February 21st, 1695
We break at dawn. The trance broken, our deed done; we split as dandelions in a stiff breeze, disappearing, melting back into our lives, carrying little but an afterglow so suppressed it appears only as sweat upon our brows.
Tonight, we tell ourselves.
Tonight, we set our trap.
Fort St. George. A town built by the Company, with the promise that it would bring us prosperity. Land surrendered to them on the basis of a lie. White walls built around it to the exclusion of our people.
Only Whites may walk freely within White Town, after all.
I only walk there in the heat of their scorn.
My every move suspect.
My every breath sacrilege.
My every step dirty.
January 7th, 1695, 8:30 A.M.
“Bring that over here, boy!” the White man calls. He stands atop the hill, dressed in the reds of a British officer, complete with feathered hat. I recognize him from the most recent Navy arrivals, the one the elders pointed out to those of us too young to know. Avery, they call him. He is the one we must avoid at all costs.
His eyes are narrow-set in his face, his brows and lips curved into the snarling grimace of a wolf. Even without the warning, I know he is dangerous.
He points at a heavy-looking wooden crate placed near me, at the base of the hill, with his pistol. I look around for Amma, who has gone to sell fish to the Britishers here, but she is nowhere in sight. My duty is to wait here while she finishes cleaning and cutting the fish, and to then carry the bag of fish guts back to our town, where we can feed them to the strays.
I am not to get myself into any sort of trouble here.
Especially after what happened to Appa.
But ignoring the British soldier’s call will lead me into trouble, as surely as disobeying Amma’s will.
But the Britisher has guns.
I know what he wants me to help with, what they never seem to have enough workers for. Renovations – expansions – are being made to the Company office and the Fort itself, as demanded by its new president. He has come here to replace old Mr. Yale, who was the one who built the Town in the first place.
I squeeze my eyes shut and shake my head to rid myself of that man’s image, pink and bulbous in the Madraspattinam heat, leering at me with eyes filled with lust. I hadn’t known the expression then, but I know it now.
That was what had seen him relieved of his post, after all.
“Are you listening, boy? Get that crate here now!” The White man is losing his patience, so I scramble to the box. Always eager to use their weapons, are they.
I take it up slowly, balancing its weight on my head, feeling its contents shift with each step. When I reach the top, I place it alongside the others, leaving it for the laborers to do with what they will. I turn to leave, but the White soldier clicks his tongue at me, stopping me in my tracks.
“Where do you think you’re going? Get up there and work, you lazy bastard,” he says, pointing the gun at the spire that rises – half-built – from the top of the office building. Rickety wooden scaffolding is set up around it, but I already see a number of dark-skinned bodies perched upon it, spiderlike and precarious.
I face him, my eyes trained on the shimmering buttons at his chest, and then the gleaming buckles on his footwear, and then the sharpened point of the bayonet on the rifle hanging from his back. I look everywhere but into his ice-cold eyes.
“I…I don’t work here, sir,” I say, stumbling over the words in my mind. “And I cannot stay out late, Amma worries about the beast in the night.”
He growls like a dog pulled from its food.
“You superstitious savages, moaning about beasts and spirits.” He towers over me now, the whiskers of his moustaches quivering with rage. “Well, now you work here,” he says. “Get up there, or get in the stocks. Your choice. I’m sure your beast will appreciate a free meal.”
I can hear Appa warning me to go with it, “Pannaadhe da, edhayume solladhe.”
He’s done it many times before. Always pleading, always preaching patience.
And look where that got him.
“What about my pay, sir?” I ask.
The pistol butt flashes for a moment as he raises it, and then I see nothing.
January 7th, 1695, Mid-afternoon
“Never talk back.”
The voice I awaken to is wry, experienced. I open my eyes to try and see its source, but my right eye is swollen shut where the soldier hit me. The next thing I notice, when I try to look at the girl who’d spoken through my good eye, is that I’m unable to. My neck and arms are held in place, bolted over with something solid and heavy.
I’m in the stocks outside the fort.
I try my bonds, but they don’t give. Of course, they don’t. They’re solid steel.
I hear the girl return to the crowd that watches me, and I quickly learn why.
Black boots and white pants, both fastidiously clean despite the monsoon-soaked grounds of the city, step up to me.
“Try that again, dog, and you’ll find yourself somewhere far worse than here.”
I am not given the chance to say that I was only asking to be paid.
I can almost hear the creaking of wood when he walks away; the clinking of heavy chains deep underneath him; the pitiful groans of the cargo he transports. His threat is not empty.
The feet retreat from my vision, leaving me blinking painfully at the mud before me.
“Best to just smile your way through it. Makes them feel less guilty, so they’ll stop using you to feel sorry for themselves and their own cowardice.” The girl is back now. The wryness is still there in her voice, but now it carries an edge to it.
