Sea Witch

by Hollick, Helen

  “Deck’s secure, Cap’n,” Rue shouted at Jesamiah, his voice raised to be heard above the roaring of the wind. “Shall I send men aloft to bring down t’gallants?”

  “Aye, do so.” The highest, thinnest, spar of the masts were the weakest, the topgallants. Better to strike them and stow them on deck rather than risk them breaking. “An’ we’ll have a couple o’ reefs in the fore tops’l.” As an afterthought Jesamiah added. “And get some men t’rig rolling tackles.”

  Rue nodded approval. Rolling tackles would stop the heavy spars from slamming from side to side when the ship really began to pitch and roll. Perhaps.

  Twenty-five minutes, thirty, and the sea was building bigger, a wild thing turned mad, rising up around the vessel to the level of the shuttered gunports, and within a further ten minutes to the quarterdeck rail. In between each massing wave as she dived into the next trough there was nothing to either side except a sheet of black water, as if they were wallowing in the open-jawed mouth of a sea monster. And then the Salvation would fight her way to the crest of another huge wave and hang there, suspended, before plunging downward to be gobbled up again. It was as if Tethys herself had been roused from her sleep. As if she was taking her temper out on any who dared disturb her peace.

  The topsail was reefed, half of it lashed tight to the yard, leaving only a token portion of the rigged stronger storm canvas exposed. Still the wind gained in ferocity; lightning split the sky in ragged tendrils spread against the blackness, followed almost immediately by the crashing anger of thunder. The rain fell, heavy, barely indistinguishable from the cascade of sea spray. Suddenly, within the drawing of a breath, any vessel running within the fury of the hurricane found she was at the mercy of nature. And of the terrible anger of Tethys herself.

  With Isiah Roberts struggling to hold the wheel steady, Jesamiah seeing for himself that all was secured down in the waist, grabbed a belaying pin on the foremast and braced himself against the rage of the storm as it tried to bully him into toppling over. He peered up the mast, could not see much beyond shapes against a dark sky. His instinct and knowledge was enough, however: even this meagre spread of canvas would not hold much longer.

  “We’ll take in and run on bare poles!” he yelled at Rue, also struggling to stand upright against the wind.

  Then the devil that was the storm tried a different tactic; it gave a malicious shove, heaving itself against the Salvation’s hull in one mighty effort. The ship yawed sideways as if the sea had swiped out with a giant paw. She juddered and rolled hard, the waves boiling up around her higher than the rails, and with a rending crack, a bang as loud as the thunder, the fore topsail split up the centre. Where a moment before there had been half a sheet of wet, grey canvas there appeared a ripped gash. As Jesamiah watched, horrified, it tore further into a host of ragged strips and as the balance of sail and hull drastically altered, the Salvation slewed around. There was now nothing they could do to save themselves. Nothing except race before the wind. And pray.

  Hauling himself hand over hand along the rail, Jesamiah ran, his hair sodden as he took the wind full in the face, the ribbons snapping as if in sympathy with the tattered sail. He needed to get to the wheel, to help Isiah keep her steady…but Rue was there before him, the both of them grim-faced, hauling at the spokes of the bucking helm.

  Jesamiah turned back to focus on the ruined sail. “Take in canvas!” he roared, cupping his hands around his mouth in an effort to send his voice further. “For fok sake, haul in sail!”

  Combined with an angry sea, the wind was determined and vicious. Again the Salvation shuddered as the paw swiped at her, a tearing, scraping sound that shivered, ominous and foreboding through her entire hull from fo’c’sle to rudder.

  Tethys was full awake, and furious.

  “We are too far west!” Rue shouted, although none could hear save for Roberts at his side, who with all his strength was trying desperately to hang on to the helm. “Mon Dieu! We ’ave ‘it a reef!”

  Jesamiah also yelled, his words torn from his mouth. The crew did not need to hear, they knew instantly. She was drifting against or over something. Coral? Rock? The clawing fingernails of Tethys herself?

  “Drop anchor!” Jesamiah screamed.

