3

The tide was out; on the sloping sandy beach half a dozen little boats lay tilted on their keels. Jan walked along the low bulkhead at the top of the beach, peering out toward the harbor. Nieuport lay at the throat of a little river, behind the banks of dunes that bounded the North Sea, with the harbor tucked into the dredged and widened river mouth. Now the sun was setting, and although the hot light still gilded the peaks of the dunes, the harbor was deep in twilight; all the ships were in, and the nets hung like folded wings from the shears.

Jan kicked a rock off the bulkhead; it fell deep into the soft wet sand of the beach. He had no idea how to find his uncle.

Ahead, the bulkhead curved away to his left, turning upriver, where the town lay. There was a little market in the swell of the curve, which was shutting down for the night. He went through the market, past the gossiping fishwives rolling up their awnings and packing their baskets. The paving stones were slick with fish scales and guts. The smell of the beach came at him, the dry salty smell of dead seaweed and fish, cork and tarred canvas. The air fell calm. Out across the harbor the water was glassy still. Softly the first breath of the freshening breeze cooled his forehead.

He asked three or four people before he found one who could direct him to his uncle’s house. With the homeward-going workingmen he trudged up the single street of the town, along the riverbank. The lights of the houses shone on the ruffled water. He went up on a bridge over a canal coming in from the right and turned on the far bank to walk along it.

The third house from the end was built down sheer to the wooden bulkhead of the canal. A dinghy was tied up to the back door. Jan knocked on the front.

There was a light in the house, shining out under the door, and through the oilskin over the window. Someone pulled at the oilskin, looking out.

“Who are you?” a hoarse voice whispered. “I don’t know you—who are you?”

“Uncle Pieter?” The boy went a step toward the window, which was on the left side of the door.

“Who are you?” the old man cried.

“Jan van Cleef, sir—your brother’s son.”

There was a silence; then suddenly the door flew open. “Well, come in,” the old man said sourly.

Jan kicked off his shoes and went into a small bare room, smoky from the lantern on the wall. His father’s brother blinked up at him, unsmiling. Lifting a leather-covered bottle, old Pieter took a deep pull at it. He faced Jan again, looking slowly up and down him.

“You’re Mies’ son? Where’d you get such a size on you?”

“My mother’s family’s tall, sir.”

“Stop calling me sir.” The old man went away across the room and through a door covered with a length of canvas.

Jan looked around him, uncertain. He had seen his uncle just once, years before, when he was only a little boy; Mies had brought him here. He remembered a more respectable house than this, with chairs and carpets and cupboards and maps on the walls. This shabby little house was bare as a mousehole.

“Come on, damn y’!” the old man shouted, and Jan ducked through the canvas curtain and into the main room of the house.

This was rather more inviting. Relieved, he looked around him with a smile. A mat of woven rushes covered the floor, and there was a hearth with a little fire and a pot on a hook over the coals. Two battered chairs and a low table took up the middle of the room. The lamp on it gave off the best light in the room, and to this warm yellow circle Jan went gladly as a child.

“Sit,” his uncle said, taking one of the chairs, and picking up a long-stemmed pipe from a dish on the table.

Jan sat down.

“So.” The old man’s gaze poked at him. “Mies’ boy. Well, you look a good stout lad. What brings you out this way from Antwerp? Get caught with your hands in the chambermaid’s skirts?”

Jan scratched his nose. He was painfully hungry; the old man’s sharp inquiry angered him. He said, “My father’s dead, sir.”

“Dead.” Above the fringe of Pieter’s mustache, his waxen-lidded eyes widened a moment, round with new interest. Almost at once he shuttered them up again. Drew on his pipe. The stomach-turning smoke rose in a spiral above the lamp. “Well, a man who spends his time sitting and thinking will wear out faster than one who works.”

“He was hanged,” Jan said. “For heresy. The Duke of Alva hanged him.”

Old Pieter gaped at him. His hand trembled and the pipe spilled a flutter of ash down the front of his shirt. “Hanged—” He threw his head back and erupted into howling laughter.

