The Following Sea (The Pirate Wolf series) (7 page)

To that end, she discreetly tucked a dagger into the folds of the blanket and bundled it under her arm as she made her way barefoot across the shattered deck to the gangway. The gate in the rail had been blown off its hinges and as she stepped to the edge, she saw the jolly boat had been tied off at the bottom.

Hugging the blanket securely against her body, she turned and carefully descended the wooden steps that protruded from the hull. She could feel eyes watching her every move. In the reflection cast across the water, she saw the shadow of the captain where he stood on one of the enormous gun barrels, his hands on his hips, closely marking her progress.

"When you are ready, cast off," he shouted. "Stay clear of the cable as it uncoils. If it catches your ankle and you fall overboard, no one will be jumping in to save you."

The wine had fortified her enough to mutter a word or two about his level of compassion before her foot touched the rocking side of the jolly boat. As soon as she was safely aboard she untied the tether and shoved away from the hull of the ship.

As the jolly boat drifted into the dark gap between the two ships, she looked up, squinting against the sunlight. "I thank you for your mercy, good sir, in rescuing me."

"My name is Dante. Captain Gabriel Dante. And do not thank me just yet. As you can see it is my intention to keep you isolated until any danger of contagion is well past. We are still at odds to know why you, alone, were spared."

Her eyes filled with tears despite her resolve. "I do not know the answer either, Captain Dante. As I said, we landed in Fox Town and some of the crew went ashore. Within the week, they were all dying or dead." Her voice fell off and she bit her lip into silence.

Someone said something that made him tip his head back and nod. "I am reminded to ask: Do you know if you had any manner of similar fever when you were a child?"

The question gave her pause as a painful memory surfaced of darkened rooms and black bunting draped over doors and windows.

"When I was five, my mother and four siblings died as a result of some illness and I recall my father saying three fourths of the county perished that year."

The captain nodded again as if this shed the light of possibility on an explanation. With his next breath he was giving orders to the short, half-bald man at his side who subsequently bellowed to send the crew scrambling up to the shrouds to set the sails.

Eva sat in the stern and hugged her knees to her chest as the galleon started to glide forward. The cable attached to the jolly boat began to play out and as the Spanish ship picked up speed, it cut a path across the beam of the
Eliza Jane
and came up on the starboard side, running parallel again.

Three full broadsides were all that were required to blast the
Eliza Jane
to oblivion. Eva sat huddled in the violently rocking jolly boat, her hands over her ears as the guns roared and belched fire. The first round levelled what was left of the masts and rigging, the second, fired at point blank range, pounded holes in the hull and blew wider openings in the gunports. Timbers burst and cracked. Windows in the stern gallery shattered and sprayed glittering shards across the surface of the sea.

One of the shots punched through to the powder room and ignited the barrels. A loud explosion buckled the upper deck and sent a thunderous cloud of debris shooting a hundred feet into the air above the ship. A bright orange fireball boiled upward with the smoke and within minutes the deck was under a hail of burning splinters that fell back down to earth. The cinders landed on dry wood and as the
Endurance
sailed out of gun range, a dense plume of black smoke painted the sky above the raging fires that sent the
Eliza Jane
to her watery grave.

~~

The rest of the day passed without incident. The sun climbed high in a clear blue sky and descended the same way, idyllic and beautiful—unless one was in a six foot by eight foot jolly boat being towed in the wake of a wooden leviathan.

Eva lost the contents of her stomach half a dozen times, leaning over the side, cursing each wave that passed beneath the keel. She kept telling herself it was better than death and sooner or later her stomach would settle. But then the galleon would tack again to alter her course and the jolly boat would be bounced across the crests of the following sea and Eva would find herself hanging over the gunwale again.

On board the
Endurance
, there was a natural curiosity that prompted the crewmen to climb the shrouds and peer down at the miserable occupant of the little boat. Some were not yet convinced she was not a siren or a water witch sent to place a curse on all their heads. They wanted to keep a sharp eye on her lest she suddenly sprouted a long, scaly fish tail and a head full of writhing snakes.