  The cable, thicker than a man’s forearm was run out, the rattle and following splash of the anchor descending from the cathead masked by the gleeful howling of the storm. The anchor should hold them, should stop the ship from its sideways drift into disaster. Again the Salvation quivered and a muffled thumping pulsed through her keel.

  “The fokken anchor’s dragging!” Jesamiah cursed. If it did not find purchase there would be little more they could do. “Throw down the sheet-anchor,” he shouted, and a moment later a second anchor and cable rattled out, another splash. But that also failed to grip on the bed of flat rock beneath them, and it too dragged across the unyielding ocean floor.

  The scraping was heard again, echoing below deck, amplified through the wooden hull. Then, a terrible splitting noise and the Salvation groaned from bow to stern, her death rattle, as water began flooding in through two rents in her keel. They must have crossed one reef, dragged over shallows and hit another. She was heeling over, the water pouring in from below, surging across her rails as she fell, to lie on her side as if for careening, the deck pitching at an odd, impossible angle. Another final sigh as she settled onto the reef, and died.

  A curling wave grasped Jesamiah and took him overboard as if it were a hand plucking from the sea. Everywhere, the saline smell of the ocean and decaying, rotting fish. Frantically, he tried to cling to a tangled mess of cordage, to shattered railing, to anything! But Tethys was for having her own way, and she wanted the man with the blue ribbons and the golden acorn. Wanted blood and life.

  He heard a scream as he went under. It must have been his voice, although it was oddly higher in pitch, and it shrieked his name.

  ~ Jes…a…mi…ah! ~

  Now why would he be shouting out his own name? Sounding like a desperate young woman?

  What odd things a man thinks of, he pondered, when he is about to drown.

  Twelve

  Few of the crew made it to the lagoon and island beyond the reef, not alive. Swept along by the raging sea they were cut to pieces on coral as sharp as a razor’s blade; the sharks, with no regard for the temper of the ocean and drawn by the pungent smell of blood, finished the rest. Some men, tangled in the rigging and shattered spars or trapped below deck, never made it from the ship. They were the lucky ones, for they died quickly; the handful who dragged their torn and mutilated bodies to the beach were beset by scavenging crabs. Some, too weak, too shocked or disorientated to brush them aside were eaten alive. Nature’s way. Whether fish, mammal or man, the dead and dying providing food for the living. Kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten.

  Eight men survived. Eight out of one hundred and sixteen.

  Rue was an able man at sea. Middle-aged, born on the Normandy Coast, he had spent virtually all his life aboard a boat of one kind or another. He believed himself to be a lucky man, so he also thought, was Jesamiah Acorne. Between them, by luck and chance, Rue and Isiah Roberts had somehow managed to launch one of the longboats. With his cutlass, Rue had slashed through rope and tackle, trusting the boat would fall keel down. Then he had jumped, Roberts following with several others. Some managed to climb aboard. Luck, Rue insisted, helped them fend her off the reef with the oars, barely making headway. Twice they were almost capsized. Half of the oars were broken, snapped off.

  When they could, they hauled men aboard. A few they threw back. No use taking the dead. Rue, in the stern battling to hold the tiller and attempting to steer, saw a man struggling in the water, saw him go down beneath a sweeping wave that tossed the boat sideways, the same wave also lifting the man forward, slamming him against the wooden hull. Rue shouted for Roberts but he had already seen, was leaning over the side, others grabbing his legs to stop him from falling. Isiah plunged his hands into the sea,
blindly grabbing, felt his fingers curl around hair and hauled.

  They made a joke of it after, when they lay on their backs in the wet sand, gasping for breath, thankful, so thankful, to be alive.

  “Just as well you have long hair Jesamiah, else Isiah would have had nothing to grab hold of.”

  “Lucky you’m not be one of them fancy cap’n’s who wear them powder’d wigs.”

  “Lucky?” Jesamiah panted, his chest feeling as if someone had tied a band too tight around it, salt water still spewing from his lungs. “He damned near pulled half of it out!”

  He hurt like hell, come morning would not be surprised to discover his whole body was bruised. His hands too, were agony, sticky with blood his palms and fingers ripped to shreds where he had tried to cling to the jagged coral. The salt water made the cuts sting abominably.

