Work Text:
In all his years sailing the world Ralph had never before been to Nassau, but as the Ranger pulled into the harbor of the infamous pirate republic, the atmosphere on deck sang with the infectious excitement of a homecoming. The pirates cheered and libations flowed around freely as they drew into the crystalline blue waters around New Providence Island; many ribald and licentious sentiments were declared as the crew began buzzing with their plans for the weeklong interval ashore.
Ralph stood silently at his solitary vantage point on the quarterdeck, the cool, salty breeze from the sea blowing his loose fair hair about his face. Nassau's harbor was a dense forest of docked sloops and schooners; black flags waved from their masts, with death's heads and other various menacing insignia; their crew members shouted and swore cheerily at them as they passed. On the beach the pirate crews seemed to have made a sprawling, ramshackle city of huts and tents cobbled together with bits of sailcloth and driftwood. Disorderly piles of loot and animal carcasses lay scattered between the campfires. Men were singing, drinking, and fornicating rambunctiously on the white sands, among the palm trees and scrub, as the hot tropical sun beat down in waves. It was a port unlike any other Ralph had seen before: chaotic, wild, and lawless.
And he, Ralph Lanyon, was now an outlaw, he thought with a faint smile of amusement—at least, a different kind of outlaw than the one he was naturally predisposed to being. Hostis humani generis.
*
It had been a few months now since he had left behind his former trade as a merchant sailor and joined up with Vane's pirate crew, although it felt to Ralph as though it were a lifetime ago. Back then he had been second mate on the Zuleika, which had been attacked and captured by the pirates on its voyage back to England.
On that fateful day, the captain had given orders to drop anchor on the coast of Jamaica for conducting routine hull maintenance. Ralph was keeping watch on the fo'c'sle when the ship appeared around the bend, a seemingly innocuous square-rigger flying the Union Jack. He was unable to shake an ominous, inexplicable trickle of unease as the ship gathered speed towards them, and he privately voiced his apprehension to the first mate, who took a look through the spyglass Ralph handed him and frowned.
The captain, a rather cantankerous and obstinate old man who did not brook much in the way of counsel from his subordinates, was adamant that they stay and finish the repairs, other ships be damned. By the time he realized the gravity of the situation, it was too late: within a few hundred yards, the black flag had been hoisted up the mainmast of the Ranger, bearing the symbols of a red dagger, skull, and heart.
Charles Vane, the more seasoned sailors on the vessel shouted, panic rising in their voices as they scrambled to their battle stations. Ralph at the time only knew Vane by his legendary and fearsome reputation, but he had heard enough lurid stories about the pirate captain to feel a sufficient sense of alarm.
And underneath that alarm beat a tiny pulse of intrigue. Ralph had only ever seen a live pirate once, during a public hanging in London when he was a boy. The pirate had been young, probably in his mid-twenties, and remarkably normal-looking, hardly the monstrous entity Ralph had imagined from the grisly tales eagerly swapped at school. He had stood in his chains grinning and hurling vehement oaths in defiance towards the jeering crowd, with the noose draped around his neck, as a court official had recited a list of his purported and extensive crimes. Ralph's mother, a very proper, Puritan woman, had shuddered in disgust and taken Ralph away before they could witness the rest of the execution. But to spar with a pirate in the flesh was quite a different matter.
Two warning shots were fired over their vessel. From the grim set of the captain's mouth, Ralph knew he had no intention to surrender. He felt for his flintlock pistol and drew it out, steadying his breath.
Vane's ship fired a full broadside; there was a loud crack and a flash of orange fire; cannonballs rained down heavily into the water and over the deck, tearing through the hull and part of the rigging, followed by a violent hail of musket balls. Wooden splinters flew in every direction like shards. The Zuleika crew answered with a volley of fire from their own cannons and pistols, but the impact of their resistance was short-lived; the pirates had far more cannons and manpower and eventually managed to swarm aboard the ship, slicing bloodily through the crew and gleefully ransacking the hold.
