The Pirate Round botc-3

by James L. Nelson

“Listen here, you men!” Marlowe shouted, taking his place at the rail at the forward edge of the quarterdeck. “Looks like yonder comes the Bloody Revenge. If they’re in sight, they got a claim to the booty, but that doesn’t mean we have to do all the work for them. We’ll drive this bastard north, get him between us. I don’t reckon the Moors’ll give us much fight, but what they do give, we’ll let them other fellows share!”

  This met with a cheer, the men shouting and banging, and then, like a counterpoint, the rumble of the Moors’ guns. Marlowe had not even noticed them fire, did not bother watching where the shot fell.

  The Moor was sailing full and bye with larboard tacks aboard. The Elizabeth Galley was on a dead run, riding those late-winter winds that flowed from the Indian Ocean and channeled northwest through Bab el Mandeb and the Red Sea. Twenty minutes on their generally converging courses, and they had closed to within half a mile of one another. The Bloody Revenge’s topgallants were visible from the Galley’s deck, and the man aloft was certain of the brig’s identity.

  “We’ll give them a cannonading! It’s a long shot, but give it to ’em as best as you can!” Marlowe called down his encouragement to the gunners, then stood back and fixed the Moor with his glass. He heard Flanders in the waist shouting “On the up-roll!” and felt the Elizabeth Galley heel with the swells, and then the cry, “Fire!” and the starboard battery went off, eight six-pounders, deafening in their proximity.

  The weight of iron was pathetic compared to what the Moor could hurl with a single broadside, but Marlowe could see through his glass that more than half his gunners had hit their mark, and he knew that a six-pound ball that hits is worth more than any size ball plunging into the sea.

  He looked down into the waist. Half the guns were run out again. Thirty seconds later, and they were all of them loaded and ready.

  “On the up-roll! Fire!” and once more the Elizabeth Galley blasted her iron into the great barn of a vessel that carried the Mogul’s treasure.

  The Moorish captain clearly understood as well as Marlowe the relative worth of round shot that hit compared with round shot that fell into the ocean. Likewise he seemed to understand the limitations of his own ship, and clearly he knew better than to try to tack that behemoth, despite the decent wind and miles of sea room.

  Marlowe watched with some amusement as the great gilded beast began her ponderous turn, the bow pointing more and more toward the Elizabeth Galley, the masts coming into line, the huge, ornate poop lost from view behind the courses as the Moor laboriously wore around.

  The heavy yards swung in short, jerky stages as the stern passed through the wind. At last the treasure ship came up on a starboard tack with her yards braced round and bowlines hauled taut. The entire evolution had taken over ten minutes, but finally they settled on their more northerly course, away from the Elizabeth Galley and toward the Bloody Revenge, which Marlowe guessed they had not yet discovered.

  “Hands to braces!” Marlowe cried, and the sail trimmers left their guns and went to the pinrails, and a moment later the Galley came up on a starboard tack as well, like the Moorish ship and half a mile astern. But the Galley sailed half again as fast as the Moor; Marlowe could pretty much choose the moment they would board her.

  They chased on for another hour, the Galley sailing a somewhat higher course than the Moor so that they could continue to pepper her broad transom with round shot.

  The Elizabeth Galley was a quarter mile astern when the Moors spotted the Bloody Revenge, a mile north of them, and turned more easterly again, sailing as close-hauled as she could, which was not very. She was a big, clumsy cow set upon by two nimble wolves, and the more she tried to flee, the more pathetic and vulnerable she appeared.

  “Very well, Honeyman,” Marlowe said to the quartermaster, who was standing beside him on the quarterdeck. Before St. Mary’s he would have chased the man away, but now he was happy to have him there.

  There was no question, of course, of a divided command. They were in a fight now. Marlowe was absolute ruler of the ship.

  “Very well,” he said again, “enough of this nonsense. We’ll lay her alongside and board her. By the time we come right up with her, the Bloody Revenge should not be far behind.

  “Aye, Captain,” Honeyman said. He hurried forward, relaying Marlowe’s words in a loud voice, in a tone untainted by excitement or fear or emotion of any kind. The boarders saw to their cutlasses and pikes and pistols; the gun captains took pains to load with the roundest of shot, and grape on top of that. The men massed in the waist and on the quarterdeck, waiting.

