Challenge of Antares

Chapter one

Chapter oneI, Dray Prescot, First Lieutenant of His Britannic Majesty’s seventy-four gun ship Roscommon, leaped for the struggling form of Mr Midshipman Simpkins entangled in rigging as the main topmast collapsed upon him.

The ship writhed in the gale and the deck went up and down like the swinging hips of those beautiful girl dancers of Tahiti. Simpkins screamed on and on, a thin kitten mewling snatched away in the maelstrom of noises. The physical force of the wind battered our senses, ripped the breath from our mouths, clenched with the pressure of a torturer’s tongs upon our brains.

There was no time for all that. Skidding on the water-running deck I nearly missed him. He was a fresh pimply-faced youngster scared out of his wits. Savagely I wrenched myself about, grabbed for him. His arm felt sparrow-leg thin in my grip.

“Come here, lad!”

A monstrous sea washed inboard spinning us about helplessly. With that water-buffeting momentum and my desperate wrench he slid free as the main topmast hammered down.

The gong note of mast against deck rang clear through the boiling confusion of the gale.

The mast slewed viciously, dragged by the trailing rigging, and gyrated across the deck. The main top-gallant smashed down and across the lee bulwark, snapped and in a smother of parting lines vanished over the side. There was no hope in my mind that the top-gallant had really gone, oh, no! The damn thing would be held up and penduluming and in the moment the thought occurred the first jarring thump shocked through the hull.

“Get that raffle cleared away!” I used the old foretop hailing voice to pierce through the racket. Another vibration through our feet made the men jump — perhaps not as much as the savage quality of command in my intemperate bellow, I dare say — and they moved in warily on the wreckage. The top-gallant would puncture our hull if we were not sharp about it.

Everything was going up and down and around and around.

The hands were right to be cautious. Lines snaked everywhere across the deck ready to snatch up an incautious man like those damned great pythons of the jungles. Axes lifted and descended and keen edges bit.

The light was going, a ghastly blood-red glow through the turmoil, and a man’s life was cheap, far cheaper than the value of one of His Britannic Majesty’s ships of the line. First Lieutenant or not, was I not Dray Prescot? Was I an officer to send my fellow human beings into peril and hang back? Well, of course, in the right circumstances certainly I was. But not now. Seizing an axe as Simpkins collapsed, I jumped at the raffle of wreckage.

The whole mass shifted threateningly and it was a business of nip and tuck. One by one the tangling lines parted. The manic banging of the top-gallant overside acted like some imperative drum, driving us on.

We’d been badly hit in the fight with the French eighty and some blood had still not been washed from the decks. There’d be shot-holes below the waterline, into the bargain, although the Froggy had played the usual French trick of shooting at our spars. Well, the monsieur had done that well enough. The main top-gallant, injured in the fight, had now fallen; we’d already lost the mizen top-gallant. Rain slashed at us, streaming water and sweat down the men’s faces. They looked like a bunch of imps crazed from hell. But we hacked and cut, jumped and dodged, and all the time the ship pirouetted and the damned timber overside smashed at our hull.

Captain Parsons appeared at my elbow as I leaped back, just avoiding a cut line whose end would have guillotined me nicely.

“Get to it, if you please, Mr Prescot! That mast will hole us if you delay.”

Parsons was incompetent to the point of imbecility. There was nothing else I could say but: “Aye aye, sir!” and leap at the rigging again, axe flailing.

And — danger brooded malevolently in Captain Parsons. He was one of the famous Mad Captains of the Royal Navy. A captain was God Almighty aboard his own ship. This affected certain men, the corruption of power infecting them insidiously over a period of time so that in the end they turned out to be as mad as March hares in their addled brains. No doubt the dreadful conditions of those under their command and the well-nigh intolerable burdens of command serving an Admiralty that demanded perfection accelerated the process of mental decay.

All that meant was that I, plain Dray Prescot, had to give the captain a wide berth and bear his tantrums with what equanimity I could muster.

Thankfully with the onset of night the gale began to abate. The dark seas laced with creamy marbling rushing past eased. Urging the hands on to fresh efforts, taking chances to get at the inner coils of lines inextricably entwined, hacking the raffle free, at last I was rewarded with the sight of the topmast swiveling, swaying, stabbing its splintered butt dangerously at us as we leaped back, and finally toppling overboard. I dragged in a lungful of air, storm-washed, refreshing, scented with the smells of the sea. All the time the manic captain pattered on in a monologue, a harangue of threats and descriptions of what he would do in the way of discipline aboard his ship.

A portly, florid man, he had a whining nasal voice. Now he gave me a hostile look and said: “Jury masts, if you please, Mr Prescot. And as quick as you like.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

God rot the confounded fellow!

Mr Harcourt, the carpenter, running sweat from his exertions, turned his head away; but not before I’d seen the look of contempt upon that mahogany countenance. I took no notice. Mr Brace, the bosun, shouted at the nearest hands, panting, sweaty, pawing their faces where sweat and rainwater mingled. If a king’s ship had no top hamper by reason of it being shot away by the French, why, then, Bigod, sir! it must be restored with a jury-rig immediately.

There was no such thing as rest aboard a vessel of the Royal Navy until all that had to be done was done. And done all shipshape and Bristol-fashion into the bargain.

