Foreword

This one sails well outside my usual waters, and it will likely stay a one-off. A reader I’ve traded letters with has a soft spot for a kind of story I had never once tried, and against my better sense I sat down and wrote her one. So if it’s a departure from what you know me for, that’s the reason. It started as a gift and stayed one.

The idea was hers. What I did with it is mine.

For janis-from-the-uk, who never grew out of the pirate stories, and finally has one of her own.

The Rock

My mother’s hands stopped in my hair.

She’d been working the knots out with her fingers, quick and rough the way she did everything, and then the light caught the color of it and she went still, her hands dead against my scalp. I didn’t turn around. I knew the stopping by then. It meant she was doing the sum again — from the day I was born back to a night nine months before it, a black ship on the water and the man who’d come off it with a beard the color of dried blood. Her hands always got the same answer. They never once got a different one.

I had his hair. That deep rust-red, the only thing on me anyone ever called pretty, and I hated it more than any part of me because I knew off whose head the color had come. His hands too. She’d hold one of mine up in front of my face like evidence — you’ve got his hands — as if I’d swum out to his ship and taken them off him myself.

She told me the rest so many times it stopped being a story. A ship came the year before I was born, flying no colors, and men off it took what the island had and then took the rest. They killed the man she’d married, in the doorway of the house I grew up in; I walked past the spot ten times a day. She never called him my father and I never learned to. And while he was still cooling on the sand the red-headed man put her down on her own floor and used her and left her the way you leave a thing you’ve used, and got back on his black ship and was gone before the tide turned. Reave. She said the name like something gone bad in her mouth she had to spit out. Captain Reave. Nine months later, me.

So I grew up on a rock in the middle of the water, the get of the worst man the sea ever made, raised by a woman who couldn’t decide if she wanted to hold me or drown me, and most days couldn’t have told you which she’d done last.

I kept my hair hacked short with a fish knife — it caught on everything worth doing, and a girl who looked like a boy was a girl nobody came sniffing after, and my mother had her reasons to want that. She had another reason too, one she never put words to. Grown out and washed my hair came in bright, that rust-red, his red, and she couldn’t hold her eyes on it; hacked to the scalp and worked full of grime and salt it was nothing, a boy’s dirty mop. So I’d come up off the tide-line brown and scabbed and stinking of low water with the red beaten down out of sight, quicker up a mast-tree than any boy on the shore and meaner with my fists, and she’d catch sight of me in the doorway and something in her face would ease — one more day she didn’t have to watch him surface in me.

But my body had a mind of its own, and it had started going the way a body goes whether you want it to or not. There were breasts coming up under the wrappings now, sore against the cloth I bound them down with, tender enough some mornings that the binding was its own small daily hurt, and my hips had started to say something my knees and fists had spent years shouting down, a curve to me the loose slops couldn’t quite lie about anymore. The men who put in at the island had taken to letting their eyes catch and hold on me a beat too long before they worked out what they were looking at, and I’d learned to kill that beat with a hard flat look of my own before it could turn into anything. And the hair fought me hardest: let it grow even a little and it came back thick and rust-red, the one part of me I could never beat down for long, and every inch of it was his.

My mother watched it come on the way she watched a storm she could feel in her joints, and got quiet. I got restless the same way, and had no name for mine.

Then the black ship came back.

The island knew it on sight, which was how I came to know too. The old ones who’d lived through the first time went still when it rounded the point, and my mother came out of the house and stood in the doorway her husband had died in and watched it a long while and said the name once, low, like a splinter working its way out of her. Reave. A ship like his didn’t need a flag run up. The coast had learned its shape the hard way and never once forgot it.

It sat out past the reef where the water goes from green to deep, and it hadn’t come to burn anything this time, only to water and take what the island would trade rather than fight for. A boat came ashore with barrels and hard men who touched nobody, and they filled up at the stream and traded salt fish for rum and looked at the whole island like it wasn’t worth a second look.

But I looked at them. I looked at them the whole day from up the mast-tree by the point, and I looked at the ship past the reef, and something in me that had been restless for a year went very still and very sure, the way it did before I jumped from a height I probably shouldn’t.

