Killigrew and the Golden Dragon

by Jonathan Lunn

  ‘I hear that someone poisoned the prisoner we had in the gaol.’

  Cargill nodded grimly. ‘My fault. I should have known that someone would try to hush him. But it only shows what ruthless villains we’re dealing with. You can’t afford to take half-measures. This is war, and the only good pilong is a dead pilong.’ Cargill clapped Killigrew on the shoulder as Verran, Morgan and his clerk re-emerged from the after-hatch. ‘I’m going ashore with Captain Morgan. Good luck, Killigrew. I only wish I were coming with you. Next time, perhaps, eh?’

  As Verran stood at the entry port to see Morgan off, Cargill had a word with him before he descended the accommodation ladder. Something he said made Verran glance back at Killigrew. When he saw the lieutenant watching them, Verran smiled and waved before turning back to Cargill.

  ‘Loo-tenant Killigrew?’

  Killigrew turned and saw a young man of about twenty. He was snub-nosed, and although he had obviously grown a beard to make him look older, it actually had the opposite effect. ‘Hayes is the name, sir. Billy Hayes. I’m the number-one tindal.’ He grinned. ‘What you’d be calling the first mate. Welcome aboard, sir. The cap’n asked me to show you to your cabin.’

  ‘Much obliged.’ Killigrew allowed the tindal to show him below decks. ‘So tell me, Mr Hayes, how does a son of Columbia come to be serving on a British steamer in Chinese waters crewed by sea-cunnies?’

  Hayes grinned. ‘When I was a kid I used to work on my pa’s barquentine on Lake Erie, running furs down from Canada. Then I got a job on the brig Pilgrim, out of Boston, sailing around the Horn to fetch bullocks’ hides from California. I met Cap’n Verran in San Diego and he offered to pay me twice what I was getting on the Pilgrim.’

  ‘What was Verran doing in San Diego?’

  Hayes turned away to open the door to one of the cabins for him. ‘Running mails across to the States for Mr Bannatyne. This here’s your cabin, sir. Hope it suits.’

  Killigrew took in the accommodation. The cabin was marginally smaller than the one he enjoyed on the Tisiphone, which was small enough. But what this one lacked in space it certainly made up for in comfort and style, with polished teak fittings and plush velvet furnishings. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told Hayes with a faint smile. ‘It won’t be the first time I’ve had to rough it.’

  Hayes grinned. ‘Yeah, the cap’n’s told me all about you, sir. Syria, Borneo, China, the Guinea Coast… Reckon if your navy had had a few more boys like you back in 1812, things might have been real different. Good to have you aboard, sir. We’ll soon bring them pilongs to heel. Cap’n says to let you unpack and then you can join him on the quarterdeck. We’ll be setting sail on the afternoon tide.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Hayes.’

  ‘Call me Bully.’

  Killigrew waited until the tindal had gone out before opening his sea chest. Then he took out his pepperbox, checked it was loaded and slipped it into one of the capacious pockets of his greatcoat. He was unpacking his shirts into a drawer when he found a full bottle of laudanum. He took it out and stared at it for a moment.

  ‘Thanks, Jago, but no thanks.’

  He crossed to the porthole and was about to throw the bottle out when instead he pulled out the stopper, took a sip, and smiled. He had forgotten how good the taste was. He took a longer pull, and at once a warm feeling of contentment spread outwards from his stomach. He replaced the stopper and put the bottle back in the drawer.

  Chapter 12

  Wheel of Death

  Killigrew and his opponent circled one another on the quarterdeck of the Golden Dragon, where the awning stretched overhead protected them from the heavy rain. Both of them were out of breath from wielding their heavy cutlasses. Killigrew aimed a slash at his opponent’s head and the man brought his own blade up to parry, but the blow was a feint and Killigrew tried to slide in under his guard. His opponent was as fast as lightning, though, and managed to knock the thrust aside before it went home. He took a step back, drawing the lieutenant on. Killigrew lunged but his opponent side-stepped, caught him off balance and slashed at him as he staggered past. His razor-sharp blade sliced through the fabric of Killigrew’s sleeve and drew blood from his upper arm.

  ‘Touché!’

  ‘Pax!’ responded Killigrew.

  Verran grinned. ‘You’re slowing up in your old age, Kit.’

  ‘And you’ve learned a few tricks since we were in the Dreadful.’ Killigrew parted the rent in his sleeve to study the cut below.

