Outside, the others hovered and picked at the rigging, bees tending the stamens: it made no difference—the boat was now sliding sideways into the gap between the island and the point. If we were thirty feet wide and the passage was three hundred, it would have been of no concern. But her sideways drift made the Moonbird more than eighty feet wide—and she had no grip on the water. Argyle’s sail orders, and his quick hands on the wheel, were all but irrelevant to the boat’s attitude. She wanted to bring her rudder around to the front, as though the stern was going faster than the bow.

I had no idea how one would resolve such a problem, but if it went, then there was no way to avoid hitting the sides of the passage. Connolly yelled to Argyle that we were caught in a roost; the master seemed well aware of the problem, but held his tongue.

Our new passenger, our pirate queen, was looking back across our beams at the entry to this funnel that had trapped us. I followed her gaze, and there to my horror was the brig she had spoken of, within a couple of hundred yards of us. I could make out men on its decks, a lookout in the rigging. I could see a row of small cannon in ports on her beam. There was no activity around the gun ports, but several of the sailors on deck were armed.

‘Who are they?’ I asked her.

‘Who cares?’

I stared at her back: a large scar angled across her shoulder-blade, as long as a finger. It was depressed in its centre where a muscle had never regrown.

‘All the same,’ she was saying. ‘Someone I stung, hey. Stung em good, all of em.’ She paced again, like a prize-fighter. ‘Batman maybe. Now there’s one oughta be tied to a tree. Cut his filthy balls off…’

She strode up to the quarterdeck and stood with her legs apart, pointing a finger their way.

‘Bah! Light yer little candles, wadjella!’ She grabbed her breasts and shook them as she snarled. ‘Why don’t you fire them balls? You got balls?’ She was shrieking now. ‘Comin for you next, Mister Batman!’

There was a response of similar nature from the deck of the other ship. Someone bared a backside, someone loaded a Bess, but they would have known they were still out of range. The Moonbird was gaining speed all the time, not through any power from her sails but by the ineluctable force of the tide through the passage. She felt helpless to me, our calm and steady mare.