A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess

by Ron Miller

  She thinks that the poor Sommer B. looks as though it has just been through, well, a hurricane. Its deck has been stripped of virtually every appurtenance save the deckhouse itself. The rakish funnel rakes no more and the ventilators have been reduced to useless stumps. Both masts are gone; the big mainmast, however, still hangs over the opposite side of the ship in a tangle of cables and splintered wood. It thumps regularly against the hull with a dismally hollow sound. Even to the princess, who is no expert, the ship is obviously a derelict.

  She wonders what she should do.

  Food is one of the first subjects to enter her mind, as it so often is. She knew that the galley is below decks, but that is also where the fire is. How far has it spread? She isn’t certain of the relationship of the boiler room to the galley, nor, for that matter, of the boiler room to the hold, where their store of munitions is kept, including a large quantity of high explosives. She knows that they will need fresh water even more than food, and that, too, is kept below.

  She carefully moves from beneath the sleeping Basseliniden. His wound seems no worse, and, in fact, has stopped bleeding. So far as she can tell, the bullet hole is not near any organ she can remember as being vital to life. It appears, indeed, to have passed cleanly through his shoulder, just below the collarbone. It will hurt like anything, she easily imagines, but she is equally certain that he will live. The captain is sleeping easily, if deeply; his breathing is regular and, when she carefully presses her fingertips to his neck, so also is his pulse.

  She leaves the captain where he is lying and heads toward tbe bow of the ship. The galley is in the forward part, she knows, ahead of the boiler room, she believes. There is a skylight and hatch there and when she opens it only a whiff of smoke wafts from the opening.

  Emboldened, she goes on down the steps. There is little light, only what comes from the open hatchway behind her. Oddly, what had seemed perfectly familiar to her only the day before now seems strange and sinister.

  The galley is at the end of a short corridor. As she proceeds along it, she is uncomfortably aware of the absence of familiar sounds and the presence of others that are unfamiliar but disturbingly suggestive. Chief among the latter is the regular thumping of the dislodged mast, she can feel the vibration of each crash. There is an acrid odor in the air that must be from the fire somewhere ahead of her, amidships, mixed with the salty, fishy scent of seawater.

  The galley, when she reaches it, proves to be a shambles. The deserting crew had evidently raided it hastily before abandoning the ship. The pantry appears to be entirely empty. She does find a few bottles of root beer that she nestles within her jacket.

  Somewhere below the galley she knows there is a storeroom for the cook. She goes out the door through which she had entered the galley and takes the first companionway she finds that leads downward. She is descending into a murky darkness that, with the dim light behind her, she can not penetrate. She is, consequently, startled when not halfway down she steps into water. As her eyes accustom themselves to the gloom she sees that water fills the passageway halfway up its walls. The surface, covered with a scum of oil and debris, surges sluggishly from side to side as the ship rolls with the swells. It didn’t take a better sailor than Bronwyn to realize that something is seriously amiss. In any case, she finds the storeroom clearly impossible, at least for the present.

  Regaining the deck, she finds that Basseliniden is sitting upright and looking, as much as possible under the circumstances, fairly chipper. Still, his face is grey and covered with two days’ worth of stubble.

  “Ah! there you are!” he greets her. “I thought that you might have gone off foraging.”

  “Didn’t find much,” she answers, placing the bottles at his feet. “I suppose there’s some nourishment in root beer. It’s made from roots, isn’t it?”

  “We seem to be in something of a pickle, don’t we?” he asks, picking up one of the bottles and neatly flicking off its cap with the blade of his pocket knife.

  “More than you may think,” she says, and tells him about the water she had found.

  “Hm. The mast must have sprung some seams below the waterline. Well, we’ll see if we can’t cut it loose before it does even more damage.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “How do I look?”

  “I hope you look worse than I do. Let me see your shoulder,” she asks, pulling back his shirt before he has a chance to reply. “Ugh. It’s awful.”

