Blessed Isle by Alex Beecroft Read Free Book Online Page B

think he did. I think he knew they would turn on us, but he wanted to give us all a chance at life anyway. The heart of a hero beats in the breast of that man, even though he does look so much like a bailiff’s enforcer.
It did not begin immediately. It took three days. The first day, our prisoners were still too cramped in themselves, unaware of their opportunities and blasted out of their mortal concerns by the rising, enfolding seas. Landsmen all, they’d never seen anything like this. They thought nature something to subdue: a field to plant, a steady place under their feet. No one but those who have gone down to the sea can know man’s sheer insignificance in the world. When Neptune rages, one cannot reason with him, one can only hold on and hope to endure. For some, it is a strangely intoxicating freedom. For others, it loosens their wits and makes them grovel on the deck, blind and helpless as maggots. There are no unbelievers on the sea—the gods are there, visible in all their power, and a man must live with them, or die.
Harry lived up to his name and harried them at every turn, sword in hand—for the powder of a pistol would have been drenched beyond use in seconds—giving them the will to move. He pitted himself against their terror and won, driving them to work the sails, to set loose the wreckage of the foremast, to hold down the wheel. We taught them —we had to teach them—to read the compass and the flags, to keep the ship running, running fast in front of the wind.
By the end of the second day, you could see it in their faces, behind the smear of weariness, the thought, This is not so hard. We can do this.
That was when I put the barrel of water and the wax-paper-wrapped parcel of hardtack in the pinnace and loosened all the ropes that held her tight to the deck. I’m not certain even now whether this was forethought or cowardice. I know I dared not tell Mortimer or Lieutenant Gregory what I had done, lest they should take it for defeatism or even mutiny. What can I say? I like to have an escape route prepared.
On the third day, the wind fell briefly, and a gleam of yellow sunshine pierced the cloud. From yards and rigging our convicts looked up and cheered, light tender over battered faces. Steam rose in frail curls from the decks as the hot sunlight dried them.
Gregory put a hand on the scuttlebutt, dipped me out fresh storm water. He was a lovely creature, not above nineteen years of age, smooth skinned and rosy as a girl. You’d have thought he rouged his lips, they were so pink, and he was as leggy and eager and charming as a new colt. God knows what he must have suffered, growing up in the Navy, but it had made him wary. He glanced down at his reflection, up again at me. “This . . . this is it, isn’t it, sir? The moment they turn on us.”
The clouds thinned and streamed away to the west, a sky of cerulean blue dreaming hot above our heads. The scuttlebutt blazed silver, a perfect mirrored circle, and the air filled with the scent of wet hemp. One by one, like fruit too heavy to stay on the bough, men came down from the rigging. The soft thud of their bare feet sounded on the deck all around us.
“They’d be fools,” I said. Then loudly, “Can’t you see the second front following on behind?” I pointed out east, and indeed there hung a second black line, thin as a pencil stroke. “Can’t you taste the lightning in the air? This is only a temporary respite. It’ll be on us again in minutes.”
We’d had to give them axes with which to clear away the fallen foremast and its tangles of snagged rigging. We hadn’t dared to ask for them back. Now the leader of the convicts, a man named Nathan Carter, walked over to us, took the cup from my hand, and dropped it on the deck.
I had been working beside them for the past three days. My hands were swollen, bleeding, and black from rope burns. I had slept perhaps twentyfour hours in the past fortnight. I had begun to see the phantoms of