Twenty-one
MEN OF WAR
THEY WERE STILL GATHERING BY THE HUNDRED ON THE wharves. Artimion had piled up a couple of crates and was standing atop them. About his feet stood Miriam and a few of her musketeers. All work had ceased, and the yards of the ships in dock were black with sailors, listening.
“They’re troopships, no more, and their escort is only a pair of brigs,” Artimion was saying, his baritone echoing in the eerie silence of the ship-cavern. “But if they manage to land Bionese regulars onshore, then we are lost. We must meet and destroy them at sea.”
“Two Bionese men-of-war? Swallow and Albatross and Prosper cannot take them alone,” someone shouted, and there was a general murmur.
“You damned fool, how do you think we had word of them? Timian and Gan are out there in their own ships, shadowing this flotilla. The Osprey and the Skua carry nine-pounders. With their help we’ll take the brigs and sink the transports.”
“How many soldiers in these transports?”
“There are eight troopships in the convoy, so bank on a full regiment, sixteen hundred men.” Another murmur, disquieted and more widespread. Some women began sobbing. Artimion held up his hands.
“They’re still thirty miles out at sea, so if we’re quick we can meet them a good distance from the Ka. There is no reason to believe they know where we are, not yet.”
“Then why embark a marine regiment?” a burly mariner called out. “They’re not on board those troopships for their health.”
Artimion’s face grew grim and closed. “We must sink them all; drown every one of the bastards in the Reach. Not one must get back to Bionar, not one. We do that, and Ganesh Ka’s secret is safe.”
A general growl of approval met this.
“But we must plan for the worst also. We’re clearing the decks and holds of every fishing boat and launch in the Ka, and I want all those not in a ship’s company to prepare to leave the city.”
A roar went up; fear and anger in the wordless chorus of a thousand voices. Once again Artimion raised his hands amid the upcry, and the levelheaded about him began shouting for silence and cursing their more histrionic neighbors.
“Those who cannot or will not find a berth in the boats must take what they can inland, into the hills. When this fleet has been destroyed we will make contact with you as soon as we can. You shall return to your homes, I swear it. I will sink these enemies of ours in the Reach, down to the last man, or I will die in the attempt.”
A stillness fell over all that serried host of men and women. Some were nodding determinedly, others seemed sunk in resignation. A child cried out and was silenced by its mother.
“That is all. We are getting under way now, the men of the ships. May Ran be kind to us, and may Ussa of the Swells watch over us.”
Artimion jumped down from his box and the crowds began to part reluctantly. There was no panic, only a purposeful current of movement. The mariners began filing to their ships, and the decks of the Prosper, the Swallow, and the Albatross were at once crowded with busy men. Rol, Gallico, and Creed looked at one another, and then as one they left the Revenant and began forging through the milling throng to Artimion’s brigantine. They caught up with Ganesh Ka’s de facto ruler just before he boarded the gangplank.
“Where do you want us?” Rol asked.
Artimion turned round, eyes bright in his black face. “You are free to leave the Ka without obligation, as we agreed. I do not hold you to its defense.”
“The hell you don’t, Artimion,” Gallico began.
“Ask your captain, Gallico. You are his man now, not mine.”
“We’ll take our place in the line of battle with the rest of you,” Elias said hotly.
“No. I do not want you in it.”
“Why not?” Rol asked. “Surely this is no time to allow personal animosity to sway judgment.”
“My judgment is sound,” Artimion flashed. “Your ship has not even undergone sea trials. You are short in your complement, and your men have not yet worked together under your command—you would be more of a liability than an asset. This is not your fight, Cortishane. Stay out of it.”
“Is that your last word?”
“If you wish to be of use, take on as many of the common folk as you can and get them out of here until the thing is done. Otherwise, you’re just wasting my time. Go waste your own elsewhere.”
He turned and walked over the gangplank, closely followed by Miriam and half a dozen of her musketeers. Rol watched him go white-faced, but he put an arm out to stop Gallico following. “It’s no use.”
“I never thought Artimion small-minded until today.”
“He may be right. We’re not ready to take on Bionese men-of-war in open battle. Not yet.”
“We have a ship and a crew to sail her.”
