Standard of Honor by Jack Whyte

Author:Jack Whyte [Whyte, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Fiction, General, Historical, Action & Adventure
ISBN: 9780515145076
Publisher: Jove
Published: 2007-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

IT WAS EASTER SUNDAY, late in the afternoon, and if there were any priests celebrating Mass or offering thanks for their deliverance from the storm, they were doing it privately and in silence, in whatever quarters they had been able to appropriate for themselves in the aftermath of the destruction. Sir Henry St. Clair knew he was still alive, but he knew little else of any import, and he had not yet decided whether to be grateful for his survival or to regret the lost opportunity to die in the tempest and be rid of the aches, pains, and griefs that beset him now.

He sat braced on a coil of rope, staring at the junction where the sides of the ship came together at the bows. He had at least two cracked or broken ribs, the pain of which made it impossible for him to stand and lean forward against the rails, and so he was forced to sit there, unable to see over the wooden sides in front of him. His back was propped against two other, smaller rope coils balanced on the first, and he forced himself to ignore both the pain of his ribs and the inconvenience of not being able to see anything, and to concentrate instead upon the small amount of information he had managed to glean to this point. The man who had found him half dead in the scuppers had known who he was, and had summoned another man to help carry him back to the rear of the ship, where someone else had tended to his injuries—Henry had no idea who that had been, but they had strapped up his ribs and bound a cloth tightly over the gash in his right temple before sending him back, supported between two crewmen, to sit where he had spent much of the previous few days, in the foremost point of the ship's bows and out of the way of most of the vessel's crew.

Twenty-one men had been lost. That much Henry knew beyond doubt, having overheard a report on casualties being delivered to someone he assumed to be Besanceau on the stern deck while his injuries were being treated. He had assumed that the missing men were his own, landsmen like him and unused to being afloat, whereas the ship's crew might reasonably be expected to survive a storm at sea. And besides, he recalled now that the galley held a complement of fifteen crew members only. But if that were true and all the missing men were his, then that meant they had lost one-fifth of their shipboard complement without their ever having had an opportunity to strike a single blow against the enemy. That thought depressed him, and he turned himself, very slightly and with great difficulty, to look back over his shoulder to where another man leaned against the side of the prow, gazing outward.

"Hey," Henry grunted, drawing the man's attention. "What can you see out there?"

The fellow scanned him from head to foot, then looked back over the side.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.