by Kin Law
“All right. I will take your experience on this matter into consideration,” Hargreaves yielded.
“Let us hope Nessie Drake is indeed harboring our quarry.”
“What do you think it is?” Albion asked. He suddenly seemed to be in a conversational mood, waxing philosophic. “That’s doing it, I mean. Stealing bloody huge buildings. The airmen have their gossip. Some people say it’s nothing manmade at all, but some creature of the ether come to cut us down to size. Us as in human beings, as if it were some old god. “
“It would be just like a god to strike us down, tear us from our tower of Babel and teach us humility. But no, I don’t believe my God would do such things.”
“The God of England?”
“A compassionate God,” Hargreaves snorted.
“There are old pirate legends, you know? Like the Krakens of old, or the maelstroms, the mermaids, we have our demon storms, our ghost ships cleaving soulless through the air. There are things out there we have very little knowledge of. Even the lift compound running through this ship seems otherworldly, anachronistic in spite of our steamworked times. The superstitious rabble could easily be right.”
“I know not what it is,” Hargreaves admitted, “and I do not care very much. The Queen set me to stop it, and retrieve our Houses of Parliament if we can. That is all I wish to know.”
“You have to have some curiosity about the thing you mean to intercept?”
Hargreaves snorted. Within her was much of the detective, but also something of the soldier as well. Arturo C. Adler would have answered an unabashed, flamboyant yes to the question.
The Inspector had to grudgingly allow Clemens his point. What stupendous power could rip up entire pieces of Europe and carry them about? It was certainly monstrous.
Albion looked on, but the Inspector seemed to be finished. He shrugged, and bid her enjoy the view as they flew on across the Mediterranean, before heading below decks. Let the Inspector snort; she would not be a problem. The one he had to worry about, when they got to Romania, was his helmswoman, Rosa Marija.
“What do you mean, gone?” squawked Rosa Marija into the Romanian dockhand’s face. The thick-browed Turk just started, alarmed but uncomprehending the beautiful mocha horror screaming at the point of his goatee.
This close to the Ottoman border, the man’s ethnicity was the only sign of their intrusion on this, an independent mooring platform somewhere in the Romanian mountains.
He, Rosa Marija, Inspector Hargreaves and crewman Prissy Jack stood round on the platform, fishing for clues. It was a way station in the middle of nowhere, with only the bare essentials: namely, a bar. The place was packed with dirigibles roped to poles thrust out over the mountains, many of them having been waylaid, turned back from the closed Ottoman border.
“Just that, gone,” Prissy Jack, who happened to know some Turkish, attempted to squeak against Rosa’s tirade. The thin, hatchet-nosed kid was full of surprises, and he looked mixed enough to pass for anybody’s countryman.
Jack spoke rapidly with the dockhand, who seemed to be reconsidering the coin clutched in his fingers. Was gold adequate payment for a good whipping? Clemens himself had often considered the question of Rosa Marija. Prissy Jack spoke again.
“He says a Russian freighter came round two days ago, reporting a black ship like Le Maere over the northwest. She was flying low, otherwise they would never have seen her. It looked like she had taken a lot of damage.”
While Rosa Marija whirled away in a cloud of gypsy veils and huff, Albion and the Inspector exchanged a look. It seemed Le Maere had run into the Lovelorn after all.
“Ask him if there was another ship,” Clemens said quietly while Rosa Marija was getting a drink. “About the size of the French Revenant-class, sort of shaped like a wedge.”
Another burst of chatter, in which Clemens glanced worriedly between Rosa and the suddenly animated Turk.
“He says, of course!” Jack returned with an answer. “The Lovelorn put in at this very station not three days ago. They paid very good money, though in German marks. ”
“Bloody shit, that’s her,” Clemens said to Hargreaves, in the colorful portmanteau of cultures he had when stimulated. “Ada hires out her ship to German border patrol occasionally, after their GSG units became too expensive to maintain. There are only four left by all accounts, the rest of the border defended by mercenaries, often pirates looking to cannibalize their own.”
“The GSG would be the German terrorist response team,” breathed Inspector Hargreaves, visibly impressed. “Who is Ada anyway?”
