Arabella of Mars(60)
Arabella looked to Mills. “What was that?”
Mills’s dark eyes narrowed. “Pistol.”
Arabella moved ahead of the water cask, still pressing inexorably forward, and braced her back against the bulkhead to bring it to a halt. She and Mills paused, straining their ears, but could make out little more than muted voices and the occasional thump. Then one voice rose above the others, a high and strident one, delivering a long and impassioned speech. Though the words failed to penetrate the wood above their heads, the speaker’s voice was far too familiar.
Binion.
“I’m afraid it’s mutiny, Mills,” Arabella said. “And I need to know which side you’re on—the mutineers’, or the captain’s.”
Their eyes met over the cask. Mills’s eyes, the nearly black irises floating in pale yellow whites, gazed steadily into Arabella’s, his expression revealing nothing.
Arabella swallowed. One or the other of them would have to take sides, or they’d still be here staring at each other when the mutiny reached them. “I’m … I’m with the captain,” she said, knowing that with her words she might be signing her own death warrant. “He’s been good to me.”
Mills blinked. “Been good to me too,” he said. “No telling what them mutineers might do.”
Arabella blew out a sigh of relief, but then realized her peril had been only slightly reduced.
Mills maneuvered himself around to her side of the floating cask and spoke low. “So we do what, now?”
A sudden, sharp scuffle from abovedecks was brought to a halt by another pistol shot, which caused both their heads to jerk up like a pair of puppets. “We can’t just hang about here waiting for the action to come to us,” Arabella said.
Mills frowned, then ducked back down the ladder. He returned a moment later with a heavy belaying pin, which he handed to Arabella. A second pin was tucked into his rope belt, next to his rigging knife.
Arabella took the pin and worked it beneath her own belt. She had no knife of her own. “We should bring the cask with us, as though we didn’t know that any thing was wrong. It might stop a bullet.”
They put their shoulders against the cask and began the long, slow process of nudging it into motion.
*
As they reached the lower deck, they were met by a topman, one not well known to Arabella. “Belay that hauling,” he said. “It’s all hands on deck.”
Arabella held tight to the cask, which continued its stately progress upward, keeping its bulk between herself and the topman. The bulkhead behind her brushed against her shirt-collar. Mills, she noted, had positioned himself similarly, the great muscles of his shoulders bunching in anticipation. “Why?” she asked the topman, pretending ignorance.
“Change in course,” he sneered, revealing his allegiance.
Mills’s eyes met Arabella’s, she jerked her chin toward the topman, and without a word they braced their backs against the bulkhead and pressed the heavy cask toward the mutineer with all the strength of their arms and legs. Such a maneuver was strictly against the rules for normal operations—a full water cask was never to be allowed to move rapidly, on account of the danger of its great weight.
For a moment the airman did not notice the cask’s change in course and speed. For a second moment he failed to appreciate its implications. By the time he took action, attempting to scramble out of the way, Arabella and Mills were already halfway up the ladder to the upper deck.
The drifting cask, moving with stately inevitability, pinned the topman between itself and the mainmast with an audible crunch, rebounding away with an equally unhurried pace and only a slight tumble.
He began to scream just as they had reached the upper deck. But the screams soon faded away, to Arabella’s mingled dismay and relief.
One mutineer down. How many more were there?
*
They paused at the top of the forward ladder, peering from the darkness of the hatch out onto the sun-washed deck. But even as they watched, the sunlight rippled and dimmed—a storm was on its way.
Clearly something unusual was afoot. Men drifted in clumps here and there, laughing or chattering nervously without any display of discipline. And on the quarterdeck, no officers were visible. Only Binion and two other midshipmen—two midshipmen whom Arabella had heard the captain describe as the least capable students of navigation. Binion held a cocked and loaded pistol in each hand.
“Where are the officers?” Arabella whispered to Mills.
He shrugged. “Overboard?”
Arabella’s throat tightened at the thought. “We can but hope not.” She paused, thinking hard. “Binion told me he’d keep the captain alive, as a hostage to force me to navigate for them. He’s probably tied up somewhere.” The upper deck, from which they had just come, was mostly one large room and currently empty of airmen. Surely if the captain were still alive he would be under heavy guard. And if he were further below, on the lower deck or in the hold, they’d have seen some evidence of it as they’d ascended. “Must be in the great cabin,” she muttered.
And, indeed, two stout airmen floated before the great cabin’s door, truncheons in their hands and their arms crossed on their chests. One of them wiped at his eye, where a drop of rain had just impacted, and Arabella realized with a start that he was Gowse. Surely the captain was imprisoned there, and perhaps the other officers as well. “We must creep in there somehow and free him.”