image [https://i.imgur.com/15eGPa6.jpg]

scuttlebutt – A cask of drinking water. Also, slang for gossip, often shared around the scuttlebutt.

TWO MEN OF the Hazard had a disagreement and now wanted to kill each other. The island they chose to do this on was Naresquí Island, which was convenient because that was exactly where Captain Laurier was headed anyway. He sat now on a tree stump, with a cloak pulled over him and his sword laid across his lap like a scepter. But for a crown, he appeared to be a king overseeing a ceremony.

The crew had gathered down by the beach. John could see them all from here, circling the two combatants—a tall fellow named Fenton and a brawny one named…Mitchell? Morgan? He could not remember and did not try. The headache and fever dominated almost all thoughts. Belmont’s ministrations had helped but it now seemed as if it was all up to the Ladyman now. John had Okoa as his constant attendant, never standing too far away in case he needed anything.

The two men were given sabres by Jaime, and two pistols, primed and loaded, from Jenkins. Fenton and the other fellow faced each other, then went back-to-back. Akil and the Africans all stood a good distance away but their focus was fixed on the proceedings—they had never witnessed a duel before. The sun was out in full glory and the wind was brisk.

As good a day as any to die, I reckon.

Pain seized his right arm, and clawed hand, wrapped in a sling, spasmed wicked for a moment before it finally settled. John ground his teeth until the tension fully released.

The two duelists took their ten paces, turned, and took careful aim at each other. After a few breaths, Jenkins called out, “Fire!” Both men fired at once. Fenton nicked the one fellow…Madison? Matthews? But it was to his left arm. And that fellow missed his shot entirely, but had enough gumption to draw his sabre and charge. Fenton’s blade met his and they circled one another as men looked on silently. It was not meet that a pirate ought to cheer on either combatant, only observe and jeer if anyone broke any of the rules of the duel.

Movement from behind. It was Okoa hopping over on his crutch. “Dobbs and Anne return, Captain. They say the natives are all gone. Must have sailed away to the other island when they see us coming.” Okoa was referring to another distant island along the archipelago. The natives here rowed canoes from island to island throughout the year, fishing the shoals with nets and spears.

“They’re certain?” he said.

“Yes, Captain.”

“Well, that’s good news at least. Our food stores?”

“Low at the moment.” Okoa shrugged. They had had to sail with few supplies to make room for all of Bateria de la Lanza’s treasure. Even the bilge was packed to bursting. The plan had been to sail away, bury the treasure in key places as they went along, and collect food from those places. “I’ve sent some men to hunt. There are monkeys here, and signs of wild boar.”

“Outstanding, Okoa. And what about the treasure?”

“They bury the chests you give them.”

“Good.” The others got to choose what to do with their shares. Predictably, they wanted to bring them all with them to Nassau or Port Royal. But like any pirate John knew the safest thing was to bury his treasure and use it like a bank, only taking as much as he needed to keep going. That way, if his ship was ever sunk or seized, his treasure would not vanish along with it. “Tell them they both get an extra ration of rum tonight.”

“Yes, Captain. Don’t forget to drink tea.”

“Of course. Thank you, old friend. And…how many sick?” He dreaded the answer.

“Five, Captain,” Okoa said solemnly.

“Damn. Damn, damn, damn.” He looked to the far end of the beach where a tent had been set up for the sick. “That means it’ll likely spread. We can’t bring them with us.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“What is it? Scurvy, King’s evil, what?”

Okoa shrugged. “Ship’s fever, Captain.”

“Did you speak to Belmont?”

“Captain Belmont say he never been around men with scurvy, but he say there is a belief among some in England it is caused by some deficiency, and that it can be treated, eh…well, here he comes now.” Okoa waved to the former militiaman who came wandering up the shoreline with his red coat pulled on. It was chilly these days, no matter the time of the year, no matter how much the sun was out. Captain Belmont had been the closest thing the ship had to a physiker, and had been tending to Laurier’s Corrupted hand. Now he sort of watched dejectedly on as the two pirates fought to the death on the beach, swords clanging. “Captain Belmont!” Okoa called, and waved him over.

Belmont came walking up to the two of them. “Captain Laurier, Mr. Okoa, what is it?”

“Okoa says it may be scurvy that has us,” John said.

Belmont sighed, and stuck his hands in his pockets. “Two of the men who are sick have loose teeth, and blackening skin. That’s usually a sign of scurvy, the way I understand it?”

