Artemis - Kydd 02

by Julian Stockwin

  Kydd had never considered the matter before.

  Renzi waited, and thought of Cecilia, the intelligent, darting dark eyes, the sturdy practicality giving backbone to the appealing childish warmth of her femininity. Unaccountably he felt a pang. 'Would you be offended were I to offer my suggestions?' he found himself saying.

  'O' course not, Nicholas! Give us a broadside of 'em, I beg.'

  'Very well.' Cecilia was practical, but she would want to know personal details. 'Are you ready?'

  '"It is the eve of great adventures - to the fabled court of the Great Moghul, the sacred groves of Calicut - yet must I look to the needs of the voyage! Therefore, dear sister, I have . . ."' Those eyes, softening under his gaze. She would want to know of feelings; fears, hopes . . . '"At the signal on the morrow we spread our sails and disappear from mortal ken into the Great Unknown, the vasty deep. I cannot but feel a quickening of the spirit as I contemplate the asininity of man's claims to dominion, when he but rides above the . . ."'

  'Wait! This pen is scratchy. Do ye think she'll suspect that it's not me, I mean, writin' like this?'

  'Of course she will not, brother. ". . . if you give thought to me, dear Cecilia, be certain that my image is foremost in your mind when . . ."' It would be months before there would be chance of a mail passage back to England in one of the stately East Indiamans; this letter would have to last.

  'Haaaands to unmoor ship!'

  The anchorage was the same, the view of the low, dark green coast and white slashed Downs was the same, but the feeling was definitely different.

  Kydd waited in the foretop to go up to lay out and loose the foretopsail; he had possibly the best view in the ship. Impulsively he reached for one of the brand new lines from aloft, and took a long sniff. The deep, heady odour of the tar was a clean sea smell, and it seemed to Kydd to symbolise his break with the land.

  His heart beat with excitement at the thought of the epic voyage ahead, to lands strange and far. What singular sights would he see, what adventures would he undergo, before he would be back here again? He gulped but his eyes shone. Deep-sea voyaging was never anything but a hard, chancy affair. Death from a dozen causes lay in wait — a helpless fall from aloft into the vastness of the sea, malice of the enemy, shipwreck, disease. His eyes might at this moment be making their last mortal sighting of the land that had given him birth.

  On deck below, officers paced impatiently as the cable slowly came in at the hawse, and Kydd blessed his fortune once again at being a topman and therefore spared cruel labour at the capstan.

  'Lay out and loose!' The voice blared up from Parry's speaking trumpet. It was common knowledge that he had been mortified when Fairfax had been brought in as first lieutenant against his expectations. It was usual for wholesale promotions to follow a successful bloody action. Some officers might take their disappointment out on the men; time would tell.

  The frigate cast effortlessly to starboard, quickly gathering way. The fo'c'sle guns banged out the salute, eddying puffs of a reduced charge from the six-pounders reaching him with its memory of battle.

  On deck again, Kydd heaved a deep sigh, gripping a shroud and looking back on the still detailed shoreline. He thought of the small schoolhouse that perhaps he would never see again. A tremor passed over him, a premonition perhaps. Had this all been a mistake?

  The yards trimmed, the anchor at last catted and fished, Artemis settled down for the run out to sea. Kydd busied himself at the forebitts, anxious for some reason to keep the land in sight for as long as possible. Details of the shore diminished and blurred into insignificance as it slipped away astern, and the land began to take on an anonymous uniformity.

  As they passed beyond the seamark of Worsley's Obelisk, Artemis duly performed her curtsy to Neptune, the first deep sea swell raising her bow majestically and passing down her length until at midpoint she fell again in a smash of spray. The motion made him stagger at first, but the live deck once more under his feet was glorious. Glancing aloft he drank in the curving of the leeches of the sails, one above the other in exactly the right blend of curves and graces, the bar-taut new rigging in its familiar complexity as an elegant counterpoint.

  With no raised poop the deck edge was a sweet line from where he stood right aft, and he marvelled anew at the natural beauty of a ship: no straight lines, no blocky walls, she was much closer to a sculpture than a building.

  He looked back to the land. Within the span of a deck watch it had transformed from the solid earth from where before he had his being to the greying band now about to leave his sight and consciousness. In a short time they would be alone, quite alone in the trackless immensity of the ocean.