Jan started up straight, offended. His uncle roared with mirth, pounded his foot on the floor, and thumped his knee. Gradually the fit faded; he wiped his eyes, chuckling, and leaning one heavy elbow on the table faced Jan again.

“It wasn’t funny,” Jan said. His throat filled with rage and grief. “We’re ruined, all of us.”

“Well, well.” Pieter looked around him at the ashes floating over his sleeves. “Life’s a big joke, boy. A big stupid joke.” He spat into the fire.

“Where’s the joke?” Jan cried. “Ten thousand people the Spaniards hanged—”

“All my life,” old Pieter said dreamily, “all my life people have said I was born to be hanged, and only look at my godly brother, Mies, crowned with piety and wealth …” His flat palm struck the table. “Now who went to the gallows, and who sits …”

He spat again. Jan saw the joke; he saw, too, the deep bitter lines along the corners of the old man’s mouth.

“He’s better off, probably,” old Pieter said.

A little silence spun out between them. Jan’s stomach contracted with hunger. His gaze strayed around the room toward the fire; he snuffled hopefully at the air.

“What brings you here, anyway?” Pieter said.

“You said once—remember? Mies brought me here, I was only a little boy, but you said”—Jan licked his lips—“when I grew up, I could sail with you.”

Pieter stared at him a moment; another mirthless laugh rumbled up out of his throat. “Oh, I did, did I? And what are we to sail on?”

“You said—I could—on your ship. Remember?”

Again the wet red laugh. Pieter wiped the back of his hand over his mouth. “Impounded. The Wayward Girl. Devil give them plagues and never let them die.”

“They took your ship?”

“Impounded her.” Pieter sucked on his cold pipe, his eyes half-closed. “So, you see. Mies was hanged, and I, I sit and think.”

Jan looked around again at the dreary room. Suddenly his mood slipped away into despair; he imagined the Duke of Alva, looking in through a window in the roof, laughing at him. He put his hands up to his face, longing for Hanneke, for his home. His stomach growled.

“Got the bear in you,” Pieter said. “Well, well.” One hand moved, starting to point to the pot on the hearth, but the gesture died. He nodded to Jan. “There’s a mess in the pot. I’ll get you a stoup of the juniper, to warm your gut.”

“Thank you,” Jan said, going toward the fire.

“There she is,” Pieter said. “Yon by the careening beach.” He braced his elbows on the top of the river wall, his eyes directed across the quiet water toward a little single-masted ship.

“What are they doing to her?” Jan shaded his eyes with his hand. The Wayward Girl looked rather like a fishing boat. Her hull was round as a bowl at stern and bow, her fore decks flush with the main deck, a little sterncastle standing up over the rear end of her. A third of the way from the top of her mast, the jack yard of a gaffsail jutted out like a cocked thumb. Men worked on her.

“What are they doing to her?”

The old man shrugged. His pipe in his hand, his gaze on his lost ship, he sank into his reveries. Not tall, yet he was stout through the body, with heavy shoulders and a neck thick as a yardarm. When he fell into his daydream, he seemed to shrink inside his clothes.

Jan looked over the river toward the Wayward Girl. Her hull appeared freshly painted. The sun flashed on a bright bit of metal by her mast foot.

“She seems pretty good to me.”

“Just careened her,” the old man said. “They ought to be towing her out to a deep mooring some time soon.”

“They’re refitting her?”

He looked at her more closely, wondering what the Spaniards had in mind for her. Like most Dutch boys, he had sailed all his life, although in nothing larger than the river-going flyboats that plied the canals and the broad Schelde. The Wayward Girl had a clean, trim look not entirely attributable to her new paint and lack of rigging. She looked fast and handy as one of the gray sea gulls that swooped and glided over the harbor around her. The Wayward Girl. He loved the name. In a flash, he knew he loved the ship.

Now the Spaniards had her. He sucked on his teeth, wounded in his newborn heart.

“Couple times,” the old man said softly, “I’ve thought over swimming in, at night, and banging a hole in her, so the dirty devil won’t get his hands on her, but—”

In one of the tall houses behind them a window rattled open. A shrill female voice shouted, furious. Jan was eyeing the ship, his mind dreamy; not until his uncle pulled on his sleeve, tugging him off down the street, did he realize the woman was yelling at them.

