And Prometheus herself seemed different. He supposed he should have expected teething troubles, and thought now he had overreacted to them. For the deep blue waters of the Indian Ocean seemed to have brought out the best in her. Her mysterious, unsettling little ways had departed and she showed her true colors at last. She was a strong, pleasant, reliable ship.
Worked by a strong, reliable, for the most part pleasant crew. Oh, Martyr might have been more approachable, but their discussion after Slope’s rescue seemed to have made him less suspicious and antagonistic; Ben could have been less of a bully at times; “Slugger” Napier less of a hard man at all times; and Paul Rice less of a pirate, he was talking of wearing an earring to emphasize his scar: here was a man born a couple of centuries too late — he should have served with that other great Welsh sailor, Henry Morgan. But by and large they were fine. And Robin seemed to have pulled them together. At times she seemed their mascot, almost their pet. They took endless delight in teasing her, being gruff, avuncular, patronizing; indulging her, teaching her, testing her.
It was not a situation she enjoyed. She was her own woman, a fully trained, flawlessly competent officer. She deserved a great deal more respect than most of them tended to give her. But they had both known that this would be the case at first before he had agreed to take her on. And she was behaving perfectly under the added strain, slowly earning the respect of the most deeply entrenched male chauvinists among them. As he had never doubted that she would.
At first she had put on an act, becoming a wide-eyed innocent with an inexhaustible fund of energy and an open, enquiring, apparently guileless nature. Trained in the dour rigors of the North Sea, on tankers a fraction of Prometheus’s size, she made a game of the simple joy it was giving her to be on her first Cape run. She treated the whole thing as an enormous lark; a huge adventure. And this ebullient enthusiasm, showered on one and all, had proved a perfect buffer. And a necessary one, keeping her at a distance from them during the long days sailing these vast blue waters, sun-filled and monsoon-cooled; and during the black velvet nights with their mother-of-pearl moons and extravagant, gemstone stars.
Only occasionally, when they were together not as captain and third mate, but as master and owner of the oil, did she put the mask away with him and show how much it was costing to perform the role.
He worried about her, and wondered if that were patronizing. He was tempted to protect her a little, too aware that the others were watching them like a teacher with a favorite pupil. On the surface, the tip of the iceberg, his relationship with her was the same as everyone else’s, and turned around her efficiency as an officer and member of the crew. For the others, her sex made her an unknown quantity in a situation where unknown quantities were dangerous. It was the old story: their lives might depend upon her. They had to know how reliable she was under pressure. With a man, rightly or wrongly, they would take so much for granted. With a woman they would not. He found it distasteful, as did some of the others. But they could not protect her and nor should he.
They would have been foolish to try. She wanted no protection; required no special treatment. She was perfectly capable of handling them, individually or all at once. However they chose to test her, she would pass. On their terms, perhaps: on her own terms, certainly.
And below and abaft the bridge where he lay, she was undergoing her first real test — the ageless maritime ritual of the Crossing of the Line.
A great roar of “GUILTY!” greeted the completion of the charges.
“Guilty as charged!” thundered a single voice. “Remove the first prisoner for execution. Uncover the second prisoner.”
At once, Robin stood blinking in the brightness.
Unbelievingly, she looked around Prometheus’s a ft e r-deck. The security lighting revealed half a dozen weirdly dressed figures etched against the absolute blackness of the vast night, grouped around the ship’s swimming pool. Beside them stood a raised platform with a table on it.
A GP seaman called Kerem Khalil was the only other person aboard who had never crossed the equator before. He was undergoing the ritual first. Having been charged, he was now being led, in chains, up toward the table. As he neared it, a huge figure, bizarrely dressed to resemble a cook, rose up to meet him, flourishing a massive meat ax.
Struggling silently, Khalil was laid on the table. The ax rose and fell, apparently splitting him open. The cook reached down and pulled free string after string of raw sausages, seemingly disemboweling the struggling man. The spectators howled their approval. The victim was swept off the table and hurled into the pool.
The two nymphs holding Robin’s arms were in motion at once, hurrying her round the end of the pool into the presence of Neptune himself. He sat on a throne of shells, cascading water from his great gold crown whenever he moved. Everything about him gleamed green — his trident, his curling beard, his flowing seaweed robes. The nymphs forced her to her knees. At least she wasn’t in chains like poor Khalil, whom she could hear trying to get out of the pool behind her.
“Who dares enter my watery kingdom?” boomed the same mannered voice that had just sentenced Khalil.
“Robin Heritage, third officer, Prometheus,” cried her escorts.
“With what is she charged?”
Another, more sinister, figure appeared beside the vivid god. Someone dressed as a lawyer. Wigged and masked like the rest. “With being a woman!”
Raucous chorus of approval.
“With being aboard a man’s ship…With doing aboard a man’s ship a man’s job…With doing it almost as well as the average man might do it…With robbing, therefore, the average man of his job…and so being guilty of the current levels of unemployment in the British Empire and of the collapse of the Western World!”
“GUILTY!” they chorused.
“Guilty as charged,” yelled Neptune. “Remove the prisoner for execution!”
Robin was unceremoniously dumped in an empty chair that was immediately lifted onto the platform where the cook’s table had been. Before she could react in any way, a shaving brush the size of a mop was thrust into her face, spreading stiff, green, stinking foam everywhere from shoulders to ears. In a moment she was ready. Gasping for breath, she opened her eyes only to be confronted with a fish-man wielding a cutthroat razor as long as her arm. The blade was metal, and sharp enough to scrape away a little skin as she was shaved to the gleeful shouts of Neptune and his cohorts.
After a few moments this, too, was over and she was lifted bodily from the chair. She saw Neptune rise to tower above her.
“One!” he shouted. She was swung like a hammock between two of them.
“Two!” The whole chorus as she went back, and…
“THREE!”
As she sailed through the air she twisted and landed badly. As soon as the water closed over her, she curled her body so her shoulders hit the bottom with a considerable bump. At once, she wedged her left hand into a filter on the pool’s floor and waited, her right fist closed around the scissors hidden in her pocket.
The trick worked even better than she had dared hope.
After no more than a minute, Neptune himself came floundering to her rescue.
As soon as he plunged into the pool she was in motion, and before he knew what was going on, the sea king’s heroic gesture was undone. She swam around him, snipping away carefully but ruthlessly. After a few moments, she rose out of the water in the far corner to throw his robes onto the deck, the scissors skittering away across the metal. Then, lithe as a seal, she was out herself, turning to sit on the corner of the pool looking in; her uniform transparent, but beneath it, instead of her practical but flimsy underclothes, her best black swimsuit. And in her left hand the final revenge: the remains of a pair of swimming trunks.