CHAPTER
1
Lightning
flashed and the thunder cracked and boomed and the sound of it rolled
over the ship.
The force of the wind made the rigging
howl and large waves crashed over the bow and railings as the ship
pitched and wallowed severely up and down in the heavy swells. At
times the ship would disappear in a trough only to reappear on top
again as the sea heaved.
The deck was slick and the crashing
waves and wind made topside dangerous. Men working on deck to keep
the ship upright had to tether themselves to something fixed to keep
from being washed overboard. But a fixed point on that sea and in
that storm was an illusion. Everything was moving. Everything was in
motion. Everything on deck conspired to toss the careless ones into
the sea.
And even the not-so-careless ones
To be washed overboard meant certain
death. As it was, to stay with the ship right then in that storm
looked more and more as if it were only to delay what looked
inevitable.
Death. In the roiling waters of the sea.
It was dark as night now though it was
close to noonday. The storm had come up suddenly and it had struck
ferociously. With it had come the rains, the winds and the waves that
now buffeted the ship.
And fear had come with it, the fear that
all was lost though the crew still fought desperately to save the
ship for their lives.
Only the barest few sails were furled to
give the vessel steerage. Any more would have made the ship
unmanageable. Any more would have split masts and taken pieces of the
ship.
The captain was competent enough and he
gave orders. And the crew obeyed them with a promptness they didn’t
show in fair weather. It was survival and they understood it so they
struggled for their lives. But inside, down deep, the feeling began
to take shape that the clap of doom sounded in the thunder and it was
likely they wouldn’t make it.
Hours passed and the storm didn’t let
up. The ship still tossed on the waves. Nothing much had changed.
Except that now shapes appeared. They
moved in the shadows and in the dark and became men for a moment in
the flashes of light.
Men.
They were men.
But not from the crew.
They were the cargo. Human cargo. Their
fate had been declared somewhere else and they had been chained to
the decks and to the bulkheads down below waiting for that fate to
arrive.
But no more. The men in the shadows were
now loose, they were free, and the fate that had been fixed to them
was now a fate to them no longer.
They worked quickly and secured control
of the ship. This was possible only because the attention of the
officers and of the crew were on the storm, the ship and the danger.
When they saw the men from the shadows and understood what was in the
offing, the men of the crew protested that saving the ship from the
storm was in all of their interests.
“Help us!” they cried. “Help us
save the ship!”
But the men from the shadows laughed as
they bound them and threw them overboard.
“There is a lifeboat missing,” said
one of them when the ship was in their hands. He was standing on the
rain, seawater and windswept deck speaking to another. This other man
was a large man, a man who carried himself as if he were a man above
other men. For the men of the shadows and many others, he was.
He stood fixed to the deck. And there
was no fear in his face.
“Escaped?”
“Maybe, possibly. We had supposed we
got them all. Evidently not.
“But, if it was, there couldn’t have
been many.”
“It is no matter.”
The rigging continued to howl and the
waves still crashed over the bow and the railing and the ship still
heaved up crests and settled roughly down into troughs made by the
raging sea.
The two of them could hardly be heard
above the sounds of the storm and the ship.
“What do we do now, Deukselon?”
asked the first.
“We shall go where the wind takes us,”
said the other. “After that, we shall see.”
He smiled.
“Yes, we shall see.”
And then he raised his fist to the sky
and shook it.
“I shall have them now!” he cried.
“They shall be mine!”
He brought his fist down again and
opened it.
In the middle of the palm lay a round
object that flashed white when the lightning struck. It was a pearl,
large and round, and, though it could not be seen in that light, it
was very beautiful and very precious.
The man held it up and looked at it.
And then he laughed.
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