  “Here, let me see that,” he says, moving her aside and craning his neck to see his own collarbone. “It’s not as bad as all that. It hurts worse than it is, if you follow me. See if you can find some water and I’ll clean it up.”

  “Do you have any bandages?”

  “There might be a first-aid kit in the wheelhouse, whatever’s left of it.”

  “I’ll see what I can find.”

  The wheelhouse still stands, though its roof had been carried away and its windows blown out. Fastened to one of its walls is a metal box with the first-aid symbol stenciled on it. She takes this back to the captain.

  “I don’t know if there’s any fresh water I can get to,” she says.

  “Well, I don’t suppose it would kill me if you used seawater. The salt might even help. The antiseptics in the kit ought to make everything come out even.”

  The captain is more or less right. Once the wound is cleaned it looks less threatening if not less ugly. The princess does a neat job of dressing it.

  “It’s going to be stiff for a long while,” he says, “and it’ll hurt something awful, but then, that bastard’s aim can have been better, too. Or worse, depending on point of view.”

  “Let’s see what we can do,” he continues, “about that mast before it staves in the whole side of the ship.”

  He stands, and immediately wobbles, grasping the wall of the deckhouse behind him for support.

  “Woo! I did lose a little blood, I think.”

  “Finish that drink,” advises Bronwyn, “and give the sugar a chance to get in your system.”

  The jettisoning of the broken mast is a more or less simple operation. Bronwyn wields the axe and works under the expert direction of the captain, so that the tangle of lines would be cut away in the safest order. The princess pulls off her short sailor’s jacket and tosses it over a belaying pin, then rolls up the sleeves of her blouse. She is barefoot and the cuffs of the flaring seaman’s trousers come to just below her knees. She has her russet hair pulled back tightly from her face and tied with a piece of string at her nape. She looks competent and strong and her muscles slide beneath the tanned skin of her arms like ripples in a crucible of molten bronze.

  Once her chore is done, Basseliniden peers over the side and inspects the hull.

  “How’s it look?” the princess asks.

  “Not very good, I’m afraid. Feel how she’s wallowing? How sluggish she feels? We’ve probably been taking on water all night. How far up did you say the water is in the lower passage?”

  “Halfway up the wall. Are we sinking?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know which fate awaits us first: drowning or burning. Look at the smoke: it’s gotten heavier.”

  “Just feel the deck,” she replies. “It’s almost too hot to touch. What if the water puts the fire out?”

  “That’d be fine, but we’d still be sinking. And don’t forget, it’s not just the fire, it’s the explosives we have on board.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. So we’re to be drowned, burnt or blown to bits?”

  “Well, I don’t know in what order they’ll come, but those appear to be our choices.”

  “Can’t we get off the ship? Cann’t we make a raftt?”

  “Maybe, but I’d like to get some idea of where we are first. I wish I can see the sun.”

  “Cann’t you just as easily find our position in a raft?”

  “Probably,” he says, turning to her, “but I don’t think we’re in any present danger of sinking, not immediately, at
least. That is, the ship is certainly going down eventually, but she’s sinking so gradually that, all things being equal, we can take some time thinking about what to do.”

  “And things not being equal?”

  “We ought to abandon ship as quickly as possible.”

  “What can we make a raft from?”

  “We can tear planks from the deckhouse. And there are plenty of spars; they should do if we can lash them together. Do you think you can help move them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Bronwyn follows the man toward the wreckage that is piled in the middle of the deck. She looks with dismay at the destruction around her: the Sommer B. looks like an enormous dog has been worrying at it, like a bone that has been rolled around under the furniture until the saliva has picked up all sorts of forgotten fuzz and debris. It also has the same shaggy, disheveled look of a dead cockroach found under a sink.

  “Just look at your beautiful ship, captain!”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It’s destroyed! Why, even if it weren’t on fire and sinking, it would be unsalvageable.”

  “It’s unfortunate but it doesn’t really matter because it isn’t my ship.”

