Cast Off (15 page)

In fact, it was too soon to take effect, but I was glad the idea of the medicine gave him comfort. I sat by Barometer Piet's side and watched his breathing grow easier. Just before he drifted into a deep sleep, he opened an eye at me.

“We ain't square, you know. I carried you down to the bowels of hell, where you work all hours, the food's lousy, and the pay's worse. You saved my life. We won't be square 'til I save yours.”

“You busy?” Bram asked.

I looked up from the pigskin I was using to practice stitches, pigskin being the material on board closest to human flesh. Bram's face was black with powder from exercising the guns. Clockert and I didn't join in these drills, since in the event of battle we'd be stationed below, repairing the wounded. When weather permitted, all hands practiced rolling the four-thousand-pound cannons from their braces and loading them with powder and shot. The price of powder was too dear to fire the guns every day, but the captain sometimes ordered the men to fire on Sundays. What better way to honor the Lord than with a deafening explosion of artillery?

“Why?” I asked.

“You never did climb the mast. And,” he added in a low voice, “We need to talk.”

I'd been at my station through two watches already, but fatigue vanished in an instant. This was the moment I'd worked for all those weeks in the gymnasium. I glanced at Clockert for permission. Ten days after the keelhauling, my stiches were out and the wounds were healing nicely.

“Try not to fall,” he said.

Bram and I climbed to the waist, where we found Louis Cheval and two sailors urinating over the rail.

“'Ave a pee with us, Albert!” Louis called.

“Thank you, Louis, but I've no need,” I said.

“Baptize the ocean, Jochims,” said one of the sailors. “It's the Lord's day.”

I shot a worried glance at Bram.

“Sorry, mates,” he said. “We've got business.”

He led me to the fo'c'sle.

“Bram,” I said under my breath.

“Forget it. They was just joking around.”

This time
.

I craned my neck to gaze to the top of the foremast, which suddenly looked two hundred feet tall at least, and decided that for the moment I had worse problems than being female. It'd been some time since I'd practiced climbing. Would my muscles know what to do?

The mast had once been the trunk of a great fir tree and was so thick at the bottom that I could not have circled it with my arms. A grid of ropes stretched from the rail to a lookout platform halfway up and then to a second platform three-quarters of the way up. From there, more rope went to the yard that held the sails near the very top of the mast.

“You remember the first part,” Bram said, taking hold of a rope. “You just climb it like a ladder.”

I did remember the first part, and it wasn't like a ladder. Ladders didn't give way when a person stepped on them. Nor did they sway in a wild alarming fashion each time the ship crested a wave. But I hadn't spent weeks practicing in the hold to quit now.

Bram swung himself up, balancing on cordage as naturally as a monkey on a branch. I clambered onto the rail, awkward as a pig in a ballroom.

“It's best if you don't stop. Or look down,” Bram advised.

My gut lurched with the motion of the ship. I tugged my hat over my ears, set my teeth, and began to climb.

Bram stayed two steps ahead of me, although I suspected he could have made it to the top, down, and up again in the time it took me to creep twenty feet. I was beginning to gain confidence, when a gust of wind puffed me toward the mast. I flung out an arm and found nothing but air. My legs buckled; my arms waved.

My feet slipped.

Thirty feet aloft, one hand was all that kept my head from splattering on the deck like a rotten melon. The newly healed skin on my arms stretched painfully. Sweat loosened my grip; the wind caught me by the waist and hurled me over the sea.

“Easy does it!” called Bram.

I glanced down. Some soldiers were holding a funeral. I saw them push two canvas-wrapped bodies over the rail. At the same time, a growing crowd of sailors watched me struggle, and, if I knew them at all, wagered bets on my fate. Heartless!

Wager all you like. I've done this a hundred times before. Two hundred times.

I swung my free arm up and grabbed the rigging. Now for my feet. I willed myself to stop struggling, to float with the wind instead of against it. Kicked out and missed, my bare foot scraping rough cord. Kicked again and this time found rope. Safe for the moment, I took in deep breaths of sea air.

This is, perhaps, somewhat more difficult than climbing in my gymnasium.

“Nicely done!” Bram shouted down to me. “You're nearly there. Now listen carefully. This next part's tricky!”

“Excellent,” I muttered. “I was just thinking things were getting rather dull.”

“You see that hole?” I looked where he pointed. The mast and rigging went through a hole in the center of the wood platform. “It's called the lubber's hole,” Bram called.

Good enough. I can make it to the lubber's hole.

“Real seamen
never
use the lubber's hole. We go round and over the top of the platform like this.”

More rigging stretched away from the mast up to the outside edge of the platform. Bram scuttled up this rigging like a beetle, back to the sea, face to the sky.

I don't want to be a real seaman! I want to be a lubber!
I longed to shout. But it wasn't true. I wanted to be a real seaman very much.

“Now your turn!” he encouraged me with an over-bright smile.

I knew if I hesitated I might never move at all. I swung out an arm . . .

“Steady now!” he called.

. . . grabbed on . . .

“Mind the topsail,” Bram advised. “It'll give you a good bonk on the head.”

. . . and jumped, wrapping my legs around the line like Bram had so I was leaning backward over the ocean.

“That's it! You got it now!”

Inching, straining, eyes tearing in the vile, despicable, loathsome sun . . .

