Shell Game

by Benny Lawrence

“Oh, what now?” The desperation was back in her voice.

  “Well, you have to tie me up again.”

  “Why, in the name of every god in creation, would I need to tie you up again?”

  “Just think for a second, captain. You’re going to be sleeping next to your prisoner. What if I decide to cut your throat in the middle of the night?”

  “Who the hell said that I’m sleeping next to you?”

  “This is your cabin. Of course you’re sleeping next to me. So you need to take precautions—”

  “Precautions.”

  “—precautions, to keep control of your vengeful prisoner.”

  “My unarmed prisoner—”

  “—don’t forget naked—your vengeful, unarmed, naked prisoner.”

  Even in the dim light, I saw her tear at her hair. “I brought you a spare tunic! What kind of sick bastard do you think I am?”

  “You’re a pirate,” I explained patiently.

  “I told you, I’m not.”

  “You sail the seas, kidnapping maidens from remote villages and tying them to your mast. Call a spade a spade. You’re a pirate. You operate in piratical fashion. And if you want to keep on operating much longer, you can’t be so trusting all the time.” I thought about patting her tanned cheek, but it seemed too soon. “Go get the rope. I’ll change while you’re gone. Don’t take too long, though. You look tired.”

  THAT WAS THE first day. Darren, I learned, snored like a bull calf, and I made a mental note of that as one more thing to address when the time was right. In the meantime, I just draped a blanket over her face.

  I lay, head propped up on one arm, watching her, as snores burbled from underneath the blanket, and I thought about the next step, and the one after that, and the one after that.

  CHAPTER TWO

  TO ANSWER THE obvious question: No, I did not know what I was doing. Not exactly, anyway. Maybe it would have been different if Darren had sent a carrier pigeon to my village before she arrived, announcing her intention to show up and punch people in the face. If she’d done that, maybe I would have found a few quiet hours before she came to sit and think about how I would use the opportunity. As it was, I had to improvise.

  You could say that I was making it up as I went along. I would prefer to say that my plan was a work in progress.

  THINGS GOT INTO a pattern pretty quickly and stayed that way for the rest of the week-long trip to the mainland. I spent my nights down in the tiny, improvised cabin. Darren slept there too, in the short stretches when she wasn’t on watch. She seemed afraid of brushing against me, though, judging from the way she kept her back pressed against the biscuit boxes that formed the cabin wall. For that entire week, I don’t think she touched me once while we were sleeping. That was an incredibly good score, considering that we were sharing a space about the size of a rowboat.

  It was an uphill job, I can tell you, trying to convince Darren of her responsibilities as a pirate with a prisoner. Left to her own devices, she would have let me romp all over the damn place unsupervised. Of course, I wasn’t about to put up with that.

  Regon helped. After I threatened him a sufficient number of times, he unearthed a short, broken length of anchor chain and an old padlock, and he improvised a fetter for my ankle. During the day, I was chained to the mast, and during the night, I made Darren secure me to a deck support in the cabin. She winced each time I held my foot out to her, but at least she wasn’t arguing any more. Probably because she was too busy.

  Looking back, I can see that we had a fairly easy crossing. The wind was strong and steady; the trading ship, with its light cargo, sliced effortlessly through the waters of the channel. But I didn’t know much about sailing back then, and to my inexperienced eye, it looked like we were always on the verge of disaster. Darren and her crew were never still for a moment. Every hour of the day, from dawn to dawn, they were charging to and fro, frantically hauling at things and letting things go and pulling some things on deck and throwing other things over board. If there was ever a lapse in activity, then there would come a cry from a man on the masthead or another on the aft castle, and they would all charge off again.

  On top of that, all of the children from my village had voracious appetites, and most of them had weak stomachs, and none of them ever managed to get to the rail on time. The crew was forever sluicing down the deck after their accidents. The children who weren’t sick spent their time chasing after rats, or investigating interesting smells, or shrieking complaints when they were told they couldn’t go swimming. Yes, the crew had a busy time.

  It made me tired just to watch them, as I sat comfortably on deck, shaded by the sails. I used to rest my chained ankle out in front of me. A dozen times a day, Darren nearly tripped over my leg as she barrelled purposefully from one side of the ship to the other.

  “You need more sailors,” I suggested to Regon, halfway through the crossing. I’d persuaded him to take a break through the simple expedient of threatening to murder him in his sleep if he didn’t take a break, and he was leaning against the mast beside me, sharing my shade.

  At the words “more sailors,” Regon huffed out a tired laugh. “Nice thought. Not going to happen, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because . . . because it’s not going to happen, that’s all.”

  “Don’t tell me she can’t afford to hire more. She’s a noblewoman, right?”

  Regon stiffened. “Who the hell told you that?”

  I raised an eyebrow at him, surprised at his reaction. “For the sake of the living gods, she’s the captain of a trading ship. It doesn’t take a leap of logic to figure out that she’s a noble.”

