Marlowe reached out his arm, and Bickerstaff reached out to him. Bickerstaff’s hand clapped onto Marlowe’s forearm and Marlowe’s onto Bickerstaff’s, and he helped his friend from the boat just as the man in the longboat fired the swivel in the bow.
Marlowe’s head was filled with a horrible screaming, a rushing concussion of sound, and he felt himself spinning as though someone had twirled him on a dance floor. His eyes were filled with red, he could see nothing but red. He hit the deck, slid, came to a stop against the rail. He felt a burning agony all through his right side.
He opened his eyes and was surprised to see that everything was just as it was-the water, the deck, the sky now robin’s-egg *blue overhead. He looked down at his arm, the arm that had been holding Bickerstaff’s. It was not an arm anymore, just a shredded mass of bone and flesh and blood-soaked cloth. He looked at the deck. Bickerstaff was there, wide-eyed. A dozen or so holes in his chest. A pool of blood below him, running into the scuppers.
“Francis…” Marlowe said. “Francis, what have I done…?” It was no more than a whisper. His mind could grasp nothing beyond that question.
“Come on!” Dinwiddie shouted. He grabbed Marlowe’s collar, tried to make him stand.
Marlowe looked up at him. “We came for you,” he said. “Francis, he said we had to. We came for you. And now he is dead.”
“Come on!”
Marlowe saw Dinwiddie grab Bickerstaff’s lifeless body, drape it over his shoulder, and push his way, grunting, up the steep deck. He passed Bickerstaff’s body across the wide gap, half ran and half slid back, pulled Marlowe to his feet. Everything felt heavy, dull, the edges of Marlowe’s vision going dark. He was aware only of the pain, the incredible pain in his arm, the anguish.
Dinwiddie eased him over the rail. He saw the Elizabeth Galleys reaching out for him, pulling him the rest of the way to the Elizabeth Galley’s deck.
Marlowe felt his head swimming, knew he was losing a lot of blood, reckoned this was the end. Francis dead, he did not want to go on. Swimming, swimming, the tall rig overhead whirling around. He closed his eyes, felt the warmth of the deck below him.
Peleg Dinwiddie watched them lay Marlowe’s pale form down on the deck, Bickerstaff’s bloody and lifeless body beside him.
Close his eyes! Dear God, will someone close his eyes? Dinwiddie thought, but he could not do it himself. He could not put his hand on those accusing eyes.
“We came for you. Francis, he said we had to.”
Of course. Marlowe would not have risked everything to save him. But Francis was a true man, a real friend, a decent and moral being. So of course it was Francis who took the case-shot blast. Not Marlowe. Not him. Francis. The good ones always got it.
Dinwiddie felt the agony like a hot coal inside him. He was back on the Elizabeth Galley, he was in the midst of fire, he had helped his shipmates back on board. But he was not cleansed, not by far. He felt dirtier than ever.
To his left, down the sloping deck, the longboat was twenty feet away and closing, fifty armed men ready to swarm up the deck of the Queen’s Venture, over the Galley’s rail. Fling themselves with loaded weapons and drawn swords at his shipmates, and his shipmates, disorganized, with no arms at the ready, might well be taken.
He looked down. An arms chest at his feet, and he knew what was in it, had inspected it a hundred times back when he was first officer, a lifetime or two before. Smoldering match by the guns in the waist below. He moved without thinking, just acting on nebulous emotion, a sense for what would make things right.
Ran down into the waist, grabbed up the match. Forward, men were hacking through the anchor cable, no time even to slip it through the hawsepipe. Back up to the gangway. Flip open the arms chest. To one side, a neat row of hand grenadoes with their uniform wooden plugs and curling fuse.
He snatched one up, touched the matched to it, held it there until the fuse was hissing and burning well. Picked up another one and held that fuse to the match until that was also well lit.
Below him the boat was just bumping up alongside the low, nearly submerged rail of the Queen’s Venture, the first of the armed men leaping out of her.
