Free God of Luck by Ruthann Lum McCunn Page A

until released by the captain.
    From the glimpses I’d caught of him, the captain seemed almost mousy he was so small and gray. But no mouse would have charge of a devil-ship let alone permit the use of a whip that had nine separate cords, each weighted with jagged slatherings of tar.
    Ah Bun, in a voice faint from screaming, told us the sensation of those nine sharply-edged cords simultaneously flaying open his flesh was like that of molten lead. “By the second stroke, I was praying I’d die. After the fourth, I passed out. The devils revived me before going on. Not just that once. Every time.”

    RUMOR HAD IT that the captain, furious because the doctor’s dismissals would short him six captives, had abducted Small Eyes. Then, when the swineherd had rushed to defend Small Eyes, the captain had accused them both of fraud. In the ruckus that had followed, the swineherd and Small Eyes had somehow managed to leap overboard, and the crew from the junk had saved them. Otherwise, the two would have been whipped and chained alongside the pointy-eared resister I’d seen shackled to the stern deck when I’d first boarded.
    Whether this resister was still in irons, I was uncertain. He had not been brought below. Neither had he been seen in the sickroom located directly behind the main mast. Sleepy checked whenever he went for what Twitchy, translating for the doctor, called “a dose of medicinal opium.” I’d also try to look while fetching our meals from the cookhouse. But all I could see of the sickroom was the area outside where Sleepy and others with the opium habit stretched out to take their dose, and my view of the stern deck was blocked by the sails billowing from the main mast, the buffalo tethered beneath the ship’s longboat, which was piled high with caged hens and pigs.
    There was little meat in our rice. Yet every day there were sounds of slaughter, and I’d seen the knives and cleavers necessary for butchering in the cookhouse. Was it really possible that, as instructed by Ah Choy, I need only scratch my left ear while waiting for tomorrow’s morning meal, and a cook would hide one in my basket?
    That the cooks—Pockface, Shorty, and Ah Kow—were willing to participate in a mutiny, perhaps even lead it, rang true. Pockface, a butcher in Canton, had been kidnapped on his way to visit his parents in their home village; Shorty and Ah Kow, cooks at a large restaurant in the city, had been decoyed by an acquaintance who’d told them there were openings with better wages in a Macao gambling house, and the three ranted about their captivity. So did Ah Choy.
    But the cooks’ helpers, Big Buffalo and Little Buffalo, wore greasy smiles. Before voluntarily signing contracts for labor overseas, both men had been unemployed porters who ate only when they were lucky enough to find a grave with offerings of food they could steal. Now their mouths were never empty. Indeed, it was their con- tinuous grazing in the cookhouse that had earned them their nicknames.
    I was certain they wouldn’t mutiny, and there were bound to be others, especially among the corporals, opium eaters, and gamblers—those who found the risk of injury and death worse than a future in captivity without family. In the shipyard where Ah Jook had labored though, much of the work had been the conversion of foreign vessels for the more profitable trade in men, and he said the number of crew on a devil-ship this size was about fifty. Say just half the captives mutineed, we’d still outnumber the devils eight to one. Moreover, there were former soldiers among us.
    True, Red and the sailors had confiscated anything they found that could be turned into a weapon. Despite the thoroughness of their searches, however, they’d failed to discover some items. How else would Old Eight have pins to hold his cockroaches in place? Pins that could be made into weapons. And although every sailor seemed to have a knife hanging from a strap about his waist, the