…waste no more time, it should only take a minute to go around.

After watching them a moment more and realising they are in no rush to move, you backtrack the way you came, veering towards the village side. While lights had been seen along the way, you pick a particularly dark patch in the vague blocks of old buildings, and find yourself picking your way through a bush and into the narrow space of what was once an old back garden. The next house looks like a narrow shell, with thin reedy trees growing from its top and pushing wide its joints as nature reclaims what’s hers, and between the two, a narrow cluttered squeeze, which you navigate through gingerly for its occasional rusty nail and splintered board. It eventually leads to a dirty alley swallowed by shadows.

The sounds you heard before are louder here, with the cheers and riotous celebrations floating through the night and the nearby walls, though likely sourced several buildings away. Despite the revelry, the air of neglect is heavy, comforting you with the promise of no eyes and no passers-by.

Sticking to the shadows and with eyes ever watchful, you remove your pack and quickly fill it with your dark jumper and dark trousers, thankful for the sudden air upon your skin. You stash the bag behind a barrel, pulling at the jacket and trouser hem to peel them off you and allow your sweat to do its work. Making sure you are all buttoned and ready, you walk across the empty alley and join another narrower path, which joins the main road a little further down from your goal. The street is empty, though the sounds of fun and frolic are clearer here, coming from further down the road and in the opposite direction to the one you take. Homes and businesses line the main road, some still with some scant life and others mere rotted husks of their former selves. It’s narrower than a normal street, which you attest to island life; there are no ruts from trade wagons, nor need for them to pass each other. You walk around the broad corner and see the stone pillars of the mansions gate from the other side, and the men still standing before them.

As you near, several turn to you.

The attention gives you reason to sweat more than you already have, but you press on, opening and closing your hand with nerves before shaking it off. Now is the time for your disguise to work, and you help it along by adopting a bored ‘I have work to do’ expression on your face, striding forward with quick deliberate steps.

With stone pillars in sight and a manufactured air of belonging, you walk forward with a confidence you don’t feel, your destination clear to all who look.

“What’s this then?”

A man with a bulbous bloated nose and a red face steps in front of you, blocking your way. He’s big, though mostly in the gut, to the point that you don’t so much side-step him as walk around. He doesn’t grab you, but he doesn’t have to. Another swarms in like a buzzing insect.

“Hold up darlin.”

You decide to step around him as well, hoping to ignore them all. They’re pirates after all, and cat-calls are an oft unavoidable reality, even from supposedly decent men. The plan falls apart when he grabs your jacket, hauling you backwards and making you stagger until you fall into the wide man you passed before. His meaty hands steady you by the shoulders, but they don’t let go.

“Man asked you a question.” The thug who pulled you back now looks at you again, smiling as you’re kept in place. Others turn. Others smile.

“Careful there little miss, almost fell!” The fat man behind sounds jovial, yet there is a cruel undercurrent to it, his humour taken from your discomfort. Before you can get your legs under you, he knocks them off the ground, reaching down with an arm and sweeping them like the loose beam of a sail, leaving you cradled in his arms like a babe in the space of a second.

“Ahh! Let me go!”

Several of the group laughs as you kick, watching you squirm in the man’s thick hairy arms, both heavy with muscle and rounded with fat.

“Where do you want me to take you?”

The whole group is watching you now, some with mirth and others with interest, several stepping closer like spiders drawn to something twitching in their web. You squirm more, trying to get purchase on the man and roll free of his scoop.

“Just, put me down please.”

“Just tell us where you’re goin.” One of the men responds, tall and smiling, with a beak like nose and the cruel hard face of an instinctively awful person. Whoever broke that nose in the past, they didn’t break it near as hard or as often as they should.

Several others begin to question,

“Where, eh?”

“Looking for me?”

“Nah, she’s lookin fer me!”

They laugh and joke to each other as you entertain them.

“I was just going up to-“ the mansion, to talk to my captain, is how you’d finish that, but as the men look at you, they also look at your captor, and goaded by the others mood, the comedian cuts you off and begins to perform.

“Did she say up?”

He tosses you. There is no other way to describe it. From lowered to the ground to being flung up into the air, your arms and legs flail and your body turns, alight in the roar of laughter from the group.

“AHHHHH!”

Thump!

You land in his arms a tangled mess, face down, one arm pinned and the other clawing air. The group howls with laughter, even the most disinterested before now snickering to themselves. One is doubled over, his shoulders shaking silently.

