The Sea Wolves (5 page)

“My orders were clear, Finn. He was not to be touched. Worse yet, you hoped to rob him and keep the dust for yourself—”

“No, sir,” Finn began. “It weren't my intention at all. I only—”

Ghost's cruel smile alone was enough to silence the man.

“And now you've interrupted me,” the captain said.

The ship creaked, lines swaying, pulley blocks jangling, but the crew was utterly silent. Jack had seen this before in the packs of sled dogs in the frozen north. He had watched as a member of the pack challenged the leader, as a bloody, snapping, snarling fight ensued, and as the rest of the pack loomed with dark purpose, waiting to savage the loser. These were men, not dogs, but their ominous silence bespoke the same malign intent.

“Do I not give my men a fair share of the spoils, Finn?”

“You do, sir,” Finn said, his voice faltering. “My word, you do.”

“And yet,” Ghost said, almost idly. “And yet.”

He turned and paced a bit, tapping his temple as if he were a stage actor performing the part of one deep in thought. Then he glanced at Jack and tipped him a wink, an amused twinkle in his eye.

“Mr. Johansen,” Ghost said.

Jack turned to see a sailor step forward, a lanky man with tiny beads for eyes and long, spidery fingers. This, he knew, must be the first mate, for the captain had called him Mister, and to him would be delivered the orders.

“Sir?”

No trace of a smile remained on the captain's face.

“Keelhaul him.”

Finn screamed, lunged from his place at the railing, and drew out a wicked-looking knife as he hurled himself at the captain. Ghost slapped the blade from his hand and it stuck in the deck, quivering in the moonlight. So fierce and strong was the captain that he had the man on his back in the space between heartbeats. He raked a single fingernail along Finn's jaw, drawing blood and causing the sailor to cry out in surrender.

“It's the keel or your throat,” Ghost growled, his face bent so low that the two men were nose to nose. He almost whispered, but in the loaded silence the whole crew heard. “Pain or death. Those are your only choices.”

Finn went slack beneath him, and Ghost stood, turning his back on the defeated sailor. The captain paused and looked at Jack.

“They are forever our only choices, young Jack. As you will most assuredly learn.”

As a boy, Jack London had been something of a pirate himself. Desperate to escape the hellish drudgery of his work at Hickmott's Cannery, he'd borrowed enough money from his foster mother to buy the sloop
Razzle Dazzle
. All his young life, he had been in the company of rough men, and he had been along with some of them as they raided the oyster beds in the mudflats off San Francisco Bay, stealing what they could by night and selling it off in Oakland the next morning. Oyster pirates, they called themselves, and with his new boat, he'd become a pirate captain. At the age of fourteen, it had seemed a glorious adventure.

Now he stood on the deck of the
Larsen
, the sails full of a gentle Pacific breeze as the ship kept a steady course westward, away from the California coast—away from home and safety, and the family who had already waited too long for his return, and the financial salvation they would be praying he had found in the Yukon. In a single night he had seen blood dripping from multiple blades, heard the dying sighs of innocents, witnessed the brutal abduction of fellow passengers, and been savagely assaulted by someone who seemed more beast than man. And he had the feeling that far worse horrors yet awaited him.

Oyster pirate? He had been a laughing boy, an imp, attempting to thwart the Fish Patrol and escape arrest. Here, now …
these
were pirates. They lived by the law of blade and club. Bloodletting seemed ordinary and righteous to them, violence the solution to all riddles. And until he could divine some manner of escape, which at this moment seemed impossible, he had to dedicate himself to a single principle: survival. It was a familiar instinct—he had survived a long, hungry winter stranded on the banks of a frozen river, the cruelty of slavers, the obsession of an insane forest spirit, and the wild fury of the dreadful Wendigo. This was a new challenge, but Jack would endure.

Finn, however, might well be dead in the next few minutes.

