Shortsighted Gains
A common merchant and a shrewd pirate lord, both lured by the promise of instantaneous remuneration, realize far too late that myopic opportunities can mask obscured consequences. Pieces of Eight Challenge: Mistress Ching.
Pieces of Eight Challenge, Black Pearl Forum. www dot fanfiction dot net/topic/67105/19502591/3/PotC-Fanfiction-Story-Recommendations#80473192
I wish to express my gratitude and appreciation to Vytina for being my beta on this piece. :)
It sounded easy. And it should have been. It was a simple and common transport: exotic Asian spice from China and ivory from the eastern coast of Africa to be sold at market in London, the small addition should not have a hindrance.
Before casting off from Hong Kong, a scarred face Englishman had approached him with a summon to deliver a small chest, not more than the size of a brick, the contents of which he was told were desired by a high-ranked British official. Alton knew that he had no true choice in the matter even before the scarred man allotted that if he failed his contracts with the East India Company would be terminated. Without these contracts, his business would be lost. The association with the Company was not always accommodating, and occasionally hampering, but it did offer a degree of protection and constancy which were beneficial for a smaller, independent vessel like the Vosburg.
Alton did voice his wonder if what lay within the small box was so valuable, why was not an armed merchant ship hired for its return. The scarred man curtly informed him that questions were not to be asked and that he was to do as ordered. Alton settled on the assumption that the owner requested inconspicuousness, which could be more easily achieved by transport on his bilander, to ease his concerns. Even though the small wooden box was tarnished by blood, it was a profitable, yet small addition to his cargo. Easy Money.
As he set there, panicked, the taste of blood souring his mouth, he remembered his father saying "there is no such thing as easy money." How true those words came to be when his ship was taken over by pirates.
Just one hour after dusk, not far beyond the shores of Hong Kong, the sea calm and the moon low, a junk flanked his ship, its crew boarded and swarmed the Vosburg before many his men could load their muskets. Defense was futile. The Chinese pirates cut down any who resisted, turning the Vosburg from ship to slaughterhouse. Now only a handful of his crew remained, tied together at the mast as the pirates shouted venom in a dialect they did not understand.
Two men, who so closely resembled each other in both appearance and movement that they could be brothers, approached.
"Captain?" one of them called in broken English.
Alton squared his body and answered as assertive as he could muster, "I am Captain."
The two men tore him away from the rest of his crew. With blows, they forced him down, his hands and feet were tied together behind his back, making impossible for him to stand. The pirates gathered about him, their primal gaze chilling his gut.
A small framed woman approached and stood in front of the men. She was dressed in trappings of the finest quality. The exposed skin of her face and hands was sallow and rugose. Beneath her headdress and face powder, it appeared she was going blind in her right eye.
Alton snorted.
The man who'd spoken before struck him hard, then leaned down and barked in Alton's ear, "respect my Captain!"
It puzzled him that somehow this old crone was captain of this horde, but it was the way that she silently, but clearly, commanded the respect of all the pirate crew that confirmed her status and stirred unease.
Determined not to show he was not intimidated, and perhaps muster some minute degree of control, he rose as high as his bindings would afford him. "I am Thomas Alton, Captain of the Vosburg. I demand that you-"
"The gall of this dog to demand of Mistress Ching!" she called out in English to the crew, cutting him off. "Before me on its knees. Tail between its legs. Head low in submission. A dog. Fitting... as only a dog would act as agent for the East India Company!"
Her crew roared their disgust for his employer evident without translation.
Alton saw that brashness was not the correct tact and decided to bargain. "You have my cargo and my ship. I respectfully request the release of my surviving crew and set us adrift in a long boat where the sea will determine our fates."
As if not hearing any of the words he had spoken, she addressed the man at his right and then his left, the assumed brothers. "Hon. Tam."
Tam stepped away. A short moment later he returned with the Vosburg's carpenter, a seasoned crewman named Morris. The pirates forced Morris down on his knees not far from his captain. Morris' lack of hope was transparent. He showed no fear, only surrender.