  “What do you mean, it’s not your ship?”

  “I’m a pirate; why should I want my own ship when I can have someone else’s?”

  “But I thought that you always had the Sommer B.”

  “I’ve always have a ship called the Sommer B., I never said it was always the same ship. This was originally the Flying Phalander until I relieved her owner of the burden.”

  “I see.”

  “You know I was originally a smuggler and only got into piracy more or less by accident. It just seemed like a natural extension of what I’d always been doing.”

  “I can see where that can happen.”

  “I’ve no particular love for the sea, however, and I might as well admit now that I’d always pretty much left the actual operation of my ships up to my seconds-in-command. I’m more of an administrator, an idea man, you might say.”

  Bronwyn does not consider that a particularly encouraging confession.

  The construction of the raft takes a full day, during which time the Sommer B.’s deck sinks further toward sea level; the ship rolls ever more sluggishly. Whatever equilibrium it had been enjoying has all too obviously been lost, and the almost imperceptible settling now becomes a noticeably steady sinking. Basseliniden and the princess manage to build a small, ungainly, unattractive but serviceable raft. It is securely constructed of a dozen spars cut to length and lashed together, crosswise, one above the other, by strong ropes. A platform made of planking torn from the deck house rises nearly two feet above the water. The captain has fixed a rough step near the aft end of the raft so that a mast can be erected there.

  It is late in the afternoon, nearly evening, before they have finished. They haven’t more than a moment’s time to appreciate their handiwork before there is a tremendous crash that jars the ship from one end to the other. The Sommer B. heels far over to port and Bronwyn just barely avoids being crushed by the raft as it slides rumbling across the deck, smashing the bulwarks into splinters .

  “What happened?”

  “We seem to have run aground.”

  “Aground? We’re in the middle of the ocean! There’s nothing out here for hundreds of miles.”

  “You’re only seeing the top. We’ve probably run onto a shoal in the Grand Bank.”

  “Now what?”

  “It’s only an incident. Nothing’s really changed. We still need to get onto the raft as soon as we can.”

  “The ship won’t sink if it’s stuck on a shoal, will it?”

  “I don’t know. What if the tide’s out right now? If the water level rises, it can float us off and then we will sink.”

  “Well, is the tide in or out?”

  “How would I know?”

  The launching of the raft, they discover, has now become complicated by the angle of the deck and the fact that the raft is now wedged into the breach its corner has punched in the bulwark. They first have to secure the raft by tying a cable from it to the remaining stump of the mast, to prevent the raft from falling into the sea prematurely. Once this is done, they begin the laborious task of cutting away the shattered lumber. It is now quite dark: neither moons nor stars are visible through the low, level canopy of heavy vapor. Bronwyn and the captain have to work by the light of the single unbroken lamp they are able to find. Bronwyn again wields the axe and Basseliniden a heavy pry bar. Her muscles ache painfully from the previous day’s labor and she fights to keep them from cramping. She has to consciously force herself not to panic and try to work too quickly; more will get done by deliberation and steadiness: a difficult thing to do when facing such a literal deadline. She knows all too well that whatever condition the tide is in, it will be changing within a matter of hours . . . at best six, at worst any moment. Dual moons make such calculations difficult even for one who knows how to make them, which Bronwyn does not, and neither, apparently, does Basseliniden.

  In spite of their best efforts and most fervent hopes, the tide turns early. And, as Basseliniden fears, they had been at low tide. Soundlessly and steadily, the water above the shoal deepens and Bronwyn feels the ship almost imperceptibly begin to shift. Then, with a groan, it slides from the sandbar into the deeper surrounding water. It does not right itself, however, and the deck remains steeply slanted to port. Instead, and to the princess’s acute distress, the ship continued to settle into the water until the small waves began to lap at the breach in the bulwark.

  “We’re sinking!”

  “We certainly are.”

  “What’re we going to do?”

  “We’ve got to get the raft launched before the ship carries it under, and us with it.”