“Captain of the Lovelorn. Doesn’t matter. Under no conditions are we to break this to Rosa Marija,” Clemens cautioned. In the background, Rosa was arm-wrestling some assembled airmen for drinks, beating them into submission without mussing a single corset tie. As they watched, one man went down with a crash, right through a table, while Rosa waved an elegant glove and grunted supremacy.
“Bollocks. Why not? What does she have to do with either of them?” Hargreaves asked. It wasn’t quite proper of her, but she needed to know if Rosa would be dangerous. Clemens understood all of it flashing across her face.
“Nessie Drake is… well, she’s…. sometimes, right, people hunt for booty together, and they… that is, female sexuality is a lot more fluid, right?” Clemens stammered.
“Oh God, they were lovers,” whispered Hargreaves, flushing pink right down to where skin showed at her neck. The embarrassment was handy, and Clemens let his reply of ‘sort of…’ go away and hang itself.
The two of them couldn’t help but glance at Rosa, now dancing a jig on three-inch heels. A pair of hairy men played the accordion and fiddle, respectively. Surely she had drained the way station’s store of vodka by now?
Meanwhile, Prissy Jack had been conversing with their friend the Turk, seemingly discussing something of mutual amusement. Now he turned and tapped Clemens on the shoulder.
“Captain, Ignat here says Le Maere isn’t likely to have gone far. If they’re running from someone, there are only a few places she could set down to make repairs.”
“Thanks Jack,” answered Clemens, “Have him mark them on this map.”
“If she’s downed, she could be anywhere,” Hargreaves interjected. “Not to mention she’ll likely shoot down anything flying close enough to see her. Didn’t you say Nessie Drake’s got, and I quote with disgust, ‘big honkin’ cannons?’”
“Frankly, now Rosa Marija’s all fired up for it, I would rather pit the ‘Berry against Nessie’s cannons than deny Rosa the piloting. Let’s chase a nightmare, shall we?”
Their conversation was interrupted as a man came flying between them; Rosa Marija, bored with friendly contests, had started a bar fight, yelling happily whilst she laid into everyone with drunken fists.
It wasn’t as if Albion intended to fly over the whole of Romania, waiting for Nessie Drake to shoot them out of the sky. Prissy Jack had done well; there were indeed only five little valleys and mountainous nooks available for a Chiropteran-class dirigible to hide in.
Such a ship was as long as a German zeppelin, and far heavier if she was as damaged as he was led to believe. Clemens’ plan was pretty simple: fly in low, stay invisible, and track on foot once they sighted any sign of aeon particles or debris.
Now if only Rosa Marija would cooperate.
“Hey! DRAKE! Get out here you flat-chested bitch!” Rosa’s voice erupted over the first spot Clemens stopped over. He had even taken the precaution of relieving her of the helm, but overlooked the trumpets mounted at the forecastle directly over the bridge. Rosa’s richly peppered vernacular was now blasting from mountaintop to mountaintop, likely waking up every vampire in the country with its melodious echo.
Bitch…bitch…bitch….
“What in blazes is that racket?” Elric Blair’s voice came over the speaking horns near Clemens’ elbow. Of course- the library. A split second later, similar sentiments were coming in from all over the ship,
as Clemens’ crew discovered their helmswoman was intent on continuing her verbal assault until they found Nessie Drake.
“It’s all right,” Clemens announced. “They’re old friends. If anybody should be screaming her name, it’s Rosa.”
Clemens was resigned to it. Rosa Marija was convinced Nessie wouldn’t hurt a mocha hair on her pretty head, and if Albion tried to stop her, he might have two pepper pots to deal with instead of one. What he hadn’t counted on was somebody else trying.
“Miss Marija! Really! You disgrace yourself!” came thundering over the forecastle trumpets.
It was Inspector Hargreaves, her prim, precise intonation jarring horrifically with the intrusive nature of the instrument. “Let go of the trumpet immediately! Is this the speaking toggle? Switch it off at once!”
“Go to hell, pig! DRAKE!” Rosa retaliated. There were sounds of a struggle, and no slaphappy tussle either. These were the hard, packed thuds and clipped grunts of two skilled fighters doing what they did best.
