Arabella of Mars (27 page)

The two airmen pushed off from the bulkhead behind them, carrying the struggling Arabella unwillingly across the deck, and brought themselves to a halt just above the grating. “Hold his legs,” said Gowse, and then, without ceremony, yanked Arabella's sodden shirt from beneath her rope belt.

Panicked, Arabella crossed her arms tightly across her chest before the shirt could come off any further. “I'll k-keep the shirt,” she stuttered through chattering teeth. “G-grant me that much d-dignity.”

Gowse leaned in close, his broken and still swollen nose just inches from Arabella's ear. “It's for yer own good, lad,” he whispered, not unkindly. “Bits of shirt in the wound can fester and kill ye.”

And then, in one smooth move, he broke Arabella's grip on her chest and stripped her shirt off her body. The hard, chill rain struck her exposed skin like a slap.

For a moment she managed to shield her breasts with her arms. But then, with the same great strength that had removed her shirt with barely any notice of her resistance, Gowse pulled her hands apart. “Don't struggle, lad, ye'll just make it wor … what the
h—l?
”

Arabella squirmed in the man's inexorable grip like a trapped rat, squealing incoherently, trying valiantly not to cry. But though she did her best to extricate herself, or even to cover her nakedness with elbows or knees, the wind and the rain and the men's eyes still penetrated to her soft unprotected flesh.

“Yer a
girl
!” cried Gowse.

*   *   *

Arabella stood exposed on the deck, the driving rain cold on her bared bosom, tears hot on her cheeks.

Time seemed to stop still in its tracks. All around her men and boys stared at her, shocked expressions frozen on their faces. Even Gowse, still holding her arms, seemed paralyzed where he stood.

Arabella herself was the first to break the moment, yanking her arms from the man's grip and folding them across her chest. But having accomplished that much, she could manage no more. All she could do was hang miserably in the gusty, soaking air, hugging herself, blinded by tears. After a moment the man holding her legs released her as well, and she curled sobbing into a ball, a tight little knot of abject wretchedness.

She was ashamed. Ashamed of her nudity, ashamed of her femininity, ashamed of herself for being too weak to prevent this moment. What would become of her now? A half-naked girl, exposed on an airship full of mutinous airmen?

“I won't whip a girl,” came a voice. Something brushed her hand. Wet cloth. Her own shirt. It was Gowse, who'd stripped it off, now handing it back to her.

She took it and clutched it, wadded up, to her chest. Putting the sodden, stained, and ragged thing back on was entirely beyond her.

As her shuddering sobs subsided, she began to be able to pay attention to what was happening around her. She wiped her streaming eyes and nose with her shirt-tail.

“I won't whip a girl,” Gowse repeated. He floated between Arabella and Binion, arms crossed on his chest; she couldn't see his face, but the set of the shoulders beneath his sodden shirt indicated grim determination. The other man, the one who had held her legs, had drifted to one side, his eyes flicking indecisively between Gowse and Binion. The other mutineers also seemed to be hanging back, watching the situation. Distant thunder rumbled uncertainly beneath the roaring wind.

“Girl or not,” Binion replied with some heat, “she's still the only navigator we've got.” A flash of lightning froze his face for a moment in a sneering rictus. “You'll whip her, Gowse, or I'll whip her myself, and you as well!”

“I'd like to see ye try,” growled the airman, the great muscles in his shoulders bunching as the thunder rolled.

Binion glared at Gowse, then, without taking his eyes off the man, extended a hand behind himself. “Watson,” he called, “bring me the lash.”

Behind him Watson, the young midshipman who had been guarding the officers, floated trembling and uncertain.

“Watson!” Binion snapped, and turned to face the smaller boy. “The lash!”

Recoiling from the force of Binion's command, Watson moved in the direction of the red cloth bag, floating attached to a peg on the quarterdeck bulkhead, that held the loathsome item.

“Y-you don't have to do it,” Arabella said.

Her voice shook as she forced the words past the sobs that clogged her constricted throat. Her eyes were blinded by tears and rainwater, and her nose stuffed. Yet she spoke, and loud enough to be heard above the storm.

