The Broken Squadron

The hoist had been perfect. That was what Marr kept coming back to, in the stern of the cutter, with the oars going and Brindle's cliffs sliding past in the dark.

She had been on Brightwater's quarterdeck with the book open on the binnacle and Merrick at her elbow. A brig lay in the north-east gate with Compact colors at her peak and Gannet's number at her fore. The flags came up her halyard one after another, clean and quick, as a good signal officer sends them. Enemy transports escaping north-east. Brightwater to chase. She had turned every flag up in the book with her finger, and every flag was right. She had seen Gannet go round the Stack after her transport ten minutes before. She had thought: Pollard has come back round the far side, and sighted something. Merrick had said, "That's Gannet's station, ma'am." And she had thought: the book is safe. I have both copies. The rest were burned by regulation.

"Bear away," she had said. "North-east. Every sail."

The last thing she had seen astern, before the eastern islands shut it off, was the Kestrel's topsails going out past the outer rocks. She had thought, he's broken it again, and gone below to log the time.

She found the Kestrel by a lantern no bigger than a fist, two hours after midnight, at the mouth of a creek she had never seen.

She was in the stern of the Brightwater's cutter with fourteen of the Gannet's people packed in around her and the ship's gig following astern. They had come round Brindle's north point under oars in the starlight, keeping in under the cliffs. Brightwater herself lay hove-to off the island's eastern shore with every lamp doused. Brindle was out of every engine's field. Covenant's dark filled the south-west over the Darn Race, and Shelter's hid Greyhaven far off to the south-east. Between them the stars were out, bright and hard, and the boats' wakes glittered.

Twice she had seen lanterns along the shore ahead, low on the water and moving slowly. Searchers. Twice she had laid the boats in against the rocks and waited, with the oars shipped and her hand up for silence, until they passed.

At every inlet on the western shore she showed the Kestrel's lantern code toward the land: two lanterns, one held above the other, shown and hidden three times. Isobel Wray had worked it out with her by lamplight at Sandle Bay, the night of the convoy, for the boats. At three inlets nothing answered.

At the fourth, from a ledge of rock at the edge of the trees, a single red light showed. It was shaded so that it threw its glow seaward and nowhere else, and it went out again at once.

A low voice came over the water.

"Commander?"

"Isobel," Marr said.

"Pull straight in, past the white rock, and keep the trees on your right. There's a boat out on the point, theirs. It went by a quarter hour ago." A breath. "We thought you were gone."

"Not quite," said Marr. "Is the Captain alive?"

"Yes, ma'am," Isobel said. "Come in. I'll take you up."

The Kestrel lay in a bend of the creek under oaks so low that their branches brushed what was left of her rigging. Marr saw her first as a black shape against blacker trees. Nearer, she saw the stump.

The mainmast was gone at waist height. The starboard rail was smashed for twenty feet along the waist, and lashed timbers and canvas covered the break. She sat low in the water. Below decks, Marr could hear the pumps working, slow and steady, a sound she had heard in her sleep on other ships and never liked.

Rusk was at the gangway. He held a shaded lantern, and in its light his face was gray with fatigue under the beard. He looked at her, at the boats, and at the Gannet's men climbing the side behind her.

"Commander."

"Captain." She kept her voice level. "I've fourteen of Pollard's people. They got off in Gannet's jolly boat when she struck. Pollard is a prisoner, they think. I have the Brightwater off the east shore with a sprung foretopmast and every man of Tern's who reached her. Captain Merrick took a bolt through the hip when we came back past the Stack, and Lieutenant Kell has her." She stopped. "What have you?"

"Most of Tern's that were still in the water. Strand's here, burned. Nine of mine dead." He paused. "Enoch's aft in the cabin with his back broken. Orris has a broken leg."

She looked past him into the dark of the deck, at the people lying under blankets in lines along it, and at the stump of the mast.

"I saw you turn away," Rusk said. "From the Skerrow."

"I know you did."

"Strand says it was a signal," Rusk said.

"It was." Marr met his eyes. "We'll speak of it, Captain. All of it. Not on a gangway in the middle of the night."

He held her gaze, and stood aside to let her pass.

Hanne Webb had turned the Kestrel's cabin into a hospital again. Marr went down to it in the gray before dawn, when the Gannet's men were fed and bedded on the forward deck.