“Here!” Bram leaned over the railing, just above me. He grabbed hold of my wrist and yanked. I landed on my belly on the slatted wood.

I will not kiss the planks.

“Have a rest and we'll head up some more.”

“Can't we talk here?” I asked.

Bram shook his head. “Too close. We need to go all the way up for this.”

I sat up. “Then save the rest. I don't need it.”

“Good man,” Bram said.

The climb to the next platform was faster, although the higher I went, the more I felt the pitch and roll of the ship. Pride swelled in my chest when I went over the rail unaided.

“Lucky for us there's no weather today, hey?” Bram said.

Lucky indeed. I leaned on the rail and felt the fear trickle from my liver. I'd done it at last! I'd climbed to the top of the mast like a regular sailor. I was stronger than Atlas! I—

Bram clapped me on the shoulder. “Just one last bit and you're there.”

I beg your pardon?

I squinted up the mast. A single rope stretched from here to the yard at the top. I'd have to wrap my legs around the lone vertical line and shimmy up. My hands already had blisters and my legs were trembling.

A hundred times before. Two hundred times—

I took hold and jumped. Stretched thus, my body swayed like laundry on a line. I twisted my legs around the rope and pulled.

Blisters burst, ankle bloody. The sails snapped in the wind, and I clung tighter. My cap slipped from my head, bounced off a sail, and rode the currents to the outstretched hand of a sailor on the deck below. I saw him wave his prize in the air while his mates cheered.

You'll give that hat back or I'll make you, you cheeky bandit.

The yard was within reach. I grabbed the solid wood and hoisted myself up. Bram climbed next to me and we two perched on either side of the mast, much narrower at the top, with an arm holding on. We sat on the yard with our feet dangling in the air, gazing a dozen miles out to sea.

“Well?” Bram asked.

“Better than helping Barometer Piet with the chamber pot,” I said.

But in truth, now that we'd reached the top of the world, I would have gladly risked my life ten times over to come again. Far below us, the men crowded the deck like a good catch of herring released from a net. White foam dotted the green sea, and every so often the sleek curve of a dolphin's back crested the waves. Up in the sky, pearl mist swathed the sun. There was only the sound of the wind, nothing but clean air to breathe. I never wanted to leave.

“It's my favorite place too,” Bram said.

Together we watched the glittering sea in silence. It seemed the whole world was nothing but water, the
Lion
its only earthbound creature.

“May I ask you a question?” I said.

“It's been since yesterday. I was wondering when you'd start again.”

I ignored his impertinence.

“Where are we?”

“In the Atlantic, maybe six hundred sea miles east of Brazil,” he said. “We sailed southwest from Holland around the doldrums and then shifted southeast at Trindade Island to chase the trade winds. Pretty soon we'll head due south. There'll be a lot more weather down there, and those big winds in the forties'll blow us clear to Cape Town.”

My mouth hung open like a simpleton's. “However do you know all that?”

“The captain lets me sit in sometimes when he teaches the midshipmen their astronomy and navigation. And the quartermaster don't mind me asking questions. Even the pilot'll name a star or two if I can get him to sit still long enough.”

I leaned against the mast and tilted my face to the sun, now warm, nourishing, forgiven.

“Miss Petra?”

“Hmm.”

“I need to tell you something.”

I heard the seriousness in his voice and understood that Bram hadn't brought us to the top of the mast simply to enjoy the view. It was also one of the only private places on the ship.

“There's mutiny afoot,” he said, voicing the dirtiest word on any vessel.

“A mutiny! Who?
Why?
”

“They're aiming to bite the VOC payroll,” he said. “I don't know every cove who's in on it or how they mean to do it or when. Just that there's a plan.”

Bram had no need to tell me that mutiny usually ended in death—either the captain's and the men loyal to him or the failed mutineers'—Albertina used to read aloud the stories of the trials in the broadsheet newspapers.

“Does Paulus know?” I asked.

He told me of his conversation with his father. “But he won't say more. If we can figure out who's in and what they're planning, we can decide which side we want to be on.”

“You'd side with the mutineers?”

“I might! And you should think on it too,
Miss
Petra De Winter. You can't be a boy forever. And then what? You got two choices and you know it. You find a cove to marry or you go work yourself to death. But if you had enough money, you wouldn't have to do either.”

“You don't know that! I've years to figure out another way. And, besides, stealing is
wrong
. And so is mutiny. It's the worst kind of treachery.”

“Is it stealing when every coin in those chests was earned on the backs of ordinary men? You know what's
wrong
? Wrong's when your only choice is being a slave on land or working like a slave on a boat you can't ever leave. That letter from De Ridder's my only chance at a free life, and even if he writes it, the fancy nabobs in Amsterdam still might turn me away. Seems to me it's the rich coves who decide what's the
worst kind of treachery
and they do it so's the poor coves work harder and harder to make the nabobs richer and richer.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I think I might.”

I could well understand Bram's feelings and how an otherwise good-hearted sailor might be willing to consider mutiny for three million florins. My father was one of those rich nabobs, after all. But what about honor? What about loyalty? Stealing was stealing, and De Ridder seemed to be a decent man.

Bram interrupted my thoughts. “Look, I'm not saying we should do anything. I'm just saying we should find out as much as we can so we can decide what's best.”