The Daughters of Mars: A Novel

by Keneally, Thomas

  Life belts, said Honora almost lightly then. Their life belts were in their cabins. Come on, she said.

  They flowed down the stairs. On the main deck forward they could for a moment see the soldiers leaning over the bows and looking for enlightenment on what had happened to the Archimedes’s flanks. Below—running through the hospital decks nearly empty of soldiers—they reached their quarters and their life belts and calmly put them on. Sally felt an abstract and intense curiosity on what was to happen next and they all seemed averse to any rush. They walked in good order back to the companionway that would take them to the deck. On the way Naomi approached Sally and disapproved of the way her belt was tied. A double loop, I think, she said as she adjusted the belt with strange cheeriness.

  When they got up to the deck again they found it was already slightly angled sideways and forwards. It didn’t seem likely to Sally that the threat would become more severe than that. Forward there was a melee of ship’s officers and sailors and soldiers who seemed to have the same conviction that the Archimedes had become unstable only in a minor way. An officer said on a foghorn, Please, ladies—forward. Thank you. Plenty of time. Plenty of time.

  Mitchie stood back and ushered her women along the deck. In passing her, Sally could sense at once that water—now that it had become a serious issue—frightened Mitchie. She was palely and only by a margin in command of herself. Kiernan and his orderlies bearing stretchers were making their way urgently towards the melee. By their rush they introduced a new level of concern in the soldiers they pushed through. A hatchway had exploded up forward where the torpedo had struck. Men had been wounded by fragments of steel. Mitchie saw the bearers pass and caught up with her women and faced them.

  Quick, she said. Two nurses. We must attend to those fellows.

  There was a ship’s officer with a beard like that worn by the King of England who said, No, they’ll be attended to. You must take boat number two forward.

  Mitchie called for Karla Freud and Nettice and bustled past the man. Sally struggled to follow.

  Mitchie turned and screamed at her, Get back! This was in all the hours they’d been at sea the first time Mitchie had become a fury. Someone was blowing a trumpet in a way that was not triumphant, and then the captain let the ship’s siren sound endlessly. Sergeant Kiernan was back, and he and the officer who looked like George V began hurrying women along the downward-leaning deck, where suddenly you had to walk by shortening a leg and reaching with another.

  Honora stretched out her hand in panic. Hold my hand, Sally. Hold your friend’s hand, for God’s sake.

  Naomi, Sally called, and Naomi called back. Here, here, behind you! We should take off our veils. Nurses made a neat pile of their veils against the bulkhead. They still seemed sure of what Sally had begun to doubt—that they would simply collect them again when the small emergency ended.

  Mitchie and Freud and Nettice had been driven back by orderlies to join them. Two dead, said Karla Freud, and the others are on stretchers with tourniquets.

  We ought to take off our skirts, yelled Nettice. She immediately and functionally did it herself. The others began to obey by dropping their skirts until they were all in drawers. That would have amused the Fusiliers had there been time for hilarity and perhaps had the deck been level. A lifeboat was being cranked down from the upper deck and swung way out. It was unreachable because the ship was listing and at the same time inclined by the bows. But there were men with boat hooks to haul it closer. Sally held Honora around the waist.

  Honora muttered, Sea bathing. I never understood the charm of the thing.

  Are you saying you can’t swim? asked Sally.

  In my book it’s not a natural thing to do, said Honora in defense.

  The noise from the unwounded soldiers surging from the bows and climbing up the deck towards the stern was like the hubbub of a football crowd and seemed almost as innocent. But that was now joined by the sound of braying mules and screaming ponies. For far below them some brave man had opened the double door on the livestock hold and offered them a hope of escape.

  They’re trying to make them jump into the sea—all those horses, said Freud, looking at Sally starkly. Mitchie herself had taken off her skirts and showed her plump, bloomered thighs amongst the shuffling girls. But then she broke off and went forward against the tide to direct orderlies with half a dozen stretchers. She looked helplessly at the deck where stretchers might be laid. But it was taking on an angle which—as yet not decisive—would become comic pretty soon. Two of the wounded were howling.

