Chapter 6: The Cat and the Chain

The ladder emptied him onto the third deck, and the third deck was a different animal than the ones below.

This one breathed. The hatch above stood open to a wedge of night sky, and cold salt air poured down through it, cutting the powder stink with something clean. The deck itself was tighter than the gun deck — a corridor of cabins and lockers with a low beam running fore to aft, so low that Zugonda had to duck his shaven head under it. Lanterns hung on iron hooks, swinging with the ship's roll, throwing light that never stayed still.

Behind him the women came up one at a time. The honey-skinned one first, cutlass held low and out of the way the way a person holds a tool they've decided to trust. Then the mahogany one with her half-straightened hair sticking to her temples. Then the ebony one, lean and long-limbed, moving like she'd been born in a corridor this dark. The milk-chocolate girl last, and she came up with her jaw set, which Zugonda noted.

Six of them now. He had started alone.

He raised one hand. They stopped. He pointed at the lanterns, then swept his palm flat — low, stay down — and they folded themselves into the shadows between the crates without being told twice.

Above, the ship's bell had stopped ringing. That was worse than the ringing. A bell meant panic. Silence meant the crew had organized.

Zugonda moved.

---

The forward cabin had two men in it and a table covered in charts, and neither of the men was looking at the door. One held a compass and the other held a lamp, and they were arguing in low voices about the channel ahead. Zugonda came in behind them and took the lamp man first, chain looped once around the throat and pulled back hard, and the compass man got halfway to his feet before the dirk went in under his ribs and up.

He lowered both bodies behind the chart table and wiped the dirk on a coat.

The next cabin was empty — hammocks still warm, a pipe still smoking in a tin dish. He paused there. He listened. The ship had a sound to it now that he had learned: the sound of men hiding. Boots that stopped too suddenly. Breathing that came through wood.

He found the first of them crouched behind a spirit locker with a boarding axe in both hands, and the man swung too early, too wide, and Zugonda stepped inside the arc and broke his wrist against the locker edge and then broke his neck against the same edge. The axe he kept. It was a good weight.

---

They came at him in the aft passage three at once, and that was the first time on this deck that Zugonda had to give ground.

The corridor was narrow. Three men couldn't swing, only stab, which helped. The first got his chain wrapped around his knife hand and lost it. The second came in low with a cutlass and opened a line across Zugonda's forearm, a hot bright stripe of pain that made him grunt. The third hung back and shouted for the officer.

Zugonda killed the first with the boarding axe, a short ugly chop to the side of the head. The second he took to the deck with a knee and finished with the dirk. The third ran.

Let him run. Let him fetch the man Zugonda wanted.

He pressed his hand over his forearm. The blood was coming fast but shallow. The ebony woman had come up behind him without a sound — she had a sailor's neckerchief in her hand and she wound it around his arm and knotted it tight before he could tell her not to. Her hands were steady. Her eyes were not; they were bright and hot and fixed on the blood.

He nodded to her. She nodded back and faded into the dark again.

---

The third deck's officer waited at the end of the passage with the door open behind him, and he was not a young man.

Grey in the beard, a heavy paunch held in by a good coat, and a cat-o'-nine-tails hanging from his belt like other men hang keys. He had a pistol in his hand — an old thing, black-powder, single shot — and he had it aimed steady at the middle of the passage.

"Come on then," he said. His voice was quiet. "Come on, boy."

Zugonda did not come.

He went sideways instead, into the cabin door on his left, and the pistol cracked and a hole appeared in the planking where his chest had been. The smoke rolled. Through it Zugonda came out low and hard, and he hit the officer in the middle with his shoulder and drove him back through the open door into his own cabin.

They went down together on a rug. The officer roared and got a hand in Zugonda's face, thumb hunting for the eye, and Zugonda bit down on the base of his thumb with the filed points of his teeth and felt the man scream through his arm.

Then the chain.

It took three passes to get it seated, because the old man fought like a man who had spent thirty years fighting, and he got his boot into Zugonda's stomach once and knocked the breath out of him. But the links found the throat in the end, and Zugonda crossed his wrists and leaned back and did not stop until the booting stopped.

He stayed there a moment, breathing hard, the dead man's weight against his knees.