  The hurricane wandered away to uproot trees and drive the tide to rearrange the shore along the Mississippi delta. The survivors of the Salvation barely noticing its going. Exhausted, they slept where they had fallen.

  Daylight. With scudding clouds and a weak sun the new day brought everything into devastating focus. They buried the dead, those corpses that had been washed ashore, in one grave, digging it with their bare hands and large shells, marking it with a cross fashioned by Roberts from the flotsam. The island was small, two acres? No more than three. The four palm trees bending before the wind had survived the storm but were battered and ripped, the shade they gave, scanty. There was no water. Food aplenty, for the crabs were everywhere, but with their weapons and powder sodden, the survivors had no resource to strike a spark to make a fire. Wreckage spewed along the shore; sharks lurked beyond the reef. The bloated bodies of the dead floated, macabre, with the swell of the tide.

  They waited through the day and the night for the tail end of the tempest to blow itself out and then launched the boat, raised sail and limped towards the mainland of Florida. Rue took the tiller. Jesamiah sat hunched in the stern, his torn hands making it impossible for him to do anything useful. Looking over his shoulder as they carefully negotiated the shoals he stared at what was left of his ship. She lay keel up, the rent across her belly gaping like an open mouth pleading for help, the splintered wood her jagged teeth. She was a dead, lifeless hulk, to be haunted by men whose souls would remain washing in and out with the rise and fall of the tides forever. His ship, his first command. Gone.

  He felt like weeping, but did not have the energy. He was beyond tears, his ship’s loss as raw as the soreness of his hands.

  “There was nothing more you could ‘ave done,” Rue assured him, setting his fingers on Jesamiah’s shoulder and squeezing an offer of comfort. “When a storm blows, all you can do is pray God ‘as the Grace to ‘elp you survive it. We will not be the only ones in this situation.” He shrugged, squeezed again. “We were the lucky ones, Capitaine, we ‘ave a boat. Most of the poor souls either do not need one or will be facing a slow death without water, food or shelter.”

  “I could have taken in sail earlier.”

  “Oui or you could ‘ave plotted a different course. You could ‘ave suggested we ‘ead for Africa not the Carolinas. You could ‘ave taken us to where we caught the plague and died with our skin turning to boils and pus, our innards rotting, our brains roasting with fever. You could ‘ave done lots of things, mon ami, but we are ‘ere,” he gestured towards their surroundings, “and we are alive. Let us just say merci bien to God and leave it there, non?”

  “I think it was the Lady who saved us,” Roberts said after a short while of silence. “The Holy Mother Mary.” He crossed himself, muttering a liturgy under his breath, several of the men doing likewise.

  “Why say you that?” Rue asked, intrigued. He had no holding with Papist views, did not particularly believe in God. Many pirates did not, although they were a superstitious lot. Nothing of the colour green, unless it was food, to be taken aboard. No whistling on deck; touching wood or scratching a stay for luck, tossing a pinch of spilt salt over the shoulder. Wearing a gold earring or having gold teeth to pay for passage into the next world.

  “I heard a woman calling,” Roberts explained as matter of factly as if he was saying the sun was shining in the sky. He tilted his head higher, his chin jutting out firm, knowing he would not be believed. “She hollered at me to look in the water.”

  “Non, non! That was me calling!” Rue corrected with gruff amusement.

  “You changed your voice to a female’s then?” Roberts challenged, defiant, casting a glower over his shoulder at the older man. “This was a young woman. Lovely voice she had, sort of sing-song. Bit like Mickey O’Hannagan’s only different.” He crossed himself again. Mickey O’Hannagan had been one of the victims to fall to the sharks.

  Rue laughed outright. “That is the first time I ‘ave ‘eard the Mother of God to be Irish!”

  Jesamiah said nothing. He sat staring at the empty ocean that was today so benign. The accent had not been Irish. He had heard it before, somewhere, he could not think where. But somehow, he knew it was Cornish.

  Satisfied, Tethys subsided back into the darkness and the quiet of the deep, sated from her lust of devouring the dead. The one she had wanted had not been among her plunder; she had dragged him under, had held him in her watery embrace but had been forced to let him go. It did not matter. There was plenty of time to be claiming him. She was eternal, he was not.