Jack did nothing to draw attention to himself. The crew was occupied with the punishment being meted out, and no one seemed at all concerned that he might attempt escape. The ship measured perhaps one hundred feet from bow to stern, and its beam couldn't have been wider than twenty-five feet. This was the extent of his world, at least for now. There were four small boats on board—used, he supposed, for hunting and going ashore from deep anchorage—but it wasn't as if he could lower one into the water and paddle away unnoticed.

Ghost, too, seemed almost to have forgotten about Jack's presence.

Johansen barked orders and two men—Vukovich and Kelly—dragged a struggling Finn to the front of the ship and held him still as others tied ropes to his wrists and ankles.

“You bastards!” Finn screamed, trying to shake free as they stripped him. “Stand up to him!”

Vukovich grabbed him by the hair and forced Finn to meet his gaze. “For your greed? We should challenge 'im for that? No, Finn. You'll take what's coming.”

Jack stood on the raised foredeck slightly away from the
Larsen
's crew, his own predicament almost forgotten as he watched the men force Finn toward the bow. He had heard of keelhauling—had read about it as a boy and included it in the pirate tales he shared with his chums—and so he knew what was to come. They would throw Finn overboard and drag him beneath the ship, right along the keel, where the hull would be caked with barnacles that would shred his skin to ribbons. The faster they dragged him, the tighter he would be held against the keel, and the worse his injuries. But if they went slowly, giving him slack to spare him the flaying, he could well drown.

“I don't understand,” Jack said, stepping up between the ogre and Louis, the short black man whom he had first seen when Ghost dragged him aboard. “I'd thought a man would be thrown over one side and dragged to the other. If they haul him fore to aft on a ship this size…”

He glanced at them for answers. The ogre ignored him, scratching at his huge head. But Louis smiled to reveal an awful mouth: some teeth missing, some jagged as a shark's, and that single upper canine made of gold.

“It'll hurt,
c'est vrai,”
Louis said, in an island-lilted French accent. “But if he dies …
c'est sa bonne fortune.”

Jack frowned in confusion. “I don't—”

The ogre grunted and cleared his throat, tugging at his filthy beard. “If the captain lets him die, Finn'll be lucky,” he said, his voice a deep rumble in his chest. “Fool wants to howl, thinks he can challenge Ghost, but he's no match. If he lives, he'd best fall into line. You challenge Ghost and lose … better off in hell.”

Then there was shouting and the pounding of feet on the deck, and Jack whipped round to see he had missed the moment when they hurled Finn off the bow. Vukovich and Kelly and two other men were running along beside the railings, ropes held taut, slowing only to feed the ropes around rigging, and Jack tried not to visualize Finn beneath the ship, holding his breath as barnacles ripped his skin. Sickened, he watched the men run as the rest of the small crew followed.

A hand like an iron vise grabbed his arm and propelled him forward, slowly but far from gently.

“Come along, young Jack,” Ghost growled in his ear. “This is for all to see.”

Not quite all
, Jack thought, remembering the others abducted from the
Umatilla
who must still be locked below. But he thought it best to hold his tongue for now. That was a question for another time.

With Ghost as his escort, he walked aft, watching as the crew gathered along the stern railing. Together, the four men who'd done the hauling pulled at the ropes, hoisting Finn from the water. Jack watched with dreadful anticipation, because he knew that what he was about to see would be awful.

What they dragged aboard was not at first recognizable as human. The skin had been flayed open on Finn's back, arms and legs, flesh ripped way, so that he resembled little more than a pile of bloody meat. Only when he vomited seawater onto the blood-smeared deck, and tried to rise to his knees, could Jack be certain the creature before him was a man.

Then Finn collapsed, blood running freely from his wounds and flowing across the deck.

The first mate, Johansen, turned expectantly to the captain, and the crew watched impatiently. For a moment, Jack felt sure they weren't done with him. Their captain had inflicted punishment, but the crew seemed to want their own pound of flesh. Jack imagined that attempting to keep a secret stash of one's own must be the worst of sins among pirates. Ghost's own words had suggested that he divided up their ill-gotten gains by some formula they all agreed was fair. For Finn to keep even so small a bit of treasure as Jack's bag of gold for himself was for him to steal from all of them.