It was an unequal battle, in every respect; the Zuleika had always been lightly manned, and Vane's crew outnumbered them more than three to one. Most ships who fell victim to Vane quickly surrendered, for Vane was not known to give quarter in a fight. The captain, on the other hand, refused to surrender up to the end and would not, under any amount of duress, give up the location of the ship's valuables. Ralph was by his side when he was killed, after being brutally whipped and tortured, and then shot point-blank between the eyes. Silly old fool, Ralph thought.
The pirates had been about to turn the gun on Ralph when the first mate crept up from behind and speared the captain's murderer through with his sword. Ralph took advantage of the ensuing confusion to grab his pistol and open fire around the cabin.
A sudden granado-shell explosion threw Ralph back against the wall and separated him from his pistol. When the thick fog of black smoke finally cleared, Ralph lifted his head and was promptly greeted with the blade of a cutlass shoved underneath his chin.
Slowly he rose to his feet, trying to keep his gaze level, without betraying any trace of fear. In the periphery of his vision he saw that his previous attackers were all dead, their bodies punctured with bullet wounds, and the first mate laid in a pool of blood a few yards away from him, his face half blown off by shrapnel.
Three other pirates had entered the cabin. The one holding the sword to his face was a large, burly, unpleasant-looking man, who leered at him across the steel. "Hello there," he said, smirking in a way that insinuated vulgar intentions. Ralph was suddenly very conscious that the front of his shirt had burnt and come partially undone in the explosion, exposing much of his bare chest and shoulders; a few tendrils of his long, fair hair had unraveled from its braided queue, streaming around his face. He felt horribly vulnerable, and hated it. "Would be a shame to kill a handsome young lad like you, eh?" He slid the edge of the blade along Ralph's cheek.
Ralph didn't stop to think. He spat directly in the man's eyes, then grabbed and slammed the cup hilt of the cutlass into his face, hearing the vicious crunch of bones, and stabbed the other pirate in the throat with the blade. They both fell away easily, in paroxysms of gurgling and a gory shower of blood.
The third pirate moved in quickly with his cutlass, forcing Ralph to drop onto the ground to evade the strike of the blade. Thank God for those fencing lessons at school, Ralph thought as he rolled and parried blow after blow from the ground, then nimbly sprang to his feet to resume the fight in fencing stance, his queue of hair whipping around as he moved in brisk, fluid steps. The air rang with the sharp sounds of colliding steel. Despite being in immense, life-threatening peril, Ralph felt his skin begin to tingle with excitement; the sword flowed in his hands as naturally as it had in his schooldays, and he had so greatly missed the thrill of a duel.
After several energetic thrusts and ripostes, he succeeded in knocking the cutlass out of the pirate's hand. The pirate reacted by pulling out a dagger and lunging at him. Ralph managed to avert the blade away from his chest; in the midst of the tussle, the dagger instead severed two of the fingers on his left hand and caught in the bone of the third.
Ralph cursed and staggered for a moment, overcome with splitting, agonizing pain. Collecting himself quickly, he pulled the dagger out of his hand, whirled around, and held the point of it to the pirate's throat. "Take me to your captain," Ralph hissed, with blood dripping down his chin.
In the end, Ralph made the devil's bargain. The ship was lost, the remainder of his crew was dead, and since he had left home Ralph had always done whatever it took to survive.
Vane laughed but accepted Ralph's offer to join his crew, in exchange for his life. "The boy's a natural fighter, and we could use more of those."
"We're also now short several crew members, thanks to you and your captain's stubbornness," the quartermaster said, sardonic. "What skills do you have to offer aside from waving around a sword?"
"I can read and write, and I'm rather good at navigation," Ralph replied, neutrally. "And I've sometimes provided medical aid on ships where they didn't have anyone better."