“Oh, we’ll sail her, all right. Never fear.”
The little flotilla of vessels left the Ka towed by lighters from the wharves and cheered from the dockside by almost the entire population. Rol’s crew stood watching from the decks of the Revenant, sullen and low-spirited. Gallico was clenching and unclenching his mighty fists as though eager to wrap them round a throat. Elias came running along the packed dockside and pelted up the gangplank as though pursued.
“Well?” Rol asked, still watching the yards of the departing ships, stark silhouettes against the bright sunshine beyond the sea gates.
“I spoke to one of Artimion’s master’s mates. The enemy are sou’-sou’east of here, nine leagues. The wind’s from the west-nor’west, a fresh breeze. They’re beating up into it, tack on tack.”
“So that’s why he’s so confident,” Gallico said. “He has the weather-gage. He’ll swoop down on them at the time and place of his choosing.”
Rol stood considering. “We’re putting to sea, all the same. We’ll make some offing from the coast and take a wide course down their starboard flank, make sure everything is going to plan.”
“And maybe get in a few licks of our own?” Gallico asked, eyes dancing.
“If we can. We’ll play it by ear. Elias, go you to the far docks and hunt us up another lighter—we’ll need a tow to get out of the bay same as Artimion. But we’ll leave it until he’s made it beyond the cliffs. No sense in antagonizing him. He has enough on his mind.”
Ganesh Ka was not yet in a panic, but it was a close-run thing. Its population had divided into those who sought safety on the boats now being cleared at the wharves, and those who were fleeing pell-mell for the hills. Experienced mariners were numbering folk off to each and every fishing smack, cutter, launch, lighter, and hoy that stood at the docks. It was an ordered process, but in the queuing lines there was the growing stink of desperation. Rol did not doubt that it would turn ugly before long.
A gaggle of men and women turned up on the dock alongside the Revenant and hailed the ship in shrill voices. The gangplank had been taken up preparatory to casting off but now these unfortunates were wailing in a body at the busy ship’s company.
“Take us aboard of you, sirs!”
“I worked three weeks on this here ship!”
“For pity’s sake, you have room enough in the hold; let us aboard.”
“Lower the gangplank,” Rol said to Creed, his hand on his sword hilt. “Gallico, how many could we get below the waterline?”
“We pack ’em in tight among the cable-tiers and the water casks, I’d say fifty maybe.”
“Count the first fifty on board and then raise the plank.”
Those on the docks cried out their thanks and came aboard in single file, their arms full of their meager possessions. Men, women, and bewildered children, some sobbing bitterly as they boarded. Creed led them below bearing a ship’s lantern and stowed them in the depths of the hold, where they lay weeping and gabbling in the near-darkness. When the gangplank was raised on the last of the fifty the remainder of the crowd stood staring hopelessly at the ship for a while, and then shouldered their burdens and left quietly. Rol felt a kind of shame as he watched them go.
“No lights to be allowed below,” he snapped as Creed came back on deck bearing his lantern. “We may have loose powder coming and going later on. Gallico, how long can we fight?”
The halftroll scratched his chin. “We’ve enough for eighteen or twenty full broadsides, fighting only one side of the ship. Both broadsides are loaded, though, and we’ve plenty of match, no fear about that.”
“If we haven’t won with twenty broadsides we’re beat anyway,” Rol said. “Sidearms?”
“A brace of pistols in your cabin, courtesy of the magazine. For everyone else it’s cutlasses, pikes, and axes, and don’t they hope we won’t need ’em.”
The lighter was alongside, its twelve-man crew resting on their oars. They had their seabags piled about the thwarts; clearly, once they had towed the Revenant out of the bay they meant to keep going.
“Cast off fore and aft!” Rol shouted. His heart was thumping madly. “Bear a hand with the towline forward. Helmsman, stand by at the wheel.”
His orders were well-nigh superfluous, for every one of the crew was an experienced seaman, and they had anticipated him. Beneath their feet, the ship began to move. Achingly slow at first, she built up a momentum through the water as the lighter crew strained at their oars. They edged away from the docks, toward the blazing brightness of the sea gates and the wide blue disc of the bay beyond.