  There is a sudden rumbling, hissing sound and thick white clouds burst from every seam and opening.

  “What’s happening?” cries the princess.

  “Well, something good, for what it’s worth: the water’s put out the fire.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful news, isn’t it?” she replies sarcastically. “How’re we going to launch the raft? It’s still jammed into the bulwark.”

  “It’s almost free. If we can cut that piece there loose, it’ll slide right off the deck.”

  The captain is perfectly correct: a single blow from Bronwyn’s axe splinters the remaining wreckage and she is only just able to leap back as the raft thunders from the deck and into the water with a splash that soaks them both.

  “Quickly now!” cries Basselinden, unnecessarily. “Onto the raft! The ship’s going down!”

  Bronwyn vaults the bulwark and would have landed with both feet squarely on the raft have it been beneath her. She surfaces spitting, choking, gagging and flailing for a grip upon the raft. Unless one counts the time she waded and swam a short distance in Stuckney Bay, just downstream from Glibner, this is the first time in Bronwyn’s life that she has found herself, willingly or otherwise, immersed in seawater. She is immediately conscious of only two things: that she feels as though she is suspended above a bottomless black abyss, which for all practical purposes she is, and that she is swallowing a liquid that has been home and shelter to countless generations of sealife, as well as their toilet and graveyard, and how many hapless seamen and travelers are dissolved in the very water she is now inhaling? She hates to think.

  Basseliniden, who has made a much more successful transfer from ship to raft, pulls the sodden and disgusted princess aboard. She shivers and spits.

  “There she goes!” he cries, pointing behind her. Bronwyn turns in time to see the Sommer B. slip from the sandbar that had trapped her.

  “No she doesn’t,” the princess replies, for the ship, after coasting for a few yards, settles until it reaches an equilibrium, its deck awash and only the remaining masts and deckhouse roofs showing above the waves.

  “Well, what d’you know about that?” says the
captain, a little awestruck.

  “What’s that?” asks Bronwyn, indicating a point just beyond the now nearly invisible ship.

  “What’s what?”

  “Over there, see it? Doesn’t it look like someone in a small boat or on a raft?”

  The coincidence would be ridiculous and the captain says as much.

  “No, look! I’m sure of it! They’re waving a flag or something!”

  “What is this? A convention of castaways?”

  “Who are they?” she asks, ignoring the sarcasm.

  “ ‘Who is it?’ might be a better question. There’s only one person.”

  Whoever it is has evidently just taken notice of the captain and the princess; Bronwyn sees a dark figure erect itself and begin semaphoring with its arms. The fellow castaway is still much too far away to be more than a mere silhouette against the leaden sea and sky.

  “Can we get to him?” she asks, taking off her wet jacket and waving it in broad circles around her head, in answer to the stranger’s signals. The cheap sailor’s blouse she wore beneath clings to her like wet tissue and she shivers in the light breeze, although the air itself is warm.

  “I don’t see how. We’ve no way yet of either steering or propelling the raft.”

  The problem is a moot one as it relates to the princess and ber companion; once the distant figure perceives their answering signals, he or she promptly throws up a ragged-looking sail. Although the breeze is only a very mild one, the stranger immediately begins to draw perceptibly closer.

  “Well, he certainly knows how to sail,” says Basseliniden, impressed.

  “I hope he has some food,” murmurs the princess hopefully.

  It is something like half an hour before the stranger approaches Bronwyn’s refuge, riding up and down the long, low swells like a toboggan.

  “You know,” says the captain, “that figure looks uncannily familiar.”

  “It does indeed. In fact, it should. It’s Professor Wittenoom.”

  “It cann’t be!”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, he’s . . . I don’t know . . . I mean, Wittenoom?” he stammers, as though that word explained everything. In fact, it did. The last person one might expect to meet adrift in the midst of the South Mostaza Sea would be the cadaverous, unworldly chief scientist of the Londeacan Academy of Sciences.