Infinite Devotion (21 page)

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“Boys, to your feet and on deck!” We jump at the sound of the captain’s voice.

We get up quickly and pull our still-soaked selves up the ladder while the ship’s listing dangerously. We come up to much commotion. The judge and second officers throw out commands left and right.

“We are embayed, boys!” The captain’s brow is deeply furrowed. “Our ship and two others cannot beat out again round that head.” He points to a misty black jut of foreboding jagged rocks. “We’re going to try to anchor off this sandy strip of land and pray our puny kedge holds and we don’t wind up on that shore or those rocks.”

We stare off toward the sand he’s talking about and can barely see the faint whiteness of the sands through the thick grey fog on shore. The three of us stay quiet, and the captain gives Andres a fatherly pat. “Stay above deck for as long as you can. I don’t like the looks of the gale that’s blowing in.” He nods off to shore, and we see a large dark mass even darker than the dark skies already smothering us.

“What a storm!” Pepe actually appears excited upon seeing this and turns to exclaim to the captain, but he’s already walked away.

Andres turns dead pale at the thing that’s headed toward us.

Pepe’s already running for the crow’s nest, and Andres and I try to find a drier spot to wait out the approaching storm. The westerly wind rages, and tremendous breakers start reaching us far off the shore.

The captain comes up in a huff, and Andres and I pull out of our huddle to see the captain holding Pepe from the back of his shirt like a naughty kitten. “I found this idiot headed up to the crow’s nest.” He turns to Pepe and says, “If you want to kill yourself, you’re doing a great job.” He pushes him toward us. “Even if you don’t have any good sense these boys do, stay with them.”

I shout, but he shakes his head like he can’t hear me. He takes another bumbling step as the ship creaks and rocks with the rising waves, practically falling on top of us.

“What’s happening, Captain?” I scream as loud as I can.

He screams as loud back, “We’re being dragged into the shallow sands. As soon as we beach, those hellish waves will break our ship to pieces!”

With that, a huge wave crashes over the deck and sends all the sailors and the captain grabbing for anything in reach. One sailor’s swept over with a bloodcurdling scream. Pepe grabs for us, and we brace ourselves between the mast and the cabin of the ship. Waves keep crashing on the deck. Every man with any life left in his body straggles up to find something to hold, but at least one man’s carried away with every wave. Suddenly, we feel the ship buck violently during a roll, and the whole ship seems to moan and groan and crack. Pepe, Andres, and I look up at each other, silently speaking the same thing—
we’re beached.

Andres’s mouth opens in panic, and he cries, “I can’t swim! I can’t swim!”

Men all over the ship shout, “Save yourselves!” as one man takes a running leap over the side.

Another large wave crashes on us, and the worst sound I’ve heard ricochets across the desperate scene—
Rrrrrreeeeaaaaaggghhhhhh
—CRACK! The ship lurches to starboard, and Andres holds me tighter. Many more men stand on the railing, make the sign of the cross, and jump into the surging waves. Part of me thinks if I stay in this exact spot that everything will be fine. The gale will blow out, and I can wait for a ship to come save us.

The noblemen on ship heave bags of gold out from their cabins and load them on the only lifeboat we had. The finest nobleman shouts something to a caulker he drags out. He puts his precious items in first and steps into the hold of the small boat with two other well-dressed men. They put the hatch on the hold, and next the caulker caulks in the hatch so they’re completely sealed in. An officer starts to lower the boat over the side, when a gang of desperate sailors and soldiers all clamor and shove each other to jump on top. The officers try to keep them off, but it’s no use as the boat’s going over the side with as many as thirty men already on it.

Pepe gets up to watch the spectacle and, upon returning a few minutes later, says, “Once it hit the water, drowning men also tried to get on the boat and capsized it!”

I realize that now those noblemen were upside down in the waves‌—‌trapped.

I start to get up from our spot to see the situation below. There are men floating in the water, struggling to stay afloat, as every wave washes over them, pulling them down just to clamor back to the surface for half a desperate breath before the next wave hits again. Any man given a slight reprieve from the berating waves screams, “God help me!”

Two other larger ships are also floundering and breaking up on the sands. Three identical scenes of horror. No hope for rescue.

I cling to the railing as a wave washes over again, and Andres slides away back to the spot where we were just hiding. He stays there, clutching the mast alone. Pepe and I study how each man jumps. One man jumps too close to the ship and never resurfaces. Another man jumps as a wave is coming, and he’s slapped against the ship’s hull. It seems the only ones who resurface time it perfectly between waves and swim immediately away from the ship. Even though more and more men keep plunging into the water, it seems less and less were bobbing in the churning sea.

Suddenly the captain’s beside us along with the judge.

“Judge, it’s time to go in!” the captain yells.

“It’s no use!” he says back, his eyes fixed on the drowning below. “We have no hope in these waters.”

“The ship can’t last much longer!” the captain screams. “If we stay here any longer, we’ll surely die. In the water, we have a chance!”

The judge is quiet, and I imagine him measuring how far the fall.

Then it hits me‌—‌my dream of the storm—
I held on to a door
. A door just like a hatch! I look at the large hatch cover next to us and grab the captain’s arm.

“Captain! I think this will float!”

They all turn, and the captain’s eyes light up when he realizes what I mean.

“Boys! Help me throw this over!”

Pepe, the captain, and I all heave the hatch up to waist level and carry it to the bow. The judge and Andres follow behind quietly.

“On three! One, two, three!” the captain cries.

We throw it the farthest we can, but it still lands pretty close to the bow of the ship.

The captain says, “We’ll need another one!”

We run to another hatch and throw that in.

The captain gets on the railing and puts his hand down to the judge. The judge looks back at the beaten, hopeless ship and despairingly takes the captain’s hand, which pulls the plumper, older man up on the railing.