My response is a groan that is the first thing that leaves my lips when I part them.
“Got you good, didn’t he?” the girl says.
“I’m sorry, who are you?” The pain in my skull is making me irritable, as is the uncomfortable weight around my neck and wrists.
“Devyani, monster hunter,” she says, as if I should know her by reputation.
“Not much of a monster hunter then. It’s still out there,” I reply.
She’s silent for a moment, as if my sullenness has spread to her. I feel a pang of guilt – it’s not her fault I’m in here, I shouldn’t be antagonizing her, even if she does seem a little too happy for someone watching their fellow rot in the stocks.
When she speaks next, the humor has dropped entirely from her voice, turning dark – feral, carrying the promise of violence. “Come find me once you get out, then you’ll see just what I am.”
A shiver runs down my spine, but the question leaves my lips even through my fear.
“Where?”
She crouches, and I finally see her—her face is thin, as if she’s been recently starved, but there is a lean muscle to her frame that suggests a violent life.
She smiles the smile of a predator when she responds.
“Follow it, and you’ll know.”
I hear her back crack as she stretches, and then her footsteps recede behind me, vanishing into the haphazard huts of our port town – Black Town – that sprawls outside the northern wall of White Town.
Panic sets in my chest, a hammering drumbeat that throbs in my ears. A beast roams the streets at night. One that has evaded all attempts at capture.
Was that an invitation, or a threat?
If I get out, will she be waiting in the streets to kill me herself?
I wait in agony for what feels like days, but is only a few hours, as Suryan drifts across the sky in his chariot to begin his descent back into his palace in the ocean, but the next steps I hear don’t follow the languid rhythm of the White man, arrogance in his gait, confident in his superiority and his dominance; they beat to the frantic pulse of a worried mother.
“Aditya! Dei, eppadi da idhe aachu? Why did they put you in here?” Amma has dropped to her knees and slid up to me, her face now level with mine, her rough hands cupping my face; her eyes wide as the sambar deer when it is slaughtered.
“What did they do to you?” She touches the swelling on my eye softly, but even that is enough to send a fresh wave of pain through me.
“I only asked to be paid to help them,” I say, keeping the other word – the one Sir Yale was so fond of, that he had made his name on – out of my mouth for fear of spitting it in my mother’s face.
She hears it anyway, and we turn away from each other for a moment, wincing against resurfacing memories; scabs torn open; a family riven. No, there is no escaping that word, not while the Company still exists on this land.
“We’ll talk about that when we’re home. Now, hold still.” She pulls her bone pin from her hair, letting it fall in waves to her heels, and begins poking at the locks holding me in place.
“Amma! What if they see you?” I ask, panic welling in my throat, burning me from the inside. It is late, and the White men do not often stay late to torment their captives – not those on public display anyway. But even so, I cannot help but worry that they will catch her – and breaking a prisoner from captivity is a greater crime than talking back to the White man, if only just.
I cannot handle another separation.
“I don’t care. I’m not leaving you out here as bait for that creature to take you – like these monsters took your father,” she says.
But my fears are unfounded, for the moment, as I hear the first lock click open, allowing me to pull my right hand from its shackle. Amma moves quickly over to the other one, working faster now that she’s in rhythm. The second lock tumbles free of my wrist moments later, and then we work together to remove the bar over my head.
When I throw it off my neck, my back screams with the strain of having been bent for half a day, but there is no time to rest or stretch now.
Amma grabs my hand and pulls me away from the grounds and into the shadows of Black Town. We run back to our hut – one of hundreds thrown up just off the beach – and duck inside. We hold our breaths and wait a minute. Then two. Then five.
No shouts sound in the darkness, no torches light up the sand path outside. No heavy boots kick down the flimsy door, and no saber-wielding devils walk through.
We’re safe.
January 8th, 1695, 4:30 A.M.
I open the door to our hut at the first crowing of the rooster.
A crowd has gathered four doors from ours, silent. Grave. Hands over mouths. Shuddering in abject terror.
I peer over the massed heads at the sight, and stifle the moan that pours forth, the bodily rejection of the image in front of me.
A body – no, a torso – lies on the floor, its blood splattering the door and the thatch walls of the hut in front of it. Its other limbs are cast haphazardly around it, as if this man had been pulled apart by each of them at once. Its head is placed carefully on the wooden beam above the door, painted red with its own lifeblood – a mockery of the pumpkin wards we have all placed around our homes.
And walking away from the sight are the bloody prints of a massive wolf.
February 16th, 1695
I have stayed away from White Town for some time, spending those days out at sea with the trawlers and their nets, letting the sun and the salt bake my skin until it cracks. Coming back home well before nightfall and barricading the doors with everything we have.