  The Elizabeth Galley closed fast, with the Moor caught between the pincers of the two Red Sea Rovers. Marlowe climbed up the main shrouds halfway to the main top, shifted his glass between the Moor and the Bloody Revenge and back. Billy Bird was making no extraordinary effort to get into the fight. The Revenge would come up with them a good fifteen minutes after the Galley had laid alongside the Moor.

  “Damn you, you bloody…” Marlowe muttered. The word “coward” was floating just below the surface, but he could not bring himself to voice it. It was too heinous an accusation, even to be made in private, without greater evidence than he had.

  After all, the Revenge might have sprung a plank, or her bottom might be covered with weeds, or the men might have decided to become insensibly drunk. Any number of things might have happened that were beyond Billy Bird’s control.

  Marlowe climbed down, regained the quarterdeck. “Elizabeth, my dear,” he called to his wife, who had been all the while standing aft, keeping out of the way. “We will be at them directly. I think it would be best were you to retire to the cable tier.”

  “Of course, my love.” Elizabeth stepped over, kissed him. Bold as she was, they both knew that the decks would not be the place for her when the fighting got hot.

  Marlowe glanced down at the two pistols thrust in her sash. “You are all loaded, then?” he asked, trying to make his voice sound as cheery as possible. He had insisted that Elizabeth take two loaded guns with her. He had explained that if they were taken, the guns were not to be used for defense.

  It was not the first time Elizabeth had been relegated to the cable tier with instructions to blow her brains out if the ship was taken. Marlowe did not like it, but there was no other option. He could not get the image of Thomas Tew out of his head-his guts spilling on the deck, his crew surrendering to the Moors. The thought of Elizabeth dead by her own hand was more palatable than the thought of her in the hands of the Moors.

  “Loaded and ready,” Elizabeth said. She gave him an alluring smile, kissed him again, and disappeared below. If she was afraid, she would never let him know it. He knew that Elizabeth did not wish to burden him with any additional considerations, and he loved her for that and for many other things besides.

  Another broadside from the big ship, two cable lengths away, and this time a few of the heavy balls hit, sending up swarms of splinters and making the vessel shudder from stem to stern, but there was no damage that Marlowe could see.

  The men in the waist were silent, their previous enthusiasm waning as the Moorish ship loomed over them, her enormous size becoming more obvious and intimidating with every yard they closed. Marlowe swept the Moor with his glass. He could see the decks crowded with men. He could see white turbans and black beards and bright-colored jackets and the skirts they wore below them. He could see flashing swords and pole arms. There were hundreds of them.

  “Mr. Flanders, let us have a few broadsides here!” Marlowe shouted.

  That thought seemed to sit well with the Elizabeth Galleys, and they moved with a will to run out the larboard guns.

  “On the up-roll! Fire!” And the world was lost in the blast of smoke and the thunder of the guns, and when it cleared, Marlowe could see gaps in the Moor’s bulwarks and rigging hanging in tatters.

  “Again!” he shouted, but the men were already reloading and running out. Now he could see wolf grins on their faces, and more than a few
of them were shouting at the enemy.

  The guns fired again, and some of the Moor’s as well, the two ships blasting metal and smoke at one another over two hundred yards of water. Marlowe saw one of his men go down with a splinter in the arm, another knocked on the head by a falling block, but nothing worse than that. There were more holes in the Moor’s bulwark, and two gun-ports had been smashed into one.

  “Grape now!” Marlowe called down to the waist. “Grape and langrage, and get ready to board her!” The two ships were closing fast. Even without a glass he could see the defenders massing at the big ship’s rails, which were a good fifteen feet above the Elizabeth Galley’s highest deck.

  “Maximum elevation, let us blow a path through these bastards!” Marlowe’s blood was up now, and he was filled with the fighting madness that swept fear and even good sense away. His men felt it, too, he could tell just watching the way they manned the guns or held their weapons or hopped from one foot to another, eager to be at the enemy.

