Sharpe's Devil

by Bernard Cornwell

  “We’re trying, mister! We’re trying!” The man on the steering oar was desperately pushing against the whaler’s weight.

  “Trying?” Ardiles repeated the word, then, still in English, he swore. “The devil! They didn’t lose their tryworks when they rolled!” He turned to shout toward the quarterdeck, but already events were accelerating to combat pace and Ardiles’s warning shout was lost in the sudden chaos.

  For just as Ardiles turned, so a massive wave lifted the whaler’s square stern and an officer on the Espiritu Santo’s quarterdeck saw that the Mary Starbuck’s rudder was not shorn away after all, but was in place and being steered from a tiller concealed beneath the whaler’s deck. The rudder was bringing the heavy boat toward the Spanish frigate, which meant the steering oar was faked, which meant the shipwreck was faked, a fact that Ardiles had simultaneously guessed when he saw that the whaler’s tryworks, a brick furnace built amidships in which the whale blubber was rendered down into the precious oil, had survived the apparent rolling of a ship that had destroyed three solid masts.

  The Spaniards were shouting in warning, but the Mary Starbuck was already within ten feet of the frigate. A man aboard the whaler suddenly cut free the American flag and, in its place, unfurled a red, white and blue flag which was unfamiliar to Sharpe, but all too familiar to Ardiles. It was the flag of the Chilean rebel government. “Beat to quarters!” Ardiles shouted, and as he called the order aloud, so the hatch covers on the whaler’s deck were thrust aside and Sharpe, astonished, saw that a huge gun was mounted in the hold. It was a carronade: a squat, wide-mouthed, short-range killer designed to shred men rather then smash the timbers or rigging of a ship. Sharpe also saw, before he and Harper dropped for cover behind the nine-pounder cannon, that a mass of men was seething up onto the whaler’s deck. The men were armed with muskets, pikes, cutlasses, pistols and grapnels.

  “Fire!” The order was shouted on board the Mary Starbuck, and the carronade belched a bellyful of iron scraps and links of rusted chain up at the Espiritu Santo’s waist. Most of the missiles struck the starboard gunwale, but a few Spanish crewmen, helping to lower the first water barrel over the side, were thrown back in a sudden spray of blood. The barrel, holed in a hundred places, sprayed drinking water into the bloody scuppers.

  Grapnels came soaring across the narrowing gap of water. The metal hooks snagged on rigging or thumped into the decks. The Espiritu Santo’s crew, trained to just such an emergency, reacted fast. Some men started slashing at the ropes attached to the grapnels, while others ran to seize pikes or muskets. “Gun crews! Gun crews!” Ardiles had left the frigate’s bows and was striding back to the quarterdeck where the children were screaming in terror. “Passengers down to the orlop deck!” Ardiles was astonishingly calm. “Quick now! Below!”

  Musket balls whiplashed up from the whaler, which suddenly struck the frigate’s side, so hard that some of the Espiritu Santo’s crew were knocked down by the force of the collision. The first boarders were already swarming up their ropes. Sharpe, snatching a glance from the beakhead, saw two of the invaders fall back as their rope was cut free. Another, gaining the gunwale, screamed as a pike slammed into his face to blind him and hurl him back to the Mary Starbuck’s crowded deck. The attackers, jostling at the ropes, were screaming a war cry that at first sounded jumbled and indistinct to Sharpe, but which now became clear. “Cochrane! Cochrane!” Ardiles, it seemed, was having his dearest wish granted.

  A grapnel soared high over the Espiritu Santo’s bows to fall and catch on the beakhead. For the moment Sharpe and Harper were alone on the small hidden platform of the beakhead, and neither man moved to cut the rope free. “We’re joining the fight then, are we?” Harper asked.

  “I like Ardiles,” Sharpe said, “but I’m damned if I’ll fight for a man on the same side as Bautista.”

  “Ah, well. Back to the wars.” Harper grinned, then instinctively ducked as another carronade fired, this one from the forecastle above them. The Espiritu Santo’s forecastle carronade, unable to depress its muzzle sufficiently, had not done great damage to the attackers, but its noise alone seemed to encourage the Spaniards who now began to shout their own war cry, “Espiritu Santo! Espiritu Santo!”

  “So what do we do?” Harper asked.

