by Tom Abrahams
“A joke?”
“He’s a coward,” she’d said. “He pretended to be dead to avoid being killed. That’s gutless. It seems like he’s joking. Or that the person who wrote the play is joking.”
Her father had smiled. “You’re too smart for your own good.”
As she sat in the Texas’s galley, letting Branch spin his lie, was she being a coward? Maybe her father and whoever wrote the play were right. Discretion was the better part of valor. Live to fight another day. She decided to stay quiet and let Branch speak uninterrupted.
“We’ve come from the central archipelago,” he said. “It’s been a while since we’ve fueled up. Long journey ahead.”
Nahodha folded his arms across his chest, resting them on his protruding belly, and regarded his guests. After a longer than comfortable silence, he clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “You tell half-truths, Desmond Branch.”
Branch was unmoved. He quietly took another sip of the rum.
“I know who you are, friend,” Nahodha went on. “You are a pirate. You take what is not yours. You hurt people who do not deserve it. You are a man without a home, without a village.”
Branch set the glass on the table. “And I’m a legend. You forgot that.”
Nahodha chuckled. It was the laugh of someone who sensed the tension rising but sought to ease it. He unfolded his arms and put his fingers on the table, walking them across the worn, cigarette-burned surface.
“I did not forget, he said. “Everyone knows you, Desmond Branch. You travel from place to place. So many places. Where are you going now? And whose child is this?”
Nahodha pointed at Anaxi, but didn’t look at her. He was focused on the pirate.
“Are we going to have a problem, Nahodha?” Branch asked, his voice firm. “I’ve paid for my fuel. I didn’t take anything from you. We’re in business fair and square, no?”
The captain raised his hands in surrender. “No problems. You did pay. There is no judgment from me, my friend. No judgment. I only say what I know is truth. Do you have a problem with truth?”
Branch balled his hands into fists then extended his fingers. He flexed them back and forth.
“The truth is,” he said, “you are either judging me, or you want something from me. Otherwise, as I see it, you wouldn’t be sitting here with me, drinking this fine rum.”
The captain said nothing. He poured a third glass for himself and offered a refill to Branch. The pirate declined. The captain dropped his hands beneath the table.
“I know people who would pay me lots of money for you,” admitted Nahodha. “You have many enemies, my friend. People you have wronged. People from whom you have taken valuables. That is the truth.”
Branch laughed. “Is that what this is about? The bounty on my head? You planning on killing me?”
The captain shrugged and lifted a pistol, which had apparently been secured to the underside of the table. He leveled it at Branch’s chest.
“You are worth more alive than dead,” Nahodha said. “Much more. Do you think I would do business with a stranger? I know you. Raise your hands, friend.”
Branch raised his hands. Anaxi saw the muscles in his jaw flex.
Nahodha used the gun to motion toward Anaxi. “The girl too.”
She raised her hands. Behind her, from the bridge, she heard shouts and what sounded like a struggle. In front of her, Nahodha’s expression shifted. His nervous confidence melted into confused concern.
“I think you might want to lower the weapon, friend,” said Branch. “If you knew me as you claim, you never would have tried this.”
Three of Branch’s men appeared in the galley. Two were bloodied and one of them had Mafuta by the collar of his faded T-shirt. The man had a large swelling under his eyes and blood draining from what might have been a broken nose.
Branch lowered his hands and stood. “My men have control of your ship now. Go ahead and put down the gun.”
Rage flooded Nahodha’s features, but he didn’t lower the weapon. He opened his mouth to speak but sputtered something unintelligible.
“Go ahead,” said Branch. “Shoot me. You’ll be dead before my body hits the deck. So will your woman. And your child.”
Nahodha’s hand trembled now. He couldn’t keep his aim straight. His rage mixed with fear.
Branch stepped behind Anaxi. He tapped her shoulder and pulled out her chair as she stood.
“That’s right, Nahodha,” he said. “I know my business partners too. And I know their half-truths.”
Sweat beaded on Nahodha’s head. It pooled in the divots at his crown and ran down his forehead.
