The rebel heart hg-4

by Martin Stephen

  Gresham decided to play the aristocrat.

  'Serve him right!' he said grandly, and with a laugh. 'Drowning'll teach him not to get drunk at sea!' It was a comment that could have come very easily from numerous of the chinless wonders who spent their time pomping around Court.

  Gresham retreated to the stern rail, directly behind the wheel. The sailing master's attention was distracted by the sight of Mannion, apparently clumsily climbing into the crow's nest, despite the protestations of Lowbrow which were whipped away by the wind before they could properly reach the deck. Mannion was half in and half out of the vantage point when he raised the flagon he still clutched in his hand in what appeared to be a salute. Except the salute turned into something else as he brought the flagon crashing down on the skull of the look-out. The man collapsed forward, hanging half in and half out of the wooden structure, arms dangling faintly ludicrously.

  If they had known for certain that the look-out had been bought by an unidentified enemy, Mannion would simply have hurled him overboard and left the sea to do its job. But what if this was a false alarm? Were their suspicions worth the life of a possibly innocent man? Gresham had reckoned not, so Mannion tied the fiercest of gags round the unconscious man's mouth, and produced twine firstly to bind his hands, then his arms to his side and finally his feet. Finally he bound him to the mast, so it looked as if he were still on duty. One thing was certain. If the Anna sank tonight, she would be taking its erstwhile look-out along with her.

  The sailing master looked aghast as the blow struck, and started as if to move from the wheel when his sailor's instinct told him what happened to sailing vessels whose helmsman suddenly left their station; the wheel and the helm as a result swinging wildly in the wind. Still grappling the wheel, he turned with open mouth to remonstrate with Gresham when suddenly more stars than there were in the sky exploded in his head, and he fell unconscious. Gresham pocketed the short wooden club and grabbed the helm, the Anna already having started to swing head to wind. Jack appeared as from nowhere, and dragged the sailing master to one side, binding him as effectively as Mannion had done the look-out. Then he came to the wheel, taking it over with a nod from Gresham.

  There were flittering shadows on the deck now, moving quietly with shoes removed so as not to wake the rest of the crew sleeping in the forecastle. The extra chests that had been brought from The House were opened, some of their contents removed. This was the tricky part. The Anna's guns were not on her lower decks, firing through ports cut into the hull. They were rather on the upper deck, firing through the guardrail. The result was that their snouts barely projected over the side, but under any normal circumstances they would still have been rolled back to muzzle load. Yet even these light brass guns would send noise and shuddering pounding through the hull if they were rolled back on their wheeled mountings, and if that did not wake the crew and the master nothing would.

  Could they load the guns without rolling them back? The men had assured Gresham they could. It was devilishly difficult, though. They were under half sail, and a ship moving through the sea under sail is never a steady platform. One man had to lean out over the bulwark and push the powder charge down to the end of the barrel using a shortened rammer. A second man held onto his legs for all he was worth. The charges brought from The House, were in the finest of linen bags. The loader had to ram a metal spike down the touch hole of the gun, piercing the linen and exposing the powder. He would then pour a charge of powder down the touch hole. He could then light the powder directly with a slow fuse, or use the new-fangled flint-and-wheel mechanism on the gun to fire it. In the meantime, the loader had taken the ball, and rammed that down the barrel as well, while leaning out over the side. Except in this case, it was not a ball the loader was ramming down the barrel, but another, more coarsely bound package — grapeshot: loose, sharp pieces of metal, lethal at short range to any crowded deck. While Mannion and three of the men sweated to load the cannon, Gresham and Dick loaded the swivel guns. Here again convention was being denied. Just as the main deck cannon were for ball, so the swivel guns were for grape. Yet Gresham was opening packages from The House that contained not one but two small cannon balls, linked by chain. Chain shot. Designed to wrap itself round masts, bringing them crashing down. There was some satisfaction for Gresham in the recognition that these had been part of the original stores he had brought to the Anna for this journey. The first thing he had done when he had bought the ship was to have ball and grape cast for her cannon. Many did not bother. You could fire almost anything out of the mouth of cannon, including balls far too small for its bore. If you did, you simply increased to ludicrous proportions windage, the effect the air had on a cannon ball that was not perfectly round, or the ball ricocheted round the inside of the barrel as it was fired to the vast detriment of any capacity to aim it.

  They were hampered by the need to load on both sides. If the enemy came, which side of the Anna would they come alongside? There was no way of knowing. In three quarters of an hour it was finished.

  Gresham remembered to ask Mannion to go down and brief Jane on what was happening. He then had a sudden feeling of panic. Would she fire through the door and kill him?

  They had shifted the allocation of men in the light of what they were expecting. Jack had taken the helm, even putting on the sailing master's stupid little woollen cap that had covered his blond hair, and trying to shrink himself in size. Gresham and Dick crouched behind the bulwark, two pistols each in their belts, both clutching boat axes with a cutting blade on one end and a sharp spike on the other. Gresham had his sword, despite the extraordinary ability of the sword and scabbard to get between the legs and trip up the owner. Mannion and the others huddled under the lee of the quarterdeck. A slow match in a tub of sand was burning between each of their cannon.