Dinwiddie jumped across to the Queen’s Venture’s gangway and ran around the open waist, then down the deck, slipping and stumbling with the sharp angle, screaming as loud as he could. It was a scream from his heart and from his bowels, his final sound, and all his life and all he had been or done, all the horrible mistakes he had made in the past half year or ever before that-all of it went into that shout.
He saw heads snap up in surprise, saw pistols leveled, but it was too late for them. He slammed into the few men on the Venture’s deck like a ball in a game of ninepins, knocked them aside, launched himself into the longboat.
He fell across the thwarts with a painful crash, the breath knocked from his lungs, but he clutched the grenadoes tighter still. He heard shouts of surprise, cries of “Grenado! He’s got a grenado!” Hands pulled at him, tugged at his arms, beat him. He closed his eyes tight, clenched his fists around the metal balls, then rolled over fast so he would not smother the blast with his body.
More shouts. Through clenched eyelids he saw a bright flash of red.
Billy Bird, watching from the Elizabeth Galley’s quarterdeck, saw the scene unfold with a strange combination of horror, admiration, and disgust. That fellow-Billy had no notion of who he was-had charged into the boat with two lit grenadoes, had fended off all hands reaching for him, had exposed the bombs at just the right second.
“Hoisted by his own petard, and by choice, for all love!” he shouted.
The two explosions, less than a second apart, had torn the man holding them to bits and shredded half the crew of the boat. Billy Bird could hear the scream of the shrapnel through the air, could see the bloody spread of flying metal as it plowed the men down.
Billy had had a plan, and that was to cut the Queen’s Venture away and let it roll over the attacking boat, but then Marlowe had reached the Venture first and spoiled that idea.
Then Yancy’s boat had reached the Venture’s side, and Billy thought it quite possible that those fifty armed and determined men might even overrun his larger but weary, hungry, disorganized crew, take the ship back. But now that problem was wiped out, figuratively, literally.
They had not all been killed in the blast. Some were even now crawling forward, stepping over the mutilated bodies of the shipmates, making for the deck of the Venture, still determined to carry the fight forward, still whipped into enough of a frenzy that they were willing to plunge into it, even with their decimated numbers.
But this was not a problem.
“Honeyman, now!” Billy shouted. The anchor cable parted under the blow of an ax, and all along the larboard side of the Elizabeth Galley men fell with axes on the lashings binding her to the Queen’s Venture. It was like cutting cordwood, so taut were the ropes, and with a few strokes they began to part with the sound of small-arms fire. A gunner’s mate who stood imprudently close to the rope was caught with the snap-back and flung clean off the gangway and into the waist.
The last half dozen ropes did not need cutting. With all the weight of the ship on them, they parted one after another, right down the line from forward aft as if it had been orchestrated.
The Queen’s Venture gave a shudder and a sound like a deep moan, and over she went. Her masts came sweeping down to the water like felled trees, her larboard side disappeared, and from the Galley’s deck all they could see was the great white, weed-covered bottom as the ship turned on her side.
The pressure of the Venture rolling and pushing against the Galley, and the water she pushed as she rolled, served to drift the Elizabeth Galley away from the dying vessel.
“Sheet home topsails!” Billy shouted, and the men waiting eagerly and anxiously at the pinrails let fly buntlines and hauled on sheets, and the big sails were pulled down and out.
“Run away with your halyards!” The yards began their steady climb up the topmasts, the sails catching the breeze as they spread, the Galley coming to life, inching away from the Queen’s Venture.
The Venture, in turn, was settling in the water. For some seconds she remained on her side, as if she were just resting, and then the hull started to sink. Her entire larboard side went down, and then her long keel disappeared under the blue-green water. Faster and faster she was swallowed up as her hull became less buoyant. The water churned and bubbled around her and rose up over her waterline, over her gunports that were now pointing at the
