The King's Commission

by Dewey Lambdin

  “She thinks they’re hilarious, Kit.” Alan shrugged. “Don’t ask me why. Everything quiet so far?”

  “So far so good,” he agreed. “I’ve brought my pickets in from the marshes to a close perimeter ’bout fifty yards out. With this mist, that’s ’bout as long a shot as we’ll get. McGilliveray’s warriors are further out, huntin’ sign of their people, far’s I know. You hear owls hootin’ he tells me, that’ll be them comin’ back in. Well, damn my eyes if we didn’t pull it off after all, me lad! ’Tis all over but the shoutin’ at this point. Your crew see any Dagoes out to sea?”

  “Not one sail in all that time. Almost uncannily easy.”

  “Knock on wood,” Cashman said, grinning and rapping his knuckles on the butt of his fusil. He then strolled back towards the perimeter.

  The cargo was finally off-loaded completely, the sloop swung about to direct its fire up-river, or overhead of the camp on the sand-spit to the marshes and swamps. The day dragged on until it was time for dinner, and the hands ceased their labors for “clear decks and up spirits” from a small puncheon of rum brought ashore for them. Rabbit and the other girls had a small fire going, and were almost ready to ladle out more bowls of the eternal sofkee, mixed with some dried venison they had been steeping in a pot of water. There was also some salt-meat from the sloop’s galley, and biscuit.

  The Indian girls looked up first, their ears more attuned to an odd sound than the whites. Owls were not known to hunt so close to the coast, or call anywhere in daylight.

  “That’ll be the Creek scouts coming back in,” McGilliveray said. Cashman’s troops were all back at the sand-spit by then, for the fogs had burned off or been blown away by a new day’s sea breeze, and they were too exposed out by the edge of the marshes. Other than a few who stood guard from covert hides in the saw grass and palmettoes at the top of the beach, they were all queuing up for their rum and tucker.

  “They’re in a damned hurry if they are,” Cashman said, going for his weapons. “Sarn’t, stand to! Form, form open skirmish order!”

  The Creek warriors came out of the woods at a dead run, first one who clutched his side where an arrow had pierced him, and then the last two, looking back over their shoulders as they ran as a rearguard for the wounded man.

  Not a full minute after they stumbled into camp, a solid pack of painted and feathered warriors came loping out of the trees and across the shallow marsh.

  “Apalachee!” McGilliveray shouted. “The bastards!”

  “Take ’em under fire, sor?” the sergeant asked Cashman.

  “Stand by …”

  “No, Cashman!” Cowell pleaded. “We don’t know why they chased these lads. They could have tried to raid the Apalachee just for the fun of it, they do that all the time. If we fire we might destroy whatever good will we’ve built here!”

  “No, Mister Cowell, they’re going to fight us,” McGilliveray countered.

  “Fire!” Cashman ordered, and the fusils cracked even as the first Apalachee arrows came arcing down among them with a sizzling rush.

  There were some shrill screams as the leading warriors were hit and knocked down, and the rest checked their headlong rush and began to weave back and forth among the reeds in the marsh, leaping up as targets to draw fire, or dropping out of sight after they got off an arrow or a cane spear from one of their throwers. They seemed to dart forward and then fall back as if frightened of their own audacity, running in circles like the practice of a Spanish tiercio of pistoleers on horseback.

  Alan ran to his fusil, which had been leaning on the cargo, and checked his priming. He took aim at a warrior in a bone-armor vest and let fly as the man paused to nock an arrow. The man whooped in pain as Alan’s shot took him in the belly and the Indian dropped into the marsh out of sight with a great, muddy splash.

  “Svensen!” Alan called over his shoulder to the sloop not sixty yards to his rear in the river. “Lay a gun on these bastards and shoot at the largest pack of them!”

  An arrow whickered by him with a thrumming sound and he flinched as he pulled his weapon back to half-cock and began to load, rapping the butt on the nearest crate to settle the load after he had bitten off the cartouche and poured the powder in. Another arrow zhooped past his head, and his cocked hat went sailing off somewhere aft. Rabbit was kneeling near him behind the crates, and went to fetch it for him. She came back just as he stood up and shot another running man down in mid-stride, and as he sensibly knelt to load out of sight this time, she gave a blood-thirsty smile of encouragement, whooping in glee.

