The Pirate Round

Chapter 11

THE GALLEY ’S spritsail yard hit first, dragging across the quarterdeck of the drifting hulk, then catching in the shattered taffrail, tangling inextricably in the jagged wood, as if the dying ship were reaching out, one last desperate grasp for help.

Honeyman was at the bow, casting off the spritsail lifts and braces, but Marlowe could already feel the Elizabeth Galley pause as the wreck held her in its grip.

“Shift your helm!” The tiller went over again, and the Galley turned, just a bit. The wind and sea were driving the Galley fast, and now the waterlogged wreck was trying to hold her back.

He could see the bowsprit flexing under the enormous pressure, could see the spritsail yard bending, wondered what would give first.

And then the spritsail yard was torn clean away, pulling free from the bowsprit with a cracking of wood and snapping of lines. Bits of rigging whipped through the air as the big yard was wrenched off. The Elizabeth Galley leaped forward, out of the wreck’s grip.

“Midships!” Marlowe shouted, and then the Elizabeth Galley’s starboard bow slammed into the wreck’s transom. The ship shuddered, the waterlogged hulk as unyielding as solid rock. The cathead crumpled under the impact, and the bulwark stove in. Men ran aft as the ship dragged along the wreck, tearing itself up.

Marlowe stared, transfixed by the sight of the great round white bottom of the ship. The deck was still lost to his view, the ship listing away from the Elizabeth Galley.

The starboard fore channel hit next, tangled up in the battered stern section of the hulk. Marlowe could see the three forward shrouds grow taut and tauter under the strain, and then something snapped, and the shrouds went slack again, ripped apart like old twine. If even one more shroud was torn free, they would loose the mast.

The next sea lifted the Galley’s stern and began to shove it around. She turned sideways to the sea, pivoting on the forward section that was locked to the wreck. Broadside to the waves, a bigger sea might have rolled them over, but the waves were smaller now, choppier, and Marlowe did not see a watery end coming.

The channel wrenched free from the hulk, and the sea drove the Galley past, and they were downwind of the drifting menace, safe, beyond the threat.

The deck of the dead ship came into view, and Marlowe was able to see something of her in the imperfect light of that early morning. A big vessel, an Indiaman perhaps. The lee bulwarks were underwater-her hull must have been half filled. She had an hour to live, perhaps a bit more, and then she would be gone.

On the stump of her mainmast, rising fifteen feet above the deck, a British merchantman’s ensign, torn to rags, set upside down. A pathetic signal of distress, as if anyone would see it or would have been able to render any help if they had.

Marlowe did not like to think of the horrible death that had attended the crew, thrashing in the bitter-cold water at night, the nightmare of every sailor.

Then, just as the big ship was disappearing from sight behind the next steep wave, one that would leave her farther beyond the Galley’s reach, he saw motion, color, something moving along the deck. He leaped into the main shrouds, raced aloft, eyes locked on the wreck, trying to gain some height, to see before she was lost behind the wall of water.

There were men still alive on her. He could see them, now one hundred yards away, but he could see them, crawling along the high side, waving frantically. Something white-a shirt, a fragment of sail- someone was desperately signaling.

The Elizabeth Galley was still nearly beam on to the waves, but the helmsmen had the tiller over, and she was turning again, so that in a moment she would once again be running away downwind.

“Helmsmen! Hold as you are!” Marlowe shouted. “Mr. Dinwiddie! The mizzen sail! Let us set it, quickly, quickly!”

Dinwiddie came running aft, a lumbering, awkward sort of run, with the more athletic Honeyman on his heels and a gang of men behind. They did not ask questions, they just obeyed, casting off gaskets and laying out the halyard, clapping on and hauling away with speed and care.

“Reef’s tucked!” Honeyman shouted over the wind.

“Good! We are going to bring to!”

That order received a frown and a knitting of brows, but no more, as the men struggled with setting the sail in the howling gale. When they were running before it, the wind had not seemed so bad, but now, with the ship virtually stopped, it blew over them with all its force, pulling at hair and clothes, making the rigging hum and sing.

