Heiresses of Russ 2012 Page 8

  “There’s none here but us,” Francis says. “We’d be there before all others. Think of the treasure we could find before they came after us.”

  “Think of the suspicion raised amongst those out there,” Jack corrects. “We sail under Her Majesty’s flag, lest you forget.”

  “With license to do as we see fit on arrival,” Francis says. He’s been too much at the drink, and I half wish to agree to what he says, if only to calm him. One night of unnatural speed shouldn’t be too much. “Pirates by law, isn’t it?”

  “Only law for pirates has them hanged as an example,” Jack tells him. “Privateers in name and pirates in deed, and no letter from Queen Elizabeth will grant passage for a ship with a warlock aboard. Drink up, now, and enough of you.”

  Late that night, the crew settled into near silence around me, I climb from my bunk and pick my careful way to where Jonas lies sprawled in hers, one arm hanging over the side. Maybe she hears me, or maybe just senses me there. Her eyes open bright on mine, her mouth curving into a lush smile. She lifts her blanket, takes my wrist in her hand, and pulls me down, her skin sleep-warm against my own, even through our clothing.

  It has become easy, with time, with practice, to meet her mouth with my own. She catches my lower lip in her teeth, a moment of sharp pain that she soothes with the tip of her tongue, her breath tangy from the herbs she chews like so many of the others, a taste I’m like to spend the rest of the night licking from my own mouth.

  Her skin beneath her shirt is roughened by salt water, but her breath still catches when I slide my hands, callused from weeks of work at sea, over her breasts, my palms against her nipples. She kisses my neck, sighing a little, and I shiver, her own arousal causing mine to build as well, the base of my spine tight with it. She’s unlike any woman before, silent and strong, her legs wrapped tight around my waist as she slides my shirt over my head, naked skin against my own sending both of us to shivering.

  “You’re cold,” she murmurs in my ear.

  “I was on deck. The night is chilled.”

  She rubs her hands up and down my spine, not so brisk as to be solely for warmth, though I surely feel much warmer for it.

  Jonas kisses me again, her tongue in my mouth, and gives a small moan when I pull away.

  A moment later it becomes a gasp as I slide between her legs and lick along the inside of her thigh. The gasp goes higher pitched as I lick inside her, her hands pushing into my hair, holding my head in place. The motion comes easy, like the rocking of the ship, my hands on her thighs nudging them a little more open so I can go deeper inside her.

  “Go on,” she murmurs, so low I barely hear it. When I look up, she’s watching me through lowered lids, eyes dark, and my own pulse beats hard between my legs. “Go on, please.”

  From then it takes only moments for her to climax, her hands tightening in my hair in a way that makes me moan and her shudder again, a circle that seems it may go on endlessly.

  I let my head fall against the curve of her stomach and she strokes her fingers through my hair, soft with what I think could be gratitude, or just the after-wash of her own pleasure. My own pleasure has built so much that I find my hand sliding between my legs almost without thought, pushing a finger inside myself. “Shall I?” she asks, and I shake my head, again with little thought. Her hands in my hair, my own hand inside me…. I press my mouth to her skin in a shadow of a kiss, trying to keep the veil of silence that covers us when nothing else comes close to privacy on a ship.

  The pleasure is not so strong as it would be from her fingers, her mouth, but it washes over me, tumbles me as the waves would, deep and intense.

  “He speaks truth,” I tell Jonas when we are recovered, hushed in the dark, and I wonder, again, why I never choose to ask her name, her story, and why she never asks mine. Perhaps it no longer matters—perhaps I am Daniel as she is Jonas, as much as Jack or Francis are their own names. Perhaps they are no more who they say they are than we, when so many rules bend to breaking point at sea.

  “The things I could do….”

  “Will you sail with this crew forevermore?” Jonas asks, her head on my shoulder.

  “I plan to make my life in the Americas,” I tell her, and she sighs.

  “As what? Wife to a plantation owner? Whore to any drunken sailor passing through? Maid in a house so large you could clean all day and start again the next morning?”

  “The last. Such as I did before I left England.”

  Jonas kisses me. “You will not. When the time comes, you will join me in a life more than that, more than this.”

