Chapter 7: Monster Isle
The Sea-Nymph's Revenge pulled away from the island of deadly women with the rowboat trailing behind on a long line, Lefty's enormous bulk gliding beneath the hull like a shadow the ship could not shake. Nell stood at the wheel with her thighs pressed together, the new gold ring through her clit a constant bright flare of sensation every time she shifted her weight. She had not slept. Every swell of the sea rubbed the little hoop against her flesh and made her breath catch. By the time the island had sunk below the horizon she had given the wheel to Scathach and gone below.
She slept like the dead, naked on her bunk with one hand cupped protectively over her cunt, and did not dream.
The shriek came sometime deep in the night, and it was not the cry of any gull or gull-adjacent thing. It was a woman's scream, high and slicing, the kind of scream that made every hair on a sailor's body stand up and take notice. Nell was on her feet before she was properly awake, her cutlass in her hand by pure muscle memory, her bare feet slapping the boards as she ran up the companionway with her coat thrown over her shoulders and nothing else.
The deck was chaos. Half the crew had turned out with lanterns and belaying pins, Scoffer with his red nose and his posing pouch and nothing else, Dravion in a silk robe with his hair loose, Honeymuff hovering overhead with her wings a blur, Wee Minnie in her nightdress with a teapot still steaming in her hand. Brutehilde had an axe and was bellowing for order. Tanna was at Nell's side in an instant, silver armour half-laced, sword drawn.
"Where?" Nell snapped.
"Starboard bow. It came from over the water, close," said Scathach. "Then nothing."
They searched until dawn. They threw lanterns on booms, sent the longboat around the ship twice, called out into the dark. Lefty surfaced once, a mountain of wet flesh, and settled again without showing the least interest. No ship, no swimmer, no rock. Just black water and a scream that had no source.
"It's the goddess," whispered a deckhand, and Brutehilde told him to shut his hole and swab something.
Nell stayed on deck until the sky greyed, and then she went to her cabin and sat on the edge of the bunk and put her face in her hands. The ring throbbed. Everything throbbed. She was still sitting there when the door opened without a knock, and Tanna came in, still in her half-armour, her long, straight hair plastered to her forehead with sweat.
"You look like shit," Tanna said.
"I feel like it."
Tanna closed the door behind her and shot the bolt. She crossed the cabin and stood in front of Nell, and there was something in her face that Nell could not read, something bright and nervous and proud all at once.
"You got a token," Tanna said. "For the goddess. For the ship. For everyone."
"For the ship," Nell agreed. "It's a decoration. It's politics."
"It's through your clit," Tanna said.
"It is."
Tanna's jaw worked. She reached up and began to unlace her breastplate, and Nell watched, puzzled, as she set it aside and stripped off the padded gambeson beneath and stood in her linen shirt. Then she pulled the shirt over her head and stood there in just her breeches, her small breasts and the hard muscle of her belly bare in the grey light, and she hooked her thumbs into her waistband.
"What are you doing?" Nell asked.
Tanna pushed her breeches down and stepped out of them. She stood with her legs apart in front of Nell, and Nell looked down and saw it. A small gold ring, the twin of her own, punched through the hood of Tanna's clit, the flesh around it still angry and red and shining, a bead of blood at the top of the wound.
"Gods," said Nell.
"I did it myself," Tanna said. "Last night. While you were asleep. I used the sail needle and the rubbing alcohol and the same kind of jeweller's hoop you've got. Sindy doesn't know. Nobody knows but you."
"You mad bitch."
"You went first," Tanna said. "You took the goddess's mark so the rest of us could sail home. You think I'm letting you wear that alone? I'm your shield. I'm your woman. If it's in your cunt, it's in mine."
Nell stood up and took Tanna's face in both hands and kissed her hard enough to hurt. Tanna grunted into it and kissed back, and when they broke apart Nell was laughing, or crying, or both, and Tanna was grinning like a lunatic with her clit ring catching the light between her thighs.
"It hurts," Tanna admitted. "Quite a lot. I did it badly. I think I went too deep on the left side."
"You should have woken me. I'd have done it for you. Clean."
"You were asleep. And I wanted it to be mine." Tanna reached down and very gently touched the ring, and her whole body flinched. "Ah. Fuck. Yes. That's going to be a problem for a few days."
Nell kissed her again, softer. "Sit down. Let me look at it."
Tanna sat on the bunk and spread her legs, and Nell knelt on the floor between them and looked at the wound, at the delicate swollen flesh, at the gold gleaming through it. She touched it with the tip of her tongue, just barely, and Tanna hissed through her teeth and grabbed the edge of the bunk. Nell pulled back.
"Too much?"
"No," Tanna said. "No. It's. It's very much. It's the right kind of much."
Nell sat back on her heels. "I have something to show you too. The priestess gave me more than the piercing. She gave me a chain." She reached into the drawer of her sea chest and brought out a thin gold chain, delicate as a necklace, with a small clasp at either end. "She said it was part of the token. I thought it was for wearing around the neck. Now I think I know what it's for."
Tanna took one end of the chain and looked at the clasp, and then at the ring in her own flesh, and then at Nell's cunt, where the matching ring glinted in the smooth pale flesh of her shaven mound.
