Something crashed into the mainmast over his head, and dropped onto his hair. It slid down to his shoulder and onto the deck. He thought it must be a bird, but, looking down, saw that it was a human hand, severed at the wrist. There was a ring on one finger.
“Good God,” he whispered, and when he looked back at the warship, he saw an equally astonishing sight.
The warship was gone.
Literally, gone: one minute it had been there, consumed by fire and hot spheres of explosions, and yet there. Now it was gone. Burning debris, sails, and spars floated on the surface of the water. The bodies of seamen floated with them, and he heard the screams and shouts of the survivors. Yet the warship was gone.
All around him, his crew was laughing and jumping in frenzied celebration. Hunter could only stare at the water where the warship had once been. Amid the burning wreckage, his eye fell on a body floating facedown in the water. The body was that of a Spanish officer; Hunter could tell from the blue uniform on the man’s back. The man’s trousers had been shredded in the explosions, and his naked buttocks were exposed to view. Hunter stared at the bared flesh, fascinated that the back should be uninjured and yet the clothing below torn away. There was something obscene about the randomness and casualness of the injury. Then, as the body bounced on the waves, Hunter saw that it was headless.
Aboard his own ship, he was distantly aware that the crew was no longer jubilant. They had all fallen silent, and had turned to look at him. He looked around at their faces, weary, smudged, bleeding, the eyes drained and blank with fatigue, and yet oddly expectant.
They were looking at him, and waiting for him to do something. For a moment, he could not imagine what was expected of him. And then he became aware of something on his cheeks.
Rain.
Chapter 31
THE HURRICANE STRUCK with furious intensity. Within minutes, the wind was screaming through the rigging at more than forty knots, lashing them with stinging pellets of rain. The seas were rougher, with fifteen-foot swells, mountains of water that swung the boat crazily. One moment they were high in the air, riding the crest of a swell; seconds later they were plunged into a stomach-wrenching trough, with water looming high all around them.
And each man knew that this was just the beginning. The wind, and the rain, and the seas would become much worse, and the storm would last for hours, perhaps days.
They sprang to work with an energy that belied the fatigue they all felt. They cleared the decks and reefed shredded canvas; they fought to get a sail over the side, and plug the holes in the ship below the waterline. They worked in silence on the slippery, shifting wet decks, each man knowing that at the next instant he might be swept overboard, and that no one would even see it happen.
But the first task - and the worst - was to trim the ship, by moving the cannon back to the starboard side. This was no easy matter on calm seas with dry decking. In a storm, when the ship was taking water over her sides, with the deck pitching to forty-five-degree angles, with every deck surface and line soaked and slippery, it was plainly impossible and a nightmare. Yet it had to be done if they were to survive.
Hunter directed the operation, one cannon at a time. It was a problem of anticipating the pitch, of letting the angles do the work as the men wrestled with the five-thousand-pound weights.
They lost the first cannon; a line snapped, and the gun shot across the slanted deck like a missile, shattering the hull railing on the far side and crashing into the water. The men were terrified by the speed with which it happened. Double lines were lashed around the second cannon, yet it also broke free, crushing a seaman in its path.
For the next five hours, they battled the wind and the rain to get the cannon in position and safely lashed down. When they were finished, every man on El Trinidad was exhausted beyond endurance; the sailors clung like drowning animals to stays and railings, exerting every last ounce of energy to keep from being washed over the side.
And yet, Hunter knew, the storm was just beginning.
…
A HURRICANE, THE most awesome event in nature, was discovered by the voyagers to the New World. The name - hurricane - is an Arawak word for storms that had no counterpart in Europe. Hunter’s crew knew of the awful power of these giant cyclonic events, and responded to the terrible physical reality of the storm with the oldest sailor’s superstitions and rites.
Enders, at the helm, watched the mountains of water all around him, and muttered every prayer he had ever learned as a boy, while he simultaneously clutched the shark’s tooth around his neck and wished he could raise more canvas. El Trinidad was struggling with three sails at the moment, and it was unlucky to sail with three.
Belowdecks, the Moor took his dagger and cut his own finger, then drew a triangle on the deck with his blood. He placed a feather in the center of the triangle, and held it there while he whispered an incantation to himself.
Forward, Lazue threw a casket of salt pork over the side, and held three fingers into the air. Hers was the most ancient superstition of all, though she knew only the old seaman’s tale that food over the side and three fingers in the air might save a foundering ship. In fact, the three fingers represented the trident of Neptune, and the food was a sacrifice to the god of the oceans.
Hunter himself professed to despise such superstition, yet he went to his cabin, locked the door, got down on his knees, and prayed. All around him, the furniture of the cabin crashed back and forth from one wall to another, as the ship rocked crazily on the seas.
Outside, the storm screamed with demonic fury, and the ship beneath him creaked and groaned in long, agonizing moans. At first, he did not notice any other sound, and then he heard a woman’s scream. And then another.
He left his cabin and found five sailors dragging Lady Sarah Almont forward, to the companionway ladder. She was screaming and wrestling in their grip.
“Hold there,” Hunter shouted, and went up to them. Waves crashed over them, smashing against the deck.
The men would not look him in the eye.
“What goes here?” Hunter demanded.
None of the men spoke. It was Lady Sarah who finally shrieked: “They’re going to throw me in the ocean!”
The leader of the men seemed to be Edwards, a rough seaman, veteran of dozens of privateering campaigns.
“She’s a witch,” he said, looking at Hunter defiantly. “That’s what it is, Captain. We’ll never last this storm if she’s on board.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hunter said.
“Mark me,” Edwards said. “We’ll not last with her on board. Mark me, she’s a witch as ever I saw.”
“How do you know this?”
“I knew it first I seen her,” Edwards said.
“By what proofs?” Hunter persisted.
“The man is mad,” Lady Sarah said. “Stark mad.”
“What proofs?” Hunter demanded, shouting over the wind.
Edwards hesitated. Finally, he released the girl, and turned away. “No use talking of it,” he said. “You mark me, though. Mark me.”
He walked away. One by one, the other men backed off. Hunter was alone with Lady Sarah.
“Go to your cabin,” Hunter said, “and bolt the door, and stay there. On no account come out, and do not open the door for any reason.”
Her eyes were wide with fright. She nodded, and went to her room. Hunter waited until he saw the door to
