Free God of Luck by Ruthann Lum McCunn

not quail for fear of the corporals’ sticks or the devils’ muskets, bayonets, swords, and shackles, but their lash.

    RULES FOR THE between-decks were posted under all three hatches, and topping the list of “crimes punishable with the lash” was gambling. Yet the man-stealers had knowingly decoyed gamblers, and the thieves in the pigpen had encouraged purchases of dice, paper cards, bamboo dominoes, and checkers to wile away the time at sea in play. Is it any wonder our quarters were as infested with gamblers as bugs? Some were even gaming with the pests.
    Old Eight in the berth directly opposite mine would flip two cockroaches onto their backs, pin them into the wood, side by side, and then drop a little piece of straw on top of each. The roaches—instinctively, I suppose— would grasp and pass the straw from one pair of their legs to the other, over and over, and Old Eight would take wagers on which would be the first to collapse in exhaustion.
    Also gambling with cockroaches were Toothless and Big Belly. Except they tickled their roaches with straw, irritating them the way boys and gamblers back home did crickets, until the creatures fought.
    The cockroaches kept fighting after they were injured. They’d struggle to keep moving the straw back and forth long after their legs’ initial frantic churning slowed to a drag. Did they somehow realize that once they gave up, they’d be squashed dead and replaced?
    To make room for their roaches, Old Eight, Toothless, and Big Belly had to dangle their feet over the edges of their berths. Gamblers using dominoes or checkers, which required more space, had to sit with their knees drawn up to their chins, their backs hunched, their heads bowed.
    Since the height of the between-decks from floor to ceiling was barely five-and-a-half feet and our berths were double-tiered, we were compelled to eat our meals like this. A bowl of rice, though, was finished in a matter of moments while a game could stretch from the chiming of one bell to another—and another.
    I’d pass gamblers thus huddled whenever I was in the walkway, and while waiting to use a wastebucket, I was sometimes invited to join in. Even if I’d had money, I’d have refused. But I gave the players my full attention. As children, Moongirl, our friends, and I had often played the game in which a fist represents a stone, an outstretched hand water, and curved fingers a bowl. I’d had fun whether my bowl managed to capture someone else’s water or their water swept away my stone instead of my stone breaking another player’s bowl. So I’d never tried to anticipate my opponents’ strategies or made any of my own. I’d never trained myself to make accurate judgments, decisions, and changes in haste the way Moongirl had urged me to, the way she did. Realizing that this failing was, at least in part, why I’d been bested repeatedly by my captors, I was attempting to change by studying them, my fellow captives, especially the gamblers and corporals.
    The corporals, I noted, received a hefty percentage of the money passing through the gamblers’ hands. Similarly, the corporals accepted bribes to overlook theft and fighting, which were also punishable with the lash.
    When Ah Bun—three berths down from me—broke the rule which prohibited smoking in the between-decks though, the corporals jeered at him for offering them cash to spare him.
    “Wah, you really are bun, stupid.”
    “Straw burns, you idiot. Wood, too.”
    “What good is your cash if we burn to death?”
    “Have mercy,” Ah Bun pleaded. “I didn’t think.”
    “You got that right!”
    “Now you won’t forget.”
    Nor would any of us who witnessed Ah Bun’s suffering after the corporals returned him to his berth. And where Ah Bun had suffered the twelve strokes prescribed for smokers, gamblers, fighters, and thieves, the punishment for mutiny was forty-eight lashes, after which the mutineer would be chained to the ringbolts of the stern deck