A Tyranny of Petticoats (3 page)

The wind is sharp from the starboard beam. It won’t be a turn of the glass before we’re pushed close enough to the frigate to force a reckoning.

Pop is drawn tight like a mainstay line. He badly wants to say something but he’s not going to. I’m not even sure what there is to say.

I can’t take my offer back. And I can’t let us be taken.

I face the water. I slip out of my jacket and dive in.

The water is bonechill-cold and the shock of it hits me like a cudgel. I kick my feet and force myself upward and forward, but my shirt and trousers splay out like a jellyfish, clinging and dragging and slowing every limb I thrash.

So I choke and gasp and struggle, fighting out of my clothes. I break the surface and the cold hits me again, rakes over my stubbly head, but I suck in a mighty breath and tread water long enough to steady myself.

Cold. Oh, Father Neptune but it is cold in nothing but smallclothes and the linen I keep wrapped about my chest.

Black Tom’s in the rigging. The old man has the spyglass. One of them’s bound to notice.

I’ll reap that whirlwind once I’m back on board. For now, I’ve got a ship to sink.

I tighten the mate’s belt and make sure I still have both auger and dagger, then I slice my arms through the water in a nice steady rhythm. I start to feel warmer. Every twenty strokes I look up and mark the warship just to be sure I’m on course.

At first it feels like I’ll never get there.

Then she’s within a stone’s throw.

Then I’m right beneath her.

I tread water once I reach the warship, fighting to catch my breath. It’s been a while since I’ve swum this much, and my arms are weak and melty, my eyes burning from the salt. The ship is moving only with the tide, and I unfasten the auger from my waist and feel along till I find a spongy, worm-eaten patch below the waterline.

There’s no way to auger without a grip to hold me steady, and there’s nothing to grip but barnacles. They cake the whole shipbottom like drifted sand, and each is a tiny razor.

I’m too tired to hesitate. I grab a clump of barnacles, and they slice me open clean and thoughtless. And those cuts burn. They burn and burn and I whimper, not an ounce of piss and vinegar left to fight it.

But my right hand is free, and I set to work with the auger. I crank it round and round, round and round. It’s all I do. It’s all I think about.

Before long I’ve bored half a dozen holes clear through the hull. The barnacles have already done the job halfway, quietly eating the wood till it all but ripples beneath my palms. Already I can hear the slurpsuck of water punching through my holes and the panicky shouts of men inside, the clomp and clatter as they flee, the futile clang of the ship’s bell ringing the general alarm.

My arms throb and my whole left hand is numb from scores of tiny half-moon cuts across my fingers. When I fumble the auger against the hull to start a new hole, it wheels out of my hand and drops like an anchor down and down and gone.

I watch it disappear. The job is only half done. All I have left is my dagger.

I force my stiff fingers around another clump of barnacles. New cuts crosshatch the old ones. I pull the dagger from my belt and stab at the pulpy wood like a murderer.

A raw, violent hole appears beneath my blade. Then two, then many.

The warship is taking on water. The shift in pitch is sobering. I’m killing these men. They can swim no better than the lads on the
Vanity.

I’ve lost count of the holes I’ve put in, but I’m spent. The warship’s list is bad enough that she’s in no position to fight us or give chase. And if she goes down, I want to be nowhere near.

I’ve earned my prize. Pop’s prize. And half the rum ration of every man on the
Vanity
whose life I saved sinking this Spanish tub.

I cram my dagger into its sheath, push off the side of the listing warship — the barnacles open up my toes like meat — and thrash through the waves toward home. Each stroke takes all my effort, and halfway there I start to crawl-paddle and sputter out seawater hard enough to set my vitals throbbing.

I won’t make it if I think how bad I hurt.

So I think how to explain to Half-Hanged Henry that I don’t want his daughter’s hand in marriage.

I think of the first time I made it all the way up to the topgallant yard on the
Sally Dearest,
how I felt light enough to spread my arms and take wing like a bird.

And I think of Pop, who only ever wanted a place of his own and a houseful of babies.

My blind, splashing hands clatter against something hard and wet and splintery. The
Golden Vanity.
I grab and scrabble for a barnacle handhold, but Captain Royal Navy actually careens them off proper on occasion, and I must weakly tread water.

Up on the foredeck I see faces of the crew peering over, tiny ovals of color against a flat gray sky and sprawls of dingy canvas and a tangle of rigging.

I dredge an arm out of the water in salute. Any moment now a rope will fall over the side. Somewhere in me is the strength to hold that rope, and I will find it.

One by one, the faces at the rail disappear.

Only the old man is left.

“She’s sunk!” I shout. “I sank her. Pull me up!”

The old man doesn’t reply. He doesn’t throw a rope either. He merely shakes his head.

Over my shoulder, the Spanish warship is tilting like driftwood and the whole quarterdeck is in chaos as men push and fight for dry ground. Seeing her on her way down reminds me how hot and weak my arms are, how much of a struggle it is to keep my head above the waves.

“Captain!” I howl, but it’s a mistake because I choke on a sudden harsh mouthful of water.

“Can’t do it, Joe,” he says, and disappears from the rail.

I’m gasping with every flailed stroke and kick, but I manage to free my dagger from its sheath. I punch it out of the water and shout, “I know well how to sink a ship, Cap! If this is how you’ll serve me, I’ll take you to the bottom with me. We’ll all be on Mother Carey’s table together!”

And that’s when Pop appears at the rail, fighting the first mate and the bosun, who have him by either arm. There’s a length of ratline in his hand and he almost gets it over the gunwale before they haul him away, out of sight.

He’ll go to the bottom too.

