The Sea Wolves (2 page)

“I'll not harm you,” he said softly, and his throat seemed to throb with an unusual vibration. He realized that he had no real idea what sound these birds made, but it bobbed its head, flapped its mighty wings several times, and then hunkered down again. Jack grew still, and found himself staring into the bird's eye. He was reflected in there. He wondered how it viewed him—threat, something interesting, or simply part of the scenery?

He watched the pelican as Lesya, the forest spirit, had taught him to watch, and before long he did not perceive this tableau as man and beast at all. It was simply observer and observed. Though in the end she had proved to be a mad thing, Lesya had given him a gift, opening his mind and senses so that if he focused he could touch the thoughts of other creatures. Reaching out to the pelican, he sensed the same feeling of foreboding that had only just started to settle over him.

In the distance, Jack heard several resounding thuds of waves striking a hull. He frowned. The
Umatilla
rode smooth as ever, and he had not felt even the smallest impact vibration. The pelican lifted and opened its heavy beak.

Jack heard that sound again, the
thud-wash, thud-wash
of a hull cutting across the waves instead of going with them. Something was out there. He looked up at the two men in the crow's nest, but they were vague shadows behind a gentle haze of mist, and he could not even tell which direction they were looking.

“What's this, then?” he asked the pelican, and the bird spread its wings. But it remained behind the railing, turning on its big feet so that it could look directly back along the deck.
I could call to the lookouts
, Jack thought. But what would he say? Darkness and the mist stirred his senses, and that feeling of things slightly askew might be only in his mind.

He leaned on the railing and looked down, ghostly whitecaps breaking gently away from the ship. They were cutting through the water, not impacting against the waves, and the spray that reached him up here was carried on the gentlest of breezes.

A shadow moved far out across the waves. Jack held on to the railing and scanned the skeins of mist that played like curtains across the ocean's surface.
Something huge
, he thought.

And then he saw the shadow again. A hardening of the mists, a solidifying of shapes that danced where no one normally watched, and a boat emerged. It was cutting a diagonal that would intercept the
Umatilla
within twenty seconds. Three masts, maybe a hundred feet long, the craft was dwarfed by the
Umatilla
. And yet there was something about the way it moved that seemed almost predatory.

The vessel's masts sported dark sails that swallowed the weak moonlight, and it slipped through the water as if it were hardly there at all, a phantom ship. The only sign of its existence was the intermittent thump of waves against its hull, but that lessened as the ship came close to matching the
Umatilla
's course.

Jack could see shadows busy in the rigging, and more on deck. The booms swung as the schooner drew down alongside the
Umatilla
. And Jack knew then that something was very wrong indeed.

From above, he heard the lookouts' muttering rise in alarm. Then something whistled, the two men groaned, and their speaking ceased.

Behind him the white pelican grumbled like an old man. Jack ducked behind the solid railing and peered over the top. There was a flurry of activity on board the phantom schooner—rigging whispered, shadows moved, and he heard the soft impact of the vessel's buffered hull striking the
Umatilla
.

It was only as the first of several muffled grappling hooks appeared over the railing, thirty feet back along the deck from where he hid, that Jack realized the truth.
We're being boarded!

He went to shout a warning, but no one would hear. If he moved, he might have time to get belowdecks before the first of the aggressors came on board … but he could already see the rope attached to the first grappling hook tensing as it was subjected to weight from below.

Instinct told him to duck down and stay where he was, and the pelican flapped its wings and lifted away from the deck, following its own instinct. It grumbled again as it flew, disappearing quickly across the port side and away into the thickening mist. For a fleeting instant Jack knew its freedom, but then he was back in his cumbersome and heavy flesh again, searching for shadows in which to conceal himself as the first head appeared above the railing.

The man slipped over onto the deck, and Jack felt a tingle of awe. He breathed out a gentle gasp. The man moved like a shadow himself, completely silent, and he stood crouched low while his head turned left and right. His arms were held out from his sides, and he seemed to be holding something in his right hand. There was so much threat in that shape—energy coiled like a wound spring, violence gathering like distant, silent storm clouds.

The man sniffed like an animal, head tilted. Then he glanced up at the crow's nest, gave a brief hand signal over the railing, and dashed for the first doorway leading belowdecks. His shadow was large—easily half a foot taller than Jack's five feet eight inches, and broad across the chest—and his head was topped with a mane of hair that seemed to writhe its own shadowy pattern as he moved. Jack did not hear a sound, and he breathed the word that his mother had made him fear since childhood.

“Ghost.”

But the other five men who appeared on deck over the next few seconds were not ghosts. With a sigh of clothing against metal, the soft exhalation of effort, they boarded the ship and quickly dispersed, full of purpose and oozing menace.

“If only I could fly,” Jack whispered. Because he could not remain where he was. Without a plan, and yet also without fear, Jack pulled his knife from his belt and started to follow after the last of the men.