More attacks have haunted our nights, and despite myself, I search the shadowed alleyways they were taken from for signs of that girl. I think I have seen her in the crowds, but I can never catch up to her.
My work today is different from the usual. Special. Today, the English sailors have come in with bullion. Fishing is an afterthought, ignored in favor of being among the first to take the masula boats to the English ships moored off in the deep water a quarter mile from shore. We carry fish and crab from the morning’s haul to them and return with the cargo they have brought in from their voyages.
I return to shore with my share, leaving a group of landlocked laborers to carry the cargo back into White Town. But as they reach the Sea Gate into White Town, I glimpse something. A face amongst them that does not belong. Devyani.
I’m on my feet and moving before I know it, wrapping myself in a sura-skin cloak to hide my skin, the hood drawn fully over my face. I run to catch up with the cargo transporters, pushing my way into the middle of the caravan of bullock carts. She has already passed through the gate and out of sight, so I make myself as small as I can when we pass under the Gate and the scowling eyes that patrol it, praying that they don’t notice me. The caravan pauses briefly as a guard captain checks the cargo manifest, but he clears it after a cursory pass and lets us through. I empty one crate onto a bullock cart and place it on my head before splitting from the caravan.
White Town houses around three hundred individuals – two hundred White men and women of wealth, and another hundred of their guards and houseservants. The sailors do not count among them – they stay moored on their ships, and never linger for longer than a week or two before setting off again for China or some other land to the East.
The Governor’s house was the last act of Sir Yale in this town before his forced retirement. It was a miniscule comfort to me that he never got to stay in the giant stone monstrosity he’d had built for his leisure. To the right of it was the largest building in the Town – St. Mary’s Church. Their preachers held sermons in the streets for those who’d listen, and even had the ‘courage’ to venture into the recesses of Black Town to convert us to join them in their faith. There were those who took to it, but their god held nothing for me.
Not after what their soldiers and their governor – all regular churchgoers – had done to my father.
I did not find it surprising that the preachers did not come to Black Town when it was plagued by a monster.
And now, with the Gate behind me, it is time to find Devyani.
I turn a corner and walk into a red-jacketed British soldier. The crate drops from my head and onto the floor behind me. My eyes flick upwards a moment, past the clean-shaven chin, over the long black moustache framing heat-pinked cheeks, and lock onto a pair of shocked brown eyes.
The same eyes that had glared at me moments before a pistol smashed into my head.
I stumble away from the man and mumble an apology, my eyes turning quickly back to the ground. I bend to pick up the crate, hoping that he doesn’t see that it’s empty, and praying that he didn’t recognize me.
His shadow looms over me, but he says nothing. The crate in my hands, I glance over my shoulder and find him staring intently at my back.
“It’s you,” he says, surprise widening in eyes reddening with anger. His lips part, revealing sharp teeth. Too sharp?
So much for them thinking me beneath notice.
I push the crate into his midriff and run around him, lowering my shoulder into him as I run past him and through the wide cobblestoned streets of White Town.
He yells from behind me, threatening to shoot, though I know that even the Whites are loath to fire their weapons within the Town – can’t have the bullets damaging buildings, or savage blood muddying their pretty roads.
I run for St. George’s Hill, cutting through the fabric market to try and lose the soldier. My path takes me through several women with coiffed hair and billowing dresses, knocking some to the ground in my wake. This, compounded with my other crimes, puts me in line for execution. Not even an exile like Appa’s is enough for me now.
I clear the market and its gawking crowd, and from there I look back to find that my pursuer has found companions for his hunt. And no doubt others have sent to collect reinforcements. The noose is closing about my neck already.
A gunshot sounds in the air behind me, clearing the market in a hurry. My time’s up. There are no passers-by to protect me now, and British sensibilities will not hold them back now that I’ve had the audacity to harm theirs.
Now, now it is time for their honor to take over.
To shoot an unarmed man in the back.
Honor.
To force Appa into purchasing fabric he did not want from them, with money he did not have.
To take everything he owned from him in exchange, and still find him wanting.
To charge him with a crime they created.
To send him off into a world unknown in the hold of a ship, his hands shackled to his feet.
Cargo to be delivered on some distant shore.
I will not be subject to their honor any longer.
I cut into an alley and find myself pulled from the street.
Silence envelops me with the dark, cutting me from reality like a wound, parsing me from existence and throwing me into a void tailored for my despair.
“Stay quiet!”
The same voice, but a different tone.
Her hand grips mine, but when I turn to look at her, her eyes are closed, her brows furrowed in deep concentration.
I try to pull free, but stop when I hear soldiers.