  Ladies, said the George V officer, whose men had secured the swaying boat to the fixed starboard railing by its down ropes and who had opened the removable railing to allow easy boarding. Come aboard quickly. No false bravery or hanging back now. Up you step!

  Four sailors were already aboard the boat to act as oarsmen. Their oars were held vertical. Nurses stepped over the gunwale to board the lifeboat with a display of reluctance—just to show the others they were not panicked. Last—determined to speed things up—Mitchie edged Naomi ahead of her and stepped off the ship and into the boat, where the upraised hands of her women helped her down.

  Sally, called Mitchie, aware that Sally was still on deck.

  I’ll be in this one, called Sally. Already a second boat was being cranked down from the upper deck. The Fusiliers still maintained decent order. Officers arranged them in ranks now, as they watched the boats further aft descending to receive them. The nurses’ second boat was lashed to the railing at a steep angle some might consider perilous. The officer gently but with an increased urgency pushed the women aboard. Sally traversed the tilting boat and took a seat on the seaward side. At her angle she could see—in Mitchie’s boat lower than this one—her sister’s face frowning up.

  Sally’s boat filled up with women whose upper bodies were bulked out with life preservers. Sally held Honora’s hands, which were blue with fright. A few soldiers came aboard—almost apologetic. Peril had civilized them. The rope that attached the boat to the railing was let go and they swung wildly into the air with a joint female scream that lacked any composure. And so the Archimedes’s daughters dangled over the sea and were lowered away an inch at a time.

  Other boats were descending further aft—but so slowly. Sally saw the ranks breaking up at the officers’ permission. Resignation and calm were no longer the day’s order. And the swinging out of boats seemed to present technical difficulties and was not occurring fast enough. The rake of the far side of the ship must be presenting awful difficulties for boat lowering. So men were now permitted to seek their individual rescues. Soldiers milling at the railings seemed to speculate on what the canting of the ship might mean. Then they climbed the rails to come splashing down into the sea all around the boats. Sailors hurled rafts from both the bows and aft.

  Sally’s boat—descending by its hawsers—now picked up too much downward speed. Looking over the gunwales she saw that because of the growing steepness of the deck her sister’s boat had swung in part below hers and had stuck in place, dipping unevenly. A mere instant later it dropped hectically and splashed into the sea. The ship was nose down and Sally saw that her boat would slam the stern of her sister’s and Mitchie’s unless it could be detached from its hawsers and rowed clear. Still attached to the Archimedes by its thick cables, the boat below them—with her sister in it—now turned crazily beam on and crosswise.

  She looked up and cried to the sailors at the winches, Stop!

  But her lifeboat smashed into the midsection and across the thwarts of Naomi’s. It wildly jolted Sally and Honora, and they could hear the screams of those below them.

  This was the place where Sally’s memory changed or died. The thud of the one boat atop another numbed the brain. Sally and Honora were thrown by the impact head and shoulders first into the water and their hands separated on their individual arcs. Time ceased. Only the nurses’ watches—till choked by saltwater—kept it. But the time of the heart and
brain vanished now in the minuteless, hourless, choking sea. They flew through an atmosphere of lusty but impotent shouts from men and were unhearing then in green water where she went so much deeper than was justifiable for someone wearing a life belt. She had a memory that this was the way of water in the muddy Macleay too. This was why—unlike other farm children—she had never liked to drop from tree branches into it. Rising by painful inches rather than as a cork, she squandered all the air in her lungs. In her aching want of breath, she wondered remotely—though without intimate concern for anything but air—about Honora. But breaking into air and light she rejoiced to see her friend bobbing in her dun life jacket with its collar pushed up high around her ears. Sally could hear Honora utter a gasp that was halfway to a scream—like a picnicking girl ducked in the surf by a lout. She was slick-haired but she seemed to Sally a breathing promise that this might be an adventure after all.

  Sally? Honora shouted, wanting identification. She gave the impression she really wanted to have all this explained to her. We’re fine now, said Sally.