Orris lay on a grating against the bulkhead with his left leg splinted from knee to ankle and propped on a sea-chest. He was awake. His face was the color of old candles, but his eyes were sharp.

"Commander," he said. "You came back. Good. I said you would."

"Who said I wouldn't?" Marr asked.

"Nobody that'll say it to your face." He shifted, and his jaw clenched. "Hanne says I'm to keep it up. Six weeks, she says. I said I'd be on deck in a week, and she said a thing to me I won't repeat in front of an officer."

"She's right, Mister Fen."

"Drown me, she's always right," Orris said. "It's her worst quality."

Beyond him, on blankets on the deck under the stern windows, lay Enoch Garvey.

He was very small under the blanket. Marr had not thought of him as small before. His face was calm, and his breathing was quick and shallow. Joss Ambry sat cross-legged beside him with one of the old man's hands in his. The boy looked up when Marr came in and did not get up.

"He was awake an hour ago," Joss said. "He asked for you."

"For me?" Marr said.

"He said you owed him four coppers from the dice at the Hen. He said he wanted it before he went." Joss's mouth twisted. "He was laughing. Then he went back to sleep."

Marr knelt by the blankets. She took four coppers out of her purse, all she had in it, and put them in Enoch's other hand and closed his fingers on them. They were cold.

"Thank you," Joss said.

"It was a debt," said Marr, and got up, and went on deck before her face could do anything she had not given it leave to do.

The day went in work.

Nera had the yard hands and Tern's carpenters on the broken rail and the opened strakes below it, and a tackle rigged on an oak to swing out the shattered heel of the mainmast. The pumps went on. Hanne went among the wounded with two of Tern's men to help her. Dunning set lookouts on the high ground above the creek mouth, where they could see the sea in three directions, and Marr went up to them at noon.

From the ridge she could see it all. Far off to the south-west, Covenant's dark stood over the Darn Race like a hill of black glass. Its edge lay over Darn and the islands round it, and the sun stopped at that edge as if it had been cut off with a knife. Somewhere under it the new engine was anchored in the Race, drawing on the stream that never quite went slack. Darn had had two days of sun. It was dark again.

Seven engines. They had burned one, and Vaust had replaced it in two days.

And between the ridge and that black hill, on the bright afternoon water, there were patrol boats. She saw four. They worked along the islands' shores slowly, looking into every inlet. One of them came as far as Brindle's southern point, lay there for half an hour, and pulled away.

"They'll come in tonight," said Dunning, beside her. "That one had a long look at the creek."

"How many in her?"

"Ten," Dunning said. "Eleven. A pinnace, eight oars. One lantern in the prow."

"Then we take her," Marr said, "and nobody hears it."

The creek narrowed at its first bend to forty yards, between a low muddy bank on the north side and a steep one on the south, with the oaks reaching out over the water from both. The Kestrel lay two bends farther in. Any boat that came looking for her had to come through the narrows first, under the branches, in the dark.

Marr laid it out on the cabin table by a shaded lamp, with a knife and a spoon and three biscuits for the boats. Rusk listened without interrupting.

"Dunning and six marines on the south bank, here, under the trees, where the boat will pass within ten yards," she said. "Two men in the branches. I take the Kestrel's gig with eight hands and lie under the north bank in the shadow, oars shipped, no light. When the pinnace is abreast of the marines, they go down into her from the bank. I come out of the dark onto her other side. Blades stay sheathed unless a man has to use one. Clubs, pike-butts, fists."

"And if they go over the side?" said Rusk.

"Then we have them out before they drown. Every one. Isobel's boat lies below the narrows with lines and boathooks for anyone who drifts." She put her finger on the biscuit that was the pinnace. "We're miles from any fitting here, and a man who drowned tonight would stay dead. But the tide runs out of this creek on the fall and away south-west down the islands. A body in the water goes where the tide takes it. I'll not leave Vaust a single drowned man to pick up off a beach."

"And the pinnace?" Rusk said. "They'll miss her."

"In the wrong place." Marr moved the biscuit up the table, past the creek mouth, northward. "Four of Dunning's men put on their coats and take her out again with her lantern lit. They pull north along the shore for a mile, the way she was going, and put her on the rocks under the north point and walk home over the hill. Her friends will find her wrecked where she had no business being, a mile from here, and empty. Let them search that."

Rusk looked at the biscuits.

"Yes," he said. "That's good."

"I didn't ask," said Marr. Then, more quietly: "Thank you."