“They won’t see us if you don’t do anything,” she whispers.
“What is this?” I ask.
“A little wisdom I’ve picked up. Now shut up.”
The soldiers enter the alley by the barrels of their muskets, and Avery follows them. They poke at everything they can, but avoid the space we occupy, as if they cannot see it.
Avery stays at the mouth of the alley, and sniffs at the air, like a hound.
Like a wolf.
“He’s not hiding here, sir,” one of his men calls from the opposite end of the street.
“He’s close by, let’s keep looking,” Avery replies. He looks around the alley, his eyes locking onto mine for a moment before they slide past, and then he signals for his men to file out. Only when they’re gone do I breathe again.
“Avery’s got it out for you. Never a good sign.”
Devyani has released my hand, though sweat now pours down her face.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” I say.
She nods.
“We need to move,” she says.
We leave White Town behind us, Devyani leading me through Muttial Pettai—the artisan town—to its east, until we come to a stop at a cave temple that has been converted into a hut, complete with two wooden pillars set outside as a threshold. She enters first, and bids me follow. I look around, but there are no signs of pursuit. More curious than afraid now, I follow.
And step into something beyond my understanding.
The walls of the cave are carved with murals that spread across their entire surface; a single unbroken tapestry woven into the fabric of the rock.
“What is this place?” I ask. “What are you?”
“Safe,” is what she says.
“The house, or you?”
“Both.”
“How long have you known of Avery?”
“I was only a child when the Wolf came to my town.”
She motions for me to sit.
“My mother hid me, like I hid you. Only she didn’t have to stay to maintain it. So she told me to keep quiet and then she left. I obeyed, until I was more hungry than afraid. I found some food and then searched for my family. They had to have escaped the Wolf’s clutches too, if I did.
“But I never found them. And the wolf was gone. I chased him all up and down the coast, hunting for any scraps of information as to my parents’ whereabouts. But eventually I understood. They weren’t coming back.”
Her story was insane – but I didn’t question it. Remove the wolf, and it was mine.
“That’s when I decided that if I couldn’t save them, then the only thing I could do was to save as many from the Wolf as I could.”
“What is he doing? Why not enslave people the way they usually do? Why all this subterfuge?”
She walks over to one corner of the wall. She stands on the bench there and presses her finger to the carvings, searching along them for something.
“What are you looking for?”
“I have been recording everything I know about Avery on this wall, a monument to his crimes, and a warning to whoever finds it—should I fail in my task.”
I join her, my fingers scrape over the rough-hewn edges of the tapestry, until they reach a small figure with the same moustache, the same hat – but the red coat is cast aside, replaced with brown, as he stands under the shadow of a skull and crossbones.
Even we know what that dread flag represents.
His own shadow extends beyond the flag, stretching into the jagged outline of a massive wolf.
The scene scratches itself out under my hand, the sails of that pirate vessel billowing into another scene, where Avery is stood next to the house he’d accosted me at – the Company office that was closed for renovations. His form stretches, falls forward onto all fours; a white wolf on the prowl in Black Town. Stragglers in the night are caught, frightened into submission, and dragged back to the Company office. Avery takes them in, and they do not leave.
It shifts once more, Devyani’s chisel etching into the wall the hold of a ship; that scene that haunted my nightmares. Slaves huddled together as Avery’s pirates dragged them one by one to the deck to scrub or clean or be used as bait or sport.
A fleet of warships out in the open sea, their heart a vessel larger than any I had ever seen. Their colors those of the Mughals who lived far to the North. Five ships waited in the safety of a cove for this convoy to approach, their ambush set.
I see my people, lined up in front of his English crew, trembling as they face down the guns of the Mughal soldiers. Their bodies fall in a line, the chains connecting them to one another dragging even the living to be crushed under the weight of the ocean. The pirates and the Mughals fight on, without a single glance spared for the lives they ruined.
I see Avery atop a bed of riches, howling with glee in the middle of a sea reddened with blood. I see the horrors his crew inflicts upon their victims before they throw them over into waters churning with the delight of sharks.
He is the wolf. The hunter of men; the one who comes in the night. The Bane of Black Town.
“What is this?” I ask.
“His plan. That Mughal ship is the Gani-i-sawai—the Exceeding Treasure, pride of the Emperor’s fleet. Avery is gathering his forces to mount an assault on it. And his pirates need slaves to use on the journey, or to sell when they stop for supplies.”
“Can we stop it?”
“It will be difficult.”
“And what of him? Can he be slain?”
