The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009 Read online

  Inexperience was not, in Araminta’s case, a synonym for romanticism; defeat was now writ too plainly across the deck for her to mistake it. Molloy staggering over to her grasped her arm: he had a gash torn across the forehead and his own sword was wet with blood. She shook him off and shot one pirate leaping towards them. “Come with me, quickly,” she ordered, and turning dashed into the cabin again. The maids terrified were clinging to one another huddled by the window, with Mrs. Penulki pale and clutching a dagger in front of them.

  “Your Ladyship, you may not go out again,” the chaperone said, her voice trembling.

  “All of you hide in the water-closet, and do not make a sound if anyone should come in,” Araminta said, digging into the dower chest again. She pulled out the great long strand of pearls, her mother’s parting gift, and wrapped it around her waist, hidden beneath her sash. She took out also the gold watch, meant to be presented at the betrothal ceremony, and shut and locked the chest. “Bring that, Molloy,” she said, and dashing back outside pointed at Weedle, and taking a deep breath whispered, “Parley, or I will throw it overboard. Dacet.”

  The charm leapt from her lips, and she saw him start and look about suspiciously, as the words curled into his ears. She waved her handkerchief until his eyes fixed on her, and pointed to the chest which Molloy held at the ship’s rail.

  Pirate captains as a class are generally alive to their best advantage. The value of a ship bound for the colonies, laden with boughten goods, might be ten thousand sovereigns, of which not more than a quarter might be realized; a dower chest might hold such a sum alone, or twice that, in jewels and silks more easily exchanged for gold. Weedle was not unwilling to be put to the little difficulty of negotiation to secure it, when they might finish putting the sword to the survivors afterwards.

  “I should tell you at once, it is cursed,” Araminta said, “so if anyone but me should open it, everything inside will turn to dust.” It was not, of course. Such curses were extremely expensive, and dangerous besides, as an unwitting maid might accidentally ruin all the contents. Fortunately, the bluff would be rather risky to disprove. “There is a Fidelity charm inside, intended for my bride,” she added, by way of explaining such a measure.

  Weedle scowled a little, and a good deal more when she resolutely refused to open it, even with a dagger at her throat. “No,” she said. “I will go with you, and you may take me to Kingsport, and when you have let me off at the docks, I will open it for you there. And I dare say my family will send a ransom too, if you let Captain Rellowe go and inform them,” she added, raising her voice for the benefit of the listening pirates, “so you will all be better off than if you had taken the ship.”

  The better to emphasize her point, she had handed around the gold watch, and the pirates were all murmuring over it, imagining the chest full to the brim of such jewels. Weedle liked a little more blood, in an engagement—the fewer men to share the rewards with after—but for consolation, there was not only the contents of the chest, but what they augured for the value of the ransom.

  “What do you say, lads? Shall we give the young gentleman his passage?” he called, and tossed the watch out over their heads, to be snatched for and scrambled after, as they chorused agreement.

  “Lord Aramin, I must protest,” Captain Rellowe said, resentfully. With the swords sheathed, his mind already began to anticipate the whispers of censure to come, what indignant retribution her family might take. But he had scarcely any alternative; exposing her to rape and murder would certainly be no better, and, after all, he could only be censured if he were alive for it, which was some improvement. So he stood by, burdened with an ashamed sense of relief, as she crossed with unpardonable calm to the pirate ship and the chest trundled over carefully behind her.

  The Amphidrake sailed away to the south; the Bluegill limped on the rest of her way to New Jericho, there to be received with many exclamations of horror and dismay. The family of Lady Araminta’s fiancé (whose name let discretion also elide) sent an agent to Kingsport at once; followed by others from her own family.

  They waited one month and then two, but the Amphidrake never put in. Word eventually came that the ship had been seen instead at port in Redhook Island. It was assumed, for everyone’s comfort, that the pirates had yielded to temptation and tried the chest early, and then disposed of a still-disguised Lady Araminta for tricking them.

