Arabella of Mars

by David D. Levine

  “You said something about a lesson needing to be taught,” Arabella observed.

  “Aye,” Gowse muttered. “Aye, that I did. And someone got hisself schooled, a’right.” He reached out with the hand that was not holding his nose, sending himself slowly tumbling. “Would ye be so kind as to bring me some water, lad?”

  Leather sacks of water were kept in a net at one end of the deck. Arabella brought him one, tossing it to him from some distance away in case of a ruse.

  “Thanks,” Gowse said, pulling the stopper with his teeth. He swigged down half the water and used the other half to wet his shirt-tail and mop up some of the blood from his face. Droplets of reddish water drifted everywhere.

  After cleaning himself up a bit, Gowse looked up to where Arabella still hung near the overhead. “Good fight, lad.” He nodded. “Good fight.”

  “Thank you,” Arabella said, not knowing what else to say.

  “We’ll do better with that gun tomorrow.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “That’s all a man can do.”

  Airmen, Arabella reflected, were a strange lot.

  * * *

  After the fight, the men treated Arabella differently. Before, she’d felt tolerated—the weak, unskilled new hand—and had thought that good enough, for now. But after her defeat of Gowse she seemed accepted as truly part of the crew. When she had problems or questions, the other men provided answers and assistance without the air of annoyance or opprobrium they’d displayed before; she was now treated as merely inexperienced. It was as though, by showing skill with her fists, she’d demonstrated her potential to perform any other task.

  As for Gowse himself, to Arabella’s great surprise his relations with Arabella grew highly cordial. She’d feared retaliation, expected incivility, and hoped for merely being left alone, but despite his two black eyes and visibly off-kilter nose—about which every one, including the officers, studiously avoided any comment—Gowse now treated Arabella as the greatest of friends.

  Of course, she was still the most junior member of the crew, still given the filthiest and most tedious jobs. And if in gunnery drill she was slow in delivering a charge of powder, which did still occur from time to time, Gowse could be sharp with a rebuke. But the same was true of any other man whose performance displeased him, and during the few hours of each day when they were neither asleep nor employed in their duties he would often invite her to share a chew of tobacco (which she declined) or join in a game of cards.

  Paradoxically, now that the men had accepted her as one of their own, Arabella worried more about keeping her sex hidden. Before, when no one had paid her the least mind, she’d been free to slink off to the head while the men were gaming or carousing together, when she was less likely to be caught with her pants down. Now that she was engaged in those games and carousals herself, her absence was more likely to be noticed.

  But even at those times when she was not alone in the head, she still managed to keep her private parts private. The space was dark, close, and vile; visibility was poor, and no one wanted to do any thing other than to get in, do his business, and get out. Only during a few days of the month was there any need for Arabella to spend any more time in the head than that herself, and even then she could plead the flux or some other, more sordid, medical condition. These excuses were greeted by a sympathetic nod or knowing wink, and seemed to raise no suspicion. Certainly no airman would even consider consulting the ship’s surgeon for any condition less serious than a direct and immediate threat to life or limb.

  Outside of the head there was rarely any threat of exposure. The men slept in their clothing, almost never washed—water was too closely rationed to do otherwise—and even when a man was injured or ill and had to visit the surgeon, clothing was removed only from the affected part. Some men would strip off their shirts during gunnery drill and when working the pedals, but not every one did, and no one ever questioned Arabella’s modesty. And as the ship drew farther and farther from the sun, the warmth of the air diminished and hardly any man went shirtless.

  But there was one incident in the head that made Arabella’s heart pound.

  * * *

  The incident came in the middle of Arabella’s time off-watch, when a dire pressure in her gut roused her from her well-earned slumber. She rushed to the head, and was in the middle of doing her business when she realized she was not alone. Two other men were there with her.

  This company was not unusual; the space could accommodate as many as five, in a pinch. Nor was it strange that, the head being so dark, she had no idea of their identities. What was unusual was that they were conversing in the head—unlike women, men generally did their business in silence—in voices so low they no doubt thought themselves inaudible. But, after many years of gunnery drill, many airmen were somewhat deaf, and often spoke more loudly than they knew.

  “So,” rasped one, “are you with us?” His voice was low and grating, quite distinctive, but not one she recognized. Perhaps, she thought, he was deliberately disguising it.

  “Maybe,” came the response. This voice was not familiar either. “All I know is, I’d rather see a white face on the quarterdeck.”

  “John Company does love our Captain Singh,” the first man replied with hard irony. “He makes the owners a tidy profit, him and that witchy machine of his, so they put up with his heathen ways. But there’s plenty of good English airmen on this ship, and officers too, who agree with you.”

  A pause. “I’m in.”

  “Good man.” There was a rustle of cloth—the sound of a handshake? “We’ll contact you again when we’re just about ready to move. Until then, just do your duties, and don’t tell a soul. But be warned—there’s no changing your mind now. We’re watching you, we’re everywhere, and if you even try to tell an officer we’ll slit your throat in your hammock, and don’t think we won’t.”