The wounded finger that hadn't been completely severed, the ship's surgeon later informed him, needed immediate amputation to save the rest of the hand from becoming gangrenous. The man seemed to have been an actual surgeon at one point, before being inducted into service by Vane's crew, and so Ralph reluctantly submitted to the gruesome procedure, with a heavy dose of rum afterwards.
Once he recovered, Ralph set about making himself useful on board the Ranger, helping with dead-reckoning calculations and reading navigational charts, supplemented with some of his own local knowledge of the coastlines. Satisfied that Ralph seemed to possess at least more than rudimentary competence in this area, the quartermaster—whose name was Rackham—tasked him with keeping the logbook of the distances and courses they sailed everyday and providing twice daily estimates of the ship's position. It was a fairly tedious but important responsibility for a sailing crew, and one with which Ralph felt at home. Ralph spent most days at sea writing down numbers and descriptions and sketching out drawings of the coasts, ports, and useful landmarks, and most nights watching and measuring the altitude of the stars. On those long winter nights at sea, his favorite constellation, Auriga, gleamed as brightly as a jewel. The sight of it comforted him like an old friend, for it always made him think of the Phaedrus, and of Odell.
A pirate ship was quite a democratic little organization, Ralph soon learned. The Ranger was a motley crew mostly composed of former discontented mariners, deserters from the Royal Navy, and runaway slaves—men who had existed on the fringes of civilized society. There was even a rather deadly-looking woman among them, who mainly lurked silently by Rackham's side. The pirate captain was an elected position and could be deposed by vote at any time, even a famed one such as Vane or James Flint, and the crew members all received an equal share of the plunder after a successful raid. Pirates were even paid a decent amount of compensation for missing parts lost in battle, Rackham had noted during the initial reading of the articles, with a curt nod towards Ralph's injured hand.
As the weeks passed, Ralph found that he hardly missed his old life as a merchant seaman, the realities of which had been far harsher than he had been led to believe when he had run away to sea. In those days he had been living under constant threat of the lash and subsisting for months on moldy bread and pickled salt beef crawling with maggots, all while being paid a meager pittance for a wage. While the food on the Ranger was not always much better, Vane's crew was frequently ravenous for fresh meat and alcohol and would from time to time elect to raid ships for this purpose, and on days they were on shore, they would go hunting around the islands for pigs and sea turtles. Discipline on the ship was relatively less common in comparison to the merchant vessels Ralph had served on, unless something an unfortunate pirate did happened to incur Vane's unpredictable and breathtaking ire.
Ralph could not say that he had developed any significant measure of trust or affection towards the other pirates. Vane's crew from the outset had struck him as being extraordinarily violent and unruly, prone to needless cruelty while plundering ships, and they spent most of the time drinking and brawling like animals with one another when not actively working. Vane himself was the most brutal of all when it came to torturing captives; more than once during a raid, Ralph had witnessed him ordering his victims to be keelhauled or hanged for offending him in some way. Ralph was careful to review and suppress his own weaknesses, with untender determination. Once people knew too much about one at sea, they expected one to be too obliging, he would often remind himself grimly. He sheared off most of his long hair to shoulder-length, for the sake of convenience as well as personal vanity, and practiced his sword fighting technique daily, applying himself with a ruthless self-discipline; in spite of his injury, he acquired a reputation among the crew of being swift and lethal with a blade. At night he slept in his hammock with a dagger by his side.
Over time he managed to identify some men among the crew who he thought might share his particular tendencies. There was one of the gunners, Bim, who had looked at him several times with a flicker of interest—Harry, who spent most days roaring drunk and telling bawdy stories—among a few others who had dropped hints here and there. None of them, however, carried much personal temptation for Ralph. Which was just as well, as Ralph privately had no intention of staying on this ship for any longer than strictly necessary.
Once they reached Nassau, Ralph thought, he could leave this all behind and find a way to work his passage back to England. And after that—his future would once again lie wide open, free and unbound to anyone, as wildly unpredictable as the sea.