  ‘Gosh, did I do that?’ Verran exclaimed as they both slotted their cutlasses into their scabbards. ‘Sorry. I just got carried away…’

  ‘Lack of control, Jago. Didn’t I always tell you control was paramount?’

  ‘Yes, but that was in another context, I seem to recall.’

  ‘Never mind. It’s just a scratch,’ Killigrew said truthfully enough. ‘I think you won that bout.’

  ‘And the match. Well! I never thought the day would come when I could get the better of Kit Killigrew with a cutlass! This deserves an entry all of its own in my journal.’ Verran turned to his steward. ‘Fetchee two-piecey char, Muda.’

  The Malay grinned. ‘Hai, Missee Verran.’ He scurried below.

  The Golden Dragon was two days out of Victoria, having touched at Macao before turning south for Cape Padaran on the coast of Cochin China. The rain continued ceaselessly, falling from a leaden sky which stretched from horizon to horizon, so dark there was little to choose between day and night. The steamer’s engineer, a cheerful Scot named MacGillivray, had kept steam up in the boilers in case they needed to manoeuvre quickly if and when the pilongs attacked, but so far they had been able to run before a soldier’s wind from abaft and they had made an average of seven knots under sail alone. The steamer pitched roughly over the steep, foam-veined waves, but two seasoned sailors like Killigrew and Verran had little difficulty maintaining their balance. They had been overhauled by a couple of clippers and passed a Peninsula and Oriental steamer bound for Hong Kong, but had yet to sight any pirates.

  ‘The wind’s freshening,’ remarked Verran. ‘Better take in the t’gallants, Mr Boggs.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir!’ Verran’s number-two tindal, a handsome youth with a girlish face and delicate hands, turned away to issue orders to the hands. Killigrew watched as Dando, Firebrace, Gadsby and O’Connor ascended the rigging with the sea-cunnies to furl the topgallant sails.

  ‘What do you think of my crew, Kit?’ asked Verran.

  ‘Morgan was right about one thing: they are a villainous-looking bunch of pirates. But they know what they’re about, I’ll say that much for them. What about my lads? I trust they’re pulling their weight?’

  ‘I’ve had no complaints.’

  Killigrew watched as Boggs played a rope’s end against the backs of some sea-cunnies who were not hauling on the clew lines fast enough for his taste. ‘Your number-two tindal’s a little on the young side, isn’t he?’

  ‘Boggs? Perhaps. But this is a young man’s game; you know that, Kit. Besides, he’s got a sharp mind, a firm hand and the ambition to go places. You mark my words, one day Mr Boggs is going to make a name for himself in these waters.’

  ‘Light off the port bow!’ called the look-out at the masthead.

  Killigrew and Verran exchanged glances. ‘Want to go and see what it is?’ suggested Verran.

  Killigrew nodded and took the telescope from the binnacle. He climbed a short way up the ratlines, hooking one elbow around a shroud to secure himself, and pointed the telescope with one hand over the lens to try to keep the rain off it. It was almost impossible to make anything out through the sheeting downpour, yet he could see not one but two blazing fires about a mile away.

  He closed the telescope and climbed back down to the deck. ‘Looks like a couple of junks on fire.’ He remembered that they were approaching the reefs and islands of the Paracels, where he had first encountered Zhai Jing-mu.

  ‘Looks like there’s mischief afoot,’ said Verran. ‘Must be
the work of pilongs. Two points to starboard, Suleiman. Better bring in the flying jib and have the leadsman in the chains, Hassan.’

  ‘Tuan, Missee Verran. All hand to quarter!’

  ‘There could be men dying on those junks, Jago,’ Killigrew murmured as the Golden Dragon nosed her way forward, the leadsman calling the soundings from the chains.

  ‘I know, Kit, but there are dangers in these waters other than pilongs. I don’t want to go steaming in only for us to tear our bottom out on a reef. Mr Boggs, go below and tell Mr MacGillivray to have the engines ready to turn full astern when I give the word. If this turns out to be a trap, I want us to be ready to pull back in a hurry.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Boggs went below to the engine room.

  At length the Golden Dragon crested another steep wave and suddenly the junks – there were three of them – leaped into clear view through the sheeting rain, less than two cables away. All three were on fire, but only one was fully ablaze. Another had sunk with only its topmasts showing above the waves, but the fire had never really caught hold of the largest and now the spume and the rain had conspired all but to extinguish its charred timbers.

