Chapter 8: Ghost Ship
Lefty swam ahead of the Sea-Nymph's Revenge like a slow, patient engine, his bulk pushing a smooth wake the ship could ride. He had learned the trick of it after three days, keeping to deep water, rounding the shallows and the whirlpools without a single order from anyone. Brutehilde stood at the bow and watched the water curl off his mantle, and for the first time in a week she allowed herself to believe they might actually reach the capital before her ale turned.
The morning was bright and the wind steady off the port quarter. Greta had the galley fire going, and the smell of boiled salt pork drifted forward. Honeymuff dozed on a coil of rope near the bowsprit, one wing draped over her pregnant belly like a blanket. Dravion leaned against the rail a few feet from Brutehilde, composing something under his breath, and she pretended not to hear it.
By noon the light had gone grey.
The fog came at them from the west, a wall of it, standing flat and white across the sea as though something had drawn a curtain. It had no gap in it that Brutehilde could find. Nell came up on the quarterdeck with her braid still wet from the wash bucket and looked at the wall for a long moment.
"Lefty, hold," she called down. The Kraken slowed, tentacles furling.
"Speed to half," Nell said.
The crew hauled on the braces. The Revenge crept forward into the white, and the world behind her vanished in a dozen yards. Brutehilde could not see the stern lantern from the bow. The air turned cold and wet and tasted of iron. Water beaded on her plaits and ran down the chains until they dripped.
"Soundings," Nell said. Scoffer dropped the lead line, and every few minutes his voice came back through the mist, calling the depth. It stayed deep. Lefty's great shape moved off the starboard bow, faintly luminous in the murk, a soft blue glow that the fog could not quite swallow.
The afternoon crawled. The sun never showed. Wee Minnie brought tea round in her little cups and everyone drank it standing up, because sitting down felt like an invitation for the fog to come closer. Grakthor, whose leg had healed enough to walk on, went forward to the heads and somehow ended up in the cable tier instead. It took two hours to find him, and by then it was nearly dark.
"Grakthor," Brutehilde said, when he finally stumbled out. "Port means left. Left means the side your heart is on."
"I know that," Grakthor said. "I was checking the anchor."
The anchor was on the other side of the ship.
At dusk the fog turned a faint green, and the crew went quiet. It was not the glow of Lefty. This light hung above the water in streaks, like something decayed, and it drifted toward them on a current that had no wind in it. Greta came up from the galley with her ladle still in her hand.
"That's a ship," she said.
It came out of the murk slowly, a galleon, high-sided and enormous, and Brutehilde's first thought was that it was burning. But nothing burned. The whole hull was covered in a phosphorescent glow, green and cold, running in veins down the planks. Her sails were rags, hanging in tatters from the yards, and yet she moved. No, Brutehilde saw, she did not move. She drifted, dead in the water, and the Revenge was closing on her because the Revenge was the only thing moving at all.
"Hard aport," Nell shouted. "All hands, ware ship."
The wheel went over. The Revenge answered slowly, sluggish in the heavy air, and slid past the stranger's bow at a distance Brutehilde could have thrown a biscuit across. Up close the galleon was a ruin. Her name was painted on the transom, but the letters had bubbled and run until only the V and the N survived. Ropes trailed in the water. A longboat hung from her davits, half-swamped. Nothing moved aboard her but the slow green seep of the phosphorescence and the creak of her timbers, which sounded almost like breathing.
"Anyone aboard?" Honeymuff called. Her voice came back off the galleon's hull without an answer.
"Ship ahoy," Brutehilde bellowed. "Sea-Nymph's Revenge out of Dunkel. Do you require assistance?"
Nothing.
The two ships drifted together for a while, close enough that the fog could not get between them. Nell ordered the sails furled and a line run across. Scoffer threw a grapnel, and it caught on the stranger's rail on the first try, and the sound of it biting into wood echoed off the water for a long time afterwards.
"Captain," Dravion said. He had gone pale, which on a dark elf was a considerable achievement. "This vessel is not in any register I know. The Badgering Vadge was lost off these waters eighty years ago, and she had a V and an N in her name."
"You read too much," Brutehilde said.
"I read the correct amount."
Nell came down to the main deck with her cutlass loose in its sheath. She looked at the galleon for a long moment, then at Brutehilde, then at the line her crew had thrown.
