The Wine-Dark Sea (4 page)

'It cannot go on much longer,' said Grimble. 'The cross-sea is getting up something cruel.'

It was true. The ship was cutting such extraordinary capers that even Jack, a merman if ever there was one, had to sit down, wedging himself firmly on a broad locker; and at the setting of the watch, after their traditional toasted cheese had been eaten, he went on deck to take in the courses and lie to under a close-reefed main topsail. He had, at least by dead-reckoning, reached something like the point he had been steering for; the inevitable leeway should do the rest by dawn; and he hoped that now the ship's motion would be eased.

'Is it very disagreeable upstairs?' asked Stephen when he returned. 'I hear thunderous rain on the skylight.'

'It is not so much very disagreeable as very strange," said Jack. 'As black as can be, of course - never the smell of a star - and wet; and there are strong cross-seas, apparently flowing in three directions at once, which is contrary to reason. Lightning above the cloud, too, showing deep red. Yet there is something else I can hardly put a name to.' He held the lamp close to the barometer, shook his head, and going back to his seat on the locker he said that the motion was certainly easier: perhaps they might go back to the andante?

'With all my heart,' said Stephen, 'if I might have a rope round my middle to hold me to the chair.'

'Of course you may,' said Jack. 'Killick! Killick, there. Lash the Doctor into his seat, and let us have another decanter of port.'

The andante wound its slow length along with a curious gasping unpredictable rhythm; and when they had brought it to its hesitant end, each looking at the other with reproach and disapproval at each false note, Jack said, 'Let us drink to Zephyrus, the son of Millpond.' He was in the act of pouring a glass when the ship pitched with such extraordinary violence -pitched as though she had fallen into a hole - that he very nearly fell, and the glass left the wine in the air, a coherent body for a single moment.

'This will never do,' he said: and then, 'What in Hell was that crash?' He stood listening for a moment, and then in reply to a knock on the door he called, 'Come in.'

'Mr West's duty, sir,' said Norton, the newly-appointed midshipman, dripping on the chequered deck-cloth, 'and there is firing on the larboard bow.'

'Thank you, Mr Norton,' said Jack. 'I shall come at once.' He quickly stowed his fiddle on the locker and ran on deck. While he was still on the ladder there was another heavy crash, then as he reached the quarterdeck and the pouring rain, several more far forward.

'There, sir,' said West, pointing to a jetting glow, blurred crimson through the milk-warm rain. 'It comes and goes. I believe we are under mortar-fire.'

'Beat to quarters,' called Jack, and the bosun's mate wound his call. 'Mr West - Mr West, there. D'ye hear me?' He raised his voice immensely, calling for a lantern: it showed West flat on his face, pouring blood.

'Fore topsail,' cried Jack, putting the ship before the wind, and as she gathered way he told two of the afterguard to carry West below. 'Forestaysail and jib.'

The ship came to life, to battle-stations, with a speed and regularity that would have given him deep satisfaction if he had had a second to feel it.

Stephen was already in the sick-berth with a sleepy Martin and a half-dressed Padeen when West was brought down, followed by half a dozen foremast hands, two of them walking cases. 'A severe depressed fracture on either side of the coronal suture," said Stephen, having examined West under a powerful lantern, 'and of course this apparently meaningless laceration. Deep coma. Padeen, Davies, lift him as gently as ever you can to the mattress on the floor back there; lay him face down with a little small pad under his forehead the way he can breathe. Next.'

The next man, with a compound fracture of his left arm and a series of gashes down his side, required close, prolonged attention: sewing, snipping, binding-up. He was a man of exceptional fortitude even for a foremast jack and between involuntary gasps he told them that he had been the larboard midship look-out when he saw this sudden spurt of red to windward and a glow under the cloud, and he was hailing the quarterdeck when he heard something like stones or even grapeshot hitting the topsail and then there was a great crash and he was down. He lay on the gangway staring through the scuppers with the rain soaking him through and through before he understood what had happened, and he saw that red spurt show twice: not like a gun, but more lasting and crimson: perhaps a battery, a ragged salvo. Then a cross-sea and a lee-lurch tossed him into the waist until old Plaice and Bonden fished him out.

The groaning from a man against the side grew almost to a scream. 'Oh, oh, oh. Forgive me, mates; I can't bear it. Oh, oh, oh, oh..."

'Mr Martin, pray see what you can do," said Stephen. 'Sarah, my dear, give me the silk-thread needle.'

As she passed it Sarah said in his ear, 'Emily is frightened.'

