A King's Trade (55 page)

Twelve 12-pounders, three 6-pounders, and four monstrous 24-pounder carronades roared, almost as one, the great gouts of spent gunpowder smoke caught by the wind, turned into a solid bank of choking fog for a second or two,
before the wind rapidly whisked it over the decks and alee. And, that quick-keening wind brought to them the glad sound of solid shot, aimed “‘twixt wind and water,” crashing and crunching into the French ship's side, the parroty
Rwawrk!
screech of shattered planking, the thuds of heavier timbers as her frames were battered…and, the thin, terrified cries of frightened, wounded, or quick-slain men. Just seconds before a matching great bank of gunpowder sprang to life as her own guns stabbed long reddish tongues of flames, and the thunder of artillery bellowed, almost lost in the cracks and roars of Nature's fury!

“Christ A'mighty, aw Christ A'mighty,” Daniel Wigmore whinnied, wringing his hands in despair as rain poured down his face like tears from a whole clan upon the death of its laird, plastering long strands of hair to his cheeks. “Me silver, me gold, Cap'm Weed! Me
h'animals!
‘Em fookin' Frogs'll most-like
h'eat
‘em, or toss ‘em h'over th' side, an' we'll all be ruint! Busted! Tents, scen'ry, costumes, performers all gone… th' girls raped'r worse! H'an't ‘ere
summat
ye can do, I akses ye, man? Christ, we'll lose th' ship, t'boot, iff ‘n…!”

“Nothing to be done, ‘gainst a frigate, Mister Wigmore,” Captain Weed told him, looking equally despairing of the loss of his livelihood. “We got all the sail she'll carry aloft, already, and she
still
wallows like a hog in mud. Might be we could bear away more Westerly, turn it into a
long
stern-chase, but that'd only gain us two more hours, maybe less. ‘Less we could put up some sort o' resistance… which we can't, not with these puny old guns of ours, and no trained gunners, who
you
wouldn't let me hire on, if ye'll remem …”

” ‘Wishes were fishes, h'ever'body'd h'eat'!” Wigmore snapped.

” ‘For want of a nail…'” Capt. Weed cited right back. He had himself a gloomy squint aloft for inspiration, for an Act of God, or a Sign, but all he saw was dark sails and black rigging, masts, and spars, now and then going ghostly in the lightning flashes. The blue fusee at the truck-cap of the main mast had finally burned out, inspiring him to order the twin taffrail lanthorns to be extinguished, too, hoping that it might make
Festival
harder for the French to chase in the darkness.

As if to scoff at that forlorn hope, another long, flea-flicking fork of lightning lit up the sea like a full moon, revealing the French frigate pursuing them as clear as broad daylight, revealing
Festival
to them just as clearly.

“Damn ‘em!” Capt. Weed gravelled as he peered about for the rest of the convoy. No matter how deeply loaded with the untold riches from the Far East, the East India Company ships were sleeker, faster, their bottoms cleaner, and
carried much larger crews that could make the most of their acres of sail. They'd scarpered for the far horizons, and damn their black souls to Hell for running off and leaving them. Though, in all honesty, were their places switched, Weed would have been halfway to St. Helena by then, and “hard cheese” for the laggards!

Capt. Weed also spotted one lone blue fusee still burning over a pair of stern lights, off to the Nor'east. Another bolt of lightning revealed HMS
Jamaica,
all too far away to be of any immediate aid, but she
had
managed to come about in the storm, and was butting, pitching, and crashing as close to the wind's eye as she might lay, almost bows-on to
Festival
on what Weed thought was a course of South by West, six points off the storm's keening winds.

“Could we but hold them off a
few
minutes, Mister Wigmore!” the desperate Capt. Weed shouted almost into Wigmore's ear. “Offer up
some
resistance, there's
Jamaica,
coming to our…!”

“Wot!”
Wigmore barked back, leaning away in shock. “Are ye daft, Weed?
R'sistance!
Why, ‘ey'd shoot us t'kindlin', ‘en come swarmin' h'aboard an' slaughter us all, men, wimmen, an' babes; ye great ninny! Said yerself, we can't fight a bloody
frigate!”

“The Frogs don't want to sink us, or slaughter us, sir,” Capt. Weed urgently insisted. “They want a prize, a
whole
prize….”

“O'
course
‘ey do, puddin' brains!” Wigmore screeched in alarm. “Sure t'God, ‘ey h'an't come fer a
matinee!”