*
The air in the brothel was oppressively hot and teeming with the stench of warm bodies, sweat, and sex. The room was packed with crowds of men who had returned from their voyages flush with prize money and the intoxication of victory, now deep in their cups and raucously carousing with some of Nassau's finest women. Having been dragged there by other members of the Ranger crew as part of his initiation to piracy, Ralph sat alone in a corner feeling increasingly stifled and overdressed in his black overcoat, loose white shirt, and breeches, but felt no inclination to disrobe with the rest and partake in the revels. Sipping from his wine glass, he smiled blandly to the women in dishabille who sent flirtatious glances his way and tersely declined several invitations to join in on the surrounding orgies. He had done two years already of women, trying but failing to cultivate the societally demanded proclivities, and that had been more than enough to confirm his marked disinterest.
A beautiful, dark-haired woman sat down on his lap and ran her hand sensually down his chest, over the spearhead of tanned skin displayed through the opening of his shirt. "I see that you are new here. We have all kinds of girls to offer, who are experienced in every way of pleasuring a man," she murmured into his ear, in a lilting French accent.
Ralph took a deep breath. "And what about boys?" he murmured back.
She tilted her head, then gave an enigmatic smile. "I know just the one."
The whore she introduced him to had dazzling good looks and went by the name Bunny. The sex itself was vigorous and satisfying enough for the price, although not all that Ralph was interested in. He had heard that the prostitutes there were often paid in secrets as well as gold and silver, and sought to discreetly charm some of those out. Bunny's variety of secrets was, disappointingly, mostly dull, catty gossip about the other whores and the sexual tastes of pirates in Nassau that he had fucked, but there was finally one small, casually mentioned item of interest among all the rubbish. Bunny had heard reports of a British merchant sloop that was anchored somewhere on the coast of the island, which had come to trade with the pirates in Nassau. It had been docked there for several days, and rumor had it that the captain was presently incapacitated with a nasty tropical illness; much of the crew had, in the meantime, either fallen ill themselves or defected to piracy.
Ralph contemplated that this could be his opportunity to join an honest crew and sail his way back to England, but he didn't voice this thought out loud.
His head mildly throbbing from the alcohol he had imbibed earlier, Ralph tugged on his coat and leather boots and briskly left the room after tossing Bunny his payment. He realized a short while later, as he was walking out on the landing, that his notebook was missing, in which he kept all his private writings, and remembered that Bunny had been the one to take off his coat.
He went back to the room, where Bunny was brushing his hair in the mirror, dressed in a robe of dark red Indian silk.
"Back for more, sweetie?"
"I believe you have something that belongs to me," Ralph said, coolly.
"Why, I don't know what you—ah," Bunny said, as Ralph strode over and wordlessly plucked his notebook from the pocket of Bunny's robe. "Now how did that ever get there?" he drawled, flicking his lashes with an innocent smile.
*
Ralph slept fitfully that night in the tent. His dreams mingled together in an uneasy, tumultuous jumble of memories—the crashing waves of the ocean during a hurricane—the roar of cannons and gunfire—the hostile jeers of the crowd at the gallows in London—his mother's angry sobs when he had left home—until it all finally settled into a calm, familiar dream, flooded with warmth and nostalgia.
In the dream he would be sitting in his chair at his old study in school. Odell was seated at his feet with his head and arms resting on Ralph's lap; his face was a few years older, but still more or less the same as the last time Ralph had seen him. Ralph was telling him stories of his various exploits at sea, imbuing them with the colorful details that he knew Odell would enjoy. Odell had always been fascinated by tales of nautical high adventure, and he sat enthralled by Ralph's lively descriptions of the pirate life, exclaiming in all the right places, as Ralph gently combed his fingers through Odell's soft red hair.
There was a brief pause in the story, when Odell glanced up and said, earnestly, "Next time you go away, I'm going with you."
