The Sea Beggars (36 page)

“Sail ho!” someone screamed, from the bow of the
Wayward Girl
, and pointed.

Jan twisted around to see. Up there, through the thinning fog, the topmasts and spars of Lumey's ship were coming visible, although the hull still lay buried in mist. She was dangerously close to the shore. As Jan watched, a red flame spurted from her side, and the rumble of her cannon rolled across the water toward him.

“Pull!” He leaned into the oars.

They rowed some dozen or two dozen strokes more, groaning with effort, and suddenly the wind turned and blasted full into Jan's face so hard it froze his cheeks.

“Up oars.”

They raised their oars. On the
Wayward Girl
, the crew were rushing back and forth across the deck, trimming her mainsail. The canvas slatted and cracked full of the wind, and the ship drove forward, biting into the sea; the sound of the water rushing past her forefoot was like music. On the deck they were reeling in the cable. Jan raised his arm over his head, more a cheer than a signal, delighted.

“Sail,” Aart cried, in a voice that creaked with alarm. “For God's love, Jan—”

Jan looked about. Nearly even with the surface of the water, they could see only a few cable lengths around them. The fog was thinning to nothing in the freshening wind; the sky was turning blue. Whitecaps broke on the tops of the waves.

Out to sea, in the dissipating fog, patches of white stood above the waves, eight or nine of them, ten or twelve, squares of white with red crosses on them. Spanish ships. His back tingled.

“It's a trap,” Jan said.

He wasted no more time looking at the Spanish ships. Bending to the oars, he swung the small boat around and made for the
Wayward Girl
. Without word from him Aart and Henryk doubled to their oars.

They stroked madly across the narrowing water. Jan knew what had happened: Lumey's fat rich Spanish hen was a lure, and had gone to ground here in this filthy shallow water to draw the Beggars after her. Only the fog and the failed wind had kept the rest of the Spanish fleet away from them for so long. Rowing in under the lee of the
Wayward Girl
, he could hear the men shouting on her deck, could hear Pieter bellowing orders. As he climbed up the rope ladder to the deck, he threw a quick look over his shoulder, toward the sound of the breakers, and saw the long boiling rows of surf not three hundred yards away.

“God damn it!”

He reached the deck and went with long strides to his uncle's side, by the wheel. Pieter was staring off to sea, where the Spanish ships were waiting. Jan went a few steps past him to the poop deck and climbed the stair, to see up and down the coast.

There to the north was Lumey's ship, and another, maybe Dirk Sonoy's, and inshore from them the Spanish hen. She had gone aground in the shallows, and the two Beggar ships were nearly into the surf around her; Sonoy's ship was struggling to tack off into deeper water, and Lumey was coming about. They had seen the Spanish trap no quicker than the
Wayward Girl
.

South of them were two or three more Dutch sail, victims of the lure. Greedy, Jan thought, and shook his head: if they had not towed the
Wayward Girl
in after the sound of cannon they would be in a better place now, not pinned up against a treacherous shoaling coastline, with the tide making and the wind driving them north.

Pieter said, “They can wait, the bastards. Look at them.”

The Spanish were not coming in after their prey. Drawing sometimes twice as deep as the Dutch ships, they were better off standing out and waiting until the tide and the wind and the wild surf drove the Dutch out to meet them. Jan swallowed the panic in his throat. He cast a quick glance behind him again at the beach; beyond the surging line of the breakers, the barren sand rose into steep gray dunes, frosted with snow. Not a good place to be shipwrecked.

The old man came up beside him.

“We have to run for it, boy.”

“What do you mean?”

Pieter nodded his head to the north. “The bottom's coming up fast—almost three fathoms now. A couple more hours and the tide will shove us up onto the beach. We have to get out of here.” He turned, looking south now, and pointed. “Back there.”

Jan looked where his uncle's hand indicated. Behind them the coast curved gently around to the east, flat and dull, fringed with long white rows of breakers. Patches of fog still clung to the sea there.

“Where are we going?” Jan asked, puzzled. “The wind's dead wrong. The bottom's shallower there than here, by the way the waves break—”

“Into the fog,” Pieter said. “Get back in that boat and row.”

