The Silver Skull - Mark Chadbourn

Will's gaze followed the trailing rope. "Keelhauling," he said.

Don Alanzo nodded. "Pulled tight and fast, the rope will drag you down, under the water, and along the keel. Barnacles affixed to the keel will slice through clothes, and tear off skin, and the bloody prisoner that emerges on the other side of the ship is thereby made repentant. Pulled slack and slow, the prisoner hangs beneath the keel, and drowns. Either way, you will not survive this ordeal."

Unbidden, the terrible, shattering sensation of drowning Will had experienced in the Fairy House flashed across his mind. With all his will, he fought back the wave of terror. "Come, then. I would not delay your encounter with my countrymen. Your own reckoning awaits." He cast one eye towards the grey-sailed ship, and tried not to think of Grace.

At Don Alanzo's nod, Barrett and Stanbury lifted Will onto the rail, and then steadied the rope trailing from his back. On the other side of the deck, four sailors prepared to drag him under.

"And so the debt to my father is paid," Don Alanzo began. "This day-"

"Do not torture me with prattle." Will flashed lion Alanzo a defiant grin, and leapt from the rail. He took pleasure in Barrett's angry cry as the rope burned through his hands, and then he hit the water. The cold shocked the last of the wool from his head. His lungful of air would not last long. The two teams of sailors both now had the rope taut, dragging him directly beneath the ship where he was held tight against the barnacle-encrusted hull.

The air burned in his lungs, and however much he tried, he could not escape the haunting sense-memories of his torture in Edinburgh.

With a tremendous effort, he ignored the panic pricking his thoughts, the flashes of what would happen the moment he exhausted his breath, the water rushing into his lungs, the feeling of being trapped. By will alone, he calmed himself.

Pressing his right arm against the keel, he released the trigger on the hidden blade in the leather forearm guard under his shirtsleeve. He prayed he would have the opportunity to thank Dee for his ingenuity.

Twisting, he rubbed his restraining rope against the blade, which quickly frayed and broke under the sharp edge. He drifted down from the keel, towards the dark depths.

His lungs burned. He could not last much longer without another breath. On deck, they would realise the rope had broken and would be watching out for him. Kicking out for the stern, he surfaced just beyond the rudder before his lungs burst, and trod water. They would not be able to see him from above, but one of the other ships might spy him if he waited too long. From above came the calls of his enemies as they hung over the rails searching the water.

With difficulty, he rubbed the bonds at his wrists along the edge of the rudder, and after several attempts, the wet ropes loosened until he was able to wriggle his hands free.

Gulping air, he continued underwater beneath the next ship. The rest of the fleet was visible all around, but they would be too distracted preparing for the battle to see him in the water. After a brief rest, he carried on, surfacing for air at every ship, until he reached open water.

He was free, but adrift in the middle of the English Channel. How long could he survive before exhaustion dragged him down to his death?

CHAPTER 50

od's teeth, the Spanish are slow-witted rabbit-suckers." On the forecastle of the Revenge, Drake watched the Armada in the first light of dawn through his tele-scope. "We are at war. Did they expect us to sit back and wait for them to attack?"

"What could have distracted them?" Carpenter mused.

"Ha!" Drake laughed. "Their topmen have finally seen us. Now there will be a commotion aboard their ships, and Medina Sidonia's prayers will amount to naught!"

Closing his tele-scope with a snap, Drake set about ordering his men to prepare for battle, boosting their spirits with loud bragging and comical contempt for their enemy.

If Carpenter had doubted whether Drake's skills matched his arrogance, he was convinced now. During the night, Drake, Howard, and the other commanders had left five ships floating in easy sight of the Armada. It had fooled the Spanish into thinking the entire fleet was steady, while eighty ships were taken upwind to claim the weather gage. The English now had the advantage.

Launceston waited calmly by the rail, as though the horrors of the previous day had never happened. But at times Carpenter saw the earl's eyes flicker towards him; a bond had been forged, however much Carpenter was repulsed by it. If Drake guessed what had happened, he showed no sign of it; the word had gone out that the cabin boy must have fallen overboard during the dark sail from Plymouth harbour.

"If they had had Drake's tele-scope they may have got an early warning in the grey light," Launceston mused. "We should give thanks that Walsingham and Dee see a greater picture than you or I."