“Midships!” Marlowe called to the helmsmen. The mizzen yard inched up the mast, the bit of canvas that was exposed pulling hard, bellied out taut in the wind.

“Dinwiddie! Send some men forward! Set that fore staysail!”

The Elizabeth Galley turned until she was taking the sea and the wind on her damaged starboard bow.

“Now, helm a’larboard! There, hold her there!” Marlowe paused, gauging the feel of the ship, trying to get a sense of whether or not she was in balance, if she would stay as she was with the contending forces of helm and sail, and he saw that she would.

Honeyman and Dinwiddie were there, at his side, waiting for orders, wondering no doubt what he was thinking. The safest thing for them would have been to keep running before the storm. Instead they were stopped, hove to, with the wreck to windward and drifting down on them. Now and then it was visible from the deck, rising up on the swell, and then down again. The next wave, or the next, and she might go down and keep going, until she came to a stop in the sands’ unknown fathoms below.

“There are men alive on that ship!” Marlowe pointed to windward. He thought that would explain everything, but Honeyman and Dinwiddie continued to stare.

“We are going to get them off!” Marlowe shouted again. Behind him the man coiling down the mizzen halyard shouted, “What? In this bloody sea?” as if he were part of the conversation, which he was not.

In fact, there was no conversation. Marlowe glared at Dinwiddie, challenging him to argue. He glared at Honeyman, daring him to make some noise about what the crew wished to do. He was ready to break them both at that point if they gave him a breath of grief, and the Red Sea be damned. But Dinwiddie just nodded, and Honeyman said, “How do you reckon to do it?”

That was the question. If they had been to windward of the wreck, they might have drifted a boat down to them. But they were downwind now, and all the tacking in the world would not get them back up to windward again.

Marlowe turned from the two men, ran his eyes along the deck and then out to windward, where he was able to catch a glimpse of the wreck before it was lost again between waves. The Elizabeth Galley, with her masts in place, was drifting much faster than the waterlogged hulk. If they could slow their drift, let the wreck drift down on them, pass a line somehow…

God, this is a stupid thing I am doing! Marlowe thought. The idea of letting an unpredictable hulk drift down on them, with that sea running and the wind howling around their ears, was insane. But he could not let those men die without trying. They were sailors. British sailors, to boot. He did not examine his motives; he knew only that he had to try.

“We must slow our drift!” he shouted, and the two men nodded. “Let us lash some of them spare spars together, put ’em over the side with a light hawser, a sort of sea anchor! That might do!”

“Aye, sir!” Honeyman shouted. “Mayhaps the wreck’ll drift down on the spars. If those poor bastards yonder can reach them, they can grab on to the spars and we’ll pull ’em aboard!”

Marlowe nodded as if that had been his thought all along, but actually it had not occurred to him. Still, it was perfect. Set a sea anchor in the form of the spare masts and yards, let the hulk drift down on that, let the men climb aboard the spars, and pull them over to the Galley. Simple.

But Marlowe was seaman enough to know that it was never that simple.

The first task was to lash the spare spars together and get them over the side. Honeyman and Dinwiddie and Burgess worked the gangs of men in the waist, lashing together the long, rounded timbers, Elizabeth Galley’s inventory of spare topmasts and yards and topgallant masts. They lashed them lengthwise, like a giant bundle of twigs, and rigged stops and yard tackle and stay tackle to lift the whole mess.

Halfway down the length of the spars they attached the hawser, the three-inch-thick rope that would hold the Elizabeth Galley tethered to the drifting mass.

The Elizabeth Galley would drift faster through the water than the half-submerged sea anchor made up of spare spars. If the hawser were attached to the sharp end of the spars, the ship would just pull the sea anchor through the water like a boat. But with the hawser attached to the midpoint of the spars’ length, the Galley would be pulling the long timbers sideways, like trying to drag a ship broadside through the water, rather than bow first. The spars would thus act as a brake to slow the Galley’s fast downwind drift.

Simple.

