Purgatory's Shore

by Taylor Anderson

  “You have musicians aboard, do you not?” he suddenly asked. The young officers looked at each other.

  “Besides buglers? Fifers and drummers, of course. Two each for the artillery companies, and a trio of fifers for the dragoons.”

  “None for the Rifles,” Lieutenant Swain lamented, “though one of the men has a fiddle.”

  “But enough to provide some music for the men?” Lewis pressed.

  Burton’s eyes widened. “Of course! That’s just the thing!”

  “Ask Captain Holland’s permission,” Lewis cautioned. “He may have good reason to object. If not, assemble the musicians in the waist of the ship so those belowdecks can hear them as well. We’ll see if a little entertainment helps pass the time.”

  The four ships churned on through the deepening gloom, and even as the wind began to rise and whip inconsistently and flickering, muttering clouds built in power and size, the martial skirl of fifes and thunder of drums seemed to challenge the natural powers as boldly—and feebly—as Homer’s Ulysses. Eventually, male voices rose in bawdy mockery as well, first in Mary Riggs, then Xenophon, whose people must’ve heard and been inspired. For what seemed a pathetically short time, in retrospect, the voyage turned less hellish for the sick, and the rest were distracted from their grinding fear or boredom. Lewis would also later reflect that the resultant animation might’ve saved many lives because men were more alert, more ready to move, when—now ignored by those who’d been in their power—the heavens or some other elemental force, perhaps even God Himself, somehow took offense.

  “Stand by to wear ship! Quickly now, for your lives! We’re comin’ about!” Captain Holland roared through a japanned speaking trumpet, voice rising over and crushing the music and singing. “Down helm,” he cried to the helmsman, who, sensing his captain’s urgency, actually spun the wheel. “Helm’s alee!” he shouted as the ship heaved over to port and began a radical turn to starboard. Sailors slammed through the soldiers to perform their next tasks without commands, hauling in the main course sheet and easing the headsails, but Holland gave orders anyway. “Top men aloft! We’ll have the topsails off her, fast as you can! You soldiers, make way by the shrouds, goddamn you! Secure your gear. Secure yourselves!” He was barely ten paces from Lewis but pointed the trumpet directly at him, and their eyes met when he continued, “Get any man up from below who can move!”

  * * *

  —

  LEWIS HAD NO idea what was amiss, but knew this was no joke. Worse, he couldn’t imagine why Holland would want more men on deck. The ship was well ballasted with horses, guns, and supplies, but if a blow was coming—the only possible explanation for these frantic preparations—why make Mary Riggs more top-heavy? The only answer was obvious. Holland thought the ship would founder. Pandemonium had erupted as sailors raced up the ratlines and soldiers loudly scurried to rails, the capstan, windlass—anything they could grasp. “Get your men up,” Lewis shouted at the lieutenants still standing by while he looked to the west. If they were turning away from it, that had to be the direction of the threat—where those malevolent clouds had been. At first he saw nothing in the near-total blackness, then jagged ribbons of lightning rushed all across the horizon, lacing through the sky like thousands of silvery capillaries on some monstrous, greenish-black eye. More lighting, almost blue, then yellow, pulsed inside the terrible cloud—and Lewis saw what so alarmed Captain Holland. The thing was close, impossibly so, implying a tremendous velocity—wind like they’d never seen—pushing a rain squall heavy enough to whiten the sea at its feet as it thundered down upon them.

  “My God.” He turned to the lieutenants, still rooted. “Go! You haven’t a moment to lose—and don’t go below yourselves. Just shout down for everyone to come on deck, then report back here, understood?”

  Justinian Olayne and Coryon Burton rushed into motion, but Clifford Swain hesitated. “Do you think we’re going to be drowned?” he cried.