All eyes turned to her.

Arabella wiped her eyes again and tried to straighten herself in the air—to take up again the airman's bearing which had been stripped from her along with the shirt. It was hard to draw herself upright while still clutching the wadded shirt in front of her nakedness, but she did the best she could.

“You don't have to do as he says, Watson,” she repeated.

“Yes, he does,” Binion countered. He drew the pistol from his shirt and leveled it at Arabella. “Or you'll get worse than a whipping.”

The black O of the pistol's mouth gaped directly at her. But despite Binion's harsh words and the rain and the lightning, she saw the pistol tremble and knew that the man was afraid.

“He's nothing but a bully and a martinet, Watson,” Arabella said. Even as she spoke, she realized the truth of her own words, and she found strength returning to her voice—shouting into the teeth of the storm. “He's a petty, insecure boy, and if you let him whip me now, sooner or later you'll find yourself at the end of that same lash.”

The airman who had held her legs now moved toward Binion. “Really, Binion,” he said, “this ain't what we signed on for. Taking from the Company's one thing, but I'd rather make my way by dead reckoning than put an innocent girl to the lash.”

Binion's pistol swiveled rapidly between Watson, Arabella, Gowse, and the second airman. “You're all fools,” he declared in a low and deadly voice, though the pistol hand now shook so hard that all could plainly see it. “She's no innocent! She had you all thinking she was a man! I'll wager she's been diddling the captain the whole time!”

“Now I've heard just about enough,” said Gowse, and lunged toward Binion.

Binion aimed the pistol at Gowse and drew back the hammer.

And Watson slammed into him from the side, the two midshipmen tumbling together in a sodden, spinning midair ball. The pistol fired, a thunderbolt of smoke and flame shooting off harmlessly upward.

A moment later Gowse joined the tumble, his massive arms pinioning Binion's arms to his sides while Watson plucked the pistol from his fingers.

“Parker! Bates!” Binion cried. “Somebody suppress these insubordinates!”

Some of the mutineers immediately came to Binion's aid. But others rose to oppose them, and though the two groups fought hand-to-hand for a time, the mutineers fought without conviction, and the number of men supporting Binion dwindled quickly. The mutiny soon began to lose its momentum, then collapsed completely.

Nonetheless, Binion continued to shriek commands in every direction until Gowse put a gag in his mouth.

 

16

PASSENGER

A knock came on the cabin door, a welcome distraction from her racing thoughts. She arranged herself in the tiny space to allow the door to open. “Yes?”

It was Watson. “M-Miss Ashby,” he stammered, “The captain requests your presence in his cabin.”

The response “Aye, aye,” tried to spring to her lips, along with a salute, but she pushed it down. “Certainly, Mr. Watson,” she replied.

After the officers had been freed and the mutineers sorted out, Arabella had been whisked away to the carpenter's cabin—more like a closet—on the lower deck, so that she might clean herself up in privacy. Soon thereafter a dress had been obtained from somewhere, probably requisitioned from the cargo over Quinn's strenuous objections, and conveyed to the cabin with the captain's compliments.

Fitting herself into the dress in the tiny space had proved a considerable challenge.

The dress was quite fine, she supposed, though it was too short and the sleeves were entirely too tight. But after so many weeks in trousers, she found it nearly impossible to manage female costume in a state of free descent. The skirts billowed up and had constantly to be pushed down. On her previous trip from Mars to Earth, she had been given a sort of large garter to keep her skirt decently constrained at the bottom, but as no female passengers had been expected on this voyage
Diana
did not carry any thing in that line.

The other men—the men, she reminded herself—were more embarrassed by the sight of her legs than she was. They were the same legs as before. All of the men had seen those legs many, many times. Yet now that her sex had been revealed, the sight of them had suddenly become scandalous.

Watson knocked at the hatch of the great cabin, announced her presence, and was bidden by the captain to send her in. Watson opened the hatch and bowed her in, bending himself at the waist in midair as he gestured her to enter in a most gentlemanly way.

“Miss Ashby,” the captain said, and he too bowed.

