“You can’t keep me here, Rhodes.” Her courage almost failed her.
“Why not? I can go on doing what I’ve been doing —a little pearling here and there, hauling a bit of copra for some fellow who has the law after him and ready money to pay for the trip. My crew’s loyal to me—I can lock you in when I’m in port and only take you ashore on islands, where to be left is to die.”
Her face whitened. “You’ve changed,” she muttered.
“You haven’t,” he said lightly. “You’re just what Gavin said you were—a pretty cheat.”
Blindly, she turned to strike at him, but he caught her wrist in a grip that paralyzed her arm. “You’ll control yourself on deck,” he said savagely. “In front of my crew you’ll present a good face, or, by God, I’ll lock you in that hot cabin below decks for the whole voyage.”
She swallowed, rubbing her wrist as he let her go and her sapphire eyes smoldered after him.
Chapter 35
For days they sailed across the glassy surface of the Indian Ocean, bound she knew not where. The crew, at first reticent, soon became used to her and smiled at her as she walked about. “The captain’s lady” they called her, and tipped their hats respectfully. They were a motley group, bearded cutthroats, the riffraff of the islands, but it was plain they adored Rhodes.
Then on the ocean’s hot face the wind left them, and they sat becalmed in muggy heat and misery. By day, Roxanne panted on deck with the rest of them. By night Rhodes claimed her in the stifling heat of the cabin, and the heat they made together was hotter than anything the tropical winds could concoct. She hated herself for surrendering to him so completely, hated herself the more because he was so cynically aware of her body’s hot response to him. But there was no helping it. When he touched her, she turned to flame. At night, with his long lean body pressed to hers, all the bright veneer of civilization was stripped away. It was not the Roxanne who had danced at Government House he held in his arms, but another woman aflame with elemental passions, as timeless as Eve’s. Her breath would sob in her lungs as she fought to possess him more fully. Arms twined tightly around his muscular neck, her body would move in an aching savage effort to become one with him, welded together forever in a feverish lover’s embrace.
It was madness. It was passion. It was wonderful.
And all because it was Rhodes, Rhodes in her arms at last. Always afterward, when sanity returned, Rhodes would give her a cool appraising look, a cynical look that said her body was desirable and his to command, but that she had lovely, lying lips. . . .
That look would cut her to the quick, and she would turn away, telling herself she hated him. But the next time he took her, her response would be just as wild. . . .
The weather worsened. With leaden heat, the sky pressed down upon them. The burning copper sun was so hot, it seemed the very decks would melt. Overhead the sails hung limp, and the panting crew, stripped down as naked as they could with a woman aboard, cursed and quarreled and lay inert.
As Roxanne made her way topside one afternoon, to her surprise, she had trouble keeping her footing. Around her the ocean rolled in deep oily swells.
“Dirty weather around somewheres,” one of the crewmen remarked ominously, and another nodded. “Heard the cap’n say the glass is falling fast.”
Listless, Roxanne leaned on the rail, watching the long monotonous roll of the waves. Then with a sigh, eager to take off the sarong that clung to her skin as if pasted there, she went back down to her bunk and, naked, fell into a heavy exhausted sleep. She woke soaked with perspiration and gasping for breath. Staggering at the violent roll of the ship, she struggled back into her damp sarong and hurried topside.
For all the heat, she found the deck a flurry of activity. Above them the canvas flapped weakly in the heavy, sultry air as the Virginia Lass tried to run sharply west. With a frown, she turned to ask Rhodes the reason for all this effort and saw that he was using a glass to study the rakish sails of three distant junks looming over the horizon. As she came up beside him, he handed the glass to her.
“Looks like Yen Chiang,” he said grimly. Roxanne took the glass and studied the strange-looking red and yellow craft. “They aren’t making much headway in this calm—but then, neither are we.”
Silently, she returned the glass. In her heart she had never really believed that Rhodes meant to hand her over to Yen Chiang. “Can we outrun them, do you think?” she asked.
