The Pirate Round

by James Nelson

  ‘Ahhhh, goddamn it!’ he shouted, giving voice to the pain and the horror. He gritted his teeth, clapped his hand under his arm, put pressure on the wound.

  He turned his head to see how long they had before the other boat was on them, but he was surprised to see the boat stopped in the water, men leaning on their oars, more men swarming around the bows. There was a hole shot clean through, right at the stem, and they were close enough that Marlowe could see men stuffing jackets and rope and whatever else they had into the hole.

  And he remembered. Round shot. He looked forward to call to Burgess, but the boatswain was crumpled over his gun, and from the looks of him he had taken most of the case-shot blast.

  Bickerstaff appeared, blood smeared on his cheek. ‘Francis! You’re hit!’

  ‘A scratch! But you’ve lost fingers! Let me see!’ Reluctantly Marlowe brought his hand out from under his arm. Once he let the pressure off, the pain shot right up through his shoulder.

  Bickerstaff took the hand in his, examined it, but Marlowe had to turn his head. Even after all the bloody mutiliation he had seen – and caused – he could not endure the sight of his own fingers blown to stumps.

  He felt a pressure at the base of his fingers, forced himself to look. Bickerstaff had lashed spun yard around them to stanch the bleeding.

  ‘Thank you,’ Marlowe said, then in his commanding voice called, ‘Come along, you men! Push the wounded ones aside, them that can’t pull an oar! See how they loosen off sail, yonder! Let’s get back to the Elizabeth Galley and quit this damned place!’

  That seemed to rally the stunned men some. They pushed aside the wounded and the dead, took up the sweeps that were still there, pulled for the ship. Bickerstaff took an oar, and Dinwiddie, who had been lying in the bottom of the boat and had escaped any injury, took one as well.

  One of Yancy’s longboats, the one that had come after them, was knocked out, but the other had not swerved in her course for the Queen’s Venture. Now that longboat and Marlowe’s were converging, and it looked as if they might reach the listing Queen’s Venture at the same time.

  ‘Come on, pull! Pull!’ Marlowe urged. He did not know if there was fight enough left in his men to do battle with another boatload of armed brigands.

  Right for the low rail of the sinking Venture, that was where he aimed the bow. Run the boat right against the side of the ship, help the wounded up and over the slanting deck, onto the Elizabeth Galley, cut the ropes, and go. Sail loosened off. Cut the cable.

  He looked to his left, saw the other boat closing, both making for the same point on the Venture’s rail. But Marlowe could see now that his own boat would get there first, beat the other by a good minute.

  ‘Pull! Pull!’ It was the kind of silly, useless order that he disdained – they could not pull any harder than they were – but he could not help himself.

  Four minutes, it seemed like an hour or more, and Marlowe’s longboat swooped up alongside the heavily listing Queen’s Venture. The men flung away their oars, no need for them now, and grabbed hold of the low rail of the ship. The uninjured or slightly injured leaped over the gunnel, onto the ship, turned to help their shipmates.

  Marlowe and Bickerstaff stumbled forward, lifted the still-living men out of the boat and over the rail, handed them into the arms of their shipmates, who pulled them or carried them up the slanting deck to the sanctuary of the Elizabeth Galley.

  Dinwiddie climbed out next, stood on the rail of the sinking ship, offered a hand to Marlowe, which Marlowe ignored. He climbed out himself, turned. Yancy’s longboat was thirty feet away, close, but too far to catch them now.

  Marlowe reached out his arm, and Bickerstaff reached out to him. Bickerstaff’s hand clapped onto Marlowe’s forearm and Marlowe’s onto Bickerstaff’s, and he helped his friend from the boat just as the man in the longboat fired the swivel in the bow.

  Marlowe’s head was filled with a horrible screaming, a rushing concussion of sound, and he felt himself spinning as though someone had twirled him on a dance floor. His eyes were filled with red, he could see nothing but red. He hit the deck, slid, came to a stop against the rail. He felt a burning agony all through his right side.

