The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [64]
They shipped oars almost under her side, with the heat radiating down on them. Gasping, they twisted to look at her. The length of the hull on this side was intact, although above their heads, the parapet of the outrigger frame and the frame itself were gapped and blackened and smoking in places. The port divots for the ship’s boat hung empty, but were not warped. They had either cut the boat loose, burning, or had launched it. The Ciaretti carried gunpowder, Tobie remembered. If there had been time, Astorre would have dragged it out and sent it to sea.
The force of the fire, it now seemed, was in the middle or on the opposite side, because none of the helping boats were now visible. Not that anything was especially visible, except in glimpses. High against the black of the smoke, the rigging glowed red as a joy-frame for fireworks, already melting to nothing. The mizzen mast wasn’t there: they could see the scars of its falling. No doubt it floated somewhere beside them, with its yard and its tangle of cordage. The sail, thank God, had not been stepped. The smoke thickened and swirled. Mixed with it were burning fragments. Overhead, a blazing stanchion slackened and dropped, to strike the sea hissing beside them. They were on the lee side of the wind, and the water was littered with debris.
Someone said harshly, “Right. The other side,” and he saw that it was Nicholas, and that he and le Grant were now working together. They pulled round the stern, looking upwards. The rudderpost was undamaged. The stern-castle had lost canvas and curtain and its woodwork was blackened and charred, but the structure still held. While looking, they found their oars striking wood. They had come across the first of the flotilla of helpers and had to pick their way half-blind between them. There was shouting, some of which they made out, and some of which was drowned in the groaning and cracking of timbers and the blustering sound of the fire and the hiss and smack of the boisterous water. Within the ship, too, the noise of men’s voices was urgent and continuous but also oddly diffuse, like an argument heard in a steam bath. As they passed other boats, gleams of red picked out faces and arms, and once a cargo of sandbags. The Ciaretti, Tobie remembered, carried sand as ballast as well. If they could reach it that, too, would help. They cleared the high stern at last, and the smoke swirled and let them see what the others were telling them.
It was not the half-ship they had expected to find. The companionway was not only unburned but let down, and a chain of buckets moved up and down it. Above, there hung for a moment the manic face of the bearded Astorre, red as the axe in his hand. He croaked, “Clods! Were ye sleeping?”
Nicholas stood up in the boat. “How bad?”
“From the hold up. The smoke’s holding us back. She’s still watertight and I think we’ll keep her that way. We’re getting on top of it.”
He went on yelling hoarsely as they clambered aboard. “Two missing; two hurt when we got the mast down. Is that fool of a physician sober?”
He had sent someone already, Tobie found, to secure his medical bag in a safe place. A man who could command a mercenary troop could handle emergencies. But he was better pleased than he would admit, Tobie guessed, to have Nicholas there. To take the burden. To report to the owner his wife. And Nicholas, responding, had without doubt accepted his duty. First, the ship. Then, hallucination or not, the other matter.
If you were used to a battlefield, or a hospital, you knew what it meant, working through the worst of a crisis. In an hour of unthinking, automatic outpouring of ideas and energy, they stopped the spread of the fire. By the time another hour had gone by, they had it mostly smothered and safe. One by one, the ministering boats came to report and drew off, each crew with a jar of strong wine to reward them.
Once from the sea, and once by hailer from his own deck, Pagano Doria himself had expressed his regrets and asked if