Ralph looked down at him affectionately and replied, "Of course."
He woke up in the middle of the night reaching out for Odell, with a hollow ache blossoming in his chest.
Ralph pressed his hands to his forehead, trying as usual to think of something less painful, without much success; involuntarily his eyes fell on his cutlass propped up against the side of the tent, illumined by a cold trickle of moonlight shining through the tent flap. He had mentored Odell individually in fencing at school and could still recall, quite vividly, those long and thrilling hours spent training together—Odell doing his best to keep up with the relentless motions of Ralph's foil and mirror his footwork, his face charmingly flushed with determination—Ralph standing close behind Odell and encircling his fingers around Odell's hand and forearm to correct his grip, feeling Odell's warm breath on his cheek.
With restoration of sleep proving impossible after this, he tried writing a letter to Alec, who—last Ralph had heard—had gone to Boston to start his surgical apprenticeship, but he imagined the disapproving look on Alec's face when he found out about Ralph's foray into piracy, and decided to give it up.
*
It was his fifth day in Nassau, and Ralph was on his third tankard of rum that evening, feeling all of a sudden miserable and restless. Despite multiple inquiries and a cursory survey of the area, he had had no luck so far finding out anything more about the British sloop Bunny had mentioned; he was weighing the option of secretly acquiring a skiff to sail to Port Royal and boarding the first ship out. His left hand was beginning to seize up with pain, however, and he didn't like his odds of surviving a protracted journey by himself in the middle of this current flare-up. The rum was a mildly effective palliative, but Ralph found himself longing for a different type of distraction.
His eyes swept indifferently around the tavern, rowdy with inebriated pirates, like he was scanning a doubtful stretch of sea, before falling eventually on a man who was sitting alone at the bar and seemed to have been watching Ralph intently from across the room. Ralph could not recognize him from any of his previous days ashore, and certainly he would have remembered if they had met, for the man made a striking impression. He was attractive in a terrifying, rugged sort of way, unshaven, with reddish-brown hair and fierce, unsmiling blue eyes. There were slashes of fresh scars on his face, a fading purplish welt on his cheekbone.
Their eyes held for a brief moment, and then the man's gaze quickly slid away. Ralph recognized the look, customary to many previous clandestine encounters in seedy taverns in various parts of the world.
The other patrons of the tavern seemed to be deliberately avoiding eye contact with the man and giving him a wide berth, an observation that only served to further pique Ralph's interest. For the past hour the man had mostly kept to himself, except to quietly confer at times with the blonde teenage girl who ran the tavern (and unofficially all of Nassau, word had it), probably on some matter of business. Whoever this man was, they were all evidently afraid of him, even the biggest, most threatening toughs at the bar.
He was older than the men Ralph usually went for, harder and rougher around the edges, like some of the salty old captains he used to work under; his brown shirt was stained with flecks of newly crusted blood. This was a man who could quite possibly kill him for looking or speaking at him the wrong way. But Ralph wasn't in the mood for something painless, or gentle.
With a surge of masochistic, suicidal daring that alcohol sometimes induces, Ralph went over and sat down next to him, deliberately brushing his knee against the man's thigh under the counter, as he took a swig from his tankard and continued to look straight ahead. The man glanced sideways at him, remaining silent, but the corner of his mouth slanted upwards almost imperceptibly, in a lion's smile.
The man did not volunteer his name, nor did Ralph ask for it, or offer his own. It was better that way. He led Ralph to a private room upstairs; in the darkness and the dim arc of candlelight, Ralph let the man shove him against the wall and onto the bed, kissing the man roughly, grabbing and biting at his neck and his broad shoulders. As they stripped off their shirts and belts, Ralph felt the coarse scrape of the man's beard against his jaw, his calloused hands on the soft skin of Ralph's arse and thighs; his breath was hot and smelled of brandy.
