Ship of Fire (17 page)

The Spaniard's sword dropped, but he gave no sign of falling dead—it was a far from mortal wound. He struck me hard on the chin with the heel of his hand, jarring me loose from the handle of my weapon. He seized the blade near the hilt with his gloved hand, and withdrew it from his flesh, an act of considerable will. Then he flung my rapier across the bloody deck and closed with me, seizing me like a wrestler.

He grappled with me, gouging at my eyes with one hand, throttling me with the other. The dagger in my left hand ripped into the wool of his cloak, unable to cut into him because of the thick fabric. Breath sawed in and out of us, and we danced, wrestling, supporting each other even as we labored to get a killing grip on each other's throats.

He groaned involuntarily, the rapier wound beginning to cause him pain, and I released him. It was a surprise to me, but the logic was clear nonetheless. He was hurt, and I was accustomed to bandaging wounds, and reassuring the injured, not in causing further agony.

“Yield, sir,” I heard myself say in a ragged voice. I pressed the point of my dagger to his cheek, the fine steel alive in the fire light.

Chapter 41

Helmeted soldiers broke up our combat, a Welsh-hook thrust with little art into my opponent's face.

The heavy iron missed him, but the shaft of the weapon bruised me, a second soldier thrusting toward the Spaniard's belly, and likewise missing.

The Spanish gentleman fell back, blood streaming down the shank of his boots, and offered me some remark in his beautiful, incomprehensible tongue. I was struck by reluctant admiration for this plumed gentleman. He was courteous and well spoken, in contrast to the hard-breathing English soldiers at my side, threatening him with fatigue in their voices, their street-worn language,
poxy, whoreson, Papist
, all they could think of in the face of what sounded like proud poetry.

The Spaniard vanished, fleeing into the afterdeck of the vessel as I retrieved my sword from the shadows.

The big cargo ship was alight, now, flames leaping as our ship shoved off, our seamen doing everything they could to keep the fire from spreading to our vessel.

Soldiers stretched Sir Robert out on the deck of the
Elizabeth Bonaventure
.

The English knight did not move. He did not respond to me when I spoke, or when I rubbed his hands.

“Is he hurt badly, Tom?” was the admiral's question, as he looked down from the quarterdeck.

“My Lord Admiral,” I said, “he is for the moment insensible.”

I sent Hercules for a long hollow goose quill and a pouch of ground black pepper, recalling the many times I had seen bears awakened by their handlers from near death.

I blew several grains of pepper into Sir Robert's right nostril.

The knight opened his eyes and shut his mouth. He put out a hand, and sat up, readying and yet further readying a massive sneeze that would not come. I prayed that a great convulsion would not do him harm—cracked ribs can gouge a lung as well as any knife.

And when it did come at last, a thunderous blast, he fell back again, blinking and looking around at the masts and rigging above.

“You are well, Sir Robert,” I said, half assertion, half hopeful question.

With Sir Robert drowsy in his berth, dosed with aqua vitae and swearing that the pain was an easy burden, I felt the loss of his companionship. And I realized more fully how I had come to anticipate his advice.

“Stay at his side,” I cautioned Hercules. “And if he spits blood—”

“Sir, if he swoons or pukes I'll seek you out,” said Hercules in his eager sing-song. He added, in a tone of genuine concern for my feelings, “Sir, he will not die.”

“How can you be sure, lad?” asked Sir Robert in a tone of sleepy good humor, eavesdropping from his bed.

“If you please, sirs,” replied Hercules, “aboard a ship, a cracked rib is more common than a bruise.”

I answered a summons to the quarterdeck.

I found Anne there, the admiral pointing across the dark harbor, showing off the blazing skeletons of ships all around.

“Sir Robert's friendship warms me more than his art,” said the admiral, when I had given him a brief report on the scholar's condition. “But he's the very man to write a book of this voyage. ‘The King of Spain Bearded, Stripped of His Fleet and Mocked.' Or some such.”

Drake left us suddenly, and with no further word, called away by some commotion in the forward part of the ship. Captain Foxcroft was calling out frenzied commands, his voice hoarse with the strain of this long night.