  “What life?” I ask, though I fear I know her answer.

  “A life of piracy,” she says, her eyes glinting in the dark as I leave her bed to find my own.

  •

  She is wrong, of course she is wrong. Piracy is against the law, immoral, and wrong. Pirates are hanged when caught, if they are not shot and killed by their own crew or their competition. A hard and dangerous life, more so yet for a woman.

  And yet…there have long been stories of woman pirates, of women taken by pirate ships becoming their queens, tricking those who would not see a woman in command. Little more than stories, or so all say, but then, the skill to bring forth whatever weather is desired is supposed to be nothing but a story also.

  Maybe Jonas is my one and only friend now. Maybe she is the only person I can trust. Maybe all she says are lies to lead me into what she wants for us, and maybe I will go anyway.

  The day we sight land, it seems that anything may happen, and it would not be so strange to go from being a pirate for the Queen of England to a pirate for treasure such as I could never see otherwise.

  •

  The attack comes that evening, when the ship is still caught in celebration of a safe passage, and not so guarded for trickery as it might have been any other day. The ship sails under an English flag, out toward us as though in greeting, or at least this is what I am told, later. At the time, the first I know of it is the shout of my name taken up through the ship, the hands pulling me to the deck. “What is it?” I ask, in the moment before a cannon ball booms over my head.

  “Pirates,” someone says, pointing. I see the ship, the guns run out on it, before I see the flag, or the lack of flag. When I look for Jonas, she’s with several others, pistol in hand, though the ship must surely be too far away for any of them to shoot.

  Jack pulls me forward. “Time for some wishing, lad.”

  “For what?” I ask, thinking of Jonas’ confidence when she spoke of what would become of me.

  “Whatever you fancy, lad, unless you fancy to be taken by pirates. A wind, a storm, a many-toothed monster if it takes your fancy.”

  A second cannon ball flies over our heads, sending everyone ducking. “I fear there is little I can do so close.”

  The ship, when I look again, is drawing rapidly closer, faster than it seems it should be able.

  “A fire aboard, then.”

  “I—allow me to try.”

  I kneel against a wall, close my eyes, and turn my hands up. I think of the fields behind my mother’s house on a summer’s day, lying hidden by the long grass with nothing but a cloudless sky above me. I think of the sea—

  Another cannon ball, followed by an incomprehensible shout from the other ship, sends my eyes flying open to see our own ship full of men armed, the guns running out. The sea from the bow of our ship, scudding waves and soft winds, the moon hanging perfect in the sky after I swept the storm away.

  Another shout, and I force myself to keep my eyes closed. Jonas’ hands on me as I shudder apart under her; the view from the crow’s nest—

  The thud of ropes being slung from one ship to another; the sound of booted feet landing—I look up, see many legs in unfamiliar breeches, a chaos of our other sailors, of the pirates, the bright flash of swords, and then something solid meets the back of my head, and I see nothing further.

  •

  I expect to waken on our sh
ip, or perhaps in a cell. Instead, I waken somewhere between the two, on the deck of a ship that is not my own, my hands bound behind me. Though I cannot see, prone as I am, where we’re heading, the ship is clearly moving, and at some considerable speed, the chaos of my own ship gone.

  “Lie still,” Jonas’ voice says from behind me, her fingertips brushing mine. “All is well.”

  My head aches, but beyond that I suppose she must be correct, as we are awake and neither dead nor abandoned. Questions for the rest of our crew will come.

  “As your friend says,” says a rich voice, and a woman—clearly a woman, for all that she is dressed as we are in men’s garb, her long dark hair falling over her shoulders and a silver ring on her finger—reaches out to touch my cheek. “All is well. You belong to my crew now.”

  She leans closer, opens the top button of my shirt. “To my crew now, young lady.”

  She rises and steps away, calling to someone, “Untie their hands, set them to work.”

  The wind catches at my hair, growing long after many days on ship, and whips it about my face. Through it I can see the empty blue sky, the wide open ocean, and far above us, where I knew it to be, the skull and crossbones of a pirate ship.

  My ship.