The sunlight made them all blink like owls as they passed out of the shelter of the stone. Rol had almost forgotten that it was early summer, and the day was not yet old. He let fall topsails as a shimmer of a breeze passed over the enclosed bay, wrinkling the water, and the lightermen made better speed with the help of the sails. They steered directly for the gap in the encircling cliffs.
“We’re on the tail of the ebb,” Creed said, shading his eyes with his hand. “Lucky for us. Another hour and they’d have been hauling against the tide.”
The Revenant passed through the gap, the shadow of the cliffs cutting out the brilliant sunshine for a few minutes. But then she was through, and at once her motion changed, grew livelier. There was a stiff west-nor’west breeze blowing from the land and she had it on the port beam. The topsails bellied out taut and the creak of the rigging picked up a note.
The lighter crew cast off the towrope and stroke oar rose in his seat and waved his cap at them as they pulled away from the smaller craft. He shouted something but it was lost on the wind. Rol breathed deep. He could see Artimion’s ships fine on the starboard bow, some three or four leagues away already. He would keep his distance.
“Jib and courses—but reef the mizzen, lads,” he called out to his crew, and the men started up the shrouds, their sullenness evaporated. They were grinning and laughing as they climbed out on the yards, and the huge creamy masses of canvas fell like clouds, to be braced round and sheeted home with a minimum of fuss. Rol met Gallico’s eye, and nodded.
“Well, they’re seamen, all right.” He turned to the quartermaster at the wheel. “East-southeast.”
“Aye aye, sir. East-southeast it is.” The quartermaster was smiling like a man whose wife has given birth.
“Now let’s see what she can do,” Rol said to Gallico. “Get a log-line to the forechains.”
The Revenant was chopping through the swells, rolling and pitching as the offshore breeze met the eastward-rolling waves of the Inner Reach. She rose nobly, her heavy construction a bonus. Rol stood on her quarterdeck and grasped a backstay as was his wont, feeling the living movement of her beneath his feet, gauging the pressures working on her hull and masts. The spray raised by her bows came as far aft as the waist and in the white wake of her passage a miniature rainbow bloomed. Out here in the sunshine her hull timbers seemed even darker than in the gloom of the ship-cavern, such was the contrast with the blue sea, the unclouded sky. She was truly a black ship. His ship, the first he had ever truly taken to heart, having sweated and agonized over her resurrection like a midwife at a breech birth.
Rol closed his eyes, and felt her move under him. Felt the long creak and groan and fall and rise of her. It was like taking a strange woman into one’s bed, a new body to explore.
“By God, she has a heart,” Gallico said.
He opened his eyes at once. “Yes, she’s remarkably stiff. They knew what they were doing, those shipwrights who cursed over the teak in her ribs. Log-line there, what’s she making?”
The beardless youth who was being soaked in the forechains held on to the knotted log-line and shouted back aft. “Seven knots and one fathom!”
Gallico thumped the quarterdeck rail in sheer satisfaction.
“We’d best take in sail,” Rol said with studied casualness, “or we may well overtake master Artimion.” And then they both laughed like simpletons.
Rol sent lookouts to the mastheads; on a day like this they could survey a twenty-mile horizon. He looked back over the starboard quarter at Ganesh Ka, and saw a strange formation of mighty stone, the towers mere geological curiosities, the gap in the cliffs almost invisible. He realized in that moment that Ganesh Ka had always been a place of refuge, even back in the far distant days of its building. The Ancients had windows and fireplaces, they needed stairs and roadways, but their motives and concerns were utterly lost, completely alien. How old was Ganesh Ka? Ten thousand years? Twenty? No one knew. There was something maddening in that, not because of the Ancient blood that ran in his own veins, but simply because the loss of this knowledge, which he felt to be important, seemed almost criminal. What a world, he thought, what an awesomely crass world that can have such monuments erected in it, and not wonder about the minds that made them.
He faced forward again, the ship rising and falling under his feet. There was something in the sea, some ageless rhythm, which all men hearkened to even if none understood. He did not know if Ran’s Mark had put the sea yearning in his heart or if it had always been there, but he knew that here, now, at this moment, he was as happy as he had ever been in his life.
