The best and smartest thing she could do would be to find a place to hide, curl up there as small and out of the way as she could, and wait for it to end. But she didn’t, because she couldn’t think of any place on the ship that would be safe from the thunder, from the pounding of cannonballs that could rip through the thickest wood.
Then there was the screaming.
Members of the crew had fallen. Some of them picked themselves up; others didn’t, but instead writhed and moaned, clutching their heads or arms. Blood spilled from them. Again, blood soaked into the nice clean deck she’d spent so much time scrubbing. Jenks had a gash on his face, but he didn’t seem to notice; he kept going from mast to mast, shouting up at crewmen working the sails, trying to keep the ship moving.
In the middle of the deck, a young sailor named Saul tried to pick himself up, but he couldn’t. Even through the smoke and the haze, Jill could see the bleeding wound in his arm and the splintered bone showing through skin. She didn’t have a job, not in the middle of all this, and she didn’t know what else to do, so she ran to him.
Stumbling to a crouch beside him, she grabbed his good arm and propped him up. “Don’t move. Your arm’s broken.”
He looked at the wounded arm, maybe for the first time, then turned his gaze skyward, wincing. “Oh Jesus!”
“It’s going to be okay, we can go someplace safe, belowdecks.” Away from where the cannons were roaring and the ship was splintering around them. Cannons rumbled on wooden wheels against the deck, sparks flew, the stench of sulfur choked away the good air, and Tennant’s shouting echoed. The deck was roasting, heat radiating from the iron cannons. Many of the men who worked the cannons went shirtless, and their skin gleamed with sweat.
“I fell, fell off the yard. Stupid!” Saul said around gritted teeth.
She had thought of him as just another one of the crew, one of the rough and snarling pirates, barefoot, with worn clothes and a mocking attitude. Close to him, though, seeing his face tense and lined with pain, she saw that he was maybe even as young as her and Henry. They were all young.
Getting him belowdecks might not be the right thing to do, but she couldn’t think of anything better, so she pulled his arm over her shoulder and urged him to his feet.
“You! Girl!” A new voice was shouting at her. She looked back, twisting to see over her shoulder, and there was Emory, the surgeon. Someone had untied him. He had his own injured man, Martin, his face covered with blood, propped up next to him. “Bring him here! Quickly!” He gestured down the steps.
She helped her injured man stumble over to follow Emory into the depths. They took the stairs carefully, Jill trying to balance both her charge and herself while barely being able to see. The lower deck was dark as a cave after the light and noise of the battle.
Emory led them around the steps into a relatively clear space along the prow. There were already two other men lying there, cradling limbs, covered in blood, moaning. A pair of lanterns hung from the beam overhead. They swung on their pegs, throwing dancing shadows over them all, making the scene even stranger.
“Put him down there,” Emory said, depositing his own burden against a bulkhead. The surgeon looked at her and her injured sailor, and frowned. “God, what a mess. You, go back up and bring down anyone else.”
There wasn’t anything like a hospital here, not even a table or a basin of water. She didn’t know what Emory could do to help them. With a sick feeling in her gut, she realized that maybe he couldn’t do anything, and they were bringing the men here to die, out of everyone’s way.
She ran back up and looked for the next injured crewman.
Cooper still yelled orders, commanding the ship to move, to give chase to the Heart’s Revenge, which had now turned, managing to catch a wind that carried it away from the Diana. They’d unfurled sails, speeding their escape. Jill couldn’t tell how badly they’d been damaged, if at all; the other ship seemed perfectly functional. On the other hand, the Diana wasn’t responding to the captain’s orders. It might have been because there wasn’t enough crew standing to carry them out, but that didn’t seem to be the case because there were certainly enough people running around the deck and shouting.
When Jill looked up to the canopy of ropes and sails that was the Diana’s engine, she saw death. Cut and burned lines swung free, useless. Sails drooped from broken yards, slumping across masts and rigging. One of the smaller sails—Jill tried to remember its name, one of the triangular sails tied off to the bowsprit—was still trimmed, spread and ready for action. But it wasn’t enough to move them forward with any speed. It caught the air and sent them slowly downwind.
Captain Cooper leaned over the side, screaming at her adversary, no matter that he couldn’t hear. “That’s it, run like the scurvy worm you are, you couldn’t board me and face me down like a real man because you’re a worm! A craven worm! Dirt under my shoe, Blane, wretched dirt under my shoe!” And so on, with hardly a breath between curses.
The air began to clear, and Jill’s legs turned soft, rubbery. She sat heavily on the deck, right where she was, under a shattered piece of mast and next to a smear of blood. Tipping her head back, she studied the changed landscape of the rigging. What had been smooth and arcing sail, taut rope, a functional pattern, was now chaos. The broken sails seemed tired, and the severed ropes swung back and forth, lazy and purposeless.
“Chain shot,” Henry said. He slumped down beside her, his legs folding as bonelessly as hers had. She looked at him blankly. Nodding toward the wounded rigging, he explained, “They weren’t trying to kill us dead. They weren’t firing all cannonballs. They fired chain through the rigging to rip it all to pieces. So they could get away without us following them. Bloody curs.”
“What now?” Jill said. She thought she knew the answer: Wasn’t much else they could do but fix the sails and rigging, repair the ship, bandage the wounded, and continue on.
Henry shook his head. “Captain’s taking this personal. The crew might have a say about that if she’s not careful.”
Captain Cooper had run out of curses, though it had taken her awhile. Now she leaned one hand on the side and watched the Heart’s Revenge race away. The ship had receded back to the size of a toy bobbing on the horizon.
After the last hour, Jill was likely to approach any fight with Blane personally as well.
“Is it always like this? Every time you fight with another ship?”
His grin went crooked. “We hardly ever fight. That’s the trick. This…this is something else. There’s a war been brewing between the two captains. Since before my time here.”
“It’s not worth it. It can’t be,” she said. “Getting shot to pieces by cannonballs, spending the rest of the time waiting to be shot, dying here in a bleeding mess a million miles from anywhere.”
“Everyone dies, see,” Henry said. “I could do it here among friends, or on a merchant ship with a ruddy bastard for a captain getting whipped every day of my life. It’s worth it to me.”
She didn’t agree. Slumping back, she blinked up into the limp sails.
“Hey there, you’re hurt,” Henry said, and touched her arm.
Jill flinched away reflexively, skittish. But she looked down and saw her arm for the first time. It was bleeding. She hadn’t noticed it and couldn’t remember how it had happened. A gash sliced across her left bicep, tearing off half the sleeve of her shirt and biting into the flesh underneath. The wound gaped open and poured blood down her arm. Something must have cut it open when she fell, or some piece of flying debris must have knocked into her. How could she not have felt it happen?
Stress, adrenaline, distraction. Even now, looking at the split skin, it didn’t really hurt. But she suddenly wanted to faint as her stomach flipped over.