Golden Dragon (Code Black Book 1)

by V. E. Ulett

  “God damn your beef bones, sir. This is no good Chinese.” Maximus gave Jugma Bora a shake. “Allow me to present Jugma Bora, Siamese pirate.”

  There were exclamations at this, not least from seaman Bora.

  “Seaman Bora here was aboard Nonesuch at Lord Exmouth’s direction,” Maximus said to Francis Blackwell. “When the ship was attacked in the Celebes, our good man here tried to turn Miss Albuyeh over to his compatriots.”

  Francis gave Bora a hard stare. “What have you to say to that? After you took this man’s reward into the bargain.”

  “He mistake me,” Jugma Bora said. “I no the man. We all look alike to the farang.”

  “Oh, aye?” Maximus said. “To a China-man that would be júwàirén. You taught us that.” Done with these preliminaries Maximus yanked up Jugma Bora’s tunic. “And how will ye be explaining my boot mark on your chest?”

  That capped it for Francis, he shouted for the Sergeant of Marines.

  “Give me a moment with the prisoner, Mr. Blackwell, I beg.” Maximus shook Jugma Bora, he’d not let go of him for an instant. “I will know where they will be taking her, do you hear me there?”

  “And I will have the twenty-five reales I gave you returned,” Captain Clooney put in.

  Such fury rose to Maximus’s eyes that Captain Clooney backed away.

  “That was ill-timed,” the American captain said. “I beg your pardon.”

  The door was opened by a marine, and Admiral Hoste, the senior naval officer on station, walked into the room followed by a uniformed entourage.

  “Where is she, Bora, and I shall intercede for you,” Maximus said, with a final rattle. “You know her generous nature, she would want me to do that much. Otherwise I shall let them hang you for a pirate today itself.”

  The lid the women placed over the compartment Miriam was in had a slot running round its edge that allowed in air and light, for the benefit of poultry and other livestock that Miriam could smell and hear round her. They were alike, kept aboard in their pens. The space was so small Miriam couldn’t sit upright, much less stand, and she either had to lean over hugging her legs or lie prone on the wood deck. By contorting this way and that, Miriam was able to catch glimpses of sky, sea, and the working of the vessel.

  She was so blinded by tears and grief for Thrax when they’d first imprisoned her, Miriam had no clear recollection of what happened just after she came aboard the pirate ship. There had been a great noise of hurrying feet and shouted cries. The khun’s ship hadn’t lingered to parlay with the next wave of marauders. When she grew calmer Miriam began to wonder when she’d be released, since the danger to her captors of having their prizes snatched away was past.

  The day waned, the rhythm of the ship changed, as though lying to for the night, and Miriam remained bowed over. Her fear and desperation increased as the light died. Miriam heard the clucking protests of a bird separated from its brethren, then sounds of butchery, followed by the happy ones of supper preparing—women’s voices and the laughter of children. Miriam’s stomach rumbled when the smells of cooking reached her, and then she screamed.

  It was full dark, at least in Miriam’s prison, and something had run over her feet. She became aware there were many scurrying, crawling creatures sharing the compartment with her. Another scream, unnatural sounding, was torn from her throat.

  It brought a boy and girl, running to peer in at her. They looked like blessed angels to Miriam. She spoke to them in Malay. “Dears, let me out. There are...vermin in here.”

  The angels laughed. “It is only rats and spiders, and the spiders are good to eat.”

  Miriam shuddered, her gorge rising. The khun shouted the children away, and the lid was lifted from over Miriam’s head. In spite of cramped muscles, fear and revulsion drove Miriam to spring forth on the deck like a cat. The people of the junk found this funny too. Looking down into the compartment Miriam saw velvety fat bodied spiders moving about, wood lice, and the tails of rats as they squeezed themselves into the adjoining compartments to avoid the lantern light.

  “See Miss, see!” the little girl trapped a spider by laying a small stick exactly between head and thorax. She picked it up and extended the spider for Miriam to inspect, her small fingers between its thick legs.

