lashed past, hard enough to sting the skin, driven almost horizontal by the wind, and so thick that I barely saw the faint shape on the horizon that I thought was Eleuthera.
The sea had risen to terrifying heights, with swells rolling forty feet high. The pinnace rode them lightly, carried up and up and up to dizzy heights, then dropped abruptly into a trough. Jamie’s face was dead white in the storm-light, his sodden hair pasted against his scalp.
It was near dark that it happened. The sky was nearly black, but there was an eerie green glow all across the horizon that silhouetted the skeletal shape of the Porpoise behind us. Another of the rain squalls slammed us sideways, lurching and swaying atop a huge wave.
As we picked ourselves up from yet another bruising spill, Jamie grabbed my arm, and pointed behind us. The Porpoise’s foremast was oddly bent, the top of it leaning far to one side. Before I had time to realize what was happening, the top fifteen feet of the mast had split off and pitched into the sea, carrying with it rigging and spars.
The man-of-war swung heavily round this impromptu anchor, and came sliding sideways down the face of a wave. The wall of water towered over the ship, and came crashing down, catching her broadside. The Porpoise heeled, spun around once. The next wave rose, and took her stern first, pulling the high aft deck below the water, whipping the masts through the air like snapping twigs.
It took three more waves to sink her; no time for escape for her hapless crew, but plenty for those of us watching to share their terror. There was a great bubbling flurry in the trough of a wave, and the man-of-war was gone.
Jamie’s arm was rigid as iron beneath my hand. All the men stared back, faces gone empty with horror. All save Innes, who crouched doggedly over the wheel, meeting each wave as it came.
A new wave rose up beside the rail and seemed to hover there, looming above me. The great wall of water was glassy clear; I could see suspended in it the debris and the men of the wrecked Porpoise, limbs outflung in grotesque ballet. The body of Thomas Leonard hung no more than ten feet from me, drowned mouth open in surprise, his long soft hair aswirl above the gilded collar of his coat.
Then the wave struck. I was snatched off the deck, and at once engulfed in chaos. Blind and deaf, unable to breathe, I was tumbled through space, my arms and legs wrenched awry by the force of the water.
Everything was dark; there was nothing but sensation, and all of that intense but indistinguishable. Pressure and noise and overwhelming cold. I couldn’t feel the pull of my clothing, or the jerk of the rope—if it was still there—around my waist. A sudden faint warmth swathed my legs, distinct in the surrounding cold as a cloud in a clear sky. Urine, I thought, but didn’t know whether it was my own, or the last touch of another human body, swallowed as I was in the belly of the wave.
My head hit something with a sickening crack, and suddenly I was coughing my lungs out on the deck of the pinnace, still miraculously afloat. I sat up slowly, choking and wheezing. My rope was still in place, yanked so tight about my waist that I was sure my lower ribs were broken. I jerked feebly at it, trying to breathe, and then Jamie was there, one arm around me, the other groping at his belt for a knife.
“Are ye all right?” he bellowed, his voice barely audible above the shrieking wind.
“No!” I tried to shout back, but it came out as no more than a wheeze. I shook my head, fumbling at my waist.
The sky was a queer purple-green, a color I had never seen before. Jamie sawed at the rope, his bent head spray-soaked and the color of mahogany, hair whipped across his face by the fury of the wind.
The rope popped and I gulped in air, ignoring a stabbing pain in my side and the stinging of raw skin about my waist. The ship was pitching wildly, the deck swinging up and down like a lawn glider. Jamie fell down on the deck, pulling me with him, and began to work his way on hands and knees toward the mast, some six feet away, dragging me.
My garments had been drenched through, plastered to me from my immersion in the wave. Now the blast of the wind was so great that it plucked my skirts away from my legs and flung them up, half-dried, to beat about my face like goose wings.
Jamie’s arm was tight as an iron bar across my chest. I clung to him, trying to aid our progress by shoving with my feet on the slippery deckboards. Smaller waves washed over the rail, sousing us intermittently, but no more huge monsters followed them.