“To
board
us!” Weed snapped, going so far as to seize Wigmore by his sopping-wet lapels, wishing he could go for his throat instead, and who
needed
this job and why had he
ever
signed on this bloody Ark? “Up close,
alongside,
d'ye see! Hard enough to do in a storm, already. We have nets to catch your acrobats, do they slip and fall. We could rig them along the starboard side for
boarding
nets, to slow them down! I know your people have guns, swords, knives, and such, besides our pikes, cutlasses, and muskets. I dasn't trust our rusty old artillery with a full powder charge and solid shot, but I
can
load ‘em light, with scrap iron and langridge. Man-killin' stuff, lit off right into their Froggy
teeth,
man! The bears? The lion? Bloody bows and arrows? Your knife-thrower, your fire-eater and his oils? Free the God-damn'
baboons
if…!”

“You wish
Fransooski
man killed,
Kapitan
Veed?” a harsh voice at their elbows rasped, and there was Arslan Durschenko, so loaded down in weaponry that he had trouble standing, his precious rifled
jaegers,
and at least a full dozen of his long-barreled rifled pistols jammed in any pocket, sash, or belt handy,
strapped over with powder horns, cartouche pouches, and accoutrements from his days as an expert marksman, before a flash in a pan had seared out his right eye.
“Fransooski
not lay one hand on my Eudoxia,
yob tvoyemat. I
fight the
sikkim siyns.
Other men, girls, they shoot, too, if you do not. I die
Cossack!”
he boasted with a free hand pounding his chest. “Not prisoner, and not
poor!
Rodney!” he called over his shoulder, and up limped little Rodney, swathed in his bandages, which turned eerie blue whenever a bolt of lightning struck.
“Ma-lyenki Chorn malcheek…
little Black boy, is
bolshoi
shot and he kill many
Fransooski,
too! Almos' good as me,
yob tvoyemat.”

“Ain' no
boy,
Mistah,” Rodney soberly corrected, though without much anger. “I'z a Ord'nary Sea
-man
in th' Royal Navy, an' a
free man.
An' I
is
a damn' good shot, e'en wif muskets. Somebody he'p me upta th' mizen top, an' gimme somebody t'load fo' me, an' I keeps ‘em on de hop. Gimme a half-dozen muskets an' I kill as many French as ya wants, sah.”

Rodney took a look around as another series of lightning bolts played about them, and raised his unwounded arm to point at the struggling 64-gun
Jamaica.
“We keeps on a bit mo', dat sixty-fo' be up wit' us, lookin' fo' a fight, an' dat French'un might take a big skeer, Cap'm. Might sheer offa us,” he opined with a shrug, and a wince from the pain that cost him. “Be wot my Cap'm Lewrie'd do, count on it.”

“The lad's right, Mister Wigmore,” Capt. Weed cried, more than ready to grasp even the slimmest straw of hope. “Get guns, everyone!”

“Not go up mast,” Arslan Durschenko told Rodney. “Little man he shoot from… poop,
da?
High enough, and he cannot climb,
kanyeshna.
I shoot here, close, where I still can see. Eudoxia… nyet!” Arslan exclaimed, to see his daughter on the deck with sheafs of arrows, and her recurved horn bow. “I forbid!
Dohadeetyeh,
go away, you!”

“God helpink them who help selves, Poppa,” Eudoxia serenely said, wearing a stiff but brave smile, giving her father a fatalistic shrug.
“Fransooski peesas
no have
me,
over dead body, da?
Neeksgda!
Never! You die Cossack, Poppa,
I
die Cossack! Urrah!” she whooped.

“Bootyeh zdarovi, kraseeva doch,”
Durschenko said with a hitch in his voice, and stroked her rain-wet cheek. “I bless you, beautiful daughter.
Ya lyubeet tiy.
I love you. And, I am proud.”

”
Ya lyubeet tiy,
Poppa,” Eudoxia more-sombrely replied, tears welling in her eyes.
“Dosvidanya.”

“Arr, fook h'it,” Wigmore weakly griped. “Mad as ‘atters, th' ‘ole lot o' ye. H'ever'body, h'arm yerselves, th' law's comin'! I'll go b'low an' git me pistols.
Mind now…ye git me robbed an' ruined, an' I'll haint h'ever' last one o' ye t'yer dyin' days!”

