Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [82]
There was no more screaming. The fo’c’s’le was under. She listed. Impossibly more, she listed. Dan and the captain, as if no more than a whale jaunt was at hand, gave orders, straight, mad in the face of madness as if it was normal, this groaning of the quarterdeck, this drenched mob of us. And Henry Cash under the deck, under the water. We lowered away and took our places. Steerage was under. Two boats we had left, not enough. We had Rainey and Dan and Gabriel. Yan was holding a hog. Our boat listed as we drifted out, and the sea threw us up and down, and the wind shrilled at us. Me and Tim were together in the middle of the whaleboat, and we pulled because Dan told us to, pulled like hell with some mad strength come into our arms.
We got away and rested on our oars, watching as the Lysander fell over completely and lay on her side with a great slosh and a groan, the tip of the foremast under.
Our two boats came together.
The ship had settled, an upright, pointed crag upon the ocean, surrounded by its widening circle of flotsam. Those three great, whirling waters were far away now, and the wind had dropped like a fall into unconsciousness. A silence made of sea soughing filled the world. No one spoke. My eyes were full of seawater and I blinked them clear and looked around. Dan had us both, me and Tim, one arm round each of us. “Oh boys oh boys oh boys oh boys,” he whispered. I saw Yan’s face, a wild thing with glittering eyes and lips drawn back from the teeth, Gabriel’s, blank, flat, tear streaked. Gabriel still somehow had Simon’s fiddle, cradled against his wide, ragged chest. Alongside us in the other boat I saw the captain gripping the gunwale, the fierce jut of his jaw, and Wilson Pride, Dag Aarnasson, John Copper, Simon Flower, Skip, all alike turned stupid against the vast impossibility of it all.
Where were the others?
No one appeared on the high crag of quarterdeck. No one at all. I saw a head swimming, but it was only one of our hogs striking out bravely for salvation, trotters paddling furiously.
“Simon!” said Gabriel. “I got your fiddle.”
“Thanks.”
“Here you are.”
Passing it over, hand to hand.
“Billy!” shouted Dag, rising, pointing. “Billy! Billy Stock!”
Swimming through the spars and floating planks, through bobbing casks and sodden sheets, Billy Stock beating back the water with his sturdy brown arms, coming strong towards us. His head kept going under. All of us grabbed oars and rowed and drew near, shouting to him, stretching out our arms to pull him in. His face was intent, going under, coming up, intent on some invisible thing an inch or so in front of his eyes. He just kept going. Dan got him and hauled him over, he and Rainey laid him in the bottom of the boat on his face and set about getting the water out of him, thumping him on the back.
“That’s it, get it up,” said Dan.
Billy coughed and choked.
“That’s the way,” Rainey said.
He’d been swimming so strongly. It was as if he’d used himself all up in the water and now he was in the boat, there was nothing left. He coughed and choked and sneezed blood out of his nose, then pitched forward out of Dan’s grip onto his face in a spew of thin, green vomit. Rainey picked him up and looked into his eyes, taking him by the shoulders. Billy’s eyes had gone funny: dull and troubled, still and intent. His skin shone.
“Mr. Stock,” Rainey said, “this will not do, you must be a man, Mr. Stock, and fight back.”
But Billy’s eyes turned white and rolled up and back in his head, and his head lolled back upon the thin stalk of his neck. Mr. Rainey got down in the boat and Billy’s head rested against his arm.
“Come, come, we can’t do without our Billy Stock,” said Rainey.
But Billy just stayed that way, with his eyes gone like white slits in his brown face.
“Oh, Billy,” said Rainey sadly. “Oh, child.”
“Is he dead?” cried a shrill voice. Skip.
“Dead,” said Dan.
“Oh Christ,” said Rainey, laying Billy down in the bottom of the boat and, thank God, closing his eyes. Now it looked just as if he was sleeping.
“Mr. Rainey,” came Captain