False Colors (31 page)

“Masthead!” he shouted. “I hear ice. What d’you see?” As he pulled himself forward across the deck, his shoes slithered in the powder of snow. He tugged off the wicker-and-blanket door of the hut with a flourish and a special arrogant officer’s smile. The damp warmth within washed luxuriously over him.

“Gentlemen, you’re not being paid to take Turkish baths on his Majesty’s time. Prepare for handing over the watch. Mr. Midshipmen Wilson and Sturridge, I want the log thrown. The rest of you, that deck needs sweeping clean, we don’t have enough skates to go around.”

He squinted up into the flurry of flakes towards the platform on top of the main mast, from which the lookout should have replied seconds ago. “Masthead there! Did you hear me!”

Silence.
“That’s his third time fallen asleep on duty this trip, sir.” William Barry grinned at Alfie. “He won’t last long in a net over the bows in this weather.”
“You’re a top-man, Barry, aren’t you? Get up there and check on him,” Alfie said, discouraging the familiarity. Barry was one of the
Albions
he had laid flat with a left hook in the riot at the harbor in Kingston, and the man seemed to feel it had established a special bond between them since.
Alfie peered up at the fighting top where the lookout crouched, tucked into a loose-stuffed mattress of straw. He still couldn’t make out the dim grey shape for falling snow.
Icicles thrummed into the deck like a flight of arrows as Barry climbed the shrouds, and again there came that booming crunch and growl across the waves.
Sailors all, the men straightened up from their brooms to listen for the direction of the sound, but Alfie saw nothing more definite there than his own conviction that it was entirely too close for comfort. The wind whistled thin through the rigging. A sheet of ice the size of a dinner table came knocking down the side.
“He’s stone dead, sir!” called Barry at last. “Frozen solid, poor bugger, and his hand so tight around the puddening, I’m gonna have to break his fingers t’get him down.”
“Do that,” Alfie shouted. Sucking in a breath that numbed his teeth and skewered a stiletto of pain through his nose, his attention was caught by the darkness on the lee bow. He snapped out his own glass, squinting through the eyepiece. It showed him darkness and white snowfall. But as he moved his head it struck him anew—a sense that there was something wrong about the billowing flakes. The curl of wind, the round, antic dance of them, as though…as though they fell not
down
but
around
an invisible bulk—an invisible something that surged closer even as he watched. It lay dead ahead, whatever it was, they had to slow, to turn! Alfie’s shout tore his frozen throat, making his lips bleed. “Main course aback!
Helm hard a larboard!”
“God’s bloody wounds—!” Barry’s high pitched shriek tailed off into a falling scream as the
Albion
rammed into solid darkness. The foremast bent beneath the impact. A cracking noise and a split ran up the great trunk of it from foot to collar. Its backstay snapped and lashed across the deck like the tail of a dragon, knocking the midshipmen into the captain’s launch and sweeping one of the luckless idlers into the sea. The split gaped, writhing like a mouth trying to speak, as the mast sagged forward and stilled without falling, held by the royal mast and preventer stays.
The bowsprit splintered against a white wall. Beneath the bursting, tearing sound of tortured wood, a deep reverberation like a struck cathedral bell trembled through its socket, into the
Albion
’s keel. It resonated in harmony, and the rigging squealed as though
Albion
herself cried out in shock and pain. The mass before them surged towards them, driving
Albion
backwards. Seas breaking over her poop, she heaved her head up aboard the floating island, turning her icy deck into a steep hill. Alfie dropped his spyglass and lunged for the manrope with both hands, as his feet were swept out from beneath him by the impact.
The hut of hammocks tumbled across the deck. Burning embers from the brazier scattered into a new celestial map of gold sparks across the darkness. A hand clamped around Alfie’s ankle as a skidding shape careened into him. Barry’s body slid past on the other side, rammed itself against the quarterdeck and lay in a spreading pool of black.
Another lurch.
Albion
rolled to starboard. Men’s shouts and the screaming of the animals in the hold echoed a tormented groan deep in the superstructure of the hull. A moment of stasis, in which she hung, motionless. Alfie loosened one hand, reached down to grab a handful of tarpaulin jacket. Blood seeped from beneath the nails of his other hand—distractingly hot—as he clung tight, supporting not only his own weight but that of the bosun. He hauled the man up so that Creevy could grab the line for himself. Panting, they stared at one another, recognizing the sick, wordless certainty that
Albion
’s movement had merely paused, not stopped. Creevy’s petrified grin mirrored his own.