I open my hand and let the dagger fall, down and down, to Davy Jones.

Pop is roaring like a madman and cursing every Goddamn one of them and shouting at me to stay strong, his last little baby, the only one he could save.

I flail one final stroke and go under.

I’m colder than I’ve ever been, but nothing hurts anymore — not my arms, not my feet, not my eyes, not my guts.

Above me is a dull shadow set against shades of rippling, glinting motion. It’s the size of my thumb, oval but pointed at both ends.

Like the bottom of a ship.

I’m standing before a table on the quarterdeck of an ancient, rotted merchantman. Her mast is a ragged stump and stray chain shot is lodged in the gunwales. At the head of the table is a woman whose face is hidden by shadow and wavered by the movement of the currents around us.

“Jocasta,” she says, and all at once I know who she is. I know it even though I have only a whisper of a memory of her. This is the voice that would lilt through fire-warmed, comfortable darkness when I was small enough to be tucked into a willow basket. Then would come her gentle hand, rubbing my back, smoothing hair from my eyes, pushing away the dim of the room and the grit of the floor and the gnaw in my belly.

I have to swallow twice before I can answer, and it’s no more than a whisper. “Mama.”

“That’s right.” She swims one long graceful arm at an empty chair before a bare, waiting dinner plate. “Come, sit down. I’ve been expecting you. Supper’s ready.”

Pop would never say much about Mama. One day she was there before the fire in our cabin, the next she wasn’t. He’s always saying I was too little to remember her anyway, but he’s wrong.

I remember her voice. I remember her warmth. I remember crying quietly because she hadn’t taken me with her, wherever she went.

And here she is before me.

She leans to set a dish on the table, nudging several others to make room. The table is overflowing with platters, all covered with domed abalone shells.

I reach for the chair and pull it out. It glides through the water like my arm, like my backside as I start to sit down.

Then she smiles at me.

Her teeth are all pointy like a cat’s.

I freeze, my rump hovering above the seat. “Y-you’re not my mother.”

“Mama. Or Madre. Or Mater. All of you with salt for blood are mine.” She slides her lips over her teeth, her voice all Mama once more. “Come now, Jocasta. Sit down. I’ve missed you.”

Out of the darkness, out of everything cold and miserable would come that voice. And somehow things would grow lighter, starting with her and ending with me.

She’s back at her work, carving meat and dicing seaweed and piling everything onto platters made of shells all lined up along the table. This table on the deck of a dead ship.

“Sit.” Her voice goes sharp and she aims her knife at me.

The same knife I buried to the hilt in weak, barnacled patches of a Spanish warship, sending her and her crew to the bottom of the sea.

To Mother Carey’s table.

I flip over one of the shells covering a platter. It’s heaped with severed fingers and slabs of flesh and the odd swimming length of bowel.

I struggle backward, but it’s a maddening swish of water and my arms churn, trying to push away, trying to get clear. Mother Carey grins with her pointy cat-teeth as she lifts a goggle-eyed, limp-swaying Spanish sailor from his seat and cleaves his arm from his torso while he burbles
Mamita.

“You will sit,” Mother Carey says as she slits the sailor from neck to navel, “and you will stay. It would be a pity if you didn’t enjoy the fine feast you’ve provided me.”

Spanish sailors with empty, slack faces are taking seats one after the other in chairs that hold them fast as Mother Carey prepares a feast of the dead for herself and Davy Jones.

“You wouldn’t leave me, would you? Sit down, Jocasta. Sit down and be with your mother.”

Mama’s voice keeps coming out of Mother Carey’s mouth as she stands at the head of her table and pulls helpless Spaniards out of chairs much like the vacant one before me. As she cleaves the poor bastards bone from bone and piles their guts on abalone dishes.

I learned to stop asking about Mama. Pop said it was easier that way. That we love people when they’re here, but when they go, they’re gone.

Pop. Who never once thought to leave me behind, whatever the cost.

I don’t sit down. I kick my feet. I start to rise.

Water moves around me and over me and through me, through my hair and my skin, and flutters the scraps of linen that still cling to me. I wing out my arms and glide.

I am growing lighter.

The wind changes shades. The sunlight changes color.

Most of us huddle up close in the sand. But five of us, we feel it. We know what to do.

I become light. I catch the updraft, sway over the waves. The nests on the dunes are distant but safe for now. Out we go, and out.

A storm builds to the north. A storm my mother is stirring, for she and her man grow hungry once more.

Sails beyond the barrier island, rigged for pursuit. When the sky is this color we are drawn to ships, to those who are as we once were.

I angle my wings, slide along the ship’s waterline, pluck up some tiny-shelled creatures to crunch. Dabble my toes against the water, then glide up on a wick of wind.

I am up and into the rigging, toward a brown man with graying hair who sits all alone on the foremast yard, swinging his legs while the wind catches his jacket.

Soon they will go. Capstan chanty, anchor up, ship in sight, beat to quarters. He will be among them. He will grip his blade, swing over harsh water. He is still waiting for his prize. He waits for her even as he curses her.

Around the edge of the sail. Up, and toward him.

The water sings and beckons. The wind wants to nudge me toward the dunes and my nest, and soon enough I will return there, but right now I need to be on this yard with this man. I need to see him.

I need him to look north so he’ll stay on this side of the water and not below, where my mother would put his bones on her table.

He holds out a hand and I cannot help but take wing. Too sudden for the shell of me, too much, even though the soul of me would curl up in his pocket, feel the warm beat of his heart one last time.

I make a pass through the rigging, then sweep down to the waterline. I arc over the quarterdeck, where dark clouds are beginning to mount.

I hover there until he sees.