by River Belle
I opened my eyes and tried to move at the same time, and found that although, thankfully, I was fully able to see, I could move neither my arms or my legs. As I blinked slowly, I took in my surroundings. I was obviously aboard a vessel, that was clear enough. And it must have been a big one too, as this cabin was sized handsomely. But its size was the only handsome thing about it, it being fitted as it was with some of the most gruesome items I had ever laid my eyes upon. Everywhere was dark and murky, and there were a few, oily looking, impure candles, whose dim, unclean light illuminated the horrific shape of the odd objects which were on display proudly on the walls and on the ornate old desk which sat in the middle of the room.
There was the head of a mighty, thousand-toothed fish mounted on the wall. It’s gimlet eyes were grotesque and somehow still glistening and its ragged teeth were sharp and diseased-looking. I saw what looked like a shrunken human head in a bell jar on the desk, and there was an arsenal’s worth of cutlasses and muskets mounted in holsters on the wall. There was a sea-chest inlaid with skulls and pieces of gold on the floor and ancient, withered looking rolls of parchment stacked in a bronze bucket which stood by an old globe which had the entire map of the known world engraved onto its surface. Of course, the thing which was most terrifying was the woman who sat behind the desk. It was the woman I’d seen up on the deck of The Dolphin before I’d been taken, the woman whose visage had caused me to pass out.
In all the pictures of pirates aboard ships I’d ever seen, they were men. They had beards, and had looked gruff and old. The woman who sat in front of me certainly had no beard. And she was not old, either. She looked young and lively, her piercing blue eyes danced around the room as if they were witnessing a joke that no-one else was privy to. Her hair was shorn short, but, far from making her look boyish, it increased her femininity somehow. It showed off her chiselled cheekbones and soft skin, and drew the viewer’s gaze to her delicate, Cupid’s bow lips, pouty and playful. And yet this stunning woman was far from a passive beauty. She looked every bit as powerful as any man I had come across at sea - in fact, she oozed such confidence and poise that I reckoned she could kill at least three men with her bare hands at any one time.
She looked at me as I watched her. When she opened her mouth, I saw that her teeth were not white: they were all gold.
‘Good mornin’, sweet pearl,’ she said. Her accent was one of the south-west of England, and I wondered whether originally she had hailed from Bristol. ‘Finally, the one bit o’ plunder we managed to scrape away from that barren boat comes around.’ Her teeth glistened in the dim light of the cabin.
I realized that she was talking about me.
‘Plunder?’ I said, ‘How dare you call me plunder!’
‘Because, pearl,’ she said, drawing herself up from the table and walking over to me, ‘that’s exactly what you are.’
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