"We board her," Nell said. "Scoffer, Polly, Dravion, with me. Sindy, you'd better come too in case anyone requires medical attention. Brutehilde, you have the deck. If anything moves on that ship, or anything moves on this one, cut the line and we leave them to it."
"Lefty's circling her," Polly said. "He won't go near the hull. He swims round and round like he doesn't want to touch it."
Nell turned. Out in the fog, the blue glow drifted in a wide, patient arc, keeping its distance from the green light of the stranger.
"Then we'll be quick," Nell said.
They climbed the side together, Polly first, her boots loud on the stranger's rail. The deck under her feet gave a little with each step and wept green water through the planks. The fog stood over them like a low ceiling. Every rope, every block, every inch of the galleon was coated in that cold phosphorescence, so that the whole ship glowed faintly in the dark and the crew's own hands glowed where they touched her.
There was no one on deck. There was no one below. They searched the gun deck, the hold, the cabins, and found the same thing in every one: a meal laid out and never eaten, a pipe cold in an ashtray, a book open face-down on a cot. Nothing rusted. Nothing rotted but the wood itself. It was as if the crew had stepped away for a moment, eighty years ago, and never come back.
"This is a haunted ship," Dravion said in melodramatic tones, in the cabin of what had clearly been her captain.
"Aye," Nell said. "And it's ours now, till morning. Bring the lanterns over and make the line fast. We'll not be getting back through that fog tonight."
The lanterns came across on a line, three of them, oil and wick, and they lit the galleon's deck in a weak yellow pool that the fog pressed down on from every side. Nell walked the rail once, prodding at the wet planks with her boot heel, then gathered the watch on the quarterdeck. Polly, Dravion, Scoffer, and Sindy had all come over the side. Brutehilde held the Revenge with Wee Minnie, Greta, and It up on deck, cutlass under her arm, the grapnel line coiled ready at the rail.
"We keep four on this deck tonight," Nell said. "Two on, two off, two hours a watch. Nobody goes below alone."
"I'll stay on," Sindy said, too fast.
Nell looked at her. Sindy had her bag up on her shoulder, big as a barrel, and she was already scanning the stranger's deckhouse like a woman reading a menu.
"There's nobody aboard to cut," Nell said.
"There's a surgery aboard," Sindy said. "I saw the chest. Glass-fronted. Locked." She shrugged the bag higher. "I brought my sharpest bone saw. And the scalpels. Whole set. If there's nobody to use them on, I'd still like to look at them."
Dravion was already composing something under his breath about the surgeon and the silent ship. Nell told him to go first watch and stop that.
So Sindy stayed on. The other three took the deck, Dravion at the bow with his lantern, Scoffer at the midships rail, Polly walking slow circuits with her cudgel out, and Nell sat down on the stranger's quarterdeck bench with her cutlass across her knees and did not sleep. The fog breathed against the hull. Somewhere far off, Lefty's blue glow made one lazy pass around the ship and then went quiet.
At the turn of the watch Nell looked the other way, and Sindy went below.
The surgery was aft of the gun deck, two doors down from the captain's cabin, and the door stood open. Inside, the phosphorescence ran thickest of all, so the whole little room glowed like the inside of a jar. A cot. A cabinet. A table bolted to the deck with a leather strap hanging off one corner. And on the shelf, an open chest with glass doors, and behind the glass every instrument the dead crew had ever owned, gleaming green and cold and perfectly sharp.
Sindy set her bag down and opened the chest.
Forceps. Retractors. A trepanning brace. Six scalpels laid in a row on green velvet, all of them lit from within like they'd been dipped in moonlight. She picked one up and turned it in the light and it glowed all the way down its edge, so fine she could see the wire-thin shine of it against her thumbnail. She set it back. She took out a speculum next, a duckbilled thing of brass gone green, and the handles glowed so bright through her fingers that the bones of her hand showed pink and dark through the light.
She laughed out loud. Then she shut the door.
Nobody had oiled her since Dunkel. There had been Scoffer on the deck the first week, and a hand from one of the pirate sailors in the dark, and otherwise nothing but other people's business. She pulled her shirt off over her head and dropped it on the cot, and her trousers after it, and she stood there in the green light with her boots still on, slender-waisted and taut-buttocked, scarred all up her forearms from twenty years of other people's mistakes.
She sat on the edge of the table with her back to the cabinet and spread her legs into the light.
