Meanwhile the oarsmen on the galleot were putting on a great show of indolence, very gradually getting themselves settled into position to row away from the brig. But certain decorative encrustations on the galleot's high stern had become entangled in supremely functional matters on the brig's bowsprit, such as the martingale (a spar projecting vertically downwards from about the middle of the bowsprit) and the stays that held it in place. The disentanglement of the two vessels took some time, and was noisy, which was good because a few yards away the Cabal was hard at work doing things that, in other circumstances, would have waked the dead.

The brig had a sort of blind spot (or so they hoped) around her stempost. The stempost was nothing more than the foremost part of the keel, where it broke out of the water and slanted up to support the figurehead, the bowsprit, and the railing around the ship's head. This part of the ship was made for dashing against the sea as she fought through weather, and so was devoid of complications such as hatches and ports, which tended to be weak and leaky. Furthermore it was sharply undershot, and difficult to see from the deck above. One could get a clear look at it only by going to the head, kneeling down, and thrusting one's head down and out through the shite-hole (which had been deemed unlikely by the architects of the Plan) or by clambering out onto the bowsprit to work the rigging associated with the spritsails. Those sails would not come into use tonight, but this posed a danger nonetheless, as several seamen had gone out there to work on the disentanglement.

But there was nothing Jack could do about that, so he tried to concentrate on matters nearer to hand. There was a veritable crowd down here! Yevgeny, Gabriel, and Nyazi had jumped from the galleot moments before the collision, and had evidently had better luck with their boarding axes than Jack—perhaps because they had not been half-drowned to start out with. They had converged on the stempost, which was one enormously thick piece of solid wood, and after pulling in bags of tools and weapons tethered to their ankles they had driven spikes into that wood with muffled hammers and hung little rope slings from the spikes, just big enough to serve as footholds. Jack let go of one of his axes, flailed out, and grabbed an empty one. With some thrashing around he was able to get a foot into it. Yevgeny, also coated in black grease, was barely visible above, standing in another one of these foot-loops. He offered Jack a hand, and pulled him all the way up out of the water. Jack and Yevgeny were now plastered up against the hull together, just to one side of the stempost. Yevgeny thumped Jack's shoulder five times, meaning "we are five." So on the opposite side of the stempost, Gabriel and Nyazi must have established footholds of their own. Apparently Dappa had avoided the fate of keel-hauling, too.

There followed an hour of something approaching boredom. The general circumstances were anything but boring, of course, yet there was nothing for Jack to do except hang there and await death or deliverance. Yevgeny thrust a sack into Jack's hand. Jack found a pair of breeches inside, and a belt, and the Janissary-sword. The galleot worked itself free and rowed off, driven on a fresh gale of invective from the supremely irritated Spaniards—who almost immediately realized that they were being pushed downriver by the tidal current, and were already more than a mile from the Viceroy's villa. They tried the anchor cables and found them taut, but not taut enough. Then they tried bringing them in, and found them fouled by the mysterious lashings of Jack and Dappa. Shouts and thuds reverberated dimly through the hull-planking as the crew were ordered belowdecks to man the sweeps.

But they had barely begun to row, there in the broad estuary below Sanlúcar de Barrameda, when the galleot—which had been stalking them through the night—shot out of the darkness, moving with a speed that the pudgy, barnacle-fouled brig could only dream of, and came on almost as if making for a head-on collision. It diverted to starboard at the last possible moment (to the relief of Jack and the others, who would have been crushed), folded her oars on that side, and skimmed down the side of the brig, shearing away half of her sweeps, and leaving her there like a bird with one wing shot off.

Now this, of course, was an overt attack, the brig's first inarguable proof that she was under assault by pirates. So her captain moved just as van Hoek had predicted: He ordered that a cannon be run out and fired, as a signal to whomever was keeping watch over the harbor from the battlements of Sanlúcar de Barrameda.

But a single cannon-shot in the night-time is an ambiguous statement, and difficult to interpret—especially when what it is trying to say is something extremely implausible, such as that a Viceroy's treasure-brig is being assaulted by a Corsair-galley in the midst of one of Spain's most important harbors. And no sooner had the brig fired its distress-shot than another ship, a bit farther out to sea, fired several: this was Météore, the jacht that had appeared out of the Gulf towards sunset, flying Dutch colors. In response, a ragged patter of signals were fired from the town's batteries. This had been done at the request of the cargador metedoro, who had been talked into believing that he had incoming goods on that jacht and did not want to wake up tomorrow morning to discover that she had run aground on the bar.

The Viceroy's brig, spinning helplessly in the swirling currents, was swept out over the bar and into the Gulf of Cadiz without anyone in the town's having a clear idea of what was going on.

There was a half-moon that night, and as they drifted into the Gulf Jack watched it chasing the lost sun towards the western ocean, all aglow on its underside, like a ball of silver heated on one side by the burning radiance of a forge. It was shrouded in ripped and frayed tissues of cloud that stole some of its light: new weather coming in from the ocean, which was bad for them, because it meant that tomorrow their pursuers would have wind.

And tonight their prey were beginning to have it: a chilly breeze coming in straight from the Atlantic. Seamen had already gone to stations on the upperdeck to raise sails and get under way as best they might. Jack sensed that the Spaniards were breathing easier now: The ride down the dark river among anchored ships and over the shallow bar had been dangerous, but now they had a lot of water under their keel, and they had a bit of wind. After a few minutes' preparations they could raise some sails and move out a bit farther from the town, to eliminate the risk of running aground, and wait for daylight.

They were unaware that the galleot, after shearing away their oars, had rowed out into the Gulf and transformed herself into another kind of ship entirely. Stowed in the aisle that ran up her center, between the benches, had been an uncommonly large carpet, rolled up into a bundle some ten yards long. But that carpet (if all had gone according to the Plan) was now jetsam, unrolled and adrift in the Gulf of Cadiz somewhere. Its former contents—a tree-trunk of straight-grained fir from the slopes of the Atlas Mountains, spoke-shaved to a smooth needle shape, bolstered with iron hoops, and tipped with a barbed iron spearhead—had been brought forward and mounted on the nose of the galleot, somewhat like a bowsprit, but nearer to the waterline, and not so encumbered with stays and martingales. That iron spearhead should even now be skimming over the waves at a velocity of about ten knots, with fifty tons of galleot behind it, and one Spanish treasure-brig dead ahead.

The general plan was to strike the brig on her quarter, which meant towards the stern, where large cannons were somewhat less plentiful. The only drawback was that this made it impossible for the five boarders who were clinging to the stempost to see the galleot approaching (to the extent they could see anything by the flat chalky light of the setting half-moon). But the sudden screaming from the other end of the ship gave them a good clue that the time was now. They waited for a moment, as many footsteps receded, and then finally swung their grapples up and over the rail. Each man pulled on his rope until he felt the flukes catch in something (no way of guessing what, or how sturdy it might be) and after testing it with a few sharp tugs, abandoned his foot-loop and gave himself up to his rope. Because the hull flared out overhead they all swung far away from it, and swept to and fro above the water like pendulums.