John nodded. “It is. But Okoa says you may know a remedy?”

“If you can call it that. Vegetables. Maybe fruit.”

“I’m sorry?”

“A doctor I trained under once told me, ‘There exists a je ne sais quoi in the framework of the human body, and it cannot be preserved without fruits and vegetables.’ He’d read reports from other physicians that ‘Man is meant for land’ and that it be ‘the only physic’ for scurvy. He says since scurvy only seems to happen at sea, where there can be no fruits or vegetables taken to sea—at least, none that won’t quickly rot—then it must be that they are the key.”

“Fruits and vegetables. You want me to treat scurvy with fruits and vegetables.”

“I did not say how to treat it, Captain Laurier, only that some believe it will work. But the other three sickly men…I believe they have something else. Ship’s fever, almost certainly. I have no physic for that, Captain.”

John nodded thoughtfully, and with a flick of his one good hand he dismissed the militiaman. “Damn. Bloody fucking hell.” He sighed. “If it isn’t one thing…”

Okoa turned to leave. Down on the beach Fenton and the other fellow were still testing one another’s defences. Laurier could already see who would win. Fenton’s guard is too low, he needs to keep his tip pointed at his opponent’s eyes so the opponent cannot tell how long the blade is.

“Wait, Okoa. Before you go, tell me, what’s the scuttlebutt?”

Okoa sighed and slowly lowered himself onto a rock beside the tree stump John sat upon. “They still trust you, Captain. It was a magnificent thing, the fortress. But they not like that hand of yours. Belmont say to them, ‘Captain is no demon, it is only some strange malady.’ But they not care.”

“Because they’re seamen,” Laurier said, reaching with his left hand to massage his right shoulder. “And seamen are superstitious.”

“Yes.”

“But do they have faith in me? Will they still follow me through what must be done next?”

Okoa did not have to think. “They will, Captain. They have faith in the Ladyman. I hear them say, ‘The Ladyman can do anything he wants, and we invincible at his side.’ ”

Laurier glanced at him. “They really say that? Or are you trying to make me feel better?”

“No, Captain. I have never seen a crew so strong. Not ever. What you did at the fortress—it make them feel invincible.” He looked at the two men fighting. “Pirates always looking for proof that they made the right decision in leaving their homes. I think, maybe for first time, you gave them that.”

The Ladyman nodded. “I hope that they can hold it in their hearts.”

Up from the beach came the Frenchman, barefooted and panting.

“You’re not watching the fight?” John asked.

LaCroix waved his hand. “You see one death, you’ve seen them all. We’ve got another problem.”

John sighed. “Beetles?”

“Deathwatch beetles, yes.”

“Bloody hell. Where?”

“In the planks near the prow, Capitaine. Found some more in the starboard railing. Also Patterson was right, there’s wood fungus in the galley.”

“Cut it out. All of it. Now.”

“Oui, Capitaine.” With a flamboyant bow LaCroix walked back to the beach.

“Deathwatch beetles and damned fungus. Must’ve picked it up in Panamá, someone brought it with them aboard by accident, on their boots or in the cargo.” The fungus could eat through the oak until was soft and mushy. Some ships had been so plagued, and their captains so foolish as to neglect the fungus’s removal that, that the ships had snapped in half while at sea and sunk with few survivors.

John looked at his Corrupted hand and realized that Panamá had cost them more than they’d reckoned. A curse was following them, evidenced by the two dueling crewmen on the beach. They’ll just be the first of the fracturing, if we don’t get to Nassau soon and get some new blood.

“It will be all right, Captain,” said Okoa. Apparently he sensed the Ladyman’s mood.

“Will it? Ship’s fever? Scurvy. Fungus. A ship lousy with beetles. And the crewmen fighting. This bloody fucking hand.” He looked down at it. “If things keep on the way they’ve—”

The sun was suddenly doused. It happened so quickly it made everyone on the beach gasp and cry out. John sat in stunned awe. Darkness fell on them, the stars spun above them, and it became cold. It happened all at once—one moment the sun was shining brightly overhead, and the next it was doused like a flame before God’s breath. Men on the beach started yelling. Someone even cheered, “The Long Night is here! The Long Night is here!” and shot his pistol in the air and started dancing.

There were clouds in the east, which had been there before the sun was doused, and they remained right where they were, moving sluggishly. But a green light emanated from behind them, and once they had moved on John let out a curse.

“Captain…” Okoa breathed.

John stood up and looked at their new moon.