The speculum was cold going in, a blunt cold that made her hiss through her teeth, and she worked the handles slow until it clicked, and clicked again, and then she had herself open. Wide. The glow of the thing lit her from the inside out. She angled the table lamp of it back and up and looked down her own belly at the pink of her cunt, the wet shine of it, the soft working folds, the little pulse of her hole opening and closing around nothing. Even the deep parts of her glowed, wet and red and vivid, every ridge of her in plain sight.
"Gods," she said, to nobody. "Look at that."
She got one hand down on her clit and worked it with two fingers, thumb and forefinger, quick and businesslike, and the other hand holding the speculum steady so she could keep watching in her little mirror. Her belly went tight. Her cunt clenched down around the cold brass and pushed wet out of her, and the wet caught the green light and dripped to the table between her boots. She was grunting, low and steady, twenty years of other people's blood on her hands and now this, a filthy little room on a ghost ship and her cunt gaping open like a wound she'd made herself.
"I say," said a voice.
Sindy's hand stopped. She did not close her legs. She looked up, and there he was.
He stood at the foot of the table, near the door, but he had not come through the door. He was made of the same green light as everything else, thin as a scrim, so the cabinet showed through his chest. A big man, sailor's shoulders, no shirt, his hair tied back. His face was young and he was grinning like a man who had walked in on the best thing he'd seen in eighty years.
"Don't stop on my account," he said.
Sindy had a scalpel near her hand on the table. She did not reach for it. She was still wide open around glowing brass, and her heart was going like a hammer, and something lower down was going too.
"You're dead," she said.
"Eighty years," the sailor said. He came round the table, and where he passed the air went cold and her arm-hairs stood up. "And not one of the lads thought to bring a doctor. Then along you come, and the first thing you do is open yourself and shine a lamp up it." He looked down between her legs and made a low, appreciative noise. "That is a most delightful sight."
"Then look," Sindy said.
He knelt. His mouth touched her cunt, and it was like ice and like a mouth, both at once, no weight to him but a pressure, cold all through her to the back teeth. She made a sound she did not recognise. He licked up the length of her, plain and flat, and the cold went into her clit and up her spine and made her whole body break out in gooseflesh.
"Fuck," she said. "Fuck, that's cold."
"Hold on to your little clamp," he said against her. "I've a mind to use what's on offer."
He stood up and his trousers were gone and his cock stood out of him green and glowing, hard as the brass in her hand, fat-headed and ridged with that same cold light. She reached for it and her fingers went through, then settled, then found him the second time, cold and solid as a chunk of ice off a mast. He took the speculum handles out of her and set it aside. She was wide open and empty and wet and ready and he put the head of that cold, spectral cock against her and pushed straight in.
Sindy gripped the table's edge and took it.
It was cold, all the way through her, a cold that spread up her belly and down her thighs and made her cunt clench and clench and not stop. She got her heels up on the table rim and he drove into her, and the table groaned green water through its joints with every stroke. He talked the whole time. Filthy, sailor's talk, about her swollen cunt and her open womb and the eight decades of nothing.
She came once with her mouth shut and once with it open. He was fast and mindless, dead and desperate, and when he finished inside her the cold flooded her and she felt it spill out and run down her arse and drip onto the table with the rest.
He pulled out slow, and stood there breathing, which he could not have needed to do.
"Best watch I ever kept," he said.
Above them, out on deck, Polly's boots went past the door, once, twice, and stopped.
The door came open and Polly's lantern threw a yellow wedge across the table.
She filled the frame with her cudgel up and her jaw set, and she took in the whole scene in one pass: the doctor bare-arsed on a bolted table, a green man standing between her knees with his cock still out and shining, and the puddle on the deck boards running green.
"Hands off her," Polly said.
"He's all right," Sindy said, and did not move to cover herself an inch. "He's dead and he's friendly."
Polly did not lower the cudgel. She came in and set the lantern on the cabinet and looked at the sailor, who had turned to face her with the shameless patience of a man who had already had his watch's entertainment and would not say no to a second helping.
"What's that doing in here, Sindy?" Polly said.
"Same as me, before you came."
Polly looked at the wet on Sindy's thigh, the shine of it, the way her cunt was still open and pink in the cold light. She had walked the deck twice with her hand on her cudgel and nothing had come out of the dark but fog. Here was something out of the dark. It was grinning.
"Why should I believe a word out of a dead man's mouth?" she said.
The sailor wiped his chin with the back of his wrist, which was a gesture with no point to it, since his wrist went through his chin.
"You watched your friend here come her brains out," he said. "Ask her."
