The Sea Beggars

by Holland, Cecelia;

  He snorted, amused, seeing movement on the wall. The gate was closing. In their haste, the defenders had left someone outside, who danced and gesticulated at the foot of the wall. They were terrified in The Brill. They were wise in that; Don Federico meant to leave nothing standing higher than one stone upon another.

  “They are waiting for us. We shall have some fighting to do. I trust your men are all shriven.” Excited by the prospect of battle, he could not keep back a tight smile; he saw in the faces of his aides the same impatient eager readiness, a keen edge. “Go, in God’s name.” He crossed himself, and they dispersed to their posts.

  Lumey was tramping up and down the rampart by the gate, his gaudy vestment splattered with old blood, ribbons in his beard. When Jan came up to him, he was turning away from the gate, which he had just ordered closed.

  The admiral’s face was bound up in a twitchy frown. He swung toward Jan and barked, “There’s nothing for me to do here. You and van Treslong can do this.” He banged on the wall. “The guns don’t move—the Spanish are straight in front of you—shoot when they come in range.” He started away toward the ladder to the street, now boiling with excited people.

  Jan grabbed his sleeve. “Where are you going?”

  Lumey flung out one arm like a blade toward the Spanish in the distance. “They must have come here in boats. I’m going to find them and hull them. God be with you.” He jerked free of Jan’s grip and hurried away down the ladder.

  The Baron van Treslong had come up the rampart to Jan’s side. Amazed, Jan stood staring after Lumey, who plowed through the mob in the street, turned a corner, and was gone.

  “Is he running away?” Jan asked.

  Van Treslong grabbed his arm. “No—but he knows nothing of fighting on land. He is a sailor. Let him go. You captain the guns here; you are the master of that. I shall get these men ready to fight off an assault, if they charge the gate.” He threw one arm around Jan and hugged him tight. “Good luck. God watches over us; whatever comes is by His plan.”

  Then he too was gone, down the ladder into the street, where his voice rose sharp with orders.

  “Jan—Jan—”

  He swung around, toward Eleanor, who was pushing and shoving through the thickness of bodies that lined the rampart. She flung out her arm toward him, and he caught her hand.

  “Gather up all the women and the children,” he said, hustling her toward the ladder. “Take them down to the harbor. If any here survive, you can escape by sea.”

  He twisted to look back over the wall at the Spanish army, which now was ranging itself along the landward dike. There were thousands of them. If they broke through, the women here would suffer long and pitifully before they died. He wheeled back to his wife.

  “Jan,” she said. Her face was wild, her hair flying in wisps around her cheeks, the color high in her fine-grained skin.

  “If none of us survives,” he said, “you must—you must—”

  He flung his arms around her and held her so tight she groaned.

  “I can’t find Hanneke,” she said, standing back.

  “She’s gone.”

  “Gone! Where?”

  “To her destiny.” He held his wife’s hands in his; he looked deep into her face. “I love you very much, dear Eleanor.”

  “I love you, Jan.”

  “Go. And do as I said, if …”

  Her face tightened, grim with resolution. “I will.” She squeezed his hands in hers, turned to the ladder, and went down to the street. Jan stood there a moment longer, watching her go off into the town. When she disappeared into the swarming masses of people in the street, he turned back toward the wall, back toward the Spanish enemy.

  From the pasture outside the wall, Hanneke could see nothing of the furious bustle on the rampart, but she could hear it: the boom of feet on the wooden platform, the shouting, the prayers, the clatter of weapons. She thought she heard her brother’s voice. With the ax in her left hand, she set out for the seawall at the far end of the pasture.

  From this level, the Spaniards were invisible at first, but as she walked she noticed above the land dike the pricks of their weapons lancing the sky and she heard the tramping of their feet. She broke into a run. The ax was heavy and she slipped and fell once to her knees on the dry salty earth. The knife-edged sea grass stung her legs. She held up her skirts with her right hand and ran awkwardly forward. Her breath came short.