Others had more practical reasons to worry, watch, and speculate. There remained the lingering question of why and how she had avoided taking the fever. Douglas Podd was amongst them and he wished his cohort, Nog Kelly, was aboard; the crusty old tar from the
Iron Rose
knew more about medicine and doctoring and would have known how to set the crew’s mind at ease.

A third group simply went about their normal routines and all but forgot Eva was there. They smoked their pipes and repaired the sails or spliced new rigging lines, and ignored all the fretting and gossiping.

Gabriel Dante found himself part of all three factions at one point or another. He openly mocked most superstitions, yet he was not one to deliberately cross the path of a black cat or stare a blind man in the eye. He knew the girl was human—quite a delicate, lovely human, in fact, for he had seen her naked limbs and pale white body as she scrubbed it down with the soap and camphor. Even so, he could not get the image out of his mind of her emerging like a ghostly specter from the rubble on board the
Eliza Jane
, her shapeless white form enveloped in smoke, her long blonde hair drifting wildly about her shoulders.

He would be a fool if he did not have concerns about the plague infecting his own crew. The umbilical cable that stretched between the jolly boat and the ship was sixty feet long, but was that long enough? Stubs had suggested towing her to the nearest island and cutting her free, but that posed a whole other series of questions and doubts. If she was still carrying the fever, any island she stepped onto would potentially become infected. Even if she was clean, a young and beautiful woman stranded on an island would be helpless against natives or pirates or four-legged predators.

With Eduardo working by his side, Gabriel forced the problem of what to do with the girl to the back of his mind. He started stripping the gaudy trimmings and tassels from the great-cabin and when the lad asked what he should do with the small mountain of gold trappings, Dante ordered him to simply toss them over the stern rail, forgetting that some might rain down upon the jolly boat. At one point, he went out onto the narrow balcony to relieve himself and had his breeches open before he realized there was a pair of rounded emerald eyes staring up at him.

After that, he found himself periodically drawn to the gallery windows. He saw the girl emptying her belly several times and ordered fewer tacking maneuvers, which reduced their speed slightly but allowed for longer stretches when the jolly boat could ride relatively smoothly in the center channel of the wake. Stubs offered up the expected objections but Dante ignored them.

As the last streaks of the sunset faded to darkness, he was again at the gallery windows, his meal of steaming hot mutton stew cooling on his desk. He could just make out the blurred white bundle of blankets beneath the canvas canopy before the sea and sky turned black. He was about to turn away when he saw a flicker of sparks, then another as the girl attempted to strike flint and light the shielded lantern that had been provided with the rest of the supplies.

~~

Eva used the edge of the dagger to send a small fountain of sparks over the tiny pile of dry tinder she had built on a metal pan. Three, four times she struck the blade on the flint before the bits of straw caught and she was able to coddle a flame long enough to light the wick of a candle and place it inside the horn-sided lantern. Immensely pleased with herself, she started to draw the sides of the tented canvas sail closed to hoard the light and meagre heat inside, but before she did so, she glanced up and saw the dark silhouette of a man standing at the gallery windows. That it was the brutishly ugly and battle-scarred captain, she had no doubt, for she had caught him watching her several times during the day.

Shivering, she closed the edges of the canvas tight and curled up inside the nest of woollen blankets, and was eventually lulled into an exhausted sleep by the sound of the water rushing by an inch beneath the keel.

CHAPTER FIVE

The sea began to turn choppy shortly before dawn. The previous day’s glorious blue sky was obscured by a fast-moving ceiling of gray and green-bellied clouds. Wind spun across the surface of the water, feathering the crests of the whitecaps, sending sprays of mist as high as the upper deck of the
Endurance
. The threat of the impending squall had Dante clearing the decks and ensuring the guns were securely lashed. As the heavy ship began to roll and dip with the taller waves, the crew began to grumble that it was a sign. A sure sign they had made the wrong choice in rescuing the witch-girl from the death ship.