It was a shattered half-sphere, like a giant green boulder someone had shot with a cannon. In fact, that was exactly what Roche Brasiliano said when he came running out of the jungle. “It look like it shot by cannon, Captain!” John could not argue with him, nor could he blame the men down on the beach who started arguing in consternation. Fenton and his opponent had suspended their fight and gawked with the others.

“Captain?” Okoa said.

“The firmament is acting up again, my friend. That is all the wisdom I can give you.” After a few moments, he said, “Get the men working on those planks. Can’t have deathwatch beetles riding with us all the way to Nassau.”

“Aye, Captain.”

The Hazard’s crew stood facing the Long Night, watching the debris around the green half-moon slowly spread. It was like watching chunks of rock fall slowly through dark water. The stars were moving but not at breakneck speeds. He did not recognize a single star, he could not find any familiar constellations. John thought about Benjamin’s theory that the Universe was filled with many suns and many worlds, and that each time they were displaced, they were transported to a different part of the Universe, temporarily switching places with some other planet. If that’s true then right now we have that planet’s moon, and it has ours.

“Captain!”

Laurier swung to find Dobbs running over to him. “Dobbs? What is it?”

“There, Captain! A ship!”

Laurier looked west where he was pointing. There were lights in the far distance, near the dark horizon. Many lights. If he had to guess it was a large galleon that had been heading this way and was just as surprised as they were by the suddenness of the sun’s disappearance. Her crew must have been ordered to light lanterns and torches all along her railing—for what purpose Laurier could not fathom. Sudden fear of darkness, perhaps? Their eyes would not have had time to adjust to the dark the way men’s eyes naturally do as night approaches.

“Okoa?”

“Yes, Captain?”

“Tell the men to ready the boats. We’re returning to the Hazard. We’re done here.”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“Aye, Captain. And what about them?” He pointed to Fenton and his opponent, who had now resumed their fight.

The Ladyman grunted and laughed. “Let them live and die as they choose. Yo-ho.”

“Yo-ho, Captain.”

____

They ran from the unknown ship for several hours. Whether it was trying to hunt them or simply communicate with them, they never knew, and did not wish to find out. So, they sailed on, into the Long Night.

The exploded green moon fascinated the men. They hung out on the railing and stared up at the huge chunks of rock and named them. But soon hard angry clouds rolled in and blanketed the shattered moon, and the men listened at the thunder.

“Aloft you go!” shouted Okoa at the waist. “Reefing needs done! Before the winds hit us!”

Meanwhile, in his cabin, John Laurier down a cup of the special tea Belmont had made, and took up his cutlass in his Corrupted hand and made a few practice swings. He was still a little disoriented from the loss of blood, but after clearing some space in his cabin he was able to begin some simple footwork drills. He had the book The Flower of Battle open on his desk, going through Fiore’s one-handed weapon work. Fiore de’i Liberi had been a genius with blades of all sizes and was practically a chess master when it came to fighting tactics. John had long ago been introduced to Fiore’s works by his own father, back when Benedict Laurier had believed fencing school would give his son discipline and reinforce masculinity.

The training began with crisscrossing footwork drills, then followed focus drills to help the eye and the wrist target the exact same spot every time. Fiore’s treatise was over three hundred years old and yet still his were the seminal works of close combat. John went into basic wrist exercises to retrain his Corrupted hand, then worked in spada a dui mani, the use of the sword in two hands.

John became sweaty with the effort, trying out his Corrupted hand, which, while feeling strange and at times made him feel like a grotesquery—even monstrous—astonished him with its precision and fluidity of movement. John alternated right to left, and experimented Fiore’s studies on daga (dagger) techniques and grappling defences. The training was invigorating, and he even invited Anne Bonny in for some light sparring.

“You know,” he told her by candlelight, lowering himself into a stance and aiming the tip of his blade at her chest, “I am no longer afraid of the Long Night. How about you, Anne?”

Bonny had a dagger in her left hand and a sabre in her right. Her stance was even lower, with a slight defensive lean away from his weapon. She gave his blade a few testing swipes with hers. “I don’t know about afraid, Cap’n, but I don’t trust it, and don’t think it’s going away, not anytime soon.”

“No?”

“No!” she said, and batted his blade away and side-stepped his riposte. She smiled at him. “But I don’t think it’s the end o’ the bloody world, either.”

“Why not?”

“You first. Why aren’t you afraid?”