"I will give thanks if we survive this damnable thing," Carpenter growled. "I am not meant to feel the world rolling beneath my feet. Dry land for me, and soon!"

"Look. It begins." Launceston indicated a squadron of eleven English ships streaming west and then tacking between the Armada and the Eddystone Rocks at a speed that must have startled the slow-moving galleons.

"Our race-built galleons," Launceston noted approvingly. "None faster."

"Stop speaking some foreign language," Carpenter snapped. "Race-built? Is this some salty-haired sailor's argot?"

Launceston allowed himself a faint smile.

A signal flag went up on the mizzenmast of the lead ship, and instantly barking orders rolled out across the waves as the gun ports snapped open. The cannon on each ship in turn blasted the Spanish before the squadron raced back to the fleet, untouched.

At that moment, Carpenter and Launceston both noticed a curious sight and leaned across the rail to get a better look. Against the wind and the currents, a grey-sailed ship was limping away from the fleet, its starboard side blackened by fire. It was soon lost behind a wall of vessels, and before Launceston and Carpenter could question what they had seen, the Armada responded to the attack.

As Medina Sidonia fired his signal gun, the Spanish ships sailed into their prearranged battle order: a crescent, with a short spike in the centre, stretching several miles across. To an uneducated eye, the floating city looked imposing, a mass of white sails painted with the red cross of the Crusades, the water barely visible between them.

But Launceston waved a lazy hand towards the mass and said, "See-they create an illusion. The warships are all on the outside of the formation, but inside ... useless hulks, transport ships ... Their number is much less than it appears."

"Nevertheless," Carpenter said, "a single piece of shot will take me apart."

The Disdain, Lord Howard's personal pinnace, sailed out to fire one shot at the Spanish: a challenge; and in response Medina Sidonia raised the Spanish royal standard ordering his fleet to battle.

"Is Swyfte out there, somewhere, aboard one of those enemy ships, I wonder?" Carpenter said as he watched the dense fleet begin to attack. "What irony to be blown to pieces by your own countrymen after risking so much." He struggled with his conflicted emotions and then said, "Let us go below deck. It will be safer there, until we are needed."

"Are you sure?" Launceston asked with an odd tone.

Flushed, his eyes blazing, Drake was consumed by the moment. As the Revenge raced towards the fray, it seemed to Carpenter that the fleet's vice admiral was overcome by a religious fervour.

On the gun deck, the master gunner watched tensely as the vessel clipped across the swell into position. His hand held high, he waited, and then released it with a bellow. Carpenter was not prepared for the shock of the devastating noise as the gunfire rolled in continuous thunder from the bow chasers, to the broadside cannon, to the stern chasers, and finally to the windward guns, flash after flash of red flame, acrid black smoke rolling out of the gun ports. He staggered back, clutching his ears at the pain of the volume.

From outside the stifling world of smoke and fire came the shriek of the shot tearing through the air, and the splash where it fell short or the thunderous boom and crack of disintegrating wood where it met its target. There were screams, too, louder and more shocking than the destructive boom of the cannon fire.

As each cannon fired, it was hauled back in and prepared for the next shot. With all the ships in the fleet, the noise never stopped. On the gun deck, it seemed to Carpenter that there was mad confusion as men ran back and forth with shot, stoking powder, cursing as they burned themselves on red-hot metal, diving out of the way of the recoil.

"This is hell ..." Carpenter choked, motioning for Launceston to follow him out.

In the open air, his ears still rang and he wondered if he would be permanently deaf. Staggering to the rail, he saw the Spanish return fire, but their response was leaden and they released only one shot for every three that came from English ships.

Launceston indicated movement among some of the ships. "They are fleeing downwind," he said. As some of the ships broke rank, they caused confusion among the others, crowding them as they tried to continue their attack.

Drake saw his moment and sent the Revenge to attack the wing where the squadron's flagship was unsupported. Drake was joined by another ship, the Triumph. "Frobisher," Launceston said with an approving nod.

The Spanish flagship faced the attack alone and saw its rigging and forestay and part of the foremast disintegrate under Drake's attack. As the San Martin continued to hold its ground, Drake marched by and announced loudly, "It tries to draw us in. It is a trap, but we Englishmen are too clever for that!"

"He acts as if he is taking the air along Plymouth harbour," Carpenter bellowed above the roar of cannon fire. "Does this madness not trouble him in the slightest?"

