Disclaimer: I do not own Samurai Champloo. No financial gain is made from this. This is for entertainment purposes only.

I hid my presence until we were far away in the open seas and the captain sent his prayers. How long that was, I could not tell. I had managed to fit my tired body amongst the deepest barrels of the cargo, where I cried and slept with unseen vermin crawling around me as only company. I heard the ruckus voices of the men living above, by then in charge of my fate, their voices speaking in tongues I could not understand. Those same barrels that hid me, they fed me.

I wish I knew how much time passed before the captain found me. With no light to count my days, it felt like being buried before death. When he shone his lamp at my face, I was blinded. And weak, very weak. So much that when he grabbed me by my arm to lift me up, I felt like my arm would go out of its socket.

He spoke in that devilish language I had grown used to hear from the upper decks. He read my confusion.

"So this is the ghost my men have been whining about," he snickered in a heavily accented English. "More like a weeping cockroach." My pupils adjusted and saw a faint image of him. Big, muscular, imposing, with a thick dark beard and eyes a blue so clear it looked like they were white. "Do you understand me, boy?" I nodded. "Why are you in my ship then?"

"I am sorry," I mumbled.

"Do not be, for my men have been dying since we departed and your hands will be useful to get us to our next port. You have two hands, do you?" I nodded again. I looked down at them, they were bony and pale, still lady's hand by then. "Then you will scrub and cook," he added, leading me up.

A dance of rugged faces unfolded before my eyes as he dragged me by the arm to the surface and fear settled in my heart. A young woman like me, surrounded by these ruthless men, with no other escape than death by the sea... We stopped in what served as a kitchen and he thrust a knife in my hand and pointed at a mountain of potatoes.

I called back at him when I saw him turn around to leave. "Wait." He stopped. "You-you are not going to... I, uhm..."

He glared at me. "Half of my crew has perished since we left Sumatera. I would have treated you otherwise, but right now we need as many people as we can to survive whatever trial the sea throws at us. If you want I will flog you once we dock."

"No, please," I begged. "I will work," I said, taking the first of many potatoes.

"Good decision."

Captain Pieter van Diemen, as I would learn later his name was, wished to see back his natal Nijmegen city, where he had left wife and two daughters. At his almost fifty years, he hoped he could finish - or at least pause - his work for the Dutch East India Company after this long trip. He would not let a stupid cholera outbreak deprive him of seeing his family again. So he allowed me to serve him in his vessel. A decision I understood he would not regret, as more men fell to the illness and less of us were left to work. Communication was hard, since these men were Dutch and almost none spoke English. So instead, I started to pick up on some of their words, the most basics to survive around them. My existence was lonely and I still carried the fresh wounds of what had transpired in Becoolen.

"If you keep on crying like a girl, these sailors will soon use you as one," a voice spoke in perfect English next to my sleeping place - no more than a drape hung in a hammock style.

I quickly wiped the tears off my swollen eyes. When I was not working, images of my sin haunted my idle mind.

"Why are you here, lass?" he asked me next. My blood ran cold; I had been posing as a boy since the beginning of this cursed trip.

"How did you know?" I muttered, looking down at myself. The baggy clothes that hid the wraps around my chest. I have a humble bosom, so my woman shapes are not that hard to hide.

"I know," he said and I looked pointedly at him. Well, maybe he said it to justify that he too have been fooled.

"I have been observing you. There is not much to do in this ship except to rot away. Sadly, you are the most interesting thing here right now," he answered. Then he leaned forward, wiped his hand in his trousers and offered it to me. In the absent light of the down deck, he looked in his forties, although later I learnt he was thirty-four. He kept his blonde hair over his shoulders in a fashion not unlike mine. And he always smirked at life. "John Saris."

I shook his hand. "Diana..." No, better to omit my deceased husband's last name.

"You need a new name if you wish to get around, Diana. How about... Henry?" I nodded in approval. "Henry Burger. Sounds good?"

I offered him my hand again. "Nice to meet you, John. My name is Henry Burger."

He laughed. "You still sound like a lady, Henry. Try to speak less loud, deeper... Also, do not enunciate all the words so clearly, you are a sailor now, no need for it."

I chuckled softly, trying to not wake up the rest of the crew. But then, I grew somber. "Are you going to keep my secret, please?"

"What, that you are a woman?" I shushed him, but nodded. "Only if you explain me why an English-girl is cross-dressing in a Dutch East India Company vessel."

"I am a criminal," I ended up admitting after a long pause.

He raised an eyebrow. "You don't look like one. What did you do?"

