by L. E. Waters
The judge is quiet, and I imagine him measuring how far the fall.
Then it hits me—my dream of the storm—I held on to a door. A door just like a hatch! I look at the large hatch cover next to us and grab the captain’s arm.
“Captain! I think this will float!”
They all turn, and the captain’s eyes light up when he realizes what I mean.
“Boys! Help me throw this over!”
Pepe, the captain, and I all heave the hatch up to waist level and carry it to the bow. The judge and Andres follow behind quietly.
“On three! One, two, three!” the captain cries.
We throw it the farthest we can, but it still lands pretty close to the bow of the ship.
The captain says, “We’ll need another one!”
We run to another hatch and throw that in.
The captain gets on the railing and puts his hand down to the judge. The judge looks back at the beaten, hopeless ship and despairingly takes the captain’s hand, which pulls the plumper, older man up on the railing.
The captain says, “Jump as far as you can when I tell you!”
Then, after a wave comes, he jumps and yanks the hesitating judge with him. Pepe, Andres, and I watch eagerly as the captain surfaces and searches for the door. We yell and point where it bobs. He reaches it and shouts for the judge, who finally resurfaces, spitting water and having spasms to stay afloat.
I notice the other door’s drifting farther away, and I yell, “We have to go too!”
Pepe nods and jumps up on the railing. He tries to give me a hand, but I leap up without needing his help. I stand next to him and leave a space for Andres to stand. When we glance back, he’s stepping away backwards.
“I can’t! I really can’t! I can’t swim! I can’t go in! I’ll be okay here. You two go!” he sputters, hyperventilating.
“Andres, get up here right now! We’ll help you, and you can float on that door! But if we don’t go now, you’ll surely die here or in the water—ALONE!”
Andres halts and stares back up to us, and we both put our hands out. He slowly comes to take them, and we pull him up with us. I make the mistake of looking down off the railing into the surging, angry water. It no longer is beautiful but primal, with its dark black water and frothy white rage reaching for us at every crisscrossing wave. Nothing except the fear of death can make me go into that water. My stomach feels like it rose into my throat, making it hard to breathe.
Now I’m the flying horse.
We three boys—the tallest, smallest, and middle—all holding hands on a sinking ship, all say together, gathering strength, “ONE, TWO, THREE!” and we both pull Andres off with us, and I hear his scream the whole way down until we hit the dark, hostile water.
I’m unprepared for how painful the cold is. The water is like ice and feels like I fell on knives. I have to push the pain away from my mind and resist the urge to gasp out of sheer shock and fight my way back to air. I break away from Andres as soon as we hit the water, and I look all over for him.
“Andres! Pepe! Captain!” I scream, but hear and see no one. I search for the door and am relieved to see the captain holding Andres on his door a few feet away from me. But every time I try to reach them, the current and waves keep pulling me under. I’m struggling to avoid getting sucked back to hit against the ship. Suddenly, a monstrous wave breaks across the ship and sends broken planks and barrels flying. I come up in time to see a large piece of ship on top of a wave crash right down on top of the captain and Andres. I realize I have to give up trying to get to them and instead swim with the waves away from the ship.
“Pepe!” I yell when I can get a breath, but the salty water invades my throat, and I cough and sputter as it burns up my nasal passages.
I haven’t seen him anywhere. I wonder if he ever resurfaced. About a wave away, I see something dark in the water. It’s the size of a boy, and I start to swim as hard as I possibly can toward it. When I get nearer, my heart drops when I see it’s only a barrel. But then I realize it’s floating after all and grab on to it. I don’t know how long I’m in the waves or how I even managed to keep holding the barrel as my body shuts down to the cold. A strange primal scream brings me out of my stupor, and I pull my aching head up out of the waves to see what’s making that sound.
“Póg mo thóin!” The thing gurgles as he looks up to the sky, both arms beating his drumlike chest.
