“I hear ye been waitin’ for yer Swordfish,” a scruffy-looking powrie told Captain Wilkie, who was sitting with Massayo at a table, trying to enjoy his late supper. The tavern was no more than a large awning, the ocean breeze blowing warm onto the coast of Dinfawa Island this day.
Wilkie leaned back and considered the red-capped dwarf. He was pretty sure that he had seen this powrie before.
“You with Captain Thorngirdle?” he asked.
“Nah.”
“Then who?”
“Ain’t sailing much o’ late. Too much coin to be earned ashore.”
Wilkie’s smile showed his suspicion. He looked to Massayo and nodded.
“You have information?” Wilkie asked.
“Would I be interruptin’ yer meal if I didn’t?”
“I do not know. Would you?”
“Ye looking for the sloop, or ye ain’t?” asked the powrie.
“I’m waiting for her.”
“She ain’t coming.”
Now Wilkie came forward in his seat, as did Massayo. “What do you know? And what will it cost me?”
“Could use a meal and a drink or ten.”
“Then make it worth my coin. And yes, I’ve seen how much you bloody caps can drink.”
That brought a smile, and the dwarf licked his thick lips. “The Crocodile got her,” said the powrie. “She’s in tow and takin’ water. Listing, but she’ll make it.”
“To port?”
The powrie laughed.
“If you stay ashore, how do you know this?” Massayo demanded.
“Every red-cap huntin’ pack knows me well,” the scruffy fellow answered, puffing out his barrel chest. “Name’s Finneas. Finneas the Gaff, at yer… nah, at me own service. Might that ye’ve heard o’ me.”
“No, actually,” Massayo replied.
But Wilkie said, “Oh, indeed,” at the same time.
“The gaff?” Massayo echoed, arching his thick eyebrows. “There is more than one meaning to that particular word.”
That brought a glare from the powrie.
“Gaff hook,” Wilkie remarked sternly, and he narrowed his eyes when Massayo looked to him. “Of course I’ve heard of Finneas the Gaff, and ’tis a pleasure, good man, to finally make your acquaintance.”
The powrie continued to stare at Massayo. “Bah, but I’ve pedaled with most of ’em, even Thorngirdle’s Six Bits, and that when it was only called Two Bits. I been runnin’ these waters since afore yerself was born!”
“Enough, if you please, and forgive the ignorance of this newcomer to these waters,” Captain Wilkie intervened.
“A lubber, eh?” the dwarf snorted.
“You said that the Swordfish would make it,” said Wilkie. “Make it to where?”
Another snort. “North side o’ Serpent Isle, o’ course,” he answered, still staring at Massayo. He turned to Wilkie after he answered, and added, “Ye might get there afore ’em if ye’re fast out o’ port.”
“See that this fine fellow’s tab is covered for the night, then find all the crew you can and get them to the ship,” Wilkie ordered Massayo.
“Haha!” laughed the dwarf, and he shuffled away.
“You know that little wretch?” Massayo asked.
“No, but he doesn’t need to know that,” Wilkie told him. “You disappoint me, my friend. I thought your charm your greatest asset.”
“Not so much with powries.”
“Even powries that may hold the key to rescuing our friends?”
That set Massayo back in his chair.
“You want us to engage the Crocodile?” he asked a moment later, shaking his head. “To go against Captain Aketz? She carries a hundred archers, at least.”
“We won’t get near Cipac, because Cipac won’t go anywhere near the north side of Serpent Isle.”
“But your little friend just said—”
“Aketz will cut Swordfish loose a half mile out, or more. He won’t play with that current or tide, or the many reefs. And the water west of the island is too shallow for Cipac, and too near the coast of Behren, so that’s where we’ll be, tucked behind the tall mound that centers Serpent Isle.”
Port Mandu was out of port soon after midnight, sails full and catching a brisk and warm wind off the desert sands of Behren. Scope in hand, Captain Wilkie never left the bow. They covered most of the hundred miles northeast to Serpent Isle by the time and as the eastern sky began to brighten, the large, dome-shaped mound of the island came into view.
“Half sail!” Wilkie called. “Steady at the helm and ready at the rigging. On my calls.”
Wilkie was glad as the pre-dawn glow brightened. The waters in the triangle created by Serpent Isle, Dinfawa, and Freeport were indeed shallow, and thick with reefs, particularly as one neared Serpent Isle. Like every buccaneer, Wilkie knew them well. Even with that familiarity and his agile ship and skilled crew, he knew, too, that every sail near this lump of rock had to be taken very seriously.
