We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [14]
"Damn it, I'm cold," he said hoarsely, then gave another explosive sneeze.
"My God, if that isn't Little Clausen!"
Ejnar struggled to his feet and went over to his friend.
"So you're still alive."
"I damn well am. I told you I would be. But this bastard cold will be the death of me instead: I'm sick as a dog." He sneezed again.
Ejnar put his arm around him and led him to the straw bed he'd prepared for himself. He could feel Little Clausen shivering beneath the blanket, and his white face was mottled with feverish red.
"Do you have some dry clothes?"
"No, damn it, I didn't manage to save my sea bag."
"Take these. I hope you don't mind wearing Kresten's stuff."
"So he—"
"Yes, it turned out he was right. But what happened to you? We looked everywhere. I thought you..."
"Don't they say that you don't drown if you're meant to hang? Seems the Lord has decided I'm to die from a cold, rather than in combat. I spent the whole battle suspended in an old bosun's chair along the side of the ship. I was supposed to be mending the holes with lead plates. They kept shooting at me, the bastards. But somehow they missed."
"I didn't think you were a weakling," Ejnar said. "How come a bit of fresh air made you sick?"
"The rest of the crew damn well forgot about me. I was stuck there the whole day with my legs in the water, freezing my butt off." Little Clausen sneezed again. "It wasn't until the ship was evacuated that I managed to flag down a boat. By then I was blue all over. I couldn't even walk when I got back on shore." He'd put on the dry clothes and now slapped himself for warmth as he glanced around the church. "How many were killed?"
"You mean how many Marstallers?"
"Yes, what else would I mean? I don't know the others."
"I think we've lost seven."
"Was Laurids one of them?"
Ejnar stared at the floor. Then he shrugged, as though embarrassed about something shameful. "I can't answer that."
"You don't mean he ran away?"
"No. Not exactly. I saw him shooting up into the sky. But then I saw him come down again."
Little Clausen stared at him in disbelief, then shook his head.
"My eyes tell me that you've not been wounded," he said. "But my ears tell me that you've lost your mind."
He let off another sneeze and sat down abruptly on the bed of straw. Ejnar sat next to him and stared into space with lost eyes. Perhaps he really had gone mad. Little Clausen leaned toward his friend and put his arm around his shoulder.
"There now." He comforted him. "It'll come back, you'll see."
He lapsed into silence. Then added, softly, "But I suppose we might as well write off Laurids."
They sat for a while longer, saying nothing. Then they lay down and fell asleep, utterly spent.
At seven in the morning they woke us and treated us to more bread, bacon, and warm beer, and an hour later there was a head count. When an officer arrived to take down our names and our hometowns so that our families could be informed, we fell on him, yelling out our details so clamorously that by ten o clock, when the order came to march us to the fortress in Rendsburg, he'd noted only half our names.
Outside the church they lined us up in ranks. The mood had shifted: it seemed that Eckernförde was turning against its vanquished enemy, and our guards were losing patience with us. Many of us were still half-deaf from yesterday's cannon fire and couldn't hear orders even when they were shouted right into our faces. So they shoved us around and beat us. The town's citizens hustled around us, whooping at our humiliation, while a crowd of sailors with cutlasses swinging from their belts hurled out coarse oaths—which, to our great irritation, we had to endure in silence.
The high road ran along the shoreline, affording us a final glimpse of our inexplicable defeat: the wreck of the Christian the Eighth, floating on the water. She was still smoldering, with smoke waiting from her charred hull, and the beach was littered with the debris of masts and