A King's Trade (57 page)

Lashed together, hulls grinding paint, tar, and linseed oil off, the French were but briefly daunted. The unexpected check was like a red flag waved at a bull, enflaming their blood lust. Swords chopped through nets, slashing suspending ropes, and parts of the netting came down at last, allowing a small flood of boarders to gain footing along
Festival
's gangway.

”
Vaya con Dios, amigos,”
Jose whispered as he removed muzzles from his bears, and cuffed them hard on their snouts to enrage them. “Go,
hasta luego, niños!
Eat Frenchmen!” he directed, pointing, then shoving them in the right direction. Fredo and Paulo might not have been all that hungry, or all that enraged, either, perhaps imagined a time free of their constricting muzzles was a time to
play.
Whatever
they
made of it, the pair of brothers, usually as gentle as baa-lambs as Jose had promised, made a
distinct
impression on the French sailors who had gained the gangway as they loped towards them on all fours with their mouths open, their fangs flickering in the back-flashes of the lightning, and their claws skittering rather loudly on the oak planks!

It didn't help that Jose, in his second role as knife-thrower, was whickering butcher-knives at the French as he ran behind his bears, and shrieking curses, aiming to
hit
for a change, not outline the girl who spun on his large wooden wheel with near-misses!

“Ilya, mean old son of bitch,” Arslan Durschenko cooed into one ear of his lone adult lion after he had led him up from his cage down in the upper hold.
“Ya lyubeet tiy, syegda.
Lovink you, always, even if you no damn' good. Chase there, da? Want
head
for bitink?
There,
Ilya,
there!
Sweet meat,
Fransooski
bastards!”

The lion whuffed at the din of combat, of clashing swords, and howling men, his mane shivering at every discharge of musket or pistol. Ilya was old, as old as poor, dead Vanya, and he had never had what one might call a sweet disposition. His rheumy eyes lit up with an ancient joy, though, and, free for once of a controlling leash and collar after Durschenko removed it and gave him an encouraging slap on his rump, the lion just had to do what a lion had to do. He leaped from the weather deck to the gangway with the spryness of a young male, huge hind paws not even having to scrabble at its edge, found himself a victim on the gangway, and rose up to drape his front paws on a man's shoulders, his gaping, fang-filled mouth inches from his nose as he let out a roar!

Thankfully for
Festival
's crew, Ilya's first choice
was
French, though nothing about lions was gilt-edged guaranteed. The French tar shrieked, sword clattering to the deck in terror, and fainted away, a good thing for him, for Ilya didn't think that was very much fun, nor was it even tasty, so he rose up again and began slapping those plate-sized, sharp-taloned paws about to right and left, this time draping himself on the sole remaining trio of Frenchmen who
hadn't
been swatted into bloody tatters, and took himself a lovely mouthful of face!

“Stay th' Divil away f'um me, ye bastards!” Paddy was shouting, musket emptied into one man, pistol emptied into another, then used as a club to shatter a third's skull. His boarding pike had been lost in a Frenchman's belly, a man who had joined his shipmates in the sluice between the hulls, and he was now reduced to whirling his cutlass like a frantic St. Catherine's Wheel, and he was holding off two sword-armed enemies by creating a steel fan in front of him, but his arms were now growing lead-heavy and weak. “I don't
wanna
die, Jay-sus, Mary, an' Joseph! Don't hurt me, or Oi'll
kill
ye! Go-od
damn!”
he gawped.

Ilya had come to his rescue, pouncing, rather playfully kitten-like it
could
be described, onto their backs, and naturally going for the tried-and-true neck-bite on one of them, jostling the other to his knees with his cutlass down, and Paddy whisked his blade like an axe, cleaving right down through the crown of his foe's skull, deep into his brain. “Oi told ye, Oi warned ye! Oh, shite!”
His foe
bleated out a death-scream,
Ilya
's prey shrieked his own as long fangs met together in the unfortunate sailor's throat. Ilya gave him a good shake, then looked at Paddy with his eyes glowing in eager green chatoyance.

“Gooood
kitty!” Paddy whinnied, leaping rather spryly, himself, for the main mast shrouds and rat-lines.
“Noice
kitty!” he whimpered as he shot up the stays past the cat-harpings in an eye-blink, hoping that lions didn't much care for nigh-vertical ascents on shaky ropes, and swearing that if he survived, he'd
never
sign aboard a ship which carried
any
sort of critters! “Mither?” he cried to the main truck as the lion took a moment to look up at
him
and ponder his chances.

