and haze.

More orders, more rushing, more lines pulled, knots tied, sails unfurled. Jill didn’t know how fast they were moving, but she had to hang on to one of the ropes on the mast to keep from losing her balance. Even with the delay, they caught up to the other ship.

She saw it by the spray of water. Knowing where to look now, she could make out the shape of it, its hull and sails, like a tiny picture of a toy boat, except it was obviously moving, cutting through waves, ocean splashing around it.

“Hoist the colors! Man the cannons!”

This was different than when they’d overtaken the slave ship. Nobody cheered, nobody laughed. Nobody ran up to the gunwales to see what was happening, waving swords and pistols over their heads. This time, everyone was busy, serious, bent to their work, and if they stole a moment to look over the water, it was with a frown. The crew who weren’t trimming sails, helping the ship fly to its target, pounded to the cannons. Jill heard a new sound; rattling as hatches flew open in the sides of the boat, creaks and slams as those eight sleeping monsters were awakened, unlashed from their places, and rolled forward, ready to be loaded, fired. The whole ship groaned like a waking leviathan.

The next time Jill looked out over the water, the other ship was definitely closer. She could see people moving around on its deck, specks of urgent motion.

From the Diana’s mainmast, the leering skull with the rose and sword crossed beneath it snapped and sang, a herald of doom.

Jill looked for Henry in all the chaos and saw him emerge from the aft hatch in the deck. He had an armful of weapons.

He caught her gaze across the deck. “How are you with a pistol?”

Jill shook her head. “I’ve never held a gun in my life.”

The quirk of a smile returned to his lips, making him look a little crazy. He said, “Well then, you’ll just have to keep hold of your sword and wait for the real fighting.” He ran off on another chore, leaving her gaping.

“Wait a minute—sword fighting? We’re not really going to…there’s not really going to be—”

Well, she’d just about asked for it with all the practicing, hadn’t she?

A boom of distant thunder made Jill flinch. Across the water, a cottony puff of black smoke burst from the side of the ship and floated. Then another, and another. More thunder followed.

We’re all going to die, she thought, too numb to be scared.