Luckstones

LUCKSTONES

Three Tales of Meviel

Madeleine E. Robins

www.bookviewcafe.com

Book View Café Edition
June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-527-4
Copyright © 2015 Madeleine E. Robins

for David, Lucie, TJ, and Richard

Swash, buckle, repeat!

Deborah Ross asked me for a story. This was in 2007, and
she was editing an anthology of swashbuckling stories—stories with romance,
intrigue, maybe a little swordplay—to be called
Lace and Blade
. When an editor asks you for a story, particularly
for the kind of story that sounds like it will be great fun, you say “yes,
please, thank you,” and get to work.

I knew I wanted swordplay; as a former actor-combatant, I love swordplay and derring-do, particularly when the sword and the daring are wielded by a woman.

I also knew I wanted to set it in a city, a sprawling place
of grand architecture and mean streets. I am an urbanist by nature—I love
cities—and wanted to create a place that had some of the grit and incense of
Riverside, Sky, Ile-Rien . . . it's a long list. I wanted a new
place, with its own customs and mythology, its own architecture. Thus was born
Meviel, which I described to Amy Sterling Casil (who designed the cover for
this book, which I flat out love) as “18th
century as to technology, in a setting I’d describe as a Turkey-Italy mash-up.”

Finally, I
wanted to play with a society where luck, status, and gender could be mixed up
in interesting ways.

What I came up
with was “Virtue and the Archangel.” It was followed by “Writ of Exception” and
“A Wreath of Luck.” And I'm playing with the idea of writing more stories set
there—if you like these, please let me know.

The city-state
of Meviel has mean streets and open boulevards, pirates and footpads and
private guards, brothels and harbor-rats, jewel-draped ladies and working women
of all descriptions. It's a great playground for swashing, buckling, and
subverting the dominant paradigm.

I bid you welcome. Step in.

Amielle me Ortun had a genius for self-effacement rare in
a child of twelve. Whether this was a good thing or bad is hard to say, but it
is quite certain that without this gift she would not have been left behind on
the
Plover
when the ship was
captured. Her family fled at once to the lifeboat and, while the captain and
crew were engaged in dying to protect their passengers, rowed heartily for the
east and Meviel. By the time they realized that Amielle was not among them, the
Plover
was long gone from the
horizon.

Amielle, a slight, spindly girl who preferred reading about
adventure to undertaking it, heard the ado above-decks and did what she
generally did when there was a commotion: she hid. A few hours later, when the
cries and footfall overhead had quieted, she slid from a cupboard in the
Ladies’ Cabin and made her way up the stairs to find out what was what. The sun
had set but the moon had not yet risen; in the green twilight Amielle realized
with a shock that the persons in charge of the
Plover
were no longer the genial, brisk Captain ha Blifen and his
well-spoken crew. These, without doubt, were pirates.

There were seven of them, a skeleton crew left by the
captain of the
Drunken Daisy
to bring
the ship to port on Isl’Alander; the master, even to Amielle’s unexperienced
eyes, was a man remarkable for his beauty: tall, well-built, with light eyes, a
square jaw, and long, waving dark hair. His hair drew her eyes to the necklace
he wore: a wreath of luckstones, each gem glimmering with the unmistakable
spark of luck burning within. Amielle barely suppressed a cry of dismay when
she recognized among them the beryl ring which had belonged to the
Plover’s
captain; the opal luck which
the
Plover’s
mate had worn in his
hatband. The effect was as shocking as seeing a wreath of human ears round the
neck of an Egeni savage.

Seeing this, all thought of throwing herself on the pirates’
mercy left Amielle’s head. She slithered into the shadows while the master was
giving directions to his crew, and waited to see what would happen next. “’Til
we meet the
Daisy
there’s to be no
raids; we haven’t the numbers for it. Breggan, Lyd, you two take first watch.”
The master tossed his hair out of his eyes dramatically as he descended from
the bridge.
Silly peacock
, Amielle
thought.
Not half full of himself
.
Certainly he was the only one of the pirates who was in the least a figure of
romance. Of the six men listening, five were grizzled and ill-formed, with cast
eyes, broken noses, missing teeth and puckered scars. The sixth man, a short,
tidy fellow with spectacles and his hair in a dark queue, looked more like an
office clerk than a pirate. He certainly offered the master no competition.

All the pirates except the two left on watch went below,
passing so close to the shadows where Amielle hid that she expected to be found
and dragged into the moonlight. She crouched below the rail, not breathing,
until they had passed and the last two on deck disposed themselves, one at the
helm, the other staring out over the silent, moonlit sea. After half an hour
Amielle slipped from her hiding place and, heart pounding, went below.

The door to the Ladies’ Cabin stood open, with piles of
lace, silk, and linen garments strewn everywhere by marauders searching for
plunder. Along the passage the door to the captain’s cabin was closed; Amielle
suspected that the master had taken that cabin himself. From the muttering that
issued from the Men’s Cabin she thought that it must be where the crew had
quartered themselves. Amielle turned back to the Ladies’ Cabin, stole in, and
made for the cupboard. It was a small cupboard, and difficult to climb into,
but Amielle had not yet achieved a woman’s height or figure, and she managed
it. Then, with her knees folded tight to her chest, she covered herself well
with linens and left the cupboard door ajar for air.

Remarkably, albeit uncomfortably, she slept.

~o0o~

The sheets which covered her were damp, and by the time
the sun cast a stripe of light into the cupboard, Amielle was fighting the urge
to sneeze. She was about to slide from her hiding place when she heard voices
from the passageway and thought better of it.