  Someone began to chant: “Death, death, death…” and the others picked it up. That was what Marlowe was waiting for, the vaporing. He had been on both sides of that sound, and he knew how unnerving it was to a ship’s company that was waiting to be fallen upon by pirates.

  One hundred feet between the ships. Any closer and the Galley’s great guns would not be able to elevate high enough to reach the massed soldiers.

  “Fire!” Marlowe shouted, and an instant later came the roar of the guns, punctuated by the scream of the small grapeshot and langrage, the crash of wood as the shots hit home, the screaming and chanting of the Roundsmen as they worked themselves into a frenzy for boarding the Moor.

  The wind rolled away the smoke, lifting it like a blanket, and the Moorish ship loomed over them, a great, gilded, ornate, battered cliff. There were holes in the formerly solid mass of defenders where the Galley’s grapeshot had cut its swath.

  Marlowe looked behind him. Bickerstaff had the helm, which was the only participation that he would take in what he considered to be a nefarious act of piracy. He would fight to the death to defend the ship against boarders, but he would not board another, not for a cause such as this.

  Marlowe saw Bickerstaff push the helm over and turned back toward the Moor, and the two ships collided. In the waist Honeyman was up on the rail and grabbing the boarding steps on the Moor’s side and racing up, Hesiod at his heels, and behind the black man a dozen screaming Roundsmen. Forward of him Burgess and Flanders were leading more men over the fore channel.

  “Aft boarders! To me!” Marlowe shouted, jumping up on the quarterdeck rail and up into the mizzen shrouds. One of the Moor’s great guns was level with his belly, and thoughts of Tew flashed through his mind, but then the others were racing aft to follow him, and it was time to go.

  The Moorish ship was so huge that Marlowe had to climb halfway up the Galley’s mizzen shrouds just to get to the bottom of her main shrouds. He leaped across, landed on the channel, that platform jutting from the Moor’s side, climbed up into the Moor’s main shrouds.

  On the deck below, the fight was fully involved, dark-skinned, bearded, turbaned defenders firing their ornate pistols and swinging their great swords at the wild men who poured over their decks. All the fighting was forward of the mainmast; no one even saw Marlowe and his band coming up behind, save for the officers on the quarterdeck and the poop. Marlowe heard them shout-a warning to the others, he guessed-but he could not understand a word of it.

  He swung down to the deck, sword ready, met one of the officers coming forward. The man pointed a pistol at Marlowe, fired from ten feet, and missed. He flung the pistol away and raised his big, wide-bladed scimitar and attacked.

  Marlowe thought he had an easy kill-the man was open-and he lunged, but the scimitar swung around and knocked Marlowe’s sword aside. The officer brought his blade back again, but rather than retreat, Marlowe charged, hitting the man in the chest with his shoulder, knocking him to the deck, driving his sword into him before the Moor even knew what had happened.

  Marlowe turned toward the fight in the waist. The men he had led over the main chains were already plunging into it, falling on the turbaned defenders from behind, screaming like the damned, and that was enough for the Moorish soldiers. They flung aside pole arms and scimitars and daggers as they fled for the scuttles and hatches or fell in supplication to the deck.

  The Galleys chased them to the scuttles and slammed the hatch covers down on them or held them at sword point in little clusters around the deck. Suddenly the great volume of noise fell off to nothing. The Moorish ship was theirs. There had been little bloodshed that Marlowe could see, and what there had been had been mostly on the side of the defenders.

  “Well done, men! Well done! She is ours!” Marlowe shouted, and around him grins, nodding heads, men too winded to cheer.

  “Here’s Bloody Revenge, and just in time so she don’t get no one hurt,” called Honeyman. The brig was a cable length away and coming down fast. Marlowe could see men on her deck. They looked as if they were getting ready to board.

  “Flanders, quick, haul down that damned Moorish ensign. They might not know the ship is taken.”

  Flanders ran aft, tossed off the flag halyard, pulled the big, garish ensign down from the ensign staff, and let it pool on the deck.

  Marlowe walked over to the larboard gangway. He wanted to see Billy Bird’s expression when he found that the Elizabeth Galley had taken the Moor without him.