  He opened his eyes and was surprised to see that everything was just as it was – the water, the deck, the sky now robin’s-egg blue overhead. He looked down at his arm, the arm that had been holding Bickerstaff’s. It was not an arm anymore, just a shredded mass of bone and flesh and blood-soaked cloth. He looked at the deck. Bickerstaff was there, wide-eyed. A dozen or so holes in his chest. A pool of blood below him, running into the scuppers.

  ‘Francis …’ Marlowe said. ‘Francis, what have I done …?’ It was no more than a whisper. His mind could grasp nothing beyond that question.

  ‘Come on!’ Dinwiddie shouted. He grabbed Marlowe’s collar, tried to make him stand.

  Marlowe looked up at him. ‘We came for you,’ he said. ‘Francis, he said we had to. We came for you. And now he is dead.’

  ‘Come on!’

  Marlowe saw Dinwiddie grab Bickerstaff’s lifeless body, drape it over his shoulder, and push his way, grunting, up the steep deck. He passed Bickerstaff’s body across the wide gap, half ran and half slid back, pulled Marlowe to his feet. Everything felt heavy, dull, the edges of Marlowe’s vision going dark. He was aware only of the pain, the incredible pain in his arm, the anguish.

  Dinwiddie eased him over the rail. He saw the Elizabeth Galleys reaching out for him, pulling him the rest of the way to the Elizabeth Galley’s deck.

  Marlowe felt his head swimming, knew he was losing a lot of blood, reckoned this was the end. Francis dead, he did not want to go on. Swimming, swimming, the tall rig overhead whirling around. He closed his eyes, felt the warmth of the deck below him.

  Peleg Dinwiddie watched them lay Marlowe’s pale form down on the deck, Bickerstaff’s bloody and lifeless body beside him.

  Close his eyes! Dear God, will someone close his eyes? Dinwiddie thought, but he could not do it himself. He could not put his hand on those accusing eyes.

  ‘We came for you. Francis, he said we had to.’

  Of course. Marlowe would not have risked everything to save him. But Francis was a true man, a real friend, a decent and moral being. So of course it was Francis who took the case-shot blast. Not Marlowe. Not him. Francis. The good ones always got it.

  Dinwiddie felt the agony like a hot coal inside him. He was back on the Elizabeth Galley, he was in the midst of fire, he had helped his shipmates back on board. But he was not cleansed, not by far. He felt dirtier than ever.

  To his left, down the sloping deck, the longboat was twenty feet away and closing, fifty armed men ready to swarm up the deck of the Queen’s Venture, over the Galley’s rail. Fling themselves with loaded weapons and drawn swords at his shipmates, and his shipmates, disorganized, with no arms at the ready, might well be taken.

  He looked down. An arms chest at his feet, and he knew what was in it, had inspected it a hundred times back when he was first officer, a lifetime or two before. Smoldering match by the guns in the waist below. He moved without thinking, just acting on nebulous emotion, a sense for what would make things right.

  Ran down into the waist, grabbed up the match. Forward, men were hacking through the anchor cable, no time even to slip it through the hawsepipe. Back up to the gangway. Flip open the arms chest. To one side, a neat row of hand grenadoes with their uniform wooden plugs and curling fuse.

  He snatched one up, touched the matched to it, held it there until the fuse was hissing and burning well. Picked up another one and held that fuse to the match until that was also well lit.

  Below him the boat was just bumping up alongside the low, nearly submerged rail of the Queen’s Venture, the first of the armed men leaping out of her.

  Dinwiddie jumped across to the Queen’s Venture’s gangway and ran around the open waist, then down the deck, slipping and stumbling with the sharp angle, screaming as loud as he could. It was a
scream from his heart and from his bowels, his final sound, and all his life and all he had been or done, all the horrible mistakes he had made in the past half year or ever before that – all of it went into that shout.

  He saw heads snap up in surprise, saw pistols leveled, but it was too late for them. He slammed into the few men on the Venture’s deck like a ball in a game of ninepins, knocked them aside, launched himself into the longboat.

  He fell across the thwarts with a painful crash, the breath knocked from his lungs, but he clutched the grenadoes tighter still. He heard shouts of surprise, cries of ‘Grenado! He’s got a grenado!’ Hands pulled at him, tugged at his arms, beat him. He closed his eyes tight, clenched his fists around the metal balls, then rolled over fast so he would not smother the blast with his body.