“And don’t come back!” she screamed, now that they were moving. “I’ll set the watch on you. Riffraff! Dirtying up the street all day long in front of decent folk’s houses …”

Jan’s ears burned and he shoved his hands deep under his belt and hunched his shoulders and did not look around him. He followed his uncle quickly down the quayside toward the harbor, away from the Wayward Girl.

Pieter van Cleef had never had a wife or a child: only his ship. As long as he had the Wayward Girl, he needed for nothing else, not a way of making a living, nor a good name for himself, nor something to love, but when he lost her he was transformed into a miserable old man, his days empty and overcast with longing.

He wondered what Jan made of him. Beside him the boy walked along humpbacked, his gaze lowered to the ground, his shoes knocking on the pavement. He walked with a loose stride that threw him off-balance a little. He was still growing. When he became confident in his size he would move better.

If he grew. Probably he was hungry. He was always hungry.

Pieter led them away down the street toward the market. He was used to getting along on very little to eat, but a boy like Jan needed good round meals.

He squared his shoulders a little. After weeks of doing nothing he felt better having someone to care for.

It was Friday afternoon and the market was loud with people in from all over the district to buy fish. Pieter walked down the edge of the crowd, looking for any face he knew. By the angle in the street, where the bulkheads spread the river into the open water of the harbor, two men in wide-bottomed trousers were laying out mussels by the bucketful on a streaming bed of kelp.

“Eh. Marten.” Pieter nudged the crinkled seaweed with his foot.

The younger of the two straightened up, smiling, and put out his hand. “Hello, Captain. Good afternoon to you.”

“Have a good haul?” Pieter said. His cheeks felt stiff from the unnatural act of smiling. He avoided the frowning look of the older man.

“The mussels are Protestant,” Marten said, and laughed.

“Hush,” said the older man, Marten’s father. “Keep your fool’s tongue.”

Pieter scratched his jaw. “Don’t suppose you have any bit of work for an old man who needs something for his gut.”

“No,” said Marten’s father, harsh. “No charity for pirates.”

“Father,” Marten said, objecting. He stooped over the heap of mussels and began shoveling the shells into a bucket.

“I said no!”

“Well, now,” Pieter said, edging away. “I don’t want to put strife between a man and his son—”

“The catch is half mine,” Marten said, with a glare at his father, and brought Pieter the bucket.

“Thank you,” Pieter said. Another thing that came unnaturally. He carried the bucket off down the street; behind him Marten and his father argued in loud voices.

Pieter’s nephew had wandered off. Presently he reappeared, and, the tide being in, they went across the street to the wharf. Pieter sat down on the wharf, his legs over the edge, took out his knife, and reached for a mussel.

Jan got his own knife. They sat there with the bucket between them, opening the mussels and eating them off the shell. After a few mussels had slipped down his throat, Jan reached into his shirt and took out a sausage, bit off a chunk, and held it out to Pieter.

The old man goggled at it in surprise. “Where did you get that?”

“Back in the market.”

“Someone gave it to you?”

“I stole it.”

“Stole it.”

Pieter snatched the long brown sausage out of Jan’s hand. Springing up onto his feet, he brought the sausage down like a club over Jan’s head.

“Hey,” Jan cried, recoiling under his raised forearm. “What’s the matter?”

“Never steal from your own people!” Pieter smacked him again with the sausage and whirled and flung it end over end out into the harbor. In the cloudless air above him a gull let out a scream of greed and sailed toward the splash.

“I’m hungry,” Jan shouted.

Pieter shoved the mussels at him. “Eat.” He sat down, shutting up his knife into its whalebone handle.

“I need more than this!”

The old man glared at him. “I didn’t ask you to come here.”

Jan’s face was stiff with bad temper; he looked very young, and much like Mies, who, although delicate and high-minded as a nun, had often shown a choler fit for a fighting man.

“I don’t need you,” he said. “I can take care of myself.”

“You don’t steal from your own kind, you big square-headed fool,” said Pieter.

