The Cove - A PirateHammer Story

     

  

        Sniffling, Scara took her bowl of ‘stew’ from her captor. Her hands started shaking again with shock, fatigue, and fear, sending the food rattling in the bowl. Beside her, Jean Pierre held his own bowl. They waited until the guard walked away, then he reached over, steadying her own bowl with his hand. He started lifting his soup to his lips, but Scara shook her head violently. “Don’t,” she whispered.
          “You need to eat,” the physician sighed. “This hardly can pass for food, but it is something.

            “The Contramestre urinated in the prisoner’s porridge back on the ship, so this is suspect. I don’t want to eat urine soup.”

            Jean Pierre raised a brow in horrified disgust. “He is a brutish man.”

            “He’s mean and kind of scary, like Bruno…” then she sniffed loudly, her eyes filling fresh with tears. “Bruno was mean and scary and drunk all the time but did you see what they did to him? They ran him under the ship and what was under there that ripped him up? Is it a monster, or…”

            “No. They are called barnacles. They are the rough shells of small sea creatures. A man is run from one side of the ship to another. If he does not drown, he often has serious injuries. You saw what happened to Bruno after a few passes. You may someday need to treat a man that has this happen and survives.”
            “How do you do that?” asked the girl, her dark brown eyes growing wide with curiosity.
            “I will tell you sometime. Hopefully I will not have to show you, but now,” he sniffed at his own stew. “It smells of bad cooking and old fish, but no piss. Eat or you will collapse tomorrow while tending the wounded. If you do that, you will be of little use to the pirates for your skills any longer, which means that you will be used for your body instead.”
            She froze, quiet and still for a moment, then lifted the bowl to her face. After a few sniffs and wince, she ate a small mouthful. Quietly, Scara observed, “I think they gave us dishwater with fish in it and a few potatoes.”
            “Maybe. Eat it anyway.”
            With one last pouty look the girl drank down the foul food as quickly as she could. Once it was consumed, she shivered, holding her arm over her mouth with her eyes closed to keep the food down. This allowed Jean Pierre to finish his stew in silence, something he had been horribly short on recently. After a few precious minutes, Scara recovered enough to ask, “Why did you help me? You could have lied about who you were, or just said that I wasn’t your assistant.”
            “You were an adequate assistant when you were quiet.”
            “It seemed like more than that.”
            He sighed. “Scara, listen.” She looked at him with her bright, innocent eyes. “Keep quiet. Do your tasks. Wear the clothes you are in now, man’s clothes. Blend in. Make them think of you not as a woman, but a healer. If they start thinking of you in another way, it will go badly. Do you understand?”
            She nodded falling into silence. Jean Pierre sighed, letting some of the events of the day bleed out of his system and into the harsh rock that provided some support in the dank, drab cove. This new group of pirates that held him seemed more blood thirsty than the ones that had taken him from L’Oubliette, except for the brute that killed Jean Pierre’s patients. He thought all on Myrmidia’s Spear would be the same, but the girl seemed different. He noted the silence had lasted for more than a few moments, so despite his exhaustion he forced his eyes open. The girl was on her elbows with her face a few inches away from a small tidal pool. “If you are going to vomit, do so in the bigger body of water. It will keep the smell down and will wash away more quickly.”

            “I won’t be sick,” the girl promised without looking up.

            “Then why are you like that?”

            “I was scared before, but I just now noticed this. There are no octopi in here, of course, but smaller things, a few tiny shellfish and such. So I can study them. I used to study the tidal pools at home. They were bigger and nicer back there, but this one is good. Go back to sleep. I’ll keep an eye on us for a while.”

            Stunned, it was Jean Pierre who fell into a shocked silence at the change in the girl. He watched for a time as she observed the pool, occasionally flicking her eyes up to watch the guard at the mouth of the cove. There was more to her than the foppish thing she pretended at first.