“Bring her in,” said Branch.
Another of his men entered the galley with a small child in his arms. She was beautiful. Her dark brown skin was flawless, hair pulled tight against her head in braids. Brightly colored beads decorated the rows of styled hair. Her crystal blue eyes were wide with fear as she sucked on her thumb.
“Mtoto,” Nahodha whispered. The gun dropped to the floor. “Don’t hurt her. Please.”
Branch nodded at his man holding the child. The crew moved across the galley and handed Mtoto to her father. Now the captain’s arms were full. Nahodha kissed the girl on her forehead, then her cheeks. He held her tight against his bare chest.
“Let’s go,” said Branch.
Anaxi grabbed Branch’s arm. “Don’t do this.”
The pirate shrugged free of her hand and marched from the galley to the stairwell. He didn’t wait for Anaxi or the others. They followed without direction until they were at the stern of the large ship. It was a march that took several minutes at a brisk pace.
“Branch,” called Anaxi, “stop. Don’t do this. These people did nothing to you.”
He ignored her. Branch didn’t turn back. He didn’t even slow or hesitate.
As they moved through the ship, Anaxi saw the pirates in control. They passed dead bodies and wounded men nursing injuries. The woman in the tunic lay on her back. Blood stained the bright colors of her dress. Her eyes were lifeless now. Anaxi stepped over blood and in it. It struck her how much damage the pirates had inflicted on the Texas crew and how silently they’d manage to be in the commission of it all.
Until the Saladin arrived at her home island, Anaxi had had little violence in her short life. Since its unwelcome visit, she’d seen little else other than the worst humanity might inflict upon itself.
A bright orange lifeboat hung from the stern of the ship on a winch.
Branch’s men had the captain, his wife, and their child huddled together near it. Three other crew members, including Mafuta, remained with them under guard.
Branch stepped to one of the two entry ports on the side of the lifeboat. He motioned to one of his men. A relay of information passed among crew members until the winch began to clank and hum.
Slowly, the winch moved the boat away from its stowed position. It took two minutes for it to reach a place where people might board. Branch stepped to the boat and unlatched one of the two entry doors. Then he motioned to the opening in a sweeping movement of faux graciousness.
“All aboard,” he said.
Nahodha furrowed his brow. He frowned at the lifeboat, barely big enough to fit all of them and with only a propeller on the back, and then at Branch. He lifted his chin and pulled back his shoulders.
“No,” he said.
Branch drew his sword. Sunlight glinted on the steel. The blade sliced through the air and stopped less than an inch from Nahodha’s face. In a second quick action, the razor-sharp tip touched Nahodha’s wife’s cheek, pushing at her fleshy cheek.
Branch was expressionless, his voice dispassionate. “One way or the other, you and your family are getting off this ship. Your choice as to the method.”
“Branch,” said Anaxi, “what are you doing?”
Again, Branch ignored her. His focus remained on Nahodha.
Nahodha’s eyes moistened. He swallowed and his Adam’s
apple worked up and down against his throat. Saying nothing, he took his wife’s hand and led his family to the square portal on the starboard side of the lifeboat.
Awkwardly, they climbed inside the cabin. Three more men followed them, including the dejected Mafuta. He was a shell of the man Anaxi met earlier and hardly recognizable as he disappeared into the lifeboat.
Branch sheathed his sword, climbed toward the portal, and said something to those aboard. Anaxi couldn’t hear it, but saw the familiar self-important smirk on the pirate’s face when he emerged and lowered himself to the tanker’s deck.
He closed the portal and twirled a finger in the air, signaling it was time to get moving. Anaxi watched intently as the mechanism shifted and carried the boat toward the water. Once clear of the ship’s deck, the lifeboat sank toward the water before the taut lines holding it aloft disconnected, and the boat dropped into the sea.
Branch moved to the edge of the tanker and leaned over to check the boat. He clapped his hands together and gave his crew another signal.
“C’mon, Anaxi,” he said. “Time to leave.”
