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officer’s arm a reassuring squeeze. He stopped blushing, but looked as high-strung as a racehorse before the wire. “Proceed, Mr. Piper.”
    “It’s bodies, Captain,” the bosun answered with brevity.
    “Bodies?”
    “Oh, mercy,” Mr. Christian said, looking for a moment as if he was going to swoon. He clutched at the edge of the nearest stack of crates and weaved for a moment.
    “What sort of bodies?” I asked, eyeing the chief officer lest he suddenly totter toward me.
    “Bloody great bodies, that’s what sort,” Mr. Piper answered, scratching absently at his crotch. “Gettin’ in me way, they are.”
    “There’s blood?” the chief officer wailed, his eyes filled with horror as he grabbed the bosun. “I . . . I . . . faint at blood.”
    “Where exactly are these bodies?” I asked, almost positive that I was being tested again.
    “Over yonder, behind the barrels of salted meat.” Piper nodded toward the far side of the hold, where stacked neatly were three dozen barrels of salted venison, pork, beef, and fish destined for the emperor’s troops in the south of Italy. “Neptune’s salty cods, man, let go of me arm! Ye’ll have me uniform wrinkled.”
    “Dead or alive?” I asked.
    “Alive, we think,” Piper answered, plucking Mr. Christian’s hands from his arm. “That is, there ain’t no great big pools o’ blood soakin’ into everything.”
    “Urk!” Mr. Christian said, swallowing hard.
    “And no severed limbs that we could find, nor any entrails or guts spewed out everywhere.”
    “Entrails,” Mr. Christian whispered, his voice hoarse with horror as he groped blindly for the stack of wine barrels. “Entrails would be the end of me.”
    “Aye, and they’re a right shiv up the arse to clean up, too,” Mr. Piper agreed, sucking his teeth for a moment before he continued. “Ye need sawdust to proper clean up after entrails, ye do. An arseload of sawdust. And sodium carbonate, and we don’t be havin’ much of that on board.”
    “It’s good, then, that we will have no need for it,” I said, finding it difficult to keep my lips from twitching.
    “ ’Tis the truth ye’re speakin’,” he agreed, before adding, “It’s hard to tell if they be alive or dead, Captain. Ye’ll just have to be lookin’ for yerself.”
    “An excellent suggestion. Mr. Christian, you will come with me, please.”
    I took three steps, but paused when the chief officer made an inarticulate noise of horror in his throat before falling over in a dead faint.
    It was going to be a very long trip.
    “Son of a whore’s left leg,” Mr. Piper swore, looking with interest at the chief officer’s prone form. “He’s light in the ballast, that one is, Captain. Ye should have seen him carry on when Auld John—he were the steward two seasons ago, before Mr. Ho joined us—when Auld John had three toes drop off.”
    I paused on my way toward the cargo in question. “His toes dropped off?”
    “Aye.” He sucked his teeth for the count of three. “We’d been to Marseilles, and ye know how it can be there—lads’ll go out lookin’ for a good time, and get mixed up with a strumpet or two, and the next thing ye know, someone’s lopped off a few of their toes.”
    I stared at him in growing horror. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of anyone losing their toes because of promiscuous activities, even in so rough a city as Marseilles. None of the crew I’ve sailed with have ever done so.”
    “Aye, well,” he said shrugging, and poking at the inert form of Mr. Christian with the highly polished toes of his boot. “Could have been the pox, too. He had that right enough. He thought his rod was going to drop off one time, but it turned out to be the clap.”
    I opened my mouth to respond, but there was just nothing I could say to that, so instead I gestured toward the unconscious officer, and asked, “Would you see to him while I view these bodies of yours?”
    “They ain’t me bodies, at any