Soon, still before the sun broke the eastern horizon, they had crew all about the rails, poking and pushing at every nearby rock, dropping sounding ropes, and finally, still some distance southwest of the island, dropping the anchors, forward and aft, and the sails.
“North side, Finneas said,” Massayo reminded the captain, coming up beside him.
“Aye, but this is as close as we can take her. Toomsuba, ready the dinghy.”
“How many will we send with him?” Massayo asked.
“One, just one.”
“Who?”
Captain Wilkie handed him the spyglass. “You get just far enough to the north to get a clear look to the open waters northeast of the place.”
“Should we go ashore?”
“Serpent Isle,” Wilkie replied very evenly. “And the name doesn’t come from the shape of the place, but from the inhabitants. Little bastards, but swarms. You might survive a dozen bites. A dozen, ha! That would take about fifty steps, if you’re lucky.”
“So I am to simply witness the death of the Swordfish and our friends?” Massayo grumbled.
“Very likely, yes. But Massayo is clever—at least, he tells me that he is,” Wilkie replied. “I trust that you will figure your best course, if there is one.”
Massayo looked down at the spyglass and shook his head, smiling helplessly. Another test. Captain Wilkie always had a test for him.
“Boat’s in the water,” Toomsuba called.
Still grinning, chuckling even, Massayo started for the stairs to the main deck.
“Oh, and do understand,” Wilkie called to him, turning him about, “Toomsuba knows these waters well and knows that lump of rock quite well. You’ll not coax him out of that dinghy until she’s tied back up against Port Mandu. Never. If you lit it on fire, he would sit in it and melt before he ever stepped foot on Serpent Isle.”
Massayo blew a sigh.
Soon after, he was crouched at the prow of the dinghy, a long spear in hand and a saber lying right beside him in easy reach, looking for rocks and watching for snakes. Behind him at the oars, Toomsuba rattled on and on about how the little gray devils almost never approached a boat, but it was known to happen.
“They usually eat at dusk,” the giant islander said, over and over and over, obviously trying to convince himself as much as his shipmate.
They came around the northern edge of the island just as the leading edge of the sun crested the horizon, and far to the east, Massayo noted sails, lots and large. He figured they belonged to Cipac, and as the light grew, he realized that she was turning to starboard, to the north, and as she cleared, he saw a second ship, much smaller and with no sails flying.
“Swordfish,” he muttered.
He turned about. “It’s the Swordfish,” he told Toomsuba. “Still far out. We can get to her.”
The big man laughed at that notion.
“Then signal Captain Wilkie and let him get Port Mandu around the south side…”
“Crocodile would see him and catch him,” Toomsuba said, shaking his head.
“Then row, my giant friend.”
“Captain Aketz knew where to put her, and the tide has her,” Toomsuba explained. He did take up the oars, though, and began pulling hard. “Look for rocks and push us off, and look for snakes and push them away,” he told Massayo. “They swim, and we do not want to swim with them.”
Massayo turned a nervous look upon the giant islander, who glanced back over his shoulder and smiled widely, showing an enormous gap to the right of center in his upper teeth. It made him appear almost childlike, Massayo thought—there was something truly disarming about this huge man who could pick him up and snap him in half as easily as if he was a dry twig. Toomsuba would be smiling if he ever did that, Massayo understood. The man was perpetually amused.
“Hey, rubber maker,” Toomsuba said. “Do you know how to tell which of the snakes are full of venom?”
“Their size?”
“Nope. The little ones have little teeth, but they bite. It is very easy to tell which will poison you out here.”
“How?”
“If they are snakes out here, they will poison you,” he explained, and he laughed heartily and continued his rowing.
Lovely, Massayo mouthed, and turned to the waters ahead, gripping his pole as if his life depended on it.
The water grew shallower and clearer as they neared the island. More than once, Massayo had to direct the rowboat away from a rock, and once, he overbalanced and nearly plunged headlong into the water. His face barely inches from the surf, he noted his first serpent, slithering about at the base of the rock he had just poled, long and gray and moving with great ease through the crystal-blue water.
It wasn’t the last snake he’d view. Toomsuba brought them in tight around the northern edge, close enough for Massayo to spot snakes in almost every crevice along the rocky coast. How badly he wanted to tell his giant friend to turn the boat around!
But now he saw the Swordfish, much closer and so clearly out of control, caught by the tide and with no sails, and apparently no rudder to turn her. She lurched forward, angled diagonally, then rolled back as the swells washed under her, then forward again.