Giving the Second and Third of the ship their instructions and knowing that the carpenter would manage things with the bosun, I became aware that the gale had gone right down. The night breathed gently with the merest puff of a breeze. Someone, then, must be keeping a friendly eye on us sorry mariners.

Now the sky blazed with stars. Drawing a breath, I looked up. As ever my gaze was drawn with hypnotic power to the constellation of Scorpio with its arrogantly upflung tail. There blazed the red star of Alpha Scorpii, Antares, as though a lighthouse seen from afar off in some strange and unfathomable way was beckoning to me. Since my father had been killed by a scorpion when I was a little lad, always that red speck of fire in the heavens appeared to me to contain some hidden meaning.

A voice at my elbow said: “You are wounded, Mr Prescot. Pray allow me attend you.”

For the moment a trifle bemused, I glanced around. The surgeon, a snuffy, strange little creature, reached out for my arm.

To my surprise I saw blood on my shirt sleeve. My coat had long since been discarded. “Come below, sir. I must dress—”

“It is nothing, I thank you, doctor. A mere scratch. And I’ve the jury masts to rig.”

This surgeon, Doctor Milius, shook his narrow head. His thin face screwed up in annoyance. I tried not to look at his face, for he had the most amazing eyes. Pale, like glass, they seemed to drill through me.

“You will vastly oblige me, sir, if you will step below.”

There was no pain from my arm, and where the confounded wound had been collected I had no idea. Roscommon hummed with activity under the lamps. This crew had been hand-reared by me and knew what to expect if they failed me in the exactitude of their duty. The manic captain towered like a leering monster over us all, of course.

The work going on now was so familiar to me from many many years at sea that I knew the jury masts would be up and canvas set in good time despite the fatigue of the hands. All the same, I couldn’t leave now.

“Come, sir, I pray you.” Milius held out a hand.

He spoke with the normal florid courtesy demanded so that I could find no fault in that. When the captain said he would be vastly obliged — he’d probably say obleeged — if a person would do what he wanted done the effect was much the same as the bosun’s starter thwacking down viciously on a waister’s rump. I started to speak and Milius turned away abruptly. He trotted in his odd pigeon-like walk over to the captain. What was said I could not hear.

Captain Parsons looked across at me. “Mr Prescot! Would you kindly take yourself below, sir, and have your wound bandaged.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

All the ordered confusion of the deck could be left. I could go below to the wardroom. Amazing! What the blazes had the surgeon said to our raving captain?

The wardroom looked exactly the same as I remembered it when I’d gone up on deck at the beginning of the action. Not a single shot had penetrated here. The action itself was already history, the French eighty gun ship, mangled and near-derelict, flown with that quick gale into the night. I felt the supreme annoyance of a fellow deprived of honest Prize Money.

The odd thing was, I reflected as I led the way into my cubicle of a cabin off the wardroom, I’d been absolutely convinced we’d taken the Frenchy. Monsieur Jean Crapaud’s blue white and red had still flown from what mastheads he had left to him; but I was already anticipating the feeling of the gold in my pocket when he struck.

“The damn Froggy,” I said, my thoughts spilling out resentfully into a grumbling growl. “He’s laughing up his sleeve at us now, I’ll warrant.”

The surgeon pulled my blood-soaked sleeve back. “You do not like the Frogs.”

“Like ’em? What’s that got to do with it? We’re at war with ’em. And that’s an end to it.”

He gave a non-committal grunt and went off to fetch his medical chest. In the few minutes he was away I tipped some water from the pitcher into the bowl. There was a quantity of blood on my arm; I could feel no wound.

When he returned I pulled the little hinged table down. Something odd, something that was not quite right, was niggling away at my mind. He put his box on the table and opened the lid. Then he pointed a scrawny forefinger at my sea chest whose lid was thrown back.

“A handsome pair, Mr Prescot.”

A highly-varnished mahogany box lay open on the top of my meager possessions. Certainly, the brace of dueling pistols did look mighty handsome. The red velvet was thick and plush, the gunmetal gleamed with the dark blue of superb craftsmanship, the furniture superb with a deep polish and the locks marvels of the locksmith’s art.

I looked and shook my head.

I didn’t own but I recognized the dueling pistols; but before I could speak Milius took one out in his thin hand and turned it over. “I must see to your arm first, Mr Prescot; but then I would be vastly in your debt if you would tell me about this weapon.”

He weighed it a moment, holding it extraordinarily awkwardly, then returned it to the box.

“Now,” he said, more to himself than me. “Bandages, yes. Scissors, yes.” He rummaged about in his own medical chest. “Where are the needles?”

“Needles!” I burst out. “Sink me, Doctor Milius, the wound can’t be so bad as to need sewing up!”

“Not those kind of needles—”

He looked up swiftly at me, his thin ferrety face somehow altering its planes so as to produce the semblance of a demon.

I looked around. Now I knew what had been niggling away at my brain. The wardroom couldn’t look just as it had been before the action. Impossible! Everything would have been struck down as we cleared Roscommon for action!

He saw me looking at him, he saw my face.

“What the blue blazes is going on?” I brayed out.

The surgeon straightened up.

“Dokerty take it!”

He turned towards me and his strange eyes like glass bored piercingly into my eyes.