  Wine-dark sea, be fucked! yelled Honora. Kiernan had told her that Homer called the Mediterranean that.

  Suddenly Sally could not contemplate the fretfulness of losing Honora and knew she must lead. Stay close! Sally called like a woman with a plan. All around, nurses in life belts were thrashing with unnecessary zeal—as if they had lost any water skills they had once possessed. In front of Sally—as she spun—was the blank steel flank of the Archimedes, and forward the upper rim of a part-submerged hole, which the green sea was entering like a tide invading a grotto. Its upper shredded contours were visible—complicated by explosion. Its irregularities were known only to God but otherwise were savage and unreadable. She saw the two lifeboats—one atop the other crosswise—and sensed they were about to sink. Naomi agreed, for she could be seen lowering Matron Mitchie into the water. Mitchie displayed all blood from the waist down. It shocked Sally like nakedness. Mitchie’s mouth gaped, and she did not seem to know her circumstances. But Naomi had soon skidded into the sea beside her. Ah yes, Sally remembered. Naomi was the family swimmer. Jumping from Sherwood bridge or tree forks into an opaque gray-green mixture of topsoil and escarpment grit from up as far as Armidale.

  Sally saw the midships doorway open and tilted a few feet above the water. Protesting horses were jumping, their hooves stuttering on the last plates of steel beforehand. There were men in there, screaming at them to go and lashing their hindquarters. Mules fell gracelessly on their flanks as the Archimedes’s own leaning flank loomed above them. Two nurses and some orderlies walked down the canting ship’s stairs a step or two and launched themselves. Still looking out at the sea from the rail Nettice could be seen—squinting like a woman trying to recognize a face at a tea party. How had Nettice missed the lifeboats? By choice or accident? Already Sally and Honora and the remnants and population of their own shattered boat were sliding astern of the Archimedes and could see a little of the great rump of the ship rising by degrees. They could at once see men dropping from the lower port side closest to the shadowy surface of the water as well as others—by choice it seemed and with the howl of their lives—throwing themselves from the upmost, portside railing. They slid down the ship’s sides. Why did they choose that? What did the rivets do to their flesh? But men were queuing for the fright and abrasions of it.

  The thing will drag us under, called Honora. The bloody thing!

  Sally saw Naomi swim one-armed—a true surf Amazon indeed—dragging Mitchie by the collar of her life jacket. The water was full of claims to mercy. There was a soldier with a bandaged arm dragging another whose face had no flesh. Mitchie and Naomi were not any longer in the nursing and tending business, however.

  Some boats seemed to get away easier than hers and Sally saw two of them rounding the low but visible bows. The high tail of the Archimedes was exposed—its screw turning and turning in air and still driven by unknowing engines.

  Rafts everywhere! Sally yelled to her sister. Black, rubber—square-thwarted and unsafe-looking things with maybe a sailor aboard or a few Inniskilling men. A soldier was kneeling on one near them and dragging a boy soldier aboard. Soon it would be loaded to sinking point.

  It isn’t as cold as it could be, is it? Honora asked hopefully. Like a girl in a bathing party again.

  Cold or warm, Sally had not taken account. It seemed up to the massive sea to decide what it was. It had absolute rights to impose its temperature.

  Other lightly populated rafts were revealed by the rhythm of the sea but with no guarantee they would stay that way should you take the trouble to approach them. One came close, though, with a soldier sitting atop. Sally saw Naomi haul herself to it and supporting Mitchie with the vigor of a woman making a claim. She linked her free arm through the loop of rope on the raft’s side. Sally forgot Honora and swam up behind her sister but remembered then to turn. Honora was like many others—making a mimic of swimming and chopping the water with exaggerated liftings and plunges of her arms. But she was worthy of encouragement. Naomi attached the dazed or perhaps comatose Mitchie by both arms to a rope loop. Then she herself sprang aboard. She was so lissome. It was a gallant emergence into the air and an exhortation to strength in others, the way she levered herself from shoulder deep up and aboard without any help from the soldiers, who were distracted entirely by their own needs. Mitchie lay still in the water. Her black hair was plastered to her blue-white face and her smashed lower body made dark clouds of blood around her in the ocean. Oh, said Mitchie and became aware of Sally’s arrival at the raft and of Naomi’s attention from above.

