Free The Noble Pirates by Rima Jean

smiled at Nel, a small woman in her early twenties. She smiled back, her eyes shining. I felt a lump in my throat. This little prostitute had indeed been on the brink of death when I’d arrived at the bawdy house, looking for Kat. My frigid reception was forgotten when I told her I could help Nel and the other women afflicted with the illness. I’d done nothing fancy: I’d boiled water and added a bit of salt and sugar to it. Then I made them drink it. And drink some more.
    That was it.
    In return, Nan, the “madam” of the place, took me to Ruth.
    Her hut was on the fringe of Nassau, a decrepit place with a thatch roof. She was an escaped slave and the wife of a pirate. She was also, according to the women of the brothel, a witch doctor. Nonetheless, she’d taken care of their unwanted pregnancies, and thus they trusted her quite a bit. The aroma of herbs and burning incense filled the air of her dark, gloomy hut. She sat in a corner, drinking from a mug, not the least bit surprised to see us, a whore and a strange woman. A large scar seamed her face from hairline to chin, and she was missing an eye. No eye patch, no fake eye, nothing. Just an empty eye socket. A scarf was tied around her head and her threadbare skirts hung in tatters about her dark legs.
    “Ruth,” Nan said, and I could tell she was fearful of the woman. “There’s a lady ‘ere wanted to see you.” She looked at me and nodded, then whispered, “I’ll wait for you outside.” Nan wanted to spend as little time in that hut as possible, and I couldn’t blame her. The heady odor compared favorably to the other scents of Nassau, but was still quite dizzying. The vertigo only increased as Ruth stood and squinted her one good eye, trying to peer at me through the dimness.
    “What you have?” she asked in a gravelly voice. “No want baby, eh?” I stepped into a shaft of light that filtered in from a hole in the roof so that she could see my face. She gasped, swore, and the mug she was holding clattered to the floor. To my astonishment, she put a hand to her scarred cheek and uttered, “Sabrina!”
    I nearly fell over backward trying to inch my way out of the hut. “Shit!” I hissed, steadying myself, breathing hard. How did she know my name?
    Before I recovered from my shock, she said, “I know you come. I know it. I see you.”
    My fear was overcome by my desperation. Her English was bad, but she was going to give me an explanation, dammit. I took two long strides to stand before her, then I grabbed her by the shoulders and said, “How do you know my name?” She shook her head, speaking in her native African tongue under her breath, a look of fear in her good eye. I gave her shoulders a firm shake. “How do I get back? How? Tell me!”
    She shook her head, apparently more afraid of me than I was of her. “Not know! Know only to give you this.” She extricated herself from my grip, rushed into the darkness and emerged seconds later carrying a small tin box. I opened it to find several chunks of brown bark. She knew what I had come for before I’d even asked.
    “Yes,” I said, and sighed. “This is what I came for.”
    In the end, Ruth could tell me nothing, even though I grilled her for a good twenty minutes. Perhaps she knew something that she wouldn’t share, or she truly knew nothing. She said the words “not know” at least three hundred times. Eventually I gave up. Black magic, time warps… It was all so fantastic and beyond anything I could, or would, accept… I simply couldn’t dwell on it. I was going to put one foot in front of the other and focus on getting through the moment.
    I had no choice but to go with the flow.
    Now, as I sat before Nel, who was greedily slurping down the rehydration solution I’d made for her, I turned to look at England, my expression reserved. “This infection,” I said. “I hear that many of the residents are immune – I mean, invulnerable – to it. That most of the people afflicted