  Now that there was no danger of her rescue, she was much lionized; but for a little while only. She had been most heroic, but it would have been much more decorous to die, ideally on her own dagger. Also, both the maids had been discovered, shortly after their arrival in port, to be increasing.

  Her fiancé made the appropriate offerings and, after a decent period of mourning, married a young lady of far less exalted birth, with a reputation for shrewd investing, and a particularly fine hand in the ledger-book. Lord D—gave prayers at the River Waye; his wives lit a candle in Quensington Tower and put her deathdate in the family book. A quiet discreet settlement was made upon the maids, and the short affair of her life was laid to rest.

  The report, however, was quite wrong; the Amphidrake had not put in at Redhook Island, or at Kingsport either, for the simple reason that she had struck on shoals, three weeks before, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

  As the Bluegill sailed away, stripped of all but a little food and water, Captain Weedle escorted Lady Araminta and the dower chest to his own cabin. She accepted the courtesy quite unconsciously, but he did not leave it to her, and instead seated himself at the elegant dining table with every appearance of intending to stay. She stared a little, and recollected her disguise, and suddenly realized that she was about to be ruined.

  This understanding might be called a little late in coming, but Araminta had generally considered the laws of etiquette as the rules of the chase, and divided them into categories: those which everyone broke, all the time; those which one could not break without being frowned at; and those which caused one to be quietly and permanently left out of every future invitation to the field. Caught browsing a spellbook was in the very limits of the second category; a bit of quiet fun with a lady friend in the first; but a night alone in the company of an unmarried gentleman was very firmly in the last.

  “You aren’t married, are you?” she inquired, not with much hope; she was fairly certain that in any case, a hypothetical Mrs. Weedle a thousand sea-miles distant was not the sort of protection Lady D—would ever consider acceptable for a daughter’s reputation, magic amulet or no.

  Weedle’s face assumed a cast of melancholy, and he said, “I am not.”

  He was the by-blow of an officer of the Navy and a dockside lady of the West Indies sufficiently shrewd to have secured a vow on the hearth before yielding; accordingly he had been given a place aboard his father’s ship at a young age. He had gifts, and might well have made a respectable career, but he had been taken too much into society by his father, and while of an impressionable age had fallen in love with a lady of birth considerably beyond his own.

  He had presence enough to appeal to the maiden, but her family forbade him the house as soon as they realized his presumption. She in turn laughed with astonishment at his suggestion of an elopement, adding to this injury the insult of drawing him a brutal chart of their expected circumstances and income, five years out, without her dowry.

  In a fit of pride and oppression, he had vowed that in five years’ time he would be richer than her father or dead; and belatedly realized he had put himself into a very nasty situation, if any god had happened to be listening. One could never be sure. He was at the time only eighteen, several years from his own ship and the chance of substantial prize-money, if he should ever get either; and the lady’s father was exceptionally rich.

  Pirate ships were rather more open to the advancement of a clever lad, and there was no Navy taking the lion’s share of any prize, or inconveniently ordering one into convoy duty. He deserted, changed his name, and in six months�
� time was third mate on the Amphidrake under the vicious Captain Egg, when that gentleman met his end untimely from too much expensive brandy and heatstroke.

  A little scuffling had ensued, among the officers, and Weedle had regretfully been forced to kill the first and second mates, when they had tried to assert their claims on grounds of seniority; he was particularly sorry for the second mate, who had been an excellent navigator, and a drinking-companion.

  With nothing to lose, Weedle had gone on cheerful and reckless, and now six years later he was alive, exceptionally rich himself, and not very sorry for the turn his life had taken, though he still liked to see himself a tragic figure. “I am not married,” he repeated, and sighed, deeply.

  He would not have minded in the least to be asked for the whole tale, but Araminta was too much concerned with her own circumstances, to care at all about his. She did not care at all about being ruined for its own sake, and so had forgotten to consider it, in the crisis. But she cared very much to be caught at it, and locked up in a temple the rest of her days, never allowed to do anything but make aspirin or do up accounts for widowers—that was not to be borne. She sighed in her own turn, and sat down upon the lid of the chest.

