The Following Sea (The Pirate Wolf series) (25 page)

The green of her eyes sparkled ominously as she stood steadfast in front of him, her face tipped stubbornly upward. She planted her hands on her hips, mirroring his. “If I am blistered, Captain, I will walk on bloodied feet. If I fall down a crevice it will my own fault and I would expect you to leave me there. I have not come all this way and endured all that I have endured only to stay behind and wave a handkerchief over the rail of the ship.”

Dante glared. It was not often a man stood up to him and argued much less a yellow-haired wisp of a girl. “Tears, madam, will not strengthen your plea, nor will they sway my decision.”

“Evangeline…Eva… look at yourself and try to see what I see: A young, beautiful woman of gentle breeding who has already been through hell and survived by the grace of God alone. One who is totally unsuited to tramping across miles of rock and forest and swamps in the scorching heat.”

“One who spent the night in your bed and thus must surely have been rendered helpless and witless and incapable of buckling her own belt thereafter?”

“That has nothing to do with it,” he said after a moment.

“I’m glad to hear that, Captain, because if you do attempt to leave me behind, I will buckle more than just a belt around my waist and I will set out on my own and you may have my thanks for having brought me this far. I came here to find my father and find him I will, with or without any further help from you.”

Dante’s expression did not change by so much as a blinked eyelash. “I could bind you hand and foot and toss you into a cargo bay.”

“You could certainly try.”

Her words so closely echoed Isabeau Dante’s when his father had threatened much the same thing, that Gabriel raked his hands into his hair and looked away. When he turned back again, his face was hard, his eyes flat and cold. “I do not, for one moment, believe you can keep up or that you will last longer than half a day, but if it will serve to prove my point, then by all means, you’re welcome to join us. You will carry the same weight in weapons and water as the rest of the men. You will rest only when we rest, and by God’s ballocks, if you lag behind we’ll leave you where you fall. Is that quite clear?”

“Brilliantly clear,” she said.

He growled deep in his throat, more at his own lack of common sense than anything else. Confronted with the choice of taking her into his arms and kissing that magnificently stubborn mouth, or turning and walking away to maintain some semblance of authority, he chose the latter. He reached over and snatched his hat back, squashing it on his head before he turned and retraced his steps along the rocky path.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The insects were unbearable. They swarmed in clouds and feasted on any exposed, sweaty flesh. Second only to the sucking gnats was the scorching sun. It was directly overhead by the time Dante had organized his landing party, hot as the fires of Hades, and turned the rocky ground into vaporous embers beneath their feet.

When Dante called for volunteers, every last crewman stepped forward, even the wounded He selected a hundred and twenty of the strongest, promising the others they would not miss out on any action against the Spanish; there were more than enough of the bastards to go around.

Two groups were dispatched ahead of the main force. The first was lightly burdened to move fast as the men scouted the terrain ahead and marked the best path for the rest to follow. Another group of twenty, with the master gunner, James Giddings, in command, was charged to set up a system of runners to carry the alarm forward when Muertraigo began to move through the bight.

Every available jolly boat and longboat rowed back and forth to the little beach offloading men and supplies and weapons. When the last crewman had been set ashore, Stubs ordered the same boats to take up tow lines and start the laborious process of dragging the
Endurance
back to open water.

Gabriel set off across land, leading the seventy armed men who followed, all of them with water pipes slung across their backs, pouches of powder and shot tied to their belts, and whatever food they could tuck into their shirts. The strongest of the burly lot carried arquebuses on their shoulders, cumbersome trumpet-nosed weapons but deadly at close quarters. The rest were armed with cutlasses, pikes and pistols.

Eduardo had found Eva stout boots to protect her feet against the sharp rocks and pebbles. She balked, at first, at the thick woollen stockings he advised her to wear, but after a mile of tramping up and down the hills, she came to appreciate the buffer between her heels and the coarse leather. She mimicked the other crewmen and wore a kerchief tied around her head over which sat a hat with a brim of sorts, not nearly as wide or dashing as the one Dante wore. Her hair was plaited into a long, glossy braid that hung down her back over a loose white shirt with tight-fitting cuffs and collar, both of which helped deter the bugs from crawling up her arms and down her neck.

A swordbelt was strapped around her waist and a leather bandolier criss-crossed over her chest, hung with an assortment of pouches containing shot and powder and dry biscuits. A skin of water hung at her waist and bounced against her hip with each step she took.

True to Dante’s warning, the landing party moved swiftly up and over the hilly land, staying as close to the shoreline as possible. They waded across the mouths of swampy estuaries and passed through forests so thick they had to hack a path with their cutlasses. The patches of dense mahogany and pine forests gave some relief from the sun, but they paid the price with thicker clouds of insects.

Eva stayed close on Eduardo’s heels. Determined not to fall behind, she pushed herself to keep apace, her jaw set, her expression grim and stubborn. Dante paid her no heed. He strode in the lead, calling a halt only when a messenger came back from the scouting party.

Eva felt fairly confident of her abilities; she had been on many a hunting party with her father since she had been old enough to ride a horse. She enjoyed hiking and fishing in the country, and while she was no expert, she could parry a sword thrust, load and shoot a pistol without blowing herself off her feet. If she needed motivation, she had only to think of her father possibly being somewhere up ahead and her stride lengthened and the aches in her limbs were pushed aside.