He looked skyward, and in his mind the bright ocean became a flat gaming board upon which pieces moved in obedience to the vagaries of the wind. There was the ragged Ganesh coast; deep-bitten and rock-strewn, death for vessels that did not know it well. There was Artimion and his ships, swooping down upon ten other vessels, the Bionese regiment and its protectors. Rol breathed in slow, remembering what Psellos had told him.
Most men think in one straight line. They see their own actions as a single thread unraveling, and the impingement of others upon their life as nothing more than stray knots in the thread. They look at things through one set of eyes: their own. It is a gift you must learn, to look at your own situation from the viewpoint of another. It is not hard, nor is it complicated. But it is necessary, if you are to survive.
For a moment Rol thought of Rowen, now a rebel queen vying for the possession of a kingdom. His sister. Why would she want him brought to her, now, seven years after she had walked away? He did not believe it was for love. Whatever she was now, it was not the woman she might have been had they remained together. He knew somehow that she was an enemy. That knowledge broke the boy Rol’s heart, but the man Psellos had trained nodded thoughtfully and filed it away for future use.
Then the training went to work on the task in hand. Assemble the information, and ask yourself how it all got there. Why is this happening? Crude questions, and pyramids of factors in the answers.
The Bionari are beating up the coast, into the wind, which means they have come from the south. What is in the south? They have a garrison in Golgos, and—and that’s it.
Rol opened his eyes.
The embarked regiment is the Golgos garrison, and it has taken ship because it has received intelligence about the region in which this elusive pirate city can be found. From where would it receive such intelligence?
And he knew. The knowledge leaped up in his brain even as his heart sank under the weight of it.
His erstwhile shipmates must have been picked up by the Imperials. For the first time, the Bionari knew in which region the Hidden City lay. And now they were sailing up the coast looking for it.
Artimion was right, he thought. I am bad luck. I have brought this on their heads. And his joy in the bright blue day and the ship leaping under his feet was diminished.
“Sail ho!” the lookout on the foremast cried.
His mind emptied. He was instantly alert. “Where?”
“Broad on the larboard beam, skipper. Topsails up. I believe she might be ship-rigged.”
Rol was running aft in a moment. He clambered up the weather shrouds of the mainmast, heaved himself into the maintop, and then started up the topgallantmast. He got close to the truck, hooked an arm in the hounds, and peered east.
Yes, she was three-masted, though not ship-rigged. A barque, square-rigged on fore and main, fore-and-aft sails on the mizzen. More than that he could not make out.
He roared down at the quarterdeck. “Helmsman there! Bring her three points to larboard. Course due east!”
The Revenant turned smoothly under him, his lofty perch leaning and then straightening, dipping and rising. The strange ship could be a Mercanter, minding her own business, but somehow he did not think so. And in any case, she had the weather-gage of Artimion’s little fleet. Rol would have to intercept her if she was not to come upon the other ships of the Ka from the rear.
Ran, let her not be a man-of-war, he prayed silently. Not now.
It was a glorious day about him, a fine day to be at sea. After the confines of Ganesh Ka’s somber stone, the outside world seemed vast beyond measure.
This turning earth, as limitless as a madman’s imagination.
He could see five leagues in every direction, and if he looked east, this entire world was naught but a bubble of blue space. Turquoise sea, the breeze caressing it into a wrinkled swell that caught the sunlight in a vast shimmer. And a sky so dark above his head it might almost be purple, shading down to the far horizon and meeting the ocean, merging with it at the edge of sight. A blue world, empty of everything but air and water. And that nick on the edge of the horizon, the strange ship that might be harmless, or might spell his doom.
Heart rushing in his throat, he looked down. Far below him there pitched a tiny, crowded wooden world. The deck was covered with men, cordage, and the crouching shapes of cannon tied up close to the bulwark, like bronze beasts kept prudently in check. The men below paused, and he could see scores of faces tilted upward at him, and then out at the horizon.
He could not take the risk. Rol closed his eyes for a second, and bellowed, “Beat to quarters!”