  ‘Imperial men-o’-war,’ said Verran.

  Killigrew nodded. He had already seen the three tigers’ heads painted on the stern of the largest. He knew it could not be Admiral Huang’s junk; that had still been moored in Victoria Harbour when the Golden Dragon had sailed, and while junks were deceptively swift there was no way Huang could have got here ahead of them.

  There was a regular booming crash, the sound of breakers on a reef, and the next time a wave lifted the Golden Dragon out of a trough they could see the white horses pounding over the rocks about half a mile away beyond the junks. Hassan, the ghaut serang, ordered the sails boxed, and the steamer hove to.

  Killigrew studied the flagship through the telescope. It was massive, as big as Huang’s. There was no sign of life on deck, but even at that distance the high-sided junk seemed to tower over the steamer.

  ‘I’m going on board the flagship,’ Killigrew said in a firm voice. He half expected Verran to argue – they both knew it would be madness to try in these conditions – but the captain merely nodded.

  ‘Mr Hayes! Prepare the jolly boat. We’re sending a search party on board the big junk.’

  The jolly boat was swung out in its davits. Killigrew and the boat’s crew went below to put on their oilskins before they emerged from beneath the Golden Dragon’s awning. ‘Watch yourself, Kit,’ Verran warned Killigrew as he prepared to join Hayes and the others in the boat. ‘It could be a trap.’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll find any pilongs lying in wait. They’re bold fellows, but not bold enough to linger on board a junk which is being carried towards a reef while they’re waiting on the chance that we might turn up.’

  ‘Perhaps. But don’t you linger too long, either. I reckon you’ve got less than an hour before she strikes. And leave one man on deck, watching this ship. If I see any other vessels put in an appearance, I’ll send up a blue light. When that happens you come straight back, all right? I don’t care if you find the Crown Jewels on board, you leave them.’

  ‘I just want to take a look-see, to try to find out what happened here.’

  Killigrew climbed down the side ladder to where the jolly boat bobbed up and down in the Golden Dragon’s lee quarter with Hayes and half a dozen seamen in it. He waited until the boat neared the zenith of its next rise, and then jumped down, when the drop was shortest. Then the wave slipped away from beneath them and the boat dropped sickeningly away from the steamer’s side.

  ‘All right, pull!’ roared Hayes. ‘Every mother’s son of you! Pull, damn you!’

  The rain lashed them as the boat was tossed up and down by the heavy seas. In less than a minute every man in the boat was drenched through in spite of their oilskins. Killigrew knew that even if he had been able to get at the pepperbox he wore beneath his rain-cape, it would be useless, the powder soaked through.

  The brightly painted junk towered over them, its open gun ports dark and forbidding. A rope ladder hung down its side from the entry port in the lee waist, twenty feet above them. Killigrew stood up in the boat’s prow and prepared to jump.

  ‘I sure hope you know what you’re doing, mister!’ Hayes had to yell to make himself heard above the noise of the wind and the rain.

  Killigrew took a deep breath, waited for the next wave to bring the ladder closer, and jumped. He hooked both hands over the second-from-bottom rung, but his fingers slipped on the wet board and left him dangling from one arm. He gripped the rope and hauled himself up until he could get one foot on the lowermost rung.

  Gasping for breath, he tilted his head back and felt the heavy rain sting his face. There was no point in hanging around. Wondering what would be waiting for him on deck, he began to climb. Once he was immediately below the entry port, he hooked one arm around a rung and reached under his rain-cape to draw his cutlass. He took a deep breath and scrambled up the last couple of feet.

  Whenever he remembered Chingkiang-fu, he was always at a loss to decide which was the greatest horror: the terrible hand-to-hand conflict on the battlements of the walled city, or the sights which had greeted him within the walls once the city had fallen. After one last desperate defence at the centre of the city, the Tartar soldiers had gone back to their homes, slaughtered their wives and daughters rather than let them be raped by the barbarian invaders, and then committed suicide. Killigrew would never forget wandering through those streets, where every house concealed the bodies of women hanged from the roof-beams with silken scarves in nooses about their necks, and children of all ages – even tiny babies – with their throats slit, their bodies tumbled into wells and fishponds. The stench of death in his nostrils, the blood of innocents wherever he turned, innumerable flies buzzing around the fast-rotting corpses on that stiflingly hot day. The memory was as fresh in 1849 as it had been seven years earlier.

