Bell heard it from the ladder.
Low and easy, drifting up out of the lower deck with the lamplight and the smell of bilge.
Ring, Bell, ring, you won’t ring long, the sea don’t carry a chain that strong…
A few voices joined on the last line.
Soft, careful.
Grinning.
Kofi Brook don’t die.
Bell came down the ladder.
The singing stopped as if someone had cut its throat.
A dozen men sat frozen around a mess table, cups halfway to their mouths.
Dawkins had his back to the ladder.
He was the last to turn around.
“Continue,” Bell said.
Nobody moved.
“I said continue, Mr. Dawkins. I’d like to hear the rest.”
Dawkins swallowed.
“It’s only a tavern song, sir. From Nassau. Didn’t mean nothing by it.”
“Sing it.”
“Sir, I—”
“SING IT.”
The whole deck flinched.
Bell almost never raised his voice.
Dawkins’s mouth opened and shut.
Then, shaking, he sang the first verse.
His voice cracked on every chain they fastened there.
Bell listened to all of it.
When Dawkins reached the chorus, Bell’s hand tightened on the ladder rail until the knuckles went white.
“Bosun.” Bell didn’t look away from Dawkins.
“Rig a grating on the main deck. All hands to witness punishment.”
They tied Dawkins to the grating at dawn, his shirt torn from his back.
The crew stood in rows.
Sterling watched from the quarterdeck, leaning on his cane.
Cross stood at the front of the ranks with his arms folded and a smile he didn’t try to hide.
Bell read from a paper without inflection.
“For insolence to a superior officer and for singing seditious verses in praise of a fugitive felon. Two dozen lashes.”
The bosun’s mate raised the cat-o’-nine-tails.
The first stroke cracked across Dawkins’s back, leaving nine red lines.
He screamed.
The second stroke landed on top of the first.
The skin split.
By the sixth, blood ran down his spine into the waistband of his trousers.
By the twelfth, he’d stopped screaming and only grunted, his head hanging.
Bell watched every stroke.
He didn’t blink.
At twenty-four, they cut Dawkins down.
He folded to the deck.
Two men dragged him below.
Bell turned to the crew.
“That song is banned aboard this ship. Any man who sings it, hums it, whistles it, or so much as taps its rhythm on a rail will receive the same. Dismissed.”
Sterling limped over as the crew scattered.
His eyes were bright.
“Well done, Captain. I’d have given him four dozen.”
“I didn’t ask what you’d have given him, my lord.”
The next night Bell sat alone in his cabin with the ledger open.
The ship creaked around him.
Water hissed along the hull.
The lantern swung on its hook.
Then, from somewhere below, faint as breath, someone hummed.
No words.
Only the tune.
Bell set down his pen.
He followed the sound down two ladders, past sleeping men in their hammocks, to the cable tier in the bow where the anchor rope lay coiled in the dark.
A boy sat on the coils with his knees drawn up.
He couldn’t have been more than sixteen.
Harrow, the ship’s boy.
He was humming to himself the way a child hums to keep the dark away.
He saw Bell’s boots and went silent.
“Captain. I wasn’t— I didn’t sing it, sir. I didn’t say the words.”
Bell stood over him.
The torch in the passage behind him dimmed.
Its flame leaned toward him and shrank to a blue bead.
From under the deck came the sound of iron dragging over stone.
The boy’s eyes went huge.
A chain rose out of the dark behind him.
It wrapped once around his throat.
Bell didn’t touch his saber.
He didn’t need to.
The brand on its spine glowed a dull orange against his hip, and the chain drew tight.
The boy clawed at the links.
His heels drummed on the coils of rope.
His mouth opened, and no sound came out.
It took a long time.
When it was done, the chain sank away into the planks.
The torch flared back to yellow.
The boy slumped sideways on the coils with his eyes open.
Footsteps behind him.
Sterling stood in the passage, cane in hand, watching.
He looked at the boy for a long moment.
Then he looked at Bell.
“You should have done that to every one of them who sang it.”
“Tell the surgeon the boy fell from the rigging,” he said over his shoulder.
“And bury him at dawn.”
In his cabin, he opened the ledger and wrote under the day’s date.
He pressed so hard the pen tore through the paper.
The outer islands spread across the sea like crumbs on a table.