Now they were close enough for Massayo to see the person—he knew at once that it was Jocasta—tied spread-eagled against the prow.
Far, far out, the Cipac had dropped her sails. The bastards wanted to watch, obviously.
“Keep pulling hard, Toomsuba,” Massayo said, snakes be damned. He didn’t know why he had said that, for he had no idea of what they might begin to do to help their doomed friends. Even if they somehow got up aside the Swordfish, they’d be caught in the same killer tide—and it was murderous indeed, Massayo recognized as they came around that northern tip, to see the great jags and sheafs of stone awaiting the Swordfish, waves crashing in with tremendous force and thunderous reports.
Massayo noted a second figure then, hanging upside down from the topmost yard. He put his face in his hand for Chimeg, the woman who had become his best friend in the two years he had been sailing with Captain Wilkie, the woman who had almost convinced him to join the Swordfish when Wilkie had granted Jocasta her command.
Only Wilkie’s elevation of Massayo to bosun with a promise that he would soon fill the vacant role as first mate of Port Mandu had convinced Massayo to stay.
It wasn’t lost on the tall man that good fortune alone was the only reason he wasn’t on that doomed ship.
Toomsuba continued to row hard, bringing the boat around to the eastern coast of Serpent Isle. He had to give it a wide berth, though, with the tide threatening to pull them into the rocks.
Even if he had cut a straight line to intercept the Swordfish, they wouldn’t have made it.
The sloop was caught fast by the tide now, rushing forward in greater swells, pitching hard to starboard so violently that her forward rail almost dipped under the water with each wave.
Massayo watched, transfixed.
Jocasta was still very much alive, stubbornly shaking the water from her face with each pitch. He saw her eyes go wide with horror, her mouth opened wide in a gurgling, water-filled scream as the last waves lifted that prow and launched it headlong into a great shelf of rock.
Massayo looked away and tried to growl through his agony.
It took him a long while to look back, to see the ship being lifted and thrown repeatedly into the stones. Jocasta was gone, most of her anyway, for he could still see her right arm swinging at the end of the rope.
Screams carried across the waves, sailors in the water and others stubbornly and foolishly holding on to the shattering Swordfish.
“There is a small beach. If they can get to the beach,” he heard Toomsuba saying, but it hardly registered against the horrors, the sights and the sounds, playing out before him.
A huge wave came in right under Swordfish and lifted it up high and threw it, clear of the water—other than the bottom of its keel—for a heartbeat, over the first bank of rock and into the second!
Massayo heard himself screaming, and that was the only way he even realized that he was. In that moment of utter shock, watching the ship verily explode as it crashed down on the stone, there came one brief moment of hope. For up high on that pitching, then snapping, mainmast, Massayo saw Chimeg, dear Chimeg, invert suddenly and brace herself.
As the mast struck the ledge and snapped, Chimeg somehow—was it the magical gemstones, perhaps? Massayo wondered—lifted straight up from the splintering beam into the air and came down behind it, landing on her feet, but hard, before crumpling down out of sight.
“Get me there, Toomsuba! I beg!” he called.
The big man responded by pulling even harder, driving the boat along and against the relentless pull of the incoming tide.
Massayo kept his eyes peeled on that ledge, the broken mast leaning against it, the top of the mast shattered along it, hoping that Chimeg would show herself again. More than once, he reacted only at the very last moment to slap aside a swimming snake or to deflect the hit from a submerged stone.
He noted more movement in the water—not snakes, but fellow buccaneers, some splashing, some bobbing facedown, and also barrels and crates, planks, and a sizable portion of Swordfish’s quarterdeck, all of it being swept around the rocks toward a small beach at the end of a short inlet.
Toomsuba was already rowing hard that way, turning the small boat to ride the tide.
“Use your weapons now,” he told Massayo. “No more rocks.”
Massayo replaced the long pole in the boat and drew out a cutlass and a hatchet, fidgeting nervously and rolling them about in his hands, ready to cut in half any snake that came too near. Not all his friends were dead, he noted. One man turned at the sight of the rowboat and tried to swim for it, but a swell caught him and drove him far into the inlet toward the beach.
“Hurry,” Massayo urged. He saw a second man stand up in the shallow waters, stumbling for the beach and slapping at something on his side.
Massayo didn’t have to see it to know it was a snake.
In the rescuers rushed, coming up on the man battling the snake, whom Massayo recognized as Calloway.
Calloway, the first mate of the Swordfish, who would likely take that title from Massayo if he came back alive.