She points to another segment of the wall, a different branch that stretches back from Avery to a younger form of the monster. It shows a scene of battle upon a sinking ship, a human Avery fighting a wolf; his swings wild and desperate, blood pouring from a hole in his throat. The wolf prowls, unhurt by his sword or his gun, its eyes focused on its prize, waiting for it to bleed out. Avery falls to the deck, and the wolf closes for the feast. A flash of movement, a piece of the deck broken and burning from the fight around them, it pierces the wolf where steel bounced off. The wolf falls limp beside Avery, and the two expire together.
And then they are one.
“Burning wood.”
“Sharpened to a blade, yes. I’ve been trying to find a way to kill him for ages, but he’s never easy to find alone – unless he’s a wolf, and that fight is not one I can win.”
“But we have to try.”
We have to stop his future from coming to be. The people of Madraspattinam do not deserve the fate Avery has in store for them.
“We can try finding those he’s taken, free them before they can be moved to his ship. Maybe use the commotion to isolate him,” Devyani suggests.
“How are we going to get inside the Company office? They’ll never let us in there. And that’s if they aren’t out there hunting for me right now.”
But she isn’t listening to me; she is pointing at the wall where Avery stood next to the building. He watches the men and women enter the building, and when the sun sets on the building, men appear at its rear, dragging out those who have been abducted – now chained and meek; drugged. They file outwards from the office and are loaded into a carriage to be taken to the port.
“There’s a secret passage,” I say.
“How do you feel about heists?” she asks, grinning.
We have the beginnings of a plan.
February 16th, 1695
I hurry home, leaving Devyani with the promise of a meeting soon, my heart thumping, my breath heavy from fear. My eyes flit at every small movement in the dark, seeing the wolf’s grin in every shadow. I reach my house and I open the thatch door, but there is no one inside. The house is dark, though not absent of the mild scent of fish that lingers for hours after dinner.
She’s gone looking for me. Again.
I run to the docks, relying on muscle memory to keep me from falling into the surf. The oil lamps have been doused for the night, so the only light here comes from the moon and stars, and the tiny swaying pinpricks of revelry onboard the ships moored in the bay. At least one of those, I know, carries people like me in its belly. And if I’m not careful, something else will be carrying me in its belly tonight.
I find Amma huddled behind a stack of crates, her head peering over top to stare at something in the distance. I kneel next to her, falling back on my haunches when she swings at me in surprise.
“Amma, it’s me!” I whisper, picking myself up from the ground, “What are you doing?”
She hushes me and turns to look over the crates again. Clearly my “disappearance” is not of import anymore.
I join her in looking, my eyes focusing on the blurred outlines of several people shuffling near the waterline twenty feet from us. They have boats, which creak with the muffled weight of boots entering them.
“Who are they?” I ask, though I fear I know the answer.
In response, Amma pulls me away from the crates, my foot bumping painfully into the corner of one. We break into a crouched run towards the tangled grove of huts near ours, and we do not stop to see if the pirates heard our mistake. We do not stop until we have run through every alley in Black Town, until we reach home and throw our own crates and possessions before the door. My heart beats painfully in my throat, gagging me, choking me for my mistake.
Amma recovers before I do.
“We’re really making this a habit,” she says, a chuckle forcing its way through her panting.
They didn’t manage to follow us in the dark. They didn’t know who had seen them. But they existed. Devyani had been right.
And all that meant was that we had to go through with the plan. With the fevered concoction of one mind addled by fear and adrenaline, and another addled by a lifelong hunt.
“What were you doing there?” I ask Amma, “Why were you watching them?”
“I was looking for you!” she replies, indignance taking over from the tired laugh. She wheels on me. “And where were you? Vishnu said you left the docks before midday, and you only come home well past sundown?”
I breathe deep, preparing the lie, but what comes out instead is the truth in all its mad glory. The girl from the stocks, the identity of the man who’d put me there in the first place – who’d hunted me today with murderous intent – and the wall that showed me his plans for the future.
“It sounds mad, I know,” I say at the end of it all.
“So, they were slaves,” Amma says, her voice soft as the Mughal satin that the White people covet.
“The people at the docks just now? They probably were, yes.” A pause. “And their slavers.”
“The men under the command of the one who hit you. The wolf.” Satin turns to steel, folding over itself until its edge is honed sharp enough to sing in the air.
I nod.
She sits back against the far wall of the hut, on top of her thin rajai, and pulls her knees into her chest to rest her head on them. For ten minutes she stays that way, deep in thought.
“This girl, can you show her to me?” she asks, when she comes out of her reverie.
“I’ll ask her. She did seem to want to find more help if she could, so she might not be averse to company.”
Amma nods, as if this is enough for the moment.
“I don’t know what to make of all this, you know,” she says, “It’s…a lot.”
She holds a hand up to cut me off before I can speak.
“But I know that they’re still taking our people as slaves – just as they did to Appa. And if you and this girl are planning to oppose that, then I will help in every way I can.”
