Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [130]
‘Nicholas?’ said Loppe. ‘You won’t divert him that way.’
‘What do you want me to do, then?’ Nicholas said.
‘Why not tell me the truth?’ Godscalc said. ‘What has Loppe promised to do?’
Nicholas said very slowly, ‘Loppe is not required to make promises. And I don’t exact them.’ In the bows of the ship, someone suddenly screamed.
Nicholas gripped the rail. A whistle blew. A man shouted, and then several others, and there came a pounding of feet and the voice of Vicente, yelling commands to the helmsman, to the mariners, to his deputy. The sheets of the mainsail flew free and the trumpet started to stutter and blare, summoning the full crew from below. Men ran forward, poles in their hands; the lead splashed and splashed in wider casts, and the mizzen also spilled its wind suddenly. A great shudder ran all through the ship, and a jolt that threw Godscalc to the deck, followed by another. He saw Jorge da Silves running towards him, and stagger as the ship lurched again. There came a squealing of timber.
‘A reef,’ Nicholas said. ‘Not a sandbank, a reef. How could there be one in this place?’
The helmsman turned, livid with shock. The two boats, bobbing behind, had men and cable in them already, and the capstan was being rigged. The boy Filipe, staggering back, had flung an arm round the mizzenmast. He was whiter than the man, and was whimpering. Nicholas looked at him. Then he looked at the binnacle.
Loppe said, ‘Nicholas, come. We must find out the damage.’
Nicholas said, ‘You did that before.’ He wasn’t speaking to Loppe.
The boy whimpered again, but mixed with the whimper was a wild snigger.
Nicholas said, ‘When she ran aground before. You did that.’
Godscalc picked himself up and strode forward. The whole deck was tilting. He could hardly hear himself speak for the uproar. Loppe, after waiting, had flung off to help with the anchor. Godscalc said, ‘Filipe did this? What are you talking about?’
‘Fornicator with blackamoors,’ Filipe suddenly said. His voice was thin and breathless and girlish. ‘Common scullion. My father would chain you to his …’ His voice petered away. On his face, stiff and forgotten, was a defiant grin.
‘I am talking about this,’ Nicholas said; and delivered a blow that travelled straight from the shoulder.
Against the hubbub below, the boy’s screams were hardly heard, except by Godscalc and the petrified helmsman and by Jorge da Silves who was stopped by them, while leaping up to the helm. Stopped by the screams, and by the crunch of fine breaking glass, and by the sight of the blood that welled black through the sobbing boy’s shirt and under his arms as he hugged himself.
There was fresh blood, too, on the hand that Nicholas let drop to his side. He said nothing, but watched as reddened clots of sand slid to the deck from the boy’s clothing. Jorge da Silves saw them too. His features, always grim, became waxlike. He drew back his arm, his knuckles stark, his eyes on the boy’s twitching face.
Nicholas stopped him. ‘Later. Padre, lock him below. And come back. I may need you to prevent me from doing anything stupid.’
It was a long night that followed, for the San Niccolò had hitched herself on her reef at slack water with the ebb still to come, and she had the choice, it first seemed, of sliding off with her holed bottom and sinking, or of staying stuck and breaking her back. In the end, the carpenters worked like bullocks down in the bilges and had her sufficiently sound to keep out the water by the time the boats had found a secure bed for their anchor.
Unfortunately, by then the ebb had reached such a state that it would have done the grounded ship as much damage again to warp her free. All they could do was haul up the contents of their wood store and make legs of it, to shore up their pretty new caravel until the flood came with the daylight. And even then their troubles were hardly over, for the day brought a fresh blowing of sand, and the men straining at the bars of the capstan