“I’ll steal from anybody who has anything!”

“Not from your own people.”

“My people. They aren’t my people—where were they when my father—”

He gulped, his face red and swollen with rage. Pieter poked his finger at the boy’s chest. “You have to live here, you fool—if they think you’re a thief, you’ll get nothing but hard looks and blows!”

“You sound like my sister.” Jan got halfway to his feet; he was running away. Then to Pieter’s amazement he fell back sitting onto the board of the wharf and burst into tears.

“Oh, there, now,” Pieter said, uneasy.

The boy wept voluminously as a woman, all his feeling gushing out in rivers, his hands over his face. Pieter watched him a moment. He preferred the boy’s rage, which he could argue with. Finally he put out his hand and touched Jan’s shoulder.

“There, now,” he said again, feeling foolish.

Jan shook his head; tears splattered his shoulders. “Hanneke,” he cried, in a broken voice. “Hanneke. I want Hanneke, and Papa, and my mother. I want Hanneke.”

Pieter stroked his back, keeping at arm’s length from the unseemly storm of feeling. “Come on, now. A man doesn’t cry.”

“I’m sick of being a man!”

Mumbling sounds like words, Pieter patted his back a little more; he wondered what sort of water ran in Jan’s veins, that he cried for his sister, a big strong boy like this. But now he found himself thinking of his brother, Mies, hanged in Brussels, and of the Wayward Girl, and his eyes began to ache painfully with tears of his own.

None of that, now. He got heavily up onto his feet. “Well, let’s go find something fit to eat.” With either hand he grabbed the pail of mussels and his nephew and towed them off down the street.

“So we laid up a while by The Lizard,” Pieter said, loud; the beer and juniper in his belly had him stoked to a full roar. “Staying up there to windward of them, and the day broke, and the storm lifted. There was sail all over the sea, there, Spanish crosses, like sheep scattered in a field, just ready to pick off.”

He stopped for a deep draught of his liquor. He was sitting on the bench in front of a wharfside tavern; several other men lounged around him, sucking their pipes, and drinking, and looking out across the harbor. Red Aart, whose tavern it was, came along the front sweeping the paving stones, a dirty apron tied around his waist. No one paid much heed to Pieter and his story, which they had all heard twenty times or more, but the old man did not mind their inattention; the story drove up irresistibly within him, like a whale breaching.

“So we went down toward the galleon. She was rolling like a barrel in the troughs of the waves, two masts gone, and the mizzen down over her bow, all the sail and rigging dragging along beside her in the water …”

Jan sat on the flagstones with a great tub of water in front of him; he was washing Red Aart’s cups and dishes, in return for which, and other small chores, the tavern keeper had promised them the makings of a stew.

“As we was coming up to her you could hear the axes ringing. Trying to cut her away, they was, what hands was left.”

Red Aart stood over Jan, watching critically. The brilliant hair that gave him his nickname stood up like a cockscomb on the top of his head. Bending, he scooped up a bowl and waved it under the boy’s nose.

“You call that washed?”

Silently Jan took the bowl to wash again. Pieter burned for him: humiliating enough to do woman’s work; worse yet to be chided for doing it poorly. He saw the boy’s neck flush dark below the ragged line of his fair hair. There was nothing to do, save go on with his story. The old man reached for his tall flared cup.

“So then we came up, quiet as mice, you, see—”

“Pieter,” said one of the men beside him. “There she comes!”

Everyone sat up straight, even Jan, looking out to the harbor, where the river came in. Pieter let out a choked exclamation. A brace of little galleys was towing up a ship into the harbor, and the ship they towed was the Wayward Girl.

Now she was rigged up, with new line and new canvas. Her new paint shone in the late sun, and the water turned over at her forefoot in a little round green wave. The boats towed her toward a mooring in the deep harbor, among the seagoing ships.

No one around Pieter said anything. In utter silence they watched the little ship made fast by stern and bow at her new mooring. The few men on board her slid down her side into the galleys and rowed across the shiny harbor water toward the wharf.

The hands were Dutch, but the black-haired man who stepped smartly from the galley onto the wharf and began giving orders was a Spaniard. He wore a green and white and red-trimmed doublet so new it pinched his neck; he put his finger inside it once or twice to ease it.