My heart swells. I had expected her to kill the idea, tell us to keep our heads low and to avoid angering the British. But it seems that selling one’s spouse into slavery and beating their child into submission will turn even mild souls to rebellion.
“What do you want to do?” she asks.
I tell her.
February 18th, 1695
“You told your mother.” Devyani paces, torchlight casting her shadow over the winding images of Avery’s triumph on the wall behind her. It looks like waves, rising and falling against the hulls of the battleships.
“She saw them taking the slaves out to the ship. I couldn’t really lie to her after that,” I say.
“Where is she now?”
“She’ll be here soon, had to finish her work in White Town to avoid suspicion.”
She arrives an hour later, forcing one last piece of white coconut meat into her mouth as she enters the cave, and then wiping her hands on her saree.
“You’re thinking too small,” Amma says, once we lay out the whole plan. She sits on a bench facing Devyani’s mural and crosses her left leg over her knee. “You want to free the people that pirate has taken, but that’s not enough.”
Devyani glances at me, plainly not sure what to expect from Amma.
“What do you suggest, then?” she ventures eventually.
“Hit them where it hurts. They expect nothing from us – we’re harmless, subservient. Unseen.”
She lays out her plan.
We listen.
February 21st, 1695
We’re ready for our raid on the slave holding. Amma and Devyani watch over it during the day in the guises of fish vendors while I hide in the secret house, avoiding Avery and his men. Over three days we’ve moved lockpicks, hammers, and a number of aruvals into Devyani’s house – along with everything else we can smuggle in without being noticed. I spend the day wrapping them together in wool, muffling the sound that comes from them.
Devyani comes to take them from me in the afternoon, passing them to Amma so she can secret them away to the docks. From there, Vishnu – another fisherman and dockworker—will carry them onto Avery’s ship at the next delivery of cargo to them, closer to the day of their departure.
At midnight, Devyani calls for me and we make our way around the back of the hill with the wrapped weapon bundles. We search along the wall of the governor’s house, and soon find the latch that reveals the trapdoor leading to its cellars, where the captives are held.
Unseen. No guards stand watch anywhere around the house – the British are secure, lax. They see no threat from us. We climb down into the cellars, and recoil. The smell washes over us like the surf at high tide, a wave of putrefaction that threatens to send us right back out of the cellar. But Devyani in front of me grits her teeth, covers her nose with her sleeve and presses on, into the midst of the thirty or so bodies that lie in the small space.
She points Amma and me to different sections of the room, and we get to work undoing the bolts holding the prisoners together. Most of them are insensate, too weakened by captivity and hunger to register our presence as we free them. We release three of the slaves from their bonds and push them towards the ladder leading outside.
With them gone, we shackle ourselves in their places and wait. We have steeled ourselves for this, readied ourselves to become slaves, if only for a short time. But coming into this cellar has invited questions, insecurity.
This is madness. This will kill us all.
There is nothing that can measure the misery of those in this cellar, nothing that can compare to the horror of their lives. And we were going to put ourselves in this position willingly? I look at Amma and Devyani, but they have already taken their positions, their heads lowered in mimicry of those around us.
Is this what Appa’s life had become? What Devyani’s family had suffered? Surely it could not get worse than this. But I remember now the images Devyani had carved. The slaves on all ships – British and Mughal alike – being used as human shields, blood pouring from bullet wounds as they crumple before their captors; their purpose served – their use expended.
It could get worse. It would get worse for these people here, if we did nothing. And releasing these people from captivity would not free them. It would only make Avery suspicious, and make him redouble his efforts to claim my people.
We would not get a second chance.
I swallow my fear, let it fester in my belly, burn me from the inside. I would let that fear drive me to action rather than freeze me. Better that than to let it rule my mind and condemn people to a fate worse than death. When I knew how to prevent that forevermore.
The circle of moonlight pouring from the cellar door dwindles to a sliver, and then vanishes altogether, leaving me in the dark with thirty other bodies stacked together like dead-eyed fish at the market. My decision is made.
February 28th, 1695
After nine days of captivity, with only one bucket of slop left in the room for us to fight over each day, Amma, Devyani, and I are weakened, but no more than we anticipated. The other slaves are in worse states of malnourishment, and we learned quickly to fight for the lion’s share of the food.
We’d need our strength for what was to come.
Three die in that span of time, their bodies left to rot in the cellar with us.
It takes the British three days to take them from the room.
They move us to the ship under the cover of darkness the same night, though they make no attempt to do so silently, wooden rods slapping against the raw calves of those who lagged.
“Move it, you bastards! We’ll be in for an earful if you get us caught, and then I’ll have to string you lot up by the toes,” a heavyset man says, pushing the line along, forcing us into a run to the docks where three longboats wait to carry us to Avery’s ship.