“Keep on with double-shot, Mister Catterall!” Lewrie howled to the waist, and the guns. “Keep on hullin' her!” To the four helmsmen manning the double wheel spokes, he added, “Pinch up a'weather, lads. Another half-point to weather. Crowd up to her to shorten the range!”

He paced, feeling every rumbling, squealing movement of the gun-carriages as they were run out, the shock and buffeting muzzle blasts from each fired gun, and the rapid horse-clopping of gun-truck wheels over the main deck planks, sanded that morning to a pristine paleness, but now rapidly turning smutty grey. Each piece that slammed against the extreme lengths of the breeching ropes, he felt that, too, and he could hear the groan of iron ring-bolts in the bulwarks and decks crying out as tons of artillery slammed back, some of them now so hot that they
leaped
a foot off the deck before stuttering back down in recoil.

Twenty years in “King's Coat,” most of that at sea, and Lewrie could sense the rush of the hull, its staggers, reels, and heel through his toes—could wince, too, at each crashing arrival of round shot from the French guns, and was staggered whenever a high-elevated shot chewed large pieces from the larboard bulwarks and gangway. Staggered, too, by shot that missed completely, and went screaming low over the deck, the French guns unable to be cocked up high enough to dismast his frigate. It was only on a lucky up-roll, when the French warship wallowed to nearly level decks, that bar-shot, chain-shot, or expanding star-shot could punch ragged holes in
Proteus
's sails, or carry away a stay or brace. Frustrated, the French were changing over to solid shot, accepting the unfairness of fighting hull-to-hull as the British Navy did, and attempting to out-shoot and smash up
Proteus
in like manner.

It was a bit too dangerous to remain by the gnawed-up bulwarks, so Lewrie sidled over to amidships, and paced between the binnacle and helm to the hammock nettings overlooking the ship's frenetically busy waist. Six-pounder quarterdeck guns barked, spewing both round-shot and bags of grapeshot or musket balls as the range decreased, despite the Frenchman altering course to weather a bit to keep away. Twenty-four-pounder carronades belched with titanic roars from fully-charged muzzles, hurling double-shotted loads from their stubby muzzles, then came slamming back on their greased wooden pressure slides.

Lightning flickered, so fast that sweaty gunners were frozen in a jittery series of
tableaus
as they thumb-stalled the vents, swabbed hot barrels, inserted the
flannel powder charges, and rammed them home, once removed from the wood or leather cannisters that the youngest and quickest lads, the powder monkeys, brought in scampers from the magazine. Balls were snatched up from the shot-garlands, gun-captains no longer concerned with perfect roundness or freedom from rust or scales, just
load
A solid thump from a flexible rope ramrod to seat them, a quick shove to tamp down wet wadding, perhaps a final chore by a ram-merman to seat a sack of grapeshot, musket balls, or langridge, atop ball, and it was time to pulley-haul, again.

Up to the port sills, an overhaul of the run-out tackle and the breeching ropes, then a leap for the train-tackle, maybe the employment of crow-levers and handspikes to shift the whole gun and carriage just a bit to left or right. Some fiddling with the elevating quoin block under the heavy breech to make sure that the piece pointed true at the blackness of the enemy's hull, as low as possible, and a leap away from the gun, feet well clear of tackle and ring-bolts on the deck, lest the men lose their feet as if scythed away, the gun-captain off to one side with his left arm high to show ready, right hand grasping the trigger line to the cocked flint striker, the priming powder in the touch-hole, and… BLAM! to begin it all over, again, quick as panting, and bare-chested, men could serve their brutal pieces.

Fuck
proper aim, at this range,
fuck
drill and showiness; just fire, load, and
keep
firing, no matter what was happening around them.

A hard strike, low on the waterline it felt like, with
Proteus
shuddering as if gut-punched, and almost a human groan forced from her timbers. Another slamming hit, and more larboard bulwark went flying in tatters, a yard's length of oak turned into arm-long, prickly splinters like gigantic, well-chewed toothpicks that whirred and fluttered with the sound of frantic birds' wings, some lashing and spearing men's bodies as they went, and raising a chorus of disbelieving screams.

A sudden lull, a horrified, hushed second, before Lt. Catterall could be heard screeching raspy for them to “by broadside
…fire,
and
murder
the bastards!” and
Proteus
shuffled to starboard to that shove of directed explosions a few feet alee.