'Captain,' she said with no trace of coquetry, 'can you not say something to him, issue some order?'
Hawkwood followed her gaze and saw what seemed to be a trio of master's mates high in the fore topmast shrouds. Frowning, he realised that one of them was Bleyn, and his two companions were beckoning him yet higher.
'Gribbs, Ordio!' he bellowed at once. 'On deck, and see master Bleyn down with you!'
The young men halted in their ascent, and then began to retrace their steps with the swiftness of long practice.
'Handsomely, handsomely there, damn you!', and they moderated their pace.
'Thank you, Captain,' Jemilla said, honest relief in her face. Then she swallowed and her hand went to her mouth.
'You had best get below, lady.' She left the quarterdeck, weaving across the pitching deck as though she were drunk. One of the quartermasters lent her his arm at a nod from Hawkwood and saw her down the companionway. Hawkwood felt a small, unworthy sense of satisfaction as she went. This was his world, where he commanded and she was not much more than baggage. He had seen her a few times at court in recent years, a high-born aristocrat who deemed it charity when she deigned to notice his existence. The tables had been turned, it seemed. She was a refugee dependent on him for the safety of her son and herself. There was satisfaction to be had in her current discomfort, and she was not so alluring with that pasty puking look about her.
She will gain no hold on me, Hawkwood promised himself. Not on this voyage.
The wind was picking up, and the Seahare was pitching before it like an excited horse, great showers of spray breaking over her forecastle and travelling as far aft as the waist. Hawkwood grasped the mizzen backstay and felt the tension in the cable. He would have to shorten sail if this kept up, but for now he wanted to wring every ounce of speed he could out of the blessed wind.
'Arhuz, another man to the wheel, and brail up the mizzen-course.'
'Aye, sir. Prepare to shorten sail! You there, Jorth, get on up that yard and leave the damn landlubber to make his own way. This is not a nursery.'
The landlubber in question was Bleyn. He managed a creditable progress up the waist to the quarterdeck until he stood dripping before Hawkwood, his face wind-reddened and beaming.
'Better than a good horse!' he shouted above the wind, and Hawkwood found himself grinning at the boy. He was game, if nothing else.
'Get yourself below, Bleyn, and change your clothes. And look in on your mother. She is taken poorly.'
'Aye, sir!' Hawkwood watched him go with an inexplicable ache in his breast.
'He seems a fine young fellow. I wonder he was not presented at court,' Isolla said. Hawkwood had momentarily forgotten about her.
'You too might be better below, lady. It's apt to become a trifle boisterous on deck.'
'I do not mind. I seem to have become accustomed to the movement of the ship at last, and the air is like a tonic'
Her eyes sparkled. She was no beauty, but there was a strength, a wholeness about her that informed her features and somehow invited the same openness in return. Only the livid scar down one side of her face jarred. It did not make her ugly in Hawkwood's eyes, but he was reminded of his debt to her every time he saw it.
What am I become, he thought, some kind of moonstruck youngster? There was something in him which responded to all three of his passengers in different ways, but he would sooner jump overboard than try to delve further than that. Thank God for the ceaseless business of the ship to keep his thoughts occupied.
He recalled the chart below to his mind as easily as some men might recall a passage from an oft-read book. If he kept to this course he would, in mariner's terms, shave the south-west tip of Gabrion by some ten or fifteen leagues. That was all very well, but if the southerlies started up out of Calmar he would not have much leeway to play with. And then, to play for more sea room would mean eating up more time. Two days perhaps.
The figures and angles came together in his head. He felt Isolla watching him curiously but ignored her. The crew did not approach him. They knew what he was about, and knew he needed peace to resolve it in his mind.
'Hold this course,' he said to Arhuz at last. What Bleyn had said had tipped the scales. They could not be profligate with time. He would have to chance the southerlies and gain leeway by whatever small shifts he could. The decision left his mind clear again, and the tension left the deck. He studied the sail plan. The lateens on fore and main were drawing well for now. He would let them remain until the wind began to veer, if it did at all. No need to call all hands. The watch below might snore on undisturbed in their hammocks.
'Bosun!' he thundered. 'Belay the swaying up of the square yards. We'll stick to the lateens for now. Take down those tackles.'
He stood there on the quarterdeck as the crew took to the mizzen shrouds and began to fight for fistful after fistful of the booming mizzen course, tying it up in a loose bunt on the yard. The Seahare's motion grew a little less violent, but as Hawkwood watched the sea and the clouds closely he realised that the weather was about to worsen. A squall was approaching out of the west; he could see the white line of its fury whipping up the already stiffening swell, whilst above the water the cloud bunched and darkened and came on like some purposeful titan, its underside flickering with buried lightning.
He and Arhuz looked at one another. There was something disquieting about the remorseless speed of the line of broken water.
'Where in the world did that come from?' Arhuz asked wonderingly.
'All hands!' Hawkwood bellowed. 'All hands on deck! Arhuz, take in fore and main, and make it quick.' The off-duty watch came tumbling up the companionways from below, took one look at the approaching tempest, and began climbing the shrouds, yawning and shaking the sleep out of their heads.
'Is there something the matter, Captain?' Isolla asked.
'Go below, lady.' Hawkwood's tone brooked no argument, and she obeyed him without another word.
The mizzen was brailed up and the maincourse was in, but the men were still fighting to tie up the thumping canvas of the forecourse when the squall reached them.
In the space of four minutes it grew dark, a rain-swept, heaving twilight in which the wind howled and the lightnings exploded about their heads. The squall smote the Seahare on the starboard quarter and immediately knocked her a point off course. Hawkwood helped the two helmsmen fight the wicked jerking of the wheel and as the thick, warm rain beat on their right cheeks they watched the compass in the binnacle and by main strength turned one point, then two and then three points until the beakhead pointed east-north-east and the ship was running before the wind.