A moment of stillness, and then the dry rattling of a drum started up, and the crowd of men on deck exploded into a circus of activity. The ship’s wake began to curve in a graceful arc behind her as she answered her rudder, and changed course to converge with the approaching vessel. Her bow dipped and plunged with a hissing roar and scattered packets of spindrift along the fo’c’sle. Below him, the rigging creaked and groaned, the timbers stretching and straining as though his ship were stirring into wrathful life, a woken titan.
The Revenant was running now with the wind on her larboard quarter, with her mizzen brailed up, the topsails full and drawing tight. His crew were hauling in the mainsail and forecourse—when there was action ahead, it was best not to have canvas billowing too near the muzzles of the guns.
Rol grasped a backstay and slid back down on deck, Ran’s Mark keeping his palm from burning. At once the close-packed activity surrounded him, and his world grew small and busy.
“Don’t run them out, lads,” he shouted at the gun-crews. He wanted the port-lids to remain closed until the last moment, when the Revenant would bare her teeth at her enemy by running out the six twelve-pound sakers of her larboard broadside. Below his feet the ship answered the urgent impetus of the wind with a will.
There—the chase’s topsails had come farther over the curve of the horizon and were visible on deck now. A pennant flying from the mainmast like a spit of far-off saffron, edged round with black. The fighting flag of Bionar.
“Ran’s beard,” Gallico said softly. “She’s a warship.”
“We’ll need your twenty broadsides after all,” Rol told him, smiling. He sniffed the air. The wind was still nor-nor’west, and the Revenant was making a good seven knots before it, whilst the barque was close-hauled, running into it at an angle, the yards braced round until they were almost fore-and-aft like a schooner’s. Rol studied her progress.
“A slow way to sail, it must be said. I doubt she’s making three knots.”
Gallico nodded. There was a tight grin on his face that held no humor in it at all.
“Deck there!” a lookout bellowed. “She’s altered course a point—seems she means to close with us.”
“Stand by to run out the larboard broadside. Elias, run up our colors. Gallico, go you to the fo’c’sle and see about assembling some boarders.”
“Aye, sir,” Gallico snapped, winking, and lumbered off with a swiftness startling in one so huge.
The Revenant’s pennant was run up the mainmast halliards, and the breeze snapped it out like a frenzied snake. It was a ragged length of sable linen without device. The Black Flag. If she struck after this, there would be no quarter asked or given.
“Larboard crews, run out your guns!”
The port-lids that lined one side of the ship were raised up, and sweating teams of men, six to a gun, hauled their massive, brutal charges outboard with a groaning of rope and thunderous rumbling of wood and iron. A ton and a half apiece, the twelve-pounders’ collective weight canted the ship to one side as they shifted. Sand had been scattered across the deck so that the barefoot sailors might not slip in their own blood (if blood was shed), tubs of water had been set out round the butts of the masts, and the coils of slow-match that would touch off the cannon were already smoldering away in iron buckets beside every gun-team. The acrid, pulse-quickening smell eddied about the waist of the ship. Rol breathed it in as though it were perfume and took up his battle station at the break of the quarterdeck, close to the ship’s wheel. His four quartermasters stood grasping it, keeping the ship on her course. At the quarterdeck rail two more men stood manning the wicked little two-pound swivel-guns.
“You might want these,” Creed said, proffering a pair of flintlock pistols with a wry smile. “They’re loaded and primed; I did it myself.”
Rol nodded, and tucked them into the sash at his waist. Everyone else had a cutlass at his hip, but Rol had Fleam. As the two ships drew closer together, he fiddled unconsciously with the leather-bound flints of his firearms, blessing the breadth of Psellos’s education.
“Steady.” This to the helmsmen. They were doing well, but then most of them were born to the sea. Many had seen action before. He looked up and down the decks, and saw his men standing ready and poised. There was no talk. Gallico had picked them well.
“Elias, the people in the hold—”
“They’ve been warned to stay below. They’re quiet as mice. They’ve taken the children into the bilge—not too pleasant, but safer.”
The oncoming barque was less than three cables away now. At the last moment he would put the Revenant about and present his gleaming broadside. She would have to heave-to then, for fear of being raked. Once they had pounded the tar out of her, Gallico would grapple her forestays to the bow and board her—and every man-jack of the crew would be—
“Skipper—she’s not heaving-to,” one of the helmsmen warned.
