by Peter Tonkin
He pulled himself to his feet and stumbled up out of the busy surf. Sally was sitting on the sand, her body at a strange angle and her back rigid. He scrambled up beside her and fell to his knees. One leg stretched straight out across the sand in front of her. There was no sign at all of the other one and for a truly horrific moment Richard supposed that the crocodile must have bitten it clean off.
‘Sally,’ he gasped, ‘what … ’
‘My leg,’ she said, confirming the worst of his fears. Her face was white — pale beyond anything even the moonlight could have done.
Feeling absolutely helpless, knowing that if her leg was gone then all he could do was to watch her die, Richard crouched lower. As he moved, the moonlight shone on the sand next to her and revealed a little more. One leg stretched straight out in front of her. The base of her belly sat firmly on the sand. On the other side, her pubis seemed to swing round to the underside of her buttock which sat firmly on the sand with no other leg in evidence at all. But surely there would be blood, he thought, thinking of all the massive blood vessels which passed up and down the groin.
He reached forward. Something strange was the matter with her hip …
‘It’s dislocated,’ whispered Sally’s voice. ‘My leg’s gone down a hole, I think, and it’s dislocated my hip.’
The scales fell from Richard’s eyes. Her leg had disappeared into the strange metal circle they had supposed to be a pot of some kind. She had trodden on the end of it and the sand blocking it must have given way. And then he understood the whole. Why had they not thought of it at the time? What fools they were! If the place was littered with cannonballs then what could this thing be but a cannon? A cannon standing buried on its end with its muzzle pointing upwards blocked by some sand. A cannon maybe five feet long, deep enough to gulp down Sally’s leg and to twist her hip joint out of its socket.
‘This is going to hurt,’ he said.
‘Hurts like a son of a bitch already,’ said the ghostly voice issuing from the ghastly face.
He slid his arms under her armpits and fastened his hands round his forearms under her breasts. Then, trying desperately to keep the pull in a straight line immediately above the mouth of the buried cannon, he heaved Sally straight up. Her disjointed leg was not held tight. It slid out of the hole in the sand with a sloshing whisper of sound as he powered himself upright, though the full weight of her sent bolts of agony up and down his back.
When he had her, in spite of the almost incapacitating pain he was feeling himself, he nevertheless had the presence of mind to pull her gently back to the fireside. There he laid her gently on the sand. The moonlight and the firelight showed how severely misshapen her hip was, but it was a relief to find a leg still attached to it. He ran his hands up her thigh as gently as the most considerate of lovers until they closed round the stretched junction, fingers almost psychically sensitive, trying to explore the disposition of the bones beneath the soft-furred swell of belly and the bulge of buttock.
‘You’ve got to get it up,’ she said.
It was amazing that she was still conscious. A woman of steel with a vengeance. ‘I’ll talk it through quickly,’ he said. ‘You’re the nurse, tell me if I get it wrong.’
She nodded, her face porcelain, lipped in white and eyed in bruise blue even though the lids were closed. She looked to be in her early seventies and ageing fast.
‘I lift the leg and fold the knee to ninety degrees then I articulate the joint until it slips back into its socket.’
‘You get one go, maybe two. Then I go into spasm and it sets like a rock.’
‘Cross your fingers.’
‘Sure as hell can’t cross my legs.’
‘One, two, three!’ On the third count he raised the leg with a swift but gentle fluidity. No paramedic could have done it better. She screamed. He disregarded the sound absolutely.
‘One, two, three.’ On three, he folded down her calf to a right angle. She made no sound at all. That was almost worse than the scream.
‘Here we go,’ he whispered, eyes closed, filling his head with what his fingers had learned about the internal state of her hip joint. ‘One, two, three … ’
With the whole of his body, as though the power available in his calves, thighs, buttocks and viciously complaining back were more precisely controllable than that in his torso, shoulders and arms, he swung the lever of her folded leg round so that the torque on the perfectly erect column of her thighbone twisted the ball joint back down towards the cup of its socket. Like a fisherman communicating with his catch along the surprising intimacy of his line, he felt the round end of bone begin to engage with the hollow waiting to receive it. But even Sally’s fortitude had reached its end. Her body gave a series of lurches as though massive bolts of electricity had been passed through it. Her pelvis leaped away from the point of the agony. He felt the socket slip apart again and he felt the steely thews all around it set like cement. When he released her leg, the hip remained exactly where it was. The calf flopped down as limply as a flag in a dead calm. She rolled over on to her side, curled like a foetus and deeply unconscious.
Richard paused for only the briefest of moments, looking down at his companion and then away across the silent, moon-bright reef. They might be having a war out there, he thought grimly, but they were also in possession of medical supplies and medical knowledge, both of which he needed badly and at once. And there was only one way he was going to get them. With all the force lent him by his frustration and helplessness, he tore the head of the lifeboat round and shoved the thing down into the first buoyant lapping of the returning tide. When the boat was just afloat, he came back and lifted Sally into it. He paused to add in a bundle of necessities in case they did not get a chance to return; on the top, her giant knife. Then he clambered over the side and slithered in beside her.
