Quintspinner (46 page)

If they did not escape, Cassie’s demise seemed certain. She would die slowly and horribly at the hands of the remaining pirates. At least with their escape attempt, there was an infinitesimal chance of living, of surviving this hellish adventure. Tess wondered if Cassie and Smith and Tommy would be able to break loose from the
Bloodhorn
. Given the storm, would they even try?

Uncertain as to whether they should continue, Tess spun back towards William just in time to see her grandmother’s face disappear over the railing as William and John Robert, played out a rope, lowering her down into the pitching jolly boat and into the waiting arms of Mr. Lancaster already in the lowered yawl. A hot surge of adrenaline coursed through her.

Don’t think it to death. Just believe!
Shutting out all logic and letting her intuition wash over her, Tess knew their escape had to be attempted.
Besides
,
the decision has already been made.

As a fresh wave crashed over the railing and tugged at her feet, Tess’s chest tightened in a renewed burst of fear and she stared wild-eyed at William. Lashed by the rain and sea water, his long blond curls were now pasted to his face, and he squinted back at her. He was grinning.

“What’s to smile about? Have you lost your senses?” Tess yelled in disbelief.

William shrugged and replied, his blue eyes piercing her heart with his sincerity, “No one gets outta’ life alive–and if it’s my time there’s no one I’d rather take the journey with–” The smile suddenly dropped from his face and he screamed, “
Tess! Jump!
” and he lunged for her.

“What?–What do you mean? What are you
doing
?” Tess screeched in alarm.

“I smell
him
!” William cried. “It’s
Edward
! Jump!
Now!
”

Out of the shadows behind her, a pair of hands shot out. At the same moment, William shoved Tess hard against the railing, just out of reach–too hard–and with arms and legs flailing, she toppled over the edge and plunged down the side of the ship.

Instead of their intended target, the hands closed around William, one of them clamping firmly around his neck and the other jamming the barrel of a pistol against his temple. Strengthened anew by his failure to apprehend his destined victim, Edward lurched forward, shoving William along in front of him, as he peered over the edge from where Tess had disappeared.

A deep throaty growl tore through the howl of the wind. Edward’s head snapped back to the deck and his eyes fixed in surprise on John Robert. The giant’s lips were curled back in a dangerous snarl and his eyes glowed with hatred as he slowly advanced upon Edward and his prisoner.

“S-stop!” Edward’s mouth still drooped but his speech, although slurred, was clear enough. “Or … else I’ll … kill hi-im!” As if to emphasize his threat, Edward shifted his grip on the pistol, straightening his hold on the barrel until it was aimed perfectly perpendicular to William’s skull.

John Robert froze in his advance, his eyes locked on the two bodies in front of him. At their feet, nests of floating ropes snarled their ankles while torrents of sea water swirled and tore at their legs, attempting to pry them loose from where they stood. The salt and sea minerals in the spray scalded their nostrils and throats, and half blinded them all. John Robert’s lids had no eyelashes to protect his eyes but still he glared unflinchingly as Edward blinked and squinted against the burn of the sea water.

“Trade!” Edward demanded. “You have hi-i-im. I wan’ Tess. For me!” Edward shouted. “Bring her up or I kill hi-i-im.”

Ever so slowly John Robert raised his arms, as an unarmed man would do, never taking his eyes off of his son and the deathly barrel pressed to William’s head. Almost imperceptibly he flexed his index finger and wrist.

Responding immediately to her master’s signal and without a heartbeat of hesitation, Gerta launched herself off the high ground of the quarterdeck’s railing behind Edward, where she had sought refuge from the ocean’s invasion of the main deck. Sharp pointy hooves and all thirty pounds of her smashed into Edward’s head and shoulders from behind. In the same split second, John Robert charged at William, ripping him from Edward’s grasp. The momentum of this maneuver freed William, spinning him over the railing, as the roar of the pistol blasted beside him.

Instinctively, Edward grabbed Gerta by one hind leg and in a roar of rage, flung her up and over the edge of the ship.

“No–o–oh!
” John Robert screamed and grasped for them both as William’s and the tiny goat’s limbs entangled and they dropped from sight. His fingers snapped shut on thin air. One of his arms dangled uselessly at his side, the pistol’s ball having blasted its way through his shoulder, but the huge man whirled on the spot, his remaining arm smashing into Edward’s skull with the fury and power of a launched boulder. It was Edward’s turn to scream as his skull bones snapped, cracked, and caved under the pressure of the blow.

Collapsing backwards, Edward was overcome with instantaneous dizziness and nausea, and through his fading sight, he registered John Robert’s shape hovering over top of him. From behind him, the blurred forms of two pirates swam briefly into view, and John Robert’s form suddenly sank to the deck beside him. Edward closed his salt-burned eyes and drifted into unconsciousness.

John Robert had been thwarted in his attempt to strangle Edward. The musket ball had shattered his right arm and shoulder at the socket, leaving it hanging heavily and useless at his side. Sharp shards of bone pierced through the muscles and skin; exposed and torn tendons flapped in the fury of the gale around him. He knew that he was not likely to survive this wound. He also knew that his great strength had been the only thing that he had had that was of any value to those around him.