  “Oh yes, well done,” Miriam said, stomach roiling and skin crawling.

  Not to be outdone, the little boy waved the spider he trapped at her, and cried, “And then all you do is—” and he skewered his spider onto the stick he’d caught it with.

  The children scampered off with their snacks to the galley. Miriam was not unaware the khun had been watching her closely during this interlude. She thought about the knife in her boot, she would resist going back in that hole.

  “Come with me,” the khun’s voice came out of the night. “There is someone you should meet.”

  He led Miriam to the galley, where more children and three women were chatting and stirring pots of delicious smelling food. Miriam’s stomach protested audibly in the silence, when the little group turned to look her over. Her hopes were rising she would be given something to eat, treated decently, and not forced back into a verminous pit.

  “Here she is,” the khun announced.

  The women’s gazes were stern. The eldest among them stepped forward and slapped Miriam’s face. Miriam swayed back, surprised more than anything; the woman hadn’t struck her hard.

  “You’re the one! The British spy.”

  Miriam said nothing, but gazed steadily back at the older woman, trying to keep a neutral expression of face.

  “Because of you, the Golden Dragon took a daughter from each of the Boat People. Made us keen to find you, whoever laid hold of you could have their own back. And because of you, Captain,” the woman raised her voice to the khun, standing at the head of his men, “it will be my daughter who is returned in exchange for this foreign devil.”

  There was a general cry of happy agreement. Miriam felt gut punched. The Golden Dragon was no ship.

  Miriam sucked in a great breath. “I don’t know anything of dragons or devils or British,” she said. “I’m a merchant’s daughter, from Iran.”

  The woman looked at Miriam like she’d spoken Greek.

  “Little Dragon says differently,” the khun put in mildly.

  Oh, that bastard Bora!

  “Please don’t put me back in that hole.” Miriam appealed to the woman. “I won’t run away, I can’t. In the morning I will go quietly and take the place of your girl.”

  “You will long for the spiders and rats when the Golden Dragon has you.”

  That hurt Miriam far more than the slap earlier.

  “See here, Mai,” the khun said in a reasoning tone, “the white woman can’t say fairer than that. And you won’t think of casting yourself overboard.” The khun turned to Miriam. “Because there are snakes in these waters, deadly poisonous ones. That’s why the place works so well as a prison island for the Golden Dragon. Less men needed for guards.”

  Miriam’s eyes filled with tears, she couldn’t help it, and the woman Mai came right up close to her. She thought she would receive another slap. Instead Mai patted Miriam’s cheeks with both hands and led her to a seat in the galley, and a bowl of rice and stewed fowl.

  Miriam ate the meal, though at the end she had to force down the slightly raw flesh of the bird so as not to offend the Boat People. She tried desperately to enjoy sitting upright near the galley stove with the women, listening to the pops and hisses as the children roasted their spiders on sticks. But the women’s talk turned to the nephew the Golden Dragon had taken for a lover. Miriam could think of little else; a prison island, and the Golden Dragon not a ship. It was something or someone willing to torture its own people. Greed, revenge, lust, what vices drove this Dragon, Miriam couldn’t guess—not from the perspective of her sheltered upbringing. She told herself she must be grateful for these moments of peace, and relative freedom, in the cool night air.

  Mai glanced
over at her as the sound of the men dicing nearby in the ship became louder, and Miriam knew that freedom was at an end.

  “Safer for you back there.”

  Legs trembling, Miriam followed Mai to the stowage area. She asked for the privy on the way and Mai took her to the seat of ease, and stood patiently by while Miriam used it and washed from a bucket of water left there for the purpose. Being clean put some heart into Miriam.

  “Leave me a lantern, I beg,” Miriam said, glimpsing the vermin slithering in the hole.

  Mai glared at her. “Yes, alright, you get in.”

  Miriam stepped gingerly into the stowage compartment. She took off her jacket and tented it over her head, reaching out for the lantern. Mai handed it down to her, and beckoned for one of the other women to assist her with the lid.