The Morning Star threaded between them for two days.
Low cays with scrubby palms.
Mangroves standing in the water on their roots.
White sand.
And here and there in the shallows, round patches of water so deep blue they looked like ink spilled on the sea floor.
“Blue holes,” Theo said, leaning over the rail with his chart.
“Straight down. Nobody knows how deep. Sailors say things live in them.”
“Everything lives somewhere,” Clementine said.
“Yes, but these things live in them and eat sailors.”
Kofi stood at the wheel.
Every day looked like the last one.
No sign of anyone.
At the bow, Ezinne sat with her fiddle across her knees, humming, stopping, and humming again.
Then she played it through once and sang.
Captain came with his frigate tall, thought he had him, thought it all.
Kofi slipped where the coral lies, left the Navy with empty eyes.
Obi whooped.
Bess laughed out loud.
Toby slapped the rail.
Then all of them sang the chorus back to her, loud enough to carry across the water.
Ring, Bell, ring, you won’t ring long…
Kofi looked at Titus.
Titus stood at the mast, lips moving.
“You’re singing.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m breathing in time.”
Clementine found the first sign on the third morning.
A gray heron stood on a mangrove root close enough to touch as the ship slid past.
It didn’t fly.
It turned its head and watched them go.
“Herons don’t do that,” she said.
That afternoon she ran her finger along the salt line she’d laid on the rail back in Trelawny.
It was damp.
No spray had come over the side all day.
The sun was blazing.
“Something wet is near,” she said, “and it isn’t the sea.”
Near sunset, Obi shouted from the crow’s nest.
“Fog! There’s fog ahead!”
Kofi looked.
A low gray bank sat on the water between two cays, thick as wool.
The sun was still blazing.
The wind blew steady from the east.
The fog didn’t move.
“Fog don’t sit still,” Toby said.
“This one does,” Clementine said.
Kofi turned the wheel toward it.
The fog took them in a single breath.
One moment Kofi could see the whole ship from the helm.
The next, he couldn’t see the foremast.
White pressed against his face, cool and damp.
It smelled of tobacco.
“Theo. Where are we?”
“I have no idea.” Theo’s voice came from somewhere to his left.
“My chart says we’re sailing through a cay. My chart and I are no longer speaking.”
Sounds came strangely.
A bell rang somewhere far off, slow and deep.
Water lapped on the starboard side where there should have been open sea.
Someone whispered, very close to Kofi’s ear, and when he turned, there was nobody there.
“Everyone stay where you are,” he called.
“Nobody move.”
“I’m not moving,” Bess said.
“I’m not ever moving again.”
A soft bump against the hull.
Kofi leaned over the rail.
A small boat sat alongside, low and gray as driftwood.
Without oars and sail.
An old woman sat in the stern, so small she looked like a child wrapped in a gray shawl.
Her face was a web of wrinkles.
A long clay pipe was clamped between her teeth, and smoke curled from the bowl, poured over the gunwale, and spread across the water.
The fog was coming from her pipe.
She took the pipe out of her mouth and looked up at him.
“Unu make plenty noise for people who on the run.” Her voice was dry and low, with a lilt that turned the words over like pebbles.
“Singing loud enough to wake the dead. Mi could hear you three cays off.”
“Hello, we’re looking for someone named Mother Phibba.”
“Mi know who unu looking for.” She puffed.
Fresh smoke rolled out.
“Question is why mi should let unu find her.”
“Quaco sent us.”
“Quaco.” She snorted.
“That one-foot fool still drinking?”
“He is.”
“Hmph. Him always did talk too much.” She studied Kofi.
Her eyes were small, black, and very bright.
“Kofi Brook.”
The smoke stopped in the pipe bowl.
“The one in the song.”
“Yes.”
“The one with six hundred pounds on him head.” She set the pipe back between her teeth.
“Unu know what mi do out here? Mi hide people. Runaways. Mothers and pickney coming off the plantations with dogs behind them. Mi carry them through the fog where no Navy and people who after them can follow, to places no one know. Thirty years mi do it. Not one lost.” She leaned forward.
“Why mi should risk every one of them for a man with a bounty so big, every pirate in the Bahamas want to sell him?”
Kofi held her eyes.