The engine caught first time with no fuss and he took the tiller, guiding the boat out towards the distant cluster of lights which told of life and power aboard at least one of the wrecks on the reef. In the moonlight, his destination made such an easy target that he did not really need to navigate but the tide was still low and he was well aware of how dangerous it would be if he ran the lifeboat up on to one of the coral outcrops which he knew in his bones must stand between them.
So it was that Richard spent much of his time peering over the side of the boat trying to judge the depth of water they were ploughing through. The moon proved a friend here for she stood high and bright enough to reveal the shallows to him. The depths soon vanished into inky blackness like the interstellar spaces high above, but anything that heaved itself into the top couple of metres of the sea stood starkly revealed under the steady lunar gaze. It was a mesmerising, weirdly beautiful dreamscape whose reality soon became subsumed into dreams of exhaustion and shock. One thing remained firm and apparently real at first, however. On the silvery pallor of the reef top there lay a line of black pocks, like the dots in a dot-to-dot puzzle in a child’s book. The black pearls made a straight line across the reef, leading disturbingly directly towards the glowing wrecks.
Richard followed the string of black pearls out across the reef for some time before he realised that they must be more cannonballs — probably from the batch which had saved him from the crocodile and whose cannon had crippled Sally. It seemed slyly apt that they should be guiding him back towards her only hope of recovery now … But they were guiding him towards more than the two ships stranded on Drake’s tall pinnacle of rock.
In one of his most dream-like moments, when the moon, standing high over his shoulder and hovering at her zenith, sent her beams like pale searchlights into the heaves and gullies of the reef bed immediately below, he saw something more than mere cannonballs. He saw, on an upward slope of the bone-white bottom, tantalisingly close beneath him, a pair of skeletons. The ripple of the water made it hard to be certain, but it looked as though they were being held in place by the coral growing through their bones. But there they lay, side
by side, with their feet pointing back to the wrecks and their arms reaching in towards the island, as precisely laid as any of Flint’s ghastly signal skeletons which had guided Long John Silver on Treasure Island. But these were no mere mute guides hinting at the location of something buried far away. For there, just out of reach beneath the silently slipping keel, still held fast in those reaching, skeletal hands, lay a sea chest with a great lead seal catching the moonlight and winking up at him as bright as a silver dollar, doubloon or piece of eight.
18
Richard nudged the bow of the lifeboat up against the side of Luck Voyager. All was darkness and silence above. Down here there was nothing but the lapping of restless wavelets and the hollow grating of wood on black metal. This last was made by the bow of the boat and the wreckage of the deck cargo and its packaging which still clung to the ships. When Sally groaned, it sounded almost monstrous.
After he had seen the sea chest, the moon had waned and the wind, what there was of it, had fallen. Richard’s weary hails to the ship, echoing over the water, sounded as though they were calls for help in some long lost tomb addressed to dust-deafened mummies. And they might as well have been just that for all the response they got. If Sally was going aboard to get some medical help, Richard would have to get her up there on his own.
Under normal circumstances the task would have been impossible. To board a large freighter from a small boat is only possible if the ship is so well-laden that the freeboard is very low indeed or if there is a line or ladder left hanging down from the deck. Otherwise the hopeful boarder is faced with a wall of steel which is simply insurmountable. Luck Voyager was dead and dark but the other ship had all her bridge lights lit. At first glance this other ship was a more inviting prospect, but Richard’s memory of the gun battle he had seen from the island hilltop made him very hesitant about approaching the unknown vessel unannounced; it really was a case of ‘better the devil you know’.
To his right, the deck cargo sloped down from the tilting deck and into the dangerously shallow sea. The containers had been destroyed by the storm or the impact and now seemed to make a solid slipway. Richard guided the lifeboat, its powerful engine grumbling like distant thunder, up to the groin made by the outthrust of planking. His strong hands soon showed it to be solid enough and he started to test it to see whether he might climb up it. It was wet, however, and very slippery. He turned to look elsewhere and saw outlined against more distant brightness one of the deck winches. And from it, snaking in and out of shadow like a silvery serpent, was a frayed line.
It was the work of a moment for Richard to discover the end of that solid extra-strong plastic deck rope and bring it aboard. In his youth, before he had fallen under the spell of long, dark, E-type Jaguars, he had kept a Land Rover. The Rover had been one of the old sort which had come with an all-terrain survival manual. And, more importantly, it had come with a winch worked by the vehicle’s own motor so that it was possible to pull the whole thing up slopes too steep for the rugged four-wheel drive.