Reaching hands grasped us and hauled us the last few feet, into the nominal shelter of the mast. Innes had tied the wheel over long since; as I looked forward, I saw lightning strike the sea ahead, making the spokes of the wheel spring out black, leaving an image like a spider’s web printed on my retina.
Speech was impossible—and unnecessary. Raeburn, Ian, Meldrum, and Lawrence were huddled against the mast, all tied; frightful as it was on deck, no one wanted to go below, to be tossed to and fro in bruising darkness, with no notion of what was happening overhead.
I was sitting on the deck, legs splayed, with the mast at my back and the line passed across my chest. The sky had gone lead-gray on one side, a deep, lucent green on the other, and lightning was striking at random over the surface of the sea, bright jags of brilliance across the dark. The wind was so loud that even the thunderclaps reached us only now and then, as muffled booms, like ships’ guns firing at a distance.
Then a bolt crashed down beside the ship, lightning and thunder together, close enough to hear the hiss of boiling water in the ringing aftermath of the thunderclap. The sharp reek of ozone flooded the air. Innes turned from the light, his tall, thin figure so sharply cut against the flash that he looked momentarily like a skeleton, black bones against the sky.
The momentary dazzle and his movement made it seem for an instant that he stood whole once more, two arms swinging, as though his missing limb had emerged from the ghost world to join him, here on the brink of eternity.
Oh, de headbone connected to de…neckbone. Joe Abernathy’s voice sang softly in memory. And de neckbone connected to de…backbone… I had a sudden hideous vision of the scattered limbs I had seen on the beach by the corpse of the Bruja, animated by the lightning, squirming and wriggling to reunite.
Dem bones, dem bones, are gonna walk around.
Now, hear de word of de Lawd!
Another clap of thunder and I screamed, not at the sound, but at the lightning bolt of memory. A skull in my hands, with empty eyes that had once been the green of the hurricane sky.
Jamie shouted something in my ear, but I couldn’t hear him. I could only shake my head in speechless shock, my skin rippling with horror.
My hair, like my skirts, was drying in the wind; the strands of it danced on my head, pulling at the roots. As it dried, I felt the crackle of static electricity where my hair brushed my cheek. There was a sudden movement among the sailors around me and I looked up, to see the spars and rigging above coated in the blue phosphorescence of St. Elmo’s fire.
A fireball dropped to the deck and rolled toward us, streaming phosphorescence. Jamie struck at it and it hopped delicately into the air and rolled away along the rail, leaving a scent of burning in its wake.
I looked up at Jamie to see if he was all right, and saw the loose ends of his hair standing out from his head, coated with fire and streaming backward like a demon’s. Streaks of vivid blue outlined the fingers of his hand when he brushed the hair from his face. Then he looked down, saw me, and grasped my hand. A jolt of electricity shot through us both with the touch, but he didn’t let go.
I couldn’t say how long it lasted; hours or days. Our mouths dried from the wind, and grew sticky with thirst. The sky went from gray to black, but there was no telling whether it was night, or only the coming of rain.
The rain, when it did come, was welcome. It came with the drenching roar of a tropical shower, a drumming audible even above the wind. Better yet, it was hail, not rain; the hailstones hit my skull like pebbles, but I didn’t care. I gathered the icy globules in both hands, and swallowed them half-melted, a
cool benison to my tortured throat.
Meldrum and MacLeod crawled about the deck on hands and knees, scooping the hailstones into buckets and pots, anything that would hold water.
I slept intermittently, head lolling on Jamie’s shoulder, and woke to find the wind still screaming. Numb to terror now, I only waited. Whether we lived or died seemed of little consequence, if only the dreadful noise would stop.
There was no telling day from night, no way to keep time, while the sun hid its face. The darkness seemed a little lighter now and then, but whether it was by virtue of daylight or moonlight, I couldn’t tell. I slept, and woke, and slept again.
Then I woke, to find the wind a little quieter. The seas still heaved, and the tiny boat pitched like a cockleshell, throwing us up and dropping us with stomach-churning regularity. But the noise was less; I could hear, when MacGregor shouted to Ian to pass a cup of water. The men’s faces were chapped and raw, their lips cracked to bleeding by the whistling wind, but they were smiling.