  Behind her Jan was screaming at her. She ran faster toward the dike.

  Just as she reached the end of the seawall, a little troop of Spanish soldiers appeared at the other end. They carried muskets. She saw at once that they meant to line up along the top of the dike, to fire on the rampart where the Calvinist guns were so that the defenders could not shoot their cannon while the main army attacked. She ran up onto the dike, scrambling along the steep stony slope, her feet knocking loose clods of dirt and rocks to shower down behind her in a little cascade.

  When she reached the top of the dike, the musketeers saw her, and a whoop went up from them. One threw his weapon to his shoulder and fired at her. Where the bullet went, she did not see; she ignored it, running along the top of the dike to the sluice gate.

  Another musket fired. The bullet plinked off the stony ground by her feet.

  Half the length of the dike separated her from them; they would never reach her in time to stop her. She lifted the ax and swung it in a round arc toward the top of the sluice gate. Down the dike, a Spanish voice snapped orders. She heard the rattle of their armor as the men knelt down to fire from rest. Hauling up the heavy ax, she drove it down against the iron-hard wood of the gate. Chips flew off from the notch she had made in the top.

  The muskets went off in a light crackle of sound. The bullets swarmed around her like bees, ticking off the ground, and something burned into her thigh. She heaved up the ax, struck hard into the gate, and split it down from top to bottom. Again the muskets banged.

  Like a needle through her, a pain lanced her chest. The gate was groaning, the weight of the water behind it pushing against the cracked wood, but still it held, and she swung the ax up, extending her body full length to get all the power she could behind the blade, and the bullets whispered in her ears and tore into her cheek and her arm. She drove the ax down into the gate with all her strength. A chunk of wood jumped up and sailed away to her left, and the gate broke, and the sea poured in.

  She gasped. She could not move, balanced on her bleeding legs, teetering, the ax falling from her hand. She turned her eyes now from the broken gate through which the green water rushed to the musketeers at the end of the dike; she could hear the bullets strike her flesh, but she knew they were beaten. She had beaten them, she and the Dutch earth and God’s sea. Slowly she fell down onto the dike, laid her head to the ground, and was still.

  On the wall Jan saw her break open the sluice gate, and all around him the others saw and cheered, cheered the water rushing in onto the pasture, but Jan did not cheer, because he saw his sister die. The first. He faced the Spanish over the stretch of scrubby pasturage and said, “Fire.”

  Beside him, Mouse reached out the slow match to the big brass culverin and lit the powder. The gun swallowed the scrap of fire and bellowed smoke and shot into the air.

  The roar of the gun silenced the cheers. Jan went on to the next gun, Mouse at his side with the slow match. He did not think of Hanneke; he felt her dying like a knife in the heart, a fire in his own guts, a fury.

  “Low,” Mouse said, and pointed.

  The shot from the brass culverin had struck the dike below the line of Spanish soldiers, kicking up a spray of rocks and dirt high into the air; the enemy troops scattered away from it, and a horse reared and bugled in panic. Jan said, “Fire.”

  This gun was an old iron gun from the Christ the Redeemer. Her voice was different—all the guns had different voices—this one a throaty roar and a rumble, and her shot whistled in the air, eerie, like a live thing.

  The
Spanish recoiled at the sound of the shot, the line swaying back away from the dike, but this gun was set higher and her belly’s worth of iron flew over the dike and struck square into the mass of men retreating from it. There was a roar from the men on the wall of The Brill, and Jan’s lips drew back from his teeth in an unpleasant smile. Pieces of bodies lay on the top of the dike, thrown there by the shot.

  He said, “Good. Keep this one as it is, and fire as it’s ready.” Stepping past the gun crew, Mouse at his side, he went on to the next cannon.

  They had brought this gun, a light demiculverin, in from the smaller of van Treslong’s ships; it did not fit its truck, and they had spent most of a day trying to rig it so that it would not jump off its bed when it was fired. The gun crew stood back as Jan came up to them. He glanced out at the Spanish, who were re-forming their lines; they would charge soon. They were only waiting now for the musketeers to line up on the seaward dike and open fire, to drive the defenders back off the wall.

