“Right, now, Tom, you goes first, ’n’ I’ll be right behind you.”
Bowyer stepped aside, and there was nothing now before Kydd but the main shrouds leading up to a final focus – the big platform of the main fighting top.
He addressed himself to the venture. The thick shrouds soaring up had thin lines across them to form a ladder. He began to climb, feet feeling shakily for the thin rope, looking obediently upward.
“Don’t put yer hands on the ratlines,” Bowyer called from below him, “use the shrouds – they’ll never give way on yer.”
Kydd had a brief but intense picture of the thinner line snapping in his clutching hands, letting him hurtle backwards to his doom. Nervously he moved to grip tightly the thick black vertical shrouds, shiny with use.
Despite himself, he became aware of his increasing height, the shrouds on the other side getting closer, the deck dropping away below. He continued upward, foot finding the next ratline above while he hung on grimly; a push upward and a pause at the new level while his other foot relocated; then moving his hands gingerly one by one.
He knew he was not moving efficiently, but at least he was safe like that. His leg muscles burned with fatigue and he stopped for a moment to rest.
The shrouds shivered and Bowyer appeared on the broad span of shrouds next to him.
“I’m fine, Joe,” Kydd said.
“Yeah – but watch that feller over there.” Bowyer was pointing to the opposite ratlines. A seaman was mounting the shrouds in a fast, economic swing. “See how he uses his hands to pull himself up, only rests his feet. Doesn’t go at it like he was climbin’ stairs.”
Kydd watched the graceful continuity of the sailor’s movements; a fluid motion he could now sense was achieved by hauling forcefully on alternate hands, the feet just following. He tried it; the transfer of effort to the hands felt awkward at first, but he could feel the potential for a more connected movement. He persevered, his concentration on the required actions diverting his mind from his situation.
The main top approached with a reality it never had from the deck, foursquare and solid, with a big lanthorn rearing up oddly from the after edge. His arms ached. He knew now where the best seamen got their deep chests. Stopping for a breather, he idly looked down.
It was a mistake. What he saw was an ugly distortion – an impossibly narrow deck on which the people moving about it had become flattened, elongated disks, their feet blipping out in front of them like penguins’.
But what was so hard to take was the sheer vertigo of being at a killing height while clinging halfway up a vertical surface. Animal instinct made him freeze, pinned helplessly somewhere between heaven and earth. He clung fiercely, his eyes closed.
A shaking in the shrouds told him that Bowyer had arrived next to him. Whatever Bowyer said, Kydd vowed to himself that he would not release his hold. Perhaps Bowyer could work some rescue plan to lower him to the deck on a rope.
“Bit of a hard beat to wind’d, first time aloft,” Bowyer mused. “Um, ever you gets in the situation you needs yer bearings fast. What I does, I looks at where I’m at first.” He waited. “These here shrouds, Tom, very curious ropes. See here, they’ve got four strands, not yer usual three. And they’re laid up with the sun, not like your anchor cable, which you may’ve noticed is laid up agin the sun.”
Kydd allowed his eyes to slit open. Inches before his eyes was one of the shrouds, ordinary enough in itself, a stout rope several inches thick. It was tarred but this close he could see every microscopic detail of where it had been whitened by the weather. On impulse, he pressed his face to it, feeling its sturdy roughness against his skin and smelling the rich odor of tar and sea salt.
“’N’ up there, you gets a good view of the catharpins. You c’n see there, Tom, how we use ’em to bowse in the shrouds – keeps the lee rigging well in when yer ship rolls.”
Taking no chances, Kydd moved his gaze slowly upward, following the line of shrouds to where they disappeared into a large hole in the black underneath of the top.
“Get a move on, you heavy-arsed dogs!” Elkins’s impatient bawl carried up clearly. It only served to make Kydd hold on tighter.
“Shall we go a bit farther, matey?” Bowyer said, inching a little higher.
Kydd willed the movement, but it stalled in a backwash of fear.
At that moment into his consciousness seeped an awareness of angels. It was a pure sound that enveloped his soul. He listened, enraptured. It was a light tenor, and it soared so sweetly that he could swear it belonged to the upper celestial regions.
Life is chequr’d-toil and pleasure
Fill one up the various measure;
Hark! the crew with sunburnt faces
Chanting Black-eyed Susan’s graces…
Bowyer chuckled. “That’ll be Ned Doud. Quite th’ songbird is our Ned. Let’s go visit, Tom.”
The spell had been broken. With his heart in his mouth, Kydd followed Bowyer up.
They passed under the shadow of the great fighting top, then up through the large aperture next to the mast and its complexity of massive jeer blocks and heavy rope seizings, to emerge onto the platform of the top itself.
“Well, Joe,” said Doud happily, “never thought to see you come up by the lubber’s hole.” He was sitting cross-legged, making a plaited bunt gasket using his own fox yarns.
“Came up to see what the noise was, did we not, shipmate?” Bowyer said, but Kydd had taken a deep breath and was looking about him in giddy exhilaration.
The maintop was impressive – it could take twenty men comfortably on its decked surface, and was bounded at the after end by a rail and nettings, and on both sides by the next stage of shrouds stretching up to the topmast.
Cautiously Kydd got to his feet and went to the edge. Although it was only some seventy feet above the deck, it felt like a separate world, one of peace and solitude. Farther out there were more ships at anchor, and beyond a noticeable increase in the depth of the countryside.
“Bear a fist, will you, Ned, reevin’ the clewgarnet,” Bowyer asked.
He slipped out of sight over the side. Kydd went over to see him pass from a downward hanging position on the futtock shrouds to drop to the main yard, with the dull white canvas of the course carefully furled in a fine harbor stow above it. Bowyer lay over the yard before swinging down, his feet finding the footrope, and moved outward to where the clewgarnet blocks hung below the yard.
“Watch yer back, sailor!” Doud said, pushing past Kydd. He was watching the clewgarnet rise from below, suspended on a fly block next to the mainmast as it was hauled up by the laborers on deck. Feeling like a yokel on his first trip to town, Kydd admired the skill and cool assurance of the two as they worked, thoroughly at home in this unfathomable complication of spars and cordage.
At one point when Doud and Bowyer were both out on the yard they asked him to pass the clewgarnet down to its second stoppering on the hauling line, out to the blocks. This involved the team sharing the task of passing it along, right out to the end of the yard where the clew of the furled course now was, and bringing it back again to where it was clinched to the mainyard.
Kydd’s part was not onerous, but he had to move about the top and give his full attention to the whole picture. He sensed that this was no special task, but when they finally stepped down from the shrouds to the deck at last, he was elated. Nothing could have stopped his foolish laugh and the casual swagger.
Elkins was waiting. “So you knows a bit o’ sailorin’, then, Kydd – get below, my respects t’ the boatswain, and we needs a sky hook to sway up the kelson.”
Concentrating on the message, Kydd turned to go. “Where -?”
“Forrard on the orlop, you grass-combin’ bugger. Get goin’, sharpish like, we got work to do.”