  “Of course not, here on deck,” Lewis lied, “but if the horses break loose, they’ll kill everyone below.” It was all he could think of to say. If the ship went down, everyone below would go with her. And he honestly doubted it would make much difference to those on deck. Few soldiers could swim—he couldn’t—and most had put all their heavy gear on when the alarm was sounded. They’d sink like stones. The ship’s fragile longboat wouldn’t carry many, and would never survive the destruction of the ship in any event. A few might cling to shattered debris. But Lewis’s last glimpse of land put it over ten miles away.

  Swain stood still and Lewis patted his arm. There was nothing the boy could add to what others were already doing. “That’s all right. Stay here where Burton and Olayne can find you. I’ll be back after a word with the captain.” Lewis stepped toward the helm, noting that whatever troops hadn’t found part of the ship to grasp were now clinging to one another.

  “Rise tacks and sheets!” bellowed Holland’s burly mate, Mr. Sessions, pacing forward.

  “Let go and haul!” Holland shouted before turning to stare behind them as the wind came around on the starboard quarter. It was a fitful wind now, however, increasingly uncertain. He shook his head. “Ease the headsails to run with the wind and take in everything but the forecourse. Fast as you can, lads!”

  A lightning-lit glance to the south showed Lewis that Commissary and Xenophon had both come about as well, but Isidra was steaming onward, sparks gushing from her single funnel past sails tightly furled to the yards, her captain apparently intent on taking the storm head-on, under power.

  “What’ll happen?” Lewis shouted at Holland over the rising west wind when he thought he was close enough to be heard.

  “Down now, damn you!” Holland roared into the rigging. A few men were still struggling to secure the flapping fore topsail. He looked at Lewis, eyes wide with more incredulity than fear.

  “I’ve no idea!”

  They both turned aft as the first blow struck in the form of hail the size of musket balls. Men screamed as hard, icy projectiles slashed them like double loads of canister from the sky. Lewis’s wool uniform, even his ridiculous wheel hat, afforded him some protection, but the sheer suddenness and violence of the assault stunned him, even as his hands and face felt like buzzards were brutally pecking and snatching great gobbets of flesh. It wasn’t quite that bad. Big as musket balls or not, the hailstones had little mass. They could cut but not kill. Most couldn’t, at least. Occasional giants the size of roundshot crashed into the deck, blasting apart in stinging, lacerating fragments. A few of those hit men, breaking bones and crushing skulls. Lewis peeked under the little visor that actually deflected a smaller pellet from his eye and saw Holland, bareheaded, standing grim and bloody at the wheel, the helmsman sprawled at his feet. “Hold on!” the man bellowed, just as rain and wind as dense and hard and solid as a wall of water slammed Mary Riggs.

  Lewis had no time to grasp anything and was blown to the deck, where he slid and tumbled before fetching up against a skylight, the glass panes shattered. He raised his head against the battering rain to see men literally swept over the side, either by the thundering wind or the inches-deep sluice of water already roaring out the scuppers. They must’ve screamed, but he never heard them. He did hear a great snapping, crackling noise as backstays parted, timbers screeched, and all three of the ship’s towering masts crashed down forward, smashing screaming men under tons of wood, cordage, and canvas, breaking arms and heads with blocks, and snapping lines. How many men just died because I called them up from below? he thought. No more than will drown when the ship goes down, he realized. In an instant, Mary Riggs had been entirely dismasted, the entangling wreckage blown forward into the sea pulling her around broadside and helpless against the wind and ferocious deluge. She heaved hard over, and Lewis felt himself tumbling across the deck toward the sea.

  Then, in a heartbeat, everything changed.

  Lewis was no longer sliding, a
nd the rain had stopped. Even the wind had dropped to nothing in the space of a breath. He couldn’t tell for certain, but didn’t believe he saw the sea below him anymore, and utter blackness yawned. It was as if some giant hand now held the ship immobile, poised to drop it in an infinite void. The same unnaturally turbulent sky still brooded overhead, but its violence had been arrested, and it was just as unnaturally still. Even the streaks of lightning had slowed to a glaring halt in the glowing, greenish heavens. That’s when Lewis noted another kind of glow, somewhat bluish, completely enveloping everything around him, even the ship itself. It was brightest on the ironwork and soldiers’ muskets, but brass and pewter buttons, beltplates—anything metal—seemed similarly affected. Like Saint Elmo’s fire, it had to be an electrical phenomenon. Lewis was fascinated by electricity—the Morse electrical telegraph was just one of many wondrous new applications—and knew enough about it to understand water conducted it, sometimes dangerously so. That could explain why everything glowed, he supposed. Nothing could explain . . . anything else, and most disconcertingly, how the rain just hung there in the air; large, densely spaced raindrops inexplicably suspended as if time itself had ground to a stop.