A thunder-clap, and then another, escalating to a single ripping tear. Out there in the darkness a part of the berg split off and fell away. The sea surging beneath her, the ship raised again, rolling further starboard. Men hung from the line like flags as she slipped sideways down the white shore, back into the white sea. A wall of freezing water, rough with chunks of ice, smashed across the deck, stopped Alfie’s heart as the chill hit him. His hands hung on of themselves, immovable for a long moment of unnaturally stretched time. He had time to wonder if he should scream, decide against it as being too unmanly, as the pounding water sucked back past him, pummeling his frozen fingers. Brittle as twigs, they still held.
Albion
righted herself. Alfie’s feet touched the deck and he collapsed onto his knees, gasping, curling around the flickering core of heat deep in his chest. Panic swarmed in his lungs like a hive of wasps.
Breathe! Breathe, damn it!
Beneath him,
Albion
moved with the heavy, sluggish wallow of a ship filling with tons of seawater. Somewhere behind the reluctant spasm of his heart he could hear it, pouring in.
Move! Breathe! Sodding hell!
He heard running feet and shouts. Absurdly brave—bringing tears to his eyes—he even heard the tattoo of a marine drummer, beating out “all hands on deck.” Then more shouting and the pumps throbbed into life about the main mast. As he tried to gasp with relief, mouth open wide, a thick wooden bar smacked him across the back with enough force to break ribs. The hot, slicing pain jerked the breath out of his lungs and shocked his heart into hammering. He whooped in air, scrabbled to his feet, found John—the wooden bar in hand—pulling him up by the elbow. John was all diamond; sharp and brilliant as he had been in Algiers, and Alfie stood trembling in front of him, feeling rescued all over again.
“You’re perished with the cold. Go below and stand to the pumps for a watch.”
“I can….” The arctic wind blasted his soaked clothes. They grayed over with hoar-frost even as he dithered, but his toes and fingers felt warm as they hadn’t been for weeks.
“Help,”
he was going to say, but John had already run past and jammed the bar into the capstan, shouting as he worked.
“Launch and pinnace crew! Row out the small anchors. Find a crevice on the iceberg and get them jammed in hard. Everyone who isn’t on the pumps to the capstans! We’ll winch her up onto the ice until we can float her again. Look lively! She’s sinking beneath your feet!”
Alfie tried to turn to run below, but found his limbs heavy. As he stood, frozen to the spot, a white mass, impossibly warm, settled about his shoulders. He pulled it close with clumsy fingers.
“I think we are ever so slightly superfluous,” said Gillingham, shivering without his fur. “But a turn on the pumps will free up more able hands. Shall we?”
They stumbled down into the relative warmth of the gundeck. A lantern’s light picked out the group of twelve men left to man the pumps, all of them anonymously swaddled in layers of blankets and hats. Alfie could not stop the chattering of his teeth long enough to speak, but laid a hand on the shoulder of the man turning the handle in its round casing. He moved inwards to make room and Alfie set his hands to the pole, picked up the rhythm without a break. The chain rattled up its long wooden casing, sucked the water up with it, out of the hold in great gouts like blood through a vein until it burst gushing over the sides at a rate of a ton a minute.
Despite the triumphant spewing of the pumps, a knocking came from directly beneath Alfie’s feet. He could feel the impact through his soles, as the contents of the orlop deck, barrels from the hold, even bodies no doubt, rose with the flood to drive themselves against the planks of the deck below him. Flaws in the caulking began to well with freezing water. They had started pumping in the dry. Now it was damp underfoot.
As Alfie pumped his heartbeat thinned, strained, and then steadied. His petrified muscles ached and tore, burning like branding irons. Trying not to whimper, he drove himself on by willpower alone. Gasping for breath, he threw off the fur. Two of the men waiting in line to take over snatched it and huddled inside. Gillingham reeled away, clutching at his chest, and collapsed on one of the cannons. Wordlessly, Alfie gestured for the next man in line to take his place.
A bubbling noise came from the stairwell and a wash of icy water lifted over the ridge of it and splashed against their shoes.
“It’s still rising!” wept the cook. Despite his wooden leg, he clambered nimbly enough onto the galley table, and thence to the top of the coppers, which still retained a faint heat from yesterday’s supper. “It’s coming up! Pouring in twice as fast as we’re flushing it out. The pumps ain’t good enough! God preserve us, we’ve got maybe ten minutes to live, lads. Maybe five!”
“None of that!” Alfie bellowed, feeling the panic as if it was his own. He’d started out his naval career on the lower decks and felt its clannish comfort still, deeper in his blood than the cold honor and duty of an officer. But if he gave into the group now, they would all die in screaming, irrational terror. “Let’s have a third man here to replace me. Alright, Jack Grady, you clap onto this, and we’ll see if we can do better. We’re not sunk yet!”