“Mind your course.”
The barque’s crew were crowding forward onto her fo’c’sle. Rol saw the gleam of metal on blades there; and then all along her hull the port-lids opened and the sinister shapes of heavy guns were run out. She was going to plow straight on and meet them yardarm to yardarm.
“Hard a starboard!” he yelled, hoping he had not left it too late.
The helmsmen spun the ship’s wheel frantically and the Revenant turned, growling and smashing waves aside. But the run-out guns on her port side slowed the turn. The deck canted and they groaned against the tackles that held them in place. A water bucket slithered into the scuppers and overturned, and one unhandy lubber lost his footing on the sand-strewn deck and followed it.
Too slow.
“She won’t make it. Gun-crews there—lie down on deck! After her first broadside, fire as they bear!”
“Ran be merciful,” one of the helmsmen muttered. He and his fellows had to remain standing to keep the ship on course.
The barque put about her helm a scant half cable from the bow of the Revenant, and then her entire side vanished in a huge fuming storm of yellow smoke. Half a heartbeat later came the tremendous roar of her full broadside, and then the air was screaming and alive with iron and wood and sundered flesh. The cannonballs struck the Revenant fine on the port bow and traveled almost the full length of the ship, slicing rigging, smashing the boats on the booms to fragments, rending her hull, and blasting men to bloody pieces. One shot, which shrieked along the quarterdeck, cut two of the helmsmen in half and burst the ship’s wheel into jagged shards of wood. The two surviving quartermasters fought to regain control of the shattered wheel whilst Rol picked himself off the deck and, panting, yanked a wicked sliver of oak out of his thigh.
“Fire!” he shouted, maddened with pain and fury.
The ship was still answering her rudder, and completed her turn to starboard with barely a check. With blood streaming from her scuppers like that of some wounded giant, her own guns thundered out in savage sequence. A bank of smoke as tall as the mainyard rose up in a billowing cloud, shot through with flame. In the waist the heavy sakers jumped back one by one as their crews jammed smoking match into the touch-holes.
“Pour it into them, boys!” Rol yelled. And to the surviving helmsmen: “How does she steer?”
“She’s all right, skipper.”
“Then make three points to port. Take us right up the bastard’s throat.”
Chaos all the length of his ship. A gun overturned there in the middle of the waist with the corpses of its crew a mangled pulp about it. Men throwing water over a burning heap of cordage, others tossing bodies overboard. The mizzen half shot through, and up on the fo’c’sle a bewildering maze of broken timber and rope with Gallico and his men trying to hack it free of the bow-chasers. Rol looked up. The foretopgallantmast had gone by the board. Sailors were up in the shrouds with axes already, trying to cut away the wreckage that was strangling the Revenant.
God damn them. His beautiful ship.
“Skipper, we’ve half a dozen holes just on the waterline. I need more men for the pumps.” This was Eiserne, the carpenter.
“You shall have them, Kier. Take half a dozen from the larboard gun-crews—no more, mind. Can you plug the holes?”
“Aye, no fear of that. But she’s a fearful mess down below. Some of the passengers have copped it.”
“As long as she floats. Go to it now.” Rol clapped the man on his shoulder, and the carpenter scurried off down the companionway.
Another broadside from the barque. This one was less devastating, as the two ships were side by side now, slugging it out on even terms. Another saker dismounted, and three gun-ports beaten into one jagged hole on the larboard side, murderous splinters of wood spraying across the deck and knocking men down like skittles. The enemy was firing low, into the hull. When going after a prize it was usual to aim high, at the rigging, and so avoid the risk of sinking a valuable vessel. These men were not out to capture, but to kill.
Rol saw a cannonball rolling along the deck—an eighteen-pounder by the looks of it. This was heavier metal than he had ever thought to encounter—he was outgunned.
But the men who served the Revenant’s guns were not novices, and their blood was up. Broadside after broadside continued to roar out, and they heaved at their sakers with sweat streaming down their naked torsos, faces black with powder, blood trickling from minor wounds.