“Because,” the Ladyman said, push-stepping forward and parrying her strike before he poked her left arm and backed away. The ship heeled heavily and groaned. They both fought for balance. Outside, there came a crack of thunder. “A man once told me this would happen. I didn’t know what to make of it at the time, but now I realize this was always coming.”

“A man told you the Long Night would come? What man?”

“If I said Edward Teach, would you believe me?”

“I know you served with Blackbeard. Didn’t know you two were close.”

“Wouldn’t say we were close, but he was a talkative man, a right wordsmith at times, in fact—gah!”

“Sorry.” She had slipped in with a gissard and nicked his wrist.

“Quite all right. Suppose I had it coming.” He backed up to the center of the room and lowered himself back into his stance.

“Captain?”

“Yes, Anne?”

“What’s that hand o’ yours?”

John looked down at the grotesquery in its sling. “Why? Does it scare you?”

“More than the Long Night, aye.”

They both looked at each other.

“Captain?”

“Yes?”

“Where are we off to next?”

He straightened. “You really want to know? You’re usually not so demanding.”

“I know it seems like I’ve always just been along for the right, and I s’ppose I have been for the most part, but this time I would really like to know. What are you doing all this for? What’s it all about?”

John took a deep breath, and resumed his fighting stance. He brought his blade up to meet hers. The blades kissed. “I’m securing enough funds to buy a diving bell, and enough pirates to haul a monstrous treasure out of the sea.”

Anne looked at him, eyes narrowing, trying to figure him out.

John cracked a smile first, and then came at her.

____

The storm rolled in fast and the Hazard heeled hard. Dobbs clambered up the ratlines, foot planted on the futtock shrouds as he made for the topmast. He moved up past the mainyard, his mind briefly recalling the man he’d seen hung there in his first week aboard the Hazard. Man named Thomas, caught stealing and trying to blame others. Man like that could not be suffered to live.

The sloop-of-war heeled again, this time hard, and Dobbs looked down at the dark waves, lit only by the occasional flash of lightning or a peek of that shattered green moon. Dobbs passed the lubber hole, called such because only cowardly landlubbers went the safe route. You wanted the men to respect you, you went the fast route, climbing the ropes and the netting until you came to rest on the futtocks higher up. Seventy feet in the air, he straddled the giant wood beam and clenched hard with his thighs, reeling in the piece of sail the wind had whipped loose. Rain slapped his face, thunder muffle the voices of the men shouting at him from below, and the wind stole his breath by forcing the air down his throat. He had to turn his head from the wind just to breathe.

He growled against the storm’s fury. Every drop of rain was a blade in his face and bare legs, he could hardly open his eyes. He had to feel his way with the sails, he must keep enough canvas reefed to propel the ship away from the rocks ahead, yet not so much to capsize them.

The job done, he climbed a quarter of the way down and clung to the mast. Because now a giant wave smashed into Hazard’s port side and she heeled to starboard, and if he continued to climb down he might slip and fall. Better to hang on and wait till Hazard righted herself. While hanging on, Dobbs’s eye spotted another ship, perhaps three hundred yards away, mounting a tall wave and fighting her own battle across the sea. Lightning revealed little details, but he was sure it had been following them.

Finally it was safe to come down, and the men received him with pats on the back. “Atta lad! Good boy!” they all said.

But the storm wore on. Waves knocked a barrel of wine overboard. A few pulleys for the foresails broke. LaCroix and a carpenter named Lloyd scrambled to repair them. Captain Laurier trudged down to the bilge to help pump water out, then went aloft again to help lower a broken yard. The men’s eyes were never far from his Corrupted hand, always watching it, and Dobbs had to admit it worried him, as well.

Later, Dobbs spotted the Ladyman at the steering, lending his one good hand to Okoa, who was fighting the wheel. Beside Dobbs, a man with no pants named Roderick vomited. Roderick’s pants were missing because he’d had diarrhea all day. He wasn’t the only one. Dobbs had started to feel sick just before the storm, and was afraid he had ship’s fever, as well.

He pushed the fear from his mind and fought his way up to the quarterdeck. “Captain! A ship, sir! She’s still following us!”

“Where?”

He pointed. “Three hundred yards out, abaft us!”

“You heard the man, Okoa!” Pale-faced, ragged, but with embers in his eyes, the Ladyman pulled the wheel the other direction. “Make distance while we can!” He clambered down from the quarterdeck, and to the crew he shouted, “Sway the foreyard up and set the foresail!”

They executed a jibe, swinging the ship’s bow away from the wind in order to turn her.