“I’ll get precious little sleep with you snoring in my ear,
Breggan.” It was a young voice. Amielle thought it must belong to the pirate
who looked like a clerk.

“Don’t make no mind to me, Lyd me boy. P’raps the captain’ll
let you take
his
cot.” This seemed to
be an unsavory joke, for the second man laughed heartily.

“I don’t think I’m the captain’s meat,” Lyd said evenly. To
Amielle’s horror his voice came from within the Ladies’ Cabin, not two feet
from her head. “Your snores won’t rattle the walls in here, I think.”

Breggan made some indecipherable joke; Amielle heard him
laugh heartily at his own wit as he went down the passage, then Lyd closed the
door to the Ladies’ Cabin. Amielle drew the quietest breath she could manage,
realizing that nothing more than the cupboard door separated her from discovery.
She pushed the sheet away from her face and peered through the slit of the
door: the spectacled pirate, in an attitude of exhaustion, had untied the
string from his queue, shook out his lank, dark hair and scratched his head
with every evidence of refreshment. His luck, a ruby in his ear, gleamed
through the curtain of dark hair.

“Gods alive,” the pirate muttered, and shrugged off his
coat, rolling his shoulders. Amielle, whose muscles were stiff and sore with
her unnatural position, watched enviously. The pirate turned to look out the
port, peeled off his shirt, and began to unwind a strip of bandage which
suggested that he had been injured in the taking of the
Plover
. With the bandage off the pirate stretched, pivoted, and
scratched as vigorously at her breasts as she had done, a moment before, at her
scalp.

Amielle let out a gasp of astonishment.

The pirate girl seized her shirt to her chest with one hand
and tore the cupboard door open with the other. “Out of there!” she cried,
pushing aside the linens.

Amielle unfolded herself, slowly and painfully, from the
small space, and slid out into the confines of the Ladies’ Cabin.

“Gods alive,” the pirate girl said again. “What will Nault
say about you?”

Amielle was shaking her leg, which prickled almost unbearably
with the return of circulation. “Is that the captain?” she asked.

“The master—until we reach Isl’Alander, anyway. I’d best
take you right along to him.”

“Wait.” The middle-most of five children, Amielle me Ortun
had negotiated the pitfalls of life in the Ortun nursery. She knew an advantage
when she saw one. “You’d best put on a shirt first, hadn’t you? Unless your
captain already knows you’re a woman.” She put a singsong lilt to her words.

Lyd pursed her lips and Amielle knew she had drawn blood.
“It makes no difference,” Lyd said.

“Then why bind your breasts and dress like one of them?”
Amielle shrugged. “If it makes no difference, then by all means let us go and—”

“All right! All right!” Lyd attempted to bind her breasts as
she talked, but surprise and distraction had her making a bad job of it. “What
do you want?”

Amielle considered. Her immediate objective was not to be
turned over to the pirate master, for she doubted he’d see that she was treated
kindly, and this Lyd, while a pirate, had not immediately offered to kill her,
which she thought a hopeful sign.

“What do you want?” Lyd asked again.

“
Not
to be thrown
over board,” Amielle said firmly. “Here, I’ll help you with that.” She took the
end of the bandage from Lyd’s hand. “Really, all I want is to go on hiding
until I can get away. No offense, but your captain doesn’t seem the sort who’d
let me do that.” She pinned the bandage snug and tidy.

“Probably not,” Lyd agreed. “He doesn’t care for females
aboard ship. Thank you.” She shrugged the shirt back on and buttoned her brown
waistcoat over it. “But look, child. This ship’s being taken to Isl’Alander,
and even if you leave it there, where will you go? It’s a port for privateers
and pirates and—well, not for nice little girls like you.”

“I’m good at hiding,” Amielle told her. “I only gave myself
away because—” she pointed at Lyd’s chest. “And if I can get to this
Isl’Alander, surely I can find a way home from there. If I’m not drownded for
being a girl, that is.“

“That’s still most likely.” Lyd sighed. “Look, child: I’m
going to sleep. Perhaps I’ll forget I saw you, perhaps not. If you’re smart
you’ll stay quiet.”

Amielle, recognizing a good offer when one was made, nodded
vigorously and, once again, climbed into the linen cupboard.

~o0o~

For several days it seemed that Lyd had all but forgotten
about the stowaway in the Ladies’ Cabin; it could have been forgetfulness that
caused her to leave a trencher of stew and biscuit in the cabin from time to
time. Amielle did not think so, but she was happy to eat the stew (which was
tasty) and the biscuit (hard crackers kept for the crew). Her chiefest problem,
aside from unending anxiety about her fate, was boredom. Shut into the cupboard
it was all too easy for Amielle to let her imagination run wild and consider
her fate if she was discovered. Reciting romantic poetry to herself was very
little distraction, and finally she gave in to that occupation which her
governess had regarded as the worst sin a child could commit: eavesdropping. If
she was not shut into the cupboard she could hear any business not conducted at
a whisper—and pirates, she soon realized, conduct little business at a whisper.

Amielle learned a number of things. The master’s
second-in-command was Gorle, whom the others called Fatty behind his back. It
was Gorle more than the master, Nault, who managed things. Most of the men
thought Nault too pretty to be captain, although they were willing to admit
that he was a good pilot. Only Lyd seemed willing to stick up for the master
when grousing started, as it did, like clockwork, when the grog ration was
doled out. Lyd stubbornly insisted that the master was a clever fellow, smart
even. And he’d been put in authority over them all, so there was no point
fretting about it.