Leaning on the rail, Launceston studied the bodies floating in the water, some so blackened and torn they could barely be identified as human. In one area, near the Spanish ships, they were so thick it seemed possible to walk across them without getting wet feet.

For the next three hours, the English taunted the Spanish, attacking then sailing out of reach of a response, before both fleets continued eastwards. The slow speed of the Armada, barely more than that of a rowboat, was a source of amazement to Carpenter, until Launceston pointed out that the fleet had to move at the speed of the slowest ship to keep the formation intact.

Beside them, observing through his tele-scope, Drake said, "They appear to be protecting a grey-sailed ship. Why is that so important they would risk the loss of so many other vessels?"

"That ship must be vital to their strategy in some way," Launceston replied.

Drake mulled over this puzzle for a moment before pacing the deck to check on his crew, but Launceston and Carpenter both remained focused on the mystery of the grey-sailed ship, and in their hearts they knew who was aboard.

"That ship may have sustained some damage," Launceston said, "but if the Spanish continue to protect it, then its threat remains. What is it they plan? And when will they strike?"

CHAPTER 51

xhausted and cold, Will struggled to stay afloat as the world exploded in fire and thunder around him. Fragments of shattered hulls and broken masts had been his support for hours as he was caught up in the fleeing ships, but his legs had grown numb with the cold and his fingers could barely grip. Acrid smoke drifted continually across the water so it was impossible to tell the time of day, with flashes of flame seen dully here and there through the dense bank.

In that twilit place, his existence was reduced to surviving from one moment to the next. Hulls cleaved out of the smoke, the currents pulling him under, dragging him along in the wake, so he moved continually with the Armada. Sizzling English cannonballs crashed into the water all around with a hiss and a cloud of steam. Body parts washed by, white hands reaching dismally, boots and hats, sodden letters to loved ones, never to be read. How he still lived was beyond him.

After he had noticed the grey-sailed ship limping away, his concern for Grace had kept him going in the maelstrom that began the moment the battle started. The shore was tantalisingly close-sometimes he even thought he could see the people of Devon lined along the cliffs watching the battlebut every time he struck out the ferocity of the fight drove him back. And so he had been sucked into the churning heart of the conflict.

Nearby the Revenge and the Triumph attacked the stricken flagship of the Spanish squadron on the Armada's wing. Through the heavy smoke generated by the English guns, a carrack swept towards Will en route to aid the flagship. For a second, he remained frozen by the familiar outline: it was the Rosario, bearing down on him like death.

With drained limbs, he searched for the reserves of energy to swim out of its path, but at the last he faltered and the ship struck him a glancing blow. Dazed, he went down, swallowing water, and for a moment he was back in Edinburgh, dying slowly.

As the dark reached up for him, he finally found enough strength to strike out for the surface. Gulping air, he clawed onto some flotsam, his head still dull and drifting from the blow. The thunder of the gunfire receded, became muffled, disappeared, and there was only the sound of his ragged breathing and the blood in his head. Half-seen images faded in and out of the smoke.

The confusion of Drake's attack, Spanish ships careering recklessly. The Rosario colliding with another ship, shattering her crossyard and spritsail, the carrack losing all control and slamming against another, destroying her bowsprit, halyards, and forecourse.

Nearby, a tremendous explosion blasted Will from his stupor. On the San Salvador, a ship Will had helped reprovision, the stern powder store had exploded upwards through the poop deck and the two decks of the sterncastle. Amid the plume of smoke, timbers were driven up to the mast-tops before cascading down on the closest ships. Will dived down as the wreckage rained all around, streaming trails of white bubbles plunging within inches of him where the timber fell.

Surfacing with a gasp, he saw bodies raining down too, limbless, blackened. In the background, the San Salvador blazed like the sun, thick black smoke turning the day into night. Men on fire dived into the sea; others chose drowning over the conflagration. At least two hundred were lost, Will estimated.

In the middle of the confusion, a sudden squall hit the flailing Rosario. As her foremast shattered, men with axes ran to cut it loose from the rigging, but it was too late: the carrack was crippled.

In the chaos of the listing vessel, men plunged overboard, fighting to stay afloat amid the bodies and the burning wreckage. Clinging on to his pathetic pieces of timber to stay afloat in the tossing sea, Will watched many drown.