Dead Water by Barbara Hambly Page A

“She's yours for a thousand dollars.”
    The young man flushed in the paling torchlight and looked hastily aside. But he didn't move off. Gleet's sly smile widened.
    “Worth every dime of it,” he coaxed. “Sixteen years old . . .” His big hand tugged off her tignon, releasing a soft cloud of dark-brown hair over her shoulders. “Come up closer and have a look. She's a prime one.” And he dragged her head back around when she would have turned her face away, her expression wooden but for the tears of shame in her eyes. “Now, you tell me if you've ever seen one half so sweet, for a thousand or fifteen hundred.”
    The young planter stammered, “I— She's very lovely, of course, sir, but . . .”
    “But you got your daddy's money, and can't spend it?” Gleet nodded understandingly, his sharp blue glance taking in the sweat that stood out on the youth's forehead. “But that's the great thing about a gal like this, you see. You don't like her, you can sell her again, and not a penny the worse. Here—feel of her if you don't believe me.” With a quick move he tore open the front of the girl's dress and pulled it back over her shoulders, leaving her breasts bare in the torchlight. “Go ahead, feel of her. Tell me if you ain't felt titties as hard as those in all your born days.”
    Hannibal slipped through the crowd like a ferret and climbed the stair. January followed. The two men were silent as they walked down the long upper promenade on the starboard side of the boiler-deck, past the shut doors of the staterooms to the one Hannibal had been given, three from the stern. The young steward in his white coat was there, setting out a carafe of water and a glass: “Let me know if there's anything you need, sir. My name's Thu; I been with Mr. Tredgold on the
Silver Moon
three-four years now. You're on a good boat.”
    “I'm sure of it,” returned Hannibal, slipping him one of the eleven-penny bits he'd acquired earlier in the night.
    “Luncheon is served in the Main Saloon at noon, dinner at six. I see you have a fiddle with you, sir. If it isn't an imposition, if you'd care to favor the company with a little playing after supper, it's often done on board that there's playing and dancing in the evenings. . . .”
    “As it happens, my man Ben is also quite accomplished. . . .”
    It is only a game,
thought January. Only the masque of despotism, necessary to their disguise. But after the scene on the deck below, he felt disgusted and angry, and walked to the end of the promenade, where the most fashionable of the staterooms overlooked the giant wheel. Narrow stairways ran down to the lower promenades, where the valets and maids of the cabin passengers were already staking out their tiny niches among the heaped baggage and piles of cordwood stacked along the walls of the 'tween-decks: maids on the portside, valets on the starboard, at least those who weren't required to sleep on the floors of their masters' staterooms. The doors to the galley and the engine-room opened into this part of the promenade, screened almost completely from the chained line of slaves by head-high piles of wood. Market-women in bright skirts and tignons swarmed in and out of the galley door, with last-minute offers of tomatoes and melons; two white children on the upper promenade dragged their nurse's hands and screamed, reaching toward a pralinière who hawked her wares to the stevedores. None of the market-women, January observed, would go around the piled wood to where Ned Gleet was checking the chains on his slaves; nor would the deck-hands, as they readied their long poles to shove the
Silver Moon
away from the wharf.
    Close by the rear corner of the 'tween-decks, where a narrow walkway crossed behind the wheel, Miss Skippen's maid leaned on the rail, gazing at the Cathedral's towers with a face of stone, tears running in silence down her cheeks.
    The huge black wheel at the back of the boat began to turn.
    A flash of red among the