We’re hauled onboard by our manacles and thrown in the cellar, which already reeks with the stink of numerous unwashed bodies. All the people who’d gone missing in the city, all the souls lost to an evil spirit prowling the streets of Black Town, and here they are – caught in the claws of a much larger, much more devious beast.
???, 1695
Time becomes meaningless to us below decks, where in the press of bodies we find our thoughts occupied permanently with the fight to survive, to just keep living until it is time. We lose track of the days, how close we are to the time for our plan to be put into action, but we force ourselves to stay ready – Amma, Devyani and me. We forge a corner for ourselves nearest to the stairs leading into our hovel, just as we did in the house cellar before it, and then we wait.
I listen for sounds outside the ordinary, for movement beyond the rise and fall of the waves beneath us; or the methodical running of the pirate crew above us. Amma finds the crates Vishnu brought aboard – they are hidden in the back, deep in the hold and buried in brown bodies.
Avery himself, face wolfish in the shadowed light of the sun haloing him, comes to see the hold once, and we hide our faces from him while he picks out ten men and women to take above. They do not come back.
“A wolf does not belong on the water,” Devyani says once he is gone.
“Patience,” Amma says. “We need them distracted, or all that will happen is that we will die.”
But patience is growing harder and harder to maintain. A storm lashes the ship, throwing us from side to side, crushing a few against the hull of the ship. Food becomes even more scarce in its wake, and when it does come is in smaller quantities. More of our number are taken up, and do not return.
Despair is beginning to set in. They have not yet found the ships they are to fight. Our strength is dwindling, as are our numbers. We are running out of time.
And then we hear it.
A stampede of feet rushing above us, making double-time to their stations; the ship lurching; nausea filling me as it turns to hunt down its prey. A horn sounds, its resonant note echoing through the timber to reach us deep in our prison.
It is time.
The pirates are occupied, their footfalls and screams are distant now – on the main deck far above us. They will not hear the chains fall from our wrists and ankles over the sounds of their preparation and the battle lust that roars in their ears.
“We need to act now, before anyone wins,” Devyani says. Her patience is at an end.
And so is mine.
I pull the pick from deep within my lice-infested hair and get to work on the bonds. Next to me, Amma and Devyani do the same. We work quickly, shakily through fingers coated in sweat, fearing every moment that the picks will slip from our fingers and through the gaps in the floorboards.
The first cannonball tears through the gun deck above us when we’re two-thirds of the way through the 100-strong group. We hear the roar of the enemy’s broadside first, the sound of a thousand lions in concert; and then the ship shudders around us with multiple impacts, wood ripping like paper as the iron balls tear through it.
The second wave sends a cannonball above our heads, passing through the ship and leaving a gaping hole on the far side. It springs us to action, the lethargy of the malnourished slaves evaporating in the immediacy of our peril. They hold their bonds up for us to open, and the ones freed wait near the stairs, picking up whatever they can for weapons.
Amma directs them to the crates that lie hidden behind them, they pull them open with the desperation of cornered animals, distributing the paltry weapons within amongst them. Those burdened with blades ready to be the first to breach the ship as soon as the last chain falls.
Each moment feels infinite, my breaths tight, the air viscous and congealed around me. I fear they will find us before we finished, the battle won and the victorious pirates returning with their booty to see their existing cargo attempting the greatest of crimes.
But they do not come, and the sounds of cannonfire cease, replaced by the distant clatter and boom of pistol and saber combat. They have boarded the Mughal ship.
The last bond falls free of the wrists it has torn raw, the prisoner rises, and we pour forth in a furious torrent, our roar drowning the clash of battle.
The skeleton crew left manning Avery’s ship are taken quickly, pulled from their posts at the cannons or the killing holes to be passed down through our number; to be torn apart.
I stay at the back, collect wood that has broken in the clash. There are barrels of gunpowder all around us, sealed tight to keep stray sparks from catching them. I steer clear of them and take flintboxes from three of the dead pirates and join my fellows on the main deck of Avery’s ship.
It is a scene out of my nightmares. Three ships are locked together in a deadly dance in the middle of a bloodied sea. Smoke billows from numerous fires aboard each, spiraling into a vortex of ash that wraps us in our own pocket of hell. A few of Avery’s men are working to put out the fire set to their main sail when we surface, and they are quickly brought to ground and trampled underfoot. The fires we leave to burn for now.
Avery’s ship is on the outside, flanking a massive beast of wood and gold and ivory. It dwarfs us and the ship on the opposite flank—Avery’s partner in this conquest. But despite its bulk, the ship is struggling. Its mainmast has cracked down the middle, the sail spreading over the deck, confusing and disorienting its crew, who are now struggling to repel the boarders who have poured in from either side.