“Put me down!”

You’re done being played with. While you have the knife at your thigh, drawing it is an escalation you want to avoid, and so instead, you drive your elbow into his chest at the best angle you can. It thuds on him densely, doing little save adding a feigned ‘Umph’ to his next words.

“Hey John, she wants to be put down! Do it for me!”

His arms lower and swing, tossing you out of his grip again, forward instead of up, causing you to crash bodily into another man, again to cheers and a not too dignified yell from you. He staggers back, his arms catching you unprepared, one at your shoulders and the other just a forearm between your thighs.

“Fuck! She’s heavy!”

Your back is against his narrow chest, leaving your dizzy eyes looking back at the laughing fat man.

“Weak!” He flexes his arms, which grow only slightly thicker.

With a strained voice and before you can kick free, the man holding you cries, “I don’t want to do it! You do it!” and hauls you to his friend, passing you to the ridicule of his peers. As the other man grabs you, he lets his hand linger between your legs, which earns him your strongest kick to the face.

The crowd goes wild.

You don’t stop just for hitting one of them. **** to escape their raucous bullying, you writhe more than ever, kicking and clawing like a cat in a sack.

“Gods! The curse woman! Settle would you!” The man holding you switches angles as fast as you can undo them, grabbing you by the shoulder, belly, legs, neck, arms, until you hang upside down, your hips at his shoulder and legs kicking air. You manage to hold your stolen jacket up by instinct, leaving only your navel exposed.

“Put me down!”

You’ve never been manhandled like this! Tossed about like a sack of grain. You may be somewhat shorter than average, but you’re no dwarf! You get a knee into the back of the man’s head before he turns his angle again. The laughter seems to be dying back.

With your new angle giving you the chance to punch directly at his head, another pirate steps in and grabs your arms, drawing you out flat before the crowd, though still held above the compacted dirt road.

“Tell us where you’re goin first lil yellow belly.”

He dances with your arms, stepping back and forth to dying titters, and you punch at him with ineffective frustration. ‘Yellow belly’? Could all this be for being on a different crew?

“To my captain! I’ve got a message!” you growl, hoping the borrowed authority would pave some way to freedom.

“What’s the message?”

No such luck. You wrack your brains for some message to give them, but nothing comes quickly to mind that _would _pass inspection. What message would a lone pirate deliver to her captain?

“It’s only for my captain.” Several of the faces drop their smiles, or let them slip into side slanted doubt. “A-and yours.” You add, hoping to appease them. As much as you wanted them to stop laughing, they seem a lot more frightening now. They mutter between themselves.

“Well that just sounds like bullshit.”

“As normal.”

“No respect.”

“Little Roland’s little girl.”

It stops when one, who had been quietly watching and had not dropped his smile, steps forward to appease them.

“All right, all right, plenty of reasons for not telling,” he lifts your head to look into your eyes, “though I doubt they’d send you. You sure you’re a pirate, little girl?”

You feel the lurch of your heart stopping, the question too close to a **** reality. He smiles, the eyes of his older face twinkling as his short cut beard is drawn up. It’s the face of mockery, not genuine doubt, and there is only one answer you can give.

“Y-yes!”

The affronted air you try to add doesn’t quite come through, perhaps subdued by the men’s pin or your own fear. The older man haves his hand.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s what they all say.” The men laugh again, closer now, and there is an unfeeling air to each of their expressions, looking at you as though at some troublesome insect having its legs pulled. It sends a chill down your spine. “Well, if you’re a real pirate -and I mean a _real _proper fucking pirate- answer me this riddle.”

He waves his hands like some traveling performer, framing the word in a showman’s air. The others look on, dividing their attention between him and you, with some sparing glances for the empty street. You were just meant to walk past them damn it! When did this become so bad? Why couldn’t they have just left you alone!?

He clears his throat.

“If pride comes before the falling, which would you rather be? Pride? Or Falling?”

Some laugh. Some look confused; a number enough to bring doubt on the ones that laughed as being less than genuine. It’s not a riddle you’ve heard before, and you have no head for them anyway, even when you’re not scared and held aloft.

“Please, just put-“

“Ah ah ah.” He shakes your head, cutting you off as some of those who claim to get it echo his sentiments. The group is quiet, waiting for your response, and he repeats again, smile on his face.

“Pride? Or Falling?