  “Mum’s the word.” The sound of a hand clapping another man’s shoulder, and then the door opened and closed as the two men slipped out. Try as she might, Arabella could still not discern who they were.

  She floated, trembling, for a long time in the stinking darkness before she returned to her hammock. And then, despite her exhaustion, it was yet a longer time before she slept.

  11

  SAIL HO

  Weeks passed, and the work grew routine. Arabella learned her duties well, became conversant with the strange terminology used by airmen, and developed cordial relations with the men in her mess.

  She overheard no further conversations in the head, nor were there any rumblings of mutiny among the crew on deck. Even the conversation she had heard might be no more than dissatisfied grumbling. Yet she feared that insurrection was brewing, and viewed every man with suspicion. She never found herself alone with the captain, and with no knowledge of which officers or men might be involved in the plot, she dared not share her worries with any one else.

  Despite her caution and concerns, she gradually became more comfortable with her tasks and the other members of the crew. From time to time she was given new duties, which kept her on her toes.

  The one aspect of airmanship she could not seem to master was that of tying knots, which for all its seeming simplicity proved far more complex in execution than her mind was capable of encompassing. She had never dreamed there were so many ways of tying two ropes together! But one day, as she struggled in vain to fix a loop in the middle of a line, her messmate Mills floated up to her with a raised eyebrow, his pink palms raised in a clear offer of assistance.

  The man spoke little—his native language was some West African tongue he shared with no one else on the ship—but Arabella was sure he understood English as well as any man aboard. When he did speak, his words, though not always grammatical, were carefully chosen and to the point.

  “I am to tie a bowline here,” she confessed, “but I simply cannot fathom how to do it when both ends of the line are secured.”

  “Bowline on bight,” he sa
id. With clear deliberate gestures he demonstrated the knot, his pale yellow eyes firm and kind upon hers as he made certain she understood the process.

  She tried it herself then, and though the resulting knot was far more untidy than his, his bright white smile showed that she had tied it correctly.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, and with an amiable salute he returned to his duties.

  * * *

  The most interesting part of her day was the time she spent in the captain’s cabin, learning about navigation and the use and maintenance of Aadim the clockwork navigator. These lessons were nominally for the benefit of Binion and the other midshipmen, with herself as only a guest, but it soon became abundantly clear to all that she was by far the most adept student of the lot. Even Binion, resent the situation though he might, plainly could not deny its truth.

  Though the lessons were hard—the trigonometry of sextant and compass was a particular challenge—Arabella applied herself to them with vigor and joy. Here she could exercise her mind in a way her mother, indeed all of English society, would never tolerate in a girl or even a grown woman. In these moments all shame at her continued deception fell away, replaced by anger at the opportunities denied her by her sex.

  As the captain lectured patiently, Arabella could not fail to be reminded of her father, and she often reflected that he would have very much admired the captain if they had met. The two men shared a keen interest in automata, of course, but the affinity ran deeper than that—both had an actively curious intelligence, a tenacious persistence when confronted with a difficult puzzle, and a warm heart beneath a sometimes gruff exterior. But the most complex automaton in her father’s collection was a mere toy by comparison with Aadim. The more she worked with the navigator, the more impressed she became with the many clockmakers who’d designed and built his workings.

  But far more impressive than those clockmakers, she realized, was the captain himself. Captain Singh’s knowledge of automata ran deep and broad as any aerial current, and he himself was responsible for much of Aadim’s design. Though the captain was no clockmaker himself, his understanding of the clockwork navigator’s mechanisms was complete and intimate. Aadim’s technical draughts were kept in a chest in the captain’s cabin, tightly rolled in a protective leather case, but the captain himself never consulted them; he knew every cog, gear, and shaft as well as he knew the names and duties of his crew.

  The captain, in fact, seemed to treat the automaton as a member of the crew. He always called it “he” or by name, and in cases where the ideal set of the sails or course correction was less than certain, he seemed to respect its solutions far more than the advice of Stross, his sailing-master. This habit caused some small amount of grumbling from his fellow officers, but their complaints were muted because Aadim’s navigation was invariably swifter, more accurate, and more efficient than any of theirs.

  But not only the captain’s mind was admirable to Arabella. He was handsome, to be certain, with fine symmetrical features and piercing dark eyes, and as she aided him to don his always impeccable jacket she could not fail to notice how broad and firm were the shoulders beneath his shirt. And though, as captain, he perforce held himself aloof from the men, he never failed to treat even the least of them—which would, of course, be Arabella herself—with any thing other than respect, kindness, and patience.

  Under other circumstances, he might have been a man whose company she would have sought out for its own sake. But, sadly, those circumstances were not hers, and so she kept her observations of him to herself.

  * * *

  One day Arabella was engaged in holystoning the deck—a tedious and common chore which involved hooking herself to the deck with a leather strap, scrubbing the wood with a pumice stone, and wiping up the resulting dust with a damp washing-leather before it could float away—when a cry of “sail ho!” came up from the lookout on the starboard mast. Immediately every man rushed to the starboard rail, including the other men holystoning, so she too unhooked herself and did likewise. But peer though she might, she saw no sign of any sail.