“Don’t know. But there are three of them, so we’ll have to try.” He frowned. “We have more than one devil to outrun today.”
She turned and, looking in the direction of his glance, saw a murky yellow haze that covered the horizon to the south.
“You know this Yen Chiang?” she asked him.
Rhodes nodded. “I had a brush with him once. I was pearling in the Sulu Sea when Yen Chiang tried to take over our outfit. We fought him off. Oh, he’ll remember me. He tried to cut my head off with his sword, and I shot him. Too bad I only got his arm.”
All day, amid steadily worsening swells, they played tag with the three junks. All day the storm came closer. Copper twilight found them on an ocean that seemed composed of hills and valleys. The yellow haze to the south had widened and become dense olive, a low cloud bank that hung suspended over the rocking sea.
“Look your last on the stars for a while, miss,” Bevin, the first mate, told her as he came by. “For all that we’re tacking away from her, that storm will be on us by morning.”
Roxanne give him an uneasy look. “It looks ugly.”
Bevin, who was British, nodded. “Typhoon. They’re always ugly.”
“You’ve been in them before?”
“Once. On land—not on sea. I was on a little island in the Sulu—not on the charts. One of these storms came up and damn near washed the island clean. Bent the palms double, broke them like match-sticks. Except for a rocky cliff with a cave high up, I’d not be here to tell about it.”
Rhodes came up behind him. “Stop scaring the lady, Bevin. We don’t need to add hysteria to our other ills.”
Roxanne gave him an affronted look. “I’ve been in storms before.”
“Not like this one, I dare say,” he said grimly. “Once it strikes, I want you to stay in your cabin. Understand?”
She turned on her heel, but staggered at the pitch of the ship and had to clutch the rail. She made a zigzag way back to Rhodes’s cabin and lay there on the bunk in the sweltering heat.
After a while Rhodes came down. He did not touch her. Instead he climbed into the bunk beside her and immediately fell asleep. She gave him a disgruntled look in the light of the wildly swinging lamp, turned over and went to sleep herself.
Awaking to a grayish darkness that she took to be dawn, Roxanne gasped as a table came crashing against the bunk. While she watched, startled, the cabin floor reared up at an angle, and the table that had just crashed into the bunk slid wildly across the room, along with everything else that would move, and slammed up against the opposite wall. A few moments later the floor changed angles, and everything bore down upon her and smashed violently against the bunk. Shaken, Roxanne watched as the situation repeated itself, and she made a nervous lunge for her clothes. With a minimum of bruises she managed to dress and, finally, walking uphill it seemed, made the door. At first it resisted her, then suddenly it flew open, taking her out with it into a rush of rain that battered at her as violently as if it were hail. She fought her way topside. Around her was a wild tumult, with waves crashing green across the deck. Appalled, she clung to whatever she could and watched the sea.
Out of the roar and clamor came Rhodes, soaking wet. He grasped her with rough hands and escorted her back to his cabin, where she would have gone skittering to the floor had he not held her up. “Stay—there.” he shouted above the wild shriek of the wind, slammed the door shut and left her.
To avoid the gamboling furniture, Roxanne made for her bunk and clung to it, pale and frightened. She was unfamiliar with typ
hoons, knew only that those who had been in them spoke of them with great respect. In the next few hours she would come to understand why. As the storm's fury increased, the crash of the waves seemed every moment to threaten to smash the ship. Instead of lessening, it grew worse until she was hard put to stay in the bunk at all. With the unremitting fury of an avalanche, the storm attacked them, bore down upon them as if to bury them. She heard ominous cracking sounds, sometimes of timber splintering. Sometimes the ship seemed to lunge from the water, to rear up and fall back again sickeningly—or to strike head on into something solid. Over her head, all around her, she could hear the great seas boom as they broke green and fierce and deadly across the deck. For hours it went on—the Virginia Lass locked in step with a gray gale that blew rain horizontally instead of vertically and caused the men to gasp for air as they howled directions to each other.