Two men helped her from the ladder to the Saladin despite her efforts to push them away. She didn’t want any help. Grunting and frustrated, she steadied herself on the deck of the smaller ship and watched the rest of the men climb down in single file, like ants following a prescribed path. Amidst the Saladin’s crew, a few of the men from the Texas lowered themselves. Once on the deck, they were bullied or beaten into submission. One was tossed overboard when he didn’t move fast enough toward the steps leading below deck.
Anaxi wrapped an arm around the ship’s worn foremast and leaned her head against it. Exhaustion rippled through her body. First, she felt it in her eyes, then her shoulders. Her chest was heavy. Her legs were weak. Anaxi wanted to sleep. She wanted to crawl into her small bunk in the corner of the fo’c’sle and drift into a happy dream. This waking nightmare was too much.
The acrid smell of smoke stung her nostrils, the back of her throat, and brought her to the present.
The sky blackened above her. The day had instantly turned into night. Letting go of the mast, she walked amongst the busy crew toward the starboard side of the ship. From the right side, farthest from the Texas, she could better get a view of the tanker. Through the thickening pillows of black smoke, she couldn’t see much above its deck. Then, from within the black, she saw an orange flicker. It was a flash at first. Then again. And bigger.
The Texas was on fire.
Her weight shifted underneath her and she almost fell to the deck. The Saladin was underway. She felt the low vibration in the deck planks beneath her feet.
Anaxi maneuvered her way through the hive of activity on the deck and found a spot toward the rear where she could watch the Texas burn. Above the roar of the flames and the wash of the ocean against the Saladin’s keel, screams pierced the air.
One after the other, people jumped from the burning tanker into the sea. Some of them surfaced. Some didn’t. Their arms splashed in the water. They waved them above their heads. There was no helping them.
Even the lifeboat that carried their captain, Nahodha, was too far away—an orange speck hiding and reappearing amongst the chop.
“I told Nahodha not to come back for their men,” said Branch.
He was behind Anaxi. She didn’t turn to look at him and focused on the men jumping from the tanker. Some hesitated before leaping. Others didn’t.
Tears clouded her vision. She wasn’t sure if it was the emotion welling inside her or the biting waves of smoke that drifted across her face. Instead of wiping away the tears, she kept her eyes open. A burning sensation forced her to blink.
Branch put his hand on the top of her head. She clenched her jaw. The last thing she wanted right now was anyone’s touch, anyone’s talk. But he spoke.
“You might ask why I burned the tanker. It seems counterintuitive, right? It’s a source of more fuel than the Saladin could use in a decade. We had control of it. Why not kill the captain, enslave the crew, use it as a waypoint when we embark upon more delicate missions aboard my beloved Saladin?”
He said the name with the same reverence Anaxi had heard men speak of their wives. There was a sweetness that was absent in everything else he said.
He tousled her hair and stepped next to her. His fingers pinched his nose and he sniffed the air, perhaps clearing the smoke from his nostrils. Then he spit onto the deck in front of him. Anaxi watched the bubbling glob stick to the plank, holding its shape while the pirate talked. She said nothing and lifted her chin. A man jumped from the tanker and banged off its hull before splashing limply into the water.
“There are other tankers,” he said. “We’ll find them when we need them. I thought it better to send a message. And I—”
Anaxi interrupted him. “My father had a saying.”
“Did he?”
“He did.”
Branch stepped forward. He stood between Anaxi and the burning ship so she had to look at him, or at least, through him.
“What was it?”
Anaxi glared at him. “He’d say you’re biting off your nose to spite your face.”
Branch rolled his tongue around in his mouth. He used it to poke at the inside of his cheek.
“It might appear that way,” he said. “However, before you interrupted me, I was about to tell you the more important of the two reasons I chose to burn the tanker.”
She raised an eyebrow. Smoke and flames framed both sides of him. The Texas shrank as the Saladin motored farther from it, Le Grand pushing their motor to full power.
Branch pinched his nose again. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together.