  “My advice to you, put out the candle if you hear the men coming. You do not want the light to attract them after they’ve been drinking cava.”

  Better rats and spiders than that, Miriam agreed. She crouched down with the lantern between her boots, while the lid, alive with crawling things, was fixed over her head. Miriam pulled the jacket tight round her, and hovered over the light.

  She was practically in a coffin, where her Mama and everyone throughout her girlhood told Miriam she would end if she didn’t do what she was told. If she left home and ventured out alone to try to make a life for herself. She’d been an impressionable girl then, now her woman’s heart ached for Thrax and her own predicament.

  Miriam sat hugging her knees, crying and rocking a little over her lantern, and then she heard men’s voices. The voices came nearer and Miriam, her hand shaking, lifted the lantern and blew out the candle with a wet breath. She steeled herself in the darkness against the onslaught of little clawed feet.

  The men went round the ship snugging all down for the night. Miriam felt the first furry bodies brush against her hands and run over her feet, and stifled a cry with an effort. Determined to make an even greater one, Miriam laid her head on her knees and turned her mind away.

  She started by reciting the shahadah, the Muslim profession of faith. There is no god but God, and Mohammed is His Messenger. And then recalled the Apostle’s Creed of the Christians, that she’d learned from Francis Blackwell. I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. She reached back in memory for every detail, every moment, of that last ascent and descent in Nonesuch, when Captain Thorpe allowed her to remain on deck. The glory of it, the vast star filled night sky. The feeling at once of limitless freedom, and of belonging to the community of the ship.

  This house is resplendent and joyous to-night

  The beautiful lamps give a dazzling light:

  Oh this night! This night, it is fit to inspire

  Every heart with the passion of love and desire

  Persian verses ran through her mind, comforting her with their timeless beauty and imagery. Miriam wished she’d seized more of life in Hong Kong, she regretted keeping Captain Thorpe at a distance. She must find the courage to survive no matter what occurred in order to be part of that world again, to experience the sensation of being alive in every fibre when the ship Nonesuch was in the ether, where she could reach out her hand and a brave man would take it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In the morning when the lid was lifted, Miriam lay like a dead woman stretched full length on the deck. Mai gave a shriek of despair and jumped down into the compartment. During the early hours just after dawn, the spiders and rats having melted away to their daytime abodes, Miriam stretched out prone in exhaustion. When Mai landed beside her, Miriam woke with a start, a deck seam etched across her face.

  Over a breakfast of rice porridge and tea, the khun announced that the exchange of captives had been arranged with the prison island. The pirate vessel rocked gently on the placid swell, while bright rays of morning sunshine made the mists rise from the sea in delicate upward spirals. After the meal—her share of porridge with egg Miriam barely and with difficulty ate—she was taken to the lee side of the junk and invited down into Caldera’s jolly boat.

  “This time of year,” Mai whispered to her, before Miriam went over the side, “no snakes in these waters.”

  The junk lay close to the island during the night. The prison island was one of a series or atoll, like chucks of mountainous jungle thrown down by handfuls into the sea. Miriam could swim the distance to the strand the jolly boat pulled toward, it wasn’t far. She shivered in spite of the humidity of the morning.

  The jolly boat ground ashore, and the khun took Miriam’s arm to assist her out of the boat. She stepped into ankle deep water, shimmering, warm, and iridescent. Miriam was marched up the beach surrounded by the khun and his men toward a dense ring of vegetation. A trail running into the jungle came into view, and four men stepped from under cover of the trees.

  Miriam and all on her side halted. The four men, heavily muscled, tattooed and scarred, had with them a girl of no more than thirteen. The girl cried out when she saw the khun and his men, and received a vigorous shake for it from the man holding her bound wrists. Miriam tried to meet the girl’s eyes but found her gaze avoided, Mai’s daughter was crying too hard at sight of her rescuers. At least Miriam’s hands were not tied, though her heart was constricted and heavy inside her chest.

