Free Pirate Freedom by Gene Wolfe

and I splashed a lot of it on the cuts. I had bandaged my side and was trying to get a bandage to stay on my right arm when somebody knocked. It was a soft little knock, like the person was scared, and I could not even guess who it might be.

    I opened the door, and it was the slave girl we had found in there. She had the sheath and gave it to me, and said that the other masters had given it toher and made her knock. I say she said that, but about half was gestures. She knew a couple of hundred words of Spanish, I would say, and her pronunciation was so bad I had to get her to say some words over and over. I asked her name, and she said Santiaga. After she finished bandaging my right arm, I got her real name out of her. It was Azuka.

    She went over to the bunk and got ready for what she thought was coming next. When I said she had to go out, she cried. The other women had beaten her, she said, and made fun of her because we had killed her man. It was mostly making fun, I think, because I could not see that she had been badly hurt. No swollen eyes or cut lips or anything like that. Anyway, I told her that was her problem and they would get tired of it pretty quick.

    Then she wanted to know if it would be all right if one of the other masters became her new man.

    I said sure.

    What about the one at the wheel?

    I said that would be okay, but she would have to wait until he was off duty—until his work was finished.

    She smiled and went out.

    My cabin was right under the quarterdeck, like they usually are, and the chains ran down the aft bulkhead, so I could hear just about everything they said. She could not speak French and Lesage could not speak Spanish, or very little, but it took them about as long to understand each other as it would take me to tie one shoe. Azuka was naked and that probably helped.

    When it was over, I put my new dirk into its sheath, stuck it in my belt, and had a good look around the cabin. The arms locker was under the captain's bunk, and the key was on the bunch we had already found. Except for four muskets, it was nearly empty until I put in the things that had been picked up off the deck after the fight. My guess is that most of the cutlasses and pistols had been issued to the crew as soon as the ship got to Africa. On a slave ship, there is always a chance that the slaves will try to take over.

    I had been thinking a lot about that for two reasons. The first was that some of the crew said these slaves would try to when they were brought up on deck. I limited that to sixteen men—two bunches—at a time because I was afraid they might be right. I said that if sixteen unarmed men who were chained together could beat seven armed men who were not, they deserved to win.

    The second was that I had been thinking about taking off their chains some night and telling them to go to it. In a lot of ways I would have loved to do that, but there were five big problems with it.

    Five!

    Number one was that there was not enough food and water on the ship for us to sail it back to Africa. Number two was that I could not talk to them. Even if I could have, they might not have followed my orders. As it was, they could not even understand them.

    Number three was worse: they were not sailors. Unless the weather was good all the way, we would not make it there and everyone on board would die.

    Number four would have given me fits if the first three had not been so bad. The crew had made me captain. (Capt. Burt had put on board only men who would vote for me.) If I unlocked the slaves, those men would die, not just the one whose nose I had cut, but Lesage and all the rest of them.

    You will have guessed number five already. I would be stranded in Africa, and if Capt. Burt ever got hold of me I was dead meat alla grande.

    So no. It sounded good, but that was out.

    I kept worrying about it just the same. Suppose we just landed them on the coast of Mexico or South America someplace and turned them loose? In