Only then could Hawkwood lift his gaze. He saw that the forecourse had broken free from the men on the yard and was flying in great, flapping rags, the heavy canvas creating havoc in the forestays, ripping ropes and splintering timber as far forward as the jib boom. Even as he watched, the sailors managed to cut the head of the sail free of the yard, and it took off like some huge pale bird and vanished into the foaming darkness ahead.
The Seahare was shipping green water over her forecastle, and it flooded down the waist as the bow rose, knocking men off their feet and smashing through the companion doorway and thus flooding the cabins aft. Hawkwood found himself staring at slate-grey, angry sky over the bowsprit, and then as the ship's stern rose the waves soared up like dark, foam-tipped phantoms and came choking and crashing over the bow again.
Arhuz was setting up lifelines and double-frapping the boats on the booms. Hawkwood shouted in the ear of the senior helmsman, 'Thus, very well thus.' The man's reply was lost in the roar of wave and wind, but he was nodding his head. Hawkwood made his way down into the waist as carefully as a man negotiating a cliff face in a gale. The turtle deck was shedding the green seas admirably, but they had surmounted the storm-sills of the companionways and he could feel the extra weight of water in the ship, rendering her stiffer and thus more likely to bury her bowsprit. It was a following sea now, and thank God the xebec was not square-sterned like most ships he had sailed and thus the waves which the wind was flinging at them slid under her counter without too much trouble. Hawkwood found himself admiring his sleek vessel, and her winsome eagerness to ride the monstrous swells.
'She swims well!' he shouted in Arhuz's ear. The Merduk grinned, his teeth a white flash in his dark face. 'Aye sir, she was always a willing ship.'
'We need men on the pumps, though, and those hatchway tarpaulins are working loose. Get Chips on deck to batten them down.'
'Aye, sir.' Arhuz hauled himself aft with the aid of the just-rigged lifelines.
It was the lack of heavy broadside guns that helped, Hawkwood realised. The weight of a couple of dozen culverins on deck raised the centre of gravity of a ship and made her that much less seaworthy. It was the difference between a man jogging with a pack on his back, and one running unencumbered. The xebec was running before the wind with only a brailed-up mizzen course to propel her, but her speed was remarkable. Perhaps too remarkable. A vision of the chart still pinned to his table below decks floated into his mind. They were steering directly for the ironbound western coast of Gabrion now, and there was not a safe landfall to be made there for many leagues in any direction; the promontories of that land loomed out to sea like the unforgiving ravelins of a fortress. They must turn aside if they were not to be flung upon the coast and smashed to matchwood. Hawkwood closed his eyes as the water foamed around his knees. A northerly course was the safer bet. Once they were around that great rocky peninsula known as the Gripe, they would find anchorages aplenty on Gabrion's flatter northern shores. But it would mean giving up on the southern route. They would then be committed to a passage of the Malacar Straits, the one thing he had tried so hard to avoid.
He opened his eyes and stared at the lowering sky again. Sudden squalls such as this were unusual but by no means unknown in the Hebrian Sea. Mostly they were quick to pass, a brief, chaotic maelstrom most dangerous in the first few minutes. But every horizon was dark now, and the sun had disappeared. This squall would blow for a day or two at least. The southern passage was too risky. He cursed silently. They would have to go north as soon as the ship could bear it.
He blinked rain out of his eyes. For a moment— And then he was sure. He had seen something up there against the dark racing clouds, a shadow or group of shadows moving with the wind. His blood ran cold. He stood staring with wide eyes, but saw nothing more than the galloping clouds, the flicker of the lightning, and the shifting silver curtain of the rain.
His cabin was swimming in at least a foot of water which sloshed back and forth with the pitch of the ship. A hooded lantern set in gimbals still burned feebly and he opened its slot to give himself more light, then bent over the chart and picked up the dividers. Navigating by dead-reckoning, with a rocky shore to leeward and the ship running full tilt towards it before the wind. A mariner's nightmare. He wiped salt water out of his eyes and forced himself to concentrate, estimating the ship's speed and plotting out her course. The results of his calculations made him whistle soundlessly, and he tossed down the dividers with something like anger. There was nothing natural about this squall, of that he was now sure. It had reared up out of a clear sky at just the right moment, and was meant to wreck them on the rocks of Gabrion. It would blow until its work was done. 'Bastards.'
He roused out a bottle of brandy and gulped from the neck, feeling the good spirit kindle his innards, wondering if the xebec could stand a change of course to the north. The wind would be square on the larboard beam then, trying to capsize her. The decision had to be made soon. With every passing minute they were running off their leeway, thundering ever closer to that killer coast.
A knock on the door of his cabin. It stood open, swinging back and forth with the pressure of the water that sloshed underfoot. He did not turn around, and was unsurprised to hear Isolla's voice, somewhat hoarse.
'Captain, may I speak to you?'
'By all means.' He sucked from the neck of the brandy bottle again as though inspiration might be found therein.
'How long do you suppose this storm will endure? The mariners seem very concerned.'
Hawkwood smiled. 'I've no doubt they are, lady.' The lurch of the ship sent Isolla thumping against the door jamb. Hawkwood steadied her with one hand. Her cloak was sodden and cold. She was as soaked as he was.
‘I believe the Himerians have found us,' Hawkwood said at last. 'It is they who have conjured up this squall. It's not violent enough to threaten the ship - not yet - but it is making us go where we do not want to go.' He gestured to the chart, which was wrinkling with wet. 'If I cannot change course very soon we will run full tilt on to the rocks of Gabrion. They timed their weather-working well.'