Chapter 7: The Gunner's Reckoning

The ladder took him up into a passage the width of a man’s shoulders, and the passage smelled wrong.

Not powder. Not tar. Soap. Somebody up here had been washing, and recently, and the clean smell laid over the ship’s stink like a tablecloth thrown over a corpse. Zugonda crouched at the ladder head and let his eyes adjust. Lantern light came from his left, steady, no swing — the lamp was set down on something, not hung. Somebody was waiting.

He set his palm flat on the deck and felt it. Boots. Two sets, and one of them shifting weight from heel to toe, heel to toe, the way a nervous man stands watch.

He slid the empty pistol out of his waistband and left it on the planks behind him. Useless weight. The cat he kept. The chain he kept.

The first man was twenty feet down the passage with a boarding pike held across his body, and he was facing the wrong way — facing the ladder to the deck above, guarding against men coming down, because it had not occurred to him that anything good could come up.

Zugonda went at him flat-out, no crouch, no creep. The pike swung to meet him, all point and no timing, and Zugonda turned his shoulder into the shaft and let it slide past, and then he was inside the reach with his chain already moving.

The pike clattered. The chain cinched. The man’s heels lifted off the deck and drummed once, twice, and then he was hanging there with his weight on Zugonda’s wrist and nothing left in him.

The second man ran.

Let him run. Zugonda had learned on the deck below that a running man was worth more than a dead one. He dropped the body, took the boarding pike, and followed at a walk.

---

The passage opened into a wider space forward — not a cabin, a mess. Two long tables bolted to the deck, benches along them, a cabinet on the bulkhead with its doors hanging open and a dozen clay cups scattered across the floor. Three men at the far table with cards between them and a bottle weighed down with ballast shot.

The runner came through shouting, and the three at the table came up with knives and a hatchet and no plan at all.

Zugonda put the pike through the first man’s shoulder and drove him back into the second, and the two of them went down in a tangle of bench and cards and spilled rum. The third swung the hatchet at Zugonda’s head, wide and panicked, and Zugonda caught the wrist, turned it, and put the man’s own blade into the meat of his own thigh.

The mess went quiet except for the screaming.

He finished them with the chain, one at a time, and he did it fast, because fast was a mercy and because there was no time. Then he stood in the middle of the mess and breathed and listened.

Above him, boots. A lot of them. A steady tramp of men forming up, not running.

Organized. Waiting.

Let them wait.

---

The cabinet on the bulkhead held crockery. The locker under the bench held something better.

A powder horn, stoppered with cork and waxed at the seams. A pouch of cartridges — paper twists, ball and wadding already seated. A rag, a small horn of priming powder, a spanner.

Zugonda had never loaded a pistol in his life. He had watched it done, from the dark of a hold, while a sailor's hands worked and the man talked to himself in a language Zugonda did not speak. He had watched, and he had remembered, because remembering was the only possession a chained man had.

He crouched in the lantern light and worked slowly.

Powder down the barrel from the horn. A cartridge after it, paper and all, rammed home with the pistol's own rod. A pinch of priming powder in the pan. The hammer half-cocked while he worked, and then full.

It took him longer than it would have taken a sailor. But when he stood up, the pistol in his belt was loaded, and it would fire once, and once was a whole conversation.

---

He found the fourth deck’s captive in a pantry off the galley passage.

The door was barred from the outside, which was strange, and there was no lock on it at all, which was stranger. Zugonda lifted the bar and set it aside and pushed the door open with the boarding pike held low.

She was standing against the far wall with a broken plate in her hand, and she was ready to use it.

Tall. Taller than most of the women below, and built the way a mast is built — long-boned, narrow-hipped, with a flat, hard stomach and arms corded from work. Her skin was a deep, dull ebony, the kind that went grey at the elbows and knees from old ash and old scrubbing, and her shoulders and upper back carried a lattice of keloid scars, raised and ropy and shiny, some of them ten years healed and some of them not.

Her hair was short and wiry and stiff with salt. Her nose was wide and flat-bridged. Her lips were full and split at the corner from dehydration.

She looked at the pike, and she looked at the chain on his forearm, and she looked at the blood on his hands, and the plate came down to her side but did not leave her hand.

Zugonda stepped back from the doorway and turned sideways so she could see the ladder behind him.

She did not move.

He pointed at the dead men in the mess. He made a gesture — up, run — and then a second gesture, the flat palm, the sweep, the one he had made in the hold and on every deck since.

Her jaw worked. She looked at the dead men, and something in her face shut like a door.

Then she came out of the pantry, and she walked past him close enough that her shoulder brushed his, and she went to the mess table and picked up the hatchet the third man had dropped. She tested its weight. She looked back at Zugonda with her eyebrows up.

He nodded.

She nodded.

---

The last cabin on the fourth deck was the gunner’s, and it had a door with a good lock and a bar across it, and somebody inside it was breathing like they’d been running.

Zugonda put his ear to the wood.

Two men. One talking, one not. The talking one had a voice that carried, the kind of voice that has never once been contradicted in its life.

“—no, I am not going to sit here and be told there are thirty of them, Mr. Kettle, there are not thirty of them, there are not ten of them. A womb of screaming wenches and one runaway buck does not constitute a mutiny. It constitutes a chore.”

The other man said something quiet and reasonable and got cut off.

“You will go up to the deck. You will tell the captain that the lower decks are secured and the negroes have been driven back into the hold, and you will do it now, before he comes down here and asks me why in the name of the sea I am hiding in the gunner’s pantry.”

Zugonda stepped back.

He looked at the door. He looked at the tall woman with the hatchet. He looked at the pike in his hands.

Then he set the pike down against the bulkhead, quietly, and drew the cat-o’-nine-tails off his hip, and let the nine leather tails hang loose and still in the lantern light.

He had been learning this weapon all night. He understood it now. It was not for killing. It was for catching — for hooking a wrist, a hock, a wrist, a throat — and for making a man look at the wrong thing while something else happened.

The bar came off the door with a sound like a dropped bell.

The door was already moving when the shouting started.

---

The talking man was heavy and red-faced and had a cutlass on his hip and a coat too good for the deck, and he came through the door swinging because he had spent his whole life having the first swing.

Zugonda was not there.

The cutlass bit the doorframe and stuck. The nine tails came around the edge of it and wrapped the man’s sword wrist, and Zugonda pulled, and the heavy man came out of his own cabin sideways and went down on the deck like a dropped trunk. The chain came down after him, and it came down three times, and after the third time the man stopped telling anybody what to do.

The quiet man in the pantry was older, grey, unarmed, and already on his knees with his hands open.

Zugonda looked at him. The man looked back. Neither of them had a word the other could use.

Zugonda turned the pistol over in his belt and laid the muzzle against the man’s temple and cocked the hammer.

The quiet man shut his eyes and made a small sound that was not a word.

Zugonda uncocked the hammer and pulled him to his feet by the collar, and pushed him out into the passage ahead of him, and prodded him down the ladder with the pike. A man who would be a shield was worth more than a man who would be a corpse.

Behind him, the tall woman with the keloid scars stopped at the hatch and looked up. Beyond it, the deck above was full of moving boots and the first grey light and a voice — the same carrying voice as before, only bigger — calling the crew to muster at the mainmast.

She looked back at Zugonda. She touched the hatchets at her belt.

Zugonda put his hand on the lowest rung of the ladder and started up.