The sea slapped beneath the bow as the small craft sliced through the fog. The minutes flew at Merry too quickly for her to guess when one left off and the next began. They came to a place where the fog shimmered like a fine clear powder and ahead of the skiff a heaving mountain reared from the ocean. On its back rode the great triple spires of the masts; far below the skiff passed, tiny and bouncing like a waterbug, under the gargoyle figurehead with its pointed ears, opaque goiterous eyes, and red tongue, thrust out and drooling condensed moisture. Merry tried to sit up, staring, but a long thin foot, bare of covering, met her chest and pushed her quickly back to the floor.
“Down!” he said. “Or can you swim with your hands tied? If we capsize, I’d never find you. The water’s too dark.”
Merry heard a hallooing from the watch, and an answering shout from Cat. A rope came spinning down, and Cat made it fast and began to uncleat the halyards at the base of the mast.
A youth of about eighteen years let himself quickly down the rope, hand over hand, staring with blossoming interest at Merry through sable eyes set in warm, sun-honeyed skin. His hair was long and very dark, pulled back under a large red bandanna knotted on one side of his head.
“Cat, are you crazy?” he said. “Or don’t you notice she’s a woman?”
“Little though you may credit it, Icantell the sexes apart,” snapped the boy, catching the luffing sails as they fell.
“Morgan’s gonna wring your neck, mon. There’s not a pirate ship from Maine to Christi that’ll take a woman on board. Even Blackbeard—”
“Plague rot it! Will you quit the Blackbeard lore? It’s most of it a bunch of cock and bull. No women on board.Icould tell you some stories…” Cat glanced at the other boy’s eager face and said sourly, “But I won’t. Why don’t you do something constructive like lifting in the rudder?”
Ignoring him, the boy with the red bandanna dropped to his knees beside Merry’s shivering form and gently lifted a wet curl from her nose. “Mon, she’s got pretty eyes—like blue glass in a church window. And her body?”
“Is covered with gooseflesh and bleeding saltwater from every pore,” Cat said, flipping his braid irritably out of the way as he expertly coiled a rope.
“So? She looks half-dead. What’s she been doing all morning, dancing a blanket hornpipe?”
“No. But almost. And not with me. Look, you lazy sucker. See that nothing of an apple barrel behind you? Very good. Put it where His Lordship can get a look at it, will you, and with care, please. If it falls in the water, it’ll beyourneck that gets wrung.”
The boy gave Cat a grin with a gold tooth in it. “If you’re so worried about the barrel, you bring it. I’ll take care of Blue Eyes.”
“Fine. And then you can be the one who explains her to Morgan. No? Ithoughtthat would change your mind. And one of the side stays is loose, if you’ve got time…”
Frigid and terrified, and unable, it seemed, to control the tears making ceaseless icy streaks down her cheeks, Merrydiscovered what a singularly painful exercise it is to be carried over a man’s shoulder like a sack of meal. Establishing her there with no attention to her comfort, Cat climbed the rope ladder, and with each jarring step his hard-boned shoulder jammed into her midriff, forcing gasps of agony from her that vanished into the choking folds of her gag. Her vision spun as she looked straight down into the boiling sea, where it dashed against the side of the ship, and saw the skiff shrink as they climbed.
Her hair was too much snarled in her face for her to see anything once they reached the deck, but she could hear the vibration of footsteps, and voices. Heedless of them, the young pirate carried her toward the stern and then ducked and took her down a flight of steps, to halt before a doorway. He knocked once, pushed it open with his foot, and brought her inside.
She had never seen a room as exotically luxurious as this one, let alone a ship’s cabin. On three sides massive windows of wavy, diamond-shaped glass let in scattered light, but no vision beyond a gray impression of the heaving, watery horizon. A Persian carpet of the Fereghan type spread over the floor, a massive flowing field of madder red, its delicate pattern etched in densely saturated yellow and blue: two hundred and fifty Persian knots to the square inch, if anyone cared to count. Beneath the far window a beautifully carved line of bench seats were heaped with pillows in rich brocades of red and black, twisted with embroidered gold flowers. Not the smallest scratch or smear marred the high shine of the Chinese lacquered tables, Ming dynasty, or the intricate pictorial marquetry of the Belgian writing desk. The chairs were draped in ebony lambskin, catching copper glints from tiny flame tongues that licked the air behind saffron globes of Bohemian glass.
Gleaming deeply on one wall were Russian icons, sucking room light into their amazingly brilliant colors, and underneath them a bed with a perimeter as big as a stone tool house was hidden under a blanket of Siberian crown sable.
Cat dropped her on the bed’s blue-black fur, where she lay, rigid and weeping in her bonds. Taking a stiletto from his belt, and ignoring her horrified eyes, he brought the knife to her throat and paused before using it to rip down the fabric of her soaked nightdress, freeing it from her body; and she lay naked before him, shaking furiously.
His cold eyes traveled over her, but with indifference, not with the prurience of one to whom such things were a mystery, and then he reached behind him, grabbed a square of cloth, and rubbed her limbs vigorously, not touching her intimately but not taking pains to avoid doing so either; and then he brought a blanket and covered her with it, tucking it efficiently around her, his long braid falling against her cheek.
The door opened, and Rand Morgan entered, stooping as he came in. A dark olive and buttonless coat with gold facings that had some time ago belonged to one of Napoleon’sgarde d’honneurcasually encased the pirate captain’s wide shoulders, and the huge emerald flickered erratically from the soft inky curls on his chest. The deep black eyes looked at Cat questioningly, and then at her; the granite face was as frightening in its seeming omniscience as she had remembered it from the tavern. He spoke, the tone spiced lightly with pleasant sarcasm.
“Dear me. Shall I come back later?”
“Don’t be funny,” replied Cat irritably. “I’m drying her off.” He reached back into the lacquered chest bolted to the wall behind him, brought out a towel, and used it to dry Merry’s hair.
Morgan’s imperturbable gaze followed the youth’s quick movements. “Why is she wet? And if one is permitted to ask, who is she? Or were you going to wait until Christmas and surprise me?”
The self-assured, accurate movements in her hair stilled as the boy looked up at Morgan. “I knew you wouldn’t like it.”
Morgan’s eyes wandered, more slowly than Cat’s haddone, over her form as she shivered beneath the blanket, and he said dryly, “That doesn’t seem to have been much of a deterrent. But you were about to tell me who she is, weren’t you? Don’t mind me. I’m going to smoke.”
Morgan lowered his long-shafted limbs into a lambskin chair. Beside him was a vertical tower the length of a man’s arm with many bulb-shaped chambers made from silver and blown glass painted with floral decorations. A small brazier glowed red in the footed conical base, and into it Morgan dropped a dark-brown substance that looked like an oily rock as Cat brought a handkerchief to her pinkened nose.
“You’re the wettest wench I ever saw,” he said disgustedly. “If you’d stop crying for a minute…”
Merry could see Morgan’s lips quirk at the corners. From the base of the chambered tower he uncoiled a woven tube tipped with a steaming ivory mouthpiece, which he laid backhanded between his lips. Inhaling, he stretched out his legs contentedly; as he slowly exhaled, a dense and billowing smoke scattered around him. Its odor was sharp, rich, and cloying, and faintly tinged with roses. Merry was an American girl and knew tobacco in all its incarnations: smoked and chewed, growing in fields and at harvest, hanging in storage and sold in shops, andthis—whatever else it was, it was not tobacco. Morgan closed his eyes, the thick lashes drooping, and smiled slowly.
“ ‘Divine in hookahs, glorious in a pipe,’ ” he said. “Speak.”