  By some signal Miriam did not detect, she and the girl were pushed roughly forward at the same instant. The khun caught the sobbing girl, and one of the black-toothed guards kept Miriam from falling down. She recovered her footing at once and stepped away from them. The Dragon’s men laughed.

  “What are you waiting for? Bugger off.”

  The khun picked the girl up in his arms, and he and his men double-timed it to the jolly boat.

  The four men surrounding Miriam turned back up the footpath. She went along with them and kept their pace, not wanting to give cause for them to bind her hands, or indeed to handle her in any way. These were very rough men, with their blackened teeth and their hair done up in top knots—warrior fashion. Miriam doubted they were Muslim or Christian, or anything anyone had ever heard of.

  When the footpath opened on to a cluster of thatched huts Miriam felt her legs go weak, especially as the men began to purposely shoulder and touch her. A woman’s voice floated out from a hut as they passed, a simple tune like a lullaby, incongruous in their surroundings. It was sung in some European language. German? Or Dutch. Miriam stared sharply round toward the sound.

  “No, Missy,” one of the men said, mistaking why Miriam turned away, “take a good look.”

  In the center of the ring of huts was a stock for imprisoning the head and hands. Miriam recoiled. It was stained rust colored like the whipping posts and triangles of Harriman’s Hole. Mixed in with the churned mud beneath the stocks was blood, and worse.

  “That’s where the Golden Dragon puts girls who try to escape.”

  Miriam gasped, fighting down full panic, fearing any moment she’d be forced into one of the huts, alone with the four men.

  At one end of the circle was the largest hut, and the men shoved Miriam toward it. They pinched and squeezed her as they neared it. Miriam choked back her sobs, her fingers tingling toward the handle of the sgian dubh. She had no illusions about battling the four guards, but with the knowledge from Maximus’s tutelage, Miriam thought she might be able to effectively stab herself.

  She stumbled inside the hut, and came face to face with the smallest Chinese woman in all creation. Her relief at seeing another woman was so great, Miriam sobbed aloud.

  “What are you about?” the little woman shrieked at the four men. “Haven’t I told you not to mishandle them? Get out! Don’t go far.”

  The four thugs bowled one another over in their haste to get away through the door opening carved in the thatch.

  Miriam heard the men take up positions outside. The little woman, meanwhile, was climbing up and taking a seat in an ornate wooden chair set atop a low table.

  When she could look down on
Miriam from this eminence, her bony fingers clutching the gilded chair arms carved to resemble the heads of open mouthed dragons, the small woman flashed Miriam a yellow toothed grimace.

  “I shall call them back in a trice if you displease me. Understand? Don’t speak!”

  Miriam nodded, closing her mouth and casting her gaze deferentially down.

  “I’ll give you permission when you may speak. My nephew told me of your coming here, to My dominions. He said you were promising. A girl with spirit, a likely girl awake on every suit, resourceful and knowing, and that is just what I need at present. Are you such a one, girl, are you...promising?”

  The woman gave Miriam a regal inclination of her head.

  “Yes,” Miriam squeaked out. The memory of a luminous bow wave and Jugma Bora’s talk of heirs and empires came to her. “I speak five languages and—” the woman slammed an open palm down on the top of a dragon’s head. Miriam hastened to say, “What would you require of such a promising person?”

  “Ah! Better, you understand you are here to serve Me. What is it I require? Information and retribution. I want to know the movements of ships—my own number in the thousands. Warships from China, Britain, and Holland come to annoy me, and I should like to be ready for them.”

  The little woman leaned back in her throne-like chair staring at Miriam, rubbing the dragon heads and grunting.

  “What would you do?” she shrilled of a sudden. “To evade the attentions of those men outside, not to die screaming?”

  “Whatever you wish,” Miriam stammered.

  “Good answer.” The woman leaned forward, her feet dangling short of the table below. “All you need do to avoid such a fate is—two things.” She paused and bared teeth in shades of amber and brown, while Miriam held her breath. “First, you will summon the ship that brought you here. I will have an airship, and that will take care of my information needs.”