  As soon as he pulled himself through the entry port and crouched in the lee of the bulwark, sweeping the deck with his eyes for danger, Killigrew knew he had a new memory to add to the album. As horrific as the aftermath of Chingkiang-fu had been, it had been meant – in the eyes of the perpetrators, at least – as an act of kindness.

  There was no evidence of any kindness on the junk. The lucky ones had died swiftly from sword-slashes. Each time the deck rolled, half a dozen decapitated heads tumbled from one side to the other. Even the slicing rain could not wash away all the blood. Others had died harder, tortured by men who took pleasure in suffering, then roasted alive. One man had been pinned to the door leading into the poop, skewered on a bamboo spear, his curved sword still hanging from his wrist by a leather thong. Another – a mandarin, from what Killigrew could see of his chaired robes – had been hung by a long rope tied about his ankles from a crossbeam slung from the truck of the mainmast, high above. A fire had been lit below him, so that each roll of the junk’s deck had swung his head through the flames.

  Killigrew bit back the bile which rose to his gorge.

  ‘Sweet Jesus!’ gasped Hayes, appearing at the entry port beside him. Both of them were too stunned to say anything for a few moments. They gazed at the grisly scene with horror and revulsion as four of the sea-cunnies climbed up the side ladder behind them, leaving two in the boat.

  Hayes was the first to find his tongue again. ‘Goddamned heathens! Zhai Jing-mu’s work?’

  ‘Who else would do such a thing?’ Killigrew’s hoarse voice cracked. ‘Come on. Let’s see what we can find.’

  ‘What are we supposed to be looking for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Killigrew said irritably. It was not the slaughter he found so offensive. He himself had had recourse to killing enough times in his career not to condemn it out of hand, and these poor devils had been sailors of the Imperial Chinese Navy who, like the men on board the Tisiphone, had known what they were signing up for when they had joined. What was so sickening was
the relish that had obviously gone into this atrocity. Killigrew bottled up his anger; he swore to himself he would uncork it at a later date, and let Zhai Jing-mu have a taste of the vintage. ‘There may be survivors.’

  ‘’Vast heaving, Killigrew! Seems to me the pilongs have done a goddamn thorough job.’

  ‘Nevertheless, Mr Hayes, we must be certain.’ Killigrew picked his way between the corpses and headed aft to the cabin beneath the poop. Much of the raised stern had been burned away, the charred timbers steaming slightly in the incessant rain. There was more blood here, another body, huddled in a shapeless mass at the foot of a bulkhead.

  He found a hatch and descended. The rainwater which gathered on deck trickled steadily from the corners of the hatch and made crazy patterns on this lower deck. The paper lanterns which illuminated the ’tween decks still burned, and as they swung with the rolling of the junk they cast eerie shadows back and forth. The rain hammered down above, and the timbers creaked, but even so it was quiet enough for Killigrew to be aware of his own breath rasping raggedly through his teeth.

  Below decks, the junk’s hull was divided up into a series of watertight compartments which could be sealed off in the event of the hull being breached; another ingenious Chinese innovation. Killigrew stepped up to one of the doors and listened. Was it his imagination, or could he hear sobbing on the other side of the door? He flexed his fingers around the grip of his cutlass, balanced on one foot, and kicked the door. It swung open, stopped short before it reached the bulkhead as it struck something with a thud, and then swung back. In the same instant he heard a yelp of pain.

  He pushed the door open once more and barged through, whirling to face the young Chinese who had been hiding behind the door. The man looked dazed – a massive bruise already swelled on his forehead – but his eyes widened when he saw Killigrew and he snatched up the curved sword he had dropped. He was dressed in the sky-blue uniform of an Imperial soldier, a black silk cap with an upturned brim and two squirrels’ tails hanging down behind, and a yellow patch on his chest embroidered with the Chinese character for ‘brave’. He was clearly terrified as he pointed his sword at Killigrew with trembling fingers. Killigrew could hardly blame him. The brave must have hidden down here when the pilongs had attacked the junk. He must have heard the screams of his comrades as they had been tortured to death, knowing that a similar fate must await him if his hiding place was discovered. And now, after being stranded on this drifting junk with no company but corpses, the vessel which had come to rescue him was crewed by ‘ocean ghosts’.