Wake of the Bloody Angel

Chapter Eight

“ — a bitch!”

I snapped wide awake, finishing the curse I’d begun in my sleep. I looked around, momentarily disoriented, then remembered I was on a pirate-hunter ship headed for the Southern Ocean, and had been for two weeks. I tossed the light blanket aside, sat up, and shook my head to clear it.

In my half-awake state I’d just realized something that should have been obvious, and I was astounded at my own idiocy. How had I missed that? It was right in front of me, plain as day, and hadn’t registered.

I swung my bare feet off the bed. The wooden deck was damp with condensation, as was my skin. The tiny master’s cabin-a closet-sized space located between the much more spacious captain’s quarters and the equally claustrophobic one belonging to the purser-had one round window that was essentially useless unless the door was open to allow a cross breeze. Seated on the edge of the bunk, I could touch my forehead to the opposite wall if I leaned far enough. My saddlebags lay beside the door, and my sword rested under my bunk.

I stood, wiped the sweat from my face, and looked around for my tunic. I’d cut the sleeves off my second day at sea; now my face and arms were deep brown, and the crisscross marks of old sword battles stood out pink and white against my new tan. I could’ve gone shirtless like most of the crew, but I’d discovered over the years that the big scar on my chest, and its matching one on my back, led to lots of questions I’d rather not answer.

I pulled on my trousers and boots, then opened the door. I was still furious. The little cabin boy who generally slept right outside jumped to his feet when he saw me. “Yes, sir!” he exclaimed with a rigid salute.

“At ease,” I said as I tied a bandanna around my sweatmatted hair. “Dorsal, is Captain Argo in her cabin?” She’d been given the purser’s cabin next to mine.

“No, sir, she went on deck about an hour ago.” He had the serious face of a child for whom childhood was not an option. I guessed he was about nine or ten, barefoot and dressed in adult clothes cut down and cinched up to fit him. “I think she’s talking to Captain Clift.”

“Thanks,” I said, and he jumped aside as I went out into the dim hold. A good number of men still slept in the hammocks, as the ship carried a crew twice what was required to operate on a day-to-day basis. Since I was paying for this charter, I was also subsidizing their apparent laziness. I was assured, though, that in battle every man would earn his keep.

The heat was just as oppressive in the hold, but the smells were worse. This was the odor of pirates, all right, and even if they now worked on the right side of the law, they hadn’t substantially changed their ways, certainly not their personal hygiene routines. I’d let myself slip a bit, too, but I still managed to wash in vital places every day.

I stopped at the piss barrel. Apparently stale urine did a great job getting blood out of clothes, so everyone contributed; well, except the female crew members, although I wouldn’t put it past Jane. I added my allotment, marveling again at how the human nose can eventually get used to any smell. I wondered if I’d ever be able to appreciate a rose or good cooking again.

“Hey, sword jockey,” a man said sleepily. One leg dangled off the edge of his cot, and was long enough to rest his bare foot flat on the ground. This was Suhonen, the biggest man aboard, a towering piece of muscle who, I suspected, played dumber than he was. “What’s the hurry? We won’t hit the Southern Ocean for another two days.”

“I just thought of something,” I said honestly. I left out that I should’ve caught a damn month ago. No need to advertise my shortcomings.

“Must be some thought to have you busting out like a moray eel,” he said. Other heads popped up from hammocks, aroused by the voices and any break in routine.

“Nah, nothing important,” I said. I went up the stairs to the main hatch and stood halfway out as I waited for my eyes to adjust to the blinding sun. I heard a voice below me murmur, “Cap’n Jane says he’s the most vicious swordsman in Muscodia.”

“That’s not saying much,” someone replied, and I fought not to laugh.

“She also says he took a sword to the heart and lived.”

“And that’s just impossible.”

“Did you ever know Cap’n Jane to lie?”

“I never sailed with her before. All I know is what you moony-eyed schoolboys tell me about her.”

“Well, call her a liar, wake up a eunuch, so say those of us who did sail with her.”

I climbed through the main hatch and emerged on deck before I laughed out loud. Instantly the breeze hit me, a rush of clean salt air that felt especially wonderful after passing through the hold. The morning sun was about a hand’s-width above the horizon, and the heat had not reached the eggboiling proportions it would by midday. If this was what it was like at this latitude, I really wasn’t looking forward to the heat of the Southern Ocean.