  The Bloody Revenge was less than one hundred yards away and showing no sign of heaving to or even slowing her onrush. Marlowe looked to her quarterdeck for some sign of the flamboyant Bird, but he could not see him. He wondered if that was the problem, if something had happened, some shift of power.

  Fifty yards, and they still came on. “Don’t he know we already took the fucking ship?” Honeyman asked, voicing the thoughts of many. Twenty-five yards, and Honeyman leaped up on the rail, shouted, “Stand off! Stand off, ya rutting bastards, the ship is ours!”

  But they did not stand off, and Honeyman jumped down, and the others fled from the larboard rail as it became clear that the Bloody Revenge was going to hit their prize, and hit her hard.

  At the last moment, the Bloody Revenge turned. Her jib boom caught on the Moor’s bulwark and snapped as her helm went over, and then the brig hit the bigger ship with a shudder.

  “What in all hell are these arseholes about?” Flanders said, loud. And then a shout from below the rail, and they heard the sound of men swarming up the side, and then the first of the Bloody Revenges appeared over the bulwark, swords and pistols in hand.

  “Hold! Hold!” Marlowe shouted. “The ship is ours, the Moors are below! Hold, there!”

  It was like shouting at deaf men. The Revenges did not pause for a beat before they fired a volley into the stunned men of the Elizabeth Galley and then fell on them-those still standing-with sword and cutlass.

  Chapter 22

  THE FIGHT did not last long. It was shorter even than the battle with the treasure ship’s original defenders. The Elizabeth Galleys were exhausted, stunned, and taken entirely by surprise.

  A pistol ball grazed Marlowe’s ribs, and it hurt like the devil, but it did not put him down. He had time enough to recover from the shock, time even to draw his sword and shout again for the boarders to hold their attack as the Revenges swarmed across the deck to fall on his men.

  Even as Marlowe’s sword rang with the clang of steel on steel and he turned aside an attacking blade, he could not believe the depth of the betrayal. He did not know Billy Bird well, but Elizabeth did, and he could not believe that she could have misjudged him to such a degree.

  He parried the sword thrust, leaped back from the slashing dagger his opponent wielded in his left hand, lunged forward. The move was slow and awkward-like his men, Marlowe was tired-and his blade was easily beaten aside. Marlowe leaped back away from the riposte, the man’s blade missing him by inches.

  Billy Bird,
son of a bitch! Marlowe thought, even as his eyes kept track of every move his opponent made. But he had not seen Billy come over the rail. His eyes darted around. No Billy that he could see. Had Billy Bird been voted out by a faction of his crew bent on betrayal?

  The other man lunged again, a full-body attack, sword and dagger, and Marlowe had all he could do to fight him off. The man-Marlowe did not recognize him-was fast, but Marlowe could see his tendency to expose himself as he countered with the dagger, and he knew that was the weakness that would kill him.

  One step back, sword held low, and the man leaped forward, brought the dagger around, and Marlowe had him right under the arm, drove his sword into his thrashing body. The man’s eyes went wide, his mouth fell open, and he screamed as if the sword puncture had released the sound from his chest.

  Sword withdrawn, and the man collapsed. Marlowe turned to see who was next. Searched the deck for a familiar face. He had met most of the Revenges during their floating bacchanal. But he recognized no one.

  And then one of his own men threw down his sword, shouted, “Quarter!” And then another did the same, and then the fight was over, the furious, confused, stunned Elizabeth Galleys dropping their weapons, glaring at this new enemy, who looked on them in gloating triumph.

  And then on the far side of the deck, up the boarding steps and through the gangway came Billy Bird. He stepped with great difficulty. His face was a battered wreck, his nose broken, both his eyes blackened and one of them swollen shut.

  He stood there for a moment, swaying. And then, coming up behind him and shoving him to the deck, appeared Roger Press.

  Hours before, Billy Bird had heard the signal, two guns in quick succession, then a third, and he knew what it meant. His head had jerked up from the deck, half turned toward the sound, and then Roger Press had slammed his boot into Billy’s stomach and driven the breath out of him.

  “What was that?”

  Billy Bird, eyes wide, gasping, as if all the air had suddenly been sucked from the deck. At last he managed to draw breath. “Cannon fire, you stupid bastard…” he croaked.