Across a Moonlit Sea Read Free Page A

between one heartbeat and the next.
    Far off in the distance, the wind filling every sail she could mount on her masts and tops, the
Talon
was racing across the blue of the horizon.
    Racing north.
    Racing away from the smoke-filled arena.
    She was fleeing to the safety of wide open sea, leaving the
Virago
and her crew to face the circle of predators alone.



Chapter 1

     S he emerged from the receding bank of mist like a ghost ship. The air was dead calm, the water smooth as glass. The lines of her rigging were frosted with dew and glistened with a million pinpricks of light as the first rays of the morning sun found her. She had originally carried four masts, but the mizzen and fore were badly damaged, the latter cracked off halfway up the stem and folded over on itself, suspended in a harness formed of its own ratlines. What few scraps of canvas she carried were reefed, as if she knew she was going nowhere fast. The huge mainsail hung limp, half of it in tatters, the rest valiantly patched wherever it was possible and bolstered by a new array of lines and cleats to give it some hope of catching any breeze that might whuff by. There was more damage scarring her rails and hull, and she was listing heavily to starboard, weary with the weight of all that hope.
    Captain Jonas Spence frowned through the thick wire fuzz of his eyebrows. “I see no lanterns. No signs of life on any of her decks.”
    His second-in-command, Spit McCutcheon, duplicatedthe frown but he was not looking so much at the silent galleon as he was the dense gray wall of fog behind her.
    “There could be a dozen ships out there, lyin’ in wait, an’ we’d not know it,” he muttered through the wide gaps of his front teeth. “’Tis just the kind o’ trap a bloody-minded Spaniard would set. Use one of our own as bait to lure us in, then”—he leaned over the rail and spat a wad of phlegm into the water twenty feet below—“pepper us like a slab o’ hot mutton.”
    Spence’s frown deepened, the lines becoming crevices in a face already as weathered and hardened as granite. He was a tall bull of a man, as broad across the beam as his ship, as bald as the pickled gull’s eggs he ate by the crockful. “Mutton?” He glared at McCutcheon. “Did ye have to say mutton, ye flat-nosed bastard? Now I’ll be havin’ the taste of it in my throat the whole blessed day long.”
    As if to verify the prediction, his stomach gave an angry rumble, one heard by most of the group of crewmen gathered behind them on the forecastle. Several smiled, despite the tension. Their captain’s appetite and capacity were infamous, and when his belly protested a lack, it was like the ominous grumbling from a volcano.
    “Mutton.” Spence snorted again and raised his hand to his eyes, shielding them against the molten silver glare of what little dull light did manage to break through the dissipating clouds. He took a slow, careful sweep along the half of the horizon that was clear, halting when he came upon the ghostly galleon and the gray miasma of mist behind it.
    “We’ll send the jolly across,” he decided. “If there are a dozen papist bastards out there, they’ll be goin’ nowhere, either, in this cursed calm. An’ if she’s genuine, there might be souls aboard who need our aid. Helmsman! Ye’dbest haul us in. Keep a square or two aloft for steerage in case a wind does come along.”
    The order was relayed and almost immediately there were men clambering nimbly up the shrouds and steadying themselves on the yards while others released the tension in the rigging lines and allowed the sails to be reefed and lashed to the spars. It was slower work than normal, for the sails had been well soaked with seawater to swell the canvas and take advantage of any breath of air. They had been becalmed three days now, and aside from the occasional cat’s paw that scudded over the surface of the water, they had drifted no more than a league or two in that time.
    That was