damp pillow. She almost fought her way back into the sweet sunlight, but then she forced herself to take a gulp of it, and though her guts heaved and she tasted the bitter flooding into the back of her throat, she kept it down.
Then her own discomfort was forgotten as she made out the chaos about her. That last wave, Zouga grunted as he steadied her with an arm about her shoulder, 'the decks have collapsed.'
Like a house of cards they had folded in upon each other, raw splinters of timber thrusting up out of the gloom, baulks crossed like the blades of a scissors, with small dark bodies trapped in the jaws, others crushed by the fallen beams, squashed so that they were no longer recognizable as human, others dangling head down on their ankle- chains, suspended in space, writhing weakly as crippled insects, or hanging quietly, swinging to the dhow's movements. Oh, sweet Mother of God, where to begin, Robyn whispered. She let go her handhold, starting forward and her feet shot out from under her on the slick coated deck, and she went plunging down into the hold.
She struck heavily and pain flared in her back and lower body, but she dragged herself on to her knees. Her own pain seemed insignificant in this terrible prison. Are you all right! Zouga asked anxiously, but she shrugged his hands away.
There was one girl screaming. Robyn crawled to her.
Her legs were crushed below the knees, trapped under a baulk of hand-hewn timber.
Can you move that! she asked Zouga. No, she's done for. Come, there are others-No Robyn crawled back to where her bag had fallen.
The pain was bad, but she forced it below the surface of her consciousness.
She had only seen a leg amputation performed once before. When she started the girl threw off the seamen who held her and attacked Robyn like a tortured wild cat. Her nails raked skin from Robyn's cheek, but by the time Robyn had freed the first leg below the knee, the child was silent and limp. She died before Robyn had reached the bone of the second leg, and Robyn was weeping chokingly to herself as she left the body still hanging in the grip of the timber baulk.
She scrubbed her hands together, they were bloodied to the elbows, her palms sticky against each other. She felt consumed by guilt at her failure, without the strength to move. Dully, she stared about her now.
The hold was more than half flooded, the tide pounded remorselessly at the ship's hull. We have to get out, ' Zouga called to her urgently, and when she did not turn her head, he seized her shoulder and shook her roughly. 'There's nothing more we can do. It will capsize at any moment.'
Robyn was staring down into the stinking black waters which sloshed from one end of the hold to the other, a single hand broke through the surface directly below her, a child's hand with soft pink palm and pretty tapered fingers spread in a gesture of appeal. The iron cuff seemed too large for the narrow wrist, and weighted it down to the hand sank gently disappearing from her sight. She stared after it with infinite regret, then Zouga hauled her roughly to her feet. Come on, damn it! His face was savage, haunted with the horrors he had experienced in this fetid, half flooded hull.
The next wave hit the swamped hull, and this time it broke the grip of the coral. Timber squealed as it twisted and tore, and the dhow began to roll, the filthy waters rose up out of the darkness into a steep black wave and burst about them, shoulder deep.
The damaged slave decks broke free, sliding down over each other, tumultuous and lethal, releasing a fresh layer of tightly packed black bodies to tumble loosely into the flooded depths. Robyn! We'll be trapped. ' He dragged her up towards the square of brilliant sunlight, clambering over timbers and bodies.
We can't leave them, Robyn resisted.
They're finished, damn it. The whole thing is going.
We have to get out.'
She pulled her arm free, stumbled, collapsed backwards, hit something so that pain flared through her lower body again and she cried out with the strength of it. She was lying on her side, couched on a pile of linked bodies, and there was a face a foot from hers. It was alive, she had never seen such eyes, cat fierce, falcon bright, the colour of boiling honey. This one is strong enough! ' Robyn thought, and then she shouted. 'Help me Zouga. 'For God's sake, Robyn.'
She crawled forward and reached the black child, and the deck tilted viciously under her, fresh cold water bursting into the hull.
Leave her, shouted Zouga.
The fresh flood swirled up around Robyn's head, annd the chained girl disappeared below it.
Robyn lunged for her, groping blindly below the surface, feeling panic rise in her when she could not find the child.
Ducking her head under, choking as the pain in her belly made her gasp and she swallowed water, she at last got a grip on the girl's shoulder, feeling her struggling as desperately as she.
Together they came out above the surface, coughing and gasping weakly, Robyn holding the girl's mouth just clear of the surface, but when she tried to lift her further the chain anchored them both and she screamed. Zouga, help me! ' Another surge of water, smelling like raw sewage, filled her mouth and both of them went under once more.
She thought she would never come up again, but stubbornly she held on, sliding one arm under the girl's armpit, and with the other hand gripping her chin, forcing it up so that when they broke out again the girl's face was lifted to take another precious breath of the stinking air, and Zouga was with them.
He took a double turn of the chain around his wrists and threw all his weight on to it. In the gloom of the hull he towered over them, the light from the hatch highlighting the bulging wet muscles in his arms and shoulders as he strained at the chain, his mouth opened in a silent scream of effort, sinewy cords standing out of his throat.
Another wave hissed over them, and this time Robyn was not ready for it, she felt the burn of it in her lungs and knew she was drowning. She need only release her hold on the girl's head and shoulders and she would be free to breathe, but she held on stubbornly, determined suddenly that she would never let this little soul go. She had seen it in the girl's eyes, the fierce will to live. This one she could save, this one out of three hundred or more was the only one she could be certain of saving.
She had to have her.