“It’s gone by.” Jamie’s voice was low and husky in my ear, rusted by weather. “The storm’s past.”
It was; there were breaks in the lead-gray sky, and small flashes of a pale, fresh blue. I thought it must be early morning, sometime just past dawn, but couldn’t tell for sure.
While the hurricane had ceased to blow, there was still a strong wind, and the storm surge carried us at an amazing speed. Meldrum took the wheel from Innes, and bending to check the compass, gave a cry of surprise. The fireball that had come aboard during the storm had harmed no one, but the compass was now a melted mass of silver metal, the wooden casing around it untouched.
“Amazing!” said Lawrence, touching it reverently with one finger.
“Aye, and inconvenient, forbye,” said Innes dryly. He looked upward, toward the ragged remnants of the dashing clouds. “Much of a hand at celestial navigation, are ye, Mr. Stern?”
After much squinting at the rising sun and the remnants of the morning stars, Jamie, Innes, and Stern determined that our heading was roughly northeast.
“We must turn to the west,” Stern said, leaning over the crude chart with Jamie and Innes. “We do not know where we are, but any land must surely be to the west.”
Innes nodded, peering soberly at the chart, which showed a sprinkle of islands like coarse-ground pepper, floating on the waters of the Caribbean.
“Aye, that’s so,” he said. “We’ve been headed out to sea for God knows how long. The hull’s in one piece, but that’s all I’d say for it. As for the mast and sails—well, they’ll maybe hold for a time.” He sounded dubious in the extreme. “God knows where we may fetch up, though.”
Jamie grinned at him, dabbing at a trickle of blood from his cracked lip.
“So long as it’s land, Duncan, I’m no verra choosy about where.”
Innes quirked an eyebrow at him, a slight smile on his lips.
“Aye? And here I thought ye’d settled for sure on a sailor’s life, Mac Dubh; ye’re sae canty on deck. Why, ye havena puked once in the last twa days!”
“That’s because I havena eaten anything in the last twa days,” Jamie said wryly. “I dinna much care if the island we find first is English, French, Spanish, or Dutch, but I should be obliged if ye’d find one with food, Duncan.”
Innes wiped a hand across his mouth and swallowed painfully; the mention of food made everyone salivate, despite dry mouths.
“I’ll do my best, Mac Dubh,” he promised.
* * *
“Land! It’s land!” The call came at last, five days later, in a voice rendered so hoarse by wind and thirst that it was no more than a faint croak, but full of joy, nonetheless. I dashed up on deck to see, my feet slipping on the ladder rungs. Everyone was hanging over the rail, looking at the humped black shape on the horizon. It was far off, but undeniably land, solid and distinct.
“Where do you think we are?” I tried to say, but my voice was so hoarse, the words came out in a tiny whisper, and no one heard. It didn’t matter; if we were headed straight for the naval barracks at Antigua, I didn’t care.
The waves were running in huge, smooth swells, like the backs of whales. The wind was gusting now, and Innes called for the helmsman to bring the bow another point nearer the wind.
I could see a line of large birds flying, a stately procession skimming down the distant shoreline. Pelicans, searching the shallows for fish, with the sun gleaming on their wings.
I tugged at Jamie’s sleeve and pointed at them.
“Look—” I began, but got no further. There was a sharp crack! and the world exploded in black and fire. I came to in the water. Dazed and half-choked, I floundered and fought in a world of dark green. Something was wrapped about my legs, dragging me down.
I flailed wildly, kicking to free my leg of the deadly grip. Something floated past my head, and I grabbed for it. Wood, blessed wood, something to hold onto in the surging waves.
A dark shape sleeked by like a seal beneath the water, and a red head bobbed up six feet away, gasping.
“Hold on!” Jamie said. He reached me with two strokes, and ducking under the piece of wood I held, dived down. I felt a tugging at my leg, a sharp pain, and then the dragging tension eased. Jamie’s head popped up again, across the spar. He grasped my wrists and hung there, gulping air, as the rolling swell carried us, up and down.