“Mother is tart and well armed,” said Anne, “with the pistol in her lap.”

“She'll blast away the life of any man who peeks in at her,” I protested.

“Then you'd best remain here on the quarterdeck,” said Anne, “and watch the dawn.”

There was indeed a strange peacefulness just then. The air, poisoned by the fumes from burning cargoes, tar-cured rigging and spruce-wood masts, was sweetened by a fresh wind. The perfume of a land breeze swept the quarterdeck for an instant, citrus, red wine and fertile fields. The stars in the east were just beginning to vanish.

“You are too much the physician,” said Anne with a sideways glance at me. “Not every limb is waiting to be torn from its body, master surgeon.”

“Perhaps not,” I admitted.

“Besides,” she said, leaning toward me confidingly, “the pistol in my mother's lap has never been loaded with shot.”

“Never?”

“Before God, Tom, all along I had powder, but no shot.”

I absorbed this news with an incredulous laugh.

“Not that it was harmless when you discovered us,” she continued. “I'd rammed in enough gunpowder to spit fire a yard long.”

I was about to respond to this, when the commotion at the ship's prow grew louder, and I hurried to the quarterdeck rail to see what was wrong.

A vessel rose toward us on the incoming tide.

A giant thing, she was a source of light as flames fluttered upward from her deck, igniting her rigging, the harbor water around her gilded and scarlet. Her sail filled with the breeze, one span of canvas blushing as the flames lapped at the yard arm. As we watched, the canvas ignited, the ship ablaze along her full length.

“A fire-ship!” cried a frightened voice.

The blazing monster breasted the water, compelled by wind and tide in our direction. I tried to tell myself that she would miss us, certainly.

But heartbeat followed heartbeat, and she swelled larger than ever, and closer. The
Elizabeth Bonaventure
would not respond to her rudder, cornered in the harbor by the sudden sea breeze.

Chapter 42

The wind played through the fire-ship, sending ember-flags and scraps of flame.

I shielded Anne from a rain of sparks as a living, clawing ember the size of a man's hand spun down upon us. I dashed it to dead ash in an instant, but the roar of the flames was too loud for us to hear each other now. The air was dragged upward toward the monster as she bore down on us.

She was an old-fashioned ship, with both a towering forecastle, and a similar fighting structure in the stern. Years of tar and fiber hammered into fissures in her planks, spilled pitch and decades of stored victuals, no doubt olive oil and bacon fat, all erupted out of her timbers now. Her sailcloth bellied as heat made us cringe, our crew and fighting men crouching, some of them falling to the deck as the withering heat and noon-day brightness of her blaze approached.

Anne was calling something to me, but I could not hear her. It was impossible to breathe, the air robbed from our lungs.

“Go get your mother!” I cried, my words snatched from my lips by the thunderous updraft. If we had to abandon our ship, Mary Woodroofe would need help.

Anne left me to grope her way to the quarterdeck rail and accepted a bucket from the hands of a seaman. She emptied water over a spray of embers. Amidships men were pouring urine from the piss-barrels over the steaming coals raining down through the rigging.

Captain Foxcroft called out orders that could not be heard. A score of men were bravely poised with boarding hooks, long implements used in securing one ship to another, and at times like these, in warding off an approaching threat. But the heat was too great as the fire storm grew ever nearer, and the men wilted.

Admiral Drake waved to me, with the desperate but spirited manner of a man greeting a long-abandoned friend through a snowstorm. I hurried to him, half falling through the tempest.

The admiral hefted one end of a long, stout oar in my hand, one of the sweeps ships use in rowing against river currents. He called out some fierce encouragement, but I was deaf to every sound but the upward avalanche of the heat.

Jack Flagg and Ross Bagot seized another sweep, and the four of us made way toward the prow of our vessel.

There was a majesty to this mountain of fire as she came on, a ruined, cavernous three-master, her rigging dancing with flame.

We met the seething beakhead of her prow with the extended ends of our sweeps. The heat fried the ends of my hair, a tickling, sickening sensation all over my scalp, and every breath was a bite of emptiness, all air gone. The momentum of the huge vessel rocked us back, but other men joined us, getting a hand hold on the long oars, others pushing with pikes and staves, all of us leaning into the roiling hulk.