The men staggered through the task, tired, battered from their long night, their footing unsure on the slick and rolling deck.

Will this be worth it, if any of my men are killed in the trying? Marlowe wondered.

Bickerstaff made his way aft. He looked drawn, pale with fatigue. “You are setting a sea anchor, or so the rumor goes, forward.”

“Yes, we are. Let that hulk drift down on us.”

“Do you mean to take possession of her?”

“Possession? Dear God, she will not live till the first dog watch. I have no hope beyond getting her men off!” Their conversation, like every such conversation for the past twenty hours, was carried out at shouting volume. Marlowe could feel his throat ache with the effort.

“Whatever do you hope to gain by this?” Bickerstaff asked.

Marlowe shook his head. His throat hurt too much to bother with “I don’t understand you.” “We can do no more than save those men!” he shouted, hoping that would answer Bickerstaff’s question.

And apparently it did, for Bickerstaff nodded and went forward again, and the next time Marlowe looked, he was standing in the line of men holding the fall of the stay tackle and ready to haul away on Dinwiddie’s command.

It took an hour to prepare, which was an extraordinarily short time in those abominable conditions. But in that time they had drifted a good quarter mile from the wreck, which was visible only now and again from the deck. In the maintop a lookout kept a steady vigil, shouting out every so often that it was still visible, that it had not rolled over or gone to the bottom. Yet.

Marlowe stood at the break of the quarterdeck. Below him, arrayed around the waist and foredeck, the Elizabeth Galleys stood ready. A dozen men on the stay tackle, the massive block and tackle that hung directly over the main hatch, used for lifting stores and cargo in and out. Now it would lift the spars straight up. More hands, including the cook and Bickerstaff, on the yard tackles, coming down from the ends of the fore and main yards and normally used to swing the ship’s boats over the side. Now they would do the same for the sea anchor.

Honeyman and Burgess stood at the rope seized to the spars, like an umbilical cord between the sea anchor and the Elizabeth Galley, ready to slack that away as needed.

There would be no orders shouted. In that howling wind it was not worth trying. Marlowe pointed a finger at Flanders at the stay tackle, pointed toward the sky, and Flanders ordered his men to haul away.

Up off the hatch the bundle of spars rose, swaying wildly with the roll of the ship, while Dinwiddie passed orders to the yard-tackle men to keep it steady.

Carefully, carefully they lifted the ton of tapered and oiled wood, swayed it out over the side. At one point the Galley took a wicked roll, and the spars slammed into her side with an impact that was like hitting the wreck. Then they rolled the other way, and the spars swung outboard, and the yard tackles kept them there.

Out and clear of the ship, they were lowered into the water, and the tackles jerked free, and suddenly the spars were floating, like a great pile of wreckage, tethered to the Elizabeth Galley with the three-inchthick hawser.

Marlowe gave Honeyman a sign to slack away, and Honeyman and Burgess let the rope slip around the fife rail and run out through the empty gunport. Marlowe watched the spars drift farther and farther, and then he made a closed-fist sign, and Honeyman took a turn of the rope around the rail and held it fast.

The Elizabeth Galley gave a light jerk as the sea anchor took hold and checked the ship’s fast drift, holding it more or less in place as the dangerous hulk, beyond any control, drifted down on them.

And then there was nothing to do but wait.

Marlowe sent the men below to have what breakfast they could with the seas too rough to light the galley fires. Happily there was fresh meat aboard, they being only three days out of port, and so the beef that was already cooked was served out cold, along with fresh biscuits and butter. All in all a handsome meal, far better than the salted meat, which even when cooked could be as hard as shoe leather.

The men, like Marlowe, were too eager to see what was happening to remain below. They came back up through the scuttle, meat and biscuits in hand, and lined the rails, watching for signs of the hulk as one or both of the vessels rose on the waves.

They were rewarded with the merest glimpses at first, the low-lying wreck more than a quarter mile away and visible only on those occasions when both ships happened to rise at once. But soon it was evident that the sea anchor was performing famously, that the wreck was now drifting much faster than the Elizabeth Galley.

