Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [121]
And in that second a skiff, its lamps blazing, shot out from behind the brigantine and, oars flashing, bore straight down on them.
Lymond said one word, ‘Breathe!’ before the waters closed over her head. She had seen the robed, shouting Janissary in the prow of the boat, the glint of darts and scimitar and, between the rowers, the bound figure of a man in hose and shirt, his mouth sealed by a cloth. It was Thompson the corsair.
She went under on a strained gulp of air, thinking the brigantine was no use to them now. Exhausted and weaponless out at sea, they faced a boatload of armed men.… Then, her black hair fronding about her, she had no thoughts as her brain darkened without air. Suddenly, the cruel grip that had carried her down thrust her upwards again, and the collar of the sea found and broke against her head. Wildly filling her lungs she found that above them now was the brigantine, and that Lymond had taken them into its lee. Her hand, guided by his, touched cold wood, slimy with weed, and then something else, fat and slippery, that pricked in her palm. A rope.
In her ear, his voice was no more than a breath. ‘Hold on as long as you can. I shall be back.’ Then he was gone.
The boat was circling. Masked as yet by the hulk above her, Oonagh saw the tilting lamplight move sweeping round and retrace its path. The Janissaries had lost them, she realized, for the moment, and were searching again for the two heads, black in the shimmering path of their light. Then she heard a shout and, her heart shaking her numb, exhausted body, saw that the oars had accelerated, were moving swiftly and purposefully towards a sudden brush in the water: a revolving darkness which resolved itself into the head and shoulders of a swimmer brought at last to the surface for air, before sliding below the dark waters again. Above the speeding boat, a fan of silver particles rose, arched and fell, and kneeling men shouted against one another and pointed. Darts. And there, lancing the night like a silver needle, the shaft of a spear.
These were fishermen. And this living man in the water, their fish.
Living still; for casting suddenly at loss, the boat turned, a glinting fishbone of oars, and turned again before darting suddenly, propelled by triumph, at a tangent once more. The shouting, clear across the water, reached a climax and cut off again. The swimmer had surfaced and submerged once more.
It happened again, and then again; always in an unexpected direction, and always with a coiling speed that took him down before the missiles struck. And always, too, farther and farther away from the brigantine where the woman was hiding.
Later, she realized that he was waiting for something else too. But now, a paralysed debtor, she watched the game being played out. She could do nothing. Of what use to shout? It wouldn’t save him; and he would sooner end, she guessed, in the sea. Now, drive himself as he would, his dives were briefer and less and less swift, so that he surfaced always within range, in that network of barbs. She heard the commanding officer laugh then and give an order, and a man holding a small bow of the Turkish kind came and stood in the bows.
There was something odd about the arrow. Then she saw the thin, tough cord at its base, and found that it was not an arrow, but a harpoon.
‘Stay down’ Surely, from her Celtic breeding, she could transmit to him this silent anguish? ‘Stay down. And I shall let go this little cord, and share your