His hair was nearly the same shade of red as Odell's, which had caught Ralph's attention immediately, and he had a similar dappling of light brown freckles on his arms, although that was where the superficial resemblance ended. While not exactly delicate-featured, Odell had been beautiful, with polite manners, a playful streak, and a captivatingly sweet smile; there was nothing remotely polite or sweet about this man, but Ralph was painfully hard for him nonetheless and writhed under him impatiently. The man paused after removing the remainder of Ralph's clothes, trailing his gaze over the bared muscles of Ralph's body, which were burning wild and hot with arousal; he was clearly not inexperienced with men, but something about his hesitation, flattering as that fascinated look was, told Ralph that he had not been with one for some time.
Having merely wanted to be fucked senseless, Ralph had not anticipated this. His trained ship's officer instincts took over; he pushed the man back on the bed and undid his breeches, freeing a rather sizable prick. Ralph felt a violent, excited twitch in his groin, and he took the man's prick hungrily into his mouth. He let out a small, slightly whorish moan as the man gripped him and began fucking his mouth and throat, not so hard as to cause any damage, but rough enough that Ralph would likely feel the vague soreness the next day. Being pinned into submission by this aggressive, nameless man in the dark was at once sordid and intensely exhilarating.
The man grasped Ralph's hair tightly and tipped his own head back, making small, deep sounds of pleasure as Ralph thoroughly sucked him off and cupped and massaged his balls, while in turn stroking himself steadily to completion. There was a certain, prideful satisfaction Ralph always received from this act, seeing men of all sorts blissfully come apart from the considerable skill and attentiveness Ralph brought to it; fearsome as this man might be to others, he was proving to be no exception.
"Thomas," the man groaned as he spilled into Ralph's mouth, an utterance so soft and prayer-like that Ralph just barely heard it. One of his hands dropped to touch the side of Ralph's face with an abrupt, surprisingly gentle tenderness.
Afterwards, Ralph was lying across the bed in a pose of careless relaxation, propped up on one elbow, casually smoking a cigar and sliding his hand over the thatch of hair on the man's chest. In the glow from the low-burning candle, one could see that his fair skin was patterned with scars and old stab wounds. Throughout all this the man had given no indication of his identity or rank, but Ralph had inferred from the wealth of scars and the authoritative manner with which he carried himself that he must be one of Nassau's pirate captains. They laid there smoking in silence, the candlelight flickering hazy shadows across the walls.
"Thomas," Ralph echoed, quietly, over his cigar. "Who was he?"
"It's of no concern to you." The man used the chilly tone of voice that immediately closes a topic of conversation.
Ralph had listened to so many piteous life-stories from countless people during his travels all around the world. It didn't matter the least to him what ghost this strange man thought of when he was getting his cock sucked. Ralph's own thoughts, after all, had a tendency to drift to a ghost of his own during sex. He idly remembered that last sweet kiss with Odell at school—the glorious softness of Odell's lips pressed tentatively against his—the wonder and marked longing in his eyes when Ralph had pulled away, as Odell had clutched the Phaedrus to his chest.
"You're one of Vane's men," the man said suddenly. "New recruit, I suppose."
Ralph didn't bother to ask how he knew. "I don't belong to anyone." Then, with the confidential air that such conditions naturally brought about, he went on, "I haven't been a pirate for very long. And may not be one for much longer." He flicked out a couple ashes from his cigar. "I intend to make my passage back to England, any way I can."
"Ah. So your home is in England." The man said the last word with a sharp, contemptuous laugh, as if Ralph had said his home was on some uninhabited island, or in the depths of the Arctic.
"Well...yes and no. I haven't properly been back in years, aside from the odd job or two. I was expelled from school for buggery—quite disgracefully—and my family wouldn't have me after that, of course. I spent most of the last five years knocking about in merchant vessels before getting caught up in Vane's crew and the whole piracy business. But somehow, no matter where I go, England still feels like it should be home for me." He wasn't exactly sure why, when he no longer had any familial ties or obligations binding him there. In the back of his mind he had always entertained a vague romantic notion of returning one day and serendipitously reuniting with Odell, older and hopefully more aware of himself, but the idea seemed impossible the more he thought about it.
