Chapter Fifteen
When he finds her in the middle of the ocean aboard a pirate captain’s ship, he expects to find her trapped there. Nothing could have prepared him to see her with her hair unbound with the wind and salt playing with the soft curls. Freedom looks good on her.
SOUTH CHINA SEA
Things can change in an instant.
It’s a universal truth—one Anna has had lifetimes of experience in—and yet it still manages to catch her by surprise. What was supposed to be routine passage to Portugal has taken a turn into something more dangerous than Anna feels comfortable with.
The rough boards bite into her knees, the sun beating mercilessly on the back of her neck.
She aches to stand, but she doesn’t dare.
Not when pirates are barking orders in a language she doesn’t understand.
Not when she has already watched some of the braver sailors get cut down before their bodies were tossed overboard. Their blood still smears the deck.
Anna may not fear the blade or the bullet, but she fears the seemingly endless stretches of ocean.
So she keeps her head down and kneels like the submissive passenger she is, and waits.
Listens to the mariners’ footfall as they travel to and from the storerooms—their arms heavy with precious metals and heavy silks.
They’re in good spirits, these pirates. Their foreign dialect is regularly broken by laughter.
She imagines it must be easier to bear the sweltering heat and humidity when every labored step means gold in your pocket.
Then there’s a shout—and even though Anna doesn’t know the words, she recognizes the edge of an order.
The laughter stops. A new set of slippered feet touch down on the deck, smaller and daintier than the others that came before it.
It doesn’t escape Anna’s notice that the shoes are finer than all the rest, or the respectable hush that falls over the crew.
Curiosity fills her, coaxing her eyes upward and taking in the long purple cloak flicking in the hot breeze and the rings glinting off slim fingers. The person’s hair is wrapped in a dark turban, but Anna recognizes them for what they are.
A woman.
And, judging by the previously rowdy crews’ sudden respectful silence, the captain.
Perhaps it’s the surprise of it that prompts her to continue staring instead of quietly ducking her head. Then Anna spies the golden fruit embroidered on the captain’s collar, and breathes the word before she can stop herself. “Tao.”
The captain’s steps pause, her dark gaze piercing.
A command, one Anna has no hopes of understanding, but it prompts one of her followers to drag Anna to her feet.
The captain steps closer, her fingers grasping Anna’s chin with a pressure that’s nearly bruising.
More foreign words fall from her lips. Anna only knows it’s a question by the way the captain waits for an answer.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” Anna rasps, voice hoarse. Against the ship, waves lap against the boards—a reminder of the agony that would await her in those watery depths should they choose to throw her over.
The captain’s chin tilts, sharp eyes appraising. Anna feels pinned beneath her stare. Feels judged. She wonders if the stories of pirate brutality are true and if there’s a limit to how many times she can drown before the magic stops saving her.
The captain leans in close. “What do you know of táo?”
Anna steeps the tea, carefully placing what she knows to be Shih’s favorite cup on the tray while she waits for the flavor to settle.
The kind the captain prefers is different from what she was used to in the European parts of the world.
It’s lighter, more floral and with a hint of sweetness.
The first time Anna brewed it, Ching Shih’s face had puckered, pushing her cup away with only a single word for explanation.
“Less.”
Less leaves, less time. It took her another four brews before her efforts were deemed satisfactory, made all the easier as Anna slowly began to pick up the language.
Like the tea, it is different from the European languages she had mastered over the years.
So much so, that if it weren’t for the captain’s patience and support, Anna’s certain it would have taken her years instead of months to grasp the basics.
And yet, even with her clumsy understanding of the language, Anna still doesn’t fully understand why Ching Shih chose to take her from the deck of that Portuguese ship and onto her own as a guest instead of a prisoner.
Several of her old crew mates found a temporary home below, chained and in conditions that made Anna cringe.
She tried to bring them some of her spare food once.
They spat at her through the bars and cursed her for bringing misfortune upon them—no bad luck like a woman aboard a ship—and Anna’s sympathy for them withered.
Sliding away bit by bit the way the fat did from their bones.