Seeing the Dutchmen at the tavern watching, he strolled toward them. With one hand he kept his long fancy sword out from between his legs.

“Well, there they are,” he said, in crippled Dutch. “The Sea Beggars. One hand out and their mouths filled with please.” He laughed, throwing his chest out, and marched up and down past them, flirting his sword hilt fretted with fine silverwork.

“See her, you old pirate?” His eyes on Pieter, he waved his hand at the Wayward Girl. “Old Beggar. That’s all you’ll ever see of her, dirty old Beggarman. In four days she’ll be La Diamante.” His white teeth showed in a nasty grin and he jabbed his sword forward, not taking it out of the scabbard, only pushing it at Pieter. “La Diamante. My ship, old dirty Beggarman.”

Pieter said nothing. His heart burned like a coal in his chest.

The Spanish officer strutted and bragged a little more, but none of the Dutch would speak to him, and finally he strolled away. Jan had finished with his chore. He sat cross-legged on the broad blue-gray paving stones, his eyes on the Wayward Girl. He lifted his head once; his gaze met Pieter’s in a short burning look. Standing up, he took the tub of dirty water across the wharf and threw it into the harbor.

“Damned green stripling,” one of the other men muttered, looking after the Spaniard. “Never sailed in water over his head, I’ll be bound.”

“He’ll take her out and wreck her,” said another man, Joris, who had sailed with Pieter once or twice on the Wayward Girl.

“Take her out the first time onto the bars and run her aground,” said someone else.

Up the wharf came Marten, the fisherman, staring out at the moorings; when he came even with Pieter, he swung around and said, “Captain, look! They’ve fitted her with new guns. See? Brass guns, by God!”

Pieter stood up. Sliding his hands over his shirt, he strolled across the street to the wharf, and as one man the others walked with him. They stood on the wharf, eyeing the Wayward Girl, which the current was pushing around nearly broadside to them. Pieter spat into the scummy water below the wharf. It was true: amidships, on either side, two long shining guns rested on wooden carriages on the deck, and a fifth gun, smaller, but just as shiny and new, waited in the bow.

Pieter whistled under his breath. “She’ll need a new trim, to carry that weight and still show her speed.” It ached like sickness that he would not be the man to handle her. An instant later a queer new excitement stirred under his heart. He glanced around him at the other men and saw Jan standing behind him, his mouth half open, his eyes fixed on the ship.

“Aye,” Red Aart said. “She’s way down by the head, with that big shooter there.”

“I’d move that one back to the stern,” Pieter said. He threw his chest out, giving room to the wild rising lust inside, and gave his nephew another quick look. “Move the midships guns up a little, ahead of the mainmast.”

“She’ll be fast as a snake in the water,” said Marten.

Jan swung his blazing look from the ship to his uncle. “We can’t let her go to the Spanish. She’ll tear up our own ships. They’ll use her on Dutch ships.”

Pieter reached for his pipe and stuck it between his teeth. “Now, boys,” he said.

The others were pressing in around him. Red Aart still held his broom; he shifted his grip until he held it like a weapon. “We could sink her. Swim out at night and ram a hole through that fancy paintwork—” He thrust with the broom handle.

Marten groaned. Joris said, “Such a pretty lady—”

Jan said, “Are the Spaniards God’s people?”

“Hunh?” The other men turned their incomprehending looks on him. Pieter cleared his throat.

“You mean, steal her from them?”

Jan’s head bobbed once in a sharp nod. “Take her to sea. Turn pirate. Attack the Spaniards with their own guns.”

Pieter stuck the stem of his pipe between his teeth. “I can’t sail her by myself.”

“I’ll help you.”

The other men were staring at them, their jaws slack with surprise. Joris gave a violent shake of his head.

“Christ! You’ll never get me into it. The governor’s hanging people every day just for thinking. For stealing a ship—”

Red Aart scuffed his wooden shoe over the pavement. “The harbor master has two armed galleys that would blow you to splinters before you made it out of the harbor.”

