Honour This Day

touched his injured eye. It was like that other time. Like being struck blind.

He felt himself swaying, the old sword held straight out, pointing uselessly at nothing.

Parris yelled, 'Stop that man¹' Bolitho could only guess what was happening, and waited for the searing agony of the cutlass he could not see. Someone was screaming, and occasional yells told Bolitho thai more of Keen's men were running to vanquish the last of the attackers.

Allday sliced his blade at an angle, his mind numb as he saw the other man lunging towards Bolitho, who was apparently unable to move. The blade took the man on one side of his head, a glancing blow, but it had Allday's strength and memory behind it. As he pivoted round, squinting into the sudden glare, he saw Allday looming towards him.

Jenour heard the next blow even as he scrabbled in the bloodstained scuppers to retrieve his sword. Parns, who was sobbing with pain from a slash across his wounded shoulder, saw the cutlass hit the Spaniard on the forearm; could only stare as the arm, complete with cutlass, clattered across the deck.

Allday spat, 'An' this is for me, matey!' He silenced the man's scream with one final blow across the neck.

He grasped Bolitho's arm. 'You all right, Sir Richard?'

Bolitho took several deep breaths. His lungs felt as if they were filled with fire; he could barely breathe.

'Yes. Yes, old friend. The sun…'

He looked for Jenour. 'You have true courage, Stephen!'

Then he saw Jenour's features change yet again and thought for an instant he had already been wounded. There were wild cheers from the ship snared alongside by a tangle of fallen rigging, but as a freak gust of wind drove the smoke away Bolitho knew the reason for Jenour's stunned look of dismay.

He turned, covering his left eye with his hand, and felt his body cringe.

The Spanish admiral's flagship San Mateo had stayed clear of the close-action, or maybe it had taken her this long to put about. She seemed to shine above her own tall reflection; there was not a scar or a stain on her hull or a shot hole in her elegant sails. She was moving very slowly, and Bolitho's mind recorded that there were many men aloft on her yards. She was preparing to change tack again. Away from the battle.

Bolitho could feel his limbs quivering, as if they would never stop. He heard Parns shout, 'In Christ's name! She's going to fire''

San Mateo had run out every gun, and at the range of some fifty yards could not miss with any of them, even though two of her own consorts lay directly in the path of her broadside.

Bolitho's mind refused to clear. It was Hyperion they wanted. The defiant ship with his flag still at the fore which had somehow broken their line, and inspired the others to follow. He looked at Allday but he was staring at the enemy flagship, his cutlass hanging loosely from his fist.

Together Even now

Then the flagship fired. The sound was deafening, and as the weight of the broadside smashed into the drifting Hyperion, Bolitho felt the deck rear up as if the ship was sharing their agony.

He was thrown to the side of the quarterdeck, his ears deaf to the thundering roar of falling spars, of men crying and screaming before the torn rigging dragged them over the side like corpses in a huge net.

Bolitho crawled to Midshipman Mirnelees and dragged at his shoulder to turn him on to his back. His eyes were shut tight, and there was moisture like tears beneath the lids. He was dead. He saw Allday crouching on his knees, his mouth wide as he sucked in the air. Their eyes met and Allday tried to grin.

Bolitho felt someone pulling him to his feet, his eyes blinded again by the sunlight as it laid bare the destruction.

Then the smoke drifted lower and hid San Mateo from view.

19. The Last Farewell

Sir Piers Blachford steadied himself against the makeshift table while the guns thundered out yet again and shook the whole ship. He wiped his streaming face and said, 'Take this man away. He's dead.'

The surgeon's assistants seized the naked corpse and dragged it away into the shadows of the orlop deck.

Blachford reached up and felt the massive beam by his head. If there was really a hell, he thought, it must surely look like this.

The swinging lanterns which dangled above the table made it worse, if that were possible, casting shadows up the curved sides of the hull one moment, and laying bare the huddled or inert shapes of the wounded who were being brought down to the orlop with hardly a let-up.

He looked at his companion, George Minchm, Hyperion's own surgeon, a coarse- faced man with sprouting grey hair. His eyes were red-rimmed, and not only from fatigue. There was a huge jug of rum beside the table, to help ease the agony or the passing moments of the pitiful wounded who were brought to the table, stripped, then held like victims under torture until the work was done. Minchm seemed to drink more than his share.

Blachford had seen the most terrible wounds. Men without limbs, with their faces and bodies burned, or clawed by flaying splinters. The whole place, which was normally the midshipmen's berth, where they slept, ate and studied their manuals by the dim light of their glims, was filled with suffering. It stank of blood, vomit and pain. Each thundering roar of a broadside, or the sickening crash of enemy balls hitting the ship around them, brought cries and groans from the figures who waited to be attended.

Blachford could only guess what was happening up there, where it was broad daylight. Here on the orlop, no outside light ever penetrated. Below the waterline it was the safest place for this grisly work, but it revolted him none the less.

He gestured to the obscene tubs below the table, partly filled with amputated limbs, a stark warning to those who would be the next to be carried to endure what must be an extension of their agony. Only death seemed like a blessed relief here. 'Take them out!'

He listened to the beat of hammers in the narrow carpenter's walks, which ran around the ship below the waterline. Like tiny corridors between the inner compartments and the outer hull, where the carpenter and his mates repaired shot holes or leaks as the iron smashed again and again into the side.

There was a long drawn out rumbling directly overhead, and Blachford stared at the red-painted timbers as if he expected them to cave in.

A frightened voice called from the shadows. 'What's that, Toby?'

Someone replied, 'They're runnm' in the lower battery, that's what!'

Blachford asked quickly, 'Why would they do that?'

Minchin took a cupful of rum and wiped his mouth with a blood-stained fist.

'Clearing it. We're alongside one o' the buggers. They'll need every spare Jack to fight 'em off!'

He shouted hoarsely, 'Next one, Donovan¹'

Then he eyed Blachford with something like contempt. 'Not quite what you're used to, I expect? No fancy operating rooms, with lines of ignorant students hanging on your every word.' He blinked his red-rimmed eyes as smoke eddied through the deck. 'I hope you learn something useful today, Sir Piers. Now you know what we have to suffer in the name of medicine.'

A loblolly boy said, 'This one's an officer, sir.'

Blachford leaned over the table as the lieutenant was stripped of his torn shirt and pressed flat on the table.

It was the second lieutenant, Lovering, who had been shot down by a Spanish marksman.

Blachford studied the terrible wound in his arm. The blood looked black in the swinging lanterns, the skin ragged where the ball had split apart upon hitting the bone.

Lovering stared at him, his eyes glazed with pain. 'Oh God, is it bad?'

Mmchin touched his bare shoulder. It felt cold and clammy. 'Sorry, Ralph.' He glanced at Blachford. 'It's got to come off.'