he said. “All these guns, and we can’t use ’em for lack of men.”
“You’d best get sleep,” Hunter said shortly, and walked off.
But it was true, what Enders had said. As he continued pacing the decks, the woman was forgotten, and his thoughts returned to the cannon. Some restless part of his brain churned over the problem, again and again, looking for a solution. Somehow he was convinced there was a way to use these guns. Something he had forgotten, something he knew long ago.
The woman obviously thought he was a barbarian - or, worse, a Puritan. He smiled in the darkness at the thought. In fact, Hunter was an educated man. He had been taught all the main categories of knowledge, as they had been defined since medieval days. He knew classical history, Latin and Greek, natural philosophy, religion, and music. At the time, none of it had interested him.
Even as a young man, he was far more concerned with practical, empirical knowledge than he was in the opinions of some long-dead thinker. Every schoolboy knew that the world was much larger than Aristotle had ever dreamt. Hunter himself had been born on land that the Greeks did not know existed.
Yet now, certain elements of his formal training tugged at his mind. He kept thinking of Greece - something about Greece, or the Greeks - but he did not know what, or why.
Then he thought of the oil painting in Cazalla’s cabin, aboard the Spanish warship. Hunter had hardly noticed it at the time. Nor did he remember it clearly now. But there was something about a painting aboard a warship that intrigued him. In some way, it was important.
What did it matter? He knew nothing of painting; he regarded it as a very minor talent, suitable only for decoration, and of interest only to those vain and wealthy noblemen who would pay to have their portraits done, with flattering improvements. The painters themselves were, he knew, trivial souls who wandered like gypsies from one country to another in search of some patron who would support their efforts. They were homeless, rootless, frivolous men who lacked the solid attachment of strong feeling for the nation of their birth. Hunter, despite the fact that his parents had fled England for Massachusetts, considered himself wholly English and passionately Protestant. He was at war with a Spanish and Catholic enemy and did not comprehend anyone who was not equally patriotic. To care only for painting: that was a pale allegiance indeed.
And yet the painters wandered. There were Frenchmen in London, Greeks in Spain, and Italians everywhere. Even in times of war, the painters came and went freely, especially the Italians. There were so many Italians.
Why did he care?
He walked along the dark ship, passing from cannon to cannon. He touched one. Stamped on its postern was a motto:
The words mocked him. Not always, he thought. Not without men to load and aim and fire. He touched the lettering, running his fingers over the grooves, feeling the fine, smooth curve of the S, the clean lines of the E.
There was strength in the crispness of Latin, two tight words, military and hard. The Italians had lost all that; Italians were soft and flowery, and their tongue had changed to reflect the softness. It had been a long time since Caesar had bluntly said: Veni, vidi, vici.
That one word seemed to suggest something. He looked at the clean lines of the letters, and then in his mind he saw more lines, lines and angles, and he was back to the Greeks, to his Euclidean geometry, which had been so agonizing to him as a boy. He had never been able to understand why it mattered that two angles were equal to another, or that two lines intersected at one point or another. What difference did it make?
He remembered Cazalla’s painting, a work of art on a warship, out of place, serving no purpose. That was the trouble with art, it was not practical. Art conquered nothing.
It conquers. Hunter smiled at the irony of the motto, stamped into a cannon that would conquer nothing. This weapon was as worthless to him as Cazalla’s painting. It was as worthless to him as Euclid ’s postulates. He rubbed his tired eyes.
All this thinking mattered not at all. He was traveling in circles with no sense, no purpose, no destination, only the persistent itch of a frustrated man who was trapped and sought an exit in vain.
And then, he heard the cry that seamen fear more than any other: “Fire!”
Chapter 29
HE RUSHED TOPSIDE, in time to see six fireboats bearing down on the galleon. They were the warship’s longboats thickly coated with pitch, and now blazing brightly, illuminating the still waters of the bay as they floated forward.
He cursed himself for not anticipating this maneuver; the smoke on the warship’s decks had been a clear clue, which Hunter had failed to understand. But he wasted no time in recrimination. Already the seamen of El Trinidad were pouring over the side, into the galleon’s longboats, tied alongside the ship; the first of the longboats cast off, the men stroking furiously toward the fire ships.
Hunter spun on his heel. “Where are our lookouts?” he demanded of Enders. “How did this happen?”
Enders shook his head. “I don’t know, the watch was posted on the sandy point and the shore beyond.”
“Damn!”
The men had either fallen asleep at their posts, or else Spaniards had swum ashore in the darkness, surprised the men, and killed them. He watched the first of his longboats with its complement of seamen battle the flames of one burning ship. They were trying to fend it off with their oars, and to overturn it. One seaman caught fire and jumped screaming into the water.
Then Hunter himself went over the side, dropping into a boat. As the crew rowed, they drenched themselves with seawater, as they approached the burning boats. He looked off and saw that Sanson was leading a longboat from Cassandra to join the fight.
“Bend your backs, lads!” Hunter shouted, as he moved into the inferno. Even at a distance of fifty yards, the heat from the fire ships was fierce; the flames streaked and jumped high into the night; burning gobs of pitch crackled and spit in all directions, sizzling in the water.
The next hour was a living nightmare. One by one, the burning ships were beached, or held away in the water until their hulls burned out and they sank.
When Hunter finally returned to his ship, covered in soot, his clothes ragged, he immediately fell into a deep sleep.
…
ENDERS WOKE HIM the next morning with the news that Sanson was down in the hold of El Trinidad. “He says he has found something,” Enders said doubtfully.
Hunter pulled on his clothes and climbed down the four decks of El Trinidad to the hold. On the lowest deck, redolent of dung from the cattle above, he found Sanson, grinning broadly.
“It was an accident,” Sanson said. “I cannot take credit. Come and see.”
Sanson led the way below to the ballast compartment. This narrow, low passage stank of hot air and bilge water, which sloshed back and forth with the gentle motion of the boat. Hunter saw rocks placed there for ballast. And then he frowned - they were not rocks, they were too regular in shape. They were shot.
