Free Trade Wind by M. M. Kaye Page B

and fell upon her, racing across the tilted deck, waist high and ruthless. It whirled Hero’s wet skirts about her knees, and knocking her down, carried her with it as though she had weighed no more than a shuttlecock. She snatched wildly at a stanchion and missed; saw for a brief, terrifying moment that there were no rails left at the far edge of the steeply sloping deck and nothing to hold on to. And then she was rolled over and over, blind and deaf, and tilted overboard in a cataract of boiling foam.
    No one had ever taught her to swim, and it would have made no difference if they had, since no swimmer could have fought that furious sea. A mountain of water dragged her under and threw her up again, and for an instant rain and spray lashed at her face. But before she could do more than gasp for air she was down again, choking and struggling. A second wave caught her and swung her up and threw her into something that tangled about her arms and her helpless body, and she grasped frantically at it and felt rope between her numbed fingers.
    For a period of time that seemed endless, but which could not have lasted for more than a few minutes at the most, she clung there, fighting to keep her head above the angry sea, and gulping alternate air and water as the waves dragged her down and tossed her up again. And then at last the rope drew taut and she was being drawn up, hauled in hand over hand as though she had been a mackerel on a line, to be dragged bruised and bleeding and three parts drowned on to a tilting deck that was mercifully solid.
    Hands caught her wrists and ankles, and among a medley of voices that yelled above the gale she caught an odd and entirely incredible sound. Laughter…
    Someone was shouting with laughter, and someone else—or perhaps it was the same person?—said: “A mermaid, by God!” And laughed again.
    And then suddenly they were all slipping and sliding along the deck in another swirling fury of foam, and the whole wild, wet, horrible world turned black, as Miss Hero Athena Hollis lost consciousness for the first time in her life.

5
    There was a weight pressing down upon her back. Pressing down and lifting again and then descending once more. Her hands were strained uncomfortably behind her and were being roughly and rhythmically thrust outwards and brought back again, and altogether she had never felt so sore and sick and uncomfortable in all her short and pampered life. Not even when Barclay’s groom, Jud Hinkley, had been teaching her to ride, and she had been thrown from the back of a bolting horse on to hard and sun-baked ground…
    Somewhere quite close to her someone was making a hideous groaning noise as though they were in pain, and it was several minutes before she realized that it was she herself who was responsible for this abominable sound.
    She struggled feebly and attempted to turn over, and in immediate response to that movement the hands that gripped her wrists relaxed. The man who had been kneeling above her and applying a rough and ready form of artificial respiration turned her on her back, and she found herself looking up into the face of a complete stranger.
    During the nine long weeks of the voyage Hero had come to know every member of the Norah Crayne ’s crew, at least by sight, but this was someone she had never seen before. A fair-haired man with a thin, deeply sunburned face, a cleft chin and a pair of remarkably pale eyes.
    Hero passed her tongue over her swollen lips and tasted a saltness that was not of the sea, but blood welling from a cut on her lower lip. She grimaced weakly and attempted to sit up, but finding the effort beyond her strength, forced her voice to a croaking whisper:
    “Where is…Captain Fullbright?”
    “Captain who?”
    It was, she thought vaguely, an educated voice. Then he must be a passenger. She could not understand it. Unless for a brief, ridiculous moment it crossed her mind that she might be dead and the fair-haired man the soul of