She who had once looked up into a tornado, had had no conception of the size and power of a typhoon. Over a thousand miles it ranged, and though she could not know it, they were being sucked savagely toward the center of those whirling winds that ever increased in their fury.
Slowly, as day wore into night, came the conviction that they could not outlive the violence of this shrieking gale. Roxanne bit her lip and held onto the bunk, and for a despairing hour wished she had told Rhodes—told him in plain words while she had the chance—that she loved him.
The storm seemed to peak to a horrendous, deafening intensity, and then of a sudden the wind stopped. Roxanne felt breathless and weighted down, but she staggered up nonetheless. Happily, the battered furniture no longer flew about. Had they come through it?
She made her way topside, almost unable to do so in the heaviness of the oppressive air which weighted her limbs and seemed bound to press her to the deck. On deck, she saw how badly the ship had been battered. Most of the shrouds were gone; a few rags still flapped disconsolately above. One of the masts had snapped off and was nowhere to be seen, lost doubtless somewhere in the Indian Ocean. She sought out Rhodes at the wheel.
“Rhodes.” Her voice sounded very loud to her ears. “Is—is it over?”
He turned a haggard face to her. “No. A typhoon is a circular storm, Roxanne. We’re in the center of it now.”
Sucked into the center of the storm! She looked about her fearfully and saw that it was so. The Virginia Lass seemed to be lurching uneasily at the bottom of some deep well. Far above them a few stars lit the black water, and their weak light illuminated tall clouds that swirled and moaned in a devilish circle about them.
Once before Roxanne had looked up into a circular storm—a tornado. But this was a tornado on so vast a scale as to dwarf the imagination. Appalled, she stared about her, at those whirling cloud-cliffs that swept upward to the stars.
“It will be on us again presently,” Rhodes said in a tired voice. “You must be below when that happens. We’ll have the full fury of it again, Roxanne.”
“Will we . . . make it?”
He shrugged, looked about him with a touch of the humor that always lurked in him. “Well, at least we’ve lost the junks,” he said.
She loved him for saying that, for finding some glimmer of hope in the raging hell that surrounded them.
Impulsively she hugged his sinewy arm and brushed his salt-crusted cheek with her lips. “I’ll go below,” she said.
“No—wait a moment.” He gave her a smile and turned to his exhausted crew who were staring amazed at the whirling cloud-world that surrounded them. He began to give swift orders for lashing down this, shoring up that—while there was still time.
She watched Rhodes issue his quiet orders, giving the men heart, and she was fiercely proud of him.
A low deep-throated roar coming at them from those sinister cloud walls that loomed ahead grew into a tearing shriek that seemed to vibrate through them like a thousand drums. At the height of its brutal power, the holocaust rolled back toward them. It seemed to come from all sides, a thundering torrent of sound that blanked the mind and terrified even the brave.
“Get below,” shouted Rhodes. “Now!” She could hardly hear his voice above that roar. Before she took her leave, Roxanne had time to see ahead through that whirling cloud wall a line of white foam inconceivably high, riding atop a tall black wave that would assuredly smash the Virginia Lass to kindling. Trembling, she stumbled below and got the door closed before that wall of water struck. She was hurled across the cabin with a force that stunned her, and then, before she could seize anything to hold onto, she was slammed back again, accompanied by all of the furniture in a bruising mass. The second time she had the presence of mind to clutch the bunk and hang on, though her arms were nearly wrenched from their sockets as the ship plunged and bucked and writhed like a mad thing. Suddenly, the ship seemed to have crashed into a brick wall. And then, as she clung to the bunk, another. And another. Tattered and tossed, the ship careened about in this pulsating holocaust until the whole world seemed to crash and rock and the unearthly noise was almost beyond human endurance.
Only once before had Roxanne heard a sound like that . . . and on that occasion she had looked up into a vision of hell itself laced by vivid blue lightning. Then she had lain in a ditch. Now she crouched on a bunk in what seemed a corner of a pitching dungeon, a dungeon that was wildly in motion, bent one moment on tearing loose from the waves and flying up into the sky, and the next crashing down as if to seek the ocean’s bottom. Every moment she expected to see the door cave in and the green sea fill the room. Every moment she expected to be her last.
