He went below to see how the lorcha’s crew was faring. They had already found the stores and liquor. Those who were not drinking or eating were sleeping or trying to sleep.
The barometer read 29.1, still falling.
“Good God, that’s more than three tenths of an inch an hour,” the young lieutenant said. He was tail and fair. “Oh, by the way, Mr. Struan, I’m Lieutenant Vasserly-Smythe, R.N.”
Struan shook the offered hand.
“Thanks for giving us a berth.”
A north window burst open and rain and wind poured into the foyer. Three of the seamen slammed the window shut and relocked the shutters.
“I think I’ll take a look at my ship,” the lieutenant said.
“Better come this way.” Struan led him along a corridor to a side window that was heavily shuttered but in the lee of the north wind. He opened it warily and peered out.
He saw that
China Cloud and
Resting Cloud were riding easily. The lieutenant’s lorcha was rising and falling with the waves, creaking and grinding against the pilings, and to the east there was no horizon. Just blackness. And the blackness was bearing down on them.
“Your ship’s as safe as she’ll ever be, Lieutenant.”
“Yes.” The young man took a last frightened look at the eastern sky and bolted the shutters. “She’s my first command. I’ve only been in these waters a few months. What happens in a typhoon?”
“The Supreme Winds come out of the gale against you.”
“What’re they?”
“Gusts. Squalls. Sometimes they’re called the Devil Winds.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The first of the Supreme Winds swooped across the harbor an hour later and fell on
Resting Cloud. Her hawsers snapped and she was adrift and helpless in the darkness. Mauss, in one of the cabins, looked up from his Bible and thanked God for His mercies and for Hung Hsiu-ch’uan. The gale heeled
Resting Cloud over, slamming Mauss unconscious against the bulkhead, and the ship was driven, almost on her beam ends, toward the shore. In her path was
Boston Princess, the Cooper-Tillman vessel. The two ships collided violently and
Resting Cloud’s bowsprit tore away part of the other vessel’s upperworks before it snapped off, and she careened away, stern toward the shore. The tempest flung her into the floating village of sampans, swamping scores of the tiny boats, and grounded her viciously. Hundreds of Chinese were drowning, and those still secure in the sampans cowered under their flimsy bamboo coverings. But the next Supreme Wind snatched up the coverings and with them many families.
Aboard
Boston Princess, Jeff Cooper dragged himself off the deck of the main cabin and helped Shevaun to her feet. The gale rose in violence and battered the vessel, but her hawsers held.
“Are you all right?” Cooper shouted above the tumult.
“I think so. Oh God help us!”
“Stay here!” Cooper opened the cabin door and fought his way toward the deck, pandemonium surrounding him. But the gale and horizontal rain drove him below. He went down three decks and along a corridor and into the hold. He peered around with a lantern. Where
Resting Cloud had hit, the timbers were crushed and the seams starting to go. Cooper went back to Shevaun.
“It’s all right,” he lied. “So long as we don’t break our moorings.”
A Supreme Wind struck Glessing’s Point and snapped the flagpole, throwing it like a javelin at the harbor master’s office.
The flagpole smashed through the granite wall and chopped Glessing’s arm off at the elbow. It punched its way through the other side of the building, throwing Culum aside and cascading bricks and debris and burning coals on Tess before coming to rest.
The rain and gale howled through the broken walls, and Tess’s dress was ablaze. Culum groped to his feet and beat at the flaming clothes with his hands.
When he had extinguished the fire, he held Tess in his arms. She was unconscious. Her face was white, and her hair was partially singed. He ripped off her dress and examined her carefully. There were burns on her back.
Culum heard screaming. Turning around, he saw Glessing, blood spurting from his stump. And across the room he saw the disjoined arm. Culum stood up, but his legs would not move.
“Do something, Culum!” he shouted against the wind.
His muscles obeyed, and he grabbed a flag halyard and bound a tourniquet around the stump and stopped the bleeding. He tried to decide what he should do next, and then he remembered what his father had done when Zergeyev was shot.
“Clean the wound,” he said aloud. “That’s what you’ve got to do. Then cauterize it.”
He found the teakettle. There was still water in it, so he knelt beside Glessing and began to daub the stump. “Hold on, old boy,” he muttered, Glessing’s agony tearing his guts.
Tess whimpered as she regained consciousness. She groped to her feet, the wind churning the papers and flags and dust, half blinding her. Her eyes cleared and she screamed.
Culum spun around in panic and saw her staring at the severed arm.
“Help me! Find the fire tongs!” he yelled above the storm.
She shook her head and backed away hysterically, and then she was very sick.
“Get the godrotting tongs!” Culum shouted, his hands on fire. “You can be sick later!”
Tess forced herself upright, shocked by the venom in Culum’s voice. She began searching for the tongs.
“For God’s sake, hurry up!”
She found them and through her nightmare handed them to Culum.
Culum picked up a burning coal with the tongs and held it against the stump. Glessing screamed and fainted again. The stench from the burning flesh was overpowering. Culum fought his nausea down until the stump was thoroughly cauterized.
Then he turned his head and retched violently.
Brock looked up from the barometer, the whole ship vibrating and timbers howling. “28.2 inches, Liza! It’s never beed that low!”
Liza held Lillibet and tried to contain her fear. “I wonder where Tess be. Oh God, protect her.”
“Yus,” Brock said.
Then there was a shrieking of timbers and the whole ship reeled, but she corrected herself.
“I be going on deck!”
“Stay here! For luv of God, lad, doan risk—” But she stopped, for he had already gone.
“When’s it going to stop, Mumma?” Lillibet sobbed.
“Any minute now, luv.”
Brock poked his head cautiously out of the leeward quarterdeck gangway. He craned to look at the masts. They were bent like twigs. There was a monstrous crack as the main topmast stay parted.
“Belay there!” Brock shouted down the gangway. “Port watch on deck!”
A Supreme Wind shrieked out of the north and another halyard parted, and another, and the mainmast sheered off just above the deck and slammed into the mizzen, and both masts and spars and rigging pounded onto the deck, crushing the quarterdeck gangway.
White Witch heeled dreadfully.