Blessed Isle (6 page)

A smudge darkened the edge of the world to starboard. My heart leapt into my dry throat as I peered and peered through the little circular window at that low . . . ridge of hills in the distance? Or might it be a reef? Was there a line of white beneath it where the surf broke on the shore? The log had gone over the side in the storm along with the midshipman who had been trying to read it. All I knew was that we had been tossed like a thrown stone steadily west northwest. How far we had travelled I had no idea, and would not until the skies cleared enough to show us the moon. But it
could
be America, over there. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility.
God almighty, have mercy on this sinner now
.
Let it be land. Please, let it be land.

The wind blew still nor’ nor’west, away from what I thought must be the coast. If it was land, that smudge of black should be growing fainter, dipping slowly beneath the horizon.

It flickered white. I took the glass from my eye and rubbed the strain from my face, and when I looked again the shape was larger, darker, more defined. I felt then as a man must who is alone and wounded in the woods and hears the first howl of the wolves, a kind of paralysis of terror and disbelief. The thing was flying towards us out of the east. Ten minutes more and I could see it as boiling black thunderheads, piling up one on top of another. Their undersides drew down into strange, demonic dugs, stained crimson and weeping rain as red as blood.

Courage drained from me. I closed my eyes and clung to the rigging, resting my cheek against the worn fibres of the shrouds, and I might have stayed there until the storm overtook us and blew me into the air like a child’s kite, had not Garnet beneath me suddenly begun to laugh.

I climbed down, startled. The thrum of the sea through the hull had already strengthened and the lines popped and hissed as they tightened. Garnet looked up at me, the distant lightning reflected in his eyes. “Dear God, sir,” he laughed, his smile wide and bright, “it isn’t often you get to watch your own death flying towards you across the water. It’s just as the poets say. It’s sublime!”

His joy leapt the gap between us like a flame travelling down a fuse. It touched something within me and exploded, filling me with light and heat. I thought him a magnificent madman, and he filled me with awe and delight. In that moment I knew for the first time that I loved him.

His lunacy infected me. I wanted nothing so much as to drive him into the cabin, lock the door, and couple as the ship was ripped apart around us, dying as I’d never dared live.

But I was the captain and below my feet there slumbered still a score of my crew and twentythree other human souls whose well-being was my responsibility. Half in love with death as I was, I would not let them perish without doing my utmost to save them.

“All hands on deck, Mr Littleton, if you please.” I brought the keys of the manacles out of the stern locker in which they had been stowed and passed them to him solemnly. He grasped my fingers with them and pressed, clasping my hands for a long moment, knowing what I was going to say. The wind picked up and shrieked in the rigging and the first spatterings of that bloody rain smacked aboard, hailstones rattling down with it.

“All hands please, Mr Littleton,” I said. “Including the prisoners.”
“Aye, aye sir. At once.”