And then, after terrible hours had passed—she did not know how many—it came to her battered senses that the horrendous roar of the storm was not quite so fierce, that the giant waves, while still big enough to smash the ship, had subsided a trifle, that the hull was not taking such a pounding. More time passed and she listened fearfully, felt each blow the hull took. The poor weakened Lass could not stand much more. And then—yes, she was sure of it: Like the wail of some great dying animal, the moan of the storm was retreating.
A little later Rhodes came into the cabin. He looked a wreck, his hair and face and clothes encrusted with salt, but he gave her a wide grin. “We came through it,” he said. “Not much left of us, but we’re still afloat. Bevin can hold her now.”
She stared at him wordlessly, her heart in her eyes. He seemed too tired to notice. Exhaustedly, he pitched forward into the bunk, still in his soaking wet clothes, and fell asleep.
She was content to have it so.
Morning came. Roxanne had lost count of time. How many hours the Virginia Lass had ridden the storm-tossed sea, she was not sure. But with the first light, she woke to find Rhodes gone. Wrapping her sarong about her, she climbed up on deck and saw him standing at the helm. The wind was blowing his dark hair. Like some hero of ancient tales he stood a mighty man and master of his ship, with the gray light gleaming off his spray-lashed back and shoulders, as he steered his ship through the afterwash of the storm.
Roxanne was shocked at the sight of the deck. She had seen the bones of better-looking ships deserted upon the beach. Gray with salt, the deck was a shambles of twisted wood and bits of torn sail. Two masts were gone—but one remained. And on that mast a gallant bit of canvas fluttered in the wind.
Roxanne clambered over the wreckage, past the crew making desperate repairs, to reach her captain. He turned to her a haggard face.
“We’ve made it,” she declared proudly. “You’ve made it.”
If Rhodes was surprised at the warmth of her tone, he did not show it. His green eyes held a fleeting sadness. “Not quite,” he said gently, and nodded to the west.
There on the horizon bobbed a Chinese junk, its sail a shattered thing.
“Yen Chiang’s flagship,” said Rhodes tiredly. “We haven’t lost him after all. The storm spit us both out together.”
She studied the ship anxiously. “It looks to be in bad shape.”
“Oh, you can count on that, all right. B
ut she’s heading for us nonetheless. Yen Chiang must have recognized the Lass. He bears me a grudge, as I told you.”
“At least,” she sighed, “there aren’t three of them.”
“Yes,” he said with feeling, “we can thank God for that.”
“I’ll find some food below,” she said. “I’ll bring you something.”
He turned and smiled at her. “You’re a warrior’s woman, Roxanne.”
Still feeling the glow of his approval she found a tin of dry biscuits and an unsmashed bottle down in the galley. They would win through, she told herself stubbornly. They had survived the storm—they could survive anything!
She brought the biscuit and bottle up to him. He gave the wheel to someone else and took a deep swallow.
“Will we—get away?” she asked soberly.
Rhodes paused with the biscuit halfway to his mouth and considered that junk with the ragged sail, grimly inching after them. “Not likely. Yen Chiang has more sail. Perhaps we can get away from him in the night. If it’s dark. If we’re lucky.”
She understood the need for flight. Chinese pirate junks carried many men, fighters all. The Virginia Lass with its small crew would be no match for her. Soberly, she watched the junk in the distance, pacing them as they rode the big swells that were the aftermath of the storm.
All day long Rhodes supervised the shoring up of the Virginia Lass. To make her seaworthy. To make her battleworthy.
Night came. The men cursed as the moon shone down across the great rolling waves that still swept the uneasy sea. It was late when Rhodes came below. For all his fatigue, she had never seen him look so dangerous.
“She’s gaining on us,” he said. “When dawn comes, we’ll engage her!”
A thrill went through her. He meant to fight. It was there in every line of his square-jawed face, in the very stance of his powerful body.
These Golden Pleasures Page 42
