The Gallows Tide

The mist off the shoals had a taste to it, salt and something colder underneath, and Michael Bundy had been standing the dawn watch long enough to know that taste meant nothing good. The Pilgrim rode low and easy through water the color of dishwater, her sails gone slack in the dead hour before the land breeze picked up, and somewhere beyond the gray curtain ahead a gull cried out twice and then went silent.

"Too quiet for a gull," he said to no one, and the boatswain, a thick-necked man named Oswald, grunted from the rail without looking up from his splice.

"Gulls do as they please, Mr. Bundy. Same as the weather."

Michael Bundy did not answer. He had learned over four years at sea that a feeling in the gut was worth more than any glass or chart, and the feeling in his gut this morning sat heavy and cold, lower than his breakfast had any right to sit. He walked forward past the capstan, where young Michael crouched coiling a line that didn't need coiling, his hands moving out of nerves rather than duty.

"You'll wear a groove in that rope before the sun's even up," Michael Bundy said, and the boy looked up at him with the kind of gratitude a kind word always bought from him, cheap as it was.

"Couldn't sleep, Mr. Bundy. Dreamed of drowning again."

"Then dream of something better tonight. Dream of your mother's kitchen."

Michael managed something close to a smile, and that was when the fog ahead of the brig tore open like a rotten sail, and the black hull came through it close enough to spit on.

There was no horn, no hail, no courtesy of warning shots across the bow. The warship's gunports had already opened before the fog cleared enough to show her colors, and the first broadside caught the Pilgrim along her length from bow to stern, a raking fire that no merchant brig built for grain and wool was ever meant to survive. The sound of it was not like thunder, whatever the poets wrote. It was closer, meaner, a tearing crack that Michael Bundy felt in his back teeth before he heard it with his ears.

The foremast came down in a tangle of rigging and splintered wood, and two men standing near the windlass simply stopped existing, turned in an instant from sailors into red smears across the deck planking. Michael Bundy was thrown against the capstan hard enough to crack a rib, though he wouldn't know that until later, and when he pushed himself up the world had gone white with smoke and screaming.

"Michael!" he shouted, and found the boy still crouched where he'd left him, untouched by some miracle of geometry, covered in splinters and another man's blood.

"Mr. Bundy, the captain, I can't find the captain—"

"Forget the captain. Get behind the capstan and stay low."

The second broadside never came, because by then the black ship was already alongside, close enough that Michael Bundy could see the grappling hooks arcing over the gap before they bit into the Pilgrim's rail. The iron teeth sank into splintered wood, and the lines went taut, and the two hulls ground together with a sound like a dying animal.

"Repel boarders!" someone shouted, a thin and useless command from a merchant crew that had never trained for anything but weather and cargo manifests. Michael Bundy grabbed the first weapon within reach, a boarding pike meant for fending off a longboat, and planted his feet near the capstan where Michael still crouched.

They came over the gunwales in a wave, and Michael Bundy understood in the first three seconds that this was not a fight in any sense he'd been taught to recognize. These were not sailors defending their ship. These were butchers working a pen. A man with a cutlass went for the Pilgrim's second mate, and the mate's hands came up in surrender before the blade ever reached him, and the cutlass took him anyway, across the throat, almost gently, the way a man might cut a rope he no longer needed.

"Stay down," Michael Bundy said to the boy, and leveled the pike at the first boarder who came close enough to matter.

The man was young, younger than Michael Bundy, with a bandanna gone stiff with old salt and a grin that didn't belong on a human face in the middle of a slaughter. Michael Bundy drove the pike forward and caught him in the shoulder, enough to spin him off balance and buy half a second, and in that half second he swung the butt of the weapon across another boarder's jaw and felt the bone give beneath it.

It wasn't enough. It was never going to be enough. Four more came where those two had fallen back, and Michael Bundy fought with the particular desperation of a man who has stopped thinking about living and started thinking only about the few feet of deck he still controlled, the narrow space around the capstan where young Michael pressed himself flat against the wood and shook.

"Keep him back there," Michael Bundy said through his teeth, to no one, to himself, and took a cut across the forearm that he barely registered until he saw the blood running down to drip off his fingers.

Then the crowd of boarders parted the way a crowd parts for a man they fear, and Barnaby Pryce came through it unhurried, his blade still clean, his braided beard catching what little light made it through the smoke. He was bigger than any man Michael Bundy had fought that morning, bigger than most men Michael Bundy had ever seen, and he moved like a man who had never once needed to hurry.

"You've got some spirit in you," Pryce said, and his voice carried over the dying noise of the deck the way a foghorn carries over wind. "More spirit than sense, mind. Put that pike down before you embarrass yourself further."

"Come and take it, then," Michael Bundy said, and hated the way his voice shook even as he said it.

Pryce laughed, a short bark with no warmth in it, and closed the distance faster than a man his size had any right to move. Michael Bundy thrust the pike at his chest, and Pryce turned it aside with a single contemptuous sweep of his cutlass, a blow that traveled through the shaft and into Michael Bundy's hands like a hammer strike. The pike spun away across the blood-slick planking, and a second blow, backhanded and almost lazy, caught Michael Bundy across the side of the head and sent him sprawling.