Yet though violence remained in the air, the crew glaring menacingly at Finn, none of them attacked. It was as if they awaited some word from their captain, but the word had not come.

“Take him below,” Ghost commanded at last. “Louis, doctor him as best you can. Then leave him. Everyone else, back to work. Mr. Johansen, check our course. If we lag, we'll miss our chance.”

“Aye, sir!” Johansen snapped, and hurried off to obey.

Denied further retribution, the crew might have balked, but it was plain to see that none would challenge the commands of their captain. After the example Ghost had set with Finn, Jack could see why. They were loyal to Ghost, perhaps, but they feared him as well.

The crew busied themselves about the ship, though it seemed to Jack that in fair weather the
Larsen
practically sailed herself. Vukovich clambered into the rigging, and the others rushed about, and soon the only man standing with Jack by the aft railing was the captain.

Ghost did not look at him.

“Young Jack,” the captain said, the diminutive name a purposeful needling. “Can you cook?”

Jack stared at him, but his thoughts were racing.
Survival
.

“I'm a damn fine cook,” he replied.

Ghost nodded grimly. “A lad who thinks on his feet and isn't afraid of a fight, bound from the Yukon to San Francisco? Aye, I had a feeling you might've learned to feed yourself. We lost our cook, Mr. Mugridge, in a scrape a few months back. We've been making do with Finn, but he'll be in no condition to man the galley for a time.”

For a time?
Jack thought that once they chucked him below, Finn would be lucky to survive till morning.

“You'll do his job,” Ghost went on. “I'm less inclined to kill those who are useful to me. Go and acquaint yourself with what's in our stores. It'll be morning soon and we'll want a bit of breakfast. And then, for lunch, we'll be having a special treat.”

Jack shuddered at the way Ghost said that, and the captain bared sharp teeth in a grin that seemed more hunger than smile.

“What's that?” Jack asked.

Ghost gave him a sidelong appraisal, as though reaffirming his decision. Then he grunted and strode forward, leaving Jack standing on the aft deck without an answer.

The first thing Jack did was clean the galley. In the months since the previous cook had been “lost,” Finn had made little attempt to fight the accumulating grease and filth. Every surface bore a layer of grime that required scraping and then washing, and Jack set to work long before dawn. By the time the sun had risen over the eastward waves, he was prepared to cook, although the best he could offer was a meal of cinnamon-spiced oatmeal, some eggs, and rashers of fatty bacon. He had inventoried the food available and wanted to conserve the vegetables and meat that were still relatively fresh for dinners.

From a quick conversation with Louis he had learned that there were chickens in the hold to provide eggs, and eventually they, too, would be eaten. What meat and vegetables they had fresh were in the galley already, having been acquired at their last landfall, only two days before. There was reportedly plenty of salted beef and pork, plus dried beans and baskets of sea biscuits, also in the hold. But Jack wasn't allowed down there to check.

Even so, he reasoned that though their heading was to the southwest, toward Japan, Ghost must not intend traveling that far or he would have put in greater stores of food. They were a small crew, but Jack did not think they had near enough provisions to make the ocean crossing, particularly given the threat of scurvy without much produce. There were few enough vegetables, and half a bushel of apples comprised a meager store of fruit. He reasoned that it must have been kept only for the officers, but he would not serve it without asking the captain first.

In a bucket in a corner, Jack discovered the pelican that had been shot on the deck the previous night. This, then, was the treat the men were to receive for lunch today—fried pelican. He might have turned it into a stew, but the captain's orders were to preserve the flavor of the bird. Jack would fry potatoes and onions in the pan with a liberal dash of spices, and it would make for an excellent lunch. But he himself would not partake of the meal, fixing something apart from the crew's special treat. He could not eat the creature whose portentous arrival last night had saved his life. He wished that he had the gift of life, so that with the touch of a hand he might restore it, but such a thing was not to be. Instead, the bird would end up in the bellies of the monsters who crewed the
Larsen
.