‘Hands to braces!’ yelled Pierce suddenly. ‘Helm a’lee! Headsail sheets! Mainsail! Cast off, starboard – tail on, port! And haul! And haul, damn your arses, haul!’
Panic gripped me for a moment as overhead our own sails shivered, emptied and flapped; but then the yards creaked slowly around.
‘Going about – into the wind and onto another tack!’ hissed Mall. Our canvas boomed full again, and suddenly the Chorazin’s sails, still flailing, rose up from the side, not ahead. ‘For our broadside – or theirs –’
Then it came. ‘Starboard guns – as you bear – fire!’
Barely in time I clapped my hands to my ears, and squeezed my eyes tight shut. The thunder was here, it spoke and the whole ship thrummed to the mighty word. Orange fire danced through my eyelids. The deck heaved sharply beneath me, and I was suddenly enveloped in clouds of black smoke and stinging sparks. I was coughing and choking, and even under my hands my ears rang; I didn’t hear the next command, but felt the rumble as the guns were drawn back, and gingerly opened my eyes. Through streaks of scarlet I watched the gun crew slam the still smoking gun back against its tackle. The barrel hissed and belched steam as it was swabbed out with one quick thrust and twist of a wad of soaked rags on a pole. Then – very gingerly – bags of dusty-looking cloth were lifted from deep leather buckets and tipped into the gun mouth; these were the powder cartridges, and one speck still hot from the last shot could have sparked off a fearful accident. Broad wads of coarse fibre were thrust in to hold the charge, and rammed home with a heavy felt pad on the original ten-foot pole. Only then was the iron ball rolled in, looking absurdly small, wadded and rammed home in its turn. A simple enough operation; but it was done among suffocating smoke and hot metal, and literally in a second or two. The crew wove and skipped around each other with an absurd grace – drilled movements repeated at every gun, so the deck looked like some kind of weird dance, weird and deadly.
‘Run out!’ came Pierce’s command. ‘Train! Fire!’ Again the stunning thunder, again the surge as the Defiance heeled, the flame and the burning smoke. Ship, sails, everything vanished in the searing cloud; I couldn’t even see my own hands. And this was in the open air; the lower gundeck must be like some medieval vision of hell. Panic welled up in me, and a sudden desperate need to understand; I reached out blindly, and seized warm arms. The smoke flicked aside, and instead of Mall I found myself clutching a weird grinning urchin, her green eyes flashing in a soot-blackened face.
‘Mall!’ I shouted. ‘Are you really five hundred years old?’
The whites of her eyes showed as they rolled skyward. ‘Christ i’glory, man, what a time to be asking!’
‘I had to ask! You’re throwing away your life – and it’s because of me – you’re not really risking so much? Are you?’
She nodded soberly. ‘Aye, indeed. Such things are.’
‘God …’ I sagged.
She laughed softly. ‘Did I not say the measure of all things changes? All things, even hours and distance. Time’s what the Great Wheel turns on, the axle at the heart of the Hub – the stalk in the Core, if you will; men see it in many shapes. But break the bounds, fare outward, and the world grows wider. Well then, so also must its hours; for what are they but two sides of one cloth, cut to the same yardstick? As you voyage on one, so also in the other, back and forth. The farther you voyage, the less you settle, the lighter the hours’ hold upon you; and a wanderer, I. Here your span’s as much as you may win for yourself. And as much, maybe, as you may endure. Many fare wide and live long, yet drift back to their own in the end, trapped by a web they never quite shook off. Drift back, and forget. But not I, never!’ She scowled. ‘What was there for me, among the stews and the dens, the coney-catchers and cutgizzards? I wanted to live, to learn, to find better things – or bring them to be!’
With a yell from the crew and a rattle of chains the guns rumbled forward again. The gun captain snapped back the priming cover, and we both ducked and covered our ears as the glowing linstock struck down into the powder. This time, as I opened my eyes, the gun crews were capering and cheering.
‘Looks like we’ve hit something – God!’ I shook my head again. ‘Five hundred years already … You could have as much, more – yet you’re ready to stake it all on a damn-fool jaunt like this?’
‘Why not? What’s wealth, if you but hoard it and never use it? How long’d I love my life if I never staked it ’gainst a good cause? The longer you linger, the more you must risk yourself, to give your years meaning! It’s you, my bawchuck, with your few scant years behind you who’s risking more this night – and for the barest of friendships, it seems. If it were love now, I’d understand – but then you’ve never loved, have you?’
She checked, glanced up. I’d heard it too, a flat thudding sound like a nearby door slamming, very deep, and on its tail a sibilant, falling whistle; but even as I realized what it was, she threw us both to the deck. Just above our heads wood smashed and splintered, something snapped with a deep ringing twang, and the planks beneath us leaped to a rapid tattoo of appalling crashes.
‘– seems we’ve woken them –’ I heard her say in my ear, and then our guns erupted in answer, no longer in a salvo but a savage raking drumroll, firing the moment they were ready. I hardly realized what she meant. Crouched there behind the rail, juddering with every detonation, I felt strangely detached from the whole pandemonium. Half deafened, half blinded, scared stiff, but detached. Accidentally or deliberately, Mall had triggered off a worse turmoil in me.
Just why the hell was I so hot after Clare now? To rescue her, yes; but I’d hired a whole shipload of fighters who could all do the job better. Why was it so important to me to go along? I didn’t want to hang back, to seem a coward in this tough company – but they wouldn’t thank me for slowing them up, either. So why? What was I trying to prove? That I really could care for somebody?
I didn’t drop her … The hell I didn’t. It gets hard to live a lie when you’re looking down a cannon-mouth. You could say it strips you. Fear flicked away my masks, peeled back the varnish. Slowly, thoroughly, neatly, I’d ditched Jacquie – and about as coldly and cruelly as it could be done. I’d kept up appearances, let her down gently – for her sake, I’d liked to think; but mainly for mine. Sheer bloody windowdressing … had I always known that? I couldn’t tell. But for the first time I realized she must have known; I couldn’t have fooled her for a moment – any more than I’d fooled Mall. Then why on earth had Jacquie gone along with it, that pretence of a fading affair, of drifting apart?
For my sake. She’d gone on loving me, enough at least to let me keep my dignity when she could have destroyed it completely. To let me go on playing my part; because she saw how much I needed to, how empty I’d be without it. She’d loved me, all right. I’d betrayed her – and maybe also myself.
It was the past I saw glimmer through the gun-smoke, myself of the last few years. That disillusion, that creeping dishonesty I’d kept finding in my relationships, more and more often, poisoning them from within; when had I first begun to notice it? Not long after. Somehow nothing else had been the same, ever again, nothing – or no one. Till I’d shut away women in a separate compartment of my life, nice and safe and shallow. Why? Because I’d been too damn full of myself to realize what I held in the palm of my hand? Because I’d been idiot enough to cheat myself of it, to trade it away against some unspecified golden future? Dishonesty – some laugh. It’d been there all right; but it was in me.