"He didn't hurt me," Sindy said. "He's got a cold cock and eight decades of nothing to make up for. That's the whole of his intentions."
Polly set the cudgel on the cabinet next to the lantern. She unbuttoned her coat slow, one brass button at a time, and let it fall. Under it she wore a man's shirt and nothing else worth mentioning, and she was built like an athlete, lean and muscular shoulders and arms, with thighs that took a man's breath away. She was not afraid. That was the thing about Polly. Fear had gone out of her somewhere around her twentieth blooding and never come back.
"Then prove it," she said. "Show me what you showed her."
The sailor looked at the table. Then he looked at Polly's arse, which was honest work, and he smiled.
"Bend over it," he said. "There's room for two."
Polly bent over the table, forearms down flat, cheek on the wood, and Sindy shifted up onto the cot beside them with her boot heels hooked on the frame. The sailor stepped in behind. His cock went from Sindy to Polly's arse, and the cold of it against her crack made Polly hiss and flex.
"There's oil in the chest," Sindy said. "The little green bottle."
The sailor took it up. It was cold as everything else and it ran like water, and he worked two cold fingers into Polly's bumhole with no ceremony at all, and Polly grunted and took them and told him to get on with it.
He got on with it. The head of him found her and pushed, and Polly's body gave him a slow inch and then the rest, and she laid her forehead flat on the table and breathed out through her teeth. Cold went into her like a draught under a door. It spread up her back and down her legs and pooled behind her belly, and every stroke of him pushed that cold deeper and dragged a raw sound out of her throat.
"Gods," she said. "It's like being fucked by a winter."
"Get your mouth on her," the sailor said. "Since you've nothing better to do with it."
Polly turned her face on the wood and looked up at Sindy. Sindy had watched enough, and she spread her thighs and swung her cunt down over Polly's face, close enough that Polly could smell the salt and the green of her. Polly put her tongue out and got to work.
It was the coldest cunt she had ever licked. Salt and something like standing water, and under it the sailor's leavings, thin and chill and alive on her tongue. She licked it all up anyway, slow flat strokes up one side and down the other, and swallowed, and Sindy's hands came down on the back of her head and held her there. Above her, the sailor fucked her arse with a steady, patient rhythm, and his hips made no sound against her because his hips weighed nothing. The only sound in the room was their breathing and the wet of Polly's mouth and the suction of her arsehole around ectoplasm.
She came with her cheek jammed to the table and her tongue still in Sindy, a hard clench that went right up through her shoulders. The sailor took another dozen strokes and finished in her arse with a long shiver that she felt all the way to the roots of her teeth, and the cold of it flooded her and ran out and down the inside of her thigh.
He pulled out and sat down on the deck with his back against the cabinet, thin and green and pleased with himself.
On deck, Dravion's lantern swung at the bow, and Dravion was composing.
He had hold of nothing at all and was liking it. The fog lay flat on the sea and the galleon creaked like an old man's knees, and behind all that, in the dark by the foremast, something was standing.
It was a big man. As tall as Brutehilde, which Dravion had not thought possible, with a beard down to his belt and the same green shimmer through his chest, so Dravion could see the mast's shadow through him. He had one arm propped on the rail in a way that suggested he had been standing there for twenty minutes and had enjoyed every one of them.
"You are not on my watch list," Dravion said.
"Your watch list," the ghost said. He had a voice like gravel going down a chute. "There's no list to be on, lad. I'm the first mate of the Badgering Vadge."
"Lost eighty years ago," Dravion said, faintly.
"Surrounded, boarded, and done. And in eighty years, not one of you living sort has had the manners to come aboard and keep us company." The ghost looked him up and down. "You compose, I hear. You were muttering before."
"I was," Dravion said. "It was short."
"Never mind it." The ghost stepped in close, and the rail behind Dravion went cold against his back. "Every good seaman enjoys a bit of sodomy, lad. It's in the articles."
"Is it?"
"Article nineteen. I wrote it."
Dravion opened his mouth to argue the point, and the first mate turned him round with a fist that weighed nothing and pushed him over the bulwark rail, and Dravion's breeches were down around his knees before he had finished objecting. The ghost's hand was cold and enormous and spread his cheeks. The head of him came up against Dravion's arse, blunt and huge and colder than the fog.
"This is unsanitary," Dravion said.
"It's the sea," the ghost said, and pushed in.