It was bravado, pure and simple. He could feel the rising water around his toes as well as the rest of them, but
damn it!
Five more minutes and John’s hair-brained solution might be in place. Five minutes more and they might not have to die at all. He pumped harder, watching Grady leaning in, preparing to hand over the plunging bar to a new man. As he did so, the cook’s mate—a Chinaman the crew had affectionately named Sung Flat—darted forward, grabbed Alfie’s pistol from his belt and leveled it, trembling, at Alfie’s face. Grady crowded away, jostling his neighbor, and the pump’s rhythm slackened as they flinched from the barrel of the gun.
Gillingham, still clutching the cannon and wheezing, raised his head. “Now, now, um…Sung. You—”
“You open spirit room now! Dying men, we have right to last drink. We have right to go out happy! Custom of the sea, neh?”
Alfie straightened up and curtly gestured to the next man to take his turn at the pump. The man rubbed his hand across a bald head, replaced his knitted cap and said “Yeah, but he’s right. Custom of the service, ain’t it? I’d pump if there was some kind of point to it, but there ain’t. We’re all gonna die. Now or ten minutes later, what’s it matter? We wants the rum, sir. You ain’t gonna make us go sober, is you?”
Terror and fury mixed like ice and fire in Alfie’s head, so intense they overwhelmed his ability to feel anything, left him in a kind of ruthless, focused calm. Tilting his head to one side, Alfie crossed his arms. “Go ahead and pull the trigger, Sung. And you, Bill Murray, you’ll look fine hanging on the end of a noose as a mutineer. The rest of you, pump or drown.”
“Who are you t’give us orders anyways, Alfie Donwell? You ain’t no gentleman and you’s only an officer cos you sucked the—”
Never had it felt better to punch a man straight on the nose— to feel the cartilage burst and flatten beneath the blow. Murray slipped and fell backwards into the inch of water that now covered the gundeck. In the splash, the momentary distraction, Alfie slammed the heel of his hand into Sung’s extended elbow, caught his pistol as it fell from the man’s slackened grip, and cocked it, turning back to watch his audience. The men at the pump labored on, unaware of anything but the next push. Gillingham pushed himself upright, his face clotted purple, his eyes half shut. The group waiting their turn at the pump regarded Alfie with wary eyes.
“I reckon that powder’s soused as a hog’s face,” muttered someone from the back. “An anyroad he’s only got one shot. If we was all to rush him….”
As certain as the shadowed speaker that the pistol’s powder was wet enough to be useless, Alfie dropped it to the flooded floor. He drew his sword. Water sloshed about his ankles as he eased
en garde
trying, desperately, to retain that balance of calm; not to snap and lash out for no better reason than that he was seething.
This is such madness!
“You’ve all seen me fight, lads. If you rush me, you
will
die
,
carved up into bite-sized pieces. Pump and you may yet live. Work hard enough, and I may forget this conversation ever happened at all.”
The men on the pump had not been relieved since this standoff developed. Now they had begun to reach the limits of their strength. Jack Grady’s neighbor faltered, fainted, slid to the floor. As the chain slowed, the uprush of water surged perceptibly higher. Alfie hit the next man in line with the flat of his sword. “Get to work!” he ordered, just as the mutterer at the back—one Ephraim Gross—leaned down to pick up the handspike by his cannon.
The air stank of bilge-water and terror. “You’ll doom us all, Gross.” Alfie kept his voice calm despite the raging frustration, thought about how John would handle this, and lowered his sword. “Didn’t you hear Mr. Cavendish? We need only pump until we are anchored to the island. That is going forward
now
. God knows I share the need for a drink. Any man that can pace me on the pumps I’ll buy a double round when we get back to Kingston, but I don’t drink with mutineers.”
“What’s the point? We’re gonna die!”
“We are
not
—”
Albion
lurched sideways, her timbers creaking. As Alfie caught his balance and slid his sword into its scabbard, the clashing twang of the anchor chains pulling taut rang down from above. The men on the pumps faltered, and in the sudden hush he caught the sound of stamping feet, and a lone fiddle playing “Row Well Ye Mariners”above the rumbling creak of the capstan.
With a thud, the ship’s hull touched something solid to starboard. The pumps stood silent, but the water no longer rose.
It’s working! By God,
Alfie thought, incredulous,
it really is working!
“
Now
we can stop pumping. Everyone to the capstan, if you please.”