The captain says, “Jump as far as you can when I tell you!”

Then, after a wave comes, he jumps and yanks the hesitating judge with him. Pepe, Andres, and I watch eagerly as the captain surfaces and searches for the door. We yell and point where it bobs. He reaches it and shouts for the judge, who finally resurfaces, spitting water and having spasms to stay afloat.

I notice the other door’s drifting farther away, and I yell, “We have to go too!”

Pepe nods and jumps up on the railing. He tries to give me a hand, but I leap up without needing his help. I stand next to him and leave a space for Andres to stand. When we glance back, he’s stepping away backwards.

“I can’t! I really can’t! I can’t swim! I can’t go in! I’ll be okay here. You two go!” he sputters, hyperventilating.

“Andres, get up here right now! We’ll help you, and you can float on that door! But if we don’t go now, you’ll surely die here or in the water‌—‌ALONE!”

Andres halts and stares back up to us, and we both put our hands out. He slowly comes to take them, and we pull him up with us. I make the mistake of looking down off the railing into the surging, angry water. It no longer is beautiful but primal, with its dark black water and frothy white rage reaching for us at every crisscrossing wave. Nothing except the fear of death can make me go into that water. My stomach feels like it rose into my throat, making it hard to breathe.

Now I’m the flying horse.

We three boys‌—‌the tallest, smallest, and middle‌—‌all holding hands on a sinking ship, all say together, gathering strength, “ONE, TWO, THREE!” and we both pull Andres off with us, and I hear his scream the whole way down until we hit the dark, hostile water.

I’m unprepared for how painful the cold is. The water is like ice and feels like I fell on knives. I have to push the pain away from my mind and resist the urge to gasp out of sheer shock and fight my way back to air. I break away from Andres as soon as we hit the water, and I look all over for him.

“Andres! Pepe! Captain!” I scream, but hear and see no one. I search for the door and am relieved to see the captain holding Andres on his door a few feet away from me. But every time I try to reach them, the current and waves keep pulling me under. I’m struggling to avoid getting sucked back to hit against the ship. Suddenly, a monstrous wave breaks across the ship and sends broken planks and barrels flying. I come up in time to see a large piece of ship on top of a wave crash right down on top of the captain and Andres. I realize I have to give up trying to get to them and instead swim with the waves away from the ship.

“Pepe!” I yell when I can get a breath, but the salty water invades my throat, and I cough and sputter as it burns up my nasal passages.

I haven’t seen him anywhere. I wonder if he ever resurfaced. About a wave away, I see something dark in the water. It’s the size of a boy, and I start to swim as I hard as I possibly can toward it. When I get nearer, my heart drops when I see it’s only a barrel. But then I realize it’s floating after all and grab on to it. I don’t know how long I’m in the waves or how I even managed to keep holding the barrel as my body shuts down to the cold. A strange primal scream brings me out of my stupor, and I pull my aching head up out of the waves to see what’s making that sound.

“Póg mo thóin!” The thing gurgles as he looks up to the sky, both arms beating his drumlike chest.

There, on the center of the beach ahead, about two feet deep in the water, stands a naked giant. With the constant disruption on the choppy waves closer to shore, this hairy beast of a man with muscles bulging obscenely and covered in vibrant blood shakes his ax and large mallet to the sky. I freeze at the sight of him and know he is not from our ship. I instantly let go of my barrel and try to swim backwards. I watch in horror as a sailor makes it to shore about thirty feet away from him. With the scariest sound I’ve ever heard a human make, the giant runs right at the poor man and swings his mallet round in a circle mid-flight, making contact with the petrified man’s head. A cloud of blood and matter explodes from where his head had been.

Panic shoots through me, and I swim against the waves the best I can. I try to swim westward to land among the reeds on the side of the shore. The savage yells over and over again and I count at least forty-three yells before I reach the safety of the marsh. As I lie there, panting and completely exhausted, I fight the urge to noisily cough up the water I had swallowed. I think about the chances that the captain, Pepe, or Andres made it to shore. My stomach lurches at the thought that maybe one of those yells has been the end of one of them. Blackness comes quickly and without warning.

Chapter 11

Before I open my eyes, a rustling sound is coming closer to me. The image of the naked warrior swinging his ax down on my head keeps me from opening my eyes. The noise stops, but I feel the thing right beside me. I open my eyes one at a time, and I’m relieved to see a naked and shivering Spaniard clutching his knees to his chest, trying to generate some warmth on the cold night.

“Which… sh-sh-ship… are you from?” I ask, but I’m shivering almost as much and can barely get the words out. A convulsion of cold rolls through me and locks my jaw. I hold my body closer also.

The man turns a haunted face to me, and his eyes don’t even find mine. He seems in a fog.

“What… is… your name?” I try again.

This time he just folds into himself once again, and I realize he must not be well.

We sit quietly shivering in the wind howling off the sea until I hear many footsteps coming toward us in the reeds. I look up to see three foreign faces and can’t understand a word they speak to each other. They all hold sacks in one hand and a club in the other, but as soon as they see me, a boy, and the already stripped, shivering man, clinging to our lives, they put down their clubs and instead grab at the reeds around us and start to cover the naked man in them. Then they do the same for me. Dusk falls.

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The reeds and ferns might have been the thing that kept me alive that night, but they didn’t help my new friend at all. I find him in the dawn completely frozen, with his arms and legs pulled close to him, eyes fixed and his jaw hanging open. From far away, I hear the sound of many horses. Peeking up through the reeds, I see as many as two hundred men on horseback flood the beach, each man circling around the wreckage washed ashore before continuing on. After the whole strand is looked over, they leave to the next strand. Not being able to stay a moment longer next to the corpse, I stand up in the reeds and survey the scene, mostly looking for the warrior.