Clemens couldn’t help but visualize Rosa’s familiar moves: smooth parries and pirouettes, sprinkled with liberal helpings of wild roundhouses and axe-kicks if she could elevate off the forecastle railings. Hargreaves would probably be a tucked-in fighter, all boxer’s jabs and stomps, with some judo or grappling thrown in. Clemens suddenly remembered Rosa had been wearing a lime-green camisole today, with quite a low neckline. Hargreaves was probably in the linen blouse and tight pencil skirt from breakfast.
Clemens flipped the toggle to release his anchors. The squeal of wires accompanied the thud of a metal star walloping into a mountaintop. Then he was vaulting up the ladder towards the forecastle, into the bite of the cold Romanian winds. Clemens barely managed to dodge as a high heel came swinging out over the edge of the deck, nearly clipping his scalp through his bandana.
“Maybe I should have worn goggles…” Clemens muttered, peeking over the edge.
The fight had progressed, and Hargreaves was on the offense, pressing her advantage with smooth, textbook kicks of her pointed boot, her pencil skirt bunched up on her long hips. Rosa was nimbly leaning to the left and right, reading the telegraphed moves.
Hargreaves was much taller, however, and Rosa couldn’t get in close enough to do much but slap at her ankles, hoping she would overbalance. With a crash, Hargreaves smashed a lantern on deck, showering Rosa’s gypsy skirt with glass.
“Ooh, that might have smarted,” Blair’s voice came from Clemens’ right. The Captain turned to see the journalist’s carrot top and blue eyes over the lip of the deck, diagonally opposite. He was starting to grow out of the dye, leaving a sort of rotty vegetable look to his head.
“Do! You! Have! Any! Jammy! Dodgers!” The voice was Cid Tanner, way out on the bow with a pair of binoculars. Out of the square hole beside him, Auntie and Alex were emerging with a pot of tea and a basket of goodies, though whether or not they were jammy remained to be said. Auntie’s checkerboard housedress billowed in the wind.
“They’ve got the right idea. This might be a long haul,” Clemens remarked, giving a moment to consider if he ought to go down and join his crew. The sky was impeccably blue, spotted with big, fat cumulus clouds save for a dark blot on the east. The afternoon sun was just descending from zenith, headed for a brief break in the green Romanian mountains before retiring for the night. As he was looking, a long, shapely, gartered leg blotted out the sun briefly, giving the impression of a swan in flight.
“What are you doing?” Blair called from his perch. “Shouldn’t we stop them?”
“It’s been a long time coming. Might as well let them have it out,” Clemens responded in kind.
A blind man would have seen the tension stretching tighter and tighter. Rosa was a free spirit, and Hargreaves lived by the book. Their coexistence depended entirely on Rosa’s loyalty to Albion, and Hargreaves’ tenuous conviction of this pirate crew’s usefulness in her mission.
Any further than that, Albion was loathe to conjecture. He had to admit, watching the gold braid dance behind Hargreaves’ long limbs made a pretty picture next to Rosa’s muscled, voluptuous, coffee-colored arms.
Slowly, very carefully, Albion put his toes in the woodwork of the ship and his fingers on the deck, working over to where Blair clung to his ladder.
“Budge up, friend,” Clemens grunted, and then the two were shoulder-to-shoulder. “What do you make of it?”
“Never been the scrapping sort myself,” Blair answered, somewhat reluctantly, “But Miss Marija sure does screech most piercingly.”
“It’s when she stops, that you have to be careful,” Clemens said as Rosa managed to get a grip on Hargreaves’ calf. There was a brief moment of groping, and then both men winced as the deck shook with Hargreaves’ fall. Just as Rosa turned to gloat, a pair of long legs shot up from the floor and squished Rosa’s cheeks until her face looked like the balloon on an airship. Then, both women were on the floor, scrabbling for a hold.
“Might be over in a bit,” Blair remarked, but Clemens merely shook his head.
Just as suddenly as they were down, both women struck simultaneously, rolling away from each other, and then they were up, circling. Red welts marked where bruises would soon bloom blue and mottled black, but other than at Rosa’s lip and Hargreaves’ knee, no blood had been drawn.