There, on the center of the beach ahead, about two feet deep in the water, stands a naked giant. With the constant disruption on the choppy waves closer to shore, this hairy beast of a man with muscles bulging obscenely and covered in vibrant blood shakes his ax and large mallet to the sky. I freeze at the sight of him and know he is not from our ship. I instantly let go of my barrel and try to swim backwards. I watch in horror as a sailor makes it to shore about thirty feet away from him. With the scariest sound I’ve ever heard a human make, the giant runs right at the poor man and swings his mallet round in a circle mid-flight, making contact with the petrified man’s head. A cloud of blood and matter explodes from where his head had been.
Panic shoots through me, and I swim against the waves the best I can. I try to swim westward to land among the reeds on the side of the shore. The savage yells over and over again and I count at least forty-three yells before I reach the safety of the marsh. As I lie there, panting and completely exhausted, I fight the urge to noisily cough up the water I had swallowed. I think about the chances that the captain, Pepe, or Andres made it to shore. My stomach lurches at the thought that maybe one of those yells has been the end of one of them. Blackness comes quickly and without warning.
Chapter 11
Before I open my eyes, a rustling sound is coming closer to me. The image of the naked warrior swinging his ax down on my head keeps me from opening my eyes. The noise stops, but I feel the thing right beside me. I open my eyes one at a time, and I’m relieved to see a naked and shivering Spaniard clutching his knees to his chest, trying to generate some warmth on the cold night.
“Which… sh-sh-ship… are you from?” I ask, but I’m shivering almost as much and can barely get the words out. A convulsion of cold rolls through me and locks my jaw. I hold my body closer also.
The man turns a haunted face to me, and his eyes don’t even find mine. He seems in a fog.
“What… is… your name?” I try again.
This time he just folds into himself once again, and I realize he must not be well.
We sit quietly shivering in the wind howling off the sea until I hear many footsteps coming toward us in the reeds. I look up to see three foreign faces and can’t understand a word they speak to each other. They all hold sacks in one hand and a club in the other, but as soon as they see me, a boy, and the already stripped, shivering man, clinging to our lives, they put down their clubs and instead grab at the reeds around us and start to cover the naked man in them. Then they do the same for me. Dusk falls.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
The reeds and ferns might have been the thing that kept me alive that night, but they didn’t help my new friend at all. I find him in the dawn completely frozen, with his arms and legs pulled close to him, eyes fixed and his jaw hanging open. From far away, I hear the sound of many horses. Peeking up through the reeds, I see as many as two hundred men on horseback flood the beach, each man circling around the wreckage washed ashore before continuing on. After the whole strand is looked over, they leave to the next strand. Not being able to stay a moment longer next to the corpse, I stand up in the reeds and survey the scene, mostly looking for the warrior.
The beach is terribly quiet with the soft lapping of the now calming seas in the morning light. The sands are covered with items washed up from the wreck, and as I draw closer, I realize they’re all bodies. I couldn’t have imagined such a sight. Ravens and wild dogs are taking advantage of the bounty. I run and throw rocks, trying to shoo the animals away, turning each body over, searching their faces. Most are
badly disfigured due to blows from mallets and clubs, and I realize that many of these men had made it to shore alive. All were stripped of their clothing and robbed of everything they tried to save on them. Every crate and barrel was pried open and emptied. Body after body all strewn on the sands like fish after the tide’s gone out. There are hundreds upon hundreds, and still, bodies are floating up in the sleepy waves.
“Luis!” something croaks downwind.
I turn and see Andres clutching his soaked self and running toward me, shivering so hard he can barely run. Limping in the background, I see the captain, smiling. I run to Andres. I grab him and spin him around.
“I told you you’d be fine!” I give him another hug.
He laughs. “Yeah, I held onto the captain and never let go,” he says between shivers.
I see the large blood stain down the captain’s pants.
“What happened, Captain?”
He winces as he takes another step forward. “Oh, a wave carrying a piece of floating timber came right down on my legs.”
