Burning Bright (31 page)

The green fire flickered, tried to disappear, then returned, not quite as full-strength as before, but still burning brightly. Elinor extinguished the remaining fires on
Glorious’
s deck. No new ones arose. “Attack the deck!” she shouted at Thatcher, who was the only Scorcher she could see. Fortescue was gone, crawled or carried away, and Ross might be behind a tangle of fallen beams where the top of the foremast had fallen, dragging several sailors with it. She had no time to discover his location.

To her dismay, the enemy Scorcher continued to dismiss Thatcher’s fires before they could do any damage. The green fires were flickering faster now, and Elinor pressed harder, feeling now as if she were fighting the Scorcher directly, the two of them matching wills, first one gaining headway, then the other. Sweat was running into her eyes and her spine was a streak of agony worse than the spear of wood that had gone most of the way through her arm, and—

—her fire went out.

She collapsed on hands and knees, breathing heavily, feeling as if her spine had been shattered into sharp-edged pieces that ground against each other, stones tearing her flesh. No new fires blossomed on
Glorious’
s deck; perhaps the enemy Scorcher was as exhausted as she was.

The thump of cannons warned her just in time to throw her arms over her head, then another blast of splinters struck her, none as large as the first, but stinging like nettles. She heard more screaming, and pleas for help, and she looked around to see that most of the starboard rail and all of its netting were gone, tangled and hanging over the side of the ship. Thatcher lay nearby, eyes blank and staring, his left arm ripped away and his left leg crushed under the weight of more fallen timbers. Elinor stuffed her fist in her mouth to keep from crying out, or vomiting, or whatever reaction her stricken body might produce.

She looked around and still could not see Ross, though the clouds of smoke rolling across the deck might simply obscure him from sight.
Or he’s run.
She forced herself upright against the pain and waved her hands in front of her face, vainly trying to clear the fog away. Flashes of light in the distance signaled more incoming cannonballs, but they whistled overhead, one puncturing the mainsail above her head.
Glorious
was closing the distance between herself and the pirate ship, and surely that was madness, giving their enemy a better opportunity to pound them again. Or did Crawford think they stood a better chance boarding and fighting hand to hand?

A fire, small and weak, erupted near the bow, and Elinor wearily dismissed it. If only she could find that Scorcher… She tried to produce a fire of her own and cried out at the sharp crack of agony that shot down her back. No. She would not be defeated so easily.

She concentrated, telling herself this was nothing, the pain was all in her mind, and this time she summoned a fireball and felt a dull ache rather than a spike. She sent her fire spinning across the gap and saw men fling themselves aside as it lit the grey clouds surrounding them.

No, not all the men. One figure stood, illuminated briefly by her fire, and merely ducked as the ball of fire brushed past him. Quickly, before she could lose sight of him, she set him on fire and then was engulfed herself in crackling, smoking flames. They hurt only briefly, and then her mind remembered she could not be burned and extinguished them before her clothing could do more than smolder. The enemy Scorcher had done the same, and now had disappeared into the fog, or perhaps it was she who had disappeared; the wind had died down, and the ships were sluggishly maneuvering about one another, occasionally exchanging volleys that rarely struck their targets.

Elinor moved across the deck, her eyes stinging from the bitter residue of gunpowder that filled her nose and her eyes and her mouth when she was so incautious as to open it to breathe more deeply. It tasted the way it smelled, bitter and acrid and smoky all at once, and she spat to clear her mouth, then spat again when the first time didn’t work. That Scorcher was still over there somewhere, and while he might be immune to fire as she was, she could still keep him distracted. She had no idea how the battle was going, no idea how much damage the two ships had sustained, but since the enemy was still afloat, it was still her duty to destroy it.

A fireball came flying out of the dimness, aimed somewhere over her head.
Fool
. She threw a somewhat more accurate missile of her own and then found herself once again engulfed in flame, which she put out immediately, then stumbled along the deck toward the stern as another fireball struck where she had been standing. Apparently the Scorcher was not the only fool.