  San Ildefonso’s after-most larboard three-pounder barked, and the sound of round-shot and grape passing close overhead made them all go almost flat on the ground. The round-shot cut a warrior in half, leaving his legs and trunk standing, and his torso and head flying off into the trees, shattering against a cypress trunk when they finally hit something solid. The grape-shot frothed the water in the marsh and three more Indians screamed and erupted into bloody statues before they fell, which took the starch out of their courage. After a few more arrows were loosed at the encampment, and two more warriors had been clawed down by the fusiliers at over sixty yards, they made off back into the trees.

  “Goddamn and rot the bastards!” Alan raged, snapping off his last shot at one Apalachee who stopped by the trees and presented his bare arse to them in derision. He laughed with delight to see that he had aimed a bit low and had hit the man on the inside of the thigh just a quim-hair from his genitals. “Try stuffin’ what’s left up your arse, you sorry shit-sack!”

  “Nice shot,” Cashman panted. “Nigh on ninety yards.”

  “Damn, but I like the fusil!” Alan shouted back with pleasure. “Now you give me my Ferguson, and I’d have taken his right nutmeg off!”

  Rabbit brought him his cocked hat, now decorated with a long cane arrow with a flaked stone point and three raggled feathers at the other end. She pulled a metal knife from her waist and waved it in the air, making motions that he should go out there and lift some hair.

  “God, it’s just as well I can’t take you with me,” Alan told her, smiling so she would know he was pleased. “I’d love to turn you loose on some people I know with that thing.”

  “I should have known we couldn’t trust the Apalachee, not with so much loot to be had,” McGilliveray spat. “They once were a mighty people you could trust, but the Spanish have turned them into shabby dogs. They must have been watching all this time, waiting for us to get all the muskets landed, and for us to pull our pickets in.”

  “For all the good it did them,” Cowell sniffed, clumsily trying to reload the musket he had snatched up and fired at least once.

  Several shots boomed out from the marsh and the tree-line and they ducked down once more into cover. As Cashman crawled up to his furthest forward marksmen, the volume of fire increased.

  “Damme, must be a platoon of ’em with muskets out there,” Cashman shouted back. “Mark your targets and return fire, and keep your bloody heads down.”

  “Svensen!” Alan bawled. “Into the tree-line! Take your time and aim true, one gun at a time! Reload with grape and canister as you do so!”

  “Aye, zir!” a thin voice called back from the sloop. Barely had the mate spoken than the first gun fired, and the trees rustled in shock as the deadly grape-shot thrashed at the hidden musketeers.

  “We’ll cut ’em to pieces if they try to rush us again,” Cashman said as he rolled over onto his back to reload behind a palmetto and a mound of gritty sand.

  “If they do try to rush us, it might be a near thing, even so,” Alan told him. “I’ve not seven men aboard the sloop, and the crew for a three-pounder is three men, so that’s not two guns able to fire more ’n once a minute. With a whole lot of luck, they’ll try to rush us once more, get cut up between your fusiliers and the artillery, and go sulk or something until the Creeks finally stir up their bloody arses and get here, damn their lazy eyes!”

  Rabbit was tugging at his sleeve u
rgently, and he turned to her. She pointed up-river and growled something in her own language.

  “Jesus Christ shit on a biscuit!” Alan cried.

  The river was thick with dugout canoes, the canoes crowded gunwales deep with more Apalachee, and white men in dirty blue uniforms.

  “’Ware the river, Kit, we’ve been sold out to the Dons!” Alan warned. “Svensen, use the springs and heave her about!”

  He had to stand to direct the mate’s attention up-river, and a flurry of arrows and bullets flailed the air around him as he waved and pointed.

  “Sarn’t, six men this side of the cargo, use it as a breastwork,” Cashman snarled. “Rest of you, stand fast along this dune line! Mister McGilliveray, you and your warriors up here, please. You, too, Mister Cowell. It’s going to be warm work here in a few minutes.”