  “Some trading ships have peasants for captains.”

  “Oh, please. I’ve seen Darren use a sextant.” (It was well worth watching—her utter focus as she stared at the sun.) “How many peasants get the chance to learn navigation?”

  Regon paused, the sudden sick pause of a man who just gave away too much information, and knew it. “Oh, damn,” he gulped.

  That didn’t make any sense. “Why is it such a big secret?” I asked. “She’s probably . . . what, a younger child from one of the great trading houses? And she went rogue during the war? Started running cargoes for herself rather than her daddy? That’s got to be a dead common story these days.”

  “It is,” Regon admitted reluctantly. “But Darren . . . is . . . well, it’s different with Darren. I can’t tell you any more.”

  “Why not?” I said casually. “Does she have a price on her head, or something?”

  Silence. Dead silence, electric with panic. Ever so casually, I angled myself so I could see Regon’s face.

  “So she’s been banished, huh?”

  The alarm on his face told me everything I needed to know.

  “Do you have nothing to do, Regon?” Darren panted, as she charged across the deck again. “Really? Honestly? Because I’m sure I could find some use for you, if I made the effort. For one thing, the ship needs a new anchor and for another, we’re almost out of fresh meat.”

  Regon shot to his feet and hurried away from me without a backward glance. He might as well have hung a sign around his neck that said I TOLD THE PRISONER SOMETHING I SHOULDN’T HAVE in giant bleeding letters. Fortunately, Darren was no more perceptive than usual that day.

  “What about you?” she asked me. “Getting bored?”

  “Not particularly,” I told her as I studied my ten brown toes.

  “Kash was thinking of trying to cook tonight,” she said. “Brave man. He could use someone to seed the raisins for duff. And there are fish to scale.”

  “Ah, but I’m your helpless prisoner, remember?” I said. “Prisoners don’t work. Unless they’re slaves. And I don’t think you’re tough enough to make that kind of arrangement stick.”

  I gave her my special insolent stare and waited. The moments crawled as she looked down at me, lips parted, trying to decide whether to speak. For a second she glanced away,
and I thought she was going to give in, but finally, finally—about time—her face hardened all over, and she spoke with a snap in her voice.

  “Prisoners don’t have to eat, either,” she said. “I’ve been damn patient with you, kid, but it’s time for you to give something back. I’m sending Kash up here. You do what he tells you.”

  I wanted to give her a proud hug, but I just grinned instead. “You’ve got it,” I promised.

  She stared. “What? That’s it? You’re not going to argue with me for an hour? Or tell me to hit you over the head with a hammer?”

  “You’re underestimating yourself. You can be very commanding when you try. Where are those fish? Point me at them. Point me fishwards.”

  Darren kept shooting glances at me for most of the rest of the night. She watched when Kash and I were scaling the mess of perch. She watched while I cajoled different members of her crew to come and sit with me while they were eating, first Regon, then Spinner, then Teek. Perhaps she suspected that I was pumping them for details, gradually piecing together the story of her life: her early years, her career as a merchant captain, everything right up to the day she was exiled. But if she did suspect, she didn’t interfere.

  WHILE I’M AT it, I might as well set the record straight. It’s not true that Darren was banished because she was caught sleeping with a woman. No matter what you’ve heard.

  She was a noble, after all. And when nobles marry, it’s to forge alliances and spawn heirs. Love doesn’t come into it, of course, but neither does sex. The idea of “saving yourself for marriage,” that quaint mainland invention, is unknown on the islands. For the great houses, youth is the time to sow your oats, to get all that kind of thing out of your system. Result: no Kilan noble in history ever went to marriage as a virgin.

  That’s true even for the first-born children of the noble houses, the precious heirs, destined to rule their respective families and maintain the bloodline. So it’s all the more true for the younger sons and daughters, who are put to work captaining the merchant ships almost as soon as they can count. They grow up surrounded by sailors and sailor-talk, doxies in taverns and dock-front whores, and since their lives are a hard grind day to day, they indulge in cheap pleasures every chance they get.

  And they’re not shy about sleeping with their own sex, either, at least when nothing else is on offer. What else would a captain do when he’s becalmed for a week in the dead centre of the ocean, with forty other men around, and only a ragged memory of the last time he saw a woman’s breast? And everyone knows what’s going on when a young countess, cloistered in her father’s house and waiting for marriage, takes a “favourite” from among her serving girls. No one even blinks an eye when they emerge from the brat’s private bower horribly late for dinner, pink and giggly and staring at each other’s navels. There’s nothing shameful about taking what you want, if you’re a noble. That’s just part of life. As long as it’s done with gusto and bluster and sheer cheek, nobles can admit to wanting anything.

  Darren’s father Stribos had been notorious in his own youth, as I learned later. “A woman for duty,” he always said. “But a boy for pleasure, and a goat for ecstasy.”