Stephen nodded, holding the needle between his lips. He was not exactly frightened himself, but he did dread misplacing an instrument or-probe. Even down here the ship was moving with a force he had never known: the lantern swung madly, with no sort of rhythm now; and he could scarcely keep his footing.

'This cannot go on,' he murmured. But it did go on; and as he and Martin worked far into the night that part of his mind which was not taken up with probing, sawing, splinting, sewing and bandaging heard and partly recorded what was going on around him - the talk between the hands treated or waiting for treatment, the news brought by fresh cases, the seamen's interpretation of the various sounds and cries on deck.

'There's the foretopmast gone.'

A long discussion of bomb-vessels and the huge mortars they carried: agreement: contradiction.

'Oh for my coca-leaves,' thought Stephen, who so very urgently needed a clear sharp mind untouched by sleep, and a steady hand.

The maintop was broken, injured or destroyed; but the half-heard voices said they should have had to get the topmast down on deck anyhow, with such a sea running and the poor barky almost arsy-versy every minute... poor sods on deck... it was worse than the tide-race off Sumburgh Head... 'This was the day Judas Iscariot was born,' said an Orkneyman.

'Mr Martin, the saw, if you please: hold back the flap and be ready with the tourniquet. Padeen, let him not move at all.' And bending over the patient, 'This will hurt for the moment, but it will not last. Hold steady.'

The amputation gave place to another example of these puzzling lacerated wounds; and Reade came below followed by Killick with a covered mug of coffee.

'Captain's compliments, sir,' said Reade, 'and he thinks the worst may be over: stars in the south-south-west and the swell not quite so pronounced.'

'Many thanks, Mr Reade,' said Stephen. 'And God bless you, Killick.' He swallowed half the mug, passing Martin the rest. 'Tell me, have we been severely pierced? I hear the pumps have been set a-going, and there is a power of water underfoot.'

'Oh no, sir. The masts and the maintop have suffered, but the water is only the ship working, hauling under the chains so her seams open a little. May I ask how Mr West comes along, and Wilcox and Veale, of my division?'

'Mr West is still unconscious. I believe I must open his skull tomorrow. We took Wilcox's fingers off just now: he never said a word and I think he will do well. Veale I have set back till dawn. An eye is a delicate matter and we must have daylight.'

'Well, sir, that will not be long now. Canopus is dipping, and it should be dawn quite soon.'

Chapter Two

A reluctant dawn, a dim blood-red sun; and although the sea was diminishing fast it was still wilder than most sailors had ever seen, with bursting waves and a still-prodigious swell. A desolate ocean, grey now under a deathly white, rolling with enormous force, but still with no life upon it apart from these two ships, now dismasted and tossing like paper boats on a millstream. They were at some distance from one another, both apparently wrecks, floating but out of control: beyond them, to windward, a newly-arisen island of black rock and cinders. It no longer shot out fire, but every now and then, with an enormous shriek, a vast jet of steam leapt from the crater, mingled with ash and volcanic gases. When Jack first saw the island it was a hundred and eighty feet high, but the rollers had already swept away great quantities of the clinker and by the time the sun was clear of the murk not fifty feet remained.

The more northern of the ships, the Surprise, was in fact quite well in hand, lying to under a storm trysail on her only undamaged lower mast, while her people did all that very weary men could do - it had been all hands all night - to repair her damaged maintop and to cross at least the lower yard. They had the strongest motives for doing so, since their quarry, totally dismasted and wallowing gunwales under on the swell, lay directly under their lee; but there was no certainty that helpless though she seemed she might not send up some kind of a jury-rig and slip away into the thick weather with its promise of blinding squalls.

'Larbolines bowse,' cried Captain Aubrey, watching the spare topmast with anxious care. 'Bowse away. Belay!' And to his first lieutenant, 'Oh Tom, how I hope the Doctor comes on deck before the land vanishes.'

Tom Pullings shook his head. 'When last I saw him, perhaps an hour ago, he could hardly stand for sleep: blood up to the elbows and blood where he had wiped his eyes.'

'It would be the world's pity, was he to miss all this,' said Jack. He was no naturalist, but from first light he had been very deeply impressed not only by this mineral landscape but also by the universal death all round as far as eye could see. Countless fish of every kind, most wholly unknown to him, lay dead upon their sides; a sperm whale, not quite grey, floated among them; abyssal forms, huge squids, trailing half the length of the ship. And never a bird, never a single gull. A sulphurous whiff from the island half-choked him. 'He will never forgive me if I do not tell him,' he said. 'Do you suppose he has turned in?'

