The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [65]
“And he ran into the heart of the fire?” Godscalc said.
Tobie overheard, heaving water. His scalp glistened. “The dyeshop was paid for,” he said.
“Indeed,” said Godscalc. “Well, I may be wrong, but I think that something else is being paid for just now. Perhaps you should restrain him.”
“Twice?” said Tobie; before he realised that Godscalc knew nothing. He didn’t try to explain. Time enough to consider that later.
The second hour passed. As the upper fires died, darkness reclaimed the harbour except for the rolling grey smoke from the galley. On board, they worked now by lamplight, picking their way through a wintry landscape of rubble and charcoal. They moved debris, and cut down and lashed what was dangerous and began for the first time to search out and assess the real damage. During this, the missing crew member was found: a lump of rags, flesh, hair and bones among the tufts of Charetty wool, the warped frame of a lamp at his side. The wool was a pile of black scales and glitter: the sweetened smoke hung like a fog.
Soon after that, Nicholas had whistles blown for a rest. In the glimmer of tallow, the men straightening from their work might have been cut from black paper and mist: their eyes red, their throats raw with the stink of charred wood. Broth was heated and thrown into cups. Burns were wrapped, and a sleep rota agreed on. The tattered canopies were replaced with old canvas, and blankets and coverings searched out to keep resting men from the cold of the night.
In the patron’s cabin the fine wood was cloudy and black but had not caught, though the fire had reached through the door and set alight the carpet, the table, the curtain. Their fragments lay still on the deck where they had been dragged away. The cuirasses and weapons still hung on their hooks on the wall and were sooty and warm to the touch. Summoned, the senior men of the Charetty company followed Nicholas there and sprawled on the congealed tar of the boards and swallowed the soup and the bread and the smutty wine that was all that Loppe could find.
Tobie, last to enter with his bag and his clean hands and his unsavoury shirt, looked around at a circle of striped clowns and grunted. Smeared, singed and hollow-eyed, but none of them injured beyond the burns that everyone showed. The human losses had been as Astorre said. Two soldiers caught under the falling mast and for whom he could do nothing. A marine presumably knocked overboard and still missing. And a sailor who had, it seemed, taken a thirst and a lamp to the warmest part of the hold, and there drunk himself into the stupor from which the fire had resulted.
Of course it was bad, but nowhere so bad as it might have been. Because of the sand in her ballast, the slow-burning nature of wool and a number of more unusual factors, the greater part of the ship was intact. She was afloat, and she was not taking in water. How much of the cargo was safe was not yet established, nor what equipment had gone; nor what precisely was needed to repair and replace what was damaged. Between now and dawn there was still heavy work to be done.
Aware of it, no one spoke very much. The single lamp flickered. Nicholas, in the shadows, had a cup of broth in one hand and a stylus in the other, with which he made notes, from time to time, on a tablet propped on one knee. Tobie wondered where the tablet had come from, and if the company books had survived. He saw Julius was watching as well, but had no intention of speaking to Julius. Then le Grant stretched