  Warm ain’t the fuckin’ word for it, Alan thought with a grim shudder of fear. Not two-score of us against at least a company of Dago troops and God knows how many Apalachee. Oh Christ, you could fit our little defense line into Shrike’s fo’c’sle. We’re all going to get knackered and scalped. “Rabbit!”

  “Rabbit, go to the ship. Understand me? Be safe there! Go ship! Swim?” he said, talking with his arms and hands in a flurry.

  She shook her head and snatched the dragoon pistol from his belt.

  “Let’s have this crate opened, and that’un there!” Cashman was ordering. “You men, load as many muskets as you can and stack ’em ready for use. With enough volume of fire, we may blunt ’em yet.”

  San Ildefonso cut loose finally with her starboard battery of guns, which had yet to be fired. Round-shot and grape-shot tore the river into a forest of water fountains, and two of the leading canoes were shattered into scrap lumber, pitching their screaming paddlers and warriors into the river. Svensen had shot his bolt, though, with that broadside, for with only seven men it would take time to reload three guns.

  “Swivels, Svensen!” Alan screamed. “Don’t forget the swivels! Cony, fetch the two swivels from the boats. One here facing the river, one for the fusiliers to play with up on the dune line.”

  With no more cannon being fired at them from the sloop, the savages in the marsh whooped into motion. Alan stuck his head up and saw that there were at least thirty Spanish troops with them, probably the ones responsible for the musket fire. The boats were too far off to land close; it would be the pack coming from the marsh they had to deal with first.

  “Feel like a gambling man, Lewrie?” Cashman asked.

  “Aye, but the odds are bloody horrible.”

  “Bring your people up here to be my second line.”

  “Svensen, keep that lot off our backs!” Alan shouted out to his ship, which looked so damned safe and snug out there on the water, where he really much preferred to be. Damn the cargo, he thought with a sick, empty feeling inside. If we can fight these bastards off, we’re out of here like a shot.

  They met the charge with a shot from a swivel gun that had had its stand jammed down into the firm sand. Bayonets glinted evilly as the Spanish came on to the sound of a trumpet, and the Apalachee howled their death songs.

  “First rank, pick your targets … fire!”

  A dozen shots, perhaps eight men struck down.

  “Lewrie, fire!” Cashman yelled.

  “Take aim … fire!”

  He shot one Apalachee down, tossed down his fusil and snatched up a Brown Bess from the cargo that had seen better days, but the lock came back with a firm snap, and when he pulled the trigger, it fired, and a Spaniard shrieked in shock as his chest was torn open by the .75 caliber ball.

  “Yu!” One of the Creek warriors said from beside him, letting fly with an arrow from an osage-wood bow. Each time he aimed and fired he chanted some incantation under his breath for proper aiming and a good kill, then expelled “Yu!”—he was getting five arrows for every shot from Alan’s guns, and his prayers were working wonderfully.

  The charge faltered just short of the dune line, with the fusiliers rising from cover to let off their last shots and go in with the bayonet, for which the Apalachee were not prepared. Half a dozen of them died howling on the steel, and then they were fading away, taking the Spanish with them.

  “Sam’t, one squad to cover the marsh! Rest of you, fall back to the breast-works! And reload that damned swivel!” Cashman shouted.

  They were barely in time. Svensen had been banging away steadily at the approaching canoes full of warriors, but Alan doubted if some 5th Rate frigate in the same predicament could have made much of an impression on that flotilla of dugouts, even with a dozen carriage guns. The boats were within twenty yards of grounding on the muddy river bank when Andrews lit off the swivel on the breast-works and stopped the progress of one boat by killing everyone in it with a canister-load of musket balls.

  An Apalachee came dashing through the shallows, eager to fight, and Alan shot him down with his fusil. The Brown Bess took down the second one ashore, and then there was no time to reload. Cashman’s men got off a volley and stood ready to receive with the bayonet. Alan drew his hanger.

  One Apalachee dashed for Alan, screaming loud enough to curdle Lewrie’s blood, but he found the courage to step forward and meet him, tempered steel blade against a wooden war club, which he beat aside, and glided his point into the man’s throat as he drew up for a second swing. He picked up the war club for his off-hand to use as a mobile shield, cutting the thong that bound it to the dead warrior’s wrist by hacking the man’s hand off with his superbly sharpened blade.