“I’m not going to let you endanger my mission just for some stupid pirate whore,” Hargreaves spat. Pillow talk, it was, before the two bodies met again- the Inspector was flushed, her limbs loose. She was enjoying the release. She was taunting Rosa, asking for more.
Rosa’s shoulders tensed, just a bit, then relaxed.
“Shit,” Clemens cursed.
“What? Why shit? They’re not too hurt, right?” Blair said, but his voice was lost in the flurry of Clemens clambering to his feet on the deck.
The two women on the forecastle stopped circling. A moment of silence clung, before they pounced towards each other, big cats going for the jugular.
“ROSA MARIJA YOU PUT THE KNIFE AWAY,” Albion Clemens bellowed, his voice thundering louder than any speaking trumpet.
Both women skidded to a halt, Hargreaves stumbling for a moment as the heel of her boot went out from under her. Rosa stopped smoothly, her skirts flashing forward with the momentum.
Her slender fingers opened, and a barb the size of an arrowhead stuck point-first in the deck. Hargreaves’ eyes were huge in her head.
Albion hadn’t screamed, exactly. He had spoken loudly, and the air rang with the depth of his voice more than the volume. His shoulders were visibly shaking under his thin linen shirt and brown silk vest, but his feet were planted like centenarian trees. Anything else would be futile in the face of Rosa’s rage.
Rosa Marija turned on her heel and began the climb back into the ship.
“Anticlimatic!” Cid’s voice drifted in from across the ship. The three of them threw up their hands, but made no move to break up their impromptu tea party. Maybe ten minutes had passed, and they had even set out things for Prissy Jack, who had just arrived and missed all the action.
“Would you mind telling me what just happened?” Hargreaves slurred through her slightly labored breathing.
Clemens looked around, shaken out of his stance. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Rosa Marija until she disappeared into the bridge. In a moment, the ship’s anchors made their whirring trip from the ground below, and the ‘Berry began to move once again.
“I’d like an explanation, Captain Clemens,” the Inspector was still hounding the Captain, a bit more clearly now. Albion looked her up and down, watching the way she stood, and concluded she wasn’t too badly hurt. He took out a handkerchief, knelt, and started to dab at the cut at Hargreaves’ knee. To her credit, she didn’t even flinch.
“What happened,” Clemens said, as he wet the cloth from a flask at his hip. Hargreaves hissed as the liquor touched a cut. He pressed at the wound to open it and see if there was glass inside. “Was not your fault. You brought up somet
hing Rosa’s been pushing down for years. I expect when you see her again, she might be willing to discuss it with you. At the very least, she’s going to let you borrow her good clothes.”
“Nessie Drake wasn’t a lover,” Hargreaves concluded.
“No,” Clemens agreed. “It was much worse.”
“What’s this about lesbians?” chimed in Blair, who never seemed to have a good hold of the grapevines. His nose was buried deep in his notebook, his hand fluttering away.
“Nessie Drake,” Clemens continued later, in the galley of the ship. Auntie had set out tea, proper tea, sandwiches and cold chicken and Earl Grey.
Albion hadn’t intended it, but the gang had gathered around him as Auntie took over patching up the Inspector, and now he found himself telling the story to his whole crew- sans Rosa.
“She is very hard to explain. I don’t want to tell it, as I’ve known Rosa Marija longer than any of you, and she would not want me to.”
“But, you are also acting Captain of the Huckleberry, and the responsibility of our safety falls to you,” Blair noted observantly. He was getting into the hang of piracy, albeit a bit uncomfortably.
“I won’t have us going into this blind, any of us. Particularly, you,” Albion looked at the Inspector, boots stripped, toes tickling the wind.
“Stop bellyaching and spill it, the lady’s a blasted mystery as it is,” Cockney Alex complained, banging his mug like a Saxon. “We finally get to know what makes the invincible Rosa Marija tick.”
“All right, you damned barbarian, don’t rush it!” complained Albion.
“I’ll be taking responsibility for my own life, you simpering infant,” Cid griped amiably. Clemens nodded to this. “But tell it like it is,” finished Cid.
