aimed straight on at their bow, straight at the man feverishly reloading their swivel.
Burgess snapped a pistol over the train of powder in the touchhole. The sparks drifted down, tiny, delicate points of light, and then the powder flashed and the swivel roared out, pushing the whole boat sideways, and the man at stroke oar in the approaching boat was blown away, tossed back into his shipmates as he disappeared below the gunnel.
That should cool their enthusiasm, Marlowe thought. And then from beyond the bow, a voice like a memory, like something out of a dream, floating through the gunfire: “Help! Help! Here!”
Peleg Dinwiddie.
Marlowe half stood, looked beyond the bow. Dinwiddie was clinging to an overturned dugout, and he was slipping. Two boat lengths ahead. Another stroke. “Backwater! Backwater!” The oars came down, the tholes creaking with the pressure as the momentum of the heavy boat was checked, and then they were dead in the water, and Marlowe was looking down into the bearded, gray, terrified, wide-eyed face of Peleg Dinwiddie. He was a frightening sight.
One of the oarsmen reached out with his blade, and Dinwiddie grabbed it and pulled himself over. Eager hands reached down and grabbed handfuls of clothing and hauled his tired and near-limp form over the gunnels.
Bickerstaff, beside him in the stern sheets, had snatched up one of the muskets. He trained it over the side at the approaching boat, fired, began to load it again. In the bow Burgess let go with another blast from the swivel, and several men jumped, cursed in surprise. Dinwiddie was deposited in a heap in the bottom of the boat, gasping, water streaming off him.
“Give way, together!” Marlowe shouted. He had done his moral duty, the Gospel According to Francis Bickerstaff. Time to get the hell out of there.
The men fell in, pulled. Marlowe put the tiller hard over. The longboat turned in a great, elegant arc away from the approaching boat, away from the half-sunk dugout, back toward the Elizabeth Galley.
Marlowe looked at the other boat. One hundred feet back, the swivel belched out its smoke and flames and case shot. The blast tore up the water, but the gun had been aimed too low, and none of the shot struck.
Marlowe pulled his eyes from that threat, looked up at the Elizabeth Galley. Her hull was nearly obscured by smoke, but rising from the gray cloud he could see her topmasts and topgallants, straight as ancient trees. Beside her the spars of the Queen’s Venture jutted out at a crazy angle as the ship tried to sink and the ropes binding her to the Galley held her up.
He could see men along the Elizabeth Galley’s yards. The tight bundles of furled sail tumbling down, ready to be set. He could hear that the great guns had slowed considerably, and he wondered if the Speedwell had had enough.
The land breeze was filling in. It lifted the smoke in a big blanket, pitched it forward, rolled it away. Behind the two big ships Marlowe could see that the Speedwell had indeed had enough. She had slipped her cable, set a topsail, and was moving out of the range of the Galley’s great guns. Defeated or driven off, it did not matter, as long as she had stopped fighting.
“Thank you, Marlowe! Bless you, bless you, thank you.” Dinwiddie was on his knees now, like a supplicant, hands clasped. Marlowe could see that his clothing, torn and filthy, had once been highest quality, better than anything Dinwiddie had carried on board the Galley. He was thinner, his face covered with sprawling beard. Marlowe wanted to kick him.
“Don’t thank me. Thank Bickerstaff. I’d have left you to drown.” He turned his attention elsewhere.
“Captain!” Burgess, standing in the bow, half turned around. They were pulling for the Galley, the attacking boat on their larboard quarter, and his swivel gun would not bear. “Captain! One last shot!”
Marlowe nodded, pushed the tiller over, and the longboat turned away from the Galley until Burgess’s gun could be trained on the attacking boat. Marlowe looked over his shoulder. The others, Yancy’s boat crew, were pulling like men possessed. Fifty feet away a man like Burgess’s mirror image bending over their swivel just as Burgess was bending over his.
