Medina sat on the bed. He took off his boots, his coat. He thought of telling Calley about the man with the boards on his feet, the mud-skimmer, thought he would probably like the story. Instead, he stretched out on the bed and pulled his coat over himself. Within a minute, he was asleep, dropping through the trapdoor of himself and falling, falling, until he came to with a gasp, a shudder. How long had he slept? Half an hour? Longer? Long enough to feel that something had shifted, that in sleep (it had been like a fever sleep, the last of a fever) he had put away resentment and discovered a quality of unhappiness he could, for now, endure.

When he sat up he saw that Calley had finished his work. The gun—one of those English cavalry carbines with a barrel no longer than the distance between a man’s fingertips and his elbow—was lying on the table. The room was scented with the oil he had rubbed into the cut wood.

“You would be fortunate to hit the door with such a gun,” said Medina.

Calley nodded. He too seemed to have found a new mood, purposeful but calm. “I would,” he said. “If I was standing next to it.”

“Point-blank,” said Medina, pleased to have recalled the expression, one he had learned from English dragoons.

“I will load it,” said Calley, “with rat-shot. You know what that is?” He held out his hand, a dozen of lead-shot cupped in his palm. “These,” he said, “will tear a man like canvas.”

Later he showed Medina the slings he had sewn so he could carry the gun inside his coat. Showed him the gun hidden. Showed him how it came out again.

5

He was seasick from Penarth to St. David’s Head. Expecting it did not make it any easier. In his sleep, the Jenny became the transport to Lisbon. He heard horses whinnying in terror though there were no horses on the ship, and as far as he knew no animals at all other than some hens in a coop on deck. Also, presumably, an untellable number of rats and mice.

He lay in what they had called his cabin, the space between two bulkheads, a curtain separating him from the passageway. He lay on the cot-bed, vomiting into a jug. No one came to visit him, or once—though this too he may have dreamed—the master pushed his head past the curtain in such a manner as to make it seem his head was floating . . .

When the worst of it was over he fell into a deeper sleep, and on waking, pulled on his boots, groped his way along the passage, climbed a ladder to the open hatchway and emerged on to the deck like the devil in a stage play.