When they were ransomed off four months later, their eyes held no less hate for her. And, when the pirate captain gestured a graceful hand to the ramp in offering (“Stay or go. You choose.”) Anna couldn’t bring herself to leave.
She hadn’t missed the approval in her captain’s gaze, as if Anna had been tested and won.
Perhaps, in some ways, she has. Under Ching Shih’s command, Anna is treated with a respect she’s never experienced.
The men do not leer; they do not touch. It is unnerving, realizing all the ways she once protected herself—head down and never braving the seemingly empty corners.
There is an irony, surely, that in all the centuries she’s lived, she has found the most freedom on the ship of a pirate.
It takes her three weeks to understand why.
Three weeks before a crying battered wife of one of the crew visits the captain.
Her husband’s head rolls across the deck not an hour later; his earnings in his widow’s hands.
There are rules that must be followed under Ching Shih’s command.
Infidelity and rape come with the same cost as insubordination—their life.
And so, for the first time, Anna lives among men and feels safe.
She learns to hold her head high and her spine straight, walks with a confidence she’s never dared to own.
On her time off, she jokes with the cooks and learns how to play Go against some of the more friendly crew members.
She never wins, but she never fears the tempers that might arise if she did.
It helps that her main responsibilities on the ship are to serve their captain. No one wants to deal with Ching Shih’s wrath should her favorite tea server go missing.
Anna places the stoneware pot on the wooden tray alongside hardened honey biscuits and two cups. Balancing it carefully, she brings it over to the captain. Shih provides herself with few luxuries while at sea, but the quality of her daily tea is something she never sacrifices.
Pouring the captain’s cup first before serving it and pouring her own, Anna can feel the weight of Shih’s gaze. “You are getting better,” she says, in accented English.
Anna places her right hand over her fist, bowing her head. “Duōxiè.”
It is their daily ritual. Shih practices her English and Anna tries to impress her with the things she’s learned while avoiding embarrassing herself. It’s an unbalanced trade—her English is far more advanced than Anna’s Cantonese.
There’s a map on the table today, the seas and coasts neatly labeled with characters as beautiful as the images. Despite her progress in speaking the language, Anna feels overwhelmed by their intricate writing system. In a sea of characters, the only one she recognizes is ‘ocean’.
Ching Shih sips her tea, eyes tracing over the map with an intensity Anna envies. Driven is too soft of a word for the captain. Anna has yet to meet anyone with the same amount of fierce intensity. It is not a wish for success that drives her, but a need.
“We travel home next. The Qing …” She hesitates, lips thinning in frustration as she tries to find the word she’s looking for. “Nav?”
“Navy,” Anna corrects.
“Navy,” she repeats. “Believes they are in control of my waters. They are not.” Another sip. “First, we will stock supplies.”
Anna says nothing. She has learned that just because her captain speaks, it doesn’t mean she wants conversation.
Unless she asks a question, it’s best to just listen.
She suspects that’s all Ching really wants, anyway.
Someone to listen and speak without fear when asked.
Anna gets the sense that her male crew members can’t offer the same respectful ear that she can.
So, for the next hour, she listens as her captain plots out the course, listens when she tells her where they’ll stop and why, all while keeping her cup filled. Then, when she has nothing left to tell her, Ching Shih excuses her and Anna fills her hours helping the cook.
“Taken up a life of piracy, have you?”
The man at her side looks nothing like any of the forms he’s taken in the past; long dark hair tied up, sun darkened skin that fits in with the rest of the crew’s and yet still devoid of all the blemishes a hard life deals.
Yet she still recognizes him in an instant.
Anna leans her elbows against the rail, looking over the dark water and the moon’s distorted reflection casting slivers of light across the surface. “Are you judging me?”
“Hardly.” He matches her stance, their shoulders brushing. “You deserve to lay down your self-sacrificing tendencies for a change.”
Anna’s not convinced that’s what she’s doing, not at all, but she doesn’t bother arguing.
Khiran always has a way of sucking the wind from her sails with as little as a look and a quipped, ‘if you say so’.
It’s hard to feel as if she’s proved her point with someone who will never be convinced. “What brings you?”