Elinor gave up hunting for him and struck out at the sails again; the fire burned a green beacon that, a minute later,
Glorious’
gun crews took advantage of. Elinor watched the fire, too tired to do anything more, and soon after the Scorcher extinguished it. This was not a battle of power but of endurance. Which of them would collapse first? She felt as if her back were burning, an impossibility, but there was no other word to describe the pain that tried to make her bend double to get away from it.

There was so much noise she could hardly concentrate: the pounding of the cannons, the creaking of the sails, the cracking of wood pushed past the breaking point to explode with deadly force, the screams of dying men, and the shouts, faint now, of someone calling out in the tones of one giving orders. If she could see the pirate ship, she might be able to burn the rigging; sailors rarely treated the rigging because the fire retardant compound made the ropes sticky and dangerous at temperatures higher than seventy degrees.

She picked her way past the obstacles littering the deck, stumbled when someone grabbed at her ankle pleading for water, and went to look out across the sea toward the pirate ship, that beautiful fourth-rate Navy ship that had been pressed into service to confuse its previous owners—and, thanks to Crawford’s incompetence, had succeeded. She did not know which side of the ship she was on, she was so muddled with pain and noise and confusion, but a flash of light and the scream of another cannonball told her the enemy was out there, somewhere close.

Glorious
shot off another volley which seemed to do nothing. The pirates returned fire, and then
Glorious
lurched and shuddered, knocking Elinor forward and over the rail. She screamed and clawed her way back aboard, tearing her nails and the palms of her hands, and lay pressed flat to the deck, her heart racing. The ship lurched again, and then the deck was a slope and Elinor had to press herself into the planks harder because her body was trying to slide headfirst toward—she was still confused, was it the bow or the stern that was sinking?

Sinking.
Glorious
was sinking.

Elinor dragged herself around to face uphill, got to her hands and knees and crawled. The slope was not yet so great as to throw her backward, but it was a struggle to move forward in her exhausted, pain-wracked state. Crawling was the only thing left to her. She had no doubt the survivors would cluster at the bow (or the stern) and the ship’s Bounder would carry them to safety. She could crawl that far.

She forced her arms and legs to keep moving, climbed over dead and dying bodies that reeked of blood and gunpowder, realized she was crying tears of pain and shook her head to dash them away. The
Glorious
continued to settle into the water, creaking more loudly now as if crying out for someone to help her, but there was no one to save the ship any more than there were people to save the dying crewmen who would instead spend their final moments fighting to keep the seawater out of their lungs.

The starboard steps to the quarterdeck loomed out of the dimness at her, and she took a moment to orient herself: stern, starboard side, the wheel somewhere to her right. Her vision went black, briefly, and she clung to the steps and tried to breathe without choking until the dizzy sensation passed. Then she dragged herself up the steps, bent double trying to get away from the sharp pain radiating up her spine. The screaming fell away behind her, replaced by the sound of someone talking at almost a normal volume. Momentary confusion gave way to recognition; it was Crawford, several feet ahead of her, giving someone directions.

She tried to stand, fell on her face, and went back to her hands and knees. “Captain, help me!” she cried out, but she could not speak loudly enough that even she could hear herself. She tried again, drawing in a deep breath and almost screaming the words as she dragged herself forward.

The misty gunpowder clouds had begun to clear now that both ships had stopped firing, and Elinor could clearly see Crawford’s face, his blond hair in disarray and blood matting his scalp and forehead. There were only two other men standing near him, and as she watched the first took the second by the waist and disappeared. Elinor breathed in a sigh of relief, then choked and hacked to get the grit out of her lungs. The sound finally drew Crawford’s attention. His eyes widened, but otherwise he showed no reaction to her appearance nearly at his feet.

“Captain, please help me stand,” she said, balancing on one hand to reach the other toward him.

“Of course,” he said, but made no move toward her.

The first man came staggering up the companionway, trying not to fall over with exhaustion. He did not notice Elinor. Crawford slung his arm around the Bounder, still looking at Elinor with that unreadable expression, and then they were gone.

