The coin twists and turns between her breasts, its bright glint calling to him through centuries of age. He's not seen it before, and yet...

"Where did you get that?"

"Pirate!" she teases, bearing down so hard he gasps and throws his head back. "Don' you care for nothin' but shine?"

He gulps air and lifts his head for a better look at the trinket. A small coin with scalloped edges—pretty, but not worth much—and a string of mismatched beads, one spotted like dice, but curved like a tiny cannonball, or a drop of blood. You could never be sure how high you'd rolled...

"Seems not." She bumps her hips some more, leans forward till her brown nipples ruffle his chest hair. "We'll see 'bout that..."

But Teague is a thousand miles and a dozen years away, drifting in an open boat, playing dice with a tattooed mulatta as though his life depends upon it (which, in fact, it does.)

The strange thing is that he's alone in the boat—has been for about a week now—but the woman is there too with shells in her hair, and those blood-red dice that keep on rolling long after they hit the planking. Sometimes he could swear they sink right through the hull and float back up again, still tumbling.

In the end, he wins, but only because she lets him: he doesn't need her inky laughter to tell him he owes his life to a whim. Helped along perhaps by a generous serving of Teague charm.

And being still alive, he makes the most of what he has, digging his fingers into the whore's buttocks—dark and round as the mulatta's—to pull her deeper onto him, both of them slick with sweat, writhing and clawing stripes into each other's skin as fingers spasm.

She rolls her head from side to side, kicks her legs like a swimmer, and gasps, "Jojo!" The trinket swings wildly.

Charges explode behind his eyes and down his spine. As his hips leave the straw mattress, he hears himself yell "Tia!" It's not her name; but his isn't Jojo.

She stops, still panting, then fetches him a smack on the jaw that'll ache for days. "Stupid, selfish, rutting rum-sack! You promised you'd warn me!" She clambers moistly off him, and disappears behind a screen. (It's a little late for modesty, thinks Teague, but bites his tongue and helps himself to more rum.)

There are sounds of pouring and splashing. A lot of soapy water seems to be running down her legs and onto the floor. Her cursing quietens after a while, then turns to sobbing. But by the time she comes out, she's glaring fiercely again.

"Robert Teague, if you got me in a fix, I swear you'll pay for it," she snarls. "An' for the time I can't work. 'Less you wanna go home without the tackle to make more troubles."

Teague has no desire to go home. Hoeing turnips in cold drizzle and herding recalcitrant geese has never appealed, not even when he was dying in that boat: Philomena was wrong about that. But nor does he fancy staying here to risk finding the wench is in pod.

"Julie, love," he says, "it'll take more'n a single shot to spoil your shape." He tries to emphasise the delightfulness of her current shape with his hands (hampered by the cup of rum in his right), but she bats him away.

"I mean what I say, Bob. Got three brats still alive, an' none of 'em grown enough to earn more'n chicken-feed."

Reflecting sourly that the other fathers most likely made their escapes unsuspected and unidentified, he forces a rueful smile. "You know I ain't got but what's in me coat, love."

This was the wrong thing to say, for she empties his pockets of purse, rum flask, dice, compass, nocturnal, and spyglass; then she takes the coat.

"You want to check inside the hem and behind the buttons," he advises, making a gift of what she'll plunder anyway. "Got a few good coins salted away in there."

Her brown fingers would suit fine embroidery, but there's a brutal strength in the way they squeeze along the seams, searching and weighing. It takes a good half bell, but she's somewhat appeased by the end of it.

"Enough for lost business," she concedes, "but you still owe me for the child."

"An' if there's no child, you'll turn a handsome profit: I say we're square."

"I'll pay it all back—if you stay 'round till my courses come."

He silently curses whoever thought to give women brains and let this one take more than her share. "You'd make a fine quartermaster, Julie."

"Jehu-a-lee," she corrects—or something like that—which means she's not going to give an inch. "An' you pay up now, 'fore you sneak off like a thief. Which I know you are."