The men seemed to develop an easy gait that swallowed the miles under the bright sunlight. Most of the bastards, she noted, did not even show a bead of sweat. The gnats appeared to leave them alone as well and at one of the infrequent stops, Eduardo plucked the leaves from a particularly noxious stinkweed and crushed them with spit, then smeared the juice across her neck and cheeks.

In the late afternoon, when the sun was the hottest, they came across another wide blue hole, the water so clear they could see a hundred feet down into the depths. Dante marched right past it, barely pausing to scoop a hatful of the water over his head. Most of the men did likewise, dipping their hats or soaking their kerchiefs before moving on. Rendered bug-free by Eduardo’s disgusting concoction, Eva was reluctant to splash her face or neck, but she took the opportunity to have a long drink of warm water from the skin hanging from her belt. It was almost empty.

Feeling a tickle across her nape, she looked up to see Dante watching her. She smiled as sweet a smile as she could muster and replaced the bung in the skin, adjusted her various pouches, and continued walking.

By the time darkness forced a halt for the night, her shoulders had gone beyond agony into numbness. Her back felt like one large blister and when she sat to remove her boots and stockings, there was barely enough strength in her arms to do so.

There would be no fires on such a dark, clear night, so the men sat on the rocks and chewed on hard biscuits and strips of dried beef. Thankfully they had stopped beside a stream of fresh water and most drank until their bellies sloshed when they walked. Water pipes and skins were refilled before most of them wandered off to find a flat patch of ground to sleep for the night.

The sky overhead was a brilliant swath of stars so bright and clear they cast a faint glow over the landscape. Eva was exhausted but curiously exhilarated. She waited until most of the men had moved away from the stream before she knelt and scooped handfuls of the fresh, cool water over her face and across her neck. She leaned over like she had seen the men do and sucked the water straight into her mouth, thinking she had never tasted anything half so sweet and pure. She sat back and let the water trickle down under her shirt, then unlaced the collar to let her skin breathe.

Wriggling out of her boots, she pulled off the stockings and sank her feet into the water, almost whimpering with the pleasure. She swished her feet back and forth, dug her toes into the soft, sandy bottom, and used the starlight to assure herself there were no masses of open blisters on her heels or ankles. Remarkably, there were none.

“You did well today, Mermaid.”

Eva accepted the compliment without looking up. “Thank you, Captain. I’m sure you are disappointed to have to say so.”

“On the contrary.” He chuckled as he sat cross-legged beside her. “I am never reluctant to give praise where praise is due. And praise, in this case, is most definitely due. I estimate we’ve covered at least ten miles with all the ups and downs and wading through bogs.”

He waited while she dried her feet and put her boots back on, then stood and extended a hand to assist her up—for which she was thankful as her legs protested mightily at having to move again and she might have ended up face down in the stream.

He kept hold of her hand and started walking up the nearby rise, moving around trees and brush with a lightness of step that made Eva want to smack him.

At the top of the shallow hillock, he took his hat off and combed his fingers through his hair, letting the night air cool his scalp.

“Look over there,” he said, pointing west.

Eva followed his finger and saw nothing but the rocky landscape stretching out before them like a stark black etching against the starlit horizon. Further inland, to their right, was a dark band of forest.

“You’re trying too hard and looking too far. Look there… in the crack between those rocks.”

This time when he pointed his finger, he stood directly behind her and touched his hand against her cheek. The phenomenon he was pointing to became clear at once. It was a faint bluish-green dome of light seeming to rise in fan-like streaks. The source was perhaps two hundred long paces away and as she watched, the light undulated and rippled, growing stronger in places, weaker in others.

He led the way, his eyes as keen as those of a cat as he picked a path down the far side of the slope. He took her hand several times as they navigated through thick patches of gorse and around clusters of jagged rock. As they approached the shimmering light, it seemed to grow stronger. At the same time, a second and third glowing fan appeared behind the first, smaller and much brighter, emanating from similar crevices in the rocks.

“I have heard of underground caverns and caves where water collects,” Dante said. “Something in or on the surface of the water reacts with the starlight or moonlight to produce the glow, much like the effect certain sea creatures have in the following sea behind a ship.”

Eva could see it clearly now; a long jagged crack in the rocks that extended fifty paces or so and emitted the tallest of the glowing streaks.

“It’s beautiful. Can we get closer?”

Dante studied the ground between them and the crevice. It was black as pitch and revealed no visible path through or around it, nothing that reflected the starlight. He was about to caution her against barging ahead when she did exactly that, and in the next instant he heard her cry out and saw her drop straight down into the blackness.

He reached out to grab her but was too late. His foot slipped and he felt his weight cracking through the porous rock, taking him in a belly-lurching plunge down a steep, almost vertical incline. The sliding fall lasted long enough for him to hear his own voracious string of curses before the ground—and Eva—came up abruptly beneath him.

Slammed together, they rolled in a tangle of arms and legs, coming to halt at the edge of a wide ledge of rock. A foot beyond was what looked like another blue hole, this one formed in the basin of a vast underground cavern. The ceiling was at least thirty feet high, spiked with pale cone-shaped stalactites, which were eerily mirrored by rising stalagmites on the cavern floor. The surfaces of the walls and ceiling were wet and shimmering with millions of tiny blue and green lights.

Dante tested his arms and legs, finding nothing broken, then reached over to help Eva. “Are you hurt?”