“Will and I will make ready above. Drew, Eliot, stay below. You can’t do much with that hand, anyway, Eliot. But you can help Drew break out the life jackets and the mooring lines.” The fatalism that had seized Nathaniel only moments ago was gone. It was weird how his emotional winds were swinging like the storm’s. “Make four safety lines out of the mooring lines, long as you can, good, stout running bowline in each. I want everybody in a life jacket and with safety line and a sheath knife belted on the outside, the outside, of his oilers. Got that? Turn to.”

“Ah, Nat, it’s great to have you back, giving orders,” Eliot said, and then put Trajan down.

The cat bolted into the illusory safety of a locker in the galley aft. Will and Nathaniel lurched up the companionway and went out.

“Life jackets. How do you like that?” said Eliot, sarcastically, even as he fumbled for the jackets in the foul-weather gear locker. “Know what a life jacket will do in this? Keep you alive just long enough to shit your drawers before you drown.”

“Shut up,” said Drew, cutting a mooring line into ten-foot lengths with his knife.

“And those. Sheath knives. On the outside, he said, so they’ll be handy. Yeah, if we get blown onto the rocks, we can stab each other to death and put ourselves out of our misery.”

“Shut up!”

After Will and Nathaniel returned, drenched anew, faces pale, they reported seeing two distressing sights. The first was the chafing in the anchor cables; the second, far off to windward, was what appeared to be a rolling pall of coal dust thousands of feet high and stretched from horizon to horizon: the eye wall, the black core of the hurricane. All four hunkered down with the tense resignation of townsfolk beseiged by a barbarian army.

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