Sixty feet behind the
Endurance
, Eva was under the tented canvas, holding onto the gunwales for dear life. Being towed through the wake of the massive ship had been terrifying enough. Buffeted now with gusts of wind and spray as the little wooden boat jumped from peak to trough had her clenching her teeth so hard she feared they would snap off at the gums. The water was ankle deep in the bottom and filling more with each wave that flung spume over the side. In desperation, she had emptied a cask of drinking water and was using it to bail, but a week without food had seriously depleted her strength and she simply could not keep up.

The camphor oil she had rubbed on her skin and hair ran down into her eyes, stinging them so badly she could not keep them open. The temperature of the air plunged and the cold sucked the breath from her lungs. When the sheeting wall of rain engulfed the little boat, she crawled back under the canvas and prayed to a God who, she was all but certain now, had forsaken her.

~~

Gabriel Dante stood with his long legs braced apart and welcomed the sweet rain on his battered face. He had ordered all the mainsails taken in so that they would ride the squall using only the top sheets for stability. In spite of having sailed many galleons under a prize flag, he was never sure how one would behave in heavy winds, and the
Endurance
carried more weight in armaments than most.

"I thank the devil we are nowhere near the Dragon’s Teeth," he shouted to Stubs. "We'd be hard-pressed to keep this sow from being gutted on the reef."

He said this through a flash of even white teeth, grinning in the face of the storm. While he respected the absolute power of the wind and the sea, he also drew strength from its awesome might. Nature was the one thing man could not control and must bow to whether a king or a common sailor. Twenty years earlier it had been the storms in the English Channel that had caused more damage to the fearsome Spanish Armada than the undermanned, poorly armed ships of the English navy. Not a single galleon or galleyass had been hulled by English shot, yet dozens upon dozens had been crushed against rocks or swamped by treacherous currents and enormous seas.

Few places on earth could boast storms more savage, more destructive than those that formed in the tropical waters of the Spanish Main. Hurricanes could level islands and wash entire towns and villages into the sea. Ships weighing hundreds of tons could be tossed about like a child’s toy in waves high enough to block out the sky.

This was no hurricane, but a tropical squall that could be equally sharp and vicious. Gabriel knew the sun would be out an hour from now, and the rigging would be shedding water droplets like diamonds, but at the moment the rain was falling in a deluge and the decks were ankle deep in rushing water. Men who had to be out in the open were clinging to anything solid to keep themselves from being swept away.

Something white, flapping loose, caught Gabriel's eye and he squinted into the blurring haze of rain. It was a sheet of canvas half sucked through the rails that surrounded the aftercastle. He looked up but could not see any yards that were missing sails. He was about to dismiss it when a sudden thought occurred and he ran to the rail and looked down over the ships wake.

"Damn it all to hell!"

Stubs came up beside him and followed his gaze. The cable attached to the jolly boat was pulled taut but the boat at the end of the umbilical was twisting and careening through the wash. The canvas Dante had seen had been torn free of its lashings on the jolly boat and, through the sheets of rain, the two men could see the girl curled tight against the stern, the belly of the craft half-filled with water that would soon swamp the vessel and drag it under.

Dante cursed again and vaulted over the rail to the deck below. He shed his doublet and boots as he ran toward the gangway. Stubs was a step behind, shouting for men to go below and winch the boat closer. At the same time he snatched up a line and tied it around Gabriel's waist, mumbling and spitting oaths about drowning kittens.

Happily the galleon was not moving fast, so that when Gabriel dove into the sea, he was sheltered from the gusting wind until he swam out from behind the bulbous stern of the ship. By then the jolly boat had been winched close enough for a score of powerful strokes to bring him abreast. There was almost no difference between the level of the sea and the level of water inside the gig and he dared not risk trying to pull himself on board. Instead he moved hand over hand along the side until he saw the girl curled in the green seawater.

She looked dead already. Her skin was as white as her shirt, her lips were blue. Her hair was fanned out in wide, wet waves that tangled around his hand as he reached over the side and grabbed her arm.