He landed hard on his back, the deck cold and wet beneath him, and looked up to find Pryce's blade resting an inch from his throat.

"There now," Pryce said. "That wasn't so difficult, was it."

The fighting around him was already dying down, not from any mercy but from arithmetic. There had been thirty-one souls aboard the Pilgrim that morning. Michael Bundy would count the survivors later and find there were nine, and he would carry that number with him for the rest of his life the way other men carried scars. The pirates herded what remained of the crew toward the mainmast with the casual efficiency of men driving cattle, prodding with blade points when anyone moved too slowly, and young Michael was dragged up from behind the capstan and shoved into the huddle with the rest.

"Leave him," Michael Bundy said from the deck, still flat on his back with Pryce's cutlass hovering over him. "He's done nothing. He's a boy."

"Everyone's done something," Pryce said, not looking at him, looking instead at the shivering knot of survivors with the detached interest of a man appraising livestock. "The question is whether what they've done is worth keeping alive for."

He crouched down then, close enough that Michael Bundy could smell gunpowder and rum on his breath, close enough to see the missing finger on the hand that held the cutlass steady.

"You fought well for a merchant man," Pryce said. "Better than most. I don't get much sport out of boarding brigs anymore. Everyone's learned to fold before the first shot's even fired." He tilted his head, studying Michael Bundy's face the way a man might study a horse he was thinking of buying. "What's your name?"

"Bundy. Michael Bundy."

"Well, Michael Bundy, here's your fortune for the morning." Pryce straightened, and his voice rose to carry across the deck, to the huddled survivors and the circling crew alike. "Every man here has the same choice, and I'll only offer it the once. You can take the articles and sail under my colors, and you'll eat better and live longer than you ever did hauling wool for some merchant who'd sell your contract before he'd miss a meal. Or you can keep your honor, if that's what you call it, and my quartermaster here will open your throat before the sun clears the mist. Those are the only two doors on offer, and neither one of them opens twice."

A stocky man with silver mutton chops stepped forward from the pirate ranks, a length of cutlass already bare in his hand, and waited with the patience of someone who had done this before and would do it again without losing any sleep over the outcome.

Nobody spoke. The survivors looked at each other, at the dead scattered across their own deck, at the blood soaking into planks they had scrubbed a hundred times over for less reason.

"Mr. Bundy," young Michael said, his voice cracking on the second word, and the look on his face was enough. It wasn't an argument. It wasn't even really a request. It was the look of a boy who had already decided that Michael Bundy's choice would be his own, whatever that choice turned out to be.

Michael Bundy thought of the Pilgrim's captain, somewhere in the wreckage forward, likely dead or dying. He thought of the second mate cut down with his hands raised in surrender, and the two men gone from the windlass without even time to scream. He thought, with a kind of cold clarity that surprised him even as it settled into his chest, that there was no honor left on this deck to protect. There was only the boy in front of him and the choice Pryce had laid out plain as a chart.

He got to his feet slowly, favoring the rib that had cracked against the capstan, and looked at the cutlass still held loose and ready in Pryce's scarred hand.

"The boy comes with me," Michael Bundy said. "Wherever I sign, he signs."

Pryce's eyebrows rose, and something that might have been amusement crossed his face. "Giving terms, are you. Lying flat on your back with my steel at your neck, and you're giving terms."

"You said every man had the choice. I'm making mine. He stays with me, or neither of us signs, and you'll have to find out whether killing two unarmed men still counts as sport."

For a long moment Pryce only looked at him, and the deck around them had gone strangely quiet, smoke drifting low over bodies nobody had yet had the stomach to count. Then Pryce laughed again, louder this time, genuine in a way the first laugh hadn't been.

"I like you, Michael Bundy. I'll say that plain. Most men beg for their own skins and forget they ever had friends." He reached down and turned the cutlass in his hand, offering the hilt rather than the blade, a strange and deliberate gesture. "Swear it on the steel. Both of you. Swear the articles, and swear to sail under my command, and no man here will touch either of you again today."

Michael Bundy looked once at young Michael, whose face was the color of old canvas, and then he reached out and closed his hand around the offered hilt. The metal was warm from the morning's work, warm with other men's blood still drying along the fuller.

"I swear it," he said, and the words tasted like something rotten going down.

"And the boy."

Young Michael's hand shook as he reached for the blade in turn, and his voice came out barely above a whisper. "I swear it."

"There now," Pryce said, taking the cutlass back and sheathing it with the same unhurried ease he'd drawn it, as though the whole exchange had cost him nothing at all. "Welcome aboard the Sea Wolf, gentlemen. Try not to disappoint me. The last man who disappointed me is feeding fish about two leagues back."

Behind him, the crew of boarders had already begun stripping the Pilgrim of anything worth carrying, barrels of grain hauled up from the hold, bolts of wool tossed across to waiting hands on the other hull, and nobody so much as glanced twice at the bodies they stepped over to do it. Michael Bundy watched them work and felt the cold certainty settle into him that he had just traded one kind of death for a slower one, and that the slow one would cost him more than his life before it was through.

Young Michael pressed close to his side, close enough that Michael Bundy could feel him trembling, and neither of them said anything more as the pirates drove them toward the gap between the hulls, toward the deck of the Sea Wolf and whatever waited for them there.