Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

The thing will drag us under, called Honora. The bloody thing!

Sally saw Naomi swim one-armed—a true surf Amazon indeed—dragging Mitchie by the collar of her life jacket. The water was full of claims to mercy. There was a soldier with a bandaged arm dragging another whose face had no flesh. Mitchie and Naomi were not any longer in the nursing and tending business, however.

Some boats seemed to get away easier than hers and Sally saw two of them rounding the low but visible bows. The high tail of the Archimedes was exposed—its screw turning and turning in air and still driven by unknowing engines.

Rafts everywhere! Sally yelled to her sister. Black, rubber—square-thwarted and unsafe-looking things with maybe a sailor aboard or a few Inniskilling men. A soldier was kneeling on one near them and dragging a boy soldier aboard. Soon it would be loaded to sinking point.

It isn’t as cold as it could be, is it? Honora asked hopefully. Like a girl in a bathing party again.

Cold or warm, Sally had not taken account. It seemed up to the massive sea to decide what it was. It had absolute rights to impose its temperature.

Other lightly populated rafts were revealed by the rhythm of the sea but with no guarantee they would stay that way should you take the trouble to approach them. One came close, though, with a soldier sitting atop. Sally saw Naomi haul herself to it and supporting Mitchie with the vigor of a woman making a claim. She linked her free arm through the loop of rope on the raft’s side. Sally forgot Honora and swam up behind her sister but remembered then to turn. Honora was like many others—making a mimic of swimming and chopping the water with exaggerated liftings and plunges of her arms. But she was worthy of encouragement. Naomi attached the dazed or perhaps comatose Mitchie by both arms to a rope loop. Then she herself sprang aboard. She was so lissome. It was a gallant emergence into the air and an exhortation to strength in others, the way she levered herself from shoulder deep up and aboard without any help from the soldiers, who were distracted entirely by their own needs. Mitchie lay still in the water. Her black hair was plastered to her blue-white face and her smashed lower body made dark clouds of blood around her in the ocean. Oh, said Mitchie and became aware of Sally’s arrival at the raft and of Naomi’s attention from above.

Oh, don’t heave me, she pleaded. Let me drift.

No morphine for her. Yet she said plaintively, Oh, and, Don’t heave me, when she was entitled to her screams. Her wounds were full of saltwater and her bones might be splintered in unknown ways.

Sally hooked her own arm into a rope and dragged Honora the last yard to share it with her. Naomi hauled Mitchie up. From below, Sally hugged her and—with little leverage in this water—lifted her by the waist and then the buttocks. Honora too—turned by the security of the rope loop from a panicked girl back into a hoister—gave one arm to the effort. But the chief lift came from Naomi, who was full of frantic energy. Argh! cried Mitchie loudly and ceaselessly as she emerged from the water and Naomi laid her face-up in the raft. From Sally’s place at the rope loops Mitchie could no longer be seen. She could be heard plaintively saying, What a thing to happen to a woman! What a thing!

Naomi negotiated with the soldier the use of his belt and was applying it—as far as Sally could tell from this angle—as a tourniquet on one of Mitchie’s thighs. More raucous cries came from Mitchie. Mitchie’s wounds justified at least that much sound.

Sally remained in the water for she was uncertain if she possessed the athleticism needed to get aboard. Honora stayed with her—both arms hooked through the rope. She seemed now almost at ease with the power of water which lay around and so massively underneath her. More men were struggling up to hang from the exactly angled side of the raft and its other vacant loops. There were unseen men hanging on the far side too. Two or three lifted themselves onto the raft. Yet it still felt balanced. The men aboard and those in the water called to each other in their raw accents. Their words seemed the remnants of sounds from old battles. Don’t push, said Honora to one oblivious youth wallowing up. She had regained her former self.

Since she had recovered the breath for it, Sally half turned her body towards the ship. Once she saw it she could not take her eyes from it. Its stern was rising from the water. There were still soldiers milling around its canting decks and the stern railing. They tried to keep their footing and were reluctant to leave the steel plates that had pledged a solid foothold to them. Poor Rosanna Nettice must be lost amongst the splashes and threshings between the raft and the Archimedes . The mast and funnel rose higher all the time and with more authority than they had had when the ship was solid. They reached up at a sharp angle and this looked more like a boast of power than a submission.

Honora too was watching.

That mast will thrash them, she screamed. For it looked as if the masthead would come down like a huge log as the ship heeled. The door from which the mules and horses had left was nearly under. Yet still one pony seemed to lower his head and scrape through. She could hear screaming like humans from the animals who had not jumped for fear or lack of time—a massed animal shriek of blocked escape. Men still on the ship were now reduced to jumping from the stern or sliding down its curves. She saw two land in the churning propeller which cut them to sections and threw their blood about in a terrible mist so instant you could doubt it had happened. She began to weep silently. This was a thing that stretched imagination and defiled at the last second what she thought of as the kindnesses of the Archimedes . Far down in a half-flooded deck where stokers drowned, the engines still churned and the unwitting screws spun in air.

Quick, said the older soldier from the raft. He leaned over the side with a canoe paddle which must have been part of the raft equipment—it would turn out the other one had been lost. This was a useless implement anyhow. But he was like a man awoken.

You in the water there—paddle, paddle!

Paddle yourself, yelled Honora. He was at one blunt end of the raft frenziedly plying the thing. Like a homing compass the raft swung nonetheless head-on to the Archimedes. Huge metal shrieks and thumps could be heard within the ship and the unearthly lament of mules and ponies went on. There was a blast within the skin that sent itself through the water and buffeted Sally’s spine and tried to wash her under the raft. The Archimedes used this great sound as a pretext to jerk its stern as high into the air as it could reach. More thunders and great iron scrapings and crashes came from within. Mother of Christ, said a soldier hanging in the water. The boilers are breaking loose. Brace yourselves.

But the Archimedes had found its desired angle of glide and now entered the water fast and smoothly. It left steam and a mist of coal in the air. The wave, called the sergeant with the paddle. Hold on.

The raft dipped by one of its corners, then conceded itself towards the ship’s suction. The vanished ship sought to drag them away by the legs. But there was a wave, high enough to be called surf, a strong swell at a beach. Sally held Honora by one arm. The wave did not break. They rose on it and a beam of wood broke down on the raft and bruised her shoulder but then swept away quickly. It lowered and pitched them and moved on with a tolerable smoothness to meet the floating faces of the Archimedes ’s other orphans further out.

Now that the Archimedes had orphaned them, there was a hubbub of conversation across the face of the water, echoing as in a cathedral, spiked here and there by howls of grief or fear or pain and desperate yells of insistent advice. Many voices rose in heated expressions of opinion. It seemed perhaps a thousand spoke at once. So many in the water? So much life thrown out of the Archimedes and fretfully determined to deal with the sea. A mule swam by with its glazed eye fixed on Sally. It found no succor there and blundered on. An Irish sergeant swam up with his chevrons showing below the armpit of the life preserver. He was a large, sandy-haired fellow with a sunny unpreparedness to let harm befall him and was hauling another man. He found one of the raft’s loops with his free hand. Thank Christ, he said as he attached himself to the rope. The soldier he held on to with a meaty fist had a spike of steel protruding from his face below his forehead. A man beside Honora said, Let him go up on top, Sarge. Your man there’s in a bad way.