They fired in the same instant. Marlowe saw the flame jump from the other gun, but the sound he heard was Burgess’s swivel going off, a deep-throated sound, and Marlowe thought, He’s fired round shot, and then the case shot of the attacking boat hit them broadside.
Men were knocked off their thwarts, oars dropped and disappeared over the side, men shouted, clutched bloody gashes.
Marlowe coughed in the smoke blown back from the gun. There was a pulsing, dull ache in his right hand. He lifted it up, stared at the place where he felt the pain. The agony grew sharper, sharper, like an image in a telescope coming into focus, and he realized that two of his fingers, his little finger and his ring finger, had been shot clean away. Blood ran down his palm, down his arm.
“Ahhhh, goddamn it!” he shouted, giving voice to the pain and the horror. He gritted his teeth, clapped his hand under his arm, put pressure on the wound.
He turned his head to see how long they had before the other boat was on them, but he was surprised to see the boat stopped in the water, men leaning on their oars, more men swarming around the bows. There was a hole shot clean through, right at the stem, and they were close enough that Marlowe could see men stuffing jackets and rope and whatever else they had into the hole.
And he remembered. Round shot. He looked forward to call to Burgess, but the boatswain was crumpled over his gun, and from the looks of him he had taken most of the cast-shot blast.
Bickerstaff appeared, blood smeared on his cheek. “Francis! You’re hit!”
“A scratch! But you’ve lost fingers! Let me see!”
Reluctantly Marlowe brought his hand out from under his arm. Once he let the pressure off, the pain shot right up through his shoulder.
Bickerstaff took the hand in his, examined it, but Marlowe had to turn his head. Even after all the bloody mutilation he had seen-and caused-he could not endure the sight of his own fingers blown to stumps.
He felt a pressure at the base of his fingers, forced himself to look. Bickerstaff had lashed spun yard around them to stanch the bleeding.
“Thank you,” Marlowe said, then in his commanding voice called, “Come along, you men! Push the wounded ones aside, them that can’t pull an oar! See how they loosen off sail, yonder! Let’s get back to the Elizabeth Galley and quit this damned place!”
That seemed to rally the stunned men some. They pushed aside the wounded and the dead, took up the sweeps that were still there, pulled for the ship. Bickerstaff took an oar, and Dinwiddie, who had been lying in the bottom of the boat and had escaped any injury, took one as well.
One of Yancy’s longboats, the one that had come after them, was knocked out, but the other had not swerved in her course for the Queen’s Venture. Now that longboat and Marlowe’s were converging, and it looked as if they might reach the listing Queen’s Venture at the same time.
“Come on, pull! Pull!” Marlowe urged. He did not know if there was fight enough left in his men to do battle with another boatload of armed brigands.
Right for the low rail of the sinking Venture, that was where he aimed the bow. Run the boat right against the side of the ship, help the wounded up and over the slanting deck, onto the Elizabeth Galley, cut the ropes, and go. Sail loosened off. Cut the cable.
He looked to his left, saw the other boat closing, both making for the same point on the Venture’s rail. But Marlowe could see now that his own boat would get there first, beat the other by a good minute.
“Pull! Pull!” It was the kind of silly, useless order that he disdained-they could not pull any harder than they were-but he could not help himself.
Four minutes, it seemed like an hour or more, and Marlowe’s longboat swooped up alongside the heavily listing Queen’s Venture. The men flung away their oars, no need for them now, and grabbed hold of the low rail of the ship. The uninjured or slightly injured leaped over the gunnel, onto the ship, turned to help their shipmates.
Marlowe and Bickerstaff stumbled forward, lifted the still-living men out of the boat and over the rail, handed them into the arms of their shipmates, who pulled them or carried them up the slanting deck to the sanctuary of the Elizabeth Galley.
Dinwiddie climbed out next, stood on the rail of the sinking ship, offered a hand to Marlowe, which Marlowe ignored. He climbed out himself, turned. Yancy’s longboat was thirty feet away, close, but too far to catch them now.
