Paul Kearney - The Mark of Ran

“What’s the lead say?” he called forward.

The leadsman in the forechains was coiling up his rope. “Four fathoms, sir, and shallowing. Sand and gravel.”

The wind dropped, and Rol, looking to larboard, saw a long promontory there extending miles out to sea in a hooked curve. They were in its lee now, becalmed. Prothero nodded at it. “Ussa smiled on us today. Half a league to the sou’west and we’d be broken wood on the tip of yonder headland.”

The ship came to a halt, making them all stagger slightly. The anchors had finally bitten in the seabed and were holding fore and aft. The Cormorant was still a mile offshore.

“Three fathoms!” the leadsman shouted. Eighteen feet of depth. Looking over the ship’s rail, Rol could see clear to the bottom in the pellucid water, the shadow of the brig’s hull dark in the blue-green of the shallows. Tiny fish winked silver in swarming schools and as he watched a turtle flapped its slow course through them.

Sixteen

“There’s a wicked reef about two cables offshore all the way round the bay,” Creed said. “High surf all about it; we barely pulled clear. There is a gap, though, to the northeast.”

“Did you get through it?” Rol demanded.

“Yes. The beach is new-moon-shaped, five leagues long or so, but at the back of it there’s high cliffs, thirty fathoms high at the least. Only on the southern edge do they crumble somewhat. Men could make a passage there; everywhere else it’s not even a place for mountain goats.”

“And sculling out again?”

“Nip and tuck. The cutter’s a handy craft, but even so, we scored the bottom off her. Laden, it would be a whole different pot of fish.”

There was a silence in the cabin until Rol said, “Well done, Elias. Have some rum.”

The convict smiled. “An able seaman drinking in the master’s cabin?”

“Consider yourself a master’s mate like Prothero here, and drink something, for the love of God.”

“Me, I think I’ll crawl into the neck of the bottle and stay there awhile,” Prothero said, cradling his stump. “We’re in a cleft stick.”

“Wind still picking up?” Rol asked him.

“Were it not for the headland she’d be back-broken on those reefs of Elias’s as we speak. It’s picking up into a gale again beyond the bay. What is it they say? An onshore wind is the wrecker’s friend. ”

“Ran is not done with us yet, it seems,” Rol said. He looked sightlessly at the chart that their glasses held uncurled upon the table. They had been at anchor in the bay for three days now, hard at work twenty hours of every day. But the weather was changing again, and not for the better.

“We’ve jury masts now with a yard apiece, the mainmast lateen-rigged, which is good. But there’s no way we could beat out of this bay in the teeth of that onshore gale. We wait it out. Provisions are not a problem-a soaking makes little difference to salt horse. It’s water I’m worried about. It’s so damn dry here, and there’s sand in the air too. We have to land a watering party whatever the risks.”

“With a fair wind we could cruise down the coast to Ordos in four, five days,” Prothero protested.

“With a fair wind. Given our luck on this trip so far, I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for one. No. Since the casks were bilged in the storm we’ve water for another two days, that’s all. I can cut the ration, but I’d rather try to find a spring inland.”

“For such a big, bloody-minded bastard, you are the very soul of caution,” Prothero said irritably. “If it were me-”

“Sail ho!” came the cry from on deck.

The three were on their feet in a second and piled out of the door to the waist. Rol was first up the quarterdeck ladder. “Where away?”

“Large on the port bow, sir,” Mihal, a young topman, said. “Just coming round the headland-and don’t they wish they may make it.”

The entire crew was on deck staring intently southward to the tip of the promontory that sheltered their bay. Half a league away perhaps, a lateen-rigged two-master was trying to beat clear of the rocky shore in the teeth of the wind. The men on deck held their breaths, feeling for the crew of the strange ship, willing it onward.

“Come on, come on, ” someone whispered.

She struck amidships, and the waves at once broke over her starboard side. They watched as first one mast toppled, then the other. The hull was lifted by the savage surf and dumped full onto the rocks. The vessel’s back broke. For perhaps half a minute she was a black, turning shape in the white surf, then she was gone.

“Blood of God,” Prothero said through clenched teeth. “That bastard wind-mongering whoreson. Curse you, Ran, you-” Creed laid a hand on Prothero’s good arm and he caught himself, nodded.

“There may be survivors,” Rol said, eyes hot and glaring. No man bred to the sea could watch the death of a ship with equanimity. “We’ll start inland at once. Prothero, you stay here with a harbor watch. Elias and I will take half a dozen of the fittest men up that headland and look for her crew. We’ll hunt out water while we’re at it.”

“It’s late in the day,” Creed ventured.

“All the more reason for haste. Get that fucking cutter fixed, and let’s be on our way.”

It was dusk by the time that Rol, Creed, and six of the fitter, steadier survivors among the crew were rowing away from the side of the Cormorant. They all carried cutlasses, Rol his scimitar, and a long-barreled wheel-lock pistol he had found in the master’s cabin. He had enough dry match and powder for only a few shots, but thought he might try potting a bird with it. Salt pork was beginning to stick in everyone’s throat.

Elias sat at the tiller and steered them through the gap in the reef he had navigated earlier in the day. The former pirate had become a quietly effective leader of men and Rol had made a vow to himself that Creed would never be breaking rocks in a quarry again. He belonged at sea.

The bottom of the cutter kissed the sand, and Rol felt a wall of heat hit his face: the close, baking dryness of the land. After being at sea, the deadness of the air seemed bizarre, enervating. They ran the cutter up the beach and stood on the sand in the empurpling light like men confused. Under their feet nothing moved, and each step jarred as though they were missing a stair. It did not seem right that the earth should be so solid.

“Matiu and Haim, stay here with the boat,” Rol said. “You might want to get the casks out of her and up the beach a way. We’ll make for the headland to see if any survived the wreck, and then we’ll come back down if we find water.”

The soft sand was hard work and they trudged up the curving strand in silence as the night quickened about them. Looking out to sea they could see the deck-lanterns glowing on board the Cormorant but no other sign of human activity in all that wide sweep of sand and sea and stars.

The tall cliffs reared up to one side like the walls of a fortress, and there were masses of broken rock and gravel at their feet where high tides had battered. Elias led the party without hesitation to a place where a landslide had created a precarious way up to their summits.

They began climbing on all fours, eyes straining in the starlight, stones crumbling and ticking under their feet. Once Rol’s foothold gave and he slid five yards down the steep slope, but was brought up short again by a solid outcrop of rock. Breathing heavily, he started up again.

It took them over an hour, by Rol’s guess, to make their way to the head of the cliffs. They stood wiping the sweat from their faces and rubbing the raw places, and looked out at the star-shimmered sea and the Cormorant, a twinkling toy, a jewel set upon it. They could feel the wind here, and it quickly cooled their hot backs and made them shiver. A good reefed-topsail blow hammering in from the open ocean. Farther out in the bay they could see surf glimmering white as fangs on the reef. Had it not been for the sheltering promontory, that wind would have broken Cormorant ’s back as it had the other vessel’s. As Prothero had said, it was sheer luck they had made landfall in the lee of the headland and not on the windward side.