Free Betrayal by Lady Grace Cavendish

mate go up there and free it.” He pointed up and up and up the mast that was nearest the front of the ship, to where there was a sort of lump tangled in the ropes.
    Masou knuckled his forehead. “Yes, sir.” He went over to the rail and climbed on it.
    I stared in horror at the enormous mast stretching upwards into the sky. “What if we fall?” I quavered.
    “You’ll die,” said the man who had found us. “And that’d be an easy way out.”
    “You can do as you’re told, boy,” added Mr. Newman, “or you can go in the brig. But you get no food if you don’t work. Up you go.”
    Well, it was long past breakfast time and I was thirsty, too, so I gulped and nodded.
    Mr. Newman frowned. “I don’t like your manners,Gregory,” he said. “Mend ’em or you’ll be in worse trouble than you can imagine.”
    “Y-yes, sir,” I replied, and went to follow Masou.
    He hadn’t started climbing yet. “You go first,” he whispered to me. “Then if you slip, I can catch you. Just think of it as a tree,” he suggested.
    “Hell’s teeth!” I exclaimed nervously. I don’t mind climbing trees, but this was a tree that was rocking back and forth with the waves.
    “Wait for the ship to roll the other way,” instructed Masou. “Now, up …”
    I climbed, holding on as tight as I could. My knees were knocking, but at least I could hear Masou behind me. We went up and up, past the huge yellow-white sheets of the sails and about a thousand ropes. But the ladder—what was it Captain Drake had called them? Ratlines? Anyway, the rungs got narrower and narrower and then stopped under the platform, halfway up the mast, that he’d called the fighting top.
    “Now what?” I wailed. “There’s no more ladder!”
    “See the ropes going out to the edge of the fighting top?” called Masou from below me.
    I looked, and saw ratlines I hadn’t noticed, stretching from the mast out to the edge of the top—butwhat good were they? I’d be hanging right out over the deck, which was really far below us now. “Yes,” I whispered, knowing what Masou was going to say.
    He did. “We have to climb them.”
    “What?” I squealed, sounding almost as squeaky as Lady Sarah when she’s seen a mouse. “I can’t!”
    “Yes, you can,” Masou said firmly.
    “But … it’s too high … I’ll be hanging by my hands. I can’t, Masou!” I pleaded.
    “Yes, you can!” shouted Masou fiercely. “You
can
do it, because you
have
to!”
    Masou had never spoken to me like that before. Nobody had. But I still could not move.
    “Allah save us,” he muttered. “Grace, I cannot coax you, there’s no time. You’ve climbed harder things; I know you can do this, but the only way for you to know it too is to try. Now
climb
the
tree
! Or else you will have to go back down and confess that you’re a girl.”
    Suddenly I felt furious with myself. Who was acting like Lady Sarah now? Masou was right. I would
not
give up and admit to being a girl just because I was scared of climbing the ratlines.
    Heart hammering, I put my hand up, gripped one rung of the rope ladder, then the other, got my toesinto a narrow gap, then my other foot … I was leaning right out, with nothing under me for miles and miles … If I fell, I’d die! Toes clawing round the rung of the ladder, I reached up for the next rung, then the next. The edge of the top was the worst, I had to hold on with one hand, move the other over the edge to the new set of ratlines there, then wrap my arm around it, then reach over with the other hand …
    Suddenly Masou was there, hauling me up onto the top by my jerkin. He must have whisked up on the other side of the mast. “Well done,” he whispered in my ear. “You see? You did it!”
    I lay there for a minute, gasping and shaking, and then got slowly to my feet.
    Masou pointed to the next, narrower set of ratlines, which went right up to the point of the mast where the cloth was tangled in a rope.
    “Oh no,” I gasped, my heart