With every passing wave that held the wreck up like some article for sale in the market, they could see she was getting closer, and with each cable length she closed, Marlowe could feel the tension build like a storm. He could all but hear the questions rolling through the men’s heads: How will we get these poor sods off? How will we keep that wreck from running aboard us and taking us down, too? Is this bloody worth the risk? Those questions rolled through his head as well.

For that last question, at least, Marlowe felt quite sure he had the answer. Quite sure, but not entirely.

An hour and twenty minutes after he had sent his men to their breakfast, Marlowe could see the people on the wreck distinctly through his glass. The battered ship was not more than three cable lengths upwind, visible all the time now, save for those few moments when both ships were deep in the troughs of waves.

She was hard over on her larboard side, her rounded bottom facing into the wind and sea, which broke over her as if she were a spit of land. Her deck was nearly vertical and facing the Elizabeth Galley; Marlowe had an uninterrupted view from the taffrail right up to the shattered end of the bowsprit.

He could see her crew, or what was left of them, up on the high side of the deck. They were arrayed along the combing of the main hatch like figurines on a shelf. One or two of them had been waving arms and that white cloth, but they could see now that the Elizabeth Galley had spotted them, and they had stopped waving, saving what must be the precious little energy that they still had.

Marlowe moved the glass from the deck down toward the sea, training it on the sea anchor, the bundle of masts and yards that floated halfway between the Elizabeth Galley and the drifting hulk. It was all but awash. At times it was lost from sight as the sea rose up between it and the Galley, and the three-inch hawser would seem to disappear right into the side of the wave.

The sea anchor worked because it did not move easily through the water, with the hawser pulling it sideways rather than from the pointed end. For that same reason it was going to be a son of a bitch to haul back aboard. Marlowe wished they had attached another line to one end so they could turn it perpendicular to the Galley and pull it back sharp end first, so it would ride through the sea like a ship’s hull. He wished they had put some sort of a flag on it so the men on the wreck could see it better. But they had not, and it was too late now.

Another ten anxious minutes, and the wreck drifted down on the sea anchor, and every man aboard the Galley hoped the men clinging to her would see the spars, would think to jump for them, would be able to do so. The big seas battered the half-sunk hulk, crashing against her exposed bottom, causing her to roll in such a way that the watching men aboard the Galley clenched their fists and tensed their arms and waited for the whole thing to roll over and finish the poor bastards on her slanted deck.

Then at last the wreck was there. They could see the bundle of spars slamming against the deck of the hulk where it emerged from the sea. There was exactly one hundred yards separating the two ships, the length of cable that Honeyman had veered out. Now the men on the wreck had only to climb down to the spars and grab hold, and the Elizabeth Galleys would haul them over. In theory.

Marlowe climbed halfway up the mizzen shrouds, aimed his telescope at the distant deck. There was no way to communicate to the men there what he wanted them to do, no means of passing orders over the one hundred yards. He could only watch and hope.

He saw one of the men pointing down at the spars that thumped against the nearly vertical deck, right below where they were huddled on the hatch combing. He saw arms waving, pointing at the Elizabeth Galley, pointing down at the spars. They were getting the idea.

There followed what seemed to be half a minute of arguing, and then the men started to move. One of them climbed over the edge of the hatch, half sliding, half crawling down the sloping deck, down into the water that boiled over the low rail, and for a second he was lost to Marlowe’s sight, and Marlowe feared he had been swept away. But he appeared again, his head and shoulders above the white, churning sea, clinging to the bundle of spars.

One after another his mates followed him, down the deck, into the sea, and then onto the sea anchor that ran from their former ship to the Elizabeth Galley. In the Galley’s waist, men shouted words of encouragement, cheers that the men on the wreck would never hear. The Galleys were smiling, pounding one another on the back, relieved and exhilarated.

Don’t bloody celebrate yet, Marlowe thought as he watched the last of the shipwrecked sailors slide down and take his place on the spars. Fifteen men he counted, perhaps half the original complement.

