finally run the French to earth at Aboukir Bay, the Battle of the Nile as it was now called.
It was too terrible to remember clearly, or to arrange the events in their proper order. With the passing of time they eluded him, or overlapped like insane acts in a nightmare.
At the height of it his ship, Majestic, had come up against the French Tonnant of eighty guns, which had seemed to tower over them like a flaming cliff.
The noise was still there to remember, if he let himself, the awful sights of men, and pieces of men, being flung about the bloody litter and gruel of the gundeck, a place which had become a hell all of its own. The wild eyes of the gun crews, white through their filthy skins, the cannon firing and recoiling, no longer as a controlled broadside but in divisions, then in ones and twos, while the ship shook and quaked around and above them. Unbeknown to the demented souls who sponged out, loaded and fired because it was all that they knew, their captain, Westcott, had already fallen dead, along with so many of his men. Their world was the lower gundeck. Nothing else mattered, could matter. Guns were upended and smashed by the enemyâs fire; men ran screaming to be driven back by equally terrified lieutenants and warrant officers.
Run out! Point! Fire!
He heard it still. It would never leave him. Others had told him he was lucky. Not because of the victoryâonly ignorant landsmen spoke of such things. But because he had survived when so many had fallen, the lucky to die, the others to cry out their lives under the surgeonâs saw, or to be pathetic cripples whom nobody wanted to see or remember.
He watched the compass card steady and felt the keel slicing through the steep rollers as if they were nothing.
He touched his face with his hand, feeling its roughness, seeing it in his mind as he was forced to do each day when he shaved himself.
Again he could remember nothing. A gun had exploded, or a flaming wad had come inboard from one of Tonnant âs lower battery and sparked off a full charge nearby. It could have been either. Nobody had been left to tell him.
But the whole of the right side of his face had been scored away, left like charred meat, half a face which people turned their heads not to see. How his eye had survived was the real miracle.
He thought of his visit to the flagship. He had not seen the general or even the commodore, just a bored-looking colonel who had been carrying a glass of hock or something cool in one elegant hand. They had not even asked Tyacke to be seated, let alone to take a glass with them.
As he had gone down the great shipâs side to his own long-boat, that same aide had come dashing after him.
âI say, Lieutenant! Why did you not tell me the news? About Nelson and the victory?â
Tyacke had looked up the shipâs curving black and buff hull and had not tried to conceal his contempt.
â âCause nobody asked me, sir! â God damn their eyes.
Benjamin Simcox, masterâs mate and acting-master of the schooner Miranda, lurched along the treacherous planking to join him. He was the same age as his captain, a seaman through and through who originally, like the schooner, had been in the merchant service. In such a small vesselâshe was a bare sixty-five feet long with a company of thirtyâyou got to know a man very well. Love or hate and not much in between. With Bob Jay, another masterâs mate, they ran the schooner to perform at her best. It was a matter of pride.
Usually one of them was on watch, and when Simcox had spent a few watches below with the tall lieutenant he had got to know him well. Now, after three years, they were true friends, their separate ranks only intruding in rare moments of formality. Like Tyackeâs visit to the flagship for instance.
Tyacke had looked at him, momentarily forgetting his hideous scars, and had said, âFirst time Iâve buckled on a sword for over a year, Ben!â
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