“You're mad,” Jan said. “The wind will blow the fog away, and there we'll be, naked as babies. Look at the Spanish, man—” He flung his arm out toward the Spanish fleet; his gaze followed. There were many ships, rocking with the waves, their red-crossed sails slatting in the wind, which was dying once more.

As the wind died, the fog swelled again, rolling out across the sleek water, burying ship after ship in its thick clammy advance. He swallowed. “Very well. Whatever you say.”

“Damned right,” his uncle said, staring at him. “Get back in that boat and row.”

Jan walked back to the side of the ship, where the boat was drawn up; half a dozen of the crew stood there, shivering in the cold and staring out toward the line of Spanish ships. Red Aart leapt toward him.

“What are we going to do? What's going on? Jan, I say we beach the ship and wait.”

Behind him, Marten said hoarsely, “I say run for it! If we charge the Dons maybe we can break through.”

“There's no wind,” Jan said, brusquely. “Marten, Jobst, come with me.” He swung one leg over the rail of the ship and groped with his toe for the ladder.

“Where are we going?” Marten and the other man came after him.

“To tow the ship. Come on.”

“To tow the ship—how fast can we do that? They'll slaughter us! Where are we going? Pieter's mad. He's gone off his head. It's that tobacco, and the gin, and his age …”

But they were following him down the ladder, into the little boat. He sat on the center thwart and reached for the oars, his chest tight. Trust old Pieter, he told himself.

Aloud, he said, “The old man's gotten us through before. He'll do it again. Pull!”

They bent to the oars and rowed hard; when the cable tightened and took the weight of the
Wayward Girl
, the small boat jerked like a caught fish, losing all its forward momentum. They put their backs to the oars again.

They did not have to go far to reach the fog; it was closing in on them again, so dark and dense Jan could see the droplets hanging in the air, roiling up away from the swing of his oars and falling gently onto the back of the man in front of him. The oars creaked; the cable groaned. Steadily they pulled the
Wayward Girl
on through water as still and glassy as ice.

Now it was Aart in the bow of the ship, casting the lead to read the depth of water under the
Wayward Girl
's keel. His voice reached Jan clearly with each hail.

“Four fathom and sandy. Four fathom …”

Jan's back hurt, and his hands were cramping from the cold and damp and the work, but he never thought of quitting. Better to do something, even something painful and tiring, than to stand up there on the deck and wait. The steady rhythm of rowing made the empty time manageable. The other rowers had stopped complaining, now that they were plying their oars; the silence hung around them like the fog.

“Four fathom and rising!”

Jan bent his back, stroking hard at the oars. Abruptly the gloom around him lightened, a breeze touched his face, and with a wild gust of wind the enclosing fog swirled away. Marten, in the stern of the boat, let out a hoarse cry.

“Look!”

The fog was shrinking rapidly away across the water, baring the whole coast again, the sea and the horizon around them. There, out in the deeper water, the Spanish were lying like foxes in wait.

Even as the fog parted like a curtain to expose them, there was a burst of smoke from the side of the nearest galleon, a brief darting flame, and the thunder of a cannon shot.

“Where'd it go? Where'd it fall?”

Up in the bow of the
Wayward Girl
Pieter appeared, leaning out over the bowsprit above Aart's head. “Row!” he bellowed. “Row, you damned fools—”

Suddenly between him and the boat something whizzed out of the air and fell into the sea with a great towering splash that soaked the rowers. The cannonball. Jan filled his lungs with breath. The small boat rocked violently on the turbulent waves.

“Pull!” He leaned forward, sweeping his oars back for a new stroke.

“They're firing again,” Marten cried, and stood up in the stern.

“Pull,” Jan shouted at him.

“No—we have to—”

Jan stood up and got him by the arms and jammed him down onto the thwart again, the boat bucking wildly under his feet. “Row, damn you, Marten, or I will throw you overboard!”

Marten gave him one look from a face white as the seafoam, grabbed his oars, and bent his back. Sitting down, Jan picked up the rhythm again. With a whine and a splash another cannonball tunneled into the sea a hundred yards away.