But at the moment, the heat I was most concerned with was my own temper. I looked around the ship that had been my home for the last two weeks, seeking Jane Argo.

Our ship bore the unlikely name Red Cow. She was a twomasted schooner eighty feet long and weighing in at about 220 tons. The crew complement was around a hundred. I knew very little about ships, but I did notice that the Red Cow sported an extra-long bowsprit, the purpose of which I had yet to discover.

She was a twenty-gunner as well, with five ballistae mounted on either side of the deck, and five more set to fire through ports below. The bolts might not pierce the hull of another ship, but they pierced the crew just fine. They could also grab fast to the other ship’s wood and allow the Red Cow to winch the two ships together, which was how pirates often secured their prey. Using their own tactic against them was just one of the ironies about the whole pirate-hunter enterprise.

The Red Cow was one of the fleet supported by the international coalition known as the Anti-Freebootery Guild, formed forty years ago in an attempt to stop the rampant criminal activity in and around the Southern Ocean ports. At first the various countries that signed the Guild charter used their navies to enforce it, but there were too many language barriers, cross purposes, and old grudges. In the first three years, twice as many naval vessels as pirates were sunk, often at the hands of so-called allies.

Finally someone clever suggested the creation of a special fleet of fast, heavily armed ships designed for the sole purpose of catching, capturing, and returning for trial any and all pirates. Someone even more clever-our old friend Queen Remy-realized that the best ones for the job were former pirates themselves.

So, for the last twenty-five years, the Anti-Freebootery Guild had done an adequate job keeping piracy confined to very specific, well- known areas of the ocean. Why had they not wiped it out entirely? For two reasons: One, pirates were as renewable a resource as corn or whores, and second, if they did wipe it out, the pirate hunters would be unemployed and might return to their old ways.

We’d been at sea for two weeks without encountering any pirates, but no one seemed too concerned. Certainly not the Red Cow ’s captain; in fact, I had yet to see him concerned about anything.

As my eyes finished adjusting, a new voice said, “Good morning, Captain.”

I turned to see Quartermaster Seaton clinging to the port mainsail shrouds. He was like many seconds-in-command I’d known, competent but happy to stay in the background. He had a goatee decorated with little bits of seabird bone, and a fringe of sun-lightened hair around his head. His otherwise bald pate was tanned dark and spotted in places with big moles. His arms sported muscles that looked like leather cords, and were covered with elaborate tattoos from ports all over the world. The captain led the crew, but Seaton made sure they followed his orders. He continued, “How’d you sleep?”

“Mostly on my back,” I deadpanned. “Still getting used to the heat. Have you seen Captain Argo?”

He nodded forward. “She’s down there jawing with Captain Clift.”

I followed his gaze. Jane, clad in billowing trousers and a sleeveless tunic tight enough to let everyone know when she got a chill, stood at the port bow rail. Beside her was our captain, Dylan Clift.

Clift was taller than Jane, slender, and deeply tanned, with a thin mustache along his upper lip. He was as likely to leap into the crow’s nest himself as send one of the crew to do it, and much like Jane, he tended to laugh a lot. He knew every crewman’s name, usually his background, and instinctively handled them in the most efficient way, goading with some, no-nonsense with others. He was the reason we-well, really Jane-had chosen the Red Cow. He’d served as Jane’s quartermaster during her pirate days, and followed her into pirate hunting. Several of the crew had also put in time under “Cap’n Jane” on both sides of the law. The rest had heard enough about her to be properly respectful, and they treated me well because I was with her. Jane’s exaggerated hints about my past helped, too.

“Interesting to see the two of them together again,” Seaton said.

“Did you serve under Jane?”

He nodded. “Aye, on her last two voyages.”

“When she captured Rody Hawk?”

Seaton’s expression hardened. “We don’t mention that name, Mr. LaCrosse. He’s bad luck. And no, that was before my time. In fact, no one who was on that voyage, except Cap’n Clift, still follows the sea.”

“My apologies,” I said. At least I wasn’t the only one leery of saying Hawk’s name aloud. “Lots of new rules to remember.”

He smiled. “Aye, it’s true. But as the man who’s paying our way, I suppose you can follow or not any rules you please.”

“I’ll still try to be less disruptive.”