Elinor waited. The Bounder did not return. She dragged herself higher on the stern, clung to the taffrail, thought,
He’s not coming back
, and looked down to where the waves were barely visible.
He’s not coming back
.

Her mind went blank, shut down briefly by a combination of pain and weariness and fear and fury at Crawford, the…the
bastard
, whose hatred of her was so great he would let her die on his abandoned ship. Weren’t captains supposed to go down with their ships? No, that seemed unreasonable, but then neither was it reasonable that he might leave behind someone not even mortally wounded. Yet he had.

And she had to get off this ship.

She had a vague memory that simply waiting for a ship to sink beneath the waves and then swimming away was unsafe, though she could not remember why. Possibly the debris would batter her. That brought up another problem: she could not swim. But she would have to learn how quickly, because being captured by the pirates…she knew what they would do to her, doubly damned because she was in the Navy and a woman, and drowning would be a preferable death. So she had to find something that would allow her to float and try to swim away from both ships under cover of this fog before the pirates realized she was there and came after her.

She half slid, half crawled back down the slope of the deck, frantically casting about for something that would float. Well, the ship was made of wood, and wood floated, so she simply needed to find a piece of wood large enough to bear her weight that had been blown free during the fight.

She kicked at planks and found nothing loose, nothing bigger than the sliver of wood she’d dug out of her arm. Remembering that set the wound to aching, and she reached up to touch the spot on her left arm; it was bleeding, but not heavily, and she pressed down on it until she had to let go to use both arms to climb over a pile of rope.

She reached the place where the starboard rail had been blown away and looked over the edge. The sea was far too close now, perhaps ten feet from where she stood.
Glorious
had turned so the enemy ship was on the larboard side, so all she saw was debris floating on the waves, dim in the rapidly dissipating gunpowder clouds. There was the dangling netting, half of it now floating on the waves, hundreds of splinters, a few bobbing planks too small to support her, and, several feet from the ship, a slightly curved section of hull planking about five feet square, though a lopsided square.

Elinor gripped what was left of the rail and leaned forward. Surely it was too distant for her to jump to? But the ship was sinking visibly now, and she had no time to find a better alternative. She backed as far as she could from the splintered gap, thanked Crawford briefly for making her wear trousers, cursed him for putting her in this position, and ran and leaped as far from the ship as she could.

The water struck her like a slap to her whole body, cold and hard, leaving her momentarily stunned. Salt water went up her nose and burned her sinuses, more water went down her throat, and she gagged once before sliding under the waves. The shock of being immersed in the Caribbean waters, of how much colder they were than she had imagined, brought her back to herself, and she thrashed with her arms and legs until her head was above the surface.

Blinking away the burning water, she cast frantically about for her salvation. She saw it only a few feet away just as she went under again. Desperate now, she kicked harder, swung her arms as if she were climbing a ladder, and found herself nearer to the planks, but they were drifting away on the waves, floating out of her reach. Panicked, she kicked out, found something hard under her foot, pushed off it and grabbed the edge of the planks with the tips of her fingers.

She pulled herself up, sobbing, and lay there, her arms outstretched to both sides gripping her makeshift raft’s edges, coughing up salty brine and taking in great lungsful of air tinged only slightly with the stink of gunpowder.

She rolled over to see what her foot had found and saw a barrel, upended, bobbing away from her on the waves as if bidding her farewell. What an empty barrel was doing close enough to
Glorious
’ deck to be flung free was a mystery she didn’t feel like pursuing, in case God was looking out for her and might think she was ungrateful for His gift. She lay back on her raft and discovered the slight curve of its planks eased her back considerably. But she didn’t have time to relax; she still had to escape the pirates.

She rolled back onto her stomach and scooted down until only her chest still rested on the raft and her hands clung to its sides. Then she began kicking. She had no direction in mind other than “away,” and knew the chances of her finding land, or, miraculously, a friendly ship, were almost nonexistent, but she was determined not to die at the pirates’ hands. She kicked, and kicked, and one of her shoes fell off and she discovered her kicking was more efficient if she were barefoot, so she shook her foot until the other shoe slipped loose and sank away from her.