Reflexively, Massayo hoped the boat wouldn’t get to the floundering man in time. The world was a wicked place and you had to take what you could, when you could. Would anyone blame him? He was weary of scrubbing decks and pulling lines. He was a leader, a man who had built a powerful and rich company, only to have it stolen by the goldfish. Why should he settle for being one of many in a crew, serving beneath people who didn’t have his intelligence and cleverness?
For a moment, he hoped for Calloway to die, but just a moment, and one that left him shaking his head in shame.
“Pull, Toomsuba!” he yelled emphatically, desperately, as if trying to exorcise the demons of his dark thoughts.
Calloway went under just before the boat reached him, but Massayo threw down his cutlass and hatchet and dove to the rail, holding tightly, bracing his feet, and putting his arm, his head, and shoulder under the waves.
He grasped Calloway’s shirt and felt something wriggling beneath his hand!
With a growl of denial, Massayo heaved the man up, and outraged beyond fear, he grasped the snake and flung it far away, then grabbed Calloway again and pulled him up to the rail, calling for Toomsuba.
He couldn’t get Calloway over, and the man had at least one other snake on him.
A huge hand, thick and wide, slapped down beside Massayo’s, and with strength that mocked Massayo’s efforts, Toomsuba hoisted Calloway over the side and dropped him into the boat.
As Massayo tried to grab for his cutlass, Toomsuba stomped a snake flat. He was bitten by a second serpent on his forearm, so the islander paid it back in kind, stretching it out and biting it back, then flinging the severed body into the sea, leaving the head stuck in his fleshy arm.
A third snake lifted its fanged maw toward Massayo, who wisely leveled his cutlass, waving it only slightly, just to the left of the serpent.
The snake threw itself at Massayo, its entire three-foot length coming right from the decking.
Across came the cutlass, slapping the living missile aside and right out of the boat.
Toomsuba patted him on the arm for that one, then hoisted Calloway and rolled him over, checking for more serpents before settling the groaning, wounded, and likely poisoned man into the back of the small boat.
The waves had driven them nearly to shore by then, and Toomsuba went for the oars.
Massayo gasped when he looked to the beach, to a sailor stumbling about, to the swarm of snakes about him and upon him, biting him over and over again. He stumbled and staggered, flailed and spun, showing snakes hanging from his neck and his face, and when he fell, he was covered by dozens of snakes.
Toomsuba was turning the boat then, and Massayo wasn’t about to argue—until he heard a cry from the top of that large stone block, from over the ledge near the broken mast.
“Half to starboard!” Massayo ordered. “Get me to the rocks.”
“Massayo the mad!” Toomsuba argued.
“It’s Chimeg!” Massayo yelled back.
Toomsuba paused for just a heartbeat, then pulled hard with his right hand, the port oar, swinging the rowboat hard to starboard.
“There are snakes in those rocks,” he warned Massayo, but he kept rowing.
Massayo ignored him. He hoisted the cutlass and the hatchet and set himself, one foot atop the prow. As the rowboat neared, he sprang, leaping forward to the nearest of the stones, slipping and splashing, but moving on, leaping to a second, higher perch.
“Give me as much time as you can, but do not come after me,” he ordered Toomsuba.
He was no longer consciously thinking or picking his path with any foresight. He was just moving constantly, trying to keep ahead. He saw snakes before him in the shadows of the overhanging stones. He felt snakes slap against his hard boots on several different strides. He knew that snakes were trailing him, chasing him.
He pushed it all from his mind, leaping and scrambling along the broken stones, trying to get higher up the side of the high mound, every now and then stabbing into a crevice to strike a snake before it could strike at him.
Everything was a blur around him. Instinct and reaction guided his every move. Somewhere deep inside, Massayo understood that if he paused long enough to consider this stupid rescue, he would likely throw himself from the rocks in a desperate attempt to get away.
But no, he kept going, leaping and scrambling, stabbing and chopping, pulling himself over every ledge without even thinking of what coiled monster might be awaiting his rising face.
Somehow, impossibly, he got to the last ledge, some eight feet above him. With no choice, he tossed both of his weapons over it, then leaped up, catching it with his hands, his booted feet digging against the stone to propel him up and over, where he scrambled over it, grabbing for his cutlass, eyes darting all about.
He saw no snakes. None at all up here.
He reached for his hatchet, but hesitated, for there was Chimeg, collapsed beside the broken mast, one hand on the leather strap fastened about the beam that held her corresponding gemstone.
