Nobody's Slave Read Online Free PDF Page A

surprised at the force of the call from a man who had suddenly become so small. Then he steadied himself, gripping the rail hard as he gazed at the unending acres of unruly sea.
    Grey and white. When he looked away from the ship he could see nothing but grey and white: the low, hurrying rags of cloud that followed them everywhere, darkening astern and to starboard into the black mists of rainsqualls that would be down on them soon, like wandering pockets of night; and below, the chaotic, tossing grey mountains of the sea, flecked with the furious, lethal spume of the white avalanching breakers; and everywhere, the huge, invisible fury of the wind. Nothing else at all; no other sail; not a single sign of the seven ships that had sailed so proudly out of Plymouth a few days before.
    ‘No ships, Master Barrett!’ he called down. ‘None, sir!’ His best maintop voice cracked as he yelled, ending in a high, embarrassing squeak so that he had to call again. But there was no laughter from the tiny figures on the quarter-deck below; each clung to his station as best he might, while the ship rolled and pitched to another wave; and then, as they neared its top, the Master cupped his hands and roared again, though half his words were snatched away by the gale.
    ‘Look again, lads ... eyes clear … any sail!’
    ‘There are none!’ Simon shouted, his voice hardly carrying the few inches to Tom's ear. ‘We're alone in all the world!’
    ‘Aye!’ So indeed it seemed; but while Simon trembled at the thought, to Tom it was one of awe and wonder. He had never imagined the sea to be so wide or wild, and yet he did not fear it, even now; Tom had no faculty for fear. For this, though he did not know it, Simon hated him. Because Tom did not understand fear, or feel it, Simon's nerves and horrors were an irritation to him, a sign that more than a mere twelvemonth separated them. Yet Tom liked his younger cousin well enough, and for the most part treated him with the bluff kindness he thought his father had expected, when he had put Simon in his care.
    ‘They must ... be sunk!’ came Simon's high voice again. ‘All drowned ... us next!’
    ‘Never!’ A wave caught them broad on the quarter, and they clung on as the ship rolled clumsily like the top-heavy barrel she was, nearly dropping them out of the maintop into the sea. 'She's a Queen's ship!' Tom added as they came up, shooting skywards and forwards over the forecastle. He had meant to say more; but a sudden surge of the sickness he had so far escaped prevented him from saying that the ancient Jesus of Lubeck was one of the proudest ships of Queen Elizabeth's navy, the flagship of Admiral Hawkins’ fleet. She could never sink; and yet the main deck was awash again, under a waste of white water, and this time, when it surfaced, one of the longboats that had been lashed there was gone, and the planks of another stove in. He saw the Master yelling down to the steersmen, heaving at the tiller in the darkness below the quarterdeck, to bring her high green and white painted stern round to the next grey mountain of annihilating water, before it caught her on her side and rolled her over completely.
    ‘A sail! A sail! Look, there!’ Simon jabbed with his finger to starboard, but Tom could see nothing; then, as the wave threw them into the air, he saw it too. Far off towards the horizon, a fleck of dirty white that was neither surf nor sky, but a rag of foresail that was keeping another ship's head downwind, as the triple-reefed scrap on their own foremast was doing. It was hardly a ship, compared to their own - more of a toy, a tiny fishing boat almost. Even as he saw it the sail vanished behind a wave; and then, a few seconds later, surged up again, so that for a moment they could make out the shape of the masts and part of the hull beneath.
    ‘A sail! A sail to starboard! A sail!’ Both boys yelled at once, their voices competing with the wind. Master Barrett looked up, and cupped