it was the cigarette, but when he looked, there was a cannonball sitting on the deck, perfectly intact and still glowing red from the furnace. The floor began to catch fire while he was staring. He found a water jug and upended it. The steam roared.
The whole thing belonged so much to action on a gun deck that he couldn’t remember where he was. When he did, he stood up unsteadily and looked around the wreckage for any sign of Jem. It was impossible to tell what was furniture and what was a person at first. Splintered bones and splintered wood looked alike. Smoke poured up from the fires, which were everywhere because the brandy bottles had exploded and ignited. He waited until he could tell people moving apart from the flickering shadows and the shapes in the smoke. There was no use shouting. All he could hear was a dull howl.
He started to move the fallen tables. Towards his side of the room there were more people lurching upright than nearer the windows, but not all of them. Tom was there, torn in half, still alive.
‘Help a fellow along, Miz,’ he said, quite himself.
Kite shot him, and then couldn’t look under anything else in case he found the same again. The ash in the air was sandpapering the back of his throat.
Jem kicked away a table and rocked to his feet with one hand clamped around his arm, which was bleeding. Kite could see but not hear that he was swearing. Jem caught his shoulders and asked if he was all right, then saw Tom’s body on the floor, the gun still smoking in Kite’s hand, took it off him and flung it away. It bounced off the wall near to where Nelson had been sitting. Parts of him were sitting there still.
Jem must have been trying to talk to him, because he turned him by his elbow and touched his own lips to say watch.
‘Where’s Ru?’
Casting around, it was by accident that they found Admiral Collingwood too, slumped just beside him. Collingwood was trying to talk to Jem. Ru was dead.
‘Lord Nelson, what about …’
‘He’s dead, sir.’
Collingwood stared between them. ‘Right. I see. That was the … where did it come from?’ he said helplessly, and he looked like an old man, though he wasn’t yet sixty.
‘Agamemnon,’ Kite provided. He could only hear his voice inside his own skull. But now Collingwood had asked, he knew; he had seen the flashes from six of Agamemnon’s gun ports, but the memory was only just fighting to the surface.
‘Where’s Captain Brown?’ Collingwood looked around, then stopped when Kite pointed. ‘You’re Kite. You’re the Spaniard?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You have command of Agamemnon. Get over there and find out what the hell is going on. And do it quickly. We can’t afford to leave Agamemnon behind when we sail, we need her guns. Jem, you …’ He was staring at someone’s body. ‘I suppose you’re going to have to take over Orion.’
They helped Collingwood up, but he collapsed again and didn’t wake this time. Jem motioned to get out and organise the boats. Kite eased away through the mess of pieces that had been people a minute ago. The doors were wrecked. Men were coming from the deck to help. Someone caught his arms and tried to stop him walking, and he had to explain, without really hearing his own voice, where he was going. When he looked back, he had left perfect black bootprints across the deck. Blood or wine or tar, he couldn’t tell.
Jem caught up with him and they waited together for the boats to be ready. Orion and Agamemnon were in opposite directions. Kite sat down on some ropes. He felt like he was about to faint.
The sun had set but it wasn’t wholly dark yet. A cloud bank had turned most of the sky orange and smoky, like something gargantuan was burning in it. Jem sat down next to him.
‘You said this would happen,’ Kite said.
‘What?’
‘You said we could lose at Trafalgar. Trafalgar is forty miles away from here. The French are going to run the blockade any minute now and we’ll catch them at Trafalgar.’ He looked up. ‘And if we lose, they’ll get to Calais, and they’ll take the army across to London.’
‘We might not lose.’
‘With about six senior officers left alive to cover twenty-six ships?’
They both fell quiet again.
‘Who’s first?’ a sailor said from behind them. He must have tried to say it before, because he