He spun the helm down, and the schooner lunged forward, so near to dead astern of Black Watch, she must have looked under tow from a distance. Bearing off some more, she put a few more yards in her pocket, and a few more, until her bow was almost abeam of the yawl’s mainmast, and there was so little space between the two hulls that if Black Watch’s main boom were to suddenly swing to leeward, it would sweep Double Eagle’s decks like a sickle.

“Ready!” Nathaniel hollered. “We’ll need the extra drive of that staysail in half a second!”

The boats were now abeam of each other, plunging, rearing neck and neck, snorting bow spray. Black Watch’s sails seemed to rise off the port side like a great cliff of canvas, a cliff that left Double Eagle starved for wind—Eliot could almost feel her lungs sucking as she began to lose some ground, a foot or two at a time. Abeam, then abaft abeam, and then Nat fairly screamed:

“Now! Heave! Heave away!”

Eliot and Drew heaved on the staysail halyards, hand over hand. As they were trimming, Drew vomited in two or three noisy spasms, let the line go, and fell on his ass. Eliot hopped backward to take up the sudden slack, slipped in the mixture of vomit and seawater, and fell beside his younger brother, the sheet flying from his hands to flail the air like a huge, mad, writhing serpent, while the sail slapped aloft.

Jumping to his feet, Eliot snatched the line and hauled—and felt nothing move. He looked up.

“It’s fouled, Nat! Fouled!”

“Well, by Christ, unfoul it! We’ll be looking at their arse again in a second and it’s a sight I’m sick of seeing!”

God Almighty, he even sounded like the old man now. Eliot ran to leeward and jerked the sheet, ran to weather, gave it another jerk, freeing it, but lost his footing on the wet deck a second time, banged his head against the rail hard enough to see a bright flash. An odd question shot through his mind as he sat: How many times did Jesus fall carrying his cross? And though he could not see them, he imagined that Black Watch’s crew were laughing at the circus on Double Eagle’s deck, yes, laughing, jeering, as the Pharisees, or Sadducees, or whoever had laughed and jeered Our Lord as he carried his cross. Eliot got up, shook his fist at the yawl, and hollered, “I am the risen Christ!” Then, his mind clearing, he grabbed the line again and set the sail.