"You want to hook us together," Tanna said.
"I want to know what happens if we do."
They worked it out together. The clasp on one end of the chain was small enough to click onto the ring through Tanna's clit; the clasp on the other end fitted Nell's. When the chain hung between them with about four inches of slack, they lay down on the bunk facing each other, thigh over thigh, and pressed their cunts together until the chain went taut and the two rings pulled against each other. The moment the metal went tight, the sensation hit them both at once, a bright electric pull that ran straight up from their clits into their bellies and made them both gasp and arch.
"Fuck," Tanna breathed. "Fuck, that's. Nell, that's."
"Keep going," Nell said. "Rub against me."
They ground together with the chain singing between them, four inches of gold tugging on two pierced clits with every roll of their hips, and the pleasure built in a way Nell had never felt before, doubled and mirrored, every stroke she gave Tanna coming back to her a half-second later through the taut little chain. Tanna was shaking, her hands gripping Nell's arse, her mouth open, sweat running down her temple. When Nell bucked hard and pulled the chain tight, Tanna came with a sharp cry, her whole body clenching, and Nell came a breath behind her, the two of them locked together by the gold and riding it out until they could not move.
Afterwards they lay panting, the chain slack between them, the rings still hooked. Tanna laughed weakly.
"That's going to be useful in a fight," she said.
"We are never doing that in a fight."
"We are absolutely doing that in a fight. The next man who tries to board us is going to have a very confusing last moment."
Nell turned her head and kissed Tanna's shoulder. "I don't deserve you."
"You don't," Tanna agreed, and reached down to unhook the chain, one clasp at a time, gently, gently, and as the last clasp came free the two of them flinched in unison at the small bright snap of sensation, the parting tug that ran through each ring and made them both moan and clench and press their thighs together. Tanna grinned up at the ceiling. "You deserve better."
"Oh, that's the good one," Tanna said. "That's the good one right there. We're going to be doing that every night."
Nell rolled onto her back and stared at the beams above her bunk. Somewhere above them the watch called the hour, and the ship creaked and rolled, and far below Lefty's enormous shadow slid along the keel. The scream of the night was already fading into the same file of unexplained things that happened at sea and only she and Tanna would know the sudden sharp pain that had caused it, but the ring in her clit was real, and so was the one in Tanna's, and so was Tanna herself, warm and battered and unhinged, lying in Nell's bunk as though she had always belonged there.
Nell woke with Tanna's arm across her ribs and the sun already high, and the ship moving in a long steady swell that told her the wind had come around in the night and held. She lay still for a while, listening to Tanna breathe, feeling the little ring shift against her flesh with each roll of the hull. Then she got up, washed in the basin, put on her shirt and breeches and coat and hat, and went out on deck with her cutlass and her log book, because whatever the night had been, the morning was the morning.
Scathach had the watch and the course was good. Lefty's back broke the water off the larboard beam like a moving island, patient and enormous, keeping pace without effort. Nell stood at the rail and watched him for a moment, then went below to breakfast.
The galley was hot and smelled of salt pork and scorched coffee, and Greta the Grubgirl was filling bowls at the long table with a wooden ladle and a face like a thundercloud. Brutehilde was already there with her elbows on the boards, and Polly beside her, and Honeymuff sitting cross-legged on the rim of a bowl as though it were a throne. Dravion sat apart with his own cup, composing something behind his eyes, and Scoffer occupied most of the bench at the far end, reeking gently in the steam, his red nose winking.
"Sit, sit," Greta said, and put a bowl in front of Nell. "It's the last of the good stuff, so enjoy it. That's the point I'm making."
"Last of the good stuff?" Brutehilde said, her mouth full.
"Salt pork, hard tack, dried peas, and the pickled things, that's what's left, and it will last maybe ten days at a stretch if we're careful," Greta said. "Which we are not going to be, because our friend out there is a growing boy."
She jerked her ladle at the porthole. Everyone looked at Lefty.
"He's been eating every scrap we throw him," Greta went on, "and then he looks at the ship. Not in a bad way. In a hopeful way. And I don't mind feeding him, he's good company, he keeps the whirlpools off us, but a kraken that size needs a whale a day and I have not got a whale a day. I have got flour and salt and the last barrel of salt beef."
"So we're running thin," Nell said.
"We are running thin."
Brutehilde grunted and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist, a gesture that belonged in the Knee-Knocking Damsel and looked wrong in a ship's galley, and which she performed anyway because she was Brutehilde. "Thin is a problem. Thin makes men mutiny. I have seen it. In my own tavern I have seen a man sell his own mother for a pork pie at the end of a long winter."
"That was Wee Minnie," said Polly.
"That was an unrelated matter and Minnie had the money."
Honeymuff piped up from her bowl. "There's land. I smelled it before I saw it. Greenery smell, wet-green, fruit smell, and something bigger underneath. Something that has been eating well on that island for a long time."
