Arabella of Mars(31)

Again the bosun’s pipe sounded. “All hands prepare to sway out!”

Taylor shrugged and drained his grog. Arabella took one last sip of hers and offered the remainder to him. “Much obliged,” he said with a grin, and drained it as well.

*

Arabella and Taylor joined the other waisters at the starboard rail, where at Faunt’s command they busied themselves untying a spare mast from where it was lashed at the ship’s side. Why this should be needed she had no idea, as there was no sign of any problem with the ship’s one standing mast.

“Clap on, lads!” Faunt cried as the mast, now fully released, began to roll downward, and they all bent down and held it against the ship with their hands. Though the force of gravity was greatly reduced, the mast was more than a hundred feet long and still pulled heavily against the men’s grip. Arabella, with her spindly arms, felt as though she was barely contributing.

A cry came from above: “Ahoy the deck!” Arabella looked up to see a weighted line snaking down from the mast high above, where several topmen clung to the rigging. Faunt caught the end of the rope before it struck the deck, and proceeded to make it fast to the end of the spare mast. A second line shortly followed, and was affixed to the other end.

The entire crew, officers and men alike, now wrestled the mast away from the ship’s side, tugging and hauling on the mast itself and the lines attached to it until it projected horizontally away from the ship, its thick end closest to the rail. “Lower away,” Kerrigan cried.

Arabella now found herself one of a long line of men from every division, all hauling on a line that ran through a block at the masthead to the head of the spare mast, while another gang of men did the same for the mast’s foot. Gently, inch by inch, they lowered the mast until it was well out of sight below the rail. Kerrigan, leaning over the rail and carefully observing the mast’s progress, directed the two gangs with commands and hand signals. “Handsomely now,” he said. “Steady … steady … ease up on the head a bit … that’s well! Make all fast!”

While several of the men busied themselves fastening the two lines to the rail, Kerrigan peered about the deck, looking for Arabella knew not what. Then his eye fell on Arabella. “You’re a scraggy little thing, you are. You’ll do.” He turned to the officer beside him. “Put this one in harness.”

Another weighted line came hurtling down from the mast, and several men converged on Arabella. Before she knew what was happening, Arabella found herself with a loop of rope around each leg and another around her waist, hanging just above the deck. She’d been too busy keeping her softer parts away from their hands to wonder why.

Faunt pressed a wooden peg, the size of her arm, into her hands. “All ye need do is guide the mast-foot into the keelson-plate, then peg it in place with this fid.” He clapped her shoulder. “Hoist away!”

Thoroughly baffled, Arabella felt herself hauled up into the air, then pushed sideways, past the rail, until she hung dizzily over nothing at all. The Earth gleamed far, far below, like a great glass marble floating serenely in the blue sky that lay all about.

Desperately she clung to the rope, which ran taut from the great knot at her navel to her collarbone, while trying not to lose the peg. “Lower away!” came the distant cry.

A moment later she saw what she was to do. The mast hung beside the ship, projecting downward at an angle, with its large end near a round, black hole in the lower curve of the hull. Barnacles and weed clung to the planks, and a few drops of river water still dripped from the hole’s lower rim.

She was gently lowered until she was just next to the hole. “Is the mast in position?” came a faint voice from above.

“Two inches aft!” she called back as loudly as she could. Then, as the mast shifted, “One inch up! Not so much! Back a little! That’s it!”

After a series of indistinct cries from the deck, the mast moved slowly toward the hole. At the last moment, though, she saw that it would need a little help, and gave it a shove with her foot.

It slipped right in. And kept going. Fully ten feet of the hundred-foot mast disappeared into the ship’s hull before, with a deep wooden thunk, it bottomed out.

She looked up, grinning, to see Kerrigan cupping his hands to his mouth and calling down to her. “Belay the mast!”

Belatedly she remembered the peg still clutched in her arms. Swallowing with a mouth gone completely dry, she reached out with one foot and drew herself close to the seated mast.

A hole the size of her arm—the very size of the peg—had been drilled through the hull at an angle, where it met up quite tidily with a matching hole in the mast.

Clinging with her left hand to the rope, using her feet to steady herself, she shifted the peg to her right arm and began to guide the narrow end to the hole.

But just as it was about to slip in, a drop of water from the hull above fell splat into her eye. She gasped in surprise.

The peg slipped from her grasp!

Without thinking she reached for it. But the motion overbalanced her, and she turned topsy-turvy, swinging head-down over a thousand miles of empty air.

Spinning about its axis, the peg began to fall … slowly, but rapidly gaining speed.

Still hanging upside down, Arabella clung to the rope with her left hand and reached out her right to snatch the falling peg. But her initial motion had set her swinging, and it was now well out of reach.