Then he took the pistol, unloaded now but still a club, and he took the cat-o'-nine-tails off the belt. The leather tails were old and greasy and warm from the man's body. Zugonda wound the handle once around his fist, felt the balance of it, and slung it through the loop at his hip where it would hang free.

He had a knife, a dirk, an axe, a chain, and a whip. He had started with nothing but the length of iron between his wrists.

---

The cabin had a second door, and behind it a small storeroom, and in the storeroom there was a woman.

She was chained by one ankle to a ring bolt, sitting with her back against a barrel, and she had been there long enough that the floor beneath her was worn smooth. Her skin was a deep, blue-black dusk, so dark it seemed to drink the lantern light instead of reflect it, and she was small-boned and narrow-shouldered and her hair had been cropped close to her skull for the lice. Her wide nose was crusted with dried salt. Her thick lips were cracked.

She did not move when the door opened. She looked up at Zugonda with big brown eyes that had already decided the world had nothing left to show her.

He crouched and found the right key by feel.

The shackle opened. She pulled her ankle free and sat there rubbing the skin, and then she looked at the body of the officer through the doorway, and she looked back at Zugonda, and her face did something complicated.

She laughed. It was a dry sound, no water in it at all, and it went on a little too long.

Then she got herself up, using the barrel, and she stood swaying and she came to him and pressed her forehead against his shoulder, and he stood there and let her.

She said something. He didn't know the words. But her hand came up and touched the knotted neckerchief on his arm, and her fingers came away red, and she looked at the blood with a fierce, flat satisfaction.

He handed her the dirk.

She took it. She turned it over in her hands like a person who had never held one. Then she adjusted her grip, and her chin came up, and Zugonda understood that he had just made a soldier.

---

The last of the third deck cleared in a rush.

The men who had hidden when the bell stopped rang it again — not a warning, but a call, three long pulls — and the sound went through the hull like a shout. Zugonda heard boots on the ladder from the deck above, and he heard the freed captives from the hold come pounding up through the ship behind them, and he understood that the two tides were about to meet on this deck.

He put the six women in the passage and he put them behind the crates and he did not have to explain what was coming. The mahogany one had her cutlass braced. The ebony one had a length of chain of her own. The high-yella woman had a knife in one hand and a rammer in the other and a look on her face like she had been waiting her whole life for a doorway to stand in.

They came down the ladder ten at a time and the third deck became noise.

Zugonda took the first one with the boarding axe and the second with the cat, which he discovered he liked — the nine tails wrapped and caught and pulled a man off balance better than any rope he'd ever used, and the knots opened skin wherever they landed. The chain he kept for the ones who got close. The dirk he kept for the ones who didn't go down.

At his left the ebony woman broke a man's jaw with her chain. At his right the mahogany one put her cutlass through a sailor's thigh and did not try to pull it out again, which was the right decision, because a stuck blade is better than a lost one.

The milk-chocolate girl stood her ground and screamed at them.

It was not a battle cry. It was a sound out of the bottom of her, an enormous, cracked, furious noise, and it was the loudest thing on the deck, and Zugonda saw three sailors flinch from it.

They broke.

---

When it was done the third deck belonged to the dead and the freed.

Zugonda stood at the rail of the open hatch, breathing, and counted. Six women with him. Twelve more from the decks below, wild-eyed and blood-flecked, some of them with weapons they'd taken off corpses, a few of them injured, one of them weeping quietly against the shoulder of the older grey-haired woman who had given him the knife. The grey-haired woman found him across the crowded deck, and she lifted her chin, and that was all.

Above them, the night was paling. The sky through the hatch had gone from black to a thin grey, and the sound of the sea had changed — the ship was running into weather, or out of it, he couldn't tell.

The deck above this one was silent. It had been silent since the third pull of the bell.

Zugonda knelt by the ladder and laid out what he had. Chain. Knife. Dirk. Axe. Pistol, empty. Cat-o'-nine-tails. He looked at them the way a man looks at a hand of cards.

Then he coiled the chain around his forearm, wound the cat through his belt, tucked the dirk into the cord at his waist, and stood up.

The blue-black woman was already at his side, the borrowed blade resting against her shoulder. She had found shoes somewhere. She looked at the ladder and then at him, and she raised her eyebrows in a question.

He put his hand flat on the lowest rung.

Behind them, thirty women turned their faces up toward the pale square of sky.