The Voyage of the Destiny by Robert Nye

Author:Robert Nye [Nye, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61145-532-8
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Published: 2011-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

23

25 April

Sun like a lump of coughed-up blood in the sky. Rifts and shifts in this hell-born mist. The fog is lifting. Yet the ship hardly stirs. There’s no relief of a wind from any quarter. We idle as though tethered, transfixed, weighed-down by a cargo of doom and unpardonable sin. The sea’s like black milk. If I could spy but one bird in this wilderness of water and vapour it would raise my heart. There is none. Not even the boatswain bird that sleeps on the sea. (But then no doubt they don’t venture this far north.) The only living creatures to witness our present involuntary vigil are a number of water-snakes, ringed yellow and black, which swim round and about my Destiny in great circles. Vile vassals! Odious attendants! What do they wait upon? If I were a superstitious man I could believe that their wrigglings obeyed the pattern of some enchanter’s wand, his hand tracing a magical web in which we lie trapped, bewitching us where we stand, forbidding all further motion either forwards or back.

I am no novice of fate, servant of bad stars or omens, no rhapsodist. I reject all such fancies.

I wait for the sun to grow strong and the wind to come back.

This morning I authorised Mr Burwick to instruct Simon Taverner to issue each remaining loyal gentleman of my crew with half a gill of brandy diluted in three gills of water from the rain barrels, with a little juice of lemons and sugar added. (The presence of this brandy cask in my cabin has been my best-kept secret. Lord Boyle, the Earl of Cork, made me a gift of it, the night before we sailed from Kinsale, oh so long ago! He knows my own abstemiousness, but foresaw the benefits of such liquor in an emergency.)

I have not imbibed myself. I have not even succumbed to the comfort I could find in eating another of the khoka leaves. A long pipe of tobacco is sufficient. That helps to clear the brains, to make a necessary distance between the whirlpool of my wits and the worse-than-any-whirlpool which was yesterday.

*

It is a precious jewel to be plain.

First, then, a few facts. Truths that stick in my throat. But I must spit them out. Forgive me, my son, if I dash this down like a herald arrived full of insults. You will see, in any case, that what I have to say insults myself.

I was wrong about Richard Head. Quite crazily wrong. I had him dismissed as a worm who would never dare take action. Worms turn. This one did. He waited his moment, the devil. I had humiliated him in the eyes of his fellow creatures. I should have foreseen that a man like that would seek some twisted way to get his revenge.

His gang overpowered Sam King at the door of my cabin. They left him for dead - but not before my gallant friend, half-conscious, bludgeoned to his knees, had managed to lock my door from outside and throw the key overboard.

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