  Chapter 5

  Staring at the empty horizon where England had been, he didn't hear the footsteps behind. A hand clapped on Kydd's shoulder, snapping him out of his reverie. 'No vitties fer you, then, lad?'

  He followed Petit to the fore-hatch, and joined the others with mixed emotions at dinner. The lines beside Renzi's mouth seemed deeper, his expression more set than Kydd could remember having seen it before. He realised that Renzi must feel the same way as he, but with the added force of an intelligence that had no control over its destiny, no chance to affect its onward rush into whatever lay ahead. It was a sombre thought.

  'So it's farewell t' Old England!' Kydd tried to be breezy, but it fell flat. The table lapsed into silence; no one wished to catch an eye. It might be years before they saw home again, and with the certainty that some would not make the happy return.

  Cundall slammed down his pot. 'An' not too soon, mates — me dear ole uncle just got scragged at Newgate fer

  twitchin' a bit o' silver, me aunt needin' the rhino 'n' all.'

  There was murmuring; justice shoreside was far worse than at sea. Kydd sat for a while, letting the conversation ebb and flow about him, listening to the regular shipboard creaks and swishes of a ship in a seaway, and felt better.

  'Why we goin' to India, Mr Petit?' Luke's treble voice sounded above the talk.

  Petit shoved away his plate, and thought for a while. 'Why, can't say as 'ow I has an answer fer that, Luke. We threw out the Frogs fer good not so long ago . . .'

  'Nicholas?' Kydd prompted.

  Staring at the timbers of the ship's side, Renzi didn't speak. At first Kydd thought he had not heard, then he said quietly, 'I cannot say. True, the French have been ejected, but there are native rajahs who see their best interest in stirring discord among the Europeans, and are probably in communication with the French - but this is small stuff.' He settled back and continued, 'I can't think what there is in Calcutta that would justify our presence, especially a crack frigate of our reputation.'

  That was the sticking point: Artemis was not just any frigate but at the moment the most famous in the Navy. Loosed like a wolf on the French sea lanes she was a proven predator, and if a frigate was wanted in those seas then others could be spared.

  'Coulda got wind of a Frog ship come ter ruffle feathers like, those parts.' Doud had drawn up a tub to join the group. He always respected Renzi's pronouncements for their profundity.

  Renzi shook his head. 'No, wouldn't be that, Ned. Bombay

  Marine will settle their account. Seems we have a mystery, shipmates.'

  Artemis made a fast passage south, through Biscay and on into sunnier seas. At one point they were reined in by an irascible captain of a passing seventy-four-gun ship-of-the-line, but under Admiralty orders they could not be touched, and once more spread canvas for their far destination.

  Kydd was surprised at how the immediacy and movement of his life on land froze so quickly, was packaged into a series of static images, then slipped away into the past, to become a collection of memory fossils. His immediacy was now the rhythm of sea life - the regular watch on deck, an occasional fluster of an 'all hands' to take in sail for a squall, and the continual ebb and flow of daily events, each as predictable as the rising sun, but in sum a comforting background against which Kydd
grew and matured as a seaman.

  His oaken complexion was renewed in the sun, and work aloft restored his upper body strength to the point at which he could have swarmed up a rope hand over hand without using his feet to grip.

  Renzi envied Kydd's easy development, his agility aloft, his natural gifts as a sailor. Kydd's splicing and pointing was meticulous, while his own was adequate but lacked the regularity, even technical beauty, of Kydd's work. His own body tended to the spare, whipcord wiriness that went with his austere temperament, and where Kydd gloried in the dangers lurking aloft, Renzi was careful and sure in his movements, never taking uncalculated risks or making an unconsidered move. Kydd soon caught up and overtook him in these skills but, as Renzi reminded himself, his own objective was to serve a sentence, not to make a life's calling.

  He recalled what had passed when they were tasked off to bowse down the gammoning around the bowsprit. Suspended on opposite sides, under the gratings and walkways above, they were as close to the exact point at which the stem cleaved the water as they could be. It was mesmerising, seeing at such close quarters the cutwater dip slowly and deeply into the ocean, scattering rainbow jewels of water, pausing, then making an unhurried rise, as regular and comforting as the breathing at a mother's breast. It took an effort of will for them to finish the job and return.