You felt that too? I wish I’d known! I still think there could be no better way to die than that —the glory and the ecstasy of it. Maybe when we grow old? When the aches and pains begin, you lose your teeth and I my hair, we can buy a sloop and fit it out like an emperor’s tomb and run it into the maw of a black squall. Let the sea tear apart that which it brought together. Better than dying in bed, incapable, incontinent, and wrinkled, buried in separate graves by mourners to whom the survivor would never be able to tell his grief.
But yes, yes. I dare not risk your rebuke. I have remembered I am supposed to be telling the story and not embarrassing you with my thoughts.
They came up the companionway steps like black dogs, hunkered over, stiff, scarce able to walk from their long confinement in chains. They paused at the top, straightening with exquisite care, squinting at the light and snuffing the racing, waterladen air. I can’t find it in me to blame them for what they did. I’d have done the same had I been caught scrumping apples, confined in chains for months, tossed and forgotten as human ballast in the utter dark and freezing cold of the underwater hull. If I’d gone into that a man, I’d have come out a monster. I can’t blame them.
Harry a little I can blame. He should have known. But I think he did. I think he knew they would turn on us, but he wanted to give us all a chance at life anyway. The heart of a hero beats in the breast of that man, even though he does look so much like a bailiff’s enforcer.
It did not begin immediately. It took three days. The first day, our prisoners were still too cramped in themselves, unaware of their opportunities and blasted out of their mortal concerns by the rising, enfolding seas. Landsmen all, they’d never seen anything like this. They thought nature something to subdue: a field to plant, a steady place under their feet. No one but those who have gone down to the sea can know man’s sheer insignificance in the world. When Neptune rages, one cannot reason with him, one can only hold on and hope to endure. For some, it is a strangely intoxicating freedom. For others, it loosens their wits and makes them grovel on the deck, blind and helpless as maggots. There are no unbelievers on the sea—the gods are there, visible in all their power, and a man must live with them, or die.
Harry lived up to his name and harried them at every turn, sword in hand—for the powder of a pistol would have been drenched beyond use in seconds—giving them the will to move. He pitted himself against their terror and won, driving them to work the sails, to set loose the wreckage of the foremast, to hold down the wheel. We taught them —we had to teach them—to read the compass and the flags, to keep the ship running, running fast in front of the wind.
By the end of the second day, you could see it in their faces, behind the smear of weariness, the thought,
This is not so hard. We can do this.
That was when I put the barrel of water and the wax-paper-wrapped parcel of hardtack in the pinnace and loosened all the ropes that held her tight to the deck. I’m not certain even now whether this was forethought or cowardice. I know I dared not tell Mortimer or Lieutenant Gregory what I had done, lest they should take it for defeatism or even mutiny. What can I say? I like to have an escape route prepared.
On the third day, the wind fell briefly, and a gleam of yellow sunshine pierced the cloud. From yards and rigging our convicts looked up and cheered, light tender over battered faces. Steam rose in frail curls from the decks as the hot sunlight dried them.
Gregory put a hand on the scuttlebutt, dipped me out fresh storm water. He was a lovely creature, not above nineteen years of age, smooth skinned and rosy as a girl. You’d have thought he rouged his lips, they were so pink, and he was as leggy and eager and charming as a new colt. God knows what he must have suffered, growing up in the Navy, but it had made him wary. He glanced down at his reflection, up again at me. “This . . . this is it, isn’t it, sir? The moment they turn on us.”
The clouds thinned and streamed away to the west, a sky of cerulean blue dreaming hot above our heads. The scuttlebutt blazed silver, a perfect mirrored circle, and the air filled with the scent of wet hemp. One by one, like fruit too heavy to stay on the bough, men came down from the rigging. The soft thud of their bare feet sounded on the deck all around us.
“They’d be fools,” I said. Then loudly, “Can’t you see the second front following on behind?” I pointed out east, and indeed there hung a second black line, thin as a pencil stroke. “Can’t you taste the lightning in the air? This is only a temporary respite. It’ll be on us again in minutes.”
We’d had to give them axes with which to clear away the fallen foremast and its tangles of snagged rigging. We hadn’t dared to ask for them back. Now the leader of the convicts, a man named Nathan Carter, walked over to us, took the cup from my hand, and dropped it on the deck.