Massayo ran to her and gently rolled her, calling her name. Not knowing if she was living or dead, he put away his weapon and heaved her over his shoulder, or started to, before laying her back down once more and retrieving that gemmed strap and her wonderful composite bow.
Now he hoisted her over one shoulder and stood straight, looking all about for an escape. He couldn’t go back the way he had come up, surely.
He walked to the edge and called down to Toomsuba.
“Over there!” the huge man yelled back, pointing across the rocky formation toward the other side.
Massayo swallowed hard when he realized the spot the big man was indicating: an undulating pool sheltered from the brunt of the waves, but swelling with every incoming rush of water, just to the side of the shattered Swordfish.
Massayo was fifty feet up from the sea. He’d have to go down a bit to get to the end of a lower jut overlooking that pool, but still he’d be perhaps forty feet above the pool—and who knew if there were rocks hidden under the dark water?
He turned all about again, looking for an easier path. But he couldn’t go inland, obviously, for the sheer number of aggressive serpents.
He looked down at Toomsuba and nodded emphatically, and before his better senses could overcome him, he scrambled back down to the landing below the high ledge, settled his friend more comfortably on his shoulder, and began his next run.
He leaped across a five-foot expanse to another stone and stumbled along, stomping a snake on the narrow spear of stone before him. He could see the pool and he tried to judge the incoming swells, and in the end, with more snakes coming up around him onto this jut of stone, he just had to trust his luck, and he didn’t slow when he reached the end, flinging himself and his dear friend into the air.
They crashed down hard into the pool, Massayo knifing down far enough to bang his feet on the bottom before propelling himself right back up. He grabbed Chimeg and got her face out of the water, then pulled as hard as he could for the opening between the rocks, his hope soaring when he saw the prow of his rowboat appear just beyond them.
To his surprise, two other sailors from Swordfish were in that boat with Toomsuba and Calloway.
It was hot in Tonoloya, particularly in the valleys west of the ocean. The sun, which shone down from cloudless skies upon the place for all but the winter season, radiated strong heat and could blister uncovered skin in short order, and when the winds came down through the canyons in the northeast, they carried such velocity and heat that they could dry clothes out in a matter of heartbeats.
Quauh wasn’t unused to heat, certainly, but never had she imagined the level of sweat and stickiness she had experienced as they neared the coast of the Durubazzi jungle. Her eyes stung from sweat, and no amount of wiping it away seemed to help. The humidity sapped the strength from her limbs and made her want to simply melt upon a hammock.
But they had made the journey, with the Uey’Lapialli docked on a long wharf—the only man-made structure in sight—alongside one of the escorting warships, while the other moved about at battle sail out near the mouth of the small harbor.
A host of soldiers waited on the wharf as Quauh supervised the sidhe slaves in unloading the few crates. She meant to accompany them as they made their way from the wharf into the jungle but was stopped by a fierce mundunugu commander, who told her that it would not be necessary.
Quauh looked back to the deck of the Uey, to Captain Mahuiz for instruction, and the old man just shook his head and waved her back to his side.
“The mundunugu are without humor,” Quauh noted when she joined him, the bearers and the escorting soldiers disappearing into the thick brush.
“They have been fighting sidhe for more than a decade,” Mahuiz answered. “All of them have lost friends, and indeed, lost their humor as well. Another casualty of this war to restore the empire.” He patted the young woman on the shoulder. “Prepare the ship for departure. Only the warship out in the harbor will accompany us home.”
“When the bearers return?” Quauh asked.
Mahuiz shot her a puzzled look. “They will not be coming back,” he said, and Quauh understood from his grim tone the implications and finality of that statement.
She stared at him and knew from his returning look that she wasn’t doing a good job at hiding her revulsion.
Mahuiz looked all about, making sure that no others were near enough to hear.
“There were mirrors in the crates,” he whispered. “Transport mirrors. The buccaneers have become too much of a nuisance for the augurs. They know too much about what is coming out of the jungles bound for Mayorqua Tonoloya.”
“They will send the gold and other goods all the way to Entel with the mirrors?”
“No, of course not. That would be far too distant a journey. Our leaders have secured some nearby islands, where receiving transport mirrors will be secured and hidden. We will still send our cargo ships to Durubazzi, but for lesser loads. The true hauls will be found elsewhere, away from the spies of the sidhe buccaneers.
“I have had more than enough of these troublesome pirates,” he added. “Let us hope this new plan works.”
“I thought that Captain Aketz was proving successful in ridding—”
“Sidhe are like insects, my young friend,” Mahuiz interrupted. “You slap one and a dozen others bite you. Let the buccaneers chase the ships carrying lesser treasures.”