  •

  Amphitrite

  S.L. Knapp

  “I built her, it should only be right that I have her again.”

  Consuelo settled into the cockpit of the submarine, holding the yoke tight between her hands to keep them from shaking. The whole place still reeked of the men who’d been here before her. Typical crew, never bathing. To be fair, she couldn’t blame them. The submarine had never been meant to carry more than a couple of people, certainly not when loaded with cargo. Too many bodies overheating the space together. No wonder they stank like pigs.

  “Sorry, darling,” she said to the air around her. “I’ll make it right.”

  They’d called the boat Madeleine, after some officer’s wife. Trust Americans to overlook the importance of a proper name. Consuelo called her the Amphitrite, or she would, as soon as she had a moment to bring the sub up and cross the name out. At the moment, everyone was looking for the Madeleine, and they’d never find her because she’d never been a Madeleine. Little wonder Consuelo had stolen her away so effortlessly, slipping in and out of Port Everglades and racing south, to home and safer waters.

  The controls yielded to her, pliant and biddable, as if the Amphitrite remembered.

  No surprise there, for Consuelo had designed her. A real beauty, too: the Amphitrite gleamed like a shell in the sun, and underwater her skin dappled in the rippling sunlight, all polished bronze and mother-of-pearl. Big windows revealed the edges of the Florida coast as she made her way south over the course of the day. The view from inside was lovely, but Consuelo found herself more enamored of looking in when she dove out to do quick repairs while moored off Marathon Key. The Amphitrite strained against the mooring lines holding her to the shallow sea floor. She stilled as the currents lulled, and Consuelo laid a hand on the glass bubble that looked in on the cockpit. The room was only big enough for one person to sit among all the controls, but it had a panoramic view. Consuelo returned to it in haste, shucking her dive suit and folding it away. Time pressed on, but she couldn’t take a soaking wet suit to the controls. She cursed the lost moments anyway, until she exited the crawlspace and saw the world open up beyond the confines of the viewfinder.

  The windows were her pride and joy; they held up to eleven atmospheres. The only sub capable of going deeper was Gabriel Mendez’s Leviathan monstrosity, with its tiny port windows and reinforced steel skin.

  Consuelo took a slow breath as her temper threatened to run away with her.

  “Back to the Caribbean?” Gabriel had puffed on his cigar and grimaced. “Couldn’t pay me enough to take a sub back that way.”

  “Think the Americans would?”

  “Ha! The lady submariners they’ve got are off Mexico, or the Oregon purchase. You know, untamed, pioneer types, they don’t have any in the east. They’ll be sending a man after you, sure enough.”

  Gabriel had laughed, laughed himself silly at the thought of the fate of a male submariner making it into the Caribbean hot on the tail of a Cuban. There was a reason all of Cuba’s sub pilots were women. Several hundred reasons.

  Another breath. She had to come up for air, risking the chance that a passing ship might see her. Nightfall had come and gone, but the risks still made her shudder. Consuelo didn’t take many risks if she could help it.

  She tried to still her nerves with righteousness: she had reclaimed her precious underwater boat, but all she felt was an anger that left her trembling. How dare they! How dare they, with their fancy lawyers and silver tongues, thinking that she didn’t know enough English and they could take her for a fool with their convoluted contracts. She was a graduate of la Universidad de la Habana, she knew English well enough to know that they had no right to be taking the fruits of her labors. She hadn’t signed that away. Their arrogance was their folly; Cuba granted women the opportunity to study engineering—though she had still been one of three women in a graduating class of fifty—but that was all but unheard of in America, even with their women’s colleges. They might steal a woman engineer’s work, but they would always underestimate her and think her less intelligent than their own engineers. As if English and external genitalia imparted some extra wisdom on their bearers.

  With luck, they wouldn’t expect her to have come so far. With a full crew, the Amphitrite needed to come up for air every few hours, but with only Consuelo onboard, the submarine could get by on twelve, maybe more. The gauges registered satisfactory oxygen levels, but the last thing she wanted was to be woken by the klaxons warning her of imminent suffocation. She reached for the dial controlling the gas bladders, turning it slowly so that they would fill with air and make the sub buoyant enough to rise to the surface. Too fast, and she would burst the bladders’ membranes and sink like a stone.