  More shouts. Through clenched eyelids he saw a bright flash of red.

  Billy Bird, watching from the Elizabeth Galley’s quarterdeck, saw the scene unfold with a strange combination of horror, admiration, and disgust. That fellow – Billy had no notion of who he was – had charged into the boat with two lit grenadoes, had fended off all hands reaching for him, had exposed the bombs at just the right second.

  ‘Hoisted by his own petard, and by choice, for all love!’ he shouted.

  The two explosions, less than a second apart, had torn the man holding them to bits and shredded half the crew of the boat. Billy Bird could hear the scream of the shrapnel through the air, could see the bloody spread of flying metal as it plowed the men down.

  Billy had had a plan, and that was to cut the Queen’s Venture away and let it roll over the attacking boat, but then Marlowe had reached the Venture first and spoiled that idea.

  Then Yancy’s boat had reached the Venture’s side, and Billy thought it quite possible that those fifty armed and determined men might even overrun his larger but weary, hungry, disorganized crew, take the ship back. But now that problem was wiped out, figuratively, literally.

  They had not all been killed in the blast. Some were even now crawling forward, stepping over the mutilated bodies of the shipmates, making for the deck of the Venture, still determined to carry the fight forward, still whipped into enough of a frenzy that they were willing to plunge into it, even with their decimated numbers.

  But this was not a problem.

  ‘Honeyman, now!’ Billy shouted. The anchor cable parted under the blow of an ax, and all along the larboard side of the Elizabeth Galley men fell with axes on the lashings binding her to the Queen’s Venture. It was like cutting cordwood, so taut were the ropes, and with a few strokes they began to part with the sound of small-arms fire. A gunner’s mate who stood imprudently close to the rope was caught with the snap-back and flung clean off the gangway and into the waist.

  The last half dozen ropes did not need cutting. With all the weight of the ship on them, they parted one after another, right down the line from forward aft as if it had been orchestated.

  The Queen’s Venture gave a shudder and a sound like a deep moan, and over she went. Her masts came sweeping down to the water like felled trees, her larboard side disappeared, and from the Galley’s deck all they could see was the great white, weed-covered bottom as the ship turned on her side.

  The pressure of the Venture rolling and pushing against the Galley, and the water she pushed as she rolled, served to drift the Elizabeth Galley away from the dying vessel.

  ‘Sheet home topsails!’ Billy shouted, and the men waiting eagerly and anxiously at the pinrails let fly buntlines and hauled on sheets, and the big sails were pulled down and out.

  ‘Run away with your halyards!’ The yards began their steady climb up the topmasts, the sails catching the breeze as they spread, the Galley coming to life, inching away from the Queen’s Venture.

  The Venture, in turn, was settling in the water. For some seconds she remained on her side, as if she were just resting, and then the hull started to sink. Her entire larboard side went down, and then her long keel disappeared under the blue-green water. Faster and faster she was swallowed up as her hull became less buoyant. The water churned and bubbled around her and rose up over her waterline, over her gunports that were now pointing at the sky, up over her rail.

  At last only the upper part of her quarterdeck and poop was still visible, and then that went, and a second later the masts and yards were dragged below the water, and then there was nothing left but bits of floating debris and bodies and the ever-widening circle of rippling water.

  The Elizabeth Galleys lined the rail, stared silently at the spot where the ship had disappeared. Billy, too, stared; he could not take his eyes away.

  What a waste, he thought, what a bloody waste. It was the only thing he could think, and he was not even certain of what he meant.

  CHAPTER 29

  The longboat bearing Elephiant, Lord Yancy and Captain Roger Press and what remained of their mutual commands, the longboat that was kept afloat through the tenuous use of jackets pushed into the gaping holes made by the round shot and half her men bailing furiously, ground up at last on the beach.

  Yancy stood and pushed his way through the men and jumped down into the sand. He ignored everyone, stepped quickly up to the road and out along the dock. He stopped in time to see the poop deck and then the masts of his new flagship, the Queen’s Venture, disappearing below the water.