I couldn’t see the ship anywhere; had it sunk? A wave broke over my head, and Jamie disappeared temporarily. I shook my head, blinking, and he was there again. He smiled at me, a savage grin of effort, and his grip on my wrists tightened harder.
“Hold on!” he rasped again, and I did. The wood was harsh and splintery under my hands, but I clung for all I was worth. We drifted, half-blinded by spray, spinning like a bit of flotsam, so that sometimes I saw the distant shore, sometimes nothing but the open sea from which we had come. And when the waves washed over us, I saw nothing but water.
There was something wrong with my leg; a strange numbness, punctuated with flashes of sharp pain. The vision of Murphy’s peg and the razor-grin of an openmouthed shark drifted through my mind; had my leg been taken by some toothy beast? I thought of my tiny hoard of warm blood, streaming from the stump of a bitten limb, draining away into the cold vastness of the sea, and I panicked, trying to snatch my hand from Jamie’s grasp in order to reach down and see for myself.
He snarled something unintelligible at me and held on to my wrists like grim death. After a moment of frenzied thrashing, reason returned, and I calmed myself, thinking that if my leg were indeed gone, I would have lost consciousness by now.
At that, I was beginning to lose consciousness. My vision was growing gray at the edges, and floating bright spots covered Jamie’s face. Was I really bleeding to death, or was it only cold and shock? It hardly seemed to matter, I thought muzzily; the effect was the same.
A sense of lassitude and utter peace stole gradually over me. I couldn’t feel my feet or legs, and only Jamie’s crushing grip on my hands reminded me of their existence. My head went under water, and I had to remind myself to hold my breath.
The wave subsided and the wood rose slightly, bringing my nose above water. I breathed, and my vision cleared slightly. A foot away was the face of Jamie Fraser, hair plastered to his head, wet features contorted against the spray.
“Hold on!” he roared. “Hold on, God damn you!”
I smiled gently, barely hearing him. The sense of great peace was lifting me, carrying me beyond the noise and chaos. There was no more pain. Nothing mattered. Another wave washed over me, and this time I forgot to hold my breath.
The choking sensation roused me briefly, long enough to see the flash of terror in Jamie’s eyes. Then my vision went dark again.
“Damn you, Sassenach!” his voice said, from a very great distance. His voice was choked with passion. “Damn you! I swear if ye die on me, I’ll kill you!”
* * *
I was dead. Everything around me was a blinding white, an
d there was a soft, rushing noise like the wings of angels. I felt peaceful and bodiless, free of terror, free of rage, filled with quiet happiness. Then I coughed.
I wasn’t bodiless, after all. My leg hurt. It hurt a lot. I became gradually aware that a good many other things hurt, too, but my left shin took precedence in no uncertain terms. I had the distinct impression that the bone had been removed and replaced with a red-hot poker.
At least the leg was demonstrably there. When I cracked my eyes open to look, the haze of pain that floated over my leg seemed almost visible, though perhaps that was only a product of the general fuzziness in my head. Whether mental or physical in origin, the general effect was of a sort of whirling whiteness, shot with flickers of a brighter light. Watching it hurt my eyes, so I shut them again.
“Thank God, you’re awake!” said a relieved-sounding Scottish voice near my ear.
“No I’m not,” I said. My own voice emerged as a salt-crusted croak, rusty with swallowed seawater. I could feel seawater in my sinuses, too, which gave my head an unpleasant gurgling feel. I coughed again, and my nose began to run profusely. Then I sneezed.
“Eugh!” I said, in complete revulsion at the resultant cascade of slime over my upper lip. My hand seemed far off and insubstantial, but I made the effort to raise it, swiping clumsily at my face.
“Be still, Sassenach; I’ll take care of ye.” There was a definite note of amusement in the voice, which irritated me enough to open my eyes again. I caught a brief glimpse of Jamie’s face, intent on mine, before vision vanished once again in the folds of an immense white handkerchief.
He wiped my face thoroughly, ignoring my strangled noises of protest and impending suffocation, then held the cloth to my nose.
