agreed, and followed him willingly.
At the bottom of the ladder he turned her to face him. She was only a few inches shorter than he was, and the thick, lustrous coils of her hair made the difference even less obvious. There are no other eyes here,' he said.
'I fear I have been gullible,' her cheeks blushed pink as rose petals, 'but you would never take advantage of my innocence, would you, Your Highness?'
'I am afraid you may have overestimated my chivalry, Miss Courtney. It is my intention to do exactly that.'
'I suppose that it would be of no avail if I should scream, would it?'
'I am very much afraid that it would not,' he said.
She swayed towards him. 'Then I shall save my breath,' she whispered, 'for perhaps I will find better employment for it later.'
'Your lip is swollen.' He touched it gently. 'I will not hurt you?'
'We Courtneys are a hardy lot,' she said.
He kissed her, but softly.
It was Verity who pulled him closer, and parted her swollen lips to him. 'It hurts not at all,' she said, and he lifted her in his arms and carried her through into his cabin.
Kumrah stamped three times on the deck above Mansur's bunk. He sat up quickly. 'I am wanted on deck,' he said. 'Not as much as you are wanted here,' she murmured, with drowsy contentment, 'but I know that when duty calls I must let you go for the moment.'
He stood up and she watched him, her eyes growing bigger and her interest quickening. 'I have never seen a man in his natural state before,' she said. 'Only now do I realize I have been deprived, for 'tis a sight much to my liking.'
'I could think of far better,' he demurred, and stooped to kiss her belly. It was smooth as cream and her navel was a neat pit in the taut sleek muscle. He thrust the tip of his tongue into it.
She sighed and writhed voluptuously. 'You must stop that at once, or I shall never let you go.'
He straightened and then his eyes flew wide with alarm. 'There is blood on the sheet. Have I injured you?'
She raised herself on one elbow, looked down at the bright stain and smiled complacently. 'It is the flower of my maidenhood, which I bring to you as proof that I have always belonged to you and to none other.'
'Oh, my darling.' He sat on the edge of the bunk and smothered her face with kisses.
She pushed him away. 'Go to your duty. But come back to me the instant it is done.'
Mansur ran up the ladder and it seemed that his feet were winged, but he stopped at the head of the companionway in alarm. He had expected to see the Revenge still far ahead of him, for in speed she had the edge on the Sprite, but she was almost alongside. He snatched up his telescope from its bucket beside the binnacle and strode to the side. He saw at once that the Revenge sat low in the water, and that all her pumps were manned. Seawater was spurting white over the side from the outlet pipes. As he watched in consternation, Dorian appeared on deck, stepping out from the hatch over the main hold. Mansur snatched up the speaking trumpet and hailed him. His father looked across, then came to the near rail.
'What's amiss?' Mansur called again.
'We have taken a ball below the waterline, and we are taking in water faster than the pumps can discharge it.' His father's reply was faint on the wind.
So great was the disparity in speed between the two ships that in the
short time that Mansur had been on deck the Sprite had gained a few yards on the Revenge. Already his father's voice carried more clearly across the gap. He looked back over the stern and judged that the Arcturus had lost little distance in the hours that he and Verity had been below. She was making much better speed through the water than the crippled Revenge.
'What can I do to assist you?' he asked his father. There was a long pause.
'I have shot an angle on the Arcturus's mainmast every hour,' Dorian called back. 'At this rate she will be within cannon shot before nightfall. Even in the darkness we cannot hope to elude her.'
'Can we repair the damage?'
'The shot-hole is awkwardly placed.' Dorian shook his head. 'If we heave to, Arcturus will be upon us before we can plug it.'
'What, then, must we do?'
'Unless something unforeseen happens, we shall be forced to fight again.'
Mansur thought about Verity in the cabin below this deck, and had a picture of that perfect pale body torn to bloody tatters by round-shot. He forced the image from his mind. 'Wait!' he called to Dorian, then beckoned to Kumrah.