Seaton saluted me. “Aye, sir, it’d be much appreciated.”

The conversation had caused a lot of my anger to burn away, but it grew hot again when I heard Jane’s laugh on the wind. I went along the rail past the windlass and joined the two captains at the bowsprit.

Clift turned to greet me. “Good morning, Mr. LaCrosse,” he said. His dark tan made his white teeth startling.

“Morning, Captain Clift. Any imminent action?”

“Not yet. Possibly tomorrow at the earliest. We’re still not in the real shipping lanes, so unless we come across a pirate skulking out of his hiding place, we have the luxury of peace and quiet.”

“I guess I can stand the wait.”

“You seem to be able to stand anything that’s necessary, Mr. LaCrosse.”

“I imagine my job is kind of like yours. Days of boredom punctuated by moments of total panic.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “That’s it exactly.”

I turned to Jane. Smiling, I said, “May I speak with you for a moment? In private?”

“Sure,” she said. “Excuse us, Dylan.”

“Certainly,” Clift said. And once again, I caught the moment that I’d seen now at least once a day since we left port. Clift smiled at Jane, then looked quickly away. He seemed to be changing clothes internally, putting on a different face for Jane than for everyone else. The “Jane face” wasn’t that different from his regular demeanor, and if I hadn’t caught on to the moment he switched, I might never have noticed. I had asked neither of them about it, because I could interpret it for myself: Captain Clift had it bad for ex-Captain Argo.

I pulled Jane across the deck to the starboard bow rail. She twisted out of my grip and said, “Hey, what’s the matter with you?”

I said quietly, “It took me a while, but I finally realized you lied to me.”

She looked outraged. “The hell I did.”

“You knew exactly who Black Edward Tew was the first time I mentioned his name.”

She started to protest some more, but bit it back. She knew I had her.

“When I asked you if you’d heard of him, you deliberately said something like, ‘There’s a lot of pirates in the world,’ which is not an answer. You were hiding that you knew about him without having to actually lie about it. And it was only after that that you started asking about his treasure. I thought you were just joking, but you knew there might be a treasure involved. At that point, even I didn’t know that.”

She said nothing.

“Now tell me why you did it,” I finished.

She started to speak, then stopped, then looked out at the water. I waited. A few sailors passed us, regarded us oddly, but said nothing.

At last Jane said softly, “Okay, you got me. I knew about Edward Tew. I should’ve told you. But I didn’t lie to you.”

“Don’t split hairs with me. Tell me why.”

“Why do you think? Miles. That stupid son of a bitch. Ever since I’ve known him, he’s been after the big score. I thought about telling you, but I know how good you are at this kind of thing, Eddie; if you started looking from scratch, without any hints from me, you might turn up a clue everyone else missed, and we might actually find Black Edward’s treasure. Even if I only got a cut of it, it’d be a fortune. Maybe then…”

She trailed off and looked away, but I heard the words anyway. Maybe then Miles will stop gambling and whoring.

“I’m not interested in Black Edward’s treasure, Jane. I’m really not.”

“I know that. I didn’t believe it at first, but I do now.” She looked contritely down, and then slowly her smile returned and she cut her eyes up at me. “Still, if we happen to, you know, stumble across it…”

I threw up my hands. “If we come across it, I don’t care who takes it. To be honest with you, the last thing I want is a pile of ill-gotten blood money.”

She grinned knowingly. “You’re piling it on thick, Eddie. I’m starting to not believe you again.”

I poked her in the hollow of her throat. “This is your warning shot, Jane. If you lie to me again-and just so we’re clear, just like I told Angelina, keeping things from me counts as lying-I’m leaving you at the next port we come to.”

“Okay,” she said seriously. “I’m sorry, Eddie. I should’ve trusted you.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“But I didn’t lie to you. I wouldn’t.” She poked me in the chest. “And you know damn well if you’d been really paying attention, you’d have caught me. So it’s really your fault for being sloppy.”

She said this playfully, but the seriousness beneath it was clear. And damn it, she was right. She smiled, which was bearable; if she’d laughed, we might’ve fought right there on the deck. But she didn’t.

I turned and walked away. As I did, I spotted Clift watching with the same mixture of curiosity and faint jealousy I’d noticed before.

The Red Cow was not a big ship to begin with. I wondered just how much smaller it would get before this trip was over.