It was the thunder of the drum, the piping and the cries down the hatchways, the deep growl and thump of guns being run out and the hurrying of feet that roused Martin. 'Is that you, Maturin?' he whispered, with a terrified sideways glance.
'It is,' said Stephen, taking his wrist. 'Good day to you, now.'
'Oh thank God, thank God, thank God,' said Martin, his voice broken with the horror of it. 'I thought I was dead and in Hell. This terrible room. Oh this terrible, terrible room.'
The pulse was now extremely agitated. The patient was growing more so. 'Maturin, my wits are astray - I am barely out of a night-long nightmare - forgive me my trespasses to you.'
'If you please, sir,' said Reade, coming in, 'the Captain enquires for Mr Martin and desires me to tell the Doctor that we are bearing down on a heavy pirate engaged with the Franklin: there will be some broken omelets presently.'
'Thank you, Mr Reade: Mr Martin is far from well.' And calling after him, 'I shall repair to my station very soon.'
'May I come?' cried Martin.
'You may not,' said Stephen. 'You can barely stand, my poor colleague, sick as you are.'
'Pray take me. I cannot bear to be left in this room: I hate and dread it. I could not bring myself to pass by its door, even. This is where I... this is where Mrs Oakes... the wages of sin is death... I am rotting here in this life, while in the next... Christe eleison.'
'Kyrie eleison,' said Stephen. 'But listen, Nathaniel, will you? You are not rotting as the seamen put it: not at all. These are salt-sores: they are no more, unless you have taken some improper physic. In this ship you could not have contracted any infection of that kind. There has been no source of infection, whether by kissing, toying, drinking in the same cup, or otherwise: none whatsoever. I state that as a physician.'
The wind had hauled a little farther forward, and with her astonishing spread of drum-tight canvas the Surprise was now running at such a pace that the following seas lapped idly alongside. From high aloft Jack made out the confused situation with fair certainty: the ships were still grappled fast: the Alastors had boarded the Franklin's waist but Tom had run up stout close-quarters and some of his people were holding out behind them while others had invaded the Alastor's forecastle and were fighting the Frenchmen there. Some of the Alastors were still trying to cast off, and still the Franklins prevented them - Jack could see the bearded Sethians in the furious struggle that flung three Frenchmen bodily off the lashed bowsprits. Another group of pirates were turning one of the Franklin's forward carronades aft to blast a way through the close-quarters; but the mob of their own men and deadly musket-fire from their own forecastle hindered them, and the carronade ran wild on the rolling deck, out of control.
Jack called down: 'Chasers' crew away. Run them out.' He landed on the deck with a thump, ran through the eager, attentive, well-armed groups to the bows, where his own brass Beelzebub was reaching far out of the port. 'Foretopsail,' he said, and they heaved the gun round. He and Bonden pointed it with grunts and half-words, the whole crew working as one man. Glaring along the sights Jack pulled the laniard, arched for the gun's recoil beneath him and through the bellowing crash he roared, 'T'other.'
The smoke raced away before them, and barely was it clear before the other chaser fired. Both shots fulfilled their only function, piercing the foretopsail they were aimed at, dismaying the Alastors - few ships could fire so clean - and encouraging the Franklins, whose cheer could now be heard, though faint and thin.
But these two shots, reverberating through the ship's hollow belly, sent poor Martin's weakened mind clear off its precarious balance and into a delirium. His distress became very great, reaching the screaming pitch. Stephen quickly fastened him into his cot with two bandages and ran towards the sick-berth. He met Padeen on his way to tell him that quarters had been beaten. 'I know it,' he replied. 'Go straight along and sit with Mr Martin. I shall come back.'
He returned with the fittest of his patients, a recent hernia. 'See that all is well below, Padeen,' he said, and when Padeen had gone he measured out a powerful dose from his secret store of laudanum, the tincture of opium to which he and Padeen had once been so addicted. 'Now, John,' he said to the seaman, 'hold up his shoulders.' And in pause, 'Nathaniel, Nathaniel my dear, here is your draught. Down it in one swallow, I beg.'
The pause drew out. 'Lay him back, lay him back gently,' said Stephen. 'He will be quiet now, with the blessing. But you will sit with him, John, and soothe his mind if he wakes.'
'Shipmates,' cried Jack from the break of the quarterdeck, 'I am going to lay alongside the four-master as easy as can be. Some of our people are on her forecastle; some of theirs are trying to work aft in the Franklin. So as soon as we are fast, come along with me and we will clear the four-master's waist, then carry on to relieve Captain Pullings. But Mr Grainger's division will go straight along the Alastor's gun-deck to stop them turning awkward with their cannon. None of you can go wrong if you knock an enemy on the head.'
The seamen - a savage looking crew with their long hair still wild about them - the seamen cheered, a strangely happy sound as the frigate glided in towards those embattled ships: roaring shouts, the clash of bitter fighting clear and clearer over the narrowing sea.
He stepped to the wheel, his heavy sword dangling from his wrist by a strap and he took her shaving in, his heart beating high and his face gleaming, until her yards caught in the Alastor's shrouds and the ships ground together.
'Follow me, follow me,' he cried, leaping across, and on either side of him there were Surprises, swarming over with cutlasses, pistols, boarding-axes. Bonden was at his right hand, Awkward Davies on his left, already foaming at the mouth. The Alastors came at them with furious spirit and in the very first clash, halfway across the deck, one shot Jack's hat from his head, the bullet scoring his skull, and another, lunging with a long pike, brought him down.
'The Captain's down,' shrieked Davies. He cut the pikeman's legs from under him and Bonden split his head. Davies went on hacking the body as the Franklins came howling down and took the Alastors in the flank.
There was an extremely dense and savage melee with barely room to strike - cruel blows for all that and pistols touching the enemy's face. The battle surged forward and back, more joined in, forward and back, turning, trampling on bodies dead and living, all sense of direction lost, a slaughter momentarily interrupted by the crash of the Franklin's carronade, turned and fired at last, but misfired, misaimed so that it killed many of those it was meant to help. The remaining Alastors came flooding back into their own ship, instantly pursued by Pullings' men, who cut them down from behind while the Surprises shattered them from in front and either side, for they had all heard the cry 'The Captain's down - they've got the Captain' and the fighting reached an extraordinary degree of ferocity.