  Oh, don’t heave me, she pleaded. Let me drift.

  No morphine for her. Yet she said plaintively, Oh, and, Don’t heave me, when she was entitled to her screams. Her wounds were full of saltwater and her bones might be splintered in unknown ways.

  Sally hooked her own arm into a rope and dragged Honora the last yard to share it with her. Naomi hauled Mitchie up. From below, Sally hugged her and—with little leverage in this water—lifted her by the waist and then the buttocks. Honora too—turned by the security of the rope loop from a panicked girl back into a hoister—gave one arm to the effort. But the chief lift came from Naomi, who was full of frantic energy. Argh! cried Mitchie loudly and ceaselessly as she emerged from the water and Naomi laid her face-up in the raft. From Sally’s place at the rope loops Mitchie could no longer be seen. She could be heard plaintively saying, What a thing to happen to a woman! What a thing!

  Naomi negotiated with the soldier the use of his belt and was applying it—as far as Sally could tell from this angle—as a tourniquet on one of Mitchie’s thighs. More raucous cries came from Mitchie. Mitchie’s wounds justified at least that much sound.

  Sally remained in the water for she was uncertain if she possessed the athleticism needed to get aboard. Honora stayed with her—both arms hooked through the rope. She seemed now almost at ease with the power of water which lay around and so massively underneath her. More men were struggling up to hang from the exactly angled side of the raft and its other vacant loops. There were unseen men hanging on the far side too. Two or three lifted themselves onto the raft. Yet it still felt balanced. The men aboard and those in the water called to each other in their raw accents. Their words seemed the remnants of sounds from old battles. Don’t push, said Honora to one oblivious youth wallowing up. She had regained her former self.

  Since she had recovered the breath for it, Sally half turned her body towards the ship. Once she saw it she could not take her eyes from it. Its stern was rising from the water. There were still soldiers milling around its canting decks and the stern railing. They tried to keep their footing and were reluctant to leave the steel plates that had pledged a solid foothold to them. Poor Rosanna Nettice must be lost amongst the splashes and threshings between the raft and the Archimedes. The mast and funnel rose higher all the time and with more authority than they had had when the ship was solid. They reached up at a sharp
angle and this looked more like a boast of power than a submission.

  Honora too was watching.

  That mast will thrash them, she screamed. For it looked as if the masthead would come down like a huge log as the ship heeled. The door from which the mules and horses had left was nearly under. Yet still one pony seemed to lower his head and scrape through. She could hear screaming like humans from the animals who had not jumped for fear or lack of time—a massed animal shriek of blocked escape. Men still on the ship were now reduced to jumping from the stern or sliding down its curves. She saw two land in the churning propeller which cut them to sections and threw their blood about in a terrible mist so instant you could doubt it had happened. She began to weep silently. This was a thing that stretched imagination and defiled at the last second what she thought of as the kindnesses of the Archimedes. Far down in a half-flooded deck where stokers drowned, the engines still churned and the unwitting screws spun in air.

  Quick, said the older soldier from the raft. He leaned over the side with a canoe paddle which must have been part of the raft equipment—it would turn out the other one had been lost. This was a useless implement anyhow. But he was like a man awoken.

  You in the water there—paddle, paddle!

  Paddle yourself, yelled Honora. He was at one blunt end of the raft frenziedly plying the thing. Like a homing compass the raft swung nonetheless head-on to the Archimedes. Huge metal shrieks and thumps could be heard within the ship and the unearthly lament of mules and ponies went on. There was a blast within the skin that sent itself through the water and buffeted Sally’s spine and tried to wash her under the raft. The Archimedes used this great sound as a pretext to jerk its stern as high into the air as it could reach. More thunders and great iron scrapings and crashes came from within. Mother of Christ, said a soldier hanging in the water. The boilers are breaking loose. Brace yourselves.