  They began to fire now, as he watched, and all along the rampart the gun crews ducked below the cover of the wall. At the far end, a man screamed and pitched back off the rampart into the street. Instantly another man took his place.

  Jan said, “Fire.”

  Mouse put the slow match to the bore of the demiculverin, and the gun went off with a howl.

  As it went off the iron barrel rocked sideways, breaking away from its mounting; it swung around and struck the wall, and the wall gave way. The gun crashed through it, the ropes that bound it popping like small arms. Jan lunged after it, to save it, caught the heavy brass lip around the muzzle with both hands, and braced himself, his feet against the wall. The wall gave way. With the gun he pitched out into space.

  He yelled. Desperately he twisted in midair and fell against the wall. He slipped a yard along the smooth wooden surface, his hands scrabbling for a hold, and one hand caught on the broken edge of the wall below the rampart. His body swung loose against the outside of the wall.

  This was his answer, then. He was to die here. He thought of Eleanor; there flashed into his mind the picture of Hanneke lying on the top of the seawall. His feet kicked at the wood, helpless. The Spanish were firing on him. A bullet struck his left arm and he lost his grip.

  He was falling. Then from above him on the rampart a hand grabbed his wrist and held him.

  “Jan!”

  He looked up, flailing at the wall with his feet and his free hand, and saw Mouse, bending down through the break in the wall to hold him.

  “Let go!” If he fell he would drag Mouse with him. He knew the half-wit had not the strength to hold him long. One of his feet caught on a knot in the smooth planking of the wall and pushed him upward for an instant, up toward the gap in the wall; he swung his free hand up and caught on to the wall.

  Mouse did not drop him. Standing up for leverage, the cross-eyed boy grasped Jan’s wrist with both hands and pulled, and a moment later others of the men on the rampart rushed over and caught Jan’s arm and his clothes and hauled him up through the gap, through the pelting Spanish bullets, back safe onto the rampart.

  “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

  Heaving himself up onto his knees, he flung his arms around Mouse and hugged him fast. Mouse pressed against him.

  “I saved you. I saved you, Jan.”

  Jan kissed him. Standing up, he gripped the boy’s hand. “You did that, certainly. Come along.” Stooping to take shelter from the top of the wall, they went on to the next gun, which fired low.

  “Oh what will happen to us, what will become of us?”

  “Hurry,” Eleanor said, and herded the young women with their babies on ahead of her toward the wharf, where the others were waiting. Some of the children had broken away from their mothers to play on the boats, and she shouted to the other women to keep them close. Behind them, in the town, there was the thunder of cannon.

  “God help us.” The more timid of the women began to cry, and several knelt down on the stone wharf to pray. Eleanor walked up and down past them, twisting her hands together.

  She could barely speak to them; none of them spoke French, and her Dutch was still uncertain. She wished Jan had found someone more suitable for this and let her help him on the wall.

  The cannon fire now was nearly continuous. Above the roofs of the town, a massive cloud of black smoke was rising, and she thought she heard the light crackle of small-arms fire.

  She could not stay here, waiting, doing nothing. She went back to the women and, waving her hands at them, did what she could to tell them to keep together and stay there; then she went off through the town, looking for stray people she could save. There was a huge shout from the wall, half cheer, half panic; she wondered what was happening. She wanted to be with Jan at the end, but he had told her …

  In the little square before the town hall, she came on the stocks, and the sailors still writhing in them.

  A hoarse shout broke from her throat. She ran up to the wooden frames and tugged at them. The men bellowed at her in Dutch. They wiggled their arms and legs comically at her, their faces red. The stocks were locked, of course; she could not open them with her hands, and she ran into the house across the street and rummaged through the kitchen until she found a stout knife.