He spreads his arms wide, shrugs theatrically. "Ain't got no coin left, love."

"Then steal some!"

He shakes his head. Out of confusion, amusement, rum and desperation, a plan crystallises. "Give us back the dice, an' a safe way out of here," he says, "an' I won't have to."

He wins enough the first night to pay her off, but stays for another to buy back his spyglass, compass and nocturnal. (It's not as though he really needs to know the time at night, but he's grown fond of its elegant curves marked out with latitudes and constellations.) There's enough over to pay for more rum and another night with Julie. Perhaps he's grown too fond of those too, but after two nights of implausible luck, it's time to move on.

She wakes him early in the morning and takes him down to the kitchen for ale, corn-bread, and a goodbye kiss. The trinket dangles between her bare breasts.

"Where did you get that?"

She laughs. "He was a sailor too, that one. Not just any sailor neither, or so he said, but a great lord of the sea—ain't they all? Not two ha'pence to rub together, mind. So he gave me this for keepin' him warm. Said he'd not be needin' it, for he dint care where he went 'long as it were inland. Went up the river an' never came back."

"Piece of eight!"

Last time he saw this, it was pinned proudly to a Spanish satin coat, surrounded by jewels and lace. No wonder he failed to recognise it on a greasy leather thong round the neck of a cross-breed whore. Trust that feckless rat, Roche, to fuck away a sacred token.

"Don' be daft, Bob! 'Tain't but tin, an' little enough of that, but 'tis a pretty thing, an' I was glad to get it."

Would she also be glad to learn it makes her technically a Pirate Lord and member of the Brethren Court? (Lord of where, for fucksakes? The swamp? The flophouse? The only time she sees salt water is when some hurricano sweeps in and brings it to her door.)

"Give you a shillin' for it?"

If he offers more, she'll know it's special.

"Special, is it?"

Bugger.

"Don' need a shillin' jus' now, thank you kindly. The fine gentleman who put me in the family way left coin enough to keep me respectable."

He doubts there's enough coin in the world for that. But perhaps...

"You're right, Julie," he says carefully. "It's special alright, but only to a sailor. So you take good care of it now." He's fairly sure all three of her brats are girls, though he could be wrong. It's enough to make him hope he has got another on her, for surely, any child of his would be a male. "An' if you have a babe, an' it's a lad, maybe he'll go to sea, eh?"

She looks at him as though he's mad, which from her point of view, he probably is.

"Why'd he want to do a thing like that?"

Why indeed? "Because..." he says, tearing a blank page out of the ledger and rummaging for quill and ink, "because if he does, an' if he can learn enough sea-craft to read this, then he'll know where to sail." He scrawls a rough map of Shipwreck Cove, leaves it unnamed, but scribbles latitude and longitude. "An' if you give him that, um, trinket, an' he brings it to the Keeper—the Keeper of the Code, that is, but Keeper'll do—then he'll truly be a lord of the seas. An' a rich man to boot," he adds, seeing that she remains unimpressed. "Able to keep his mother in luxury to the end of her days."

She sniffs. "Think I can manage that by me onesies."

But she folds the map carefully into her skirts, and keeps one hand on the piece of eight as she waves him goodbye.

*

It's not that he forgets the misplaced piece of eight. He is the Keeper, after all, and it matters to him that things should be properly kept.

He even wonders once or twice if there's a dark-skinned child running wild in the swamp, dreaming of the sea. Maybe the boy's heard that his da was a mad sailor named Teague; for sure, he'll know a few men eager to get a closer look at da's dice, preferably at knife point.

But what with the world being so big (and pirates so argumentative), it's a few years before the wind carries him back that way.

When it does, Julie, her brats, and the trinket are all long gone.

~

Tall Ship Tales

Prologue 1 (Tale Minus One): Shine
Prologue 2 (Tale Zero): Names


Tall Ship Tales 1: A Keel
Tall Ship Tales 2: A Hull
Tall Ship Tales 3: A Deck
Tall Ship Tales 4: Sails
Tall Ship Tales 5: A Ship