'What can we do, old friend?' They talked quickly and earnestly, but while they did so the Revenge dropped back a little further and Mansur was obliged to order a reef in his main sail to slow the Sprite enough to keep his station with the Revenge. Then he hailed his father. 'Kumrah has a plan. Conform to me as best you are able, but I will moderate my speed if you fall too far behind.'
Kumrah brought the Sprite's bows around another three points into the west until they were on a direct heading for Ras al-Had, the point of land where the gulf opened out into the ocean proper.
For the rest of that morning Mansur kept his crew busy repairing the battle damage they had suffered, cleaning and servicing the guns, bringing up more round-shot from the orlop deck, filling the powder bags to replace that which had been fired away. Then, with block and tackle, they hoisted one of the guns up from the main deck to the poop where the carpenters had made a temporary gun port for it. Trained back over the stern the cannon could now be used as a stern chaser to bring the Arcturus under fire as soon as she drew within range.
Almost imperceptibly the Revenge was settling lower in the water and losing speed as the men at the pumps battled to hold at bay the inflow or water through her pierced hull. Mansur closed in on her and they Passed a line across. Then he was able to send over twenty fresh seamen
to relieve the Revenge's crew, who were exhausted from the unremitting work at the pump handles. At the same time he sent over Baris, one of Kumrah's junior officers, a young Omani who was also a native of this coast and knew every rock and reef almost as intimately as Kumrah did. While the two ships sailed in such close company, Mansur explained to his father the plan he and Kumrah had devised.
Dorian understood at once that this was perhaps their best chance, and he endorsed it without hesitation. 'Go to it, lad,' he called back, through the speaking trumpet.
Within the next hour Mansur was obliged to take in another reef so as not to head-reach on the Revenge during the night. As darkness fell he gazed back at the Arcturus and calculated that she had closed the gap between them to only a little over two sea miles.
It was almost midnight before he went below to his cabin, but even then Mansur and Verity could not sleep. They made love as though it would never happen again, then lay naked in each other's arms, sweating in the tropical night, and they talked softly. Sometimes they laughed and more than once Verity wept. There was so much they had to tell, their whole lifetimes to relate to each other. At last, though, even their new love could no longer keep them awake, and they slept with their limbs entwined.
An hour before first light Mansur slipped from their bunk and left her to go back on deck. But within minutes Verity, too, came up the companionway and took a place in the angle of the quarter-deck and the poop, where she could be near him but unobtrusive.
Mansur ordered the cooks to give the men their breakfast and while they ate he went down the deck and spoke to them, giving them encouragement, making them laugh and others smile, even though they knew that the Arcturus was close behind them in the darkness and they would soon be called upon to fight her again.
As soon as the dawn sky began to pale Mansur and Kumrah were at the stern rail on the poop deck beside the stern chaser. The lantern on the main truck of the Revenge showed close astern, but as the circle of their vision opened they all stared beyond her for the first glimpse of the Arcturus. They were not disappointed. As the light strengthened they caught the loom of her against the still dark horizon, and Mansur had to check himself from giving voice to his disappointment. She had gained almost a mile on them during the hours of darkness, and now she was within long cannon shot. Even as Mansur stared at her through the lens of his telescope there was a flash from her bows, and a puff of white smoke.
'Your father is firing at us with bow chasers. Though I fancy the range
is a trifle too long for him to do us any real damage for a while yet,' Mansur told Verity.
At that moment there was a hail from the masthead: 'Land ho!' and they left the stern and went up into the bows to scan ahead with the spyglass.
'You excel yourself, Captain,' Mansur told Kumrah. 'Unless I am very much mistaken, that is Ras al-Had dead ahead.' They went back to the chart table beside the traverse-board and pored over the chart. This masterpiece of the cartographer's art had been drawn up by Kumrah himself, the work of a lifetime spent on the sea.
'Where is this Kos al-Heem?' Mansur asked. The name meant the Deceiver in the dialect of the Omani coast.
'I