He was the one thing on this earth that was half of me, and all my life I’d known him only through a woman who couldn’t look at me without seeing him. I wanted to stand in front of the thing I was made of and know it for myself. And under that, plainer and uglier, I wanted off the rock, away from the way she couldn’t look at me straight. I would have gone anywhere. It only happened that the anywhere that came was his.

That night I cut my hair down to nothing with a fish knife and burned what I cut so she wouldn’t find it. I bound myself flat and tight the way I’d half-done for a year, only tighter, until I could barely draw a full breath, and I rubbed grease and ash into my face and hands. I took a cap off a peg that had belonged to the man who died in the doorway. In the dark I looked at myself in the black window glass and there wasn’t a girl in it. There was a scrawny ship’s boy with a hard flat face, and I thought, that’s the last useful thing you ever gave me, and I didn’t know if I meant him or her.

I left before light. I didn’t leave anything behind me, not a word, because there was nothing I could have written that she’d have thanked me for.

Getting aboard was the easy part, which should have told me something. A ship like that was always short of hands, always burning through the small and the desperate, and a boy who’d work for nothing but passage off a rock was worth exactly the nothing they’d pay him. A man with a face like a dropped meal looked me over on the deck, felt my arm the way you’d feel a chicken, asked could I climb and could I keep my mouth shut, and I said yes to both in the lowest voice I owned. That was all of it. Nobody asked a cabin boy for his history. A cabin boy didn’t have one worth the breath.

They put me to work before the island was off the stern.

And the work was the least of what I’d have to keep hidden, though I didn’t know that yet either. What I learned in the first days was that a ship was a place with a hundred men and no walls, and that everything a body did, it did in front of somebody.

The wrappings were the constant of it. Every morning before light I wound the cloth around myself in the dark of the hold, flat and hard, tight enough to ache and then a turn tighter, until my own breath came short and stayed short the whole day and my breasts throbbed against the bite of it by the middle watch. At night I’d loose it an inch to sleep and lie there feeling them come back sore into their own shape, wedged in among the hammocks close enough to smell every man around me, close enough that a hand flung out in somebody’s sleep could have landed on me and learned in one grab what a whole voyage of care was hiding. I slept with an arm crossed hard over my chest. I did not draw a full breath, waking or sleeping, the whole time I was a boy.

I’d thought about the big things. I hadn’t thought about the small ones, and it was the small ones that nearly finished me before Reave ever laid eyes on me.

Pissing, for one. A man did it standing, careless, off the rail in front of the whole world, and the first time one shouldered in beside me at the rail to do it I near came out of my skin. I learned to turn into the wind, hunched over with my hands low and my heart going like a caught bird, learned the empty stretches of rail and the dark watches, learned to drink less than I wanted so there’d be less to hide.

It was the blood I couldn’t see my way past. I knew it was coming the way you know a debt is coming due. It came on women monthly and it had come on me for a year now, and there was no rail on any ship in the world you could piss that over. A boy who bled was a boy who was not a boy. I counted the days I didn’t rightly know how to count, and lay awake going over what I’d do when it came and finding no plan in it anywhere, and got no answer that let me sleep.

There was a bird.

The captain had a bird, a big gray thing gone ragged at the wings, older than half the crew by the look of it, and it rode a perch by the great cabin and it watched. Parrots watched; that was most of what they did. But this one watched me, from the first day, turned its head and fixed me with one flat yellow eye every time I passed with a bucket or a coil of line, and made a low sound down in its throat that wasn’t a word and wasn’t quite not one either. The men paid it no mind. It had been on that ship longer than any of them and it had earned the right to stare at whatever it liked.

I didn’t like it, and couldn’t have said why. It was a bird; a bird knew nothing; the only eyes I had to fear on that ship were in the heads of men. I gave it a wide berth when I could and told myself I imagined the way it leaned off its perch to keep me in that yellow eye as I went past.

The Sail

We took the merchantman eight or nine days out. I’d lost the exact count by then, the way you do when every day is the same water.

It started with a word off the masthead, one word carried down on the wind, and the whole ship changed under my feet like a dog coming awake. Sail. A man I’d never heard speak above a grunt was suddenly everywhere at once, and the sluggish, half-asleep vessel I’d been scrubbing for a week turned into something lean and hungry, every hand to a line, more canvas going up than I’d known she carried. We ran a flag up that wasn’t ours, some honest trading colors Reave kept in a locker for exactly this, and we came down on that other ship wearing a friendly face the whole way in.