  Weedle misunderstood the sigh, and poured her a glass of wine. “Come, sir, there is no need to be afraid, I assure you,” he said, with worldly sympathy. “You will come to no harm under my protection, and soon you will be reunited with your friends.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, unenthusiastically. She was very sorry she had ever mentioned a ransom. “Thank you,” she said, politely, and took the wine.

  For consolation, it was excellent wine, and an excellent dinner: Weedle was pleased for an excuse to show away his ability to entertain in grand style, and Araminta discovered she was uncommonly hungry. She put away a truly astonishing amount of beef and soused hog’s face and mince pie, none of which she had ever been allowed, of course; and she found she could drink three glasses of wine instead of the two which were ordinarily her limit.

  By the time the servants cleared away the pudding, she was in too much charity with the world to be anxious. She had worked out several schemes for slipping away, if the pirates should indeed deliver her to her family; and the pearls around her waist, concealed, were a great comfort. She had meant them to pay her passage home, if she were not ransomed; now they would give her the start of an independence. And, best of all, if she were ruined, she need never worry about it again: she might jettison the whole tedious set of restrictions, which she felt was worth nearly every other pain.

  And Weedle did not seem to be such a bad fellow, after all; her father’s highest requirements for a man had always been, he should be a good host, and show to advantage upon a horse, and play a decent hand at the card-table. She thoughtfully eyed Weedle’s leg, encased snugly in his silk knee-breeches and white stockings. It certainly did not need the aid of padding, and if his long curling black hair was a little extravagant, his height and his shoulders rescued that and the red coat from vulgarity. Fine eyes, and fine teeth; nothing not to like, at all.

  So it was with renewed complacency of spirit she offered Weedle a toast, and gratified his vanity by saying sincerely, “That was the best dinner I ever ate. Shall we have a round of aughts and sixes?”

  He was a little surprised to find his miserable young prisoner already so cheerful: ordinarily, it required a greater investment of patience and liquor, a show of cool, lordly kindness, to settle a delicate young nobleman’s nerves, and impress upon him his host’s generosity and masterful nature. But Weedle was not at all unwilling to congratulate himself on an early success, and began at once to calculate just how much sooner he might encompass his designs upon Lord Aramin’s virtue. Ordinarily he allowed a week; perhaps, he thought judiciously, three days would do, in the present case.

  Meanwhile, Araminta, who had spent the last several months housed in a cabin over the sailors’ berth, and was already familiar with the means of consolation men found at sea, added, “Winner has first go, after?” and tilted her head towards the bed.

  Taken aback, Weedle stared, acquiesced doubtfully, and picked up his cards with a faintly injured sense that the world was failing to arrange itself according to expectations. The sentiment was not soon overcome; Araminta was very good at aughts and sixes.

  Araminta liked to be on Amphidrake very well. The pirates, most of them deserters from the Navy or the merchant marine, were not very different from the sailors on the Bluegill. But they did not know she was a woman, so no-one batted an eye if she wished to learn how to reef and make sail, and navigate by the stars. Instead they pronounced her a good sport and full of pluck, and began to pull their forelocks when she walked past, to show they did not hold it against her for being a nobleman.

  Weedle was excellent company in most respects, if occasionally inclined to what Araminta considered inappropriate extremes of sensibility. Whistling while a man was being flogged at the grating could only be called insensitive; and on the other hand, finding one of the ship’s kittens curled up dead in the corner of the cabin was not an occasion for mourning, but for throwing it out the window, and having the ship’s boys swab the floor.

  She enjoyed her food a great deal, and was adding muscle and inches of height at what anyone might have considered a remarkable rate at her age. She began to be concerned, a little, what would happen if she were to take off the amulet, particularly when she began to sprout a beard; but as she was certainly not going to do any such thing amidst a pack of pirates, she put it out of her mind and learned to shave.