  A second man with a cane spear died with one feet of steel in his belly, and a third got back-handed with the war club, which shattered his skull like a melon.

  A Spaniard came against him next, a man with a small-sword, a smelly dog of a man with one of those infuriating mustaches and a smug look of eventual victory. Their blades rang in the first beat of their duel. The Spaniard was fast, but he had a weak wrist, and Alan threw a flying cutover at him, forcing his blade wide. To keep it there, he binded with the war-club and as the Spaniard leaped back to disengage and regain an equal advantage, Alan back-handed the slightly curved cutting edge of the hanger across the man’s stomach, opening his belly and spilling his entrails. He would have finished him off with another slash across the throat, but there was another Spaniard there with a musket and bayonet.

  Alan stepped forward to fight him, but the dying Spaniard on the ground groped at him and nailed him to the spot, and the musketman came forward. Alan deflected the bayonet down to his left, but the man got all fourteen inches of it through his thigh.

  “Goddamn you!” he screamed in sudden pain and this time got a slash at the throat, which almost took the man’s head off as they both fell. The bayonet twisted and turned as the gun behind it toppled from the dead man’s grasp, ripping Alan’s leg into agony. He saw stars and almost fainted from the indescribable pain of it. A shadow loomed over him, an Apalachee with a war-club ready to brain him, and then there was a shot and the man was toppling back into the ooze at the river’s edge.

  Rabbit was there by his side, a smoking dragoon pistol in her hands, crying and weeping as if he was indeed already dead. She got him under the arms, and he could not credit such a little girl being capable of it, but she seemed to lift him and bear him back behind the breast-works and shove a loaded musket into his hands.

  “You silly bitch, I’m bleeding like a slaughtered pig! What the hell you want me to do with this, for Christ’s sake?” he railed.

  There was a shot next to his ear that almost deafened him and he turned to see Cony and Andrews flanking him, discharging muskets as fast as they could pick them up. Alan wobbled his weapon up over the crates and leveled it in the general direction and fired, not knowing where the ball went. He sank back, feeling very tired and sleepy, and looked down at his leg. The Spanish musket and bayonet had gone away, which he thought was nice of somebody, but there seemed to be an awful lot of blood, and he was frightfully sure it was all his.<
br />
  “Christ,” he muttered, feeling his skin pop out cold sweat. His ears were ringing like Westminster’s chimes, and that was about all he could hear. Rabbit’s face loomed up in his vision as she held him to her breasts.

  Worse things to look at when you’re dying, I s’pose, he thought.

  IV

  “Oceanus ponto qua continet orbem,

  nulla tibi adversis regio sese offeret armis.

  Te manet invictus Romano marte Britannus

  teque interiecto mundi pars altera sole.”

  “Wherever the Ocean’s deep encompasses the Earth,

  no land will meet thee with opposing force.

  The Briton whom Roman prowess has not vanquished

  is reserved for thee, and the other portion of

  the world, with the Sun’s path in between.”

  “Panegyricus Messallae”

  —Tibullus

  Chapter 1

  Alan woke up in a lot of pain as someone tried to haul him up from his prone position, but damned if he wanted to move! He struck out at whoever it was, and several more hairy paws grabbed onto him to restrain him, and, still lost in a terrifying dream of being taken by savages intent on his scalping and mutilation, he let out a howl of fear and pain.

  “Sorry, sir, almost done,” Dr. Lewyss told him.

  “Ah,” Alan said, biting his lips trying to be stoic now that he recognized the good doctor, though his chest still heaved with panic. “Where am I?”

  “Aboard Shrike, sir. In my sick-bay below the forepeak,” the man said, between snatches of humming some song to himself as he fussed with a fresh dressing on Alan’s leg wound. “Most amazing thing, really. Thought sure I’d have to take the leg, but God seems to favor you remaining a biped, sir. Even if there was the foulest poultice applied to it when you were brought aboard. Some pagan muck, egh!”

  “When?” Alan groaned as Lewyss finally finished wrapping his thigh and allowed it to be lowered to the bunk, where it ceased screaming and settled down for some long-term throbbing.