“Where’s Pepe?” Andres asks, searching the shoreline behind me.
“He’s not with you?”
“No,” Andres answers, and his eyes fill.
“Did you see him after we hit the water?’
“No,” Andres says.
“Is the judge with you too?” I ask the captain.
He shakes his head. “No, sunk right to the bottom. I’m guessing his whole coat must have been sewn with gold.”
We stand and look at what lies all around us.
The captain proclaims, “Well, we must get out of here before that warrior-thing comes back. There must be someone who’ll take a fellow Catholic in.” He takes his cross from underneath his shirt and kisses it.
We make our way slowly, with the captain grimacing with every other step.
“Luis! Stay off the path,” he shouts from behind as he puts his arm out for Andres, “and help me here.” He stumbles over the rocks on the edge of the path.
We travel for less than an hour when we come upon a smoking stone church at the top of a knoll. Andres and I make to run up to the church, but the captain grabs hold of our wet shirts and pulls us back and whispers in our ears, “Never run up to a smoking church.”
We inch up to the small and charred holy place. The thatched roof is completely gone, and we see shapes hanging from the iron bars of the windows. Once inside, we see that twelve Spaniards were slaughtered within. Each youthful face blue, each one struggled out of the water and escaped the warrior to come to this place of refuge to be hanged.
Was there no escape?
Everything’s hypnotically still—a silence that only follows a tragedy.
Evil swallows all sound.
We leave the desecrated ground, walking backwards, attempting to undo a curse. Behind the church, the captain notices a faint path through the thick woods and nods toward it. No one talks for half an hour. We keep looking for death in every direction. Andres sees her first, crouches down instinctively, and we follow. An old lady pulls five cows down the path but halts as soon as she sees us and tries to push her cows back down the path to no avail.
The captain jumps forward, which causes her ancient eyes to open wide. He says, “Spain! We are from Spain! We mean you no harm.” But she doesn’t seem to understand a word and keeps trying to move back down the path, her cheeks flaming pink from the hard work.
The captain smiles his friendliest smile and holds his hands to his chest over his heart. The women watches this movement with curiosity. The captain points to his bloody leg, and she winces in sympathy. Then the captain mocks shivering and rubs his stomach to show hunger. The old woman looks at us sadly, shrugs, and put her hands up empty. She points to the woods behind her and puts her hands out like a musket and points to us. She raises her fingers up in a cross and points to us and then shakes her head at what was back in the woods. She points at her cows and then covers one of her hands over the other and points forward. The captain seems to understand it all and nods in thanks for her assistance. She smiles as she pulls her cows past us, hunched over with age.
“What did she say?” I ask.
“She warned us the English were that way, and we should go back from where we came.”
“Back to the church?” Andres fumes.
“Never doubt an old woman hiding her cows.” And he steps forward, even more sore than before, and we follow tiredly behind.
We pass the church again in silence, and we stare at our feet. The sound of Spanish words make us glance up at once as two naked figures run toward us.
Chapter 12
“Forget all about me!” one yells as they near, his arms bent at the elbows and swinging as he runs awkwardly.
My heart jumps as I see a familiar form. Andres must have recognized him also, since he goes running to him.
“Pepe!” I say, and the captain looks up, pursing his thin lips, trying to keep from smiling but his eyes well up.
“You’re all alive!” Pepe says as he hugs Andres. “I was sure you all drowned!” He reaches to hug me and engulfs me in his arms.
He goes to hug the captain, but the captain draws back. “I never hugged a naked man and don’t want to say I did now.” We laugh, and Pepe suddenly looks self-conscious and tries to cover himself with his hands.
“How did you all keep your clothes?” Pepe points to his companion. “As soon as we came up to that beach”—he points to the strand next to ours—“the natives were all dancing with their sticks above their heads, just waiting for us to make it to shore.” He grabs the man next to him. “They took every stitch we had off us, and Carlos, here, took a bad blow to the head.” He turns the skinny man to the side, showing a river of blood down to his neck.