  The future loomed alarmingly for other reasons entirely. If only they had gone directly to Kingsport, Araminta had hoped they should arrive before the ransom, and she might slip away somehow while the men went on carouse with their winnings. But Weedle meant to try and break his personal record of fourteen prizes, and so he was staying out as long as possible.

  “I am sure,” she tried, “that they are already there. If you do not go directly, they will not wait forever: surely they will decide that I am dead, and that is why you do not come.” She did not consider this a possibility at all: she envisioned nightly a horde of chaperones waiting at the docks, all of them with Horus-eyes glaring at her, and holding a heap of chains.

  “I must endure the risk,” Weedle said, “of your extended company,” with a dangerously sentimental look in his eye: worse and worse. Araminta decidedly did not mean to spend the rest of her days as a pirate captain’s paramour, no matter how splendidly muscled his thighs were. Although she depressed herself by considering that it might yet be preferable to a life with the Holy Sisters of The Sangreal.

  She was perhaps inappropriately relieved, then, when a shriek of “Leviathan” went up, the next morning; and she dashed out to the deck on Weedle’s heels. Now surely he should have to turn about and put in to port, she thought, not realizing they were already caught, until she tripped over the translucent tendril lying over the deck.

  She pulled herself up and looked over the side. The leviathan’s vast, pulsating, domelike mass was directly beneath the ship and enveloping her hull, glowing phosphorescent blue around the edges and wobbling softly like an aspic jelly. A few half-digested bones floated naked inside that transparent body, leftovers of a whale’s ribcage. A faint whitish froth was already forming around the ship, at the waterline, as the leviathan’s acid ate into the wood.

  The men were firing pistols at it, and hacking at the tough, rubbery tendrils; without much effect. The leviathan leisurely threw over a few more, and a tip struck one of the pirates; he arched his back and dropped his hand-axe, mouth opening in a silent, frozen scream. The tendril looped half a dozen times around him, quick as lightning, and lifted him up and over the side, drawing him down and into the mass of the leviathan’s body. His eyes stared up through the green murk, full of horror and quite alive: Araminta saw them slowly blink even as he was swallowed up into the jelly.

  She snatched for a sword herself, and began to help
chop away, ducking involuntarily as more of the thin limbs came up, balletic and graceful, to lace over the deck. Thankfully they did nothing once they were there other than to cling on, if one did not touch the glistening pink tips.

  “Leave off, you damned lubbers,” Weedle was shouting. “Make sail! All hands to make sail—”

  He was standing at the wheel. Araminta joined the rush for the rope lines, and shortly they were making nine knots in the direction of the wind, back towards the Drowned Lands. It was a sorry speed, by the Amphidrake’s usual standards; the leviathan dragging from below worse than ten thousand barnacles. It did not seem particularly incommoded by their movement, and kept throwing over more arms; an acrid smell, like woodsmoke and poison, rose from the sides. The men had nearly all gone to huddle down below, out of reach of the tendrils. Weedle held the wheel with one arm, and an oar with the other, which he used to beat off any that came at him.

  Araminta seized his long-glass, and climbed up to the crows-nest to go looking out: she could see clearly where the water changed color, and the gorgeous bluegreen began; the shipping lanes visible as broad bands of darker blue running through the Shallow Sea. The wind was moderately high, and everywhere she looked there seemed to be a little froth of cresting waves, useless; until at last she glimpsed in the distance a steady bank of white: a reef, or some land near enough the surface to make a breakwater; and she thought even a little green behind it: an island, maybe.

  A fist of tendrils had wrapped around the mast since she had gone up, poisonous tips waving hopefully: there would be no climbing down now. She used the whisper-charm to tell Weedle the way: south by south-east, and then she grimly clung on to the swinging nest as he drove them towards the shoals.

  What was left of the leviathan, a vile gelatinous mess stinking all the way to the shore, bobbed gently up and down with the waves breaking on the shoals, pinned atop the rocks along with what was left of the Amphidrake. This was not very much but a section of the quarterdeck, the roof of the cabin, and, unluckily, the top twelve feet of her mainmast, with the black skull flag gaily flying, planted neatly in a noxious mound of jelly.