Dravion got his elbows on the rail and took it. It was a great deal of cold all at once, going into him slow, and he stood there grinding his teeth while the first mate worked him open with a patience that suggested he had all night. And he did have all night. That was the whole trouble.
There was a good seaman, Dravion thought, grey-lipped, breath fogging, and began to say it aloud between thrusts, because a man in his position needed something to hold on to.
"There was a good seaman named Bram,
Whose arse was the pride of the gram,
Till a spectre named Ted
Put his chilly cock's head
In his bum and gave Bram chilblains, damn."
The ghost gave a slow, appreciating groan and drove deeper, and the rail bit into Dravion's belly.
"That's not the metre," the ghost said. "You're a shit poet. But it's true enough. Bit of cold in you now, is there?"
Dravion's teeth were chattering. The cold had settled into his hips and his lower back and was creeping up his spine like water finding a crack, and what was worse, he had gone hard as a mast over it, and the ghost's hand had found that out and was using it.
"I shall catch my death," Dravion said.
"You'll not," the first mate said behind him. "We've nobody aboard to bury."
Below their feet, Sindy was pulling her shirt on over her head and Polly was buttoning her coat and looking at the dead sailor where he sat on the table, still grinning, still shameless.
"How many of you?" Polly asked.
"Forty-one," the sailor said. "All hands."
"And every one of you as 'friendly' as you?"
"Friendlier," he said. "We've been lonely a long while."
Polly picked up her cudgel, then thought better of it and left it lying on the cabinet.
"Then get up on deck and be civil about it," she said. "I'll fetch the captain."
Polly went up the companionway with her coat still open, and the deck was colder than the surgery. The fog lay on it like a wet blanket. Her breath came out of her in white puffs and hung there a while before it broke up.
Dravion was at the bow rail. He had his elbows on it and his breeches round his knees, and behind him stood a thing the size of a door with a beard down to its belt. Dravion was reciting, ragged and shrill, some rhyme about sodomy and chilblains, and the ghost was driving into him slow and steady and groaning with the pleasure of old company.
"Don't mind me," Polly said, and kept walking.
Scoffer was at the midships rail with his lantern up, staring over the side at nothing. He did not turn round. "Something's in the water," he said. "Under her bow. Long as a cable."
"That's Lefty sulking," she said. "Leave him."
The quarterdeck bench was empty. Nell's lantern was not there either, and there was a wet trail of green footprints leading aft, away from it. Polly followed the prints to the great cabin under the poop. The door stood open an inch, and the cold light came out of it in a wide flat bar across the deck.
Inside, Nell was on her knees.
The galleon's captain sat in the big chair behind his chart table, and he was a tall old salt with a coat gone green and a hat brim melted into the shape of his skull. The whole front of him was open. Nell had her braid down her back and her cutlass still in its sheath at her hip and her mouth full of his cock.
It was green and glowing and thick as her wrist, and she was working it with both hands as well, down to the root and back, and the light of it showed through her cheeks where it pushed them out. She did not stop when the door opened. She did not turn her head.
"Captain?" Polly said.
Nell came off him with a wet sound and wiped her mouth with the side of her thumb.
"There you are," she said. Her voice was hoarse and level. "Don't ask."
Polly closed the door behind her and stayed where she was, back to it, arms folded.
"I wasn't going to," she said. "I came to tell you he's got a whole ship of them and they're decent."
"So I hear." Nell spat a thin string of green onto the boards and went back to it. She took him deep, past the point where she'd have gagged on a living man, and came up slow with her tongue flat and dragging the underside of him. The captain put a broad green hand on the back of her head and did not push.
"Colder than the sea," she said, and licked down to his balls, which were heavy and shining like two stones off the shingle. "Couldn't leave it."
"You've a mouth on you for a woman who doesn't care for men," the old captain said, kindly.
"I don't," Nell said. "You're dead. Doesn't count."
She took him to the root again, and his hips moved once, and he made a low sound out of a chest that had no lungs in it. His hand tightened on her braid. She got the last inch of him down her throat and held it and worked her tongue the whole way round, and the cold of him spread up under her jaw and down her neck like a swallow of ice water on an empty stomach.
He finished without warning. His spunk came cold and thin as seawater, bitter with salt and old iron, and she had a heartbeat to choose. She chose.
Nell swallowed it down, and it was colder than anything she had ever drunk, and it coated her throat and her teeth and stayed there, humming faintly, as though something in it were still alive. She took two more gulps at him to get the rest, and licked the head clean, and sat back on her heels.