“Mr. Honeyman, heave away at the capstan!” Marlowe shouted. The wind had calmed enough that Honeyman could hear him from the waist. He waved acknowledgment and shouted an order to the men at the capstan bars, and they began to heave around, hauling the hawser in, pulling the sea anchor back to the Elizabeth Galley.

They moved fast at first, pulling in the slack. The hawser rose up out of the sea, streaming water, growing straighter with the pull of the capstan. More and more rope came inboard, and as it did, the men at the capstan moved more and more slowly. And then they stopped.

“Heave! Heave a pawl!” Honeyman shouted, as if his voice could push them around, but it was no use. The hawser would not come in.

“You there, you lazy bastards, lay onto that capstan!” Dinwiddie shouted, indicating every man who was not at that moment pushing a capstan bar. They ran to the capstan, jostled in to find a place, every possible inch taken up by men ready to push the big winch around.

“Good!” Honeyman shouted. “Now, heave!”

From the quarterdeck Marlowe could hear the combined groaning of the men, the rope, the capstan as they exerted tremendous pressure on the bars. The capstan came around, slowly, and one more pawl clicked into place, and then it stopped.

Marlowe climbed down from the mizzen shrouds as Dinwiddie came rushing aft. “No bloody good, Captain!” he said between heaving for breath. “We can’t pull the damned thing in!”

“Son of a bitch!” Marlowe shouted out loud. The wreck was drifting down on the sea anchor. If he did not pull the men in, it could roll right over them. If he did not get the sea anchor free, the wreck would run right into the Elizabeth Galley and sink her as well.

The only reasonable thing to do was to cut away the damned sea anchor and the shipwrecked sailors with it. He thought of those men clinging to the spars. They had been sure of their pending death, and then like an angel from God the Elizabeth Galley had appeared. The sea anchor had been their path to salvation. He could not cut it away.

“Come with me,” he said, and ran forward and down the ladder to the waist, grabbing the main topsail halyard for balance as the ship rolled under him, an awkward, jerky motion thanks to the restraining effect of the bar-taut hawser.

Honeyman saw him coming, came staggering aft. “We’ll never haul it in!” he shouted. “Not in this sea! I-”

“If we attach a line to one end of the sea anchor, we can pull it so it is at a right angle to the ship!” Marlowe shouted, gesturing with his hands to imitate the motion of the sea anchor. “Then we will not be trying to pull it sideways but point first, like a boat going bow first through the water! It should come right in!”

“Yes,” Honeyman agreed.

“Aye, but there’s no line, sir. We can’t float one upwind,” Dinwiddie pointed out correctly.

“Right,” Marlowe agreed. He turned to Burgess. “Have you a snatch block that can go over that hawser?”

Burgess paused. A snatch block was a specialized piece of equipment, a block-what a landsman might call a pulley-like any other, save that it was opened on one side so that it could be put around a line rather than having to thread the end of the line through it.

“Aye…” Burgess said at last. “But what… you ain’t…”

“Get the snatch block over the hawser. I’ll use a strop for a sort of harness, carry a line out along the hawser.”

“Captain!” Honeyman and Dinwiddie protested, almost at once.

“Don’t argue with me, just do it, goddamn your eyes!” Marlowe shouted.

“Let me take the line out to them!” Honeyman countered.

“No! Get the block!” Marlowe shouted, and Honeyman and Burgess raced off, and Marlowe shed his oilskins, coat, and shoes and climbed up on the bulwark, above the taut hawser, above the roiling sea.

Don’t think, don’t think… The words raced through his mind. This was one of those moments, all too frequent at sea, when one could not think about the action he was resolved to take, or he would never have the courage to do it.

It was his idea to save the shipwrecked men, his mistake not to order a line tied to the end of the sea anchor in the first place. Ultimately, it was all his responsibility.

Sending men aloft to stow sail in a howling wind was one thing- that was as much a part of the sailor’s life as scrubbing the decks-but he could not expect anyone else to undertake this extraordinary danger. Not when it was his idea, and his oversight, that made it necessary.