  There was no sound, no . . . natural movement around the ship at all, for long, terrible moments. Somewhat to his surprise, however, Lewis found he could still move, and he waved his hand in front of his face in wonder, half expecting the raindrops to scatter as he brushed them aside, but they only further wet his skin. His eyes focused on the jumble of wreckage around the stump of the mainmast and saw two of Anson’s Rangers, the giant holding the youth. The boy’s wheel hat had fallen away, and though the slick black hair it released wasn’t particularly long, the way it lay, the shape of the head, the neck, the large brown eyes staring at the raindrops with the same amazement Lewis felt, all suddenly convinced him that Anson’s son or nephew was really a daughter or niece.

  That couldn’t have mattered less at the moment, because movement and sound aboard Mary Riggs had only been stilled by shock. The muffled shrieks of horses erupted from below, and men cried out in terror and agony as they tried to crawl from under fallen sails and spars—only to see the raindrops. They shouted anew with a wholly different kind of terror, and a growing agony Lewis shared. He remembered Holland’s comment about the barometer as an irresistible pressure began to build, mashing his eyes into his head and trying to crush his skull and chest. He vomited in standing water full of floating hail and tried to take a gasping breath, but his chest simply wouldn’t expand. All around him, men—and one now very frightened young woman—were doing the same. The screams abruptly tapered off as men and horses lost the air to voice them.

  Then he was falling—or thought he was—and he scrabbled for a shattered section of the broken mizzen top as his vision began to darken from lack of air. His last conscious thought would’ve been focused entirely on that tangled heap of wreckage if his lungs hadn’t suddenly sucked in a gasping breath. Others did the same and the deck around him sounded with more panting, gasping, coughing, and moaning—before the terrible pressure reversed itself and a nauseating, agonizing, screeching sound quickly built. Rolling over on the deck, he wrapped his arms around his head to stifle it, but it only grew, like it was coming from inside his skull. His head began to feel like a shrieking kettle, and he imagined jets of steam roaring and squealing from his nose and ears as he clutched his head even tighter, afraid it would burst.

  He was falling again, he was certain, just as the suspended raindrops thundered down in a final fury. The giant hand had released the ship to drop in to the void at last. Piercing screams of terror accompanied the fall; one was his, most likely. But there was a bottom to the void after all, and Mary Riggs abruptly met it with a stunning, jarring crash, half collapsing amid a thunderous roar of shattering timbers, screaming men, and shrieking horses. Before the wreck completely settled, cascading water, hailstones, debris, and other men swept Lewis along to resume his slide across the still-tilted deck. He went over the side with the rest, plummeting into darkness, and remembered nothing more.

  CHAPTER 2

  Captain Cayce! Captain Cayce! Oh, please wake up! We need you rather badly!”

  Lewis’s mind rejected what he was hearing. It sounded like the young dragoon lieutenant. Coryon Burton, wasn’t it? Of North Carolina. Class of ’46. But that’s impossible. I’m dead. We’re all dead, swallowed by the void.

  “He’s alive,” came another impossible voice—Giles Anson’s. “And none of his arms or legs seem broken. Probably bumped his head. Maybe he fell on it? Without a surgeon, who knows what’s wrong with him if he won’t wake up.”

  “I can’t wake up,” Lewis managed to protest through painful lips. “None of us can.”

  “Aye, he’s comin’ around,” came a gruff, slightly Scottish voice. “You, Private Willis, pour some water on his face. He probably can’t even open his eyes with all that dried blood gluin’ ’em shut.”