"That," she said, "was a fucking rude amount."
The captain laughed, and the laugh went through the cabin like a wind through a doorway.
"There's more where that was," he said.
She stood up and got her trousers off. They went down over her boots and she kicked them away, and she stood in the middle of his cabin with her braid hanging down her back and nothing else on but her shirt, and her thighs were already wet in the green light.
"Then sit still," she said, and climbed up into his lap.
She put one knee each side of him on the chair and took his cock in her hand and found herself with it. It was still slick with her own mouth. The head of him nudged her cunt, and the cold of it made her whole groin flinch, and then she let herself down.
He stretched her. That was the truth of it, and she had not expected it, because she had had a butt plug in her all day for a week and thought she was past surprises. He filled her all the way up, cold and thick and tireless, and every inch of the way down her cunt clenched and pushed back and gave him more.
She gasped, and it came out high, and she hated it.
His cock slid against the little gold ring through her clit, and there it was, that was the thing, the whole reason she had climbed up there. The cold of him knocked against the barbell in a rhythm, cold and warm and cold again, and every stroke sent a bright line of it straight up into her navel. She grabbed the arms of the chair and rode him and swore for a while without any words she could have written down.
The ghostly captain held her hips with both hands, weightless, cold, and let her set the pace. The chart table rattled. The cabin lanterns swung. Somewhere out on the deck Dravion's rhyme broke off in a yelp, and Nell heard it and did not care.
She came the way she had not come in years, hard and long and from deep in her gut, her cunt gripping and gripping round a cock that was made of nothing at all. The cold went up through her stomach and her ribs, and her thighs locked, and the gold ring took one last knock and she screamed through her teeth and kept moving because stopping would have been worse. Her whole body shook. The wet ran down his green hips and off his chair and onto the boards.
When she could breathe again she was still sitting on him, him still hard inside her, and she looked over her shoulder at the door.
Polly was leaning on it with her arms folded, watching, dry as a Monday.
"Finished?" Polly said.
"Fetch them all over," Nell said, and licked her lip. "Every soul on the Revenge. Nobody sleeps on the other ship tonight."
Polly went back across the grapnel line hand over hand, and dropped onto the Revenge's rail with her coat still hanging open and the cold coming off her skin in a haze.
"Captain's orders," she said. "Everyone across. Nobody sleeps on this ship tonight."
Brutehilde had her cutlass half out of the sheath before she finished.
"What's over there?"
"Forty-one dead sailors," Polly said. "Friendly ones. And Nell's found the galleon's captain, so she won't be back for a while."
Greta was already on the ladder. She had a barrel of rum on her shoulder the way most women carry a bucket, and she set it on the rail and wiped her mouth.
"Rum opens a room up," she said. "Even a cold one."
Wee Minnie went below and came back with her teapot, the good one, wrapped in a woollen blanket, and a tray of cups.
"Somebody on this crew has to keep up appearances," she said.
Brutehilde looked along the deck at the four of them. Then she looked out at the galleon's green glow sitting in the fog like a lamp in a cellar.
"It," she said. "You have the watch."
"Why me?"
"Because someone has to guard the stores. Two hours."
They ran the second line taut and laid a plank between the two rails, and Brutehilde went over first. The plank sagged under her clogs and did not break. Greta followed with the rum on her shoulder, and Wee Minnie after her with the teapot, and Polly, leading Grakthor, who still nearly stepped off the plank.
The ghosts came up out of the boards.
They rose in ones and twos, thin as breath on glass, and stood along the galleon's rails and in her shrouds and on the steps of the poop. Forty-one of them, green and shining and grinning. The first mate with his beard to his belt. The dead sailor from the surgery, still bare-arsed. The old captain in his melted hat, with Nell's hand in his and Tanna beside her on the other side, hair loose down her back.
Greta put the barrel down on the hatch and knocked the tap in with the heel of her hand.
"Drink up," she said, "if you still can."
The ghosts could. That was the surprise. The rum went through them and did not come out anywhere, and they stood around the barrel with their green hands cupped and shouted like men at a fair. Wee Minnie poured tea for the bosun, and he drank it and grinned, and steam came off his tongue and out through his collar.
It took four minutes for the deck to turn into the sort of party Brutehilde had not seen since her own tavern on a winter solstice.