I had been working beside them for the past three days. My hands were swollen, bleeding, and black from rope burns. I had slept perhaps twentyfour hours in the past fortnight. I had begun to see the phantoms of our fleet keeping pace with us, their crewmen all in grey, rags of black flesh about gleaming bone. I saw one now, behind him, and it was Joseph Barnes, who had gone down with the
Drake
rather than leave his wife and child.
A month-long fury boiled the blood within me. I slammed the heels of both hands up beneath Carter’s breastbone. The blow lifted him off his feet, sent him sprawling on the deck, winded, struggling for breath and shocked at the swift response. As he lay there, glaring at me, I made to kick him in the balls.
“Mr Littleton!” A tearing noise behind me, and the seams of my coat parted as Harry grabbed onto the material and hauled me away. I still think he was wrong to do so. Perhaps he had not seen the blatant, deliberate challenge to my authority, and therefore he supposed I had started it. I had not. But I thought, even in my rage, that reacting at once and with maximum force might yet have cowed them. Harry, Geoffrey, and I had swords; we were military men, we’d fought all our lives. I think we could have taken them. Four or five down, dead, and the rest would have thought better of it.
But Harry . . . Harry was a little too gentle for the rank he inhabited. He saw, perhaps, something of himself in the prisoners. Understood their station in life better than I, and wished to talk. He hoped we could all come through this somehow together. An admirable sentiment, but naïve.
“How could you instigate this now?” He spun me around, put himself between me and the slowly closing ring of prisoners. The fury on his face matched mine—he was terrified. “The second half is coming!”
It sped upon us almost at his call. The first outlying wave of the next storm built under
Banshee
’s abused hull until it groaned and the lines thrummed. Carter rolled to his stomach, pushed himself up onto his knees and spat on the good clean oak of His Majesty’s deck. “We don’t need these buggers anymore,” he yelled. “It’s our ship now. Our rules. Give ’em what they deserve, lads. Twelve fucking months in chains, they owe us! Now get them!”
He came for me, teeth bared. My sword was already in my hand. I cut his throat without a second’s thought. A lukewarm mixture of rain and blood spattered my face as the temperature plummeted and the sea bucked beneath us.
Wind screamed in the rigging so loud I could not hear the convicts gasp as Carter thudded to his knees and thence to the deck. But their faces changed. It recurs to me in dreams, the way heady hope, gleefulness, became grim at the sight of that fountain of blood pumping out of his throat.
My own heart choked me as if it were trying to follow suit. I took a breath and they were on us. They piled on Harry first, because he seemed weaker than I. Ten of them at least set about him, like a village football match, all gouging hands and kicks and elbows. Three of the bravest edged towards me, fanning out so that I should not be able to defend against all of them at once. Behind me, I could hear above the wind the tiny, tinny noise of steel-on-steel as Gregory fought for his life. Above us the unmanned yards creaked round and the sails blew out, thundering and snapping uselessly.
We tipped over the crest of a wave. A wall of water slammed across the deck. I grabbed a flailing line, watched with triumph as one of my attackers was swept away, flapping in the grip of the water like a minnow poured out of a jar. Wrapping the rope around my wrist, I swung out, caught the second man in the chest with my heels. He spiralled away like a sycamore seed in the gale.
Banshee
slid sideways down the wave, the relentless gale heeling her over, her port rail below the water. I darted a glance to starboard and saw a wall of water some fifty feet high, deep emerald green, flecked with racing dots of foam. We slid down its side, broadside on, and above us the crest of the wave built and bent over. Tons and tons of water mere seconds away from falling like boulders atop us, crushing us, filling us up and foundering us.
A tang of copper in the air. Gregory’s yellow-haired head flew like a cannonball overboard. I felt almost glad. I knew now that it was over. We were lost.
And then the wind fell, cut off by the enormous wave. The dead, damp air filled with Harry’s voice, calling out to me. I felt that time slowed, or perhaps I was freed of it, to partake a little in the nature of eternity. Possessed by a berserk strength, I ran up the inclined deck of the ship, stabbed two of his assailants in the back, and grabbed a handful of uniform coat. It was like stepping into a shower of knives—edges everywhere. I slashed a red-haired man in the stomach while I hauled Harry with all my strength towards the ship’s boat.