The storm batted them around like a toy, but in time they finagled her. One man had fallen into the water, lost in the spume, but he had been one of the men deathly ill and everyone wondered if he’d done it on purpose. When the storm had eased, they were alone on the sea, but the Long Night stretched on.

____

The mystery ship found them again. It was the shattered moon’s bright green light giving them away, it had to be. The ship continued chasing them throughout the Long Night, from one isle to the next, along a hundred miles of cays and across another hundred miles of open sea, sometimes losing them due to winds or currents.

The Hazard’s crew kept sailing.

Once, John ordered them into another long row of cays, stretching dozens of miles, and they sailed into an inlet and reeled in all sails and even disassembled their masts so that any ship passing on the other side of the island would not see them. Dobbs led a team ashore in a lifeboat and they climbed to the top of one of three hills. After a few hours, Dobbs’s team signaled from the hill, using a small lantern. The signal said the ship had passed.

John ordered the masts erected again and the sails bloomed and they came out of hiding. The mystery ship sailed northwest, the Hazard went east.

____

Lumen Island had once had aspirations of being an island seaport like Port Royal or Nassau, and while its bountiful lands made terrific soil for sugarcane fields, its remoteness made the island far too difficult to protect. When the French owned it, the Spanish had invaded easily, but the Spanish had not been able to fully reinforce it, so the British took it. Then the French took it back, and then the British, then back to the Spanish. Ultimately it was owned by everyone and no one at the same time, and its people were as diverse as those in Royal.

The Hazard moored away from shore, and did not fly the yellow flag of plague like they ought. The sick rowed themselves to shore on their own, then Captain Laurier followed them on a boat of six healthy men. They had expected to have to argue with port masters that would try and turn them away, but they were met with an almost silent village. The Long Night had stretched on, yet almost no lanterns were lit. The village was dark and silent as death.

A fever had struck here, too, one similar to the one the Hazard’s lads had. Vomiting, fever, diarrhea, bursting blood vessels. Which all led to delirium, men and women reaching at illusory objects in the air.

There was a hospital, and John tried to pay the nurses and the island only doctor for space for his men. But the doctor, a stooped fellow missing two fingers and who reminded him of Abner, said, “We’re all full. You can keep your money. There’s no space for anyone here.”

John soon learned that the sick numbered more than a hundred, and most were holed up in the island’s only tavern. Liquor was given to them when medicine ran out. John sat outside the tavern for hours on end, listening to the hacking and coughing and men wheezing their last breaths. He spoke to Okoa and discovered two of the healthier men had run off, not even interested in their half of the treasure. “Before they left, one of them mentioned to Dobbs and Akil that the Hazard is cursed, just like her captain,” said Okoa.

____

Akil had never seen plague like this, it burned through all the white men like fire and only one of the African crew became sick, but his vomiting was done within a few hours and he now seemed fully recovered. He walked Lumen Island, sometimes hand-in-hand with Noala, whose son slept in the shukanna on her back. They looked up at the shattered moon and said little. Not much needed saying, they were adrift in a cosmos that seemed to have as little regard for them as it did the Natural Order.

He did tell her what Captain Laurier had told him when they first met: “He told me that all the stars and the blackness in between them is called the Universe by the English. And he said there is no place in all the world for us anymore, and nowhere for us in the Universe.”

Noala shook her head. “The stars and all the skies were made by Namna Bulukku, and she made the world to be lived in. There must be a place for us in it.”

Akil was not assuaged by her comment. “The Ladyman said we must carve out a small place for ourselves on the Hazard, and ships just like it. And I think maybe he is right…for I had a dream. The captain speaks of a place called Libertalia, but I know not what it really means. He speaks in riddles, or thinks in them, or both.”

Noala guided him to the ground, and she reached her fingers deep into the soil. Then she looked out into a thick jungle, as the trees swaying in a cold breeze. “There is space for us anywhere we choose to carve it out,” she said. “If we want to stay here, we can. Even the captain said so.” On her back, Yame snored.

“No, not yet. Not until we have great power like the English have. Or the Spanish. We need power like that if we want expand beyond the Hazard.”

Noala held his hand, kissed his fingers. They had grown close over the last few months, and something was communicated between them whenever they stood together in silence. Akil reached behind her to touch Yame’s little hands. The boy had grown bigger, and he became angry when he thought Yame might have to grow up in the exact same conditions as his mother, as Bogoa, and all the others. He wished the orisha would grant him a magical spell that could grant him the power to give Yame the world he deserved. He’d sometimes thought that he’d been given the Ladyman as a conduit to such power, for the orisha could work in mysterious ways, the stories said they sometimes even used one’s own enemies to unwittingly deliver the tool of one’s liberation.