“What are you fools…?” a French Lieutenant bellowed as sailors came tumbling back aboard the frigate
Vesuve.
“Attack, I say, go back and
attack…
Eeekk!” as a lion—a shaggy-maned
lion!
—sprang from one bulwark to the next, balanced for a short second on all four paws like a domestic cat on a balcony railing, then sprang for
him
and took him down with his massive weight. The bloody-mawed beast landed atop him, embraced him with gigantic front paws,
and clawed his torso from breastbone to groin with his hind paws, roaring in his face, and fine broadcloth wool and clean white silk—always to be worn when in combat, for it was easier to withdraw from wounds!—went flying like a ragpicker's rejected quilt pieces! His sailors shot, stabbed, and bayoneted the beast, but it was far too late for the Lieutenant, and Ilya actually managed to claw a
matelot
to ribbons before he died, managing to shatter the night with one last, prideful roar that sounded like utter satisfaction, and the total domination of all Africa that he had been denied when captured as a cub so many years before.

“I not cry,” Arslan Durschenko muttered as he heard his lion's last victory roar. Even so, he had to pipe at his good left eye for a second, before turning to receive a fresh-loaded rifled musket from a wee red-headed “actress,” and brought it to his left shoulder to take careful aim. The French were still so close that Durschenko could aim, then shut his left eye before he pulled the trigger to prevent the loss of his remaining sight. A lifetime of marksmanship assured him that he would strike his man, and even before he opened his eyes, the shout of pain that followed the snap of the lock and the flash in the pan, then the bark and recoil of the rifled weapon, told him he had scored.

“A pity,” the brazenly pert little redhead told him as she took the rifle back, and handed him a pair of double-barreled pistols. “‘E were a good lion… mostly.”

“Ilya was
Devil
son of bitch,” Arslan Durschenko snarled as he cocked all four locks. “But, he die good, I give him one last chance. Those two pistols, too,
kraseeya dyevooshka,
and I showink somethink. Keep down,
dyevooshka.
Too pretty to fight. Watchink this!”

The girl ducked down behind the compass binnacle as Durschenko strode forward towards the starboard gangway with a pistol in each of his hands. The French were retreating, flowing back to their frigate, but Durschenko's blood was up. Off-handed, shooting from the hip with his left eye squinted, he volleyed off, first from the right hand, and then from the left, alternating right-side and left-side barrels from both guns, and four Frenchmen slumped to the deck! He dropped both of his empty pistols and drew his last pair of singlebarreled duellers, raising the right one to shoulder level.

The other foemen spotted the threat at last, some raising their cutlasses, or swinging muskets towards him, but not before Durschenko blasted one of them backwards to slam into the gangway bulwark with a ball in his heart, folded over himself. Durschenko raised his other pistol, just as the Frenchman who had levelled his musket right at him yelped in agony as an arrow drove deep into his
right side, and pulled the trigger as the muzzle dropped, to drive the ball deep into the oak deck. Before the French could react to this new threat, yet another arrow went into the left eye socket of the man who had swung to find the source, and his death-scream was as un-nerving as a dying woman's.

Then, the bears arrived from up forward, both Fredo and Paulo clumsily stalking aft on their hind feet, rolling their massive heads and roaring with their mouths open and their upper lips laid back from long, though un-bloodied, fangs. Durschenko fired his last pistol and found his mark, and the French at last broke and ran, scrambling from
Festival
to the relative safety of their frigate, abandoning weapons to free their hands for the desperate and dangerous crossing. Men on both ships, with good reason, were hacking at the grapnel lines with boarding axes and swords.

Astern of them, Capt. Weed was shouting orders for brace-tenders and sheet-handlers as he spun the spokes of the wheel to a blur to get his ship away into the darkness as quickly as he could. Her own battle lust not yet slaked, Eu-doxia smoothly plucked a shaft from the sheaf on her back, notched it, and drew to her cheek in one slick motion, firing four more arrows in as few seconds, it seemed, and tumbling all four of her marks into the widening gap between the hulls, or making them drop onto the frigate's gangways where their shouts and cries and confusion-causing bodies kept the recent shock and terror redly alive.

“Urrah!” Arslan Durschenko shouted, both arms and empty pistols thrust at the stormy night sky in triumph. “We win! Urrah!” he cried, looking up at the poop deck, where a bandaged Black man stood with his hunting rifle in one hand, and cheering, too.

“Urrah!” Eudoxia seconded, coming to hug her father, to dance in place and bounce on her toes in victory.

“Cossack
forever, Fransooski
bastards!