These thoughts floated around in his head, amorphous and unformed, as Honeyman and Burgess rushed up with the snatch block and strop, a loop of rope that Marlowe would pass under his arms. He leaned out of the gunport, clapped the snatch block over the bar-taut hawser, tied it shut with spunyarn so it would not open accidentally. He hitched the strop over the hook in the block while Burgess arranged the rope that Marlowe would carry out to the sea anchor. He passed the bitter end to Honeyman, and Honeyman made it fast to the snatch block.

A swell rose up beyond the bulwark, slapped in through the gun-port, hit Honeyman square in the chest and face, but he did not pause any longer than it took to spit out the water he caught in his mouth and blink it out of his eyes.

“Ready, Marlowe,” he said at last.

Marlowe nodded, looked fore and aft. Nothing holding him back now, save for his powerful reluctance to plunge into that frigid water.

“All right, goddamn my eyes…” He reached down and grabbed the strop and slipped it over his head and shoulders and arranged it under his arms. The hawser was going slack. “Honeyman, I believe the wreck is shoving the sea anchor along. Keep tension on the hawser, take up with the capstan as you can.”

“Aye,” Honeyman said, and Marlowe was surprised to see the concern in his face and the faces of the others in the waist, but he had no time to ponder it. He slipped over the side.

Marlowe grabbed for the hawser as he went down but missed it, plunging into the sea, over his head, brought up short by the strop. He thrashed with arms and legs and finally got a hand on the rope overhead and pulled himself up, spluttering, gasping with big, open-mouthed, wide-eyed gasps at the profound cold of the water. It was like a great weight pressing him all around, then a thousand wicked teeth biting into his flesh.

“Ahh! Ahh!” he heard himself shout, could not help it. He could hear the capstan going around, felt the slack coming out of the hawser. He clenched his teeth, reached out, and, half floating and half hanging from the snatch block, he pulled himself along.

Sometimes the sea rose up under him and floated him as high as the hawser, sometimes it dropped away below him and he found himself hanging, sliding down the angled rope at the end of the block. Yard by yard he made his way along, seemed to get nowhere, but every time he had the chance to see forward, the spars were closer, the men clinging to them more distinct, the wreck towering over them bigger, more threatening.

There was little feeling left in his hands. They seemed to cling to the hawser by their own will, or they were frozen in the gripping position, Marlowe could not tell. He wondered if he would be able to tie the rope he carried with him to the ends of the spars. If not, his effort was wasted, and he might die along with those he had hoped to rescue.

Then suddenly he was there. The spars, which he had thought were still a hundred feet away, were now just beyond his reach, fifteen wet, pale, drawn, exhausted men clinging to them. And behind them, just behind them, rising up and up from the sea, the wrecked ship from which they had come, a great edifice of dark, wet wood and broken gear, like some hideous monster rising up just to crush them beneath its mass.

Marlowe slipped out of the strop and climbed onto the spars, struggling over the slick, wet wood, straddled them, got himself as securely in place as he could. The sea anchor was rising and falling fast in the big seas, the water washing over it, a wild and precarious ride.

With numbed fingers Marlowe worked the knot out of the line that Burgess had bent to the snatch block. He glanced over at the others riding on the sea anchor, sprawled out on their stomachs. He had the impression that they were seamen, saw wet, matted beards, long hair, tar-stained clothing.

No one spoke, no one made a move to help. They were beyond that, Marlowe could see. Beyond the point where they had the strength to help, the energy to speak, the will to do anything to save themselves beyond just clinging to the spars.

The knot came loose, and Marlowe wrapped the end of the line around his arm, realizing that if he dropped it, they were lost. On hands and knees he crawled along the rolling, bucking bundle of spars, pausing with fingers locked around the lashings as a big sea roiled up around them and the sea anchor disappeared under a foot of foam, then crawling on. Foot by foot to the far end of the spars, until at last he was as far out at the end as he could go.