  “We start with that big bugger up there.” Sharpe jerked his chin up toward the forecastle carronade. He had to shout, for more big guns were firing, these new ones from down below on the gundeck where the Spanish were evidently firing straight into the Mary Starbuck’s upper deck. Sharpe could hear the screams of men being disemboweled and flensed by the close-range horror of the big guns. Sharpe jumped, caught the edge of the forecastle’s deck, and hauled himself up to where three men were serving the carronade. One of them, the gun captain, snapped at Sharpe to fetch some quoins so that the breech of the carronade could be elevated.

  “I’m not on your side!” Sharpe yelled at the man. Behind Sharpe, Harper was struggling to haul his huge weight up the sheer face of the forecastle which, though only eight feet high, was too much for a man as heavy as Harper, which meant that Sharpe, for the moment, was alone. He grabbed one of the carronade’s heavy spikes: a six-foot shaft of hardwood tipped with an iron point. The spike was used to aim the heavy gun by levering its trail around, and the wooden deck under the carronade’s tail was pitted with holes left by the sharp iron point. Sharpe now lunged with the spike as though it was a bayonet. He did not want to kill, for his attack was unexpected and unfair, but the gun’s Captain suddenly pulled a pistol from under his coat and Sharpe had no choice but to ram the spike forward with sudden and savage force so that the iron point punctured the man’s belly. The gun Captain dropped his pistol to grip the spike’s shaft. He was moaning sadly. Sharpe, still lunging forward, slammed the wounded man against the rail and, still pushing, heaved him overboard. Sharpe let go the spike so that the gun Captain, blood cartwheeling away from his wound, fell to the sea with the spike’s shaft still rammed into his belly.

  Sharpe turned. He ducked to retrieve the gun Captain’s pistol and the carronade’s rammer, swung with terrible force by one of the two remaining crewmen, slashed just above his head. Sharpe’s right hand closed on the pistol just as he charged forward to ram his left shoulder into the Spaniard’s belly. He heard the man’s breath gasp out, then he brought the heavy pistol up and hammered it onto his attacker’s skull. The third crew member had backed to the inboard edge of the forecastle where he was uselessly shouting for help. Harper, abandoning his attempt to climb the forward face of the forecastle, had ducked through the galley and was now climbing the companionway steps which led from the maindeck. The third crewmember, thinking that help was at last arriving, leaned down to give Harper a helping hand. Harper grabbed the offered hand, tugged, and the crewman tumbled down into the churning mass of men who fought in the ship’s waist.

  That larger fight was a gutter brawl of close-quarter horror. Cochrane’s invaders had succeeded in capturing a third of the Espiritu Santo’s main deck, but were now faced by a disciplined and spirited crew that fiercely defended their ship. Cochrane’s men, screaming like demons, had achieved an initial surprise, but Ardiles’s hours of practice were beginning to pay dividends as his men forced the invaders back.

  Sharpe, seeing his very first sea fight, was horrified by it. The killing was done in the confining space of a ship’s deck which gave neither side room to retreat. On land, when faced by a determined bayonet attack, most soldiers gave ground, but here there was no ground to give, and so the dead and dying were trampled underfoot. The heaving ocean added a horrid air of chance to death. A man might parry a thrust efficiently and be on the point of killing his opponent when a wave surge might unsteady him and, as he flailed for balance, his belly would be exposed to a steel thrust. One of the Bosun’s mates who had made Sharpe’s first days aboard such misery had been so wounded and was now dying in the scuppers. The man writhed in brief spasms, his hands fluttering and clawing at the broken sword b
lade that was embedded in his belly. A midshipman was bleeding to death, calling for his mother, which pathetic cry swelled into a shriek of terror as a rebel stepped back on the boy’s sliced belly. That rebel then died with a pistol bullet in his brain, hurled back in a spray of bright blood to slide down beside the Bosun’s mate.

  “God save Ireland,” Harper muttered.

  “Is the gun loaded?” Sharpe slapped the carronade, then ducked as a stray musket bullet slapped over his head.

  “Looks like it!”

  Sharpe found another spike which he used to lever the gun’s trail around so that the carronade faced straight down the Espiritu Santo’s length to menace the quarterdeck, where Ardiles was assembling a group of seamen. Those seamen were undoubtedly intended to be the counterattack that would finish off Cochrane’s assault. Sharpe hammered a quoin out from under the carronade’s breech, thus raising the muzzle so that the dreadful weapon was pointing straight at the quarterdeck. The carronade was a pot of a gun, not a long, elegant and accurate cannon, but a squat cauldron to be charged with powder and metal scraps that flayed out like buckshot. A carronade’s range was short, but inside that brief range it was foully lethal.