  “But Sergeant McNabb!” objected a harsh, squeaky voice, apparently Private Willis, “we ain’t found any fresh water yet, an’ all I got’s in my canteen!”

  “Do as ye’re told, damn ye! There’s plenty o’ water in the ship—if we can get to it before all the started butts leak it out.”

  Lewis sensed movement beside him and a sudden coolness on his face. Gentle fingers massaged his eyes and he cracked one open. The sky was bright pink until he blinked several times to clear the blood. It looked perfectly ordinary then; bright blue with the sun creeping into view overhead. But that was the only thing right. The deck below him didn’t move because it wasn’t a deck and the sun was beginning to glare through tall, straight trees, many of which had their branches savagely ripped from the near side of their trunks. Colorful birds—Lewis assumed they were birds, though they were shaped very strangely—flitted through the trees, cawing raucously. Those of different species didn’t seem to get along very well, and there was constant skirmishing. That didn’t matter. Realistically, the only birds Lewis should’ve seen were gulls.

  Giles Anson leaned into Lewis’s view, festooned with all the weapons he generally carried in the field. A pair of Colt Paterson revolvers were in belt holsters at his side, and a Model 1838 flintlock pistol was thrust into his belt. An 1817 flintlock rifle, a fine, .54 caliber weapon like Lieutenant Swain’s Mounted Rifles carried, was slung over one shoulder and a pair of tooled, privately made pommel holsters were draped over the other. Knowing the Ranger as he did, Lewis wasn’t surprised the man had immediately collected his weapons. Anson nodded with apparent relief and produced a genuine smile. “See there, Lewis? You can wake up.” A more customary ironic smile replaced the first one. “Might wish you hadn’t, though.”

  Lewis groaned and picked clumps of dried blood from his eyelashes, still knitting the other eye closed, while a man behind helped raise him to a sitting position. He’d expected to find himself sitting on sand for some reason, but realized he was on a bed of dry, ferny-looking leaves with spines as rigid as pine needles. That didn’t make any sense. “I thought I was dead,” he confessed hoarsely, “but even in hell, I doubt I’d hurt this much.” His other eye clear, he gently probed his scalp under blood-matted hair. “And either I didn’t feel what hit me when we were wrecked—I assume we were wrecked?—or I did fall on my head.” He looked up at Anson and Burton. “But not in the water?”

  “Give him a drink, ye fool,” came Sergeant McNabb’s voice. Lewis looked at him and beheld a virtual stereotype of his breed. Tough, craggy-faced, probably in his forties, McNabb wasn’t particularly imposing, but his rank in the regular foot artillery meant he’d been in long enough to develop sufficient skill, personality, and experience to deal with much larger men. Private Willis, also one of Lieutenant Olayne’s 1st Artillerymen, looked like he sounded: a short, wiry youngster, wearing a put-upon expression in addition to all his gear. Beyond them, and a cluster of other armed men (1816 muskets, bayonets, and short swords f
or the artillerymen, .54 caliber 1817s for the Rifles, and .52 caliber breechloading Hall carbines hanging from white leather straps and iron clips on the dragoons), stood a densely wooded forest of tall, straight-trunked trees. Lewis blinked. Private Willis handed over a gray, stamped-steel canteen.

  Lewis took a small sip and nodded his thanks. “I have a glaringly obvious question, I suppose,” he managed with a firmer voice.

  “Think you can stand?” Anson asked.

  “I must.”

  Anson and Lieutenant Burton grasped his arms and hauled him to his feet. His legs supported him, but a wave of painful vertigo left him swaying for a moment before the dizziness, at least, began to pass. Gently, the men still holding his arms guided him around to look behind. “My God,” Lewis Cayce muttered.

  He’d assumed the men had carried him inshore from whatever coast they’d struck, but the wreck of Mary Riggs was in this strange forest as well, far from any sound of the sea. Dizziness threatened to take him again as Lewis contemplated the impossibility of that.