Nell put down her spoon and went up on deck, and there it was, fine off the starboard bow, a long low shape of green under a bank of white cloud, with high jungle hills behind it and a haze of heat shimmering over the trees. Lefty had slowed and angled away from it, keeping the ship on a wide course, and for a moment Nell's stomach tightened, because the last island Lefty had refused to approach had been full of singing women with collars and a goddess who wanted a piece of her cunt as a receipt.
"We need food," she said to Brutehilde, who had come up behind her. "Fresh water too, the casks are down to the dregs. Whatever's on that island, it has fruit and it has springs. It also has no sirens that I can hear."
"Lefty's not keen," Brutehilde observed.
"Lefty is a kraken. He is not keen on shallow water and that is all that means. He'll wait offshore. We take the rowboat in, fill the barrels, pick the trees, come back before dark."
"I'll lead it," Brutehilde said. "I'm not sending people ashore and sitting at the rail with a cup of tea like some kind of admiral."
"Take Greta to tell you what's edible and what isn't. Honeymuff to scout, she's faster than any of us and she can see over the canopy. Polly as your shield. And two to carry."
"Scoffer," Brutehilde said, and grinned. "He can carry a barrel under each arm and a man on his shoulders. And Dravion, because the walk will do him good and he'll complain so beautifully it will keep us entertained."
"Both of them will complain."
"That is the entertainment."
They put the rowboat over the side, and Brutehilde went down the rope ladder first with her axe across her back, then Greta, who took the oars and made them look like toothpicks, then Honeymuff, who did not bother with the ladder and simply flew down and settled on the prow with her wings folded and her eyes already scanning the trees. Polly came down hand over hand with her knuckles wrapped in leather and her cudgel at her belt, and then Dravion, who descended the ladder with elaborate courtesy as though it were a staircase at a ball, and then Scoffer, who came down last, in his single clown shoe and his red nose and his leather posing pouch, and who made the whole boat settle two inches deeper in the water.
"Fuck me," said Greta, "he's heavier than the barrel lot."
"That's all of him," said Scoffer cheerfully, and rowed.
They came in on a shallow shingle beach under the loom of the jungle, and the heat hit them like a wet blanket the moment they stepped out of the wind. The trees began ten paces up the shingle and they were enormous, colossal, more like towers than trees, with buttressed roots taller than a man and ferns unfurling between them the size of cartwheels. The air was thick and green and full of the sound of water and wings and something far off moving through brush with a weight behind it that was not a bird.
"Fruit first," Greta said, setting her hands on her hips. "See those purple things up the slope? And the low bushes with the yellow pods? I want both. The pods I know. The purple things we will test on Dravion."
"On me?" Dravion said.
"You have the most refined palate on the ship. If you survive, we eat well."
They spread out along the treeline, Brutehilde bellowing orders that nobody could follow because none of them knew which way was which, Honeymuff zipping up through the canopy and calling down what she saw, Polly standing with her back to a fern and her eyes on the dark between the trunks, Scoffer carrying a barrel in each hand and complaining that his shoes were wet. In a clearing twenty paces up the slope there was a spring, cold and clear, welling out of a rock, and beyond it a spread of low bushes heavy with the yellow pods Greta wanted, and past that the trees opened onto a broad flat meadow of tall grass that swayed in a breeze none of them could feel down here on the beach.
Honeymuff came down out of the canopy and hovered at Brutehilde's eye level with her wings humming. Her face was not cheerful. That in itself was unusual enough that Brutehilde stopped uncoiling her rope.
"There's something in the meadow," Honeymuff said.
"How big is something?"
"Brutehilde. I flew up above the trees. There are things eating the grass that are three times the height of the mast. There are more of them back in the hills. Some of them have teeth as long as your leg and some of them have necks like snakes and some of them have plates down their backs like a wall of shields."
Brutehilde stared at her, then looked at the meadow, where the tall grass moved and bowed, and where a sound rolled out across the clearing, a deep low bellow that was not quite a cow, not quite a lion, and entirely too large for any animal Brutehilde had ever cooked.
"Well," she said. "We're still going to need the food."
Brutehilde looked at the meadow, and then at the spring, and then at the low bushes heavy with yellow pods, and made the only decision a woman who had run a tavern through eleven winters could make.
"Food first," she said. "Monsters later. Fill your hands and your barrels and keep your mouths shut while you do it."
They worked the slope for the better part of two hours. Greta went down on her knees in the pods and stripped them off the bushes with both hands, filling a sack and then another, cracking one open against her thumbnail and tasting the pale green flesh inside and giving a satisfied grunt. "Good," she said. "Mealy, but good. Roast them with the last of the fat and nobody will complain." Honeymuff ran the high branches like a squirrel, throwing down the purple fruits from the trees until Polly had a pile of them at her feet the size of a crib, and Dravion, who had been appointed tester, ate one under the eyes of the entire party with the gravity of a man accepting a duel, chewed, swallowed, pronounced it sour but serviceable, and then ate four more on the quiet when he thought nobody was looking.
Scoffer carried water. That was the whole of his assignment and it suited him. He hauled the two barrels down to the spring, filled them, and hauled them back up the slope to the shingle with his enormous shoulders bare and sweating and his red nose bobbing, and when the second barrel was loaded he went back for the sacks of pods and carried those too, because the alternative was to stand around and let Honeymuff ask him questions about his pouch.