"You would call it home still, after they cast you out like some sort of monster?" The man's voice had turned deathly quiet.
"Oh, come. Don't tell me you're trying to set me up with a grievance against society," Ralph laughed.
"And why the hell not?" the man said gruffly, with a sudden, bright flare of anger in his blue eyes. "I've seen scores of men hanged in London and flogged to death in the Royal Navy for what we just did. England doesn't want you, boy. Civilization doesn't want men like us. It's only here, in this land of thieves and murderers, where we'll ever find any hope of peace."
"And is that what you want, then?" Ralph asked, in a still voice. "To find peace?"
"Not only that." The man's jaw seemed to tighten, visibly, in the shadows. "They put Thomas in an asylum, after his father found out about us and forced me out of the navy. I heard later that he had died in there. Killed himself, they said, out of implacable grief."
"God. I'm sorry. It must have been hell." Deeply moved with sympathy, Ralph pressed a hand gently to the man's shoulder. There was a bleak look of guilt and self-loathing in his eyes, which rang all too familiar for Ralph, and so he added, in a softer tone, "And yet, I suppose part of you must have felt responsible, in a way. Like you weren't able to protect him, at the time it mattered most."
The man made a small, affirmative noise. "All I can do now is try to avenge his memory, and carry on my fight in his name." He reached out suddenly and touched a fringe of blond hair that had come uncoiled from Ralph's short queue. "You look rather like him. It isn't often that you meet someone like that. Someone you would burn the whole world for."
There was a momentary silence, and then Ralph said, slowly, "I once had someone, too, who was like that for me." Sensing the man's intense gaze on him, he shifted his eyes away towards the open window; in the distance he could see the ocean lapping silver waves onto the sands, the sky above washed with streaks of gold and crimson from the setting sun. He tossed away his cigar. "But it wasn't a romantic story."
*
They had slept together once again after that as a goodbye, before parting ways. Unexpectedly sentimental type, that man, and remarkably well-read (he had understood, without needing explanation, all of Ralph's allusions to the Phaedrus and its implicit significance). Ralph never found out his name that night, but it seemed unimportant to ask.
Later, as nightfall descended on Nassau and plunged the city into darkness, Ralph set out stealthily in a small rowboat, gliding through the tranquil waters along the coast of the island. Rowing still took a fair amount of effort with his hand injury, but he had managed to devise a method to ease some of the strain, and in any case it afforded him a chance to clear his head and think in peace. The sea around Nassau was enchanting at nighttime, the softly rolling waves bathed in cascades of white foam and the pearly reflection of moonlight, with a field of brilliant stars glittering overhead. He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the gentle spray of the ocean on his face, the sharp tang of salt on his lips; the wind stirred pleasantly through his fair hair.
When he opened his eyes, that was when he saw it—the trading sloop docked near the coast, waving British colors from its stern, and the small scattering of tents along the beach. Aside from a few sailors who were keeping watch on the shore, it laid there alone and practically defenseless. The vessel appeared to be compact and light, likely swift-moving against the winds, and looked like it could easily carry a crew of at least fifty.
It's not what one is, Ralph thought suddenly, but what one does with it.
His heart beating faster, he slipped a hand around the hilt of his cutlass and began to mentally tally up a list of names from the Ranger and others he had run into around Nassau, whom he could round up that night to join a skeleton crew. There was Bim who might be easily persuaded, Peter, Theo, several more he could recruit from the tavern or on the beach...and perhaps he would write to Alec after all, for a pirate ship did need a surgeon.
Someone you would burn the whole world for.
He would name it the Auriga. It had a rather nice ring to it.