  Running out to the stocks again, she pried open the locks with the blade of the knife. The men climbed stiffly out of the yokes and ran away down the street, toward the sound of fighting. One stopped to grab Eleanor by the shoulders and paste a wet kiss full on her mouth. With a laugh, he ran limping after the others.

  Eleanor went back into the house across the street and got out all the knives she could find, good long-bladed knives with sharp edges, and took them back to the wharf. There weren’t enough to arm all the women, and many of the older children, too, could fight. She went back to find another kitchen to rob.

  Lumey bent his back to the oars. The current of the river was so strong that he could make no headway against it, and so he had steered his little boat over to this bank. Here the water was shallow and still and the dark trees overgrew it, their branches dripping moss that dragged over the boat and his shoulders and head. The smell of the marsh was nauseating. He stopped to drink from the jug of wine he had brought, grunted to clear his throat, and picked up the oars again.

  In the distance, he could hear the boom of cannon and the lighter music of muskets. They were fighting, back there, fighting in a way that profoundly annoyed him. On ships there was always the business of maneuver, judging the wind and the sea, changing sail and plotting a course, but here, damn it, what was there but a bang-bang punching contest?

  The Spanish would win. He knew it; everybody knew it. They had the men and the metal and they would win, and the good work the Beggars had done all these years would be lost. At least the Dons would have to swim home. He hoped van Cleef and his other hotheaded friends would have the sense to hull their own ships before the Spanish took them.

  It made him cry, actually cry tears, as he stroked the flat-bottomed boat with its load of liquor and little kegs of black powder on through the stinking marsh; he cried to think of his beautiful Christ the Redeemer falling into Spanish hands. He cried sensuously, enjoying it. He stopped to drink some more and cried all the while, until his boat ran aground.

  Getting out, he stepped into water six inches deep and mud much deeper than that, up to his knees. With the boat’s painter over his shoulder, he slogged on through the rotten black swamp, ducking streamers of moss and dangling branches like evil arms that tried to hold him back.

  Now he did not cry, because now he saw ahead of him through the latticework of the trees the masts and square sails of the Spanish barges.

  He stopped, catching his breath, applauding himself for his craft in knowing where they would be. Actually, anyone who knew the Spanish would have guessed they would come from the mainland at the narrowest point of the intervening water and anchor here, but in case they had shown more sense, he had meant to g
o on rowing around the whole island until he found them; yet here they were. He went back to the boat for his jug.

  More cannon fire rolled from the land behind him. They probably thought he was a coward, running away from the fight. He had run away. He was a coward. He did not understand land fighting and never had; he had always been uneasy on the land. But he saw, with the shrewdness of long years of experience at fighting, that the land was where the great battles would be fought now. Something had changed, in the taking of The Brill; the course of the struggle with the Spanish had changed. The years of piracy and raiding were over, and a new kind of war had begun.

  Not Lumey’s war. But Lumey meant to make a grand exit from it.

  He tucked the jug inside his coat and pulled the boat forward. The water was deeper here, and he could get back into the boat and row. He did not. He tied the boat up to a wet smelly branch and trudged through the mucky swamp toward the barges, to see how they lay.

  The swamp dried up a little, here, making a reasonable landing place. Here the river swept on by to the north, and the island’s eastern shore fell off to the south, forming a wide, calm anchorage—not deep, but deep enough for several dozen flat-bottomed barges. They were all crowded together, probably tied together; the army must have unloaded those farthest from the shore across the nearer ones. He could see men sitting around a little fire, off in the middle of the anchored barges, drinking: the boatmen.

  He wiped his hands on his thighs. Pleased, he assessed his mind and found nothing that shrank from this. They had recoiled from his usage of priests. Now let them see that he used himself as violently as any other. He sloshed back to his boat.

  He did not get into it at once. First he gathered up all the long fuses that led from the little congregation of kegs in the stern, tied the sulfurous lengths together, and lit them with his tinderbox. When they were sputtering and smoking healthfully alive, he climbed into the boat and bent to the oars.