Cast In Dark Waters by Tom Piccirilli, Ed Gorman Page B

stone medallion bearing the face of the Celtic deity Anu , mother of the gods. For a moment he almost let himself be swept up in the urge to mount the stairs and beat back the two boys, but it would only serve to cause greater enmity with the others on board. He dreaded there would already be enough blood awaiting him.
    "Die and be damned, you scurvy curs."
    The guttersnipes sniggered and gestured for him to come up and the sword at his hip was a reassuring pressure, yet with a grunt of shame he turned and returned at once to his cabin.
    But far worse than murderers, he feared that even the dead were at his heels.
    Three ships had anchored in nine-fathom waters within the past twenty-four hours outside Port of St. Christopher's, making the small harbor a battleground of drunken pirates ramming each other's skiffs as they landed. Every sailor tried to impress and outspend all the others with the plunder he'd accumulated on various recent raids. A crowd of masts cluttered the harbor. Press-gangs, hell-carts, and coaches raised a racket along the streets. The fish-wives went about the wharves and marketplace selling their wares, and the whores did the same.
    Neither Neptune nor the lord Jesus of Nazareth held any sway here. Most of the brigands and marauders stuck to the usual ways of losing their money: crooked card games; harlots who'd fill a man with wine and sweet words before lifting a coin purse; dealing with former freebooters who worked all the havens of the Caribbean, rolling the men who'd once been their mates. The dead piled up along the piers while the swindled sought reparation by looting drunkards and the elderly. The cycle had no beginning or ending, it simply continued from day to day and ship to ship. The same gold piece could pass through twenty hands a night.
    A few of the larger ports in the Bahamas had some law enforcement, but such courts held no interest in poor men—pirates or not—and could be bought for a few pieces-of-eight.
    Certainly none of the officials were going to stop the fight now underway in the Hog's Head Inn.
    It was an odd scene to witness, even in a tavern where the bartender frequently used a machete to lop off the hands of thieves reaching for the till. The throng clattered their bowls and tankards of grog. They knocked furniture back as they eased away from the center of the room where the fray progressed and grew ever more waspish. Cheers and hails went up. Two brawlers laughing in each other's faces as they circled and slashed.
    "Have at 'em, lass, but you'll likely lose your blade if you peg his overstuffed belly!"
    Jessup, a stocky pirate with a graying beard hanging to his huge gut, stabbed with his sword and continued on after the slight woman causing him so much trouble. She pranced around him while he flailed and thrust. He was the new first mate of the Baranaro , now that he'd broken the former mate's skull and dumped the body out beyond the reef in full view of the other men.
    He tried like hell to pin the girl but she evaded him easily with a mocking flourish. She wore a simple white blouse and calico trousers with bone buttons down the front, her bountiful figure stirring the men around the Hog's Head even as she dodged and attacked. She had a flintlock pistol stuffed in the wide red sash around her waist, but she refused to draw it.
    That in itself was another way to scorn Jessup, and it infuriated him until he barked out snarling chortles. She swatted him twice in the ass with the flat of her blade and the crowd around him roared.
    Looping curls of her lank red hair coiled across her eyes as she parried with her cutlass. All she knew of this Jessup was that, besides blatantly murdering officers, he'd robbed one of his own mates a while back in Montserrat, a navigator named Owlstead . Pirates usually didn't keep grudges for long because it was a loser's game, holding on to such pettiness when there was so much new ill will stacking up each day.
    But Owlstead was an