Pepe’s brow knits. “I could care less about my clothes, but they took Auradona, my father’s knife, and my sewing kit my mother left me.”
I immediately take my top layer off and hand it to Pepe. “It’s still wet, but it’s something.”
He gives me a grateful look and happily throws it over his head. Andres eyes Carlos’s shivering form and begrudgingly removes his top layer. He throws it to Carlos, who thanks him eagerly.
“Are the beaches clear?” the captain asks.
“We had to wait until the scavengers were gone, and we don’t know when the horses will come back. I think we should stay off the beach. There’s a church there.”
The captain shakes his head. “Nothing holy that way.” He starts to hobble toward the beach. “We need to find some biscuits or wine that wash up if we’re going to make it anywhere.”
From the knoll, I can see two strands of beach, the one we came in from and the one where Pepe had landed. I’m surprised to see an equal number of bodies on both beaches. Coming closer, I can see more had washed up since we’d been there. Andres runs to an opened crate nearest to us, and the captain yells, “Now, why would you go to an opened crate?”
Embarrassed, he runs farther down the shore to the crates that have recently washed up, and Pepe and Andres kick away at one, trying to open it. Finally, it pops open, and soggy biscuits glob out on the lid. I never tasted such delicious mush in my life. We were starving and all too quickly finished the crate; then we ran off for another. After we filled our bellies with the contents of three crates, the captain points to a group of natives coming toward us. Three short savages come up with foreign tongues wagging and spears high. We all put our hands up as they begin to pull off our clothes, but the captain screams, “Please, we are friends of Ireland!” to no avail.
Luckily, a larger savage comes down and pulls them away from us. He picks up my shirt and throws it back to us apologetically. After his stern command, the others back away and go off looking through the wreckage. The leader turns and sees us all in our misfortune and points up to another dirt road that disappears through a different patch of woods. He thumps his fist against his chest and points up the path, and we all think he’s saying it is his village.
We bow and make our way to the path. The captain pants as he hobbles. “Quickly, before they change their minds.”
After trudging over sharp stones and rocky paths, the captain commands wearily, “Give me pause here.”
We stand watching him, anxious to get through the eerie wood to some shelter. He arches his back and looks to the sky through the short, wind-hindered treetops.
“It’s hard to tell when dusk is falling due to how grey and dismal the weather is here,” the captain says with his mouth opened, panting slightly.
Suddenly, we all turn to the noise coming from the path ahead of us. It’s too late to jump into the underbrush to hide. The group sees us and are hurrying straight at us.
Two men lead the way, and the captain quickly pushes us behind him as he brings the stick he’s walking with out in front of him. One of the men draws out a knife and quickly stabs at the captain’s already wounded leg. The captain catches the blow with his stick, but the knifepoint breaks flesh. The captain grunts and lunges at the men out of range. The other man swings at his head and knocks the captain over easily. Carlos jumps forward, only to put his hands up as soon as he sees the man brandish the knife with a grin of intent. Out of nowhere, a very beautiful girl with orange, shining hair jumps in front of them and says something feverishly to the young man with the knife, causing him to lower it to his side. An old man pulls the other young man back and says something in a calming tone.
The man steps around the girl and old man, toward Carlos. He lifts Carlos’s already too short tunic Andres loaned him and pushes him away in disgust, seeing he’s completely naked underneath. The man looks at me, Andres, and half-naked Pepe and realizes we carry no worth and focuses on the captain lying on the ground, still.
The two men step over him and pull off his clothes. One removes his doublet and the other pulls off his pants. They rip open every seam, from which drop coin after coin. Our mouths fall open at the sight of so much gold as the savage’s eyes sparkle. While pulling off his undershirt, they gasp as they unveil the thick gold chain and a thinner gold chain with a red jeweled cross around his neck. In seconds, they remove them from him. They pull off his hose and leave the captain in an unflattering position on the ground.
