“Seventy fathoms! White sand and seashells in the lead!”
“Keep sounding!” Hawkwood bellowed forward. “All hands! All hands to shorten sail!”
Eight bells in the last dog-watch had just been struck and the watch had changed, but the whole ship’s crew came scampering out into the waist and forecastle.
“Velasca!” Hawkwood roared over the soft thudding of feet and the rising babble. Topsails alone! Keep her braced round there!”
“Is it land?” Murad was asking, his eyes glittering. “Is that it? I can see nothing.”
Hawkwood ignored him and peered up at the foretop where the lookout was stationed.
“In the foretop there! What do you see?”
There was a pause.
“Nothing but haze out to six or seven leagues, sir.”
“Keep a good eye out, then.”
“What is happening?” Murad demanded, his face puce with anger.
“We are on a shelving shore, Lord Murad,” Hawkwood said calmly. “The sea is shallowing.”
“Does that mean we are approaching landfall?”
“Possibly, yes.”
“How far away is it?” Murad scanned the horizon as though he fully expected the Western Continent to pop up over it at that very second.
“I have no way of knowing, but we’re shortening sail so we don’t run full-tilt on to any reefs.”
“Saints in heaven!” Murad said hoarsely. “It’s really out there, isn’t it?”
Hawkwood allowed himself to grin.
“Yes, Murad, it really is.”
O N into the evening the carrack ran smoothly with the wind on her quarter and most of the ship’s company on deck, their faces turned towards the west. When the first stars came out in the towering blue-black vault of the night sky the passengers retired below to eat, but Hawkwood kept both watches on deck, chewing salt pork and ship’s biscuit. And the leadsman continued his chant from the forechains:
“Sixty fathoms. Sixty fathoms with this line.”
There was a different quality to the air. The sailors could feel it. There was something more humid and cloying about it that was entirely at odds with the usual keen nature of the open sea, and Hawkwood thought he could smell something now; that growing smell like a breath of a summer garden. It was not far away.
“White foam! White foam dead ahead two cables!” the lookout screamed.
Hawkwood bent to call down the tiller-hatch. “Tiller there! Larboard by two points. West-sou’-west.”
“Aye, sir.”
The carrack moved smoothly round, the wind coming right aft now. The crew rushed to the braces to trim the yards. Hawkwood saw the white flicker and rush of foam breaking on black rocks off on the starboard side.
“Leadsman! What’s our depth?”
There was a splash, a long waiting minute, then the leadsman declared, “Forty fathoms, sir, and white sand!”
“Take in topsails!” Hawkwood shouted.
The crew raced up the shrouds, bent over the topsail yards and began folding in the pale expanses of canvas. The ship lost speed.
“Why are we slowing down, Captain?” It was Murad, coming up the quarterdeck ladder almost at a run.
“Breakers ahead!” the lookout shrieked. “Starboard and larboard. Three cables from the bow!”
“God almighty!” Hawkwood exclaimed, startled. “Let go anchor!”
A seaman knocked loose the heavy sea anchor from the bows with the blow of a mallet. There was an enormous splash that lit up the black sea and the ship lost way, coming gradually to a full stop. She began to yaw as the wind pushed her stern around.
“Get a bower anchor out from the stern, Velasca,” Hawkwood told his first mate. “And pray it holds in this ground.”
He could see them himself: a broken line of white water barely visible off in the night and there was a new sound, the distant roar of surf. Hawkwood found he was trembling, his shoulder a scarlet flame of pain and the sweat sour and slick about him. But for the vigilance of the lookout, the ship would still be sailing towards the distant rocks.
“Is that it?” Murad asked in a breath, gazing out at the white foam which sliced open the darkness.
“Maybe. It might be a reef. We can’t take any chances. I’ve dropped anchor. I don’t like the ground, but there’s no way I’m going any further in at night. We’ll have to wait for daylight.”
They both listened, watched. Hard to imagine what might be out there in the night; what manner of country lay beyond the humid darkness and the line of treacherous breakers.
“Stern anchor out and holding, sir,” Velasca reported.
“Very good. Send down the larboard watch, and have the starboards haul the boats out over the side. They need a wetting, or they’ll leak like sieves in the morning.”
“Aye, sir.”
Hawkwood stared out into the darkness, feeling the ship roll and pitch beneath his feet like a tethered animal bucking the halter. The heat of the night seemed more intense now, and he thought he saw the tiny bodies of insects flickering about the stern lantern. Not an isolated reef, then, but something more substantial. It was hard to believe after all this time that their destination was most likely out there in the darkness, under their lee.
He wondered what Haukal would have made of it, and for a moment pondered the disappearance of his other ship, the graceful little caravel and the good seamen who had manned her. Were they sailing still, on some distant latitude? Or were the fishes gnawing at their bones? He might never know.
Murad had gone. Hawkwood could hear the nobleman shouting orders down in the waist, calling for his officers and sergeants. He must have everything polished and shining; they would be claiming a new world for their king in the morning.
T HAT last night, Hawkwood, Murad and Bardolin shared a bottle of Candelarian wine in the stern cabin, the shutters open to let in some air. A moth flew in the glassless windows and flapped about the table lantern like a thing entranced, and they, equally entranced, watched it avidly until it ventured too close to the flame and fell to the table, blackened. They let it lie there like some sort of mocking talisman, a promise of things to come, perhaps. And they toasted the voyage and whatever the morning might bring in the good wine, saving the last drops for a libation to be poured into the sea in a ritual far older than any vision of Ramusio’s. They drank to those whose souls had been lost in their passage of the ocean and to whatever future might appear to them out of the sunrise.
In the morning the sun came up out of a belt of molten cloud, like the product of some vast furnace housed below the eastern horizon. Every member of the ship’s company was on deck dressed in their best; Hawkwood was even wearing a sword. They could hear clearly the thunder of breaking surf, feel the damp, heavy air of the land. There were birds perched in the rigging, little dun sparrow-like creatures that twittered and sang with the rising of the sun. It was a sound that had the crew staring and smiling with wonder. Birdsong—something from a former life.
There was a mist, honeyed by the sunrise. The lookout in the foretop was the first man to be clear of it, and he yelled out to the depth of his lungs:
“Land ho! Abaft the starboard beam there—hills and trees. Great God!”
There was a spasm of cheering which Murad and his officers silenced. The mist thinned moment by moment.
And there it was. A green country of thick vegetation solidifying out of the veils of morning. Mountains rearing up into a clear sky, and the gathering sunrise gilding it.
“Man the boats,” Hawkwood said hoarsely.
The crews of the two ship’s boats that had survived scrambled down the ship’s side, the soldiers clumsy with armour and weapons, the seamen agile as apes.
“Cast off!” Hawkwood shouted as soon as they were seated on the thwarts. There was no need to say
