Chapter 132: Rows of Iron, Rows of Bone
The crew only came up long enough to spit out a mouthful of seawater and tell Bucket and Grey where the old duchess lay against the reef. Grey took the bearing as calmly as if he’d been marking a fishing spot, scratched another cross across his chart, muttered at it like the thing had argued back, then told Bucket how to ease the Herring into place.
Bucket did as asked while finding fresh reasons to curse the capstan, and before long the boom swung the bell over the rail again. This time it hung so near the wreck that its shadow would likely reach the old girl’s shattered side before the bell ever touched the bottom.
"Second drop’s always kinder."
Coombes said as he snuggled against the iron rim while the bell sank toward the sea. "The water’s already had a look at ye. No use makin’ the introduction twice."
"And what if she decides she’d like another look?"
"Then smile polite and pray she’s feelin’ charitable, Captain."
James grinned and left it at that.
The bell kissed the water surface, rocked once like it was making up its mind, and started down. By the time the daylight overhead had shrunk into a pale, trembling coin, nobody inside had enough breath to waste on conversation.
It ended up gently onto the sand. Before James even ducked beneath the pocket of trapped air, he could already make out the dark bulk of the Falmouth rising off to one side.
Coombes caught the two sailors by the shoulders and nodded toward the cannons on the wreck’s broken flank. That was all the instruction they needed, and they were already ready with the coils of rope fastened around the bell’s rim.
Coombes pushed off after them, but not before tapping two fingers against his bad ear and jerking a thumb toward James, Anne, and Mary. The meaning came through plain enough.
Anne answered with a gesture that would have been rude in any country on earth.
Coombes pressed a hand over his heart as though she’d mortally wounded him, then swam after his men. Mary’s shoulders quivered with a laugh she knew better than to let escape.
James pointed toward a broad tear low in the hull, wide enough for two people abreast, and the three of them slipped inside.
The sounds of the reef vanished when the ship closed around them. The sunlight that had painted the sand in slow golden bars faded into a thin gray glow, then dimmed again until it looked more like evening than midday.
Rows of cannons stretched away into the gloom on both sides, more than James had cared to count from outside. Some still sat square in their carriages, breeching ropes taut across the breeches just as the gun crews had left them, tompions still plugging the muzzles as though someone expected to return with powder and shot after the tide changed.
A few had broken loose entirely, lying on their sides or thrown clear of their trucks, iron wheels buried in planks softened by days beneath the sea. Near the forward end, an entire row had disappeared beneath a collapsed section of deck, with only the rounded backs of the guns and the splintered remains of their carriages showing through the wreckage.
The sea had washed away every trace of smoke long ago. It hadn’t carried off the story.
Black scorch marks climbed the timbers wherever the fire had found a good grip, places the wood had burned so deep it crumbled under the lightest touch.
He reached the nearest intact gun, ran a hand along the cold iron, and found it solid from one end to the other. No crack nor weakness where the barrel met the trunnions.
He looked back and gave Anne a thumbs-up.
She answered with one of her own while checking how firmly the carriage sat beneath the gun.
Two cannons farther on, Mary came even with one hanging half off its trucks. A fine crack ran the length of the barrel where James reckoned a shot from the Rose had struck it fair.
Mary didn’t waste time trying to explain and simply drew one hand across her throat and kept swimming. That told him everything worth knowing.
James tried to gesture about the next gun, one buried muzzle-first in the silt with only the breech sticking free. He traced a slow circle with one finger, meaning plain enough that this one ought to be dug out.
Anne took it another way entirely.
She swam one slow circle around the cannon, studying it from every side like a horse somebody hoped to sell her, then looked back at him with both eyebrows raised, waiting for the rest of the conversation.
James tried again. This time he jabbed a finger at the silt, then pantomimed hauling an invisible rope hand over hand.
Understanding lit her face.
She clapped both palms against her cheeks in grand horror at her own mistake, and Mary bent over laughing so hard she had to brace herself against a nearby carriage to keep from drifting away.
By then their borrowed breath was running thin. James tapped two fingers against his lips, pointed back the way they’d come, and the others nodded. The three of them turned for the bell, climbed back beneath its pocket of trapped oxygen long enough to fill their lungs again, then slipped beneath the water once more and returned to the wreck.
Below, the clean stretch of belowdecks ended up with a fallen beam that had dragged the deck above down with it until the wreckage filled the ship from one side to the other. There was no swimming clean through that, and the only passage sat low against the deck, barely wide enough for a man to squeeze through sideways.
James went first and made sure everybody knew how difficult it was. He sucked in his stomach, flattened both hands against his ribs, screwed up his face like he was suffering some heroic sacrifice, and wriggled through one inch at a time.
Anne watched with her arms folded and not the least sign of sympathy.
Once he cleared the far side, she slipped through the passage in one easy motion, making his grand struggle look foolish enough to be memorable.
Beyond the collapse, the current faded until it was scarcely there at all. The water stood so calm that even loose silt seemed content to hang where it was.
That was enough to put James on notice.
One skeleton lay wedged where the passage narrowed too much for the sea to carry him away. Little remained beyond clean bone and the ragged scraps of a coat that still clung stubbornly to his shoulders.
A second lay beneath a fallen spar farther on, one arm still raised as though he’d tried to shield his face from the blow that finished him.
James looked over the bodies and felt nothing at all, no joy and no regret. They were part of the wreck now, no more and no less. It was nothing personal, simply business.
The world was what it was, and it kept moving.
He pushed gently away from the nearest beam, and the three of them swam on.
Beyond the dead, the gundeck parted open wide enough to see nearly from one end to the other.
That was where it moved.
It came gliding out of the gray at the far end, long-bodied and gray-backed, slipping between the ruined cannons with indifference.
The shark didn’t hurry, there wasn’t any reason to. With one slow sweep of its tail, the creature pushed itself across the open deck, straight to their direction.