The middle spar in the sea anchor was a spare main topmast, in the end of which was cut a hole for the topsail halyard to run. Marlowe carefully took the bitter end of the rope and threaded it through this hole and back. He held it in his teeth as he flexed his fingers, preparing for the difficult task of tying a bowline in the line, a job that he could have easily done with his eyes closed, were it not for the fact that he could hardly feel his hands.

He heard the sound of a wave breaking against the wreck and with it a groaning, a clatter of broken parts. His head jerked around, up. The wreck was rolling toward them, starting to go over. He paused, open-mouthed and dumb with cold and fatigue, waited for it to come down on them like the foot of an angry god. But it stopped, the deck as perfectly vertical now as it could get in that rolling world. It would not stay that way long.

Marlowe pulled his eyes from the monstrous hull over him, turned to the rope in his hands, forced himself to work the knot. His fingers were almost useless, as if they had turned to stone, and with gross moves of his hands he formed a loop, tried to get the bitter end through, but the whole thing collapsed in a heap.

Overhead the wreck groaned again. He could see it shift on the edge of his vision. He picked up the rope again, formed another loop. He had to hold the loop in one hand, thread the bitter end through and around the standing part and back, but his aching fingers would not let him do all that.

And then he felt the spars buck as if someone else was crawling across them. He looked over. One of the sailors had made his way up to him. Marlowe saw a long, tangled beard sprouting from a face that was gray with fatigue, a leather jerkin and torn shirt, slop trousers.

The man did not say anything, did not even look at Marlowe. He just picked up the bitter end of the rope, his fingers wrinkled with wet and no more usable than Marlowe’s, and with awkward twists of hand and wrist threaded it through the loop that Marlowe held, around the standing part, back through the loop.

Marlowe wrapped the bitter end around his wrist, hauled it taut. An ugly, misshapen knot, something that would earn an apprentice seaman a box on the ear from any boatswain, but it would hold.

The wreck gave another groan, a creak, and the sound of tons of shifting water, and Marlowe and the men beside him looked up in horror, straight up, as the wreck was right over them, rising like a cliff. When it rolled, it would roll right on top of them.

Marlowe slid back to a wider place on the spars, had a chance to curse himself once again for not arranging a signal to tell the men on board the Elizabeth Galley when the line was fixed.

He stood, legs spread, half bent, a terribly awkward position, trying to balance on the rolling, twisting sea anchor. He managed one wave of his arm, and then he was forced to drop to his belly before a big sea knocked him away.

He spit out the water he had swallowed, blinked it out of his eyes, tried to muster the energy to stand again. He could feel his strength and will drifting away, like those others on the spars. A few more moments and he would not care if he lived or not. He wasn’t sure he cared now.

And then the sea anchor began to turn, to twist around in the sea. Marlowe saw the line he had carried out with him come taut and rise from the water as unseen hands aboard the Elizabeth Galley hauled away with a will.

The spars came around until at last they were pointing directly at the Galley, and the men hauling the rope and the men on the capstan were able to pull them in, able to drag them through the big seas. Water washed over them, big seas came up from behind and pitched them forward, tried to knock them off, but they were moving. They were being pulled to safety.

Twenty yards, thirty yards from the wreck, and then the big, dead hulk gave another groan, the deep guttural sound of its final agony. Marlowe turned his head, looked back. The big Indiaman began to roll, over, over, her deck coming down onto the sea, her big weed-covered bottom rising up into the air, her keel exposed to the gray light of that stormy day.

The men on the spars watched, silent, as the ship came to rest, upside down, and from the place where it hit, a great surge of water careened toward them, breaking white over the swells, the ship lashing out, her final attempt to take her men down with her. Marlowe grabbed on to the nearest lashings, forced his dead fingers under the ropes, saw the others do the same, and then the wave was over them, burying them, spinning them around.

Marlowe felt himself go under, covered with water like a blanket of crushed ice. He closed his eyes, his mouth, felt himself lift off the sea anchor, tried to close his fingers around the lashing.

And then the water fell away, and he was in the air again and still on the spars. He looked around. Two of the men were gone, pulled from their raft. The big Indiaman had slipped beneath the sea, dragged them down with her.