Brutehilde found the first mate. He was the only one on the ship built for her. She got a hand around the back of his thigh and lifted him, no more effort than lifting a chair, and sat him down on a coil of cable with his boots off the deck and his cock standing up cold and fat in the green light.
"You'll want to hold the rope," she said.
He took hold, and she climbed on. He stretched her worse than she expected, and the cold of him went up her like a nail driven slow. She set both feet on the cable on either side of him and rode him with her hands on his shoulders, and the cable groaned under them, and the whole deck heard her and did not care.
Greta had two ghosts at once. She had the trestle up on the hatch and her skirts about her waist, one old salt under her with his cold tongue working at her cunt, and another behind her with his hands full of her arse and his cock buried in it. She drank rum out of the tap the whole time without spilling a drop.
Honeymuff found out at once that a ghost could not be inside her. His cock went through her belly like a draught. So she had him lick instead, and his cold tongue on her pregnant little mound made her scream in a voice you could hear from the masthead. Then she sat on his ghostly face and held his hair and came twice, and the second time she laughed so hard her wings buzzed.
Dravion was at the rail again with the first mate's shape gone from behind him and a thin, sharp-faced ghost in the shrouds above with its hand out. He was reciting still, something about a bosun and a bilge pump, and getting faster.
Tanna and Nell had the old captain between them on the quarterdeck bench. Nell had him in her cunt with the gold ring knocking on his cold shaft, and Tanna had her mouth between Nell's legs, working her tongue round that little ring while Nell rode.
Scoffer had a whole knot of them. Scruffulus and Elophelia took a corner by the capstan. Elophelia did not care that the dead man could not get her any colder than she already was, and she made him watch while Scruffulus fucked her from behind.
And Grakthor found it all very confusing indeed. He stood there with his lantern in his hand and looked around at forty-one green men and the whole crew of the Revenge doing things that should not have been possible.
Sindy was sitting on the hatch coaming with her trousers off and her knees apart, waiting for whichever ghost fancied her next. She saw him and patted the boards beside her.
"Come on, then," she said. "Before they all get used up."
Grakthor got his trousers down. He got on top of her. He pushed.
Nothing.
He pushed again, and the head of him went over her thigh and left a wet smear there. She reached down and took him in her hand and steered him, and he shoved and slid past her cunt entirely and ground into the crease of her leg. He tried again and got her navel.
"Are you even aiming?" she said.
"I am."
"You're not." She took him again and put him there herself, right at the opening, and held him while he thrust, and he missed anyway, a hard shove up over her belly. "Gods. How did you get this far in life?"
He tried once more, breathing hard through his nose, and she shifted her hips and angled herself into his path, and the tip of him found her and pushed in a half inch and slid out again.
"Do you want me to put it in for you and hold it in?"
"Yes," he said.
She did. She held him by the root like a man leading a horse and pressed him in, and got two inches, and he came almost at once, all over her fingers and her knuckles and nothing else, mooing like a mad thing.
"Well," Sindy said, and wiped her hands on him. "That's that."
Past midnight the fog started thinning. It went grey at the edges and then it went pale, and the green light along the galleon's rails grew faint as a candle in a window at noon.
The ghosts began to go. One by one they stepped back and dimmed, and their voices came softer. The first mate put his hand on Brutehilde's arm and thanked her by name. The old captain kissed Nell's knuckles and said something nobody else heard. The bosun bowed to Wee Minnie and asked for the tea recipe, and she told him, and he faded still nodding.
Thank you, they said, all down the deck at once. Eighty years. Thank you.
Then there was only the fog and the wet boards and the tick of water in the scuppers.
"Back aboard," Nell said. "Everyone. Now."
They went over the plank in a straggling line with the rum barrel and the teapot and one lantern, and the sun came up while they did it, flat and yellow off the larboard bow. The fog burned off in a quarter of an hour.
The sea was empty.
The galleon was gone. No green glow, no tattered sails, no hulk, nothing but open water and Lefty's blue mantle turning slow off the starboard side.
Polly stood at the rail with her coat finally buttoned and counted the crew twice.
"Captain," she said. "Where in the nine hells is Grakthor?"
Nobody answered for a while. Everyone looked at the empty sea.
"Was he not on the line?" Greta said.
"He couldn't find the line," Dravion said. "It's a line. He could not find it."
Polly took a long breath through her nose and let it out.
She said. "So he got lost, he couldn't find his way back off a dead ship." She turned and spat over the side. "Well. I hope he fares well, wherever the ghost ship's taken him."