The pinnace came in at the turn of the night, on the last of the flood, with a lantern in her prow.

Marr lay in the gig under the north bank with her hand on the boat's rail and the oak leaves an arm's length above her head. She could smell mud and leaf mold and tar. The water lay black and flat. Eight Kestrel hands crouched behind her on the thwarts with clubs and boathooks across their knees, and not one of them breathed louder than the water.

She heard the oars before she saw the light. Eight oars, dipping slow and careful, and a man's voice in the island speech, low: easy, easy, way enough. Then the lantern came round the bend, a yellow eye swinging on its pole above the prow, throwing a moving pool of light on the water and the hanging branches. Behind it she could see the shape of the boat and the men in it, their faces lit from below, peering forward. A helmsman stood at the tiller in a long coat. Two men in the prow held crossbows.

They came on into the narrows. The lantern-light slid along the south bank, across the roots and the mud, and over the place where Dunning lay. It did not stop.

The pinnace came abreast of the marines.

Two shapes dropped out of the oak branches into her stern sheets. The helmsman went down under them with a grunt. Dunning and his marines came off the bank into the boat in one rush, and the boat lurched and rolled, and the lantern swung wildly on its pole.

"Now," Marr said.

The gig came out of the shadow in three strokes and struck the pinnace's other side. Marr went over into her with a club in her hand. A man rose up from a thwart in front of her with an oar, and she hit him on the forearm, and he dropped it. Another came at her with a knife, and she caught his wrist and turned it, and a Kestrel hand behind her struck him over the ear. All down the boat men were struggling. It was short and ugly and nearly silent: grunts, blows, the knock of wood on bone. Someone reached up and wrapped the lantern in a coat and smothered it, and they were in the dark.

A man went over the side with a splash. Then another.

"Lines!" Marr said. "Isobel!"

The water churned below the narrows. Lanterns were uncovered for a moment, shaded, low to the surface. She heard Isobel's voice, sharp and quick, and a man coughing and choking, and the thump of a body landing in a boat. Then a second voice, a Kestrel man, said: "Got him. Got the other. Both out, Commander. Both breathing."

Marr stood up in the pinnace with her chest heaving. Every man of the patrol was taken, lying in the bottom of the boat or held down on the thwarts, and the two who had gone over were in Isobel's boat, coughing up creek water.

"Dunning," she said. "Coats."

Ten minutes later, the pinnace pulled out of Fallow Creek and turned north along Brindle's shore with her lantern lit in her prow. Four of Dunning's men pulled at her oars in western coats, and Cobley, who had guarded Ebb since Orra, stood at her tiller in the helmsman's long one. Marr watched the light go along the shore, slowly, peering into every inlet, as the searchers had done all day. It grew small, and rounded the point, and was gone.

The helmsman was a gray, square, weathered man of fifty from the western islands, with a bump rising on his head where the marine had landed on him. He sat in the Kestrel's cabin on a sea-chest with his hands tied in front of him and looked at Marr with a sailor's contempt for an officer.

"You'll go to Southwick," she told him. "You and your men. You'll be fed. Nobody hangs."

"So you told Penrose's men at Carrick, I hear." He glanced at Rusk, standing by the door. "Funny, that. A Compact officer keeping his word to islanders."

"It happens," said Rusk.

"Once, I heard. At Ember Roads." He looked back at Marr. "What do you want, Commander? I'm a boatman. I know where the patrol lines run. You can have them. They'll change tomorrow when they find my boat."

"I want to know about the signal book," Marr said.

He smiled for the first time. It was not a kind smile.

"That vexes you."

"Yes," Marr said.

"You thought you'd got them all back." He shifted on the chest. "We heard about that, too. The one from the chain house, the one off the Swift. Very thorough. You went round picking up books while the Harrier lay on the mole at Greyhaven with her book in her captain's chest."

Marr let him talk. The Harrier had been the guard ship at Greyhaven, a heavy old frigate moored inside the mole. She had been in harbor on the first night when the dark came.

"The Harrier's captain would have burned it," she said. "Every captain's orders say so. If the ship's in danger of capture, the book goes into the stove."

"Her captain was dead on the mole with a drowned man's hands round his throat before he ever got down to his cabin," the helmsman said. "His first lieutenant was ashore at a supper. She went aground on the mole stones when her cables were cut, and our boats were aboard her by midnight. We found the chest under his cot, locked. Took an axe to it. Book, money, letters to his wife." He shrugged. "I wasn't there. My cousin was. The Admiral had it in his hand inside a week, and he's had a copy made for every escort since."

