The barrel was suddenly pushed onto its side, and Merry found herself being tumbled onto a sandy beach. She felt her knees crack as she straightened them and gasped with relief under her gag. She was in the foggy open, and it was very early in the morning. She found it difficult to focus hereyes—the effort of trying to look directly at a thing made her dizzy and nauseated. It was too much like looking at two images that passed back and forth, one in front of the other, so she shut her eyes. She had seen the same round, bewhiskered face that greeted her on the ship. She wasn’t sure if it was Jack or Biddles, but whoever it was picked her up from the beach.
The young, hard voice spoke again. “You’re breaking my heart. If you were stupid enough to let someone take your trail, you’d better put space between yourselves and this place as quickly as you can. No, not over there. Put her in the skiff if you want your money.”
Her conveyor halted, started again, halted, as if in indecision, and then turned with her. His hand under her rib cage made it difficult for her to breathe. She twisted her face and opened her eyes to look at her carrier. He was looking at someone else.
“Damn you for a cold-blooded puppy. I crave the wench. It won’t take long.” His voice had taken on a wheedling tone.
“Yes, I know it won’t—about ten seconds by the look of you,” said the younger man. “And having waited two hours already, I don’t have ten seconds. You were late, and I’d given you plenty of time.”
It was Biddles’s turn to talk. “God’s toenails, man. It was bleedin’ hard sneakin’ on that ship. It takes time to crack a ship as heavily guarded as that one was. And then to look for the papers, find the papers, and pack them up—and then this little baggage here that we didn’t plan on. It was only our native ingenooity that got us out of that one. If I hadn’t thought of the barrel, we wouldn’t have got away at all.”
“Put her in the skiff,” the young voice ordered again, and this time he was obeyed.
There was saltwater in the bilge of the skiff, and a coil of salty rope in front of her face, and a small boom wavingabove her head. Jack’s arms left her body with almost tender reluctance.
“Don’t blame her on me,” said the younger man. “You should have made sure she didn’t see you.”
“We couldn’t help it,” whined Biddles. “She was lookin’ right at us. What could we do?”
“Slit her throat,” said the younger voice coolly.
“We charge more for killin’, and you hadn’t paid us yet. You wouldn’t want us doin’ somethin’ extra you’d have to pay us more for, would you?” said Jack.
“That weren’t it at all, Jack,” said Biddles. “It’s you, always wanting a woman. Comes in the way when we have a job to do.”
Coins jingled. “That’s ample,” said the boy’s voice, “for the botch you’ve made of the job.” Light footsteps approached the skiff, crunching on the sand.
Before she saw him, Merry knew who it was. Seven months ago in a smuggler’s tavern she had become acquainted with that cold adolescent voice when its owner had grabbed her and hurt her and threatened her life. She looked up helplessly into the hard blue eyes of Rand Morgan’s reprobate companion, Cat.
The boy scanned her without pity or recognition or even much interest while the fog played mother-of-pearl patterns on the stark bend of his tall cheekbones. On one side of his face sparkled the engraved hoop of a silver earring as big as a bangle, and his pale hair ribboned neatly from chin to hip in a thick braid knotted with leather. His buttonless black shirt fell open to the low-slung waist of his trousers, exposing the bands of tanned maturing muscle that corded his chest and below. The collar of his buff greatcoat moved idly in the wind from the sea.
Without taking his eyes from her own frightened ones he said, “She saw you, so she has to die. I agree.” He bent and pushed the skiff out from the beach. She felt it break freefrom the sand and slip into the water; his legs moved slowly against the waves. “I’ll take care of it. I told you I would, and I will. But you two had better be far away from here when they find the body.”
There was a shout from the beach. “You’re not just keeping her for yourself, are you?” shouted Jack. “We want to hear her hit the water.”
The sail flapped as Cat took the sheets, and he swore under his breath at the shouting and shouted back to them over his shoulder, his braid streaming behind him. “You’ll get your splash. Now get the hell out of here.”
The dirty cambric nightdress was no protection against the cold wind that dug like nails into Merry’s skin. Tremors began in her chest and rolled violently into her limbs, where the stiff wires of the jute ropes were methodically gnawing the living flesh from her ankles and her wrists, and her hair became fouled by the sloshing bilge water.
Indifferent as a stone, Cat was working the sail, and after a time there was the rhythmic slap of the bow against the waves as the small craft made the open water. Settling back, the boy looked at her and said in an abrupt way, “I can’t help it. You’ll have to go in.”
Her resolution not to cry was broken as she begged behind her gag, tears running down her cheeks, choking her. A whimper tore from her throat, savage in its desolation. Cat hesitated for the space of a heartbeat and then said, “Relax. What’s a little seawater?”
He let go the sheets, leaving the sails to luff under the punch of the wind. Bracing the tiller with his knee, the pirate reached for her arm.
Her brain flaring with terror, she fought him in a pathetic way, twisting and squirming like a trapped mink into the rocking bow. The boy watched her, allowing patiently her futile moment of resistance before drawing her out and intohis arms. One strong and fluidly muscled arm curved tightly around her shoulders while the other caught her under the knees and spun her over the side with a splash.
The water was green and foamy and arctically cold. It rapidly discovered the raw spaces of her body: where she had been struck on the head, where the ropes had flayed open her skin, and where, in being moved and carried and packed, thoughtless hands had scraped her many times against wood and metal. Half fainting from pain, she thought how it was said the drowning could view their whole life, flashed before them like a poor man’s panorama, but all she could see was her wet, stinging hair that lashed her eyes, and all she could think of was the horrible thing that Henry Cork had told her once—that drowning victims are found with their lips drawn back over their teeth in a silent scream, only the effect of water on the facial muscles. Drowning was supposedly a pleasant death really, once one ceased to struggle.
Something cold and living brushed her cheekbone, and in a torrent of hysterical sensation she recognized the taut sinews of Cat’s arm. He had not released her. Perhaps she was to be held under the water in the unflinching compassion of his arms until he was quite sure that she was totally dead. The last scattered drops of her reason evaporated, and she began to thrash wildly, her legs arching against the water, her arms knocking low fountains of seawater into the wind.
“That,” said Cat’s voice close to her ear, “will draw sharks. And they might hear you on the beach. Feel this?” An arm, hooked under her arms, tightened. “I’m not going to let you go. Just cooperate.”
By the time he pulled her back into the skiff, Merry was crying stormily. She was dumped without ceremony again onto the spongy dampness of the bilge.
“I wish you’d stop wiggling,” he told her. “I don’t want to spend what’s left of the day pulling splinters out of you.”
Peeling off his greatcoat, he joined her where she lay and wrapped it around her; although it was wet on the outside from the ocean spray, it was warm inside where it had been against his body. Somewhere in the coat he found a handkerchief and made her blow her nose on it, and then he lifted the heavy tangled wool of her hair and, dragging it between his hands, wrung from it most of the alkaline seawater. Perhaps in his profession he saw a lot of crying women; anyway, he made no reference during his ministrations to the convulsive, effortful sobs that racked her, and finally he sat back and took the tiller again.