The pirate called Hon took position at Morris' side and without preamble drew his sword and severed the carpenters head. Stunned, Alton tried to back away, but the man called Tam took him by his hair and chin, screaming into his ear as he did, and forced him nose to nose with Morris' as his blood carpeted the deck boards.
Tam jerked him up by the shoulders and forced him back to a kneeling position as Morris' body was unceremoniously chucked overboard.
The woman simply stood in wait, her eyes passively querying.
"What is it you want?" Alton yelped, aghast by the brutality and disregard for negotiation.
She replied plainly. "You have something of mine. You will return it to me. Or..."
Mistress Ching stepped forward and kicked Morris' head away, her gaze never leaving Alton.
"Y-yours?"
"A fortnight ago, you accepted a reliquary housing the Jade Eye of Chiang-nu. My property. Where is it?"
Killing Morris had been nothing more than a demonstration of her authority, he realized, a pretentious play to scare him into yielding.
"No," Alton hissed, his anger enforcing his temerity.
The two remaining men were brought forward, Keller and Bradford. Keller, the older of the two, mirrored Morris' forlorn expression, but Bradford was pleading for his life between hysterical, wet sobs. As their heads and blood fell upon the ship's deck, and their bodies joined Morris' in the frigid Pacific waters, Alton knew with certainty he was going to follow his crew-mates into death. Knowing this to be his last act as Captain, he became hell-bent on taking the box's location with him, the affirmation "go down with your ship" echoing with his resolve.
He spat upon her feet, a line of red spittle left suspended from his lip to the deck. "Feck off, crone."
"You will answer what I ask, dog" she responded with an unsettling confidence, her eyes looking not just at him, but appearing to see through him and deep into the caverns of his mind.
Her wrinkled hand disappeared inside her robe and reappeared with not the weapon he'd expected, but a dainty pair of pince nez, irrationally finding the site of which absurd, nearly caused him to snicker. She positioned them tentatively on her nose, saying what sounded to Alton like a prayer under her breath, and then trained a cutting gaze upon him. The fog in her eyes had lifted and they'd become as brown as tilled, fertile earth. With an aggressive stride, she closed the distance between them and took hold of his head at the temples. She was steadying him, he realized, and as the pirates Hon and Tam backed away, fear rose with bile in his throat.
"Where is the Jade Eye of Chiang-nu!" she beckoned, her voice seemingly outward and not directed to him.
Alton tried to deny once again but found himself locked in paralysis. The woman lifted him without strain. As one hand continued to dangle him helplessly in its hold, she crushed the other over his forehead.
He could feel the invasion, the pull, a great heat building as she drew the information forth and extracted what she wanted unopposed. Though it felt as if a scream was savaging his brain, he could not utter a sound. He was nothing more than a stupefied marionette, helpless, limp, and terrified. It was not until he could smell the flesh on his forehead burning that she released her hold and dropped him.
She spoke a single word in Chinese sharply to Hon, who instantly hurtled away. In a limp pile on the deck, Alton could not see beyond the Chinese pirates gathered around him where Hon had went, but he knew with dismay that the location of where he stowed his mysterious cargo during the pirate raid had been exposed.
Hon returned with the small wooden box, holding it with great care. He stepped between Alton and his epicene captain as Tam joined him. The two men held the box at arm's length between them, as if what lay inside was something so sacred that they themselves lacked the worth to touch. Mistress Ching opened the box slowly and lifted out an ornate pendent hanging from a golden chain and held it up for all her crew to see. Although he was still disoriented by the violation, Alton thought he saw equal shares of desperation and expectation in her eyes.
"The Jade Eye of Chiang-nu!" she proclaimed and her men bowed as she placed it around her neck.
There was not a sound on the ship other than Alton's ragged breathing as he came to realize that not only had his career been lost over a necklace, but that Morris, Keller, and Bradford had been pointlessly tortured and murdered.