Except to William.

He hoped that his strength had been a worthy asset to William, both to protect him with and to pass on to him, but John Robert also trusted that his own courage and life as it had been lived, would be an inspiration to his youngest son, to help him through future quests. For always, he knew, life offered unending struggles and choices.

John Robert had been provided with many experiences. He had known the love of a woman of his own choosing, had been blessed with both a daughter and sons, and had been given the opportunity these past months to bond with William in a way that had brought them closer than either of them could ever have imagined. It had been one last wild ride together.

William’s adventures were not yet done, John Robert realized, even as his own were coming to an end. There would be dangerous trials ahead, and his heart ached fiercely as only a parent’s can for their child, even as a new, acute pain ripped through his chest as the tip of the pirate’s broadsword thrust from behind pierced his body. John Robert looked down in mild surprise–he had not heard the pirates’ approach above the scream of the wind–and then he simply acknowledged to himself that he was a lucky man once more. This second wound would only hasten his release from his disfigured body.

He slumped to the deck and the icy waves which surged across the deck engulfed him and carried him with them, extinguishing the fiery pain in his wounds. The shriek of the storm was silenced as he drifted beneath the ocean’s surface; invisible currents tugged at him, spiraling him down, deeper into their depths. Its cold was comforting.

There were only a few moments of unpleasant air hunger before he slipped into hypoxia, before his mermaids arrived to take John Robert home with them.

Aboard the
Bloodhorn,
men lay half-mad with raging thirsts, their tongues thickened and black from rat-bite fever and dehydration. Some struggled to their feet and staggered out onto deck, where, seasoned sailors that they were, they recognized their predicament. Although the sudden miserable illness had them all feeling like they were going to die, the approaching storm was far more likely to mete out that ending.

The wind had whipped the ocean’s surface into a furious topography of towering foam-capped mountains which rose above the bow and rails, cresting ominously for a second before breaking into a freefall crash onto the deck below. Sea water cascaded off the quarter deck above and invaded every level of the
Bloodhorn
below; salt water torrents roared through the peripheries of bat-tened-down hatchways and rushed through every available crack in the decking, coming to a dangerous final pooling in the bilge hold below, turning it into an almost certain deathtrap for those sent to man the pump there. It was therefore no surprise to anyone that Samuel Smith, little Tommy Jones, and the former captain Crowell found themselves all to be deemed dispensable in this way by the pirate crew, and ordered to do continuous shifts with the pump.

It was a great surprise, however, to all in this small group, to be joined in this watery graveyard in the ship’s bowels, by a slender sailor with a woolen Monmouth cap upon his head. He seemed to nearly disappear in the remnants of a too-large topcoat and britches, both of which had been hitched fast around the sailor’s waist with a long strip of material. It was only when a severe roll of the ship suddenly threw them all tumbling and smashing up against the hull’s walls, with their arms flying wildly to steady themselves, that Smith’s jaw dropped open in astonishment. The strange sailor’s arms flew up overhead, stretching the topcoat’s fold out long enough for Smith to glimpse a flash of red ribbon tied around the sailor’s waist.

Cassie had joined them.

It was Tommy who noticed that the strange bundles which had once been stacked in an orderly fashion on top of the gravelly layer of ballast, now floated upon the surface of the rising water level in the bilge compartment. The long and narrow bales of Portuguese cork bark were both naturally buoyant and rot resistant. It took only a few moments of hurried discussion to hatch a backup escape plan to fortify that of stealing the
Bloodhorn’s
yawl. They would lash some cork sheaves to the narrow rails of the yawl, in an effort to increase the small boat’s chance of remaining afloat in the clutches of the storm. Captain Crowell was offered an invitation to join their escape expedition.

“A captain does not desert a floundering ship,” he declared upon considering their invite. “However, it would seem that I have been demoted these past weeks and therefore,” he grinned and offered his hand forward in a handshake sealing the deal, “although it does go against my officer’s nature, I am under no compunction to stay aboard this vessel. I suggest we make hast to abandon her before the storm’s full wrath is upon her.”

Topside, the sickened and storm battered crew clung for their lives to the ratlines and yardarms as they fought to control their sails’ canvasses in the shrieking winds. They took no notice of the group of four nor of the long items that each clutched tightly, the four having hauled the strange cargo out of the hatch opening and over towards the rail where the jolly boat was fastened to the
Bloodhorn.

Just as they arrived at the side railing, a thunderous crack behind them pierced through the sounds of the storm.

“Look out!
” Captain Crowell’s screamed words of warning were lost, ripped from his lips by the fury of the gales, and he sprang forward towards his three shipmates. His violent push into Smith and Tommy sent them flying into Cassie, and in a domino effect, all three crashed into the railing, just as a piece of broken mast smashed heavily onto the deck beside them.

Scrambling to their feet, they were sickened to see the side of the jolly boat crushed and broken by the mast’s massive weight. Shock gave way to raw horror as they saw, at the mast’s middle, the captain lying face down on the deck, pinned beneath the giant piece of wood. It took the combined strength of all three to lift the jagged timber off of him. He gritted his teeth against the pain, and his face twisted in agony as they rolled him face up.