  The whole ship quivered as another broadside slammed from the frigate’s gundeck to shatter the heavy timbers of the whaler. Most of Cochrane’s men were off the whaler now and crammed onto the Spaniard’s deck where they were hemmed in by bloody pikes and bayonets. Ardiles, preparing his reserves to slam into the left flank of the invaders, was making things worse for Cochrane by destroying his only chance of escape by pounding the whaler into matchwood. Smoke was sifting from the open hold of the Mary Starbuck. Presumably some of the wadding from one of the Espiritu Santo’s cannons had set fire to a splintered timber inside the attacking ship.

  Harper cocked the flintlock that was soldered onto the carronade’s touchhole. Naval guns did not use linstocks, for the spluttering sparks of an open match were too dangerous on board a wooden ship crammed with gunpowder. Instead, just like a musket, the gun was fired by a spring-tensioned flint that was released by a lanyard. “Are you ready?” Sharpe gripped the lanyard and scuttled to one side of the gun to escape its recoil.

  “Get down!” Harper shouted. Ardiles’s men on the quarterdeck had at last seen the threat of the forecastle carronade and a dozen muskets were leveled. Sharpe dropped just as the volley fired. The sound of a musket volley, so achingly familiar, crackled about the ship as the balls whipsawed overhead. Sharpe answered the volley by yanking the carronade’s lanyard.

  The world hammered apart in thunder, in an explosion so close and hot and violent that Sharpe thought he was surely dead as the frigate shivered and dust spurted out of the cracks between her deck planks. Sharpe’s second and more realistic thought was that the barrel of the carronade had burst, but then he saw that the gun, recoiling on its huge carriage, was undamaged.

  The explosion had been aboard the Mary Starbuck. A store of gunpowder in the whaler’s hull had ripped itself apart in a moment’s blinding horror, tearing her deck into shards and exploding the wounded into the sea. Now what remained of the whaler was ablaze. The dark red flames leaped voraciously from her oil-soaked planks to flare as high as the Espiritu Santo’s topmasts.

  “Mary, Mother of God,” Harper said in awe, not at the incandescent whaler, but rather because the Espiritu Santo’s mainmast was toppling. The explosion had ripped out the frigate’s chainplates and now the great mast swayed. Some men, now recovering their wits after being stunned by the concussion of the explosion, shouted in warning, while others, from both sides of the fight, were desperately slashing at the remaining grapnels so that the roaring blaze on the whaler would not leap across to destroy the frigate. Beyond that chaos Sharpe could see a red horror on the poop- and quarterdecks where the blast of his carronade had taken a terrible toll among Ardiles’s men.

  A rebel officer shouted a piercing warning. The swaying mainmast splintered and cracked. Canvas billowed down onto the deck and into the sea. The collapsing mast dragged in its wake the fore topmast and a nightmarish tangle of yards, halyards, lines and sails.

  “Come on, Patrick!” Sharpe cocked the pistol and jumped down from the forecastle. A Spanish sailor, groggy from the explosion, tried to stand in Sharpe’s way so he thumped the man on the side of his head with the pistol’s heavy barrel. A Spanish army officer lunged at Sharpe with a long, narrow sword. Sharpe turned, straightened his right arm and pulled the trigger. The officer seemed to be snatched backward with a halo of exploding blood about his face. Smoke from the burning whaler whirled thick and black and choking across the deck. Sharpe hurled the pistol away and snatched up a fallen cutlass. “Cochrane!” he shouted, “Cochrane!” A mass of Cochrane’s men were swarming toward the frigate’s stern. The explosion and the subsequent fall of the mast had torn the heart out of the frigate’s defenders, though a stubborn rear guard, under an unwounded Ardiles, gathered for a last stand on the quarterdeck.

  To Sharpe’s left was a tall man with red hair who carried a long and heavy-bladed sword. “To me! To me!” The red-haired man was wearing a green naval coat with two gold epaulettes and was the man the rebels were looking to for orders and inspiration. The man had to be Lord Cochrane. Sharpe turned away as a swarm of Spanish fighters came streaming up from the gundeck below. These new attackers were the frigate’s guncrews who, their target destroyed, had come to recapture their maindeck.