By the time Greta clapped her hands and declared it enough, they had four sacks of fruit and pods, two barrels of sweet cold water, and a bundle of fat roots that Honeymuff had dug out of the black soil at the base of the biggest tree and which Greta swore were a kind of yam and which Brutehilde swore smelled like a corpse. Both of them were right.
"That is a month of work in an afternoon," Greta said, wiping her hands on her apron. "We eat like princes tonight."
It was then that Brutehilde turned and looked at the meadow again, and the tall grass bending, and the great slow shapes moving out there in the heat haze barely a bowshot from the treeline, and she could not help herself. She had spent her whole life in a village where the largest living thing was her sister, and now there was a herd of something out in that grass making the ground tick, big enough to feed a city.
"Let's have a look at them," she said.
"You said food first," Polly said.
"Food is done. Now I am curious. Curious is a luxury and I intend to take it."
They went up through the palms in a line with Scoffer at the rear carrying nothing for once and Honeymuff flitting ahead at shoulder height, and the jungle thinned as the ground rose, and then it simply stopped. The trees ended as though they had been cut along a ruler, and beyond them the meadow opened out, a vast green plain rolling away toward low hills half a league off, and standing in it, grazing, were the creatures.
Brutehilde stopped dead.
There were six of them in the near group alone, their necks rising up from bodies the size of houses, longer than the masts of the Sea-Nymph's Revenge and thicker at the base than a full wine tun, and they cropped the tops of the trees along the meadow's edge with the ease of a woman picking apples from a low branch. Further off, moving in a slow ridge-backed file, a row of things with plates down their spines like a palisade moved through the grass, and every so often one of them swung its tail, and the tail had spikes on it like a morningstar. And off to the left, hunched and low and armoured like an upturned boat, a broad flat brute the size of a cart rooted in the mud, grunting.
Nobody spoke for a long moment. Then Brutehilde let out a low whistle, and then a second one, and then she laughed out loud.
"Would you look at that," she said. "Would you just look at that. I have cooked for thirty years and I have never once seen anything I could not carry."
"You could carry those," said Scoffer.
"Even I could not carry those, Scoffer. Nobody could carry those. That is the point I am making."
Polly had gone quiet, which was her thinking face. She stood with her arms folded and her eyes moving across the herd, and after a while she looked down at the coil of rope over her shoulder. There was a small rise a little way into the meadow with a young one on it, or at least a smaller one, no taller than a haystack, browsing alone at the edge of the herd.
"Honeymuff," Polly said. "Those things with the plates. Are they quick?"
"Some of them. Not the plated ones. They waddle."
"Anything quick out there that isn't that tall?"
Honeymuff hovered, scanning, and then pointed. A bird was stalking out of the treeline on the far side of the meadow, on two legs, and it was big. Bigger than a man, and that was standing up, and its neck came up and up until its head was level with the shoulder of a horse, and its beak was a single hooked wedge of bone like a hatchet head, and it was walking with its head cocked and its eye on the smaller of the grazing herd. It took three long strides and the ground shook, and Brutehilde grinned with all her teeth.
"That," she said, "is dinner, and it comes with legs."
"It comes with a beak like a blade," said Dravion.
"So does Polly."
Polly was already uncoiling the rope. She shook it out, ran the end through the loop of her belt and made a running noose the way she'd made a hundred of them back home in the yard, and then she took her cudgel out and held it low and started down through the grass at an angle that would put her behind the bird. Brutehilde went with her, axe over her shoulder, keeping low, and the two of them moved through the tall grass so slow and so quiet that even Honeymuff, watching from above, could not hear them.
The bird saw the shadow too late. It turned with a hiss and a snap of that beak, and Polly's noose went out and dropped over its neck and Polly threw her whole weight back and set her heels in the soil. The bird went down on its breast with a shriek and the grass bent flat around it, and its legs came up and clawed at the air, and its neck stretched and pulled and the noose tightened and held. Brutehilde was on it before it could get a foot under itself. She brought the axe down flat across the top of its skull, once, twice, and Polly swung her cudgel into the side of its neck where the spine sat under the feathers, and between them they beat the thing down into the dirt until it stopped moving and lay still with its leg twitching once and then not at all.
Brutehilde stepped back and spat and wiped her brow.
"That," she panted, "is the biggest fucking chicken in the world."
The thing was heavier than a horse. It took four of them to drag it out of the meadow by the legs and Scoffer ended up carrying it across his shoulders with its head trailing in the dirt behind him, and even he had to stop twice. Greta met them at the treeline with her hands on her hips and her jaw hanging open, and she walked around the carcass twice and then kicked it once in the breast to feel the give of it.
"There is enough meat on this thing for the whole ship for a week," she said. "And the legs. Look at the legs on it. Look at the drumsticks. I will roast those two whole and I will not cut them, I will put them on the table and let you animals fight over them."
Brutehilde was already planning out loud as they dragged it to the boat: the breasts parcelled in salt and the thighs hung in the rigging and the carcass boiled down for stock and the feathers kept for Honeymuff's bedding and the beak, which was a hand and a half of black bone, kept for a trophy to nail to the mast and confuse the next set of polite pirates who tried to board.