  The Anna ploughed on, gently plunging her bow into the slight swell, the whoosh and swish of the waves strangely regular and set-ding. The dim light of the stern lantern showed nothing clearly, but cast a faint luminosity over the quarterdeck, the angle changing and rolling with the motion of the sea.

  Who was master and who was servant now, thought Gresham? They were simply six men, with the same skin to feel pain, the same skull to be broken and the same heart to be pierced, six men united by the intensity of risk and fear. The fear that none of them would admit, but which ate away at their guts like a worm eating its way through flesh.

  They strained to hear a change in the noise of the waves, a change that would signal another vessel pounding alongside. The minutes dragged on. Had it all been imagination? It was over an hour now since darkness had closed down on Gresham's last sight of the sails. He was about to convince himself that a look-out and a sailing master had been given seriously unnecessary headaches when he heard the noise. A different sound of water being pushed aside, one that did not match the motion of the Anna.

  Without conscious thought on Gresham's part the other person who shared his soul took over. This person is calm, icy calm, and does not feel fear. This other person has heightened senses and awareness, can smell every tang of salt in the air, actually hear the wind as it passes through the rigging. This person views the world as if everything has slowed down. This person, back pressed against the upright of the guard rail, seated low on the deck so no head was visible, felt able to twist round and look out into the noisy gloom of the sea. Yes! He had guessed right: put himself on the port side, assuming the enemy vessel would come at them from the land side.

  They were carrying stern and bow lights, and two lights hung at the masthead. They cast a ghostly, flickering light onto the deck, and for a surprising distance on either side of them. It was a shock when the enemy vessel suddenly appeared as if it had surfaced from under the very waves, sweeping up from astern, low, lean and menacing, like a sharp-beaked sea monster. Dark as it was, the dim light meant that Gresham could see the men packed onto its deck. Damn! There must be nearer to twenty of them, and a bundle of seamen. Twenty against s
ix. Well, it was time to lessen the odds.

  Scrabbling along the deck like comical tortoises, still invisible to their attackers, Mannion, Dick, Tom and Edward moved to each of the four cannon. On the other vessel, two men were swinging grappling hooks, preparing to throw them over the rapidly diminishing gap between the two ships. Half the remainder were already climbing onto the rail, holding with one or both hands to the rigging, waiting to jump across to the other ship. They were good, give them their due, no noise, no excited chatter. All very businesslike.

  Hell can be replicated here on earth. Just as the grappling hooks were about to be thrown, Mannion put his fuse to the touch hole of his cannon. Dick, Tom and Edward were a second behind him, if that. The sharp, eye-burning, red and orange tongues of flame that leapt out across the void were more startling than the crashing noise of the explosion. Gresham, his eyes firmly closed, desperate to preserve his night vision, hoped the others had heeded his instruction to do likewise. The glare of the light cut through his eyelids, determined to sear and scar his memory.

  The impact of the grapeshot was appalling. It was as if a massive scythe, Death himself, had cut through the men standing on the rail, the nails and metal shards tearing into flesh, gouging and spoiling. There were shouts and screams, but as always they were from those left relatively unscathed. Those scoured and stripped red by the cannons were either dead in an instant, or their bodies forced into instant shock. One man looked in silent horror at where his right leg had been a moment before, and toppled over the side in silence. Yet the irony of war was still in charge, the terrifying random nature of death. One man stood still on the guard rail, unmarked, while those around him were blasted to butcher's meat. He looked to left and to right, uncomprehending, too stunned to realise the nature of his luck. Bodies, still or trembling and in spasm, littered the deck, covered now in sticky blood and human debris.

  The men on the Anna were not finished yet. As soon as they had fired the cannon, before the attackers could react from their shock, all four men and Gresham on the quarterdeck bent down and picked up fragile jars, pilfered to great complaint from the stores of the cook at The House. Filled now with lamp oil, oily rags stuffed in their necks, Gresham and all except Jack, glued to the wheel, touched the fuses to them and lobbed them over the gap and onto the deck of their attacker. One, infuriatingly, bounced on the deck but did not break, and a seaman kicked it through the scuppers and over the side. The other four burst into flames, which licked satisfyingly at the deck timbers of the attacking vessel. Two spread their oil over bodies, one dead and one wounded. Gresham swore that the flame of one of them was soused out by the blood pumping from a wounded man. As the fire bit into his clothing and over his hand, the man started to scream. Suddenly it was easy to spot the sailors who were the normal crew of the attacking vessel. For sailors in a wooden vessel held together by tar, fire is second only to water as an enemy. Three or four men broke away and started to stamp out the flames, one of the four clearly in charge, giving orders. He was a small man with a goatee beard.

  A surprising number of men had survived the withering blast of grapeshot. How many? Difficult to say in the dark, despite the flickering light of the lamp oil still eagerly seeking to turn the deck to ashes. Certainly ten men, not less, perhaps a few more. Shock. Then anger. And a fierce desire for vengeance. Gresham had seen it so many times. Men either broke when faced with a sudden shock, or became consumed by blood lust. These men would have been hired because they were fighting men. As such, they were responding the only way fighting men knew how. Blood for blood.