“Pull,” Pieter howled, from the
Wayward Girl
. “Three points larboard, Jan. Make a new course. Pull, you lazy God-forsaken sons of whores! Pull!”

“Who's he calling the son of a whore?” Jobst said, behind Jan. “The crazy old bastard.”

“Up starboard oar,” Jan said. “Stroke larboard oar.”

The boat swung her bow toward the west. In the distance more cannon sounded.

“Down oars. Pull.”

There was a screech in the air like a passing witch and on the big ship a crash of timbers. A shot had hit the
Wayward Girl
. Jan could hear Pieter swearing, up there in the bow. Far away there was a rattle of cannon shot, too many to come from a single ship: the rest of the fleet was fighting Lumey and the other Beggars.

“Pull!”

Another shot hit the sleek water just beyond the ship and bounced over her; Jan saw it bounce again, on the other side, and plow into the shallows. The wind was like an icy hand across his back. He wondered what was happening to Lumey and the others.

“The fog!”

The wind died. The fog swept in again, curling around him like the arms of a cold mother, enveloping him in the gloom and wet. He sighed.

“Three fathom! Rising! Bottom's rising—”

From the bow of the
Wayward Girl
, only half visible in the fog, came Pieter's voice. “Three points to larboard, Jan—”

They changed course again. Jan's back hurt so that he gasped with each stroke; he knew by that how the others were hurting, and he called to his uncle to change the rowing crew. Swiftly, so that the ship would not lose the precious few yards of momentum that made towing her possible, the small boat returned to the
Wayward Girl
, and Marten and Jobst scurried up the ladder; two new rowers leapt down into the boat.

“Jan! Come up—get warm—”

“No,” he said. “You need me here.” He could not bear to return to the ship, to the inaction and the waiting; here at least he had some mastery over what happened to him. With the others he bent his back to the oars again.

They towed the
Girl
steadily on through the fog. From the north the boom of cannon sounded again, and the man behind Jan swore and prayed in a low voice. The oars rasped in the oarlocks. Jan's arms were heavy with fatigue. He braced his legs against the bottom of the boat to take off some of the strain. When he straightened his back, the muscles stabbed him with new pain. Suddenly there was the thunder of cannon, very close, and instinctively he ducked.

The others wailed. “They're shooting at us!”

In the bow Pieter shouted, “Jan! Bring her up to larboard some more!”

“No,” cried the man behind Jan. “The damned Dons are lying off to larboard—he'll take us into the middle of them!”

Jan bit his lip. “We'll take her to larboard. Up the starboard oars.”

“He's mad, Jan—they'll—”

“Up the starboard oars!”

On the heels of his words another cannon shot crashed out, very close, and he heard the rattle and crash of wood breaking, on the
Wayward Girl
. Someone shrieked in pain.

“The tops,” said the man in the stern, in front of him. “They must be sticking up out of the fog bank. They're shooting at us by the mastheads.”

Jan looked up overhead. At sea level the fog lay so thick around him that he could barely make out the bow of the ship, but overhead it thinned away quickly to nothing; he could even see the sun, a pale feeble eye in the gloom.

“Pull,” he said.

They towed the ship on through the grim gray mist. Every few moments the cannon fired, but now the direction appeared to have changed; it seemed to Jan now that the Spanish guns were firing from behind the
Girl
, not off to one side—not between her and the sea. Another shot hit her stern and he heard screams and saw bits of wood flying through the air.

His first thought was to thank God that Pieter was up in the bow. The old man was screaming orders at him again.

“Two points to larboard, boy—tow!”

“Pull,” Jan whispered; his whole body ached. He wondered if he did any good, rowing when his strength seemed to be gone. “Pull.”

Another cannon fired; the shot missed.

“That was farther off,” said the man in the stern. “We're pulling away from them. The wind's against them, damn them.”

Jan sighed. His arms throbbed so he could not lift them again; he sagged forward over the oars, his head down.

“Jan! Are you all right?”

He raised his head. “Just resting.” His voice croaked in his own ears. He lifted his gaze toward the sky.