They loaded the rowboat until the gunwales were a finger's width above the water, and then loaded it a little more, because Greta stood on the shingle with her fists on her hips and pointed out that the carcass would be eaten by carrion if they left it for a second trip. The sacks of pods and roots went in the bottom, the barrels of water went in on top of them, and the great bird went in last, folded beak to tail across the thwarts with its legs sticking up like two masts in a squall.
"That boat is a bucket now," said Polly flatly. "That boat is a bucket with a promise in it."
"She will swim," said Greta.
"She will drown."
"She will swim if nobody sits in her. That is the trick of it." Greta looked at Brutehilde. "I take her back with Honeymuff and Dravion and the water. We put this lot over the side at the ship, we don't even climb aboard, we just turn her and come back to pick you up. Two trips. Nothing in her but cargo."
"And us three stand here and count the trees," said Brutehilde.
"You stand here and count the trees."
Brutehilde looked back at the meadow, at the great slow shapes in the grass, and shrugged. "Fine. Be quick about it. Otherwise Dravion has my permission to start reciting poetry at you."
"You said the walk would do me good," Dravion said, wounded.
"It did. You are improved. Get in the boat."
Greta and Honeymuff and Dravion got in, and Greta took the oars with her sleeves rolled and her forearms like dock pilings, and she rowed the loaded boat out through the shallows with the water washing green over the gunwales and the great bird's legs wagging with every stroke. Scoffer stood at the waterline and watched them go with his red nose catching the light, and Brutehilde sat down on a drift log with her axe in her lap, and Polly stood with her back to them and her eyes on the treeline, because that was what Polly did and always would.
The rowboat made the ship and was unloaded in a flurry of lines and cursing, and they could see her over the water, small and busy, and then she came away from the hull and turned and started back, low in the water but riding it now, empty.
Then something came out of the treeline at the far end of the beach.
It came out walking, and the walking was the worst part, because it walked like a woman stepping over a puddle and it was the size of a barn. It stood on two legs thick as hogsheads and it had a tail held out straight behind it as counterweight and a head the length of a rowboat and jaws that did not quite close because of the teeth. The ground ticked under each step. The great bird had been a big thing. This was not a big thing. This was the thing that the big things ran from.
Scoffer turned around.
He had never in his life been the quickest thinker, and standing on a beach with his clown shoe full of wet sand and his red nose gleaming, he did not think now. He did what he did. He looked at it. It looked at him.
Its head came down, quick as a hawk, and its whole attention went to his feet. One eye like a wet black plate regarded the shoe, the single clown shoe, enormous, white and red and flapping, and the thing made a sound low in its chest that was not a roar. It was closer to a rumble of curiosity. It cocked its head, and its nostrils flared, and it looked at the shoe the way a cat looks at a moth.
"Scoffer," Brutehilde said, very quietly. "Do not move."
Scoffer moved.
He turned to run and got half a stride before the head dropped and the jaws closed around his ankle, shoe and all, and lifted. Scoffer came up off the beach upside down, dangling by one foot from a mouth full of teeth, his arms hanging and his leather pouch riding where it rode with no help from a woman, and he did not scream. He looked, from the ground, quite calm, the way a large man looks when a large thing has taken his foot and things have stopped being his decision.
Then he began to unlace.
He hung there with his hands up his own leg, his fingers working at the knot and the little bow, upside down and swinging gently from the jaws above him, and the tyrannosaur made a confused grumbling noise and shook him once, and Scoffer's limbs flailed and he kept unlacing, and then the knot came free.
He dropped nine feet and hit the shingle on his shoulder and rolled and came up with gravel in his mouth and both feet bare, and he ran.
The tyrannosaur looked down at the shoe in its mouth and looked at the running orc and did the arithmetic, and then it dropped the shoe and went after him. Fifty tons of it, and each stride was a yard of beach lost. Scoffer was fast for a big man but he was not that fast, and he ran straight down the shingle with his arms pumping.
Polly had already run past Brutehilde. She ran with the rope in her hands and her elbows in and her eyes on the thing's ankles, and when she was close enough she threw the noose and it dropped over the dinosaur's left ankle and she set her heels and took the strain.
The rope went taut and took her off her feet. She went down in the surf on her back and the tyrannosaur did not so much as break stride. It dragged her up the beach and across the shingle and through the wrack line with the foam boiling around her shoulders and she got her boots under her once and hauled, and hauled, and leaned back into it with both heels and both hands and every ounce of the weight she'd spent twenty years putting behind a cudgel and it did not even notice the load.
"Hnng," Polly said, and was dragged through a rock, and kept saying it.
Brutehilde had not moved. She stood on the shingle watching the whole line of it come, the giant, the dragged woman, the running orc, and she did the thing she had done eleven times in eleven winters when a drunk picked a fight with her in her own tavern, which was to plant her feet on the boards and make the drunk come to her.
The tyrannosaur was close and it was fast and Polly went tumbling into the wrack with the rope still wound around her arm, and Scoffer was nearly at the treeline, and the thing's great head came down toward Brutehilde and its breath was wet and thick and smelled of carrion and the sea.