She remembered Petch's office at Southwick: herself laying the two recovered books on his desk, the chain house's and the Swift's, and saying that both exposed copies were back. She remembered asking what of the big ships in Greyhaven harbor, and Petch saying they would have burned theirs, by regulation, and herself agreeing. They had not changed the book. It would have cost a month to print and distribute a new one, and every captain in the Compact would have had to learn it, and she had been sure.

"Thank you," she said. "Dunning, take him forward with the others. Feed them."

When he was gone, Rusk spoke from the door.

"The Harrier."

"Yes," Marr said.

"And the manifest," Rusk said. "It was true when they wrote it. He lost Patience with her papers in her and guessed we'd gone through them. So he sailed his convoy in the night instead of at dawn, and left us three slow ships and an engine that looked cold to chase. You couldn't have known."

"I could have asked," said Marr. "I'll say the rest in front of the others, Captain. Once."

Enoch Garvey died a little after sunrise on the sixteenth of October.

It was quick at the end. Hanne had said it would be. He woke once in the gray light and looked about him for a while with clear eyes. He saw Joss, and he saw the cat on his chest, and he lifted one hand a little way and put it on Pudding's back.

"Good girl," he said. "Stayed in the locker. Good girl."

He looked past Joss then, to where Rusk sat on a sea-chest against the bulkhead. Rusk had been there all night. Marr had seen him from the door at midnight and again at four, with his elbows on his knees and his eyes on the old man.

"Captain," Enoch said. "She's a good ship. You tell the yard. She only wants that knee."

"I'll tell them."

"Don't let them say she's finished," Enoch said.

"I won't," Rusk said.

Enoch nodded. He closed his eyes. His breathing went on, quick and small, and slowed, and stopped.

Pudding sat up on his chest and looked round at them all with her round yellow eyes, and then lay down again where she was.

Joss bent his head over the old man's hand. Rusk did not speak and did not get up. He sat where he was on the sea-chest, with his hands hanging between his knees, and stayed. Marr stood in the doorway a little longer and went on deck and told Dunning, and Dunning took off his hat.

They buried him that afternoon on the bank of the creek, under an oak that leaned out over the water. Nera made the marker from a piece of the Kestrel's broken rail. She would take no help with it. She cut the letters herself with Enoch's clasp knife, and when Joss came to hold the lantern for her she told him to go away in a voice Marr had never heard her use. Dunning brought his fiddle and played a tune badly, and for once they let him play to the end. Rusk said no words over him, and neither did anyone else. Joss carried the cat down the hill afterward inside his coat.

They met in the cabin that evening. There were six of them: Rusk, Marr, Orris on his grating with his leg on the chest, Nera with tar to the elbows, Dunning by the door, and Isobel, because Rusk asked for her. Strand was too sick to come. A lamp swung from the beam.

Marr had meant to speak first. Rusk spoke before she could.

"I broke the limit," he said. He said it to all of them. "We agreed it at Sandle Bay. I saw an engine past the rocks that I thought hadn't been woken, and I wanted her before she was. Orris told me the limit to my face."

"I did," said Orris, to the deckhead.

"I went anyway. I made the signal and didn't wait for an answer, because I'd already decided. She was bait, and I'd have been in the north-west gate beside Tern when the trap shut if I'd kept to the limit." He looked round at them. "I'd take Tern's people out of the water again. I'd let the transport go again. The rest was mine, and it cost us."

He sat down.

Marr stood. She kept her hands behind her back.

"I saw a brig in Gannet's gate," she said, "and I knew Gannet had left it, because I'd watched her go. I obeyed the hoist because the book said so, and because I'd told Commodore Petch the book was safe. It wasn't. The Harrier's was never burned. I took Brightwater eight miles out of the fight on Vaust's order, and Tern burned alone."

The lamp swung. Somewhere forward the pumps went on.

"Since Casmir I've been waiting for you to do at sea what you did at Ember Roads, Captain," Marr said. "At the Skerrow I did worse, by the book. I'll not make every quarrel between us about Sallow again."

Rusk looked at her across the table and let it stand. She had not expected more.

"Well," said Orris, from his grating. "Salt and blazes. Now that's said, what are we doing about it?"