  Water broke over the window, running off the glass like molten silver in the starlight. Consuelo pushed herself up out of the pilot’s seat, careful to put her boots on the armrests as she climbed into the narrow opening set above the seat; many a clumsy pilot had crushed their controls or thrown their sub into chaos with an errant foot.

  The safety of the cockpit seen to, she crawled into the main corridor that ran down the vessel’s length, just beneath the spine. She opened a narrow compartment, one of the awkward ones tucked at the bottom of the bulkhead, and pulled out canvas for sails, the telescoping mast, and the boom before scrambling up the ladder to set them up atop the Amphitrite. With the sails in place, she would look like a small ship from a distance, perhaps a fishing vessel. Camouflaging a submarine with sails was an old trick, but still remarkably effective. Under favorable winds, she might even get a few knots out of the deal.

  The servo pendulum would keep the Amphitrite on course while she slept for the forty minutes the pumps needed to ventilate the sub. There would be little else to do in the meantime and she needed her wits about her for what would come next. Then she could make the run across open water and hide the Amphitrite in the jumbled archipelago north of the main island so she could get the proper permits without risking exposing the sub in a municipal port. If she didn’t get them…well, there were other places that would love to have the sub, and an engineer of her caliber. Places that didn’t mind a woman getting her hands dirty, even if they didn’t trust an educated woman, and an engineer at that. Some countries could little afford to turn away anyone, though they might still think her odd or worry that she would meet a man and abandon her post in favor of children and domesticity.

  Forget about that. Of course she would get her permits; no one liked the Americans co-opting Cuba in their bid to strike at Spain. Everyone knew the Americans wanted Cuba for themselves, and any deal with them had to be made with a careful hand. Liberating the Amphitrite was her civic duty to further the cause of an independent
Cuba.

  The ventilators exhaled through the aft vents and inhaled from the fore, ensuring that the sub didn’t simply circulate the air it attempted to exchange. Consuelo dropped down amid the ensuing gale, the force of the air teasing strands of hair from her bun and whipped them about her face. She pushed them away and crawled to the cockpit to catnap. Dawn would be coming soon, and she wanted to be long gone before that happened. There were bunks toward the rear of the submarine, but the chamber lacked windows. They were more comfortable but also more dangerous, and she could stretch out and sleep when she returned home. She pulled her hair free of the loose bun settled into the chair.

  She would sleep for a few minutes, and she would be off.

  Consuelo woke to a knocking without realizing she had fallen asleep. Just a minute, someone get the door, there’s…at the door…. She started to roll out of the chair, and realized that she wasn’t in bed at home but in the pilot seat of a submarine, that she was about to fall onto an instrument panel, and most importantly, that submarines don’t have doors. Not the sort anyone would knock on, anyway.

  The knocking came again, a deep, sonorous bonk bonk lent gravitas by the echo chamber of the cockpit. Consuelo opened her eyes and found herself confronted by a young woman lounging on the domed window, silhouetted by the sorbet light of dawn. She had her chin in one hand bedecked with a big ring of silver and malachite, and rapped on the glass with the knuckles of her other hand as the bangles on her arm clinked against the glass. She wore a vest, new enough that the saltwater hadn’t ruined it yet, but the metal buttons showed signs of oxidization.

  Consuelo had to stop herself from shouting you’re scratching the glass! and smoothed her expression into one of placid interest.

  Getting annoyed with a mermaid would never do, particularly not one half her age.

  Studying to become a submariner took time, degrees, countless examinations. Every book, every class, mentioned mermaids. The mermaids of the temperate waters dominated the popular imagination and made submariners shudder in horror. Consuelo thought it nonsensical: the giant cephalopods were the most rational fear to have outside of one’s own incompetence as a pilot, and mechanical malfunctions. Squids were the most fearsome, but the lusca native to the Caribbean were far more intelligent, and for all that they lacked a squid’s aggression they might dismantle a submarine out of innocent curiosity. No, if a body had any sense, a mermaid should be the least of their worries.