  He did not know how much booty was still aboard her or if it was even possible to get to it. The answers to those questions, he imagined, were ‘not much’ and ‘most likely not.’

  Marlowe’s ship, the Elizabeth Galley – how that name mocked him! – was under way, fore and main topsails set to the steady morning breeze and the forecourse sheeting home even as he watched.

  Yancy gritted his teeth. He felt his whole body shake. Not trembling hands or shivering such as he had had before and recognized. This was something else, a tremor like an earthquake starting from his feet and spreading up and out to his extremities until his entire body was vibrating. He was suddenly afraid that something inside might give out – his heart, his brain, his bowels – something might burst from the internal pressure. He was not furious. He was far, far beyond that.

  Footsteps on the wooden planks behind him, and he spun around and tried to say something, but his jaw and his tongue and his brain all seemed to be locked up, frozen in a state of paralysis.

  ‘Dear Lord, Yancy,’ said Press, an amused note in his voice. He pulled the toothpick from his mouth, pointed it at Yancy. ‘You look as if you’re like to blow a blood vessel!’

  That seemed to shake something loose, and Yancy found he could think again.

  His first thought was to go after them. The brig was still at anchor, and the sloop Speedwell. But the sloop was pretty well battered – even from the dock he could see that – and the brig would never be able to run the Galley down. He could not risk letting them get away.

  ‘Nagel, you send some son of a bitch to the battery on Quail Island, you tell those bastards up there to blow that damned ship to splinters, do you hear me? Blow it right out of the water, I don’t even want to see pieces of it, I want it blown apart, do you understand?’

  Nagel looked around. ‘Send ’em in what boat?’

  ‘Damn the boat! Send someone to swim over!’

  ‘Aye. Stokes, you go. Get a move on.’

  Stokes nodded, kicked off his shoes, unbuckled his sword belt, pulled off his shirt as he ran for the water’s edge.

  Yancy turned his back on the others, folded his arms, watched the Elizabeth Galley standing across the harbor.

  She would not make it. There was breeze enough, but the tide was against her. Stokes would be at the battery in twenty minutes, passing his order to fire, and five minutes after that the ship would be under their guns. There was no missing, not at that range. The gunners would blow the ship away.

  Yancy wanted the ship, of course, and wanted the vast amounts of treasure that that bastard Marlowe had stolen from him. But if he could not have that, at least
he could have them all dead. He could stand there and watch them as they were blasted to pieces by the battery’s big guns, not a cable length from the channel down which the ship must sail. He could picture the agony on the decks as their near escape was taken from them.

  Perhaps they would abandon ship. Perhaps they would row ashore. Perhaps he would get his hands on Marlowe and Elizabeth after all. He felt some small sense of optimism, where before there had been only fury.

  Arms aching, heaving for breath, stumbling, Barnaby Stokes, sixteen years of age, strongest swimmer among the pirates there on St Mary’s, stood up in the shallow water near the jungle-covered shore of Quail Island and staggered for the beach.

  He reached the sand, picked up his pace, jogged through the gate in the battery’s wall, across the flat, paved ground, past the furnace for heating shot, past the bored gun crew who sat in the shade and drank rum and watched him with idle curiosity. He fell against the low wall along which the five big thirty-two-pounders were arranged, looking out over the water. He stood for a moment, hands palms down on the top of the wall, catching his breath, looking out at the harbor to see if he was too late.

  He was not. The ship had everything set and was catching a decent breeze, but the tide was against her. It would be a good five minutes before she passed in front of the battery’s guns.

  Stokes stood, breathed steady, took in the scene. It was beautiful, almost too beautiful to be real. The light blue sky, the aqua blue water in the harbor, the deep blue of the open ocean beyond. The green jungle carpeting the hills, the ship a quarter mile off, like an intricate toy. It seemed too beautiful a morning to fill it with smoke and flying shot and death.

  But there had been so much of that already that morning that Stokes reckoned a bit more would not hurt. Besides, it was going to be a great frolic, standing in the battery, blowing apart a ship whose six-pounder guns would be no match for the big thirty-twos.