“We have more important business at hand,” he said. “That takes priority over everything else. And I have other reasons.”
“What?” Anaxi asked.
“What would I do with a tanker? I can’t haul it around with the speed of my ship. I don’t have enough crew to man it. Certainly, I couldn’t trust the Texas’s loyalists to do my bidding. It was more hassle than it was worth.”
“Shortsighted. You didn’t have to kill all of those people. You could have enslaved them and put them to work on the Saladin. Given them a choice.”
Branch regarded her and said, “I have a saying too. Your father didn’t have a monopoly on pithy colloquialisms.”
She seethed. “You have no right to compare yourself to my father.”
He grinned. “I like to watch things burn.”
Anaxi sucked in as deep a breath as her lungs would allow. The air stung as she inhaled, and it stopped her short. She cleared her throat and took a step closer to her captor.
“You’re crazy,” she said. “One day you’ll sink like that tanker.”
She motioned past him, jutting her chin toward the flaming vessel. Branch turned to follow her gaze at the very moment an enormous ball of fire exploded from the Texas. An instant later, the percussive sound and wave from the blast reached them. It knocked them both from their feet.
The Saladin leaned hard to one side and Anaxi slid along the deck toward its edge. Her body caught something hard and it lifted her into the air. She tumbled and landed hard on her side. She grabbed blindly for something to hold. Nothing. Something sharp stabbed at the back of her thigh.
Another blast rocked the ship again. Her ears rang. A sharp pain radiated from the back of her head. Men screamed and groaned. Water washed over her, stinging her eyes. She gagged on a mouthful of ocean.
Through the haze of disorientation, she tried to pull focus on whatever it was in front of her. She thought she might be blinded. But she rolled a shoulder and realized she was pressed against a storage box bolted to the deck. Her nose was close enough to it that all she could see was the black metal of the box.
Under her weight, as she rolled onto her back, the ship pitched. However far the Saladin was from the Texas, it wasn’t far enough.
She lay on her back until the ship steadied on th
e sea. It might have been a minute or an hour, Anaxi wasn’t sure. Intermittent cries from the injured punctuated the wash of the sea against the ship’s keel.
The back of her head throbbed with each accelerated beat of her heart. The back of her leg burned. Her jaw was sore. Salt stung her eyes as she blinked the world into focus. Branch stood above her. Tendrils of blood ran down his face from a gash above his right eye. He reached down with an outstretched hand.
“Here. Let me help you.”
Anaxi slapped the hand away and pushed herself onto her elbows. Under her own power, she maneuvered onto her feet. Her vision blurred for an instant as the blood drained from her head. She wobbled and Branch steadied her by holding her elbow. She didn’t reject his help this time. If she had, she might have fallen again.
Looking at him, she pointed at his wound. “You’re hurt.”
He released her arm and gently tapped the injury. When he lowered his hand to look at the blood, he rubbed it between his thumb and forefingers as if testing its viscosity.
“A little lower and I’d have lost an eye,” he said. “That’d make me a right proper pirate, wouldn’t it?”
Anaxi rubbed the back of her neck, tilting her head to one side and the other. The back of her head throbbed.
Water sloshed on the deck, washing her feet, and she steadied herself on the storage box. Instead of standing, she dropped onto the box. Her shoulders sagged with exhaustion. She brushed hair from her face. The grit of salt scrubbed against her fingers.
Without an invitation, Branch sat next to her. His hip touching hers, he bent forward and rested his arms on his legs. Blood dripped like sweat from his forehead. He ignored it.
“One eye or two, you will never find that thing you’re looking for, and it doesn’t matter whether I’m with you or not,” Anaxi said. “Not if you keep acting out of insecurity. Not if you think power is the exertion of force or violence.”
He lowered his chin and sighed. He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, perhaps considering her lecture.
“All right,” he said. “Tell me then, Anaxi Mander. What do I need to do?”
Two crew members passed in front of them. One helped the other walk. The injured man limped, not putting weight on one foot. Bright white bone protruded from his bloodied skin above the ankle.