She didn't wait for the head. She bent her knees, drew back her shoulder, and hit the beast square between the eyes.
There was a sound like a barrel going up. The head stopped dead in the air and the whole enormous frame kept going an instant longer, and then it folded. The rear legs quit and the front came down and the jaw struck the shingle and ploughed a furrow in it, and the thing went over onto its side with a boom that shook the water out of the shallows, and lay there with one eye open and glazed and its tongue hanging out of the corner of its mouth, breathing slow.
Brutehilde shook out her hand. The knuckles were split and bleeding and two of them were already darkening.
The rowboat crunched onto the shingle behind her. Greta was standing in it with the oars up and her mouth open and Honeymuff was up in the air with both hands over her mouth.
"Get her moving," Brutehilde said, without turning around. "Water is coming up. I am not carrying a dinosaur."
They dragged the tyrannosaur's head clear of the waterline by the tail, which took all five of them and the rope, and then they loaded the rowboat for the second time with the beast still breathing slow and steady on the shingle, its eye glazed and its tongue lolling. Scoffer retrieved his shoe, shook it out, and put it back on with the solemn dignity of a man reclaiming his throne. Nobody said anything about the fact that he had been dangled from a dinosaur's mouth and escaped by unlacing. He was an orc. It was the thing to do.
The rowboat went out loaded with the sacks they had left behind and came back empty except for Greta and Honeymuff, and by the time the sun was low over the water the Sea-Nymph's Revenge had the bird and the pods and the roots and the fresh water all aboard, and Lefty had surfaced once to regard the carcass with an enormous, hopeful eye, and Greta had told him, in a voice she reserved for children and krakens, that he would get the bones and not before.
The galley filled that night with the smell of roasting flesh and the sound of every soul on the ship finding a reason to be near the fire. Greta had tied the great drumstick to a spit above the stove, and it turned slow and dark and dripping, big enough that its bone was thicker than a woman's thigh and its skin crackled and sang when the fat hit the embers. She had parcelled the breasts into great slabs and set them to salt in barrels, and the remainder of the carcass would boil down for stock come the morning, but tonight was the leg. Tonight was the whole leg, on the table, and no cutting.
The table in the galley was built for a ship's crew and it was not built for this. They dragged it to the centre of the deck and set the leg on it whole, steaming, a haunch that covered the boards from one side to the other, and Greta stood over it with a cleaver and a carving fork and looked at the assembled crew with the firelight making her tusks shine.
"Fight," she said.
They did not need telling twice. Scoffer got there first because he was closest, and he tore off a strip the length of his arm and shoved it in his mouth with both hands and made a sound that was half prayer and half growl. Wee Minnie, who had been immovable all evening at the far end of the table with a plate and a fork and a patience that outlasted empires, reached out with a composure no one else possessed and carved herself a slice the size of a saddle, and then another, because the first was gone. Honeymuff dived into the grain where the crust had split and came up with a morsel larger than her whole body clutched to her chest, and Scathach simply put her face into the meat and ate.
Nell carved with her cutlass because her cutlass was what she had, and she cut a slab for Tanna and a slab for herself and ate standing with her hat on and her eyes closed, and the ring through her clit pulsed with every swallow of the rich, dark meat as though the pleasure of the food had somehow routed itself through it. Tanna sat beside her with both hands busy and grease to her elbows, and said nothing, because there was nothing to say.
Brutehilde ate standing at the head of the table with her axe still in her belt and her split knuckles wrapped in a strip of sacking, and she ate like a woman feeding a furnace, in great tearing bites with no ceremony, and the firelight caught the blood still dark under the bandage and made the whole galley smell of meat and embers and victory. Dravion ate with a knife and fork because he was Dravion, even perched on a barrel with his knees drawn up and his plate balanced on his lap, and Polly ate beside Tulip with her fingers because the knife and fork were for people who had not spent the afternoon being dragged through a surf by a dinosaur.
The leg was half gone when Dravion set down his plate. He stood up on the barrel. He was wearing his silk robe and his hair was loose and the firelight made his night-dark skin gleam where the grease had caught it, and he looked around the galley with the slow, calculating eye of a man who has found his moment.
"Brutehilde of the Knee-Knocking Damsel," he said.
She looked up from the bone she was worrying. "What."
"I have heard the tale from every witness and I have seen the evidence with my own eyes. The great lizard. The charging stride. The rope that could not hold it and the woman who would not let go. And then the fist." He pressed a hand to his chest. "I have composed. I will perform. You will endure."
"Mh," said Brutehilde, and went back to the bone.
Dravion cleared his throat. He arranged his robe. He lifted one hand to the rafters as though invoking a god and began, in a voice that carried out through the hatches and across the dark water where Lefty's shadow rolled beneath the keel:
"Her name is Brutehilde, and her fist is a stone,
Swing from the shipyard and stitched to the bone.
The beach was aflame, the great lizard did run,
And the jaws that ate oxen came down with a sun.
She stood at the shoreline, she planted her feet,
She made the whole ocean go small at her seat,
And the beast that had eaten the better half of the dawn
Went over like a barrel, rolled, and was gone."