  A life for a life. Heartbreak for heartbreak. It was the oldest plaint in the world.

  Gresham had always known they would be outnumbered, could not rely on the four cannon doing the job for them. The oil was a diversion, dangerous but within the compass of any competent crew to stamp out, literally, before it became a real threat.

  He moved to the swivel gun and, as if on an order, Jack slung a loop of rope over the wheel and secured it. It would steer the ship for a minute or more, but if luck turned their way a minute was all they would need.

  The wheel of the attacking vessel was manned by one man. The deck of the Anna was still rising and falling, the sea refusing to change its habits simply because men were killing each other.

  Earth and Water, Fire and Air,

  Which nothing know of human fears.

  Earth and Water, Fire and Air,

  Which bore hemlock for Socrates.

  Earth and Water, Fire and Air,

  Which held a cup for Christ's blood tears.

  Earth and Water, Fire and Air,

  Will hold your cup of death and years.

  For some reason the doggerel he had written years earlier came to Gresham's mind. The sea would not mourn the men who had died, or the men who were going to die. In the great scheme of things, no man or woman could be said to matter.

  Waiting until the upthrust of the waves, Gresham aimed the swivel gun as carefully as he could at the enemy's wheel, Jack firing at almost the same moment. There was a double-tongued explosion of flame, and caught in it was the helmsman, open-mouthed. One ball ploughed into the deck two foot away from the wheel, cutting a furrow and sending lethal splinters flying through the night air. The other caught the wheel housing at its base, shattering it to pieces and filling the helmsman with so many splinters that he looked like a human porcupine. The ropes in the wheel housing disintegrated, and the rudder of the attacking vessel was no longer under control.

  What should have happened then was that the attacker, its steering blasted to hell along with half its complement of crew, should have sheered away uncontrollably, unable to follow the Anna even if the spirit of its men had not been broken.

  But war is not an exact science, as Gresham knew to his cost. Seconds before the wheel housing was shattered, a grappling iron arched through the air and hooked into the Anna's guard rail. One man had kept his head amid the panic and bloodshed, and bound the two ships together. It was the same man who had ordered the sailors to stamp out the flames, the small man with the strange beard. For a moment those hauling on the grappling iron were distracted by the carnage unleashed on the wheel housing, but then they renewed their efforts.

  Damn! If that one throw had missed, the other ship would be careering away, by now, its steering ropes broken, the Anna free to make her escape. One throw. One stupid throw. The difference between life and death. He must cut that rope.

  The two hulls came together with a grinding crash.

  Sails full set, the attacking ship tried to veer away, helmless, but met the resistance of the Anna's hull, its wheel still set for the wind. For the moment the greater mass of the Anna took charge, and the two intertwined hulls charged on through the dark.

  The remaining men on the attacker raised an exultant cheer. There were no prisoners taken at sea. And this had become personal. There were eleven of them left, a couple of them wounded but not seriously so, and only four men on the main deck of the Anna, two on the quarterdeck. What was there left to lose?

  Gresham knew that in an instant the remaining enemy would launch themselves onto the deck of the Anna. They would do so to the accompaniment of the awful, shrieking and grinding sound of two hulls bound unwillingly together, — and the frantic banging on the hatches that secured the forecastle and the hold. Mannion and the others had thoughtfully battened both of them down, as one would when securing for a storm. The result was that the normal crew of the Anna and her captain were locked in below, just in case they might decide to take the side of the attackers.

  The defenders had one surprise left. Those attacking had to step up onto the deck of the Anna, exposed. Men expecting to board a ship, where those on the receiving end had no warning, armed themselves with axes and sabres, cutting weapons for close work. Pistols were heavy, cumbersome, and tended to lose their priming powder if joggled. There was less hindrance for those who stood waiting for an assault.

  As eleven men l
aunched themselves onto the deck of the Anna, six pistol shots rang out. One missed completely. Dick had been shown how to load and fire such a weapon, but at the last nerves had overcome him. One other ball caught a glancing blow to the shoulder of an attacker, tearing his jacket but only nicking his flesh. He swore vociferously but swept on. One, obscenely, caught an attacker full in the mouth, and blew his head into a foul red jelly.

  Unlike a rifle bullet, a pistol ball leaves the barrel at a relatively low velocity. This has many consequences that reduce its lethalness as a weapon. The recoil is more blunt and savage, reducing aim. The short barrel means that the ball receives less sense of direction from its carrier, and is freer to decide where it goes. The ball travels less far. Its accuracy is in part a function of the speed with which it leaves the barrel.

  But the pistol ball has one, great advantage. The far faster rifle bullet hits the body at high speed and passes through it, there being little difference in size between the entry and the exit wounds. The lead pistol ball does not have the speed to pass through the body. It flattens as it meets its first impact with flesh, and even more so if the first impact is with bone. So much of the human body is fluid, and the slow pistol ball sets up a shock wave as it first hits and then settles into living flesh. Fire a pistol with a lead ball into a lump of clay, modelled to have the same constituency as human flesh and the exit wound will be six times larger than that on entry.