I took a deep breath. "A murder," I confessed.

He whistled and I wondered how the men around us were not already complaining. "That's a surprise. I was betting for 'running away from marriage' or 'adultery'. Maybe even 'adultery with some Eastern native'. That would have been quite the story, uh?"

"Will you keep my secret?"

He made a gesture to seal his lips. "I give you my word, Henry."

We fell into silence, each to his musings, until I spoke again. "You are an Englishman, aren't you?"

He smiled staring at the ceiling. "Yes, sir."

"Are you working for the Dutch?" I asked. With the language barrier I could not ask so many questions that plagued my mind about the workings of this new society that welcomed me as Henry Burger.

"Not really. I just work around the ship to get passage. There are many places in the East where Englishmen cannot set foot. I want to do so," he explained.

"You want to go where Englishmen cannot..." I repeated. "For what?"

"Talkative much, uh?" he laughed. "You really are a girl, Henry. I want to discover things, to share them with my countrymen."

"You want to be a pioneer?"

He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. There was a certain charisma to him, in his nonchalance. "More like an adventurer."

John Saris would become my crutch during my time in the Clover. He also taught me some of the tools that would keep me alive during this journey that brought us together. He educated me in how to act like a man, although as he would often say, I could do no better than an effeminate lad. When he was not teasing my manners, he would be teaching me card games and sometimes, some Dutch sailors would join in, betting their rations, their little gold or their precious drinks. But sometimes too he would ignore me, too immersed in the leather book in which he scribbled with a passion that made him look possessed by the devil.

"What do you write?" I asked him one day. The merciful weather gifted us clear skies and a shy Sun that warmed our skin, so we had gone like most to the deck to enjoy it while it lasted.

He smirked. "Everything."

I tried to peak at it, but he closed the book. "Is it a diary?"

"Kind of. I don't write uninteresting things, like what I ate or what clothes I wore, like you ladies do." He laughed weakly. Lately he had been looking lethargic and his face had taken on a pale bluish color that did not suit his usually cheerful mood.

"Did you write about me?" I asked, pointing a finger at myself.

He just smirked.

By the time we arrived to Fort Zeelandia-

"You are again speaking of places I don't know," he complained.

"It is another island, Formosa. Just in front of the Chinese coast."

"I see."

By the time we arrived there, John could no longer walk. The sickness had turned him into a ghost of himself. It pained my heart to depart from him, but if we did not leave him behind he would not survive the rest of the voyage. For Fort Zeelandia was just a layover before our final destination.

"Henry," he grabbed my hand from his make-shift bed in the apothecary house in the downtown. "Please, take this with you." He reached into his jacket, his hands wrinkled of dehydration. He gave me his journal. "Take it back to England and share with my countrymen my adventure."

"Are you going to cry?" He interrupted me. I ignored him and continued my retelling.

I took the leather book, put it aside, and brushed the stray locks from his feverish forehead. "You will get better, John. I will stay here until you do and then we can continue your adventures together."

He smirked and I left the little room with the leather book pressed to my chest.

"Is that the same book you carry around?"

I nodded.

"Did he die then?"

"I don't know."

I walked back inside the Fort, as I felt I owed Captain van Diemen an explanation of why I would not be sailing back with him and thinking he might want to be aware of John's condition. But as I entered the administration office, I could see the Captain's ire as he screamed at a hunched man. They spoke Dutch, so I could not understand much of what had them both red in anger. The other man waved a handful of papers in my Captain's face and I feared the bigger man would strike him.

"If this keeps on, we won't sail until tomorrow," I heard a man speaking behind me.

He did not address me, but his companion, who answered, "Anyways, all this trouble for nothing. They won't probably find her here if she was in Bencoolen. A woman traveling alone, could you imagine?"

"Yes, I guess this is only to save face."

Mustering all my courage, and trying to follow John's advices on how to talk like a lad, I asked, "What is the problem here?"

Now that I turned, I could see the two English sailors, dark skin showing their trade. "Looks like some Governor was murdered in Bencoolen and now everybody is losing their shit over it."

I nodded. "Do they even know who they are looking for?"

They laughed. "They do. He was killed by his own wife. His daughter saw it all. Look!"

One of them pointed at a near wall. In a flimsy paper, a poorly drawn image of a young woman was followed by bold letters spelling 'WANTED'.

I leafed through the leather journal until I found the copy of the poster I had stolen that day in Fort Zeelandia. He took it with clear interest, his fingers tracing letters that he probably did not understand, those sentences that exposed my crime.

"I had become a wanted woman."