They settled it in an hour, with Orris interrupting and Nera disagreeing with everybody in turn.

"Countersigns," said Marr. "From tonight. Any signal that changes a ship's orders, by flag or lamp, has to be followed by a countersign before it's obeyed. The countersigns aren't in any book. I'll write them by hand, a pair for each day: a challenge and a reply, two flags or two lamps. One copy to each captain, kept on his body, never in a chest. If he's taken, he eats it or burns it."

"And if the countersign doesn't come?" said Isobel.

"Then you don't obey," Marr said. "You hold your station, and you send a boat."

"Decisions on objectives," said Nera. "Where we go, what we hit, when we stop. Not one of you alone." She looked at Rusk, then at Marr. "Both of you. With Orris, and with me. I'm the one who has to put her back together after."

"Agreed," said Rusk.

"And when the plan says stop," said Orris, "we stop. Even when there's an engine on the far side of the rocks with her skirts up, Tavin."

"Even then," said Rusk.

Marr wrote it down. All three things, in her own hand, at the head of a clean sheet in the Kestrel's log, and signed it, and passed the pen to Rusk. He signed under her.

Below it she wrote the first countersign, for the company and the boats until the written lists were made. She did not ask anyone's leave for it.

"Challenge, Enoch's cat," she said. "Reply, Pudding."

Joss, at the door with the cat inside his coat, looked up, and nodded.

The news came at midnight, in a Carrick fishing boat that came up the creek showing two lanterns, one above the other.

Ansel Hart was in her, with his broken hand bound against his chest and his face hollow from two days on the water. He had been looking for the Kestrel all along the islands since the Skerrow, and he climbed the side and sat down on the hatch and drank a cup of water without stopping before he could speak.

"Greyhaven," he said. "The upper town's given in. Yesterday."

"To what?" said Marr.

"To Vaust. He's had Shelter over them since September, his boats on the river and his men on the roads. The flour ran out on the twelfth, and the town council sent a man down to the harbor under a white flag. Terms. They open the town and he lets the grain carts in." Ansel looked up. "He's put a governor in the Admiralty House. A man named Hume. Provost Ellan Hume. The harbor's his. His people are on the wharves."

"What else?" Marr asked.

"They're moving machinery." Ansel frowned. "A man from the ropewalk got out in a skiff and told my cousin. Gangs of workmen from the yards, with oxen and carts and sledges. They're hauling heavy iron and timber out of the naval yard and down along the shore road south of the harbor. To the gatehouses on the sea wall, where the sluices are, at the Basin."

Marr saw Nera's face change.

"The coastal sluices," Nera said. "The drawing at Darn. The damaged sheet. Coastal sluices and gate wards."

"We don't know what it means," said Rusk.

"No," said Marr. "Not yet."

She looked round at them in the lamplight: Rusk with his elbows on the table, Orris on his grating, Nera with her fists shut, Isobel and Ansel and Dunning by the door. The ship around them was broken, half her people were wounded, and seven engines lay between them and anything they wanted to do.

"Three things," she said. "We free Darn. The yard, the people, Master Dray, the drawing office. Covenant is anchored on their doorstep, and Darn is the only place on this sea that can build us back what we've lost. We repair the Kestrel. Not a patch, a mast and a refit, at Darn when it's ours. And we find out what those gates are for, and what Vaust means to do with Greyhaven Basin."

"With what?" said Orris. "We've one mast, and I've one leg."

"With boats," said Rusk. "Every small boat in the islands that will carry us."

They were up until the lamp burned low working out how.

Brightwater would go south at first light under Lieutenant Kell with the badly wounded: Merrick, and Strand and her burned men. She would take the Gannet's people too, and the patrol boat's crew as prisoners, and a letter to Petch about the Harrier's book. The Kestrel would stay in Fallow Creek under a jury mast that Nera would make from her spare topmast, stepped in the stump. Isobel would keep her with a dozen hands and the pumps. The rest of them would go out among the islands in fishing boats and skiffs, by different roads, to find what they needed.

When it was settled, Marr went up on deck alone. The creek lay black under the oaks. On the bank downstream she could just make out the pale square of Nera's marker on Enoch's grave.

Forty miles south-east, under Shelter's dark, Vaust's men stood on Greyhaven's wharves tonight. And along the sea wall south of the harbor they were dragging iron to the gates of a basin where six thousand people lay asleep below the level of the sea.