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“Now she can see and hear the ocean.” His Majesty took Lucien’s sword from Marie-Josèphe’s hand. “You gave me your parole, M. de Chrétien.” The King grounded the sword’s tip and stamped his boot on the Damascan steel. The sword rebounded. The edge gouged the deck. The King stamped again. His expression grim, he attacked a third time. The steel snapped. Lucien never flinched and never looked away.
His Majesty flung the handle to the deck, and kicked the broken blade over the side.
Sherzad hung suspended in the net. The ropes cut cruelly into her breasts and hips; the figurehead’s absurd bosom pressed painfully against her back. The salt spray cleansed and revived her. She opened her mouth to take it onto her tongue, the taste and smell of her home.
She was dying. She did not want to die.
She kept her silence all afternoon, refusing to reply to Marie-Josèphe, refusing to direct the ship. As night approached, she sang. Her voice was hoarse and ugly.
“She agrees! She’ll take us to the cove!” Marie-Josèphe, foolish trusting Marie-Josèphe, interpreted.
The sun touched the horizon. Sherzad sang, listening to the shape of the sea-bottom as best she could. The wind hesitated, in the moment of calm between day and night, and shifted as dark fell. The ship’s captain argued against sailing blind so close to shore. The toothless shark, the King, commanded him to obey.
The ship plunged through the water. Sherzad trilled with excitement and fear.
A jagged stone reached from the sea bottom and seized the ship, grinding along its keel. Timbers crashed and splintered. Sherzad lurched against the net. The rough cables cut her skin.
But they did not break, they did not free her. The ship hung stranded, the captain shouted in fury, Marie-Josèphe cried out in shock. Sherzad laughed, wild and terrible, ready to die, for her plot had failed.
They left her hanging before the figurehead as the waning moon followed the sun into the sea.
29
Marie-Josèphe huddled miserably on deck, a blanket around her shoulders. She had tried to persuade Louis that Sherzad had not deliberately run the ship aground. She did not believe it herself, so her protestations only convinced the King she knew what Sherzad had planned.
What does he expect, she wondered, but betrayal for betrayal?
One good thing had come of the stranding. As the tide went out and the flagship settled, the groan of insulted timber replaced the erratic pitching. Lucien slept for the first time since the voyage began. His white-gold hair gleamed in the starlight. To Marie-Josèphe’s great relief, the sword cut on his throat was neither deep nor long.
Nothing had changed. The ship was not badly damaged. The captain said it would float free at high tide.
And then what? Marie-Josèphe wondered. They’ll never trust Sherzad to guide them, they’ll never trust me. Will they torture her, or kill her, or return her to Versailles and give her to Pope Innocent?
A quiet song floated through the night. Sherzad sang a lullaby that the sea people sing to their babies.
Marie-Josèphe matched her voice to Sherzad’s. Dew collected in droplets on the blanket and on her hair and on the ship’s gleaming paint and gilt.
Nearly asleep, Marie-Josèphe caught herself. She raised her head, fully awake, singing softly.
The guard near the bow nodded, caught himself, checked his pistol, nodded again. He had orders to shoot Sherzad if she tried to escape. He nodded a third time. He snored.
Marie-Josèphe slipped from beneath the blanket. She stealthily picked up Lucien’s sword-cane and twisted its handle. The sound of its release was as loud as the crash of the ship against the rock. Yet no one responded.
She drew the broken blade. A handsbreadth of steel remained, its edge transparently sharp. In her stocking feet, singing the soothing lullaby, Marie-Josèphe crept across the deck. She passed the guard and climbed onto the bowsprit. She crept along it, afraid the rustling of her petticoat, or her awkwardness in her long skirts, would awaken the guard. Sherzad’s song charmed him into sleep. The sea woman’s song enfolded her.
Sherzad’s eyes gleamed red.
“Carry my life in your heart,” Marie-Josèphe whispered.
She slipped the broken blade beneath a cord of the net. The cord parted at the touch of the steel. She cut another cable, and a third. The sword was never meant to slice through cable. The harsh mesh dulled it quickly. She sawed harder. Sherzad grew excited, agitated, writhing, pushing her foot through the hole in the net, tearing at the mesh with her claws. Sherzad’s song faltered and dissolved into a moan. Behind them, the musketeer snorted and woke.
“No!” he cried.
Sherzad shrieked in triumph. She burst through the net and tumbled into the sea. A pistol ball screamed past Marie-Josèphe’s ear and sizzled into the water. Marie-Josèphe caught her breath and clutched the broken sword in one hand, the bowsprit in another. She gazed into the darkness, terrified that Sherzad had been hit.
A splash sprayed Marie-Josèphe’s face with cool salty droplets. Sherzad laughed, cried a challenge, and vanished.
The ship creaked and shifted. Marie-Josèphe clung to the bowsprit, shaken, intoxicated.
“Come onto the deck, Mlle de la Croix.”
She obeyed the King, crawling backwards, embarrassed that His Majesty and his men could see her legs all the way to her knees. When she reached the deck and turned around, two musketeers held their pistols on her; three sailors stood ready with pikes.
“Give His Majesty my sword, if you please.” Lucien was bareheaded, unperturbed, wide awake. “Pass it hilt first.”
Her life, perhaps Lucien’s, depended on capitulation without threat, even with a broken sword. She did as Lucien said. Louis accepted her surrender.
The sailors led Marie-Josèphe away.
Shut up in the locker with the slimy seaweed-covered anchor chain, Marie-Josèphe lost track of time. She thought it must be day again, then night; but when the ship shifted and moaned beneath her, she knew it was only dawn.
Have they left the ship to break up on the rocks? she wondered. She hoped they had taken Lucien away with them. Anyone who disliked the sea so intensely should not have to drown.
The pumps groaned and rushed. The ship floated free. As the ship settled into the water, Sherzad’s voice travelled through the sea and touched the planks, resounding like a drum. Astonished, overjoyed, Marie-Josèphe replied. Sherzad spoke again, begging her to answer. Hurry, hurry, she cried, I cannot bear to wait for you much longer.
