Sally? Honora shouted, wanting identification. She gave the impression she really wanted to have all this explained to her. We’re fine now, said Sally.
Wine-dark sea, be fucked! yelled Honora. Kiernan had told her that Homer called the Mediterranean that.
Suddenly Sally could not contemplate the fretfulness of losing Honora and knew she must lead. Stay close! Sally called like a woman with a plan. All around, nurses in life belts were thrashing with unnecessary zeal—as if they had lost any water skills they had once possessed. In front of Sally—as she spun—was the blank steel flank of the Archimedes, and forward the upper rim of a part-submerged hole, which the green sea was entering like a tide invading a grotto. Its upper shredded contours were visible—complicated by explosion. Its irregularities were known only to God but otherwise were savage and unreadable. She saw the two lifeboats—one atop the other crosswise—and sensed they were about to sink. Naomi agreed, for she could be seen lowering Matron Mitchie into the water. Mitchie displayed all blood from the waist down. It shocked Sally like nakedness. Mitchie’s mouth gaped, and she did not seem to know her circumstances. But Naomi had soon skidded into the sea beside her. Ah yes, Sally remembered. Naomi was the family swimmer. Jumping from Sherwood bridge or tree forks into an opaque gray-green mixture of topsoil and escarpment grit from up as far as Armidale.
Sally saw the midships doorway open and tilted a few feet above the water. Protesting horses were jumping, their hooves stuttering on the last plates of steel beforehand. There were men in there, screaming at them to go and lashing their hindquarters. Mules fell gracelessly on their flanks as the Archimedes’s own leaning flank loomed above them. Two nurses and some orderlies walked down the canting ship’s stairs a step or two and launched themselves. Still looking out at the sea from the rail Nettice could be seen—squinting like a woman trying to recognize a face at a tea party. How had Nettice missed the lifeboats? By choice or accident? Already Sally and Honora and the remnants and population of their own shattered boat were sliding astern of the Archimedes and could see a little of the great rump of the ship rising by degrees. They could at once see men dropping from the lower port side closest to the shadowy surface of the water as well as others—by choice it seemed and with the howl of their lives—throwing themselves from the upmost, portside railing. They slid down the ship’s sides. Why did they choose that? What did the rivets do to their flesh? But men were queuing for the fright and abrasions of it.
The thing will drag us under, called Honora. The bloody thing!
Sally saw Naomi swim one-armed—a true surf Amazon indeed—dragging Mitchie by the collar of her life jacket. The water was full of claims to mercy. There was a soldier with a bandaged arm dragging another whose face had no flesh. Mitchie and Naomi were not any longer in the nursing and tending business, however.
Some boats seemed to get away easier than hers and Sally saw two of them rounding the low but visible bows. The high tail of the Archimedes was exposed—its screw turning and turning in air and still driven by unknowing engines.
Rafts everywhere! Sally yelled to her sister. Black, rubber—square-thwarted and unsafe-looking things with maybe a sailor aboard or a few Inniskilling men. A soldier was kneeling on one near them and dragging a boy soldier aboard. Soon it would be loaded to sinking point.
It isn’t as cold as it could be, is it? Honora asked hopefully. Like a girl in a bathing party again.
Cold or warm, Sally had not taken account. It seemed up to the massive sea to decide what it was. It had absolute rights to impose its temperature.
Other lightly populated rafts were revealed by the rhythm of the sea but with no guarantee they would stay that way should you take the trouble to approach them. One came close, though, with a soldier sitting atop. Sally saw Naomi haul herself to it and supporting Mitchie with the vigor of a woman making a claim. She linked her free arm through the loop of rope on the raft’s side. Sally forgot Honora and swam up behind her sister but remembered then to turn. Honora was like many others—making a mimic of swimming and chopping the water with exaggerated liftings and plunges of her arms. But she was worthy of encouragement. Naomi attached the dazed or perhaps comatose Mitchie by both arms to a rope loop. Then she herself sprang aboard. She was so lissome. It was a gallant emergence into the air and an exhortation to strength in others, the way she levered herself from shoulder deep up and aboard without any help from the soldiers, who were distracted entirely by their own needs. Mitchie lay still in the water. Her black hair was plastered to her blue-white face and her smashed lower body made dark clouds of blood around her in the ocean. Oh, said Mitchie and became aware of Sally’s arrival at the raft and of Naomi’s attention from above.
Oh, don’t heave me, she pleaded. Let me drift.
No morphine for her. Yet she said plaintively, Oh, and, Don’t heave me, when she was entitled to her screams. Her wounds were full of saltwater and her bones might be splintered in unknown ways.
Sally hooked her own arm into a rope and dragged Honora the last yard to share it with her. Naomi hauled Mitchie up. From below, Sally hugged her and—with little leverage in this water—lifted her by the waist and then the buttocks. Honora too—turned by the security of the rope loop from a panicked girl back into a hoister—gave one arm to the effort. But the chief lift came from Naomi, who was full of frantic energy. Argh! cried Mitchie loudly and ceaselessly as she emerged from the water and Naomi laid her face-up in the raft. From Sally’s place at the rope loops Mitchie could no longer be seen. She could be heard plaintively saying, What a thing to happen to a woman! What a thing!
Naomi negotiated with the soldier the use of his belt and was applying it—as far as Sally could tell from this angle—as a tourniquet on one of Mitchie’s thighs. More raucous cries came from Mitchie. Mitchie’s wounds justified at least that much sound.
Sally remained in the water for she was uncertain if she possessed the athleticism needed to get aboard. Honora stayed with her—both arms hooked through the rope. She seemed now almost at ease with the power of water which lay around and so massively underneath her. More men were struggling up to hang from the exactly angled side of the raft and its other vacant loops. There were unseen men hanging on the far side too. Two or three lifted themselves onto the raft. Yet it still felt balanced. The men aboard and those in the water called to each other in their raw accents. Their words seemed the remnants of sounds from old battles. Don’t push, said Honora to one oblivious youth wallowing up. She had regained her former self.