  The men around Arabella fidgeted and murmured uncertainly. “What are we looking for?” she asked her messmate Hornsby, who floated beside her, shielding his eyes from the sun.

  “’Nother ship,” he muttered, still staring off into the distance. “Rare in these parts, and troublesome.”

  “Troublesome? How so?”

  “There!” he cried, pointing downward. Arabella looked in the indicated direction and this time managed to discern a tiny, wavering speck, barely visible against the blue of sky and small, scudding clouds. It might be a hundred or a thousand miles off; without landmarks, she had no sense of distance.

  “What’s so troublesome about that?” Arabella asked again. “It’s much too far away to bother us.”

  “Aye, and if she keeps her distance, there’s no worry. But it’s her angle on the bow I’m worried about.” Arabella knew from her lessons with Aadim that “angle on the bow” referred to the angle between the line of Diana’s course and a line drawn from Diana to the other ship. “No Marsman would come at us from below like that; she’d be ahead or astern, on the same course as we.” He pointed again, measuring with his eye. “If the angle changes with time, we can all breathe easy. But if it don’t … that means our courses intersect.”

  “But surely we can easily avoid a collision, with so much warning and so much space to maneuver?”

  Hornsby took his gaze from the distant speck and fixed it upon Arabella. “Unless she means to engage us. And who’d want to do a thing like that?”

  Suddenly the reason for the crew’s agitation became clear. “Pirates,” she breathed.

  “Or worse,” said Hornsby.

  “What could be worse than pirates?”

  “Could be a French frigate. Our little guns haven’t a chance against a full-blown man of war.” Again he peered into the distance. “Mind you, she don’t swim like a frigate. Might be a corsair, though. Nearly as bad.”

  “What kind of ship is that?”

  “No particular rig. Corsair’s just what the French call a privateer.”

  The naval terminology was making her head spin. “What might be the difference between a privateer and a pirate?”

  “Pirates take honest men’s cargo for their own profit, and if they’re caught they hang. Privateers do the same, but they have a license—a letter of marque, it’s called—from the French, and they share what they take with Bonaparte, all legal-like. They’re better funded, better equipped, and just all around more dangerous.”

  “Avast that lolling about!” cried Kerrigan from the quarterdeck. All the men returned to their duties, along with Arabella. But though she did her best to concentrate on her holystoning of the deck, a part of her attention was always directed to the men and officers peering over the starboard side, eyes and telescopes trained on the unknown airship.

  It seemed to her that the direction of their gazes—the angle on the bow—was not changing with time. And the expressions on the officers’ faces betrayed concern.

  * * *

  During the midday meal, Arabella’s mess talked of nothing but the approaching ship and what might occur if she did prove to be an enemy. Of the group, only Gosling and Young had seen action, and the others peppered them with questions.

  “There’s no sinking a ship in the air,” Gosling declaimed, stabbing the air with his finger. “No battle is over until every man on one ship or t’other’s dead or captured.”

  “Nay,” said Young. “When I were in Columbine we met with a French frigate. Cap’n Clive shot away her pulsers and we got away clean.” He took a bite of his biscuit, chewed noisily. “Nary a casualty on either side.”

  Hornsby shook his head. “It’s a dangerous tactic, getting in close enough for a shot like that. Ye might find yer own pulsers shot to h—l. And if neither ship can pedal away, well then it’s hand-to-hand combat, with the survivors left to piece together one good ship from what
ever’s left.”

  “But Diana’s such a fast ship,” Arabella said. “We are traveling at a rate of over seven thousand knots! Why can’t we simply outsail them?”

  Young grinned, though without humor. “It’s not so simple, lad.” He carefully placed two bits of biscuit in the air above the mess table. “This is us, and that’s them.” Then he blew a puff of breath at them, causing both bits to waft gently in the same direction. “We’re both in the same current of air, ain’t we? That’s what’s moving at seven thousand knots, carrying both of us along with it. For either ship to outrace the other, both being in the same wind, means pedaling. And though she’s fast for a Marsman, Diana can’t out-pedal a corsair with one-tenth the tonnage.”

  “Can’t we change course? Find some other wind?”

  “This ain’t the Horn, lad, where the winds blow every which way. We’re in the trades. Nearest other wind might be a hundred mile off.”

  Taylor angrily punched the air. “It’s the g______d waiting I can’t stand! On the sea, ye can’t see another ship until she’s hull-down on the horizon.” As his tattoos attested, Taylor had served as a seaman for years before joining Diana. “But out here … it could be weeks from first sight until she gets within cannon range.”

  “Be careful what ye wish for,” Gosling admonished. “From what I hear at the scuttlebutt, she’s closing fast. We could be in battle within five days.”

  At that all the men, including Arabella, fell silent, morosely chewing their salt pork.

  * * *

  As the other ship drew near, they drilled and drilled, spending hours each day at gunnery practice. While Arabella’s and the other gun crews strove to increase their rate of fire, the topmen dashed from sail to sail, and all the other men slaved at the pedals. The other ship was now clearly visible to the unaided eye, though not yet close enough to make out her provenance.