With the deck line sliding easily through his hand, Richard guided the lifeboat away from the side until he could ground it on the lowest end of the mock slipway. Sally gave another groan. Carefully, Richard positioned the lifeboat with its head facing out to sea and its rounded stem facing up the slope towards the deck. When he was satisfied, he carefully disengaged the drive and left the engine idling quietly. Then he lifted the floor panels beneath his feet and, standing astride the gap he had made, he groped down into the deep bilge until his hands encountered the solid lateral column of the drive shaft which joined the engine midships with the protected propeller under the stem. To this he attached the line, cinching the braided plastic as tightly as he could. Then he looked around for something to wedge under the loop, to stop it sliding round the slick column of his makeshift winch. Rags of clothing, slivers of wood, it was all packed as tightly as he could manage. Then he positioned the slack line over the stem and paused, calculating. The winch on the deck was taller than the back end of the boat and the line was running down from the top of the drum. The line was slim considering its massive strength. It would not fill the well of the bilge too quickly. The slipway was smooth, apparently solid and clear.
Richard stood at the engine control, looking back up the slope. There was no more calculating to be done. Nothing in fact but to try and to pray. He engaged the motor into reverse and pushed up the revs. Beneath his feet the drive shaft spun, but the propeller pulled them further up the shallow slope, so the loop round the shaft eased slightly and would not bite. Sally gave her deepest and most agonised cry yet and Richard, goaded by looming failure, opened the throttle to FULL with a vicious twist.
At once the loop caught and the lifeboat was tugged up on to the slope with such a powerful lurch that Richard winded himself against the wheel. He was tossed around the little wheelhouse, holding himself upright only by the strength of his grip on throttle and wheel. The noise was incredible. Backwards, up a slope which trembled like a drum skin, the lifeboat thundered on to the deck until its stem post slammed against the solid winch and Richard, who was just recovering from being thrown forward, was thrown back into the bilge. Fortunately the well was full of line wrapped round the drive shaft and so he was able to pick himself up and switch off the power before the motor burned itself out.
The rough ride had shaken any cobwebs out of Richard’s head with a vengeance — and that was as well, for it had also shaken Sally awake. At her first murmur, Richard pushed his battered body ruthlessly into action, stumbling down the unsteady length of the boat until he found her in the shadows, thankfully still where he had left her — on the deep angle of the prow where the seat was deepest and safest. He jumped overboard, overcompensating for the solidity of the deck and nearly falling flat. Then with a mental curse he swung back, reaching over and down for her foetal form. Grunting like a gorilla, he heaved her up into his arms then, feeling his shoulders beginning to tear, he managed to sling her into a rough fireman’s carry without doing too much more damage to her hip. Then, like an unusual, unhandy Santa Claus, he staggered down the deck towards the dark and silent bridgehouse.
While Richard’s passage up here from the water had been simplified by the slope of the ship which was on an incline of more than twenty degrees, his walk up to the accommodation areas was complicated by the fact that he was effectively walking across a hillside. Every now and then he would find himself staggering downwards as though his left leg was shorter than his right and then he would have to turn and walk directly uphill again. It was particularly important that he did this as the lower sections of the deck were not only dark but booby-trapped with debris.
The fourth or fifth of these manoeuvres brought him into a beam of light from the other ship and just as he turned to try a direct assault on the bridgehouse, a shot rang out. The metal at his feet exploded into sparks, something whined past him with vicious fury and the shock sent him staggering downhill into dangerous darkness again. He found his ankles entangled in debris and he fell to his knees, making Sally groan and groaning himself as her weight tore the muscles in his neck and shoulder. ‘Help!’ he called in English, far beyond any thought of exercising his Cantonese. ‘It’s Captain Mariner and Sergeant Alabaster. We need help!’
At once the doorway on the starboard, lower, side of the bridgehouse burst open and a swarm of black figures, outlined against the merest glimmer of torchlight, scuttled down the deck towards him. The action was so sudden and so unexpected that Richard was quite stunned by it and it was not until he recognised the leader as Lawkeeper Ho that he let his body slump a little with relief. Even so, as he felt their hands upon him and his burden, he said, ‘Be careful of the sergeant, she’s in a bad way.’
A few moments later Richard and the semi-conscious Sally were in the oddly angled ship’s sickbay. There were half a dozen beds in here with a little surgery beyond. All the beds and all the decking between them were full of wounded officers and crew. The
only place unoccupied, and this was where they put Sally, was the operating table. Much of the medicine on offer was of the traditional non-invasive Chinese kind. There were no operations scheduled. And even the most intrepid of the wounded warriors knew better than to try his luck by occupying such a place. Sally the gweilo would have had no such Middle Kingdom fears had she been in any position to express herself.
As soon as she was in place, Richard used some precious torch-battery power to check her leg again and then he searched in the unusually equipped dispensary shelves until he found a syringe and some really powerful painkiller.
‘Are any of these things muscle relaxants?’ he asked Lawkeeper. But it was Su-zi who answered.
‘That one there. Be careful of the dosage, however.’
The slight but powerful young woman did more than just offer advice in the end. Richard’s hands were trembling so much with a combination of muscular exhaustion and emotional fatigue that he could do little more than check the disposition of Sally’s joint and probe the iron-hard protective armour of the muscles around it. Su-zi’s fingers were rock-steady, however, and so it was she who slipped a long needle into the marble flesh of Sally’s buttock, and then slid two more into the stretched skin at top and bottom of her darkly distended groin.