For another five minutes they clung to the spars, and then the Elizabeth Galley was towering over them, not a threatening sight like the wreck but a welcome one. But for all his relief, Marlowe doubted that he had the strength to climb those high sides, and he knew the others did not. A raft of Moseses-they could see the Promised Land, but they could not reach it.

And then, like a vision, Duncan Honeyman seemed to float in front of him, coming down from the sky, as if he were flying. Marlowe could make no sense of what he was seeing. Honeyman lit on the sea anchor, soft as a bird landing, and only then did Marlowe realize that he had been lowered down on a boatswain’s chair, a wooden seat on a line used to hoist men aloft to places where they could not climb.

Honeyman stepped off the boatswain’s chair, moved nimbly across the bucking spars, pulling the chair with him. He set it down, grabbed Marlowe under the arms, helped him to his feet.

“You first, Captain,” he said as he made Marlowe step into the chair and signaled to the men on the Galley’s deck to take up the strain.

Marlowe tried to protest that he should not go first. He was, after all, in better shape than the other men were, for what that was worth. But he could not seem to make his mouth work.

And then he was in the air, lifting up off the sea anchor and sailing in over the side of the Elizabeth Galley, into the waiting arms of his men. Here was Hesiod, a worried look on his dark face, pulling slack in the line with one hand and supporting Marlowe with the other. Marlowe had an image of him back at the plantation, ax over his shoulder. He looked even more a pirate now.

Elizabeth was there, wrapped in her boat cloak, her face a mask of concern. Marlowe wondered if she were going to scold him, tell him to go to hell. But instead she seemed to be giving orders, telling the men of the Elizabeth Galley what to do with the others on the spars, telling the two men holding Marlowe up to take him aft, telling Dinwiddie that he was in command.

On her word the boatswain’s chair lifted off again, flew back over the water to Honeyman on the sea anchor, back for the next man and the next.

It seemed odd to Marlowe-he did not think Elizabeth had the authority to issue such orders-but she was doing it, and the others seemed to be obeying.

The men supporting Marlowe, Hesiod and Burns-one of Honeyman’s hard cases-carried him under the quarterdeck and down the alleyway and into the great cabin. They stepped through the door, and the heat from the small wood stove hit him with a shock like that of plunging into the ocean. His head swam, and his knees buckled, and he would have fallen if he had not been supported by strong arms.

They set him down on the locker aft, by Elizabeth’s orders, and began to strip him of breeches and waistcoat and shirt and underclothes. They dried him with rough towels, and he began to feel sensations coming back to his limbs, and he was overcome with fatigue.

“I must go back on deck,” he said, a weak protest.

“Nonsense,” Elizabeth said. “Mr. Dinwiddie has things well in hand. Put him in the bunk, pray.” This last she said to Hesiod. The former slave hefted up the now-naked Marlowe, and he and Burns carried him into the small sleeping cabin and put him in the bunk. He stretched out full length, and they pulled the blankets over him, and he could not recall anything ever feeling so good.

The two men disappeared, and Elizabeth stood over him, looking down. “Francis told me what you did. Risking everything to save those men. Stupid, stupid, going into the sea that way,” she said, but there was no anger in her voice.

Then, as Marlowe watched, she untied her bodice and let it fall and pulled down her skirts and let them pool on the floor. She lifted her shift over her head, and for a moment she stood there, naked, perfect, and then she slid into the cot with him, pressed up against him, warm and soft and so alive.

“Thomas, I swear I cannot tell if you are the biggest bastard in the world or the greatest man that ever lived.”

“Somewhere in between, I should think,” Marlowe muttered. He wondered if he had actually redeemed himself in her eyes, with his idiotic and ill-conceived heroism. It had never occurred to him that such might be the result.

In fact, as they had hauled him back aboard the Elizabeth Galley, his only thoughts had been a dull relief that it was over and the satisfaction of knowing he now had a dozen more hands to help him plunder the fabled treasure of the Moors.