The first mate takes off his belt and Johnny holds out a leather sheath, wide-eyed and solemn. I thread the sheath through the belt and cinch it tight under my jacket. When the bosun hands me an auger, I brandish it like a pistol with more piss and vinegar than I feel before tying it into the sheath.
Johnny laughs nervously, then paws my shoulder in an awkward sort of half-hug.
“Back to your labor,” the old man calls. “If they see us crowded at the rail, they’ll know something’s amiss.”
With both auger and dagger about my waist, I feel a full stone heavier. I can swim well, but I’ve never tried it weighted. I climb up to the rail and peer over. The water below is not a sparkling sky-blue lagoon where little waves lapped around my baby feet, where I dipped and surged with naught on my back but my smallclothes. It’s green-black and choppy, and at the bottom are the bones of sailors who did not have a care for its will.
The wind is sharp from the starboard beam. It won’t be a turn of the glass before we’re pushed close enough to the frigate to force a reckoning.
Pop is drawn tight like a mainstay line. He badly wants to say something but he’s not going to. I’m not even sure what there is to say.
I can’t take my offer back. And I can’t let us be taken.
I face the water. I slip out of my jacket and dive in.
The water is bonechill-cold and the shock of it hits me like a cudgel. I kick my feet and force myself upward and forward, but my shirt and trousers splay out like a jellyfish, clinging and dragging and slowing every limb I thrash.
So I choke and gasp and struggle, fighting out of my clothes. I break the surface and the cold hits me again, rakes over my stubbly head, but I suck in a mighty breath and tread water long enough to steady myself.
Cold. Oh, Father Neptune but it is cold in nothing but smallclothes and the linen I keep wrapped about my chest.
Black Tom’s in the rigging. The old man has the spyglass. One of them’s bound to notice.
I’ll reap that whirlwind once I’m back on board. For now, I’ve got a ship to sink.
I tighten the mate’s belt and make sure I still have both auger and dagger, then I slice my arms through the water in a nice steady rhythm. I start to feel warmer. Every twenty strokes I look up and mark the warship just to be sure I’m on course.
At first it feels like I’ll never get there.
Then she’s within a stone’s throw.
Then I’m right beneath her.
I tread water once I reach the warship, fighting to catch my breath. It’s been a while since I’ve swum this much, and my arms are weak and melty, my eyes burning from the salt. The ship is moving only with the tide, and I unfasten the auger from my waist and feel along till I find a spongy, worm-eaten patch below the waterline.
There’s no way to auger without a grip to hold me steady, and there’s nothing to grip but barnacles. They cake the whole shipbottom like drifted sand, and each is a tiny razor.
I’m too tired to hesitate. I grab a clump of barnacles, and they slice me open clean and thoughtless. And those cuts burn. They burn and burn and I whimper, not an ounce of piss and vinegar left to fight it.
But my right hand is free, and I set to work with the auger. I crank it round and round, round and round. It’s all I do. It’s all I think about.
Before long I’ve bored half a dozen holes clear through the hull. The barnacles have already done the job halfway, quietly eating the wood till it all but ripples beneath my palms. Already I can hear the slurpsuck of water punching through my holes and the panicky shouts of men inside, the clomp and clatter as they flee, the futile clang of the ship’s bell ringing the general alarm.
My arms throb and my whole left hand is numb from scores of tiny half-moon cuts across my fingers. When I fumble the auger against the hull to start a new hole, it wheels out of my hand and drops like an anchor down and down and gone.
I watch it disappear. The job is only half done. All I have left is my dagger.
I force my stiff fingers around another clump of barnacles. New cuts crosshatch the old ones. I pull the dagger from my belt and stab at the pulpy wood like a murderer.
A raw, violent hole appears beneath my blade. Then two, then many.
The warship is taking on water. The shift in pitch is sobering. I’m killing these men. They can swim no better than the lads on the Vanity.
I’ve lost count of the holes I’ve put in, but I’m spent. The warship’s list is bad enough that she’s in no position to fight us or give chase. And if she goes down, I want to be nowhere near.
I’ve earned my prize. Pop’s prize. And half the rum ration of every man on the Vanity whose life I saved sinking this Spanish tub.
I cram my dagger into its sheath, push off the side of the listing warship — the barnacles open up my toes like meat — and thrash through the waves toward home. Each stroke takes all my effort, and halfway there I start to crawl-paddle and sputter out seawater hard enough to set my vitals throbbing.
I won’t make it if I think how bad I hurt.