Something tapped me on the leg. I saw a brief, blazing glimpse of Harry’s face, eyes wide and dark as the sea, a molten star of white rage within them. He leaned past me. A whisper of movement as his sword passed within inches of my face, and then a man behind me was stumbling to his knees, clutching at his eye, blood seeping through his fingers. As he fell, something tugged again where I had felt the tap, and looking down I saw a marlinspike driven all the way through my thigh from one side to the other.
I recall thinking I had never seen anything so comical in all my life. When I pushed Harry against the boat, drew up the tarp that covered it to indicate to him that he should get in, I was laughing too hard to speak.
Shadow fell black on the ship. Columns of solid water pelted the deck like ammunition, and then one of the convicts screamed, a high-pitched, pig-like noise that echoed strangely in the trough. Solid water curled above us. Spray whipped away horizontally as the glassy roof paused before it fell.
Instinctively, the convicts turned their faces towards this greater threat, and in that split-second pause, Harry dived into the boat. I scrambled after him. For a moment I was stuck, the marlinspike caught on the tarp. Then I wrenched it out and used it to tear through the pre-weakened rope that held the boat to the deck. The rope parted. We ground slowly to port across the deck. Harry lashed the tarp closed. The sound of tons of seawater spewing through
Banshee
’s port side gunports rumbled like thunder beneath us. She rolled further over and our speed picked up. We felt the slatey grind and shudder of our keel against the deck. The boat’s oars bounced about our shins.
And then a smoothness beneath us and a roar above. The tarpaulin bowed inward. Water spurted from between the knots. We held it closed and felt the deep cold against our fingers. Everything not strapped down within the boat rose and tumbled against us, oars and barrel and biscuit and ropes, bailing bucket and the discarded, blood-stained spike. It slowed as we drove deeper. Cold and silence encompassed us, but for the creaking of the boat’s timbers. Water seeped in through the lapped planks.
We were underwater, pushed down by the breaker towards the seabed, maybe to smash there like a dropped egg on a flagstone. We held our breaths and looked at one another for a long, motionless, suspended moment.
And then with a rush and bubbling we burst back onto the surface. With a final clatter, everything settled into its place. Like men possessed, we peeled back the tarp, set up the mast and the single small sail, double reefed, working with speed and strength I don’t think I could consciously equal again.
The scrap of canvas caught the wind and, collapsing to sit by the stern, I felt life go through the rudder. She had steerage way. I turned her to run before the wind and she sped like a kite up the mountainous sea.
Harry looked back until we were over the streamers of spray and scudding down the next trough. I did not. I could see the reflection in his eyes, his pupils two dark mirrors. There was nothing behind us. The
Banshee
was lost, capsized and gone under, taking all her invalids with her.
He is a well-set-up man, Harry. Broad shouldered. The kind of man you’d put money on at boxing. But at that moment a careless touch might have shattered him. He sat down as though his bones were made of glass. Looking at me, he opened his mouth, then shut it again, dumb in his desolation.
“Go to sleep,” I said. “I’ll take the first watch.”
With a great struggle, some words surfaced. He crouched forward, laid his hand on my knee. “Your leg . . .”
I looked down in surprise. Truth be told, I’d forgotten about it. No one could have been more surprised than I to see that my white breeches were now crimson and my stocking was gummed to my leg with dried blood. That was, of course, the point at which it began to hurt. “Oh,” I said—I’m aware it was not the wittiest of ripostes—“oh damn!”
He tore the arm from his shirt to make up a pad of linen and bound it on firmly with his cravat, his hands shaking. His bent head was furred with a stubble of hair that shadowed the shape of his skull and picked out the vulnerable nape in tiny chestnut glints. Everything seemed miraculous to me then, limned in the kind of vivid high relief they say is a characteristic of the sight of eagles. I brushed my palm over his head from forehead to nape and back again, feeling how the bristles fought me one way, accommodated the next.
Harry sat back on his heels with a thud. “Don’t do that!”
They say I’m not a tactful man, and perhaps I did think,
You can hardly be worried about greater disgrace than this!
But give me credit. Even with the searing, scouring pain that was working its way up through the marrow of my leg and into my stomach and spine, I did not say it. I said, “Why not?”