  The other one, though? She was a puzzle. Not of the sea nor of the earth, was she also beyond the restriction of mortality? One like Tethys herself, a Methuselah made from the stuff of the stars? One of power formed outside of time at the very dawn of being.

  Tethys shrugged as she sank deeper. There was no hurry to find out; she would unravel the secret of this female intruder one day, one millennium. The passage of time for Tethys had no concept, no meaning. Tethys was the spiritual manifestation of the sea. Time for her did not exist.

  All the same, while she had held the one with the gold acorn and the blue ribbons, while he had almost been hers to keep, she had ensured he would not be remembering this other one’s presence. Ensured his memory would forget who this witch-girl was.

  Thirteen

  August – 1716

  Excited, Kisty ran up the stairs with an announcement, which sent Jenna fluttering for her shawl and bonnet, and puzzled Tiola.

  “Master van Overstratten has come to escort me up the Lion’s Head Mountain?” Tiola repeated, incredulous. “Is this one of Bella’s jests?”

  “I assure you Miss Oldstagh, it is no jest. I am here to do precisely that!” Into the cluttered room walked a tall, slim man in his late twenties, fashionably dressed in a neat green velvet coat, white breeches, silver-buckled shoes. He bowed to Jenna, crossed immediately to Tiola, took up her hand and kissed it.

  He was among the important men of Cape Town, Dutch, as all the important men were, a merchant trader specialising in fine wines, cotton and sugar; a man with rank and authority. They had met three days past when she had been requested to attend his sister’s labour. Tiola had not expected to meet him again, most especially not here in the shabbier part of town. Stefan van Overstratten owned a fleet of ships and was one of the wealthiest men in the Peninsula. His house was an expensive three-storied structure on the elite location of Strand Street, overlooking Table Bay. Far different to the humble dwelling Tiola called home.

  With her reputation as a midwife spreading beyond the vicinity of Grope Lane, Tiola had found herself to be popular among the women of Cape Town. Babies were always being born and her services were constantly in demand. There were days when she found herself hurrying from one side of town to the other and back again almost without pause.

  “How fares thy nephew, Surr?” she enquired, hiding her consternation within the formality of a curtsey, the rolling burr of her Cornish accent unusually exaggerated. Why had he come here? Why had he not sent a servant? Absently, she patted her hair, knowing it was a tangled mess beneath the mobcap; hoped her face w
as clean, smoothed her apron boasting more than a few stains. She had been clearing the ashes from the cooking fire, felt as grubby as the hearth. “He is thriving I trust?”

  “I am amazed,” van Overstratten admitted, setting his silver-topped cane and his feathered cocked hat on the table, and at Tiola’s gesture seating himself. “I had no idea a child so small could guzzle so much milk and make so much noise!”

  The boy was his sister’s first. The birth uncomplicated, despite the mother, Berenice, hysterically screaming her way through its entirety. She was a pretty girl, delicate in build and in Tiola’s opinion in mind also, for she appeared to be totally without intelligence. Spoilt from infancy by her father and on his passing by her brother, she wanted for nothing. As for the husband, Tiola wondered how they had managed to reproduce, so lazy was he; but he was minor Dutch nobility, an attribute which as far as van Overstratten was concerned, negated any lack of charm or fault of character.

  “I wish to personally repay your kindness towards my family, Ma’am,” the Dutchman explained. “I recall, during one of our short conversations while waiting for my lusty nephew to arrive, you mentioned you have not completed the walk to the summit of the Lion’s Head? It is most remiss of you. The view from the top is magnificent.”

  He spoke of the rock shaped like a crouching lion that flanked Table Mountain as a smaller companion. With its lower slopes crowded by trees and flora the outcrop provided a beckoning lure for an afternoon’s tour, but Tiola had not found suitable opportunity to explore its charm. There were always so many more important things to be doing and never enough daylight hours in which to be doing them.

  “I have sent a picnic ahead,” van Overstratten added, “and I will hear no refusal from you, mijn beste – my dear. I insist on this outing.”