Quauh nodded and let it go at that. She stiffened in a proper salute, then turned to go about readying the Uey for departure, but paused and looked back to the spot in the jungle wall where the mundunugu and the bearers had disappeared.
A pang of guilt stabbed at her. She had sailed with those sidhe for weeks, had watched them from afar. There were two families there. Among the bearers were several young sidhe, barely adults.
They were all about to be slaughtered.
She closed her eyes and remembered what Lahtli Ayot had told her. There could be no mercy.
She had to try to believe that.
Massayo leaned back in his chair in the lone tavern on the island of Dinfawa, a pirate refuge near to the coast of Behren. He had recovered from the trials of Serpent Isle over these last couple of weeks, physically at least. He would never forget the images, though, most particularly the poor sailor who had stumbled onto the beach to be brought down and covered by the small vipers that gave the island its name.
He was not a religious man, following no god in particular, but many times in the last days, Massayo had thanked fate, or whatever forces might be out there, for that pool below the ledge, deep enough and rock-free.
Chimeg sat across from him, and when he looked upon her, his heart swelled. She was such a good person, such a capable shipmate, such a deadly ally. He had saved her, though he still couldn’t believe he had made that run, and he felt embarrassed whenever she or anyone else thanked him. It was almost as if it wasn’t him at all who had done the heroic act, but some other spirit that had found its way into his body and controlled his movements.
Massayo didn’t feel like a hero, because he knew that if he, if this true person called Massayo, had spent a moment considering the path before him, he wouldn’t have had the courage to take it.
But he had, and Chimeg was here with him, and that was all that mattered.
Across the way, the crew of Port Mandu began entering through the open tavern door, two by two, one group after another, all thirty of them. Last of all came the two sailors, both women, whom Toomsuba had pulled from the water when Massayo had gone after Chimeg, followed by the huge man himself, and behind him came Captain Wilkie and Calloway. Calloway leaned heavily on a cane and walked shakily, appearing a shell of his former self, and the whispers were that he would never fully recover from the half-dozen snakebites he had suffered before Massayo and Toomsuba had gotten to him.
Toomsuba, though, who had been bitten only once, had quickly and fully recovered.
Again, a play of luck, Massayo realized, and the fragility of life and health twisted at his sensibilities.
The entire group made their way across the tavern to form a circle around Massayo and Chimeg. Captain Wilkie led Calloway in and helped him into a chair at the small table. On the captain’s signal, drinks were brought to the entire crew, and then to everyone else in the tavern as well.
“To the Swordfish and Captain Jocasta,” Wilkie said, hoisting his glass. “As fine a buccaneer as the Mirianic’s ever known!”
The room exploded in a rowdy “Hear, hear!” with many echoing the name of the pirate.
When the cheering had settled, Wilkie motioned for the crew to huddle in closer.
“And now we’re without our sister ship,” the captain began. “But so be it. We’ve sailed a decade alone, and so we will again—for now. But now it’s time we reorder a couple of things going forward.”
“Calloway!” one man said.
The venom-battered man shook his head.
“Mister Calloway’s days at sea are at their end,” Captain Wilkie announced. “He is staying right here in Dinfawa until the end of the season, when we’ll take him home to Port Seur.”
A cheer went up for Calloway.
“Port Mandu’s officers have been in flux since we got the Swordfish,” Wilkie said. “That’s no secret. But now, with all that’s happened, it’s past time we set it out in full.” He looked to the woman across from Massayo. “Chimeg…”
The first mate, Massayo believed.
“Our dear Chimeg is back aboard,” Wilkie said. “I’ll make no secret of the fact that I offered her the position of first mate.”
Cheers went up for Chimeg.
“But she has refused me,” Wilkie silenced them by saying. “She wishes to be our lookout, only that. To serve her friends as their eyes—and arrows—above. And she has told me who should be my second, and I could not agree more.” He stood tall and lifted his glass again. “My friends of Port Mandu, I give to you First Mate Massayo Mantili!”
Massayo’s jaw hung open, the rousing cheers only adding to his surprise. He knew the choice to be a good one; in truth, the best one. He believed himself smarter than anyone on Port Mandu, more worldly, more clever, better at understanding their goldfish enemies—he could speak the Xoconai language, even, along with several other tongues. And even though he had been on the ship, indeed on the waters, for only two years, none were better suited to the post than he, not even his dear friend Chimeg.
So, as the moments passed, he accepted the cheers and the title.
First Mate Massayo.