She was fat and slow and never had a chance, and I think her master knew it early. He crowded on what sail he had and tried to run, and we ate the water between us like it was nothing. They’d sent me below to the powder by the time the friendly flag came down, so I never saw the black go up; I only heard the low ugly cheer the crew made when it did, and felt the whole ship lean into it. Then I ran powder up to the guns in the smoke and the dark until my arms shook, and the great guns went off over my head close enough that I felt each one in my teeth and the bones of my face, and somewhere up there a shot went into her that I felt come back through the water.

She struck. Of course she struck. The screaming and the running-about on her deck stopped at once, and her colors came down, and that was that. The chase was the long part. The taking was quick.

Then the hooks went across and bit, and the two ships came together grinding and groaning like it hurt them, and the crew went over the rail with a noise that went into me and stayed, and I got shoved up out of the powder-dark into daylight to make myself useful in whatever way a boy got made useful after.

The Long Table

The first thing was how ordinary the work was.

I’d braced for slaughter and there was some, up at the bow where a few of her crew had lifted a hand and got opened up for it and left where they fell. But mostly it was hauling. The gray quartermaster went through that merchantman’s hold like a clerk taking stock, and the rest of us formed a line and passed her guts across from one deck to the other, bolt after bolt of cloth, casks of oil, a strongbox that took two men. Sweating, ordinary, hurry-up work that went on for hours. The worst afternoon of somebody’s life was, to the men making it happen, mostly just a long day of lifting.

Her people they brought across separate.

The men of her crew that lived, they pressed the useful ones and put the rest over the side into her own boat with no oars and let the sea have the argument. But her passengers, the ones who’d paid coin to sit in the stern cabins and be carried somewhere safe, those they walked across the planks laid between the ships and stood in a huddle on our deck in their good clothes, and the good clothes were the thing that marked them, same as mine marked me. Wrong for where they were. A knot of women and girls in shore dresses, standing on a pirate’s deck in the wreck of an afternoon, and every man aboard who wasn’t still hauling turned to look at them the way the whole beach had once turned to look at me for wearing clothes on a naked shore. It was the same look, and I was on the safe side of it now, in my boy’s slops, watching it land on somebody else.

They dragged the long mess-table up into the open on the deck.

I was made to stand not ten feet off with a coil of line in my arms that nobody came to take, so I saw all of it. They laid them out along that table in a row, the whole catch of them. The youngest were barely grown into their shapes, girls not much further along than I was, and the oldest were old enough to be somebody’s mother, and one or two of them were exactly that. A good few were dressed fine, ladies and their daughters off the good cabins in bodiced gowns laced up tight the way quality laced itself, and the men had a way with those that was almost a ritual. They didn’t just strip them. They’d take the front of a gown in both fists and tear it — the bodice splitting down its boning with a sound like a green branch breaking, the laces snapping one after the other, the whole fine front giving at once — and bare the woman or the girl to the waist in a single pull before they bent her back over the boards. And a low sound went through the watching men every time a bodice went, the same sound each time, as if the tearing itself was the sweet part, sweeter almost than what came after. Then the crew sorted themselves into a line the way they’d sorted to pass the cargo, no more heat in it than that, patient, waiting their turn, some of them still chewing whatever they’d found in the merchant’s stores. And they used them there in the open, one after the next, down the whole length of the table. A good many of the girls were virgins, and the men liked those best and kept a place in the line for them. And the thing I had no way to know until I stood and watched a whole tableful of it was how the bodies gave over. Not all of them, and not at first. But a woman worked at long enough, a girl gone slick from fear and friction both, and somewhere down that line the sound coming off the table changed — stopped being only screaming, went low and broken and shameful, moan on moan dragged up out of women who wept for the making of them. That was the sound the men waited on. That was the sound that got the roar. They finished in them, every one, spent and stepped off and let the next man up, and the quartermaster stood to the side and let it happen because the rule was that plunder got shared, and this was one more kind of plunder to him.