'Good morning, gentlemen,' said Stephen from the companion-ladder. 'What is this I hear about an island?' He was looking indescribably frowzy, unwashed, unshaved, no wig, old bloody shirt, bloody apron still round his waist; and it was clear that even he felt it improper to advance to the holy place itself.

'Let me steady you,' said Jack, stepping across the heaving deck. Stephen had dipped his hands but not his arms, and they looked like pale gloves against the red-brown. Jack seized one, hauled him up and led him to the rail. 'There is the island,' he said. 'But tell me, how is West? And are any of the others dangerously hurt?'

'West: there is no change, and I can do nothing until I have more light and a steadier basis. As for the others, there is always the possibility of sepsis and mortification, but with the blessing I think they will come through. So that is your island. And God help us, look at the sea! A rolling, heaving graveyard. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Whales: seven, no eight, species of shark: scombridae: cephalopods... and all parboiled. This is exactly what Dr Falconer of the Daisy told us about - submarine eruption, immense turbulence, the appearance of an island of rock or cinders, a cone shooting out flames, mephitic vapours, volcanic bombs and scoriae - and I never grasped what was happening. Yet there I had the typical lacerated wounds, sometimes accompanied by scorching, and the evidence of heavy globular objects striking sails, deck, masts, and of course poor West. You knew what was afoot, I am sure?'

'Not until we began knotting and splicing at first light,' said Jack, 'and when they brought me some of your bombs - there is one there by the capstan must weigh fifty pound - and showed me the cinders the rain had not washed away. Then I saw the whole thing plain. I think I should have smoked it earlier if the island had blazed away good and steady, like Stromboli; but it kept shooting out jets, quite like a battery of mortars. But at least I was not so foolishly mistaken about the Franklin. There she lies, right under our lee. You will have to stand on the caronnade-slide to see her: take my glass.'

The Franklin was of infinitely less interest to Dr Maturin than the encyclopaedia of marine life heaving on the swell below, but he climbed up, gazed, and said, 'She is in the sad way altogether, with no masts at all. How she rolls! Do you suppose we shall be able to catch her? Our sails seem somewhat out of order.'

'Perhaps we shall,' said Jack. 'We should have steerage-way in about five minutes. But there is no hurry. She has few hands on deck, and those few cannot be called very brisk. I had much rather bear down fully prepared, so that there can be no argument, no foolish waste of life, let alone spars and cordage.'

Six bells, and Stephen said, 'I must go below.'

Jack gave him a hand as far as the ladder, and having urged him 'to clap on for dear life' asked whether they should meet for breakfast, adding that 'this unnatural hell-fire sea would go down as suddenly as it had got up.'

'A late breakfast? I hope so indeed,' said Stephen, making his way down by single steps and moving, as Jack noticed for the first time, like an old man.

It was after this late breakfast that Stephen, somewhat restored and by now reconciled to the fact that the dead marine animals were too far altered by heat, battering and sometimes by great change of depth to be valued as specimens, sat under an awning watching the Franklin grow larger. For the rest, he and Martin contented themselves with counting at least the main genera and rehearsing all that Dr Falconer had said about submarine volcanic activity, so usual in these parts; they had little energy for more. The wind had dropped, and a squall having cleared the air of volcanic dust, the sun beat down on the heaving sea with more than ordinary strength: the Surprise, under forecourse and main topsail, bore slowly down on the privateer, rarely exceeding three knots. Her guns were loaded and run out; her boarders had their weapons at hand; but their earlier apprehensions had died away entirely. The chase had suffered much more than they had; she was much less well equipped with stores and seamen; and she made no attempt to escape. It had to be admitted that with scarcely three foot of her main and mizen masts showing above deck and the foremast gone at the partners her condition was almost desperate; but she could surely have done something with the wreckage over the side, still hanging by the shrouds and stays, something with the spars still to be seen in her waist, something with her undamaged bowsprit? The Surprises looked at her with a certain tolerant contempt. With the monstrous seas fast declining the galley fires had been lit quite early, and this being Thursday they had all eaten a pound of reasonably fresh pork, half a pint of dried peas, some of the remaining Moahu yams, and as a particular indulgence a large quantity of plum duff; they had also drunk a quarter of a pint of Sydney rum, publicly diluted with three quarters of a pint of water and lemon-juice, and now with full bellies and benevolent minds they felt that the natural order of things was returning: the barky, though cruelly mauled, was in a fair way to being shipshape; and they were bearing down upon their prey.