The broadsides were ragged now, though. Only four guns still firing on the larboard side, and those thinly manned. Damage-control parties were working steadily; putting out fires, plugging shot-holes, splicing rigging, and heaving bodies or parts of bodies over the taffrail. This could not go on. The heavier metal of the barque would prevail, in the end.
The two ships were still cruising side by side a cable’s length apart, the air between them a fuming cataclysm of smoke and hurtling iron. The Revenant had the wind on the starboard beam and thus possessed the weather-gage: in theory she should be able to close with her enemy anytime she chose.
Rol turned to the two surviving helmsmen, who were still holding steady the splintered wreck of the ship’s wheel.
“Hard a port!” he shouted.
The Revenant obediently turned to his left, and with the wind now on her starboard quarter she picked up speed, closing the two hundred yards that separated her from the barque with breath-catching rapidity.
“Brace yourselves!” Rol bellowed, the second before the two ships collided.
The Revenant’s bowsprit smashed through the barque’s bulwark just aft of her fo’c’sle and exploded into a splintered nightmare of wood and rope. The Revenant kept going, and the hulls of the two vessels came together with a concussion that knocked every man aboard them off his feet. Rol found himself flung over the quarterdeck rail like a discarded child’s toy, and landed in a pile of canvas and bodies. There was a searing crack, and the Revenant’s entire foretopmast came crashing down over the waist of the barque, entangling the two ships hopelessly and forming a bridge that Gallico and his boarders now clambered shrieking across.
The cannon-fire had stopped for the moment as the two ship’s companies picked themselves up and collected their wits. Rol wiped blood out of his eyes and drew Fleam. The scimitar was trembling in his hand. “Come on, Revenants—get the guns going. Don’t go to sleep on me now!”
The dazed crews stumbled back to their sakers and mechanically began reloading. On the barque, a confused scrum of men were fighting viciously to repel Gallico’s boarders. A surf of shouting and screaming rose up out of her hull. Rol picked his way through the wreckage of the waist and climbed up onto the fo’c’sle. It was like navigating through a storm-felled forest. Behind him, the Revenant’s guns started up again. A damage-control party was hacking at the tumbled topmast with axes. Creed was in their midst, shouting orders and looking half-demented.
“Forget about that now, Elias. Follow me. Gallico needs a hand.”
He gathered a motley crowd of perhaps twenty men and led them across the topmast that joined the two ships together. One man lost his footing and fell into the dark, choppy sea between the vessels’ hulls. The rest did not pause, but followed Rol onto the barque, brandishing axes, cutlasses, and boarding-pikes and yelling like maniacs.
Gallico was there, towering over everyone else in the melee, his face transformed into a demonic mask of battle-rage. He was laying about him with a massive baulk of broken timber, cutting men down as though they were corn, sending bodies flying to left and right. He was the apex of a solid wedge of Revenants who were struggling to advance down the waist of the barque. Resisting them was a mass of the enemy crew, some in the loose garb of sailors, others in the breastplates and helmets of soldiers. In places, men of both sides were so tightly packed together that they could not even raise their arms to strike one another. An enemy officer stood at the barque’s quarterdeck rail urging on his men. He wore black-trimmed scarlet hose and his breastplate shone like a mirror. His handsome, bearded face was framed by a cascade of raven ringlets and there was lace on his cuffs.
Rol drew forth one of the pistols at his waist, cocked it, and shot the man in the throat. He tumbled head-first into the affray below.
A cry went up, and the barque’s crew seemed to flinch. Instantly, Gallico waded forward, and the men facing him retreated hurriedly. Some moral advantage seemed to have passed to the Revenants. The fight opened out. Rol led his men into the gap, shot a raging soldier with his second pistol, skewered another through his open mouth, and kicked a third aside whilst ripping his sword free. He found himself at Gallico’s side. The massive halftroll grinned horribly, his eyes two green windows into hell.
“Well met, Rol. A hot day’s work.”
“Too damned hot by half.” Rol slashed out at an enemy sailor, opening up his bowels. The man shrieked despairingly as they poured steaming down his thighs. Gallico crushed his skull with one blow from a gnarled fist.