  And at night, the startlingly bright moonpath of countless gleaming shards, which continually fractured and joined, danced and glittered in a spirited restlessness. The reliable winds at this latitude left little for the watch on deck to do, and they would stare at it for long periods. Under its influence they considered the mysteries of life, which the normal course of existence on land, with its ever-present distractions, would never have allowed. Time at sea had a different quality: it required that men move to its own rhythms, conforming to its own pace.

  'Night's as black as ol’ Nick hisself,' said Doud, finishing hanking the fall of the weather fore-brace. The usual trimming of sails at the beginning of the watch was complete now and they would probably be stood down. Only voices in the dark and passing shadows on the glimmering paleness of the decks were evidence of the existence of other beings. A low cry came from aft: 'Watch on deck, stand down.'

  They would remain on deck ready, but they could make themselves as comfortable as the conditions would allow. Soft talk washed around Kydd; old times, old loves. Drowsily, he looked up at the sky. It was easy to be hypnotised by the regular shifting occlusion of sails and rigging across the star-field as the vessel rolled to the swell.

  'What's down there?' he found himself sayings

  The talk trailed off. 'Yer what?' said one voice.

  Kydd levered himself up while the thought took shape. 'I mean, at the bottom o' the sea — we're only on th' top, must be all kinds'a things down there.' His mind swam with images of sunken ships, skeletons of whales and the recollection of a diorama he had once seen of Davy Jones's Locker. It seemed reasonable to expect the muddy sea-bed that their anchor gripped to extend indefinitely in all directions, coming up only for land. 'How deep does it get?' he asked.

  A deeper voice answered, 'Dunno. That is ter say, no one knows. Yer deep-sea lead is eighty, hunnerd fathom, an' it gives "no bottom" only a few leagues off Scilly. After that, who knows? It's as deep as it is.'

  Six hundred, maybe a thousand feet, and straight down. Kydd remembered the purity and crystal clarity of deep sea-water in the daytime with the sun's rays reaching down in moving shafts of light, and even then he had never seen the bottom.

  'Night-time, that's when yer thinks about it — what's there movin' about under our keel, mates, a rousin' good question,' the voice declared.

  A buzz of animated conversation started.

  'Ship goes down with all hands in a blow, stands ter reason, they're down there still.'

  'Naah - sharks'll be at their bones quicker'n silver.'

  'What flam, Jeb! Where's yer sharks in th' north?'

  'There's other things, mate, what likes ter eat a sailor's bones. Things down there a-waitin' their chance.'

  'What things?' Kydd asked, apprehensive of the reply.

  'Monsters, mate! Huge 'n' bloody monsters.'

  This provoked a restless stirring, but the voice was not contradicted. The cheerful slapping of ropes against the mast and the unseen plash of the wake shifted imperceptibly to a manic fretfulness. A new voice started from further away: 'He's right there, has ter be said. Some as say there ain't no monsters, but yer've got ter agree, a sea this big c'n hide more'n a whole tribe of 'em.'

  'Sure there's monsters,' an older voice cut in. 'An' I seen one. Two summers ago only. We wuz at anchor off Funchal — 'n' that ain't so far from here — had fishin' lines over the side, hopin' fer albacore, so 'twas stout gear we had out.' He cleared his throat and continued, 'Nearly sundown, 'n' we was about to haul th' lines in when comes such a tug on one it nearly took me with it inter the 'oggin. Me frien' who was alongside me saw the line smokin' out like it had a stone weight on it plungin' down, an' he takes a turn on a cleat, slows it down a bit. Then th' line slackens an' he hauls in.'

  There was total quiet.

  'Sudden-like, there's a shout. I goes ter the side an', so help me God, I sees there somethin' I don' never want ter see again!'

  Kydd held his breath.

  'Red eyes 'n' fangs workin' away, there's this great long dark-green serpent. An' I mean long! Me frien' worked it aft by tyin' off on the pins one be one, an' I'm here ter tell yez, mates, it stretched out from abreast the foremast all the way aft ter the quarterdeck. Squirmin' and thrashin', right knaggy it was, thumpin' the side until officer o' the deck told us to cut him loose ter save the ship.'

  A younger voice interjected, 'Yer c'n be sure that's nowt but a tiddler, Lofty. Bigger ones down there, yer just don't know.'