He looked out to sea where Hazard was anchored. Up at the shattered green moon. Into Noala’s eyes. “I saw someone,” he said. “A girl. She was on the island where we took the captain, where Okoa and the others got the captain’s medicine from the bark.”

“A girl?”

“I believe she was a spirit, sent by Gawa.”

“Gawa?”

“I met her in my dreams, Noala. While we all slept on that island, I met her, and she told me I had to find someone called the Master, and someone else called the Messenger. She said I must destroy them both. She said if I could do this, I could rewrite the story of our people. She said I ought to master the waters, control the seas, and destroy the Master and his Messenger.”

Noala had a look of concern.

“What? What is it?”

“Are you sure it was her?”

“Who else could it have been?” Akil shrugged.

“Oya.”

“Oya?”

“She is goddess of the storms and the wind. She paid us visit just a few hours ago, her wrath was written in the lightning and the angry sea. It is said she plays tricks, especially on men who play wicked on the seas. It’s possible she is unhappy with you thieving on her waters.”

Akil shook his head. He found Noala’s comments confusing and irritating. He’d thought he had all this figured out, but now he wasn’t so sure. The cold wind that ran through the trees and made Yame cry now made Akil angry. He disliked uncertainty. Ever since he had been taken from his home, he had been waiting for a sign from the orisha as to what he ought to do, and now he felt like he had been sent too many.

____

Twenty days after they had landed on Lumen Island, it seemed the last of the ill-fated had finally died. Hazard had lost eleven crew, and those that survived were haggard and likely unable to work for at least a few days. They needed to get their strength back up. That would cost them time.

Before he rowed back to the Hazard, the Ladyman had Okoa, LaCroix, and Dobbs fetch more of his share of the treasure from the ship, and together they buried it in three different places across Lumen Island. That done, they set sail again. But they had to be careful, for a village elder had warned them of trouble. Lurking somewhere in these waters was a contingent of the Spanish armada, they had been skulking these waters for weeks, waiting for an English ship or a down-on-its-luck pirate vessel to go creeping by.

Why fun might they have if they found the Hazard, which had humiliated and robbed Bateria de la Lanza, and whose crew was now nearly cut in half and sick and exhausted and at their wit’s end?

“Lads,” Laurier said in a low voice, cradling his Corrupted hand. “No lights. No sounds. No calls. We utilize this Long Night for every inch that it’s worth. Sail now, and hug the darkness. She’s our new home.”

____

Then came an infestation of rats and cockroaches. Those were troublesome things, especially the rats, who for some reason liked to gnaw at ropes and eat at the spare sails in the lower hold. Those ropes and sails would be desperately needed to replace the old ones.

The rats and the cockroaches had both likely come aboard from Lumen Island, hiding in the crates of supplies the pirates had taken from a harbour warehouse without asking. So many of the island’s authorities had died, there was none to really stop them. And now it seemed the Hazard was suffering for it. The rats had bred with what few rats had already been “native” to the ship, and now their descendants scampered around at all hours, leaping across men’s faces as they slept, even biting their fingers if the hands were left dangling from their hammocks. Bingham, the ship’s last surviving cooper and a man who had barely survived the fever, lost his wits one night and went stomping after them in a mad frenzy. Others tried to restrain him, and they succeeded, at least for a few hours, because when next the bells struck seven in the morning they found Bingham missing from his watch. A search of his stall in the forecastle turned up nothing. His hammock was empty and nobody had seen him. It was generally believed he’d gone into the water.

The cockroaches crawled on every wall, in every man’s trousers, and seethed around every pail of feces and fell from the rafters onto men’s faces as they tried to sleep.

Charcoal was burned inside the hulls to smoke them all out. Rory the cat scooped up what rats it could as they fled.

And the Long Night stretched on for the Hazard, and her cursed captain, and her weak and diminishing crew. And we can guess that some of her crew stewed on those words from their captain: “Sail now, and hug the darkness. She’s our home now.”

Was the Long Night forever? What cosmic joke was being played on them? And would they ever know?

The questions likely only plagued them until their next turn in the hammock, when the screeching of rats and the feel of small insects crawling across their bodies stole only more sleep from them.