Chapter 43

Until then, in my foolishness, I believed that I had some degree of courage.

And some enduring confidence. I was certain that we would not be destroyed by her, even as the burning vessel passed by, pushed along by our efforts with the sweeps, her yard arms tumbling into the harbor. Even when a ship's boy emptied a bucket of salt water over me—“Your doublet is smoking, sir!”—I did not allow myself to acknowledge what I felt. We were desperate, but somehow I was nearly convinced that it was all play-acting, a childish shoving match in a sudden drizzle of fire.

Only when she was past us, parting water inexorably toward the wharf with its docked ships, did I understand how frightened I had been.

I was weak with relief.

Anne embraced me all too briefly, and hurried below-decks to be with her mother.

The sun was rising, and the Spanish ships against the wharf were alive with men, struggling up and down the rigging, a panic in each vessel. The receding fire-ship nosed in among them, her castles falling in, sending cascades of sparks upward into the fading stars.

Mariners pressed around me for burn medicine, and I pasted my master's recipe—tallow mixed with pulped turnips—on hands and arms, cheeks and shins, harmless but painful blisters. I smeared injuries with this healing butter, until the crock was half empty. I smeared some of the preparation on my own face, and on my forearms.

Drake put a cup of cider into my grasp, leaning against the quarterdeck rail. His features were smudged, his breastplate freckled with ash, but he raised his cup and toasted the Queen with a smile, like a commander at the beginning of a campaign, not a leader after a long night of battle. I have never tasted more delicious drink.

“Young master surgeon,” asked the admiral, “what do you think of our little harbor skirmish?”

I surveyed the smoking wrecks, strewn across the sunrise-silver waters of the harbor. The town was obscured by this haze, and as the fire-ship guttered, burned down to her waterline, I could not keep my heart from feeling a pang of compassion for the many mariners who would be without a ship on this chilly, bitter morning. There was a stirring of humanity, too, boats arriving to salvage the smoking ruins, and the ominous glint of muskets as platoons of foot soldiers hurried along the shore.

My heart sank at the sight—we would not escape unpunished.

“I think Her Majesty will be pleased with our Lord Admiral,” I offered, remembering my best manners. My voice was that of a stranger, old and without strength.

“But she will wonder why we sank and burned more than we sacked,” said Drake with a wistful shake of his head. “Even though we have plucked and roasted many ships that would have sailed against her kingdom.”

When admiralty officials heard my report in London, I would have to answer honestly. If the famous knight was little better than a thief, then he was but a falcon who did Her Majesty's bidding.

“The tide is turning, Sam,” said the admiral.

“Just now, my lord, it's true,” said the captain, haggard and hollow-voiced. Ashes grizzled his dark beard.

“It'll be in full flood soon,” said the admiral, “and we'll run with it. See, even the wind is with us now.”

“They have new guns,” said the captain.

“I've seen them,” said the admiral. “Iron guns, six of them on the hillside. No, perhaps more than six. Make it ten or twelve. Will you wager with me whether they can put a shot between our masts?”

Despite his weariness our captain laughed, shaking his head. The good-hearted man was exhausted nearly to the point of a kind of bravado when he responded, “We shall either survive, my Lord Admiral, or we shall not.”

The inconstant wind ceased altogether as the guns on the hill began to spew white smoke.

The reports of the guns reached us after a long moment, and the shots splashed near the
Golden Lion
, our sister warship following the pinnaces out to sea ahead of us. It was tempting to believe that the Spanish were giving us a farewell volley, a harmless salute. The morning sun in the sails was beautiful, the pennons of the
Golden Lion
flowing in the indolent wind. The open sea stretched far ahead of us—safety and freedom.

A leech crawling across a table makes a speedier progress than we could that morning. The ebbing tide carried us steadily but slowly, the lazy breeze drawing us into the range of the hillside battery. It was an anxious, bedeviling journey, our vessels making a stately parade under the eyes of our enemy.

Something howled through the air over our foremast. A cloud of smoke appeared over the hillside battery, and the heart-stopping thump of gunfire punished the air.