  So you see, no one would have batted an eye if Darren had rutted every whore in the shipyards, chased servant women around the halls, or even if she had thrown a peasant girl on the banquet table and spanked her in full view. At the very worst, it would have been seen as a rough joke. A bit immature perhaps, but all in fun for a person of her rank.

  No, Darren was banished for falling in love.

  “WE WAS GOING overland,” Teek began softly.

  He was leaning against the mast beside me, all his attention apparently fixed on the rope yarn he was spinning between calloused fingertips. He spoke as if he was talking to himself, and it was sheer coincidence that I happened to be in hearing range.

  “This is three years gone, back when the captain still bore arms in her father’s service. She had a tip, like, that there were sable skins going cheap upcountry, and we was going like blazes before someone beat us to the market. We got there first and bought ’em damn near out. A fortune in fur, for the price of a wagon of apples. But everything started going wrong, like, on the way back to the ship.”

  I’d spent several hours convincing Teek to tell me this part of Darren’s story. He was taciturn and stolid, nothing like Regon, whose tongue ran away with him if I gave him a little encouragement. But I found Teek to be a better informant. For one thing, Regon swore that Darren had never made a mistake in her life, and would carve huge chunks out of his own memories if they seemed to show otherwise.

  Teek went on. “Captain had spent every coin she could on sable, leaving just bare enough to feed and supply us on the way back home. A gamble, that. She lost. Seemed the whole country was trying to slow us down. Winter shut in fast. There was a mudslide and we had to detour, then Regon, he got sick, and one of our mules broke its leg. Thing after thing. Tried hunting but there was nothing around but half-starved squirrels. Captain cut our rations but she had to beef ’em up again when bandits closed in and we barely had the strength to wield a sabre. We was two weeks going upcountry, and we’d spent seven coming back and we was nowhere near the coast. Ah, if you’d seen us. Ribs like washboards and the hunger-glitter in every eye, and we had to pull the wagon of furs ourselves, because we’d eaten the other mule. But then we happened on a valley.”

  Teek had suffered badly in the hungry time. I could tell that from the way his chin wobbled when he told me how they were finally saved. The valley was shielded from the worst of the bitter weather, and it held a thriving town which had no shortage of anything. Teek’s chin wobbled worse as he described cheeses the size of wagon wheels, and hams that must have come from pigs as big as oxen, and mammoth tubs of butter and deep cream puddings.

  “The captain, she was near to screaming,” Teek went on. “She was hungry as any man there. Hungrier, for she’d pushed herself harder. And it was all she could do not to fling herself at the nearest string of sausages. But the trader in her was raving at the thought of what she’d have to pay for it.”

  “I thought you were out of money.”

  “And so we were. But we had the furs. Any village that knew its business, seeing starving men, would’ve taken our wagon and tossed us some stale loaves and the heels of the cheeses. I knew that, we all knew that, but we were past caring. All but the captain. She couldn’t bear the thought of suffering like we’d suffered and having nothing to show for it at the end.”

  I was already getting riled up at the thought of the blackhearted villagers. “Those bastards!”

  He chuckled, knotting the end of the yarn. “Ah, but it didn’t happen that way. Because she was there, you see.”

  “She?”

  Teek’s eyes swept the deck, searching for Darren. She wasn’t there, but even so, he lowered his voice. “Name of Jess. She worked as a beekeeper in summertime. Got the honey for the village from a few dead trees. But in the winter she also kept a bit of a school, and she helped with birthings. This and that. What I mean . . . they all listened when she spoke. And she spoke loud when the whisper first went round that they could get our sable for a biscuit and a half-cup of sack. She spoke loud and not a one stood against her. They took us into the inn that night and gave us such a supper that we could have rolled the rest of the way home. Didn’t ask for so much as an acorn in return.”

  “That’s a bit better,” I said, relaxing.

  “Bit better? I’d say so. Captain gave ’em a fair payment in fur, of course. We stayed a week and the inn was full so the captain went to sleep on the beekeeper’s floor. And they went about the village together and they talked ’til late. You could see the lamps in Jess’s windows burning well after dark.” Teek paused a second, brooding. “Might ha’ been the food after all the starving, but it seemed to me that the captain was happy as she’d ever been, and she’s not the happy sort.”

  “You don’t say,” I murmured. “S
o what happened?”

  “We went home. Loaded the sable, sailed it to market, sold it, made a hell of a profit. Captain’s father was pleased as could be.”

  “Yes . . . but what about Jess?”

  “Coming to that,” he said, unhurried. “Now, I don’t know everything, because I wasn’t always shipping with the captain. Spent some time serving alongside one or another of her brothers. But I was with her enough to see things changing. She began to find excuses, like, to head to the mainland. Happened more and more often that she’d come back from a voyage with crocks of honey in the hold. And a stunned sort of funny sort of a grin.

  I smiled myself. “So then what?”

  His face darkened. “She got her courage up—the captain, I mean. Invited Jess to visit the House of Torasan. Her house. To meet her family. Damn fool move, or a damn brave one. Both.”