One of the cable's three fat strands burst under his blade and unscrewed itself—he felt it slacken under his cheek, for he was gripping the cable between his head and shoulder, and felt the other two strands stretch and bleat as they took the load. He had no idea what might be going on twelve feet above. The galleot must be approaching, but it made no appreciable noise. Then there was a stifled thump, felt more than heard. He flinched, thinking it was the sound of the collision, and bubbles erupted from his nostrils. His eyes were still closed in the black water, and he was seeing phantasms: poor Dick Shaftoe being pulled up out of the Thames ankle-first. Was this how Dick's last moments had been? But such thoughts had to be banished. Instead he conjured up van Hoek on the roof of the banyolar weeks ago, saying: "When we are some ten fathoms away from the brig I'll strike the big drum once—just before we collide, twice. You'll hear this, and with any luck so will the Vagabonds ashore, so they can make more noise for a few moments—"
Jack sawed viciously at the cable and felt the yarns of the second strand spraying outwards like rays from the sun. He sensed the hull of the galleot over his head all of a sudden and felt real panic knowing it stretched, an impenetrable bulwark, between him and air. At once came two thuds of the drum. He hacked at the cable's one remaining strand and finally felt it explode in his hand like a bursting musket, the crack swallowed up in an incomparably vaster sound: a grinding drawn-out crunch like giants biting down on trees. The cut end of the cable snapped upwards and lashed him across the shoulder. But it did not whip round his neck, as had happened in many nightmares of recent months.
Something hard and smooth was pushing against the skin of Jack's back—the hull-planks of the galleot! He could not tell up from down. But those clinkers were lapped one over the next like shingles, and by reading their edges with one hand he knew instantly which way was down towards the keel, and which was up towards the waterline. Swimming, fighting his own buoyancy that wanted to stick him against the hull, he finally broke the surface and whooped in air, baying like a hound.
Above he heard shouting and panic, but no gunfire. That was good, it meant that the brig's officers had recognized them as the feckless rug-merchants seen earlier today, and not jumped to the conclusion that they were under attack. The Corsairs had lit lanterns up and down the length of the galleot shortly before the collision, so that Spaniards running up from belowdecks, rubbing sleep out of their eyes, would be presented with the reassuring sight of oarsmen who were still safely in chains, and free crew members who were unarmed and disorganized.
The galleot drifted away from Jack, or rather he drifted away from it. He squirmed round in the water to face the hull of the brig, which was onrushing—or rather the current was sweeping Jack toward it. And this was the single most terrifying moment of the Plan. The hull was angled up out of the water at the stem, to ride over waves, but it would ride over swimmers as easily. It was already blotting out the stars. The current would drive him underneath it if he did not gain some sort of purchase on it first. He would in effect be keel-hauled, and might or might not emerge a few minutes later, alive or dead, flayed by the carapace of barnacles that the brig had grown on her hull during her long Atlantic passage.
He had the means to save himself: a pair of boarding axes, taken out of the chain-barrel earlier. These looked like hatchets with long handles and small heads. Projecting out of the back of the head was a sharp curved pick, like a parrot's beak. Jack got a grip on one of these, twisted it round in his hand so it would strike pick-first, and wound up to assault the brig's hull. But the weight of his arm and of the axe drove the rest of him, including his head, under the surface. Drifting blind, he caught the hull on his chest and face. The barnacles dug into his skin like fish-hooks and the current knocked his legs out from under him, plastering his entire body up against the hull below the waterline. As a final, feeble gesture, the pick of his boarding axe might have pecked at the hull, a foot or so above water. But it found no purchase there. After a few moments he slipped down farther, the barnacles scoring his thighs, stomach, chest, and face as the current forced him under.
This was it, then: the exact keel-hauling he had worried about. He slipped again and the boarding axe tried to jerk itself out of his grasp. It must have caught on something—perhaps the edge of a single barnacle, or a caulked gap between planks. He pulled on it and it held for a moment, then started to break loose; its grip on the hull was not firm enough to pull his head up out of the water. But he had a second boarding axe that was trailing on a neck-rope and bumping uselessly against the hull. As Jack had nothing else to occupy the time while he was being flayed and drowned, he pawed water until he got a grip on that boarding axe, then brought it back, fighting that damned current, and drove it into the hull as hard, and as high, as he could. A sharp crunch of barnacle-shells was followed by the sweet thunk of iron driving into wood. Jack pulled with both hands, now, then brought the first axe away and struck with it, and finally managed to get his face up through the roiling crest of the bow-wave. He drew half a breath of air and half of water, but it was enough. Two more vicious strikes with the boarding axes brought his head and chest up out of the water. He wrapped the axes' braided tethers round his wrists and hung there for a minute or two, just breathing.
BREATHING SEEMED INFINITELY MORE FINE and more momentous than anything that could possibly be going on around him, but after a while the novelty wore off and he began to wake up and to take stock of his situation.
The lights along the shore were gone, which meant that they were adrift in the channel as planned. Probably they were still gliding past the no man's land between Bonanza and Sanlúcar de Barrameda. And yet the brig was still pointed upstream and her anchor cables were still stretched taut, because of that heavy chain she was dragging along the river-bottom. A person on the brig, preoccupied with having just been collided with by a rug-galleot, might not notice the drift.
Abovedecks, which might have been a different continent for all it mattered to Jack, some kind of acrid discussion was going on between Mr. Foot and a Spaniard (Jack assumed it was the ranking officer on the brig). The latter seemed to think that he was greatly humiliating Mr. Foot before his crew by lecturing to him on certain elementary facts about how properly to anchor a ship in an estuary. Mr. Foot, far from being embarrassed, was doing his best to elongate the argument by almost but not quite understanding everything that the other said. His ability to misapprehend even the simplest declarations had been driving his acquaintances into frenzies of annoyance for years. Finally he had discovered a practical use for it.
Meanwhile the oarsmen on the galleot were putting on a great show of indolence, very gradually getting themselves settled into position to row away from the brig. But certain decorative encrustations on the galleot's high stern had become entangled in supremely functional matters on the brig's bowsprit, such as the martingale (a spar projecting vertically downwards from about the middle of the bowsprit) and the stays that held it in place. The disentanglement of the two vessels took some time, and was noisy, which was good because a few yards away the Cabal was hard at work doing things that, in other circumstances, would have waked the dead.
The brig had a sort of blind spot (or so they hoped) around her stempost. The stempost was nothing more than the foremost part of the keel, where it broke out of the water and slanted up to support the figurehead, the bowsprit, and the railing around the ship's head. This part of the ship was made for dashing against the sea as she fought through weather, and so was devoid of complications such as hatches and ports, which tended to be weak and leaky. Furthermore it was sharply undershot, and difficult to see from the deck above. One could get a clear look at it only by going to the head, kneeling down, and thrusting one's head down and out through the shite-hole (which had been deemed unlikely by the architects of the Plan) or by clambering out onto the bowsprit to work the rigging associated with the spritsails. Those sails would not come into use tonight, but this posed a danger nonetheless, as several seamen had gone out there to work on the disentanglement.