Brutehilde stopped worrying the bone. Her jaw worked. The firelight caught the high colour rising up her thick neck and across her broad, scarred cheeks.
Dravion was not done.
"The sailors will tell you of bottles and bars,
Of a tavern that shook with her hammering scars,
But the tale that will follow her down to the sea
Is the day the long tooths-down came hopping at me,
And the great lizard found, to its terrible cost,
That the Knee-Knocking Damsel had knocked it to frost."
He bowed. Scoffer banged a spoon on the table. Wee Minnie applauded with her whole short arms. Honeymuff whistled through her fingers and did a little loop in the air, and Polly raised her cup, and Greta let out a laugh like a barrel rolling down a hill.
Brutehilde sat with the bone in her hands and the firelight on her face and the colour spread all the way up to her ears. She had taken drunks apart in her own tavern, had stood off three pirates with an axe in each fist, had fought a dinosaur with her knuckles and walked away, and now she was red as a boiled shrimp under the eyes of the whole crew.
"Hnh," she said, and put the bone down. "It's a good poem. It's a very good poem. But it is not a true poem."
"It is as true as poetry needs to be," said Dravion, "which is true in the way of the heart, not the way of the ledger."
"That beast did not hop at me," she said. "It ran at me. And it was not the frost that knocked it, it was my fist. But the part about the barrel was good. That part was true."
She took up the bone again, and found a piece of meat on it the size of her forearm, and tore it off with her teeth, and chewed, and swallowed, and looked up at Dravion who was still standing on the barrel with his robe gathered and his face lit with satisfaction.
Brutehilde looked at the bone in her hands, then at the fire, then at Dravion still standing on his barrel with his robe gathered and his face lit with satisfaction, and she let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
"Get down off that barrel," she said. "You've earned your cup tonight. Pour it yourself."
Dravion descended with the grace of a man accepting a crown, and Brutehilde pushed the horn of ale across the table toward him, and for a moment the galley was warm and full and content.
Greta was the first to move. She rose from the bench with her apron dark with meat juice and her tusks gleaming, and she took the great denuded bones in her arms, the leg bone and the wing bones and the rest of the carcass wreckage, and carried them out on deck. The crew heard her voice, low and warm, speaking to the dark water.
"Here, big lad. Here's your supper. Bones and grease and the good marrow. You've been a good boy all day and you kept the whirlpools off us."
There was a sound out in the darkness, a vast slow roll of water, and then a soft gulping noise that went on for some time, and then a satisfied rumble that vibrated through the hull like a cat's purr made ocean-sized. Lefty surfaced once, his enormous eye glittering in the starlight as though winking, and sank.
The galley emptied in ones and twos. Wee Minnie was helped down from the bench by Polly with a cup of tea still in her hand and a slice of breast meat wrapped in a napkin for later. Scoffer went out scratching his arse. Dravion followed Brutehilde out with his robe gathered, reciting something about the moon and her knuckles. The hatches closed, the lanterns were trimmed, and the ship settled into the night with the water whispering along her sides.
But the ship did not sleep. The ship had been fed. And fed flesh is lusty flesh.
In the captain's cabin, Nell had banked the lantern to a glow and lay on her back on the bunk with her knees drawn up and her breeches down around her ankles. Tanna lay beside her on her side, propped on one elbow, looking down at the gold ring gleaming in the tender flesh of Nell's cunt. The window was cracked open and the night air came in cool and salt, and the sounds of the ship came in with it. Nell reached for the drawer and took out the little gold chain and held it up between them.
"Tonight," she said.
Tanna took the clasp at one end and clicked it onto her own ring, wincing once as the metal tugged the raw flesh, then breathing out through her teeth. She took the other clasp and leaned over Nell and clicked it onto her ring as well, and the chain pooled between them, slack and warm.
"Pull," Nell whispered.
Tanna pulled. The chain went taut, four inches of gold singing between two pierced clits, and the sensation ran up through Nell's belly like a struck bell. She gasped and arched, and her own movement pulled the chain the other way, and Tanna made a sound that was half laugh and half groan.
"That's it," Tanna breathed. "That's it. Rock against me."
Nell rolled onto her side and they locked themselves together, thigh over thigh, cunt pressed to cunt with the chain taut between them, and every roll of Nell's hips pulled the ring in Tanna's flesh and every answering thrust pulled Nell's, each orgasm feeding into the other, a closed circuit of gold and nerve and wet heat. Tanna's hand came down between them and her fingertips found the place where the chain met the ring and she pulled hard, and Nell cried out and bucked, and the chain twanged and Tanna came with a shudder that went through them both, and Nell felt her own climax rise to meet it, the two of them riding the same wave to the same peak.
They lay in the afterglow with the chain still taut and the rings still hooked, breathing together, feeling each heartbeat travel down the gold.
In the hold below, in the dark between the water barrels and the crates of salted breast, Scruffulus had Elophelia bent over a stack of sacks with her skirts up around her waist and both of her hands braced on a cask, and he was behind her with one hand gripping her hip and the other clamped over her mouth, because Elophelia screamed when she came and they did not need the whole ship knowing.