  'An' they ain't the worst of 'em - it's them what the Norskeys call the Kraken, they're the worst.' 'What Y they?'

  'It's yer giant octopus, mate, big as yer like, loomin' up outa the sea at night, eyes as big as a church clock a-starin' up at yer — an' that's when you knows it's all up, 'cos it feeds on sailors what it sweeps up orf of the deck with its slimy great arms forty fathom long, with these 'ere suckers all over 'em.'

  Apprehension spread over Kydd. As they spoke there might be one directly in their path, lying in silent anticipation of its meal, just at this moment noiselessly rising up from the depths. He shivered, and hunkered down in the blackness as low as he could. Renzi was out of reach, now at his trick on the wheel, but in the forenoon they would certainly talk together.

  The prevailing westerlies died and from the other direction the north-east trade winds began: pleasantly warm, vigorous and exhilarating, the best possible impetus for their southward voyaging. The sea turned ultramarine under the azure sky, and with hurrying white horses below and towering cumulus rising above, their sea world was a contrasting study in blue and white.

  On the sun-dappled main deck Petit paused in his seaming. 'Yez knows what this means.'

  Kydd looked up and waited.

  'These are the trade winds, 'n' that means we now got Africa ter larb'd.'

  It was a thought to conjure with. The fabled dark continent, its interior unknown to mankind. Jungle and swamp, the whole mystery lying just over there from where the winds were blowing. Kydd was seized with a yearning to glimpse it, just once.

  The weather grew from warm to hot; pitch between the deck planking became sticky to the touch where the sun beat down on it, and Kydd had to cover his torso with an open shirt; his bare feet had long ago become strong and toughened.

  Below decks it was too hot to sleep. Kydd and Renzi sat on the fo'c'sle, off watch, Renzi with his clay pipe drawing contentedly and Kydd staring up dreamily. The stars were out, and of such brilliance they appeared low enough to touch. Along the eastern horizon, however, was a dark line. Curious, they watched it take shape. As the hours wore on it extended gradually on both sides and fattened to a bank of darkness. Lightning
played within it, a continuous flickering that illuminated tiny details of the cloud mass in tawny gold.

  The heat of the day was still with them, the air breathy, heavy. They looked towards the bank idly, fascinated by the primeval sight. It was now moving towards them from the beam. As it drew nearer the distant flashes of lightning became more separated and distinct, and after a long interval an answering sullen rumbling of thunder could be heard floating towards them over the water.

  'All the hands! All hands on deck — haaaaands to shorten sail!'

  There was no apparent change in the immediate weather; the wind was the same streaming easterly, but for the first time Kydd could detect a scent, a heavy humid rankness of rotten vegetation and stagnant pools — the heady fragrance of Africa.

  They took in courses, then topsails. Powlett, it seemed, would not be satisfied until the yards were at the cap and all they showed were staysails fore-and-aft. Their speed fell off, and the roll of the ship changed in character: the Atlantic swell passed them by to leave the ship wallowing in long jerky movements, an unsettling sensation for a fast frigate.

  Drawing closer, the dense cloud bank increased in height and width, its dark pall gradually snuffing out the stars until it loomed high over them. Men did not return below, they lined the side and watched. The lightning became more spectacular, the thunder a spiteful crack and pealing roar. Then came a darkness more intense than ever.

  Kydd felt something elemental stealing over him; the towers of blackness glowered moody and threatening, fat with menace. The wind died; in the calm the flashing and banging of the lightning filled the senses. There was a breathless pause as the last stars flickered out overhead. In the ominous calm it seemed that the fluky winds were in dispute for the right to turn on their prey.

  A gust, then others. The wind picked up in violent, shifting squalls, sending Kydd staggering. The wall of blackness raced across towards them - and they were hit. In an instant it seemed as if the heavens were afire. The lightning coalesced into one blinding, ear-splitting blast of thunder, which ripped the air apart. The squalls tore at Kydd's grip in a nightmare buffeting and all he could do was stand rigid, stupefied. The ship reared and shied like a frightened horse, deafening volleys of thunder entering the fabric of the vessel, transmitting through to his feet. Worse by far than any broadside, the sound smashed at his senses. He fumbled for half-remembered prayers. They josded in his mind but focus was impossible under the assault.