The whole situation was so very strange to Arabella's sensibilities that her eyes stung with tears. The great cabin, so familiar, compelled her to salute and snap a crisp “Reporting as ordered, sir.” But the captain's deferential attitude seemed to demand a demure curtsy.

She did neither. She hung stupidly in the air and said, “You … you desired to see me, sir?”

She realized that her heart was pounding. Was it simple concern over the unknown reason for her summons to the great cabin?

Or was it fear … fear of what she might find in those dark, intelligent eyes of his?

Now that her sex had been revealed, would he think less of her, or dismiss her from his consideration entirely, as a mere girl? Or might, instead, the high esteem in which she believed he held her—in which she fervently hoped he held her—develop into another type of regard, one warmer and perhaps more intimate?

But the expression in those brown eyes did not address her concerns in either direction, showing nothing but polite respect. “Thank you for coming, Miss Ashby. Will you take tea?” He proffered the tray which she herself had prepared for him so many times, the little teapot fitted to its slots with its lid screwed on tight, a sweet biscuit held beneath the silver clip. She wondered who had laid it out for him in her absence.

The thought of Captain Singh preparing a tea tray for
her
, with his own hands, was too strange to contemplate.

“Thank you, sir,” she said, if only to be polite, though as she nibbled the biscuit she realized she was ravenous.

Even so, she found herself taking gentle, ladylike bites rather than wolfing the whole thing down as she would have done when she was Arthur Ashby. How quickly expectations can change one's behavior, she thought.

“I called you in,” the captain said, “to thank you for your actions during the recent mutiny.”

“My actions?” She blinked. “I
failed
, sir. I did not even manage to get you free of your manacles before I was captured by Binion.”

“I am referring to your actions on deck,” the captain replied mildly.

Arabella dropped her gaze to her feet. “I suffered my shirt to be removed, and then collapsed in a blubbering heap.”

“After which, according to the reports I have received, you faced down Binion's pistol, rallied the men, and recaptured the ship from the mutineers. No small accomplishment.”

Her cheeks began to burn. “I … that description vastly overstates my role in the action, sir. It was Gowse who set upon Binion, and Watson who tackled him. After that, all the men took a hand. I did very little of my own accord, and nothing that any other loyal man would not have done in my place.”

“Any loyal … man,” he repeated, with slight emphasis on the last word. His dark eyes regarded her seriously. “It was Gowse and Watson themselves who told me what you did, and neither of them is of a temperament to minimize his own accomplishments. Your actions would be a credit to any officer, never mind a boy second class, and are a truly extraordinary achievement for a girl.”

The captain's words raised deep and contradictory emotions in Arabella's breast. She should be proud of her actions, she knew, yet she had failed—failed to expose the mutiny before it occurred, failed to free the captain, and failed to keep her sex hidden, and now she worried about the consequences of that failure. She had lied, through omission if not explicitly, and taken employment under a false identity. Would she be punished for that deception, now that it had been exposed? “I'm concerned about the men,” she said, approaching the question indirectly. “What will happen to those who took part in the mutiny?”

“Binion and the other leaders are now manacled in the hold, along with a few more who injured other men during the mutiny.” Arabella cringed inwardly at the remembered sound of the topman Westphal's knees being crushed by the water cask. “The rest of the men who sided with them have sworn their loyalty to the Company and returned to their stations, though there will be an inquest and possible disciplinary action upon our return to Earth.”

“And what will become of…” Again Arabella's gaze was drawn to her feet. “… of me?”

“I will be putting you in for a commendation from the Company. There are, of course, no guarantees, but I think your chances are excellent.”

She looked up in shock. “A commendation? But … but I'm not even a…”

“You are far from the first to obtain employment on an airship of the Honorable Mars Company by pretending to qualifications he does not actually hold, Miss Ashby.” Now it was the captain whose eyes drifted downward. “Some of these have even gone on to distinguished careers.” He seemed to shake himself from an inward reverie then, and his gaze returned to Arabella's face. “There is, to be sure, the unavoidable matter of your sex. You will not be allowed to continue as captain's boy.”