Bruno stopped swimming, pedaled his legs to tread in place and Jeta began to scream and thrash. He had to tighten his grip to keep the skeleton from going under. It was a minute before Durga surfaced, like a leviathan, spouting water and howling with the shock of the cold. But when she began swimming, she did so effortlessly, powerfully, even beautifully. She made it to the strongman in no time and they floated like happy mammals for a moment.
“You can swim,” was all Bruno could think to say, and the words came out high-pitched and delighted.
“In the water,” Durga said, “I’m petite.”
She reached out and squeezed the skeleton’s trembling shoulder.
“I’m fine, Jeta,” she said. “We’re all going to be fine.”
Then she made serious eyes at Bruno and said, “Let me have her. You’ll need to take two at a time.”
They both looked back to the ship where a defiant Nadja was trying to keep herself between Antoinette and the jabbing of the gaff. Antoinette was behind the lobster girl, still as a statue and weeping. Nadja’s best show dress had been torn half off her.
Bruno placed Jeta in Durga’s outstretched arms and began swimming frantically back toward The Touya. The lobster girl and the pinhead fell within seconds of each other. Antoinette howled the whole way down, a shriek of pure terror. Bruno got to her only seconds after she went under. He yanked her back into the air by an arm and as soon as she cleared her throat of water, the screaming began again.
He wasn’t as lucky with Nadja. The lobster girl fell off the far side of the conveyance beam and went under about twenty yards away. Bruno pulled Antoinette along with him but the pinhead’s thrashing slowed him. He switched his grip from arm to neck and tightened it until he choked her into silence. But in that moment of distraction he lost sight of the spot where Nadja had broken the water.
Bruno scanned the ocean and at last spotted a single claw as it bobbed up once and then slipped below the surface.
Grabbing Antoinette around the waist, the strongman swam to the claw site and dove. With his free hand, he grabbed and grabbed until he clasped a handful of the lobster girl’s hair, snatched her up by the scalp, and pulled all of them up past the surface.
Nadja broke into the air choking and heaving. Her convulsions triggered a new level of hysteria in Antoinette, which threw Bruno off balance. He began to dip to one side, immediately tried to compensate, and pitched to the other. Somewhere above him, the crew of The Touya was yelling, whistling, taunting. And then he became aware of small objects striking the water around him — banana peels, cigar stubs, and something that hit hard, maybe a rock or a bolt.
“Get on my back,” Bruno screamed at the lobster girl, trying to sling her over his shoulders and, at the same time, contain the pinhead.
He felt Nadja repositioning herself and then saw her claws jutting out below his chin. Somehow, he ignored the impulse to shake her free. He clutched Antoinette under his left arm and began to swim with his right. Keeping his head down and kicking his legs, Bruno aimed for the shore and tried not to think about what was happening up on the ship’s deck.
It seemed to take forever, but finally he could hear Durga and Aziz calling to him, cheering him on. Nadja and Antoinette stayed silent through it all, until they coasted onto the beach in a pool of foam and were scooped into Durga’s abundant arms, where they let loose all their fear and sorrow in terrible, wailing cries.
They’d come into a tiny cove, a horseshoe of sand cut out of a coastline that was mostly boulders and, further in, a plain of smaller, shinier, well-washed rocks. The human torso was in the surf up to his nipples.
“Do you need to rest?” he asked Bruno, who stood, then hunched, bracing his hands on bent knees. Water dripped steadily from his mustache.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t say a word. He turned around and dove again into the ocean.
Halfway back to the ship, he passed the twins, Vasco and Marcel. They were swimming as one body, Vasco manning the left arm and leg, Marcel, the right. Under different circumstances, it would have been something to behold. But Bruno had no time to marvel. As he glided past, Marcel said, “You must hurry,” before plunging his head back into the water, and Vasco, whose head was emerging in perfect synchronism, added, “Fatos is unconscious,” and then his head submerged and Marcel’s reappeared, saying, “and they’re about to rape Milena.”
Approaching The Touya, Bruno could see the body of Fatos hanging limp, suspended over the end of the beam. The crew had given up any pretense of ritual and the proceedings had degenerated into an unmitigated debauch. If this was God’s work, the deities of Gehenna were even more sloppy and perverse than the strongman had imagined.
Milena had been stripped naked and was bent over the railing at the waist. The angle prevented Bruno from getting the full picture, but it appeared that the hermaphrodite was being beaten with a sounding pole. The crew was into full rampage by the sound of things and the strongman began to suspect that the dwarf and the chicken boy were already at the bottom of the ocean.
He swam until he positioned himself directly beneath the hanging body of the mule. It was all he could do and it gave him time to catch his breath and rest his arms if not his legs. And though the noise of the collective sadism above was almost unbearable, the strongman’s admiration for Milena grew by the second. Bruno could see that, though s/he hadn’t yet passed out from the scourging, s/he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of even a scream, let alone a pleading. It inspired Bruno to start his own taunting and he yelled up to the sailors, “She’s got testicles you’ll never have, you arschfickers.”
And though he couldn’t have known it, Bruno’s timing was crucial. Because just at that moment, Landau, the first mate who had been wielding the sounding pole, made the decision to use it as more than a cudgel. And upon hearing the taunt from below, Landau’s associates, who had been holding Milena against the rail, released the hermaphrodite’s arms in order to spit and gesture and scream down at the strongman. And so, a moment of opportunity presented itself as the would-be rapist shortened his grip on the pole and moved closer to his victim. And all Milena needed was that moment.
S/he whirled and kicked and caught the scourger in the very groin that Bruno had just disparaged. Landau fell to the deck on his knees and before his men could react, Milena had taken the sounding pole from the first mate, thumped him just once across the face and broken his jaw, then got behind the torturer and brought the pole up to his throat to choke him. Seeing their leader in peril, the other crewmen backed off as Milena maneuvered the hostage up onto the beam and began edging backward toward Fatos.
Looking down just once, s/he spotted Bruno treading below and made the decision. S/he got a foot beneath Fatos’s chest, lifted and sent the mule plunging down to the strongman. Then s/he jumped, taking the pole and the first mate with her.
Bruno almost caught the mule. The shock of the water brought Fatos back to some semblance of consciousness and he let himself be pulled onto Seboldt’s shoulder as the others exploded the sea a few yards away.
Milena and Landau bobbed up at the same moment and immediately began to wrestle, each trying to choke and drown the other. Bruno swam to Milena’s aid, grabbed the first mate by the collar and submerged him, while Milena found and took possession of the sounding pole, then thrust it like a spear under the waves and into the opaque figure writhing below.