  Sharpe fought hand to hand, without room to swing a blade, only to stab it forward in short, hard strokes. He was close enough to see the fear in the eyes of the men he killed, or to smell the garlic and tobacco on their breath. He knew some of the men, but he felt no compunction about killing them. He had declared his allegiance to Ardiles, and Ardiles could have no complaint that Sharpe had changed sides without warning. Nor could Sharpe complain if, this fight lost, he was hung from whatever yardarm was left of the Spanish frigate. Which made it important not to lose, but instead to beat the Spaniards back in blood and terror.

  Harper climbed the fallen trunk of the mainmast. He carried a boarding pike that he swung in a huge and terrifying arc. One of the Irish crew members, having decided to change sides, was fighting alongside Harper. Both men were screaming in Gaelic, inviting their enemies to come and be killed. A musket crashed near Sharpe, who flinched aside from its flame. He ripped the cutlass blade up to throw back an enemy. The cutlass was a clumsy weapon, but sea fighting was hardly a fine art. It was more like a gutter brawl, and Sharpe had grown up with such fighting. He slipped, fell hard on his right knee, then clawed himself up to ram the blade forward again. Blood whipped across a fallen sail. A sailor trapped beneath a fallen yard shrieked as a wave surge shifted the timber balk across his crushed ribs. Balin, his face and hand still bandaged, lay dead in the portside scuppers which now ran with the blood from his crushed skull. A group of rebels had found room to use their pikes. They lunged forward, hooking men with the crooked blade on the pike’s reverse, then pulling their victims out of the Espiritu Santo’s ranks so that another pikeman, using the weapon’s broad axe-head, could slash down hard. The pikemen were driving the frigate’s guncrews back to the poopdeck where a rear guard waited with Ardiles and Lieutenant Otero.

  The ship lurched on the swell, staggering Sharpe sideways. A bleeding man screamed and fell into the sea. It seemed that the Espiritu Santo must have taken on water for she did not come fully upright, but stayed listed to starboard. A volley of musket fire from Ardiles’s group on the quarterdeck punched a hole in the rebels’ ranks, but Cochrane, seeing the danger, had led a rampaging attack up to the poopdeck and now his men clawed and scrabbled up the last companionway to attack Ardiles and his men on the quarterdeck. Royalist Captain faced rebel Admiral. Their two swords clashed and scraped. More rebels were running past their leader, swarming up to the quarterdeck where a final, fanatic group of Spaniards, including most of the army officers, stood to protect their royal ensign.

  A few despairing men still f
ought on the main deck. Sharpe kicked a man in the ankle, then hammered down the cutlass hilt as the man fell. Two men slashed at him, but Sharpe stepped back from their clumsy blades, then sliced his own forward. A rebel joined him, stabbing forward with a bayonet, and suddenly the portside steps to the poopdeck were open. Sharpe ran up. Above him, on the quarterdeck, Ardiles was pressed back by the man Sharpe supposed was Cochrane. Ardiles was no mean swordsman, but he was no match for the red-haired rebel who was taller, heavier and quicker. Ardiles lunged, missed, retreated and was toppled over the railing by a sudden thrust of his opponent’s sword. The Spanish Captain fell onto the poopdeck at Sharpe’s feet. Sharpe stooped and took his sword.

  “You,” Ardiles said bleakly.

  “I’m sorry,” Sharpe said.

  “Who the hell are you?” the red-haired man asked from above Sharpe.

  “A friend! Are you Cochrane?”

  “I am, friend, indeed I am.” Cochrane sketched a salute with his sword, then turned to lead the attack on the desperate group that waited to defend their flag. On the poop and main decks the victorious rebels disarmed Spaniards, but about the great gaudy ensign a terrible battle still waged. Pistols flared, muskets crashed smoke. A rebel squirmed in awful pain in the scuppers. Other rebels, trying to fire down at the stubborn stern guard, climbed the mizzen rigging, but Lieutenant Otero, seeing the danger, ordered a group of the frigate’s marines to fire upward. One of the rebels screamed as a bullet thudded into his belly. For a second he hung from the ratlines, his blood spraying bright across the driver-sail, then he fell to crash down into the sea. Another rebel, losing his nerve, leaped after his dying colleague. The horror was not all visited on the attackers. One of the Espiritu Santo’s midshipmen, no more than eleven years old, was clutching his groin from which blood seeped to spread along a seam between two scrubbed planks of the quarterdeck. The boy was weeping and on his face was a look of utter astonishment. The Mary Starbuck, her fire roaring like a blast furnace, had drifted away from the frigate. The sea between the two ships was littered with wreckage and dead and drowning men.