That first one to board is in charge
, he thought, and there had been something about the man's silhouette that troubled Jack. He slipped across the deck, moving from shadow to shadow, glancing back at the grappling hooks to make sure no one else would overtop the railing in that moment and see him. He ducked quickly through a doorway, into the poorly lit corridor that led to a staircase down toward the cabin deck. Gentle footsteps shuffled on the metal stairs, and he followed, keeping low so that his shadow was not cast ahead of him by the sputtering oil lamps.

Down the stairs, and three treads from the bottom he heard something that changed everything. Until now the boat's appearance from the mist, the boarding, the fleeting shadows, all had been part of some strange dream ghost-witnessed by the pelican. The rush of adventure flushed through Jack's veins.

“You got gold?” a voice asked, low, threatening.

“No … no.”

Thunk!

And Jack knew very well the sound of a knife cleaving flesh.

“Jesus!” he whispered, backing up a step because suddenly this was very real.

That question again, another negative answer, another murder, and then there was a flurry of movement from the cabin as other men came awake. And yet it took only seconds for the intruder to reappear from the cabin.

He turned away from Jack and paused, head cocked. Not the first man Jack had seen board, but still he was big, and strong. He was dressed in loose dark clothing, his hair was long and black, and in his right hand he carried a heavy knife. The blade was wet. The man was not even breathing hard.

How many men did he just kill?
Jack wondered, letting out a slow, gentle breath, mouth slightly open, conscious all the time that a click of his throat or a whistle from his nose would give him away.

Then there would be knives.

The man walked to the next cabin and opened the door without a sound. He entered, Jack descended to the corridor floor and crouched, and he heard the same question muttered.

“Got gold?”

“Who—?”

“Got gold?”

“No … we didn't…”

“Who's got gold?”

“I don't—”

Thunk! Thunk!

Merritt!
Jack thought. His friend was sleeping in their cabin on the next deck down, and this man's mates had disappeared into other doors.
Bastards will go for Merritt as well as anyone else
.

There were maybe three hundred people aboard the
Umatilla
on this return journey from the Yukon Territory gold rush, and right now most of them were asleep. Sleeping men and women were often haunted by shadows, especially people who had been through such hardships, and waking to a nightmare such as this would cause confusion and panic. How someone could do what this man was doing…

Jack gripped his blade and faced a decision. He could dash forward and engage this murderer, press a knife to his throat and demand that he submit, and then wake everyone on the corridor and tell them what was happening. In that urgent instant, it felt like the best course of action—it would reduce their enemy by one, and increase those who knew of the attack by a score.

But then the man stepped into the corridor and stood facing away from Jack once again, and his knife hand was so soaked in blood that droplets spattered to the wooden deck. He moved to the next door and opened it, and before Jack could make a decision, the man had disappeared inside.

“Who has gold?” the man's voice came, muffled and low.

“Jack London has gold!” Jack shouted, and his heart galloped, his blood surged, the decision snatched from him by impetuosity. The
Umatilla's
crew and passengers needed time. Jack might be the only person who could give them that.

He turned and bolted up the narrow, steep stairway, emerging onto the deck and breathing in the cold, mist-shrouded air. He left the door hanging open and slid to the side, dropping to the deck, grateful for the thickening mist. He pressed himself against the wall across from where the door hung against the bulkhead, the darkened passage below yawning in between.
He'll expect me to be hiding behind the door
, Jack thought.
Or to have run
. But Jack would not run. He felt flushed with fear, but there was also a cold and primal strength rising in him, a wild determination. He was sickened at the bloodshed but ready for a fight.

He heard the man's footsteps, still quiet but no longer so cautious. At the top of the staircase the murderer gave the creaking, swaying door a mighty kick, crashing it back against the bulkhead. Jack moved quickly, grabbing his leg behind the knee and standing, pushing up, lifting and tipping him so that he tumbled hard back down the stairs. The man did not cry out as he fell—made no noise at all, other than the shocking impact of his head against the stairs and the crack of something breaking.

Jack didn't even wait to see if the man would rise. He slammed the door shut, pressed his foot against the bulkhead, and levered the handle off, in the hope that it might jam the latch. He turned and saw that where the grappling hooks had come over the starboard railing, the ropes had been wound about the cleats and tied off, so the killers' vessel must be running alongside.

He'd had the knife for a long time, and it had served him well. But these ropes were wet and his hand was shaking, and Jack found cutting through harder than he'd anticipated. He kept low, remembering the fate that had befallen the lookouts up in the crow's nest. Crossbow, he suspected, or perhaps a small harpoon. He had no wish to present another silhouetted target.

Something crashed against the door behind him, shaking it in its frame. He jumped, and the rope parted. It had been under such tension that it whipped and unwound, strands catching Jack across the face as it fell away to the boat below.

Whoever was down there would now know that something was amiss.

The door shook again, the impact tremendous.

A crack sounded from somewhere; wood breaking close by, perhaps, or maybe a gunshot from farther away.

“Hey, down there!” a voice cried out, and it came from above. Jack spun around and crouched in a fighting stance, knife held out to his right, knees bent, ready to leap aside. “Hey, is that … is that a boat?”