“Blow,” he said.
I did as he said. Rather to my surprise, it helped quite a lot. I could think more or less coherently, now that my head was unclogged.
Jamie smiled down at me. His hair was rumpled and stiff with dried salt, and there was a wide abrasion on his temple, an angry dark red against the bronzed skin. He seemed not to be wearing a shirt, but had a blanket of some kind draped about his shoulders.
“Do ye feel verra bad?” he asked.
“Horrible,” I croaked in reply. I was also beginning to be annoyed at being alive, after all, and being required to take notice of things again. Hearing the rasp in my voice, Jamie reached for a jug of water on the table by my bed.
I blinked in confusion, but it really was a bed, not a berth or a hammock. The linen sheets contributed to the overwhelming impression of whiteness that had first engulfed me. This was reinforced by the whitewashed walls and ceiling, and the long white muslin draperies that bellied in like sails, rustling in the breeze from the open windows.
The flickering light came from reflections that shimmered over the ceiling; apparently there was water close by outside, and sun shining on it. It seemed altogether cozier than Davy Jones’s locker. Still, I felt a brief moment of intense regret for the sense of infinite peace. I had experienced in the heart of the wave—a regret made more keen by the slight movement that sent a bolt of white agony up my leg.
“I think your leg is broken, Sassenach,” Jamie told me unnecessarily. “Ye likely shouldna move it much.”
“Thanks for the advice,” I said, through gritted teeth. “Where in bloody hell are we?”
He shrugged briefly. “I dinna ken. It’s a fair-sized house, is all I could say. I wasna taking much note when they brought us in. One man said the place is called Les Perles.” He held the cup to my lips and I swallowed gratefully.
“What happened?” So long as I was careful not to move, the pain in my leg was bearable. Automatically, I placed my fingers under the angle of my jaw to check my pulse; reassuringly strong. I wasn’t in shock; my leg couldn’t be badly fractured, much as it hurt.
Jamie rubbed a hand over his face. He looked very tired, and I noticed that his hand trembled with fatigue. There was a large bruise on his cheek, and a line of dried blood where something had scratched the side of his neck.
“The topmast snapped, I think. One of the spars fell and knocked ye overboard. When ye hit the water, ye sank like a stone, and I dived in after you. I got hold of you—and the spar, too, thank God. Ye had a bit of rigging tangled round your leg, dragging ye down, but I managed to get that off.” He heaved a deep sigh, and rubbed his head.
“I just held to ye; and after a time, I felt sand under my feet. I carried ye ashore, and a bit later, some men found us and brought us here. That’s all.” He shrugged.
I felt cold, despite the warm breeze coming in through the windows.
“What happened to the ship? And the men? Ian? Lawrence?”
“Safe, I think. They couldna reach us, with the mast broken—by the time they’d rigged a makeshift sail, we were long gone.” He coughed roughly, and rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. “But they’re safe; the men who found us said they’d seen a small ketch go aground on a mud flat a quarter-mile south of here; they’ve gone down to salvage and bring back the men.”
He took a swallow of water, swished it about his mouth, and going to the window, spat it out.
“I’ve sand in my teeth,” he said, grimacing, as he returned. “And my ears. And my nose, and the crack of my arse, too, I shouldna wonder.”
I reached out and took his hand again. His palm was heavily calloused, but still showed the tender swelling of rising blisters, with shreds of ragged skin and raw flesh, where earlier blisters had burst and bled.
“How long were we in the water?” I asked, gently tracing the lines of his swollen palm. The tiny “C” at the base of his thumb was faded almost to invisibility, but I could still feel it under my finger. “Just how long did you hold on?”
“Long enough,” he said simply.
He smiled a little, and held my hand more tightly, despite the soreness of his own. It dawned on me suddenly that I wasn’t wearing anything; the linen sheets were smooth and cool on my bare skin, and I could see the swell of my nipples, rising under the thin fabric.
“What happened to my clothes?”
“I couldna hold ye up against the drag of your skirts, so I ripped them off,” he explained. “What was left didna seem worth saving.”