Free Blessed Isle by Alex Beecroft

hunkered down and shook him violently by the shoulder. “Garnet, wake up! That’s an order, Lieutenant. Help me find the land!”
His eyes were half open, a slit of white eyeball beneath the fringe of dark lashes. But he clung to life still. He gave a little mutter, and his pulse raced visibly in his scarlet throat. I caught up the bailing bucket, filled it in the sea—the sound of breakers growing stronger in the tricky pewter twilight of dawn—and dashed the water over his face.
Several doctors have since told me I might as well have stabbed him in the heart. The fever should be encouraged to grow and reach its climax, I now understand. This sudden cooling might have proved catastrophic. But he looked so hot, so sunken away where I couldn’t reach him, and I wanted him to wake.
Well, I’ll know next time if, Heaven forfend, there should be a next time. I could not check to see what damage I’d done, for as I knelt there, the sun came up and the wind freshened. The boom of the sail creaked around above my head and, as I caught it, I saw over the deep dark blue of the sea a line of turquoise more vivid than the gem. Breakers dazzled in the newly minted light, and a shallow rise of land showed above them, green with trees.
I stood out to sea once more and sailed cautiously along the line of shore, looking for a place to safely run the boat through the breakers and bring it to land. The dazzling white beach was as narrow as a ribbon—scarcely a shelf before falling away into deep water. The shore curved in like a horseshoe. I discovered it was an island little more than a mile long, the main wooded spine of it curled about a central lagoon. If I could steer the pinnace into that, we would have a gentle landfall.
But out from that central spine curved two long arms of dunes and reefs. The water moved like serpents over them, and the breakers rolled in, lifting themselves up and crashing down on the submerged rocks. Risk the waves hurling us down to smash on the narrow rock beach, or risk the deceitful currents and razor-edged boulders buried in the inlet to the lagoon?
I looked at Garnet. The heat in him was such that already his clothes were dry again, his face like blood. I was terrified out of my indecision. I furled the sail, shipped the oars, and rowed into the inlet.
Had there been two of us—one to row and one to watch—we might have done better. I pulled for four hours or more, from dawn ’til past noon, finding the sandbanks by grinding gently into them, and the rocks by bumping off. My back and arms passed through cramping and into pain, and thence to a kind of thin, red, torn sensation, which distracted me splendidly from my riot of unproductive emotions. A little after noon, when I had, for yet another time, run up what looked like a promising channel and come to a dead stop, the sea swelled under the keel. The tide had turned and begun to build beneath us. I had now to fight not to be flung forward too fast. The seas rose and foamed about me, crashing down into the open boat.
As I bailed and struggled to row at the same time, the swell picked us up, threw us down, jarring atop a reef. An oar splintered, tearing itself out of my hands. The boat shuddered, grounded, scraping itself along a ridge of rocks. Planks buckled beneath me and sprung wide, admitting rough volcanic pumice grown over with corals. Then a second wave lifted us off again, washed us over the bar, through and out into the sapphire waters of the lagoon.
The boat sank beneath us. I held Garnet in one arm and swam for the shore.
    My poor Harry! Such heroics, and I not conscious enough to applaud. Had it been me, I would have resented my audience’s lack of interest, but he is a better man than I. Oh, don’t argue, you know it’s true.
As for me, I had been dreaming, though horribly real it seemed at the time. I found myself the newest recruit on the Flying Dutchman, and they would keep making me work too hard—I being the only one left in