A wicked, vicious melee in which men hacked and clubbed one another to death and the deck of the barque ran slick and scarlet with their blood. Rol, Gallico, and Creed were in the forefront of the Revenants, battling their way aft to the barque’s quarterdeck. The enemy sailors streamed away but the armored soldiers in their midst gave a good account of themselves; they were Bionese marines, some of the finest professionals in the world. They asked no quarter and did not retreat, but gathered in knots and fought stubbornly, and Rol’s unprotected mariners were no match for them. The fighting swayed backwards again, and the Revenants began to waver. Though Rol, Gallico, and Creed fought on in one tight, unyielding triangle, the rest of the crew were retreating back to the fo’c’sle.
The enemy marines gave a shout and pressed home their advantage, slipping on the bloody deck, tripping over bodies in their haste to hack at the unprotected backs of the Revenants. Rol turned his head to shout, to rally his men, and the flat of a sword blade struck him just above his left eye. He fell to one knee, and the jubilant marine would have had his head off in the next second had not Gallico’s fist smashed the man backwards. Rol staggered, vision blurred, head ringing, and as he collected himself, he could feel something stirring inside him.
It was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. He laughed out loud as raw bull-like strength flooded his limbs and a white rage began to rise behind his eyes. In his fist the new-moon length of Fleam began to shake and shine, bloody over the hilt. “On me!” he shrieked in a voice that did not sound like his own, and rising to his feet he powered forward alone.
One sweep of the scimitar’s wicked edge cut through the breastplate and ribs of an enemy marine and laid his heart bare. Rol reached in and plucked the beating muscle from the man’s chest, ripped it free and threw it at his comrades. The awful laughter continued to cackle out of his throat, and from his eyes now the smoking whiteness spilled out and Fleam began to glow white and the blood boiled off her hot steel. To those about him it seemed their captain grew in size, and looming white wings of flame rose from his shoulders. His sword arced back and forth in a brightness painful to look at, and the Bionese marines about him were cut to steaming pieces by the snick of the terrible blade.
The marines broke and began climbing over one another to get away from the terrifying light. Even the Revenants turned tail on their captain and began clambering back over the tangled wreckage to their own ship. Only Gallico and Creed remained at Rol’s shoulders. He pursued the fleeing enemy back to the quarterdeck rail, to the ship’s wheel, and finally to the very taffrail itself, where they crowded like sheep yammering before a wolf. They threw away their weapons and jumped over the barque’s stern, or stood slack-jawed with terror and were cut to shreds. Fleam came down on the back of the last as he was trying to clamber over the stern and sliced clear through him, burying herself in the wood of the taffrail. The marine toppled overboard in two pieces.
For a moment it seemed that the white, winged light would rise up over the ship’s stern and fly away. The wing-shapes, almost too bright to look at, seemed to curl and smoke in silver tendrils, feathered blades sharp as frost. Then they began to shrink again.
The light went out. Rol Cortishane stood breathing hard, staring at his scimitar buried to the hilt in hard oak. He tried to wrench her free, failed, finally succeeded on the third attempt. The radiance in his eyes dwindled. He tottered, would have fallen had not Gallico’s great paw steadied him.
“It’s done, skipper,” Elias said quietly, and set a hand on his arm. The Revenants were clustered about the fo’c’sle of the barque, their faces gray with fear and shock. Rol seemed to come back to himself with a physical effort. He blinked, glared disbelievingly at the carnage about his feet. The cracking boom as one of the Revenant’s sakers fired again, sending splinters flying from the barque’s hull at the waterline.
“Revenants, ’vast firing there!” Gallico shouted out across the bulwark to the gun-crews of their own ship.
The cannons went silent. Suddenly there was no noise but for the bubbling groans of a few wounded, and the creak of the two grappled vessels, the slap of the sea at their wounded hulls. Rol’s ears hissed and rang with the after-echoes of gunfire. In his eyes colored after-images swam as if he had been staring clear into the heart of the sun. Gallico stared into his face, searching there for the man he knew.
“Rol. Rol, come back.”
Cortishane blinked stupidly. Fleam slipped from his grasp to the deck. His eyes rolled back in his head.
“Gallico, we must be quick. This ship is sinking under us,” Elias Creed said, and the halftroll scooped Rol’s body up into his blood-smeared arms.