But now the pirates have noticed us, and I see the anger that rises from them—a stench of rage, of their bruised superiority—at this mockery of ownership deeds and their God-given right.
A few turn their backs on their quarry; our insult must be answered first. They climb the giant ship’s gunwale to leap back to us, but Amma is ready. She has moved those with weapons to each of the grappling lines that hold us to the Mughal behemoth, and now she drops her hand, cutting downward, ordering the pirates moored with their enemy. The lines are cut, and our ship pulls free of the combat, sending those pirates who make the leap careening into the shark-infested waters far below us.
But one dark shadow also makes the leap, passing over our heads to land in the middle of fifty freed slaves, the thud sending a shudder through the keening ship.
Grey fur dyed red flashes in the commotion, as people back away from this revenant. It stands fully six feet from daggerlike claws to sloped shoulders. The golden-brown eyes that glare at us are eerily human, and entirely too familiar. The maw beneath them grins, revealing fangs as long as my fingers.
Avery has come to claim what is his.
Fear and horror drive my people to rush him, stabbing and cutting with whatever they find that passes for a weapon. But the blades and picks and hooks scrape off Avery’s pelt like it is made of steel, and his claws and teeth are blurs that rend flesh from bone, that hew through bone with ungodly ease.
A beast untamed; wild and cruel as the sea it calls home.
Those who have seen the wolf before begin running for the gunwales, throwing themselves into the water to avoid his wrath. Better the sharks than this wolf.
“Aditya, move!” Amma cries.
There is a path of carnage opened between the wolf and me, an honor guard of the dead guiding him straight to me. I see recognition in his eyes now, a spark of wry respect buried in his fury.
He knows me, knows what I’ve done. For the first time, he sees me as more than a savage, and it comes as he begins to lope towards me, his jaws dripping with the blood of my brothers.
I have no time to escape, nowhere to go. I see those jaws open wide, grow larger, a void stretching to take over my world. And they snap shut just beside my ear as I’m pulled aside, ringing like the lash of a whip. My weapon falls from my hand and rolls over the side of the ship.
Amma is moving as soon as she releases my arm, cutting across the wolf’s flank with a shard of fire-blackened wood in her hands. He swipes at her, his attention momentarily off me.
Behind the beast, Devyani is tying an oil-dipped rag around scrap wood and setting it ablaze. But the others now have fled to various corners of the ship, taking charge of steering us clear of the battle. None are prepared to face the monster of Black Town.
Avery charges again, and Amma is forced into a desperate dive to avoid his teeth, but the wolf is quick to adjust, and follows in, chasing her across the deck. Devyani gets her stake to light and joins the fight.
But they won’t last long without help.
I turn over, tear frantically at a spar of wood splintered by a cannonball; pull a sliver as long as my hand free. I wrap a strip of my ragged pants around my stake. I can feel the weight of the wolf’s blows thudding into the ship as Amma and Devyani fight it.
The cloth catches right as I hear Devyani grunt in pain as she’s thrown into the stairs leading to the quarterdeck, her stake dropped out of reach. The wolf grins, advances.
My hand is forced.
The sliver, newly fired, flies from my hand…and bounces off the deck between him and Devyani and lies burning uselessly on the floor.
Avery pauses, turns to me. Mocking.
He is confident. Arrogant.
He is the White Wolf, and his supremacy is unquestioned amongst those of Black Town.
He is overconfident.
Devyani surges forward and grabs the stake, plunges it into his neck, cutting through fur and skin and sinew and artery. She leaves it there and dives away from a stunned, weakened swing of Avery’s paw.
The beast staggers, shifting from man to wolf and back; pulling the blade free from his neck with human fingers that end in yellowed claws; until he falls to his knees a grotesque cross between the two, trapped in some hellish limbo as he dies.
We gather around him, watch as he tries to condemn us, belittle us with his dying breath; watch as only blood pours forth, drowning him with the uncaring eyes of those he’d enslaved there to watch.
Henry Avery, the Wolf of the Seas, the Pirate King, the Monster of Black Town—is dead.
“So, what now?” I ask.
Devyani’s response is to turn to those who have survived.
“Do any of you know how to fire cannons?” she yells.
I grin at Amma. The first step is done.
And now, we have a ship to plunder.
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Chaitanya Murali is a fantasy author who lives in Bangalore, India with his wife and two cats. His short stories have appeared in Podcastle, Mythaxis Magazine, Dragon Gems, and he has also published a novella. Outside of writing, Chaitanya works as a game designer in the mobile game industry, and is an avid sports fan who spends many of his evenings watching or playing football. |