"It was a game," he rasped, bewildered. Then, shaking with anger he screamed it. "Twas all a game to you!" He tried to stand, his restraints causing him to topple at her feet. "The deaths of those men… my men, unnecessary. You could have gotten your answer without killing them!" he bellowed, flopping on the blood covered deck like an overwrought fish.
The woman removed the spectacles and regarded him for a long moment. Her weathered face was absent of pity or remorse and she spoke not a word as he watched in awe as both her eyes changed from brown to a dim fog.
Alton's last living thought before he met the same fate as his crew was why the old woman would ever remove such powerful magic.
Mistress Ching returned to her ship and retired in her cabin, triumphant but exhausted. Her servants removed her ornate coat and headdress to return them to the wardrobe. Once finished, she summoned them to leave with a twitch of her hand.
She eased herself into a plush tall-backed chair, the extent of her exhaustion beginning to consume her, both physically and emotionally. She opened her hand to find the old pince nez still cradled in her palm. Tracing a trembling finger along the metal frames, her loneliness imposed an image of her departed husband reflecting in the glass.
"My dearest Zheng, how I miss you," she whispered as a tear slipped down her cheek.
"Be strong, my lotus," she imagined him saying now, as he said to her on his dead-bed.
She remembered, feeling helpless, sitting on the edge of the bed next to a man who was nothing but a shell of his former self, a man who had been eaten by a debasing sickness, the man who had her heart. He reached up and removed his spectacles, the pince nez given to him by his father when he acceded to take up his role in the Pacific.
Zheng had regarded her heedfully for a long moment. "For your faithful devotion, I promise you glory. You need these not for your sight, but for mine."
With surprising strength and speed, he pressed them against her brow. His head arched back as a ghastly, emptying howl escaped from his chest and his body went into convulsions, knocking her from the bed to the floor.
"Zheng!" she had screamed, scrambling to her feet and lunging herself to her husband's side.
He quacked and lurched, until the howl stopped. Suddenly, he'd become still.
"Zheng," she'd cried again, but this time it came as only a choked rasp as fear and grief roused a painful panic within her. She'd shaken him once, then again yet harder. Getting no response, she'd pressed her ear to his chest only to hear the telling silence. She'd placed her hand above his mouth hoping to feel warmth, but was met with nothing.
"Oh, my love... my love, don't leave me..." she had wept, knowing he was gone, and planted a last kiss on his cooling lips.
She'd eased trembling fingers to close his lids, when something seized her attention. Confused, she searched for his spectacles finding them on the pillow by his ear. She slipped them on her nose and took a closer look at Zheng. His eyes had turned colorless as if the iris and pupil had been washed by milk.
"Oh, your eyes?" Her suffocating question hung heavily in air surrounding her.
Frightened and stricken, she'd placed her shaking hand against his cheek. At the contact of her skin on his, a force surged into her. Her mind flooded with darkness, a vast emptiness. She was seeing into his eternal sleep.
Mistress Ching exhaled a sob, bringing her away from her husband's bedside and back to her cabin. She balanced the pince nez and the Jade Eye in her two small hands hoping the ancient healing powers of the pendant would counter balance the aging effect of the pince nez.
She let the pendant drop back onto her chest and took the spectacles between her fingers regarding them thoughtfully. Her eldest sons, Hon and Tam, had been the first to notice the effect their use placed upon her body. Loyal and intrepid, they had shared between then the burdens of the pince nez for two years until she prohibited the act. In that short span, with remorse, she watched the two virile young men weather and age, becoming twice their lived years. She would not permit their further deterioration. The power and consequence, now hers alone, was once endured by Zheng and his father. They had passed at a young age in bodies of old men. Her sons would not follow suit.
She could sense the physical strain and noticed the weakened vision from looking in to the English Captain's thoughts. She damned him aloud for not answering her spoken demand. Clutching the Jade Eye of Chiang-nu to her heart, Mistress Ching, hoped with all her strength that it would save her as Zheng's voice called out again. You need these not for your sight, but for mine. She did not know how many more times she could wear the pince nez and employ the power he placed upon them; before her body would surrender and her natural sight could only see the darkness of her own eternal sleep.