“Because we’re doing the same thing you are. There were nine of us when we ran. We had no ship and no plan. We took both. Now we’ve buried one girl already who should be alive, and there’s a Navy captain behind us who can pull chains out of the air.” He gripped the rail.
“I don’t know how to fight what he is. I need to learn. And I need to learn how to do what you do, because nine people isn’t enough. I want to carry more.”
Mother Phibba said nothing for a long time.
Then she lifted her pipe and pointed it past him, at Yaw.
“That one,” she said.
“Come down here.”
Yaw looked at Kofi.
Kofi nodded.
Yaw swung over the rail and climbed down into her boat.
It barely rocked.
She took his chin in her hand like a grandmother checking a child’s ears and turned his face side to side.
She sniffed at him.
“Mm-hm.” She let go.
“Somebody have him blood.”
“What?”
“Somebody have your blood, boy. On a blade, on a whip, something.” She tapped his chest with the stem of her pipe.
“And that somebody carry a spirit that follow blood like a dog follow meat. Unu been leaving a trail from Trelawny to Nassau to right here, like crumbs across a floor.”
Yaw’s face went gray.
“Cross.” Kofi’s voice came out hoarse.
“The whip. He cut Yaw with it.”
“That’s how the Navy found you in Nassau,” Theo whispered.
“Not just the pilot.”
“That’s how him find unu anywhere.” Phibba sucked on the pipe.
“Anywhere at all.”
“Can you stop it?” Yaw asked.
She considered him.
“What unu do with that blood-sniffing man when unu find him?”
Yaw’s jaw set.
“Kill him.”
The fog around the boat thickened fast, rolling over the gunwales until Yaw was a shadow inside it.
“Then mi can’t help you.”
“Why not?”
“Because mi spirit have one law.” Her voice came out of the white, very calm.
“Never hide a hunter in the fog. Mi carry runaways. Mi carry mothers. Mi don’t carry men going out to kill. If you going hunting, boy, go out there, where the Navy can see you.”
Silence.
Kofi watched Yaw’s shadow in the fog.
He saw the shoulders drop.
Saw one hand come up and touch the blue cloth on his pistol grip.
“I’m not hunting,” Yaw said, very quietly.
“Not today. I’m running. With them.”
The fog thinned.
Just a little.
“That’s true?” Phibba asked.
“It’s true today.”
She grunted.
“Today is enough for today.”
She cleaned him in the smoke.
She had him sit in the bottom of her boat with his eyes closed.
She puffed on the pipe and blew the smoke over him, slowly, from the top of his head down to his feet, murmuring words none of them knew.
The clay bowl of the pipe glowed.
Carved into its side, Kofi saw a small spiral like a curl of cloud, and it glowed too.
“Your spirit,” Kofi said.
“What is it?”
“Old sperrid of the cays. Grey Sperrid, the old people call her. She live in the mist over the blue holes.” Phibba blew another stream of smoke.
“She was hiding runaways long before mi was born. Mi just the one holding her pipe now.”
The smoke wrapped around Yaw and settled into his skin.
He gasped once, as if cold water had hit him.
Then his shoulders loosened.
“There.” Phibba tapped her pipe on the gunwale.
“The thread is cut. Them can’t follow him blood no more.”
Yaw opened his eyes.
“Just like that?”
“Nothing just like that, boy.” She pointed the pipe at Kofi.
“Now unu pay.”
“Name it.”
“Two days south there’s a cay called Salt Pan. White men rake salt there in the sun. They work mi people till they go blind from the glare. Last month them catch six of mine. Two mothers, four children, coming through to me. Took them to the salt.” She puffed.
“Mi can’t bring the fog there. Something on that island push it back. Something wrong.”
“You want them back.”
“Mi want them back.” Her black eyes held his.
“Bring them to me, Kofi Brook. Then we talk about teaching you to carry more than nine.”
On the Vigilant, Cross stood at the rail in the dark with the whip in his hand.
He touched the dried blood on the lash to his tongue and closed his eyes, waiting for the pull.
Nothing came.
He tasted it again.
His brow creased.
He pressed his tongue to the leather until it hurt.
Nothing.
The thread that had tugged at him since Trelawny was simply gone, like a line cut clean.
He opened his eyes and stared out at the black sea.
“Captain,” he called, and for the first time since Bell had known him, Cross sounded afraid.
“I’ve lost him.”