"Quiet," he breathed into her ear. "Quiet and I will go slow."
She bit his palm and he hissed and drove into her from behind with a stroke that lifted her onto her toes, and she made a muffled shriek into his hand and pushed back against him with a violence that almost unseated him. He laughed low against her neck and took hold of her ringlets with his free hand and pulled her head back until her spine bent like a bow, and he fucked her like that, hard and deep into her, with her arse bouncing against his thighs and her cunt hot and tight and greedy around him. She came with her whole body shuddering, and he held her through it and then kept going, working her through the aftershocks until she came a second time and a third, and only then did he pull out and spend himself over the small of her back with a groan that he buried in her hair.
In the cabin they shared, Polly lay on her back with her arms above her head and her legs spread, and Tulip was between her thighs with her mouth on Polly's arse.
Polly had been born with a body that loved food and a cunt that loved company and an arse that loved attention, and Tulip, who had seasons in her skin and patience in her blood, was devoted to all three. She had her hands on Polly's thighs and her mouth pressed to the base of Polly's spine, her tongue sliding down slow and wide along the crease of her, and every time she moved something changed in the air around them, the faint scent of spring rising off her skin. Polly's hips had begun a slow, mindless roll against nothing.
"Fuck," Polly said to the ceiling. "Fuck, Tulip. Right there. Right there. Lick that hole like you mean it."
Tulip meant it. She pressed her tongue flat against Polly's arsehole and circled it, teasing, then thrust it in hard, and Polly's back bowed off the mattress and she grabbed her own knees and hauled them up to her ears and Tulip went to work in earnest with her tongue plunging and her nose buried in the crease and one hand working Polly's clit in a rhythm that matched her tongue. Polly came within a minute, hard and grunting, her fists white in the sheets, and Tulip worked her through it and out the other side and then kissed up her thigh and turned her over and started on her cunt as though the arse had only been the appetiser.
In the crew quarters, Scoffer and Scathach were fighting.
It had started as an argument about the drumstick. Scathach claimed she had earned the first bite because she had been on watch and had not once complained about the smell of roasting meat. Scoffer claimed he had carried the bird on his shoulders and carried the water and carried the sacks and would carry the leg to his grave if he had to. She had called him a fat cunt. He had called her a skinny scrubber with a tongue like a file. She had swung at him. He had caught her wrist.
Now they were together on the deck with Scathach beneath him and her legs hooked over his hips, and every stroke of his cock into her was matched by her fists hammering on his shoulders and her heels digging into his kidneys, and every blow he landed on her arse with his open palm made her snarl and buck harder into him. He was still wearing his red nose. It bobbed above her with every thrust and she laughed up at him with spit on her chin.
"Harder, you stinking ox," she gasped. "Fight me properly or fuck me properly, I don't care which."
He drove into her so hard the deck rattled and she shrieked and clawed the skin off his back, and they went at each other with all teeth and no mercy until she came with her whole body locking tight around him and he came a pump behind her with a roar that shook the lanterns. They lay in a heap afterwards, still tangled, her boot against his face, his hand in her hair, and Scathach laughed breathlessly and called him a fat stinking bastard and pulled his hand down between her thighs for the second round.
And high above the ship, in the crow's nest, Honeymuff was wrapped in an embrace of dark things.
It had come up the mast after her, silent as oil on water, its oilskin wrappings laid aside somewhere below because in the dark, in the heights, it had no need of them. What It was could not be looked at for long without the mind slipping sideways, but Honeymuff looked at it anyway, all of it, and it looked back with the eyes it had when it had eyes. Its tentacles were cool and wet and impossibly nimble, and one of them was wrapped around her throat like a collar and two were inside her, moving in counterpoint, and two more were wrapped around her thighs and holding her open against the mast as it worked her.
"More," she gasped, her wings buzzing uselessly against the dark flesh. "More, more, more, you beautiful awful thing."
It gave her more. A tentacle slid across her mouth and she bit it and it pulsed against her tongue and she sucked it like a sweet. Another found her arse and pressed in slow, and she cried out around the one in her mouth and her whole body arched between the dark limbs like a fish on a line. The stars wheeled overhead and the sea whispered below and the crow's nest creaked its steady rhythm, and It worked her with a patience that was older than the sea until she came in a long convulsing shudder that left her boneless in its embrace, and It held her curled against whatever centre of itself passed for a heart, and she was still.
The ship rolled on through the night with Lefty beneath the keel and the lanterns guttering low, and from cabin and hold and quarters and crow's nest, the soft and not so soft sounds of a very good time drifted up and interwove with the water's whisper. On the deck, Brutehilde stood at the rail with her wrapped knuckles and a cup of ale, listening to the ship, and smiled into the dark.
Dravion came up beside her with two cups. He offered her one. She looked at it, then at him, and for a long moment the fire went out of her face and something else came into it, something she hadn't let the evening show.
"That was a good poem," she said quietly. "Even if it wasn't true."
"It was true," he said. "I would not have written it otherwise."
She took the cup. She drank. And somewhere below, the ship creaked and sighed and carried them all on.