“And if you got that far, the big guns there would make an end of you,” Marten said.

Pieter said nothing. He took a little pouch from his shirt, loosened the drawstrings, and dipped his fingers into the aromatic shreds of leaf inside. Carefully he put a pinch of the tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. “We can’t sail her alone, anyway. I’d need eight more men at least.”

“I’ve got my tavern,” said Red Aart. “And there’s my brother. I can’t go.”

“The Spanish would blow you to bits,” Marten shouted.

“Shut up.” Joris knocked him in the ribs with his elbow. “Do you want everybody to know what we’re doing?”

Pieter got out his firebox. In the midst of the other men, Jan sat with his shoulders hunched scowling at his uncle, his head sunk down like a sullen dog’s. Pieter smiled at him, pleased with him.

“The tavern’s not much,” Red Aart was saying. “But it’s mine. And I can’t very well leave my brother.”

He was talking to nobody; the other men were arguing at one another, each saying some excuse that no one else paid heed to, having excuses of his own to make. Red Aart swung toward Pieter.

“I can’t leave my brother.”

“Bring him,” said Pieter. “I went to sea before I was his age.”

“You had all your wits. And what about my tavern?”

Pieter sucked smoke through his pipe. He winked at Jan, sitting silent among the turmoil he had started. The scowl had softened to a puzzled frown. Pieter got up onto his feet.

“Well, well, I’m to my home fire.”

“Wait,” Marten said. “We’ve got talking to do yet.”

“You do, maybe,” Pieter said, and beckoned Jan after him. “My feet are cold; I’m for the fire. Good day.”

“La Diamante,” Jan said bitterly. “She’ll kill Dutch ships, too, I know it.”

Pieter said, “When they’re done fitting her up, we’ll go out and sink her.”

At that Jan bit back a curse; he had been learning new oaths from his uncle, words that would have made his mother faint and which it still shocked him a little to hear from his own mouth. They were walking up the street toward Pieter’s house. Darkness was fast falling over Nieuport. They passed by the front steps of an old plaster house, the wife standing on the top step on her toes to light the lantern over the door.

The watch was coming. Jan could hear their marching feet. He followed Pieter up over the bridge that spanned the canal.

At the top of the bridge, Pieter stopped so abruptly that Jan walked on his heels.

Not the watch that marched along the street ahead of them. A column of men with iron pots on their heads and double-bladed pikes laid over their shoulders was striding briskly down the way between the canal and the row of houses facing it. As they passed each doorway, a soldier left the column and climbed the step and hammered on the door with his fist.

Pieter swore, one of his dirtier oaths. “Well, well,” he said. “Now we’ll all be hostelers.”

“What?” Jan said. The wild thought entered his mind that everyone in Nieuport was to be arrested; but the houses opened their doors, and the soldiers went in, and no one came out again. “What are they doing?”

Pieter growled at him and led him down across the canal and into the next street. They had to step back nearly to the wall of the corner house to let the soldiers pass. The clank-clank of their iron clothes marked the time of their march. Jan sniffed. They smelled funny—sour, like pickles.

“Germans,” said Pieter. “Farts from Hell.”

The column past, they went down their own little street. In front of Pieter’s door a soldier was waiting. Pieter said nothing to him. He climbed the steps and opened the door, and the soldier barged up past him and into the house. The floor seemed to shake under his feet. Pushing through the front room, he stopped in the larger room beyond, where the hearth was, and the furniture, and looked around, and shrugged his pike and his pack off his shoulders.

“I’ll take this room,” he said, in ruined Dutch. Pieter and Jan retreated to the chill and bare walls of the front room.

Red Aart hated tavern work; he put Jan to doing it, in exchange for feeding him and filling Pieter’s cup. He would have filled Pieter’s cup anyway. The tavern was his because his father had sailed with Pieter for years, saving up his shares of booty and smuggling in the tavern stores. Sitting on his tall stool at the back of the tavern’s drinking room, Red Aart counted the coins in the till, one eye set to oversee Jan’s work with the broom, and wondered why there was never any money extra, as he was sure there had been in his father’s time.

“Hi, there,” he called to Jan. “Don’t ply the broom so strongly; you put all the dust up into the air.”

His father had shouted the same words to him, and the eminent good sense in it enlarged his feeling of himself, as the few coins clinking in his hand did not.

Jan flung him a surly look, but he softened his strokes of the broom. In the corner, Red Aart’s half-witted brother, Mouse, scowled fiercely at Aart. Mouse had taken as good a liking to Jan as a bride to her new husband and spent the day trailing after him.

Lifting his hand, Red Aart let the coins slide into his purse. No meat today. He got down from the stool and went across the street to the fish market, to buy a fish for dinner.

He chose a fine halibut, the eye still shining and clear. Although she knew he was taking it only thirty yards away, the fishmonger made a point of wrapping it in paper. Red Aart haggled the price with her a while. As the money changed hands, Jan came from the tavern and crossed the cobblestones to the wharf, where he stood looking out at the Wayward Girl.

“Come take this fish and clean it,” Aart called.

Jan wheeled toward him, hot. “I’ve already worked half the day for you—”

From behind him, Mouse ran up, a runty boy, cockeyed, and took the wrapped fish in his arms like a baby and bore it away to the tavern. Jan and Aart glared at each other a long moment. Finally Red Aart said, “Do you want to eat?”

Jan’s mouth twisted in a grimace. He ate enough for two men. Lowering his eyes, he went after Mouse, and Aart followed, relieved. There was something about Jan that made Aart very nervous at the thought of fighting with him, although they were nearly of a height.

He took his stool again, and fell to brooding over the lack of money in the till. Through the back door he could see Jan hacking off the head of the fish. The knife scraped at the scales. A moment later Jan came in, the damp fishy paper in his hand.

“The fishmonger gave you this?”

Aart took it; there was writing on it, printed words. He pursed his lips, trying to look wise. He had spent his childhood years struggling with the mysteries of the alphabet without solving them in the least.

“Can you read?” he asked Jan, and thrust the paper at him. “I don’t want to get my hands dirty.”

Jan hardly glanced at the paper. “It says the governor is going to tax you one hundredth the value of your tavern, and then one tenth of everything you earn from the trade.”

Aart snatched the paper back again and fixed his eyes on the black letters. “He can’t do that. I’ll be ruined.”

“To pay for his troops, it says,” Jan told him. He leaned his arms on the counter. His hands were bloody and smelled of fish, and scales, like tiny coins, clung to his sleeves. Mouse had come up behind him.

“He can’t do that!” Red Aart said again. A helpless rage burned in his chest. He threw a wild look around his tavern. “It’s not worth anything! I cannot pay it—if I have to pay a tenth of my trade, there won’t be anything left for me.”

Jan leaned toward him. “Then go to sea with us, and keep everything you earn.”

The tavern keeper blinked at him, slow to follow this change of lead. “To sea.”

“On the Wayward Girl. You said—the other day—it’s the tavern that keeps you here.”

The front door banged open. A score of soldiers tramped in, men of the Spanish army, but mostly German mercenaries. Aart watched them spill out across the room, find places, and bellow for drink.

He slid off the stool, to answer their demands. Facing Jan, he said, with a weak smile, “My custom’s growing, you see.”

Jan said, “Yes, and you are paying them to come here.”

Aart pressed his lips shut. He saw the truth in that; there were three soldiers living in his house, now, and probably these would want credit, if they paid at all. But still—still—

“Herr Obst!” the mercenaries bawled, and beat on the tables.

He went to wait on them, bowing and smiling like a servant. With a grunt of contempt, Jan went out again to finish cleaning the fish.

Pieter had gone to bed very drunk; now he woke slowly, painfully, his mouth burning dry and his stomach sick. He fought against wakening. Pulling his head down he buried it under the blanket.

“What are you doing?” The sibilant rasp of Jan’s voice came from the far side of the room. Heavy feet clumped. Pieter groaned; his head was so filled with pain it felt soft and swollen.

“Oh, ho, Dutch boy,” said the thick throaty voice of the German mercenary. “You think you stop me? I take whatever I want!”

“Over me,” Jan said.

“Shut up,” cried Pieter, and the effort pierced his head with pain; his stomach heaved.

Their feet tramped and thumped on the floor; a gasp followed a grunt, and something hard hit something softer. They were fighting. With a great effort of will the old man pulled his mind up from the dull comfort of sleep and rolled over.

The German was wrestling with Jan in the center of the floor. They were of a height; they strained together, their arms locked, in the dim room, until suddenly the German gave way and fell. Jan nearly fell on top of him. Instead he hovered over the German and shouted, “Now get out of here!”

Without a word the German launched himself upward from the floor, in his hand a long knife.

Pieter let out a yell. Tangled in his blanket, he fought to rise, while his nephew met the flashing blade with his bare hands. The German swore in his own language. Jan had him by the wrist and was holding his knife arm out straight; as the two men struggled for mastery their faces darkened and the cords on their necks stood up like rigging on a ship’s mast.

The German lunged to the side, his leg snaking out, and kicked Jan behind the knee. The boy grunted; he went down heavily on his knees, his fist still clutching the German’s knife hand, but the blade was now poised above him, gleaming in the dark.

Pieter kicked his blankets off. Snorting for breath, he flung himself up onto the German’s back and wrapped his arms around the man’s upper arms. The German howled. Jan sprang forward and drove his fist deep into the mercenary’s belly, and as the German fell slackly to the floor kicked him between the legs.

The knife clattered on the floorboards. Pieter landed on top of the German, who writhed and moaned, helpless under him.

Jan reached down for the knife. When he straightened with it in his hand he started toward the German, and Pieter saw that he meant to kill him.

“No!” Pieter leapt between his nephew and the defenseless German mercenary. “No—don’t cut him, for God’s love.”

“He’ll rob us naked,” Jan said.

“No. God, if he’s killed in this house they’ll hang both of us.”

The German was lying limp on the floor, unconscious, or feigning. Pieter cast a swift look down at him and getting Jan by the arm pulled him toward the door. “Come along.”

“I can’t stay there with him,” Jan said, on the steps outside.

The dawn was breaking over the rooftops of Nieuport. In the street the housewives were sweeping their steps, calling gossip to one another; the air was cold and fresh. Pieter locked his nephew’s arm firmly in his own and led him away toward the canal.

“Come on.”

“I’ve got to get out of here,” Jan said. “I can’t stay here. I’ll kill him or he’ll kill me.”

“Quiet.”

“You should have let me kill him. I owe them some killings—after what they did to my father—”

“Quiet!” Pieter gave him a shake.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see,” Pieter said. “Just be quiet and let me do the talking.”

Red Aart said, “Well, what about the harbor patrols? If they catch us out there—”

“They won’t catch us,” Pieter said. “Not if we work fast.”

Marten leaned across the table, his eyes bright. “Besides, if they do, we can just jump overboard and swim for it. I say let’s do it! Pay the Goddamned royalists back a little for what they’ve caused us.”

There was a general growl of assent from around the table. Beside Red Aart his half-wit brother stood, jaw dropped open and crossed eyes dancing.

“All right,” Aart said. “When?”

“Tonight,” Pieter said. “After the tenth bell.”

“And we’ll just be going to sink the Wayward Girl, right? Nothing fancy. I know you, Pieter van Cleef.”

Pieter stuck his pipe between his teeth. “Do you?”

“Not much else we can do, tonight,” said Marten. “The wind will be dead foul for the mouth of the harbor, even when the tide’s at full ebb.”

“It might shift,” said Jobst, the baker’s son.

“Aye,” said Red Aart, “and it might die entirely. The harbor patrols are galleys; they don’t need the wind. I don’t like the sound of this.”

“We’ll stove a hole in her and go,” Pieter said. He glanced at Jan, sitting silent beside him; the young man said nothing.

“Don’t worry about the galleys,” said Jobst. “What can slaves do against free Dutchmen?”

“I’ll drink to that,” Pieter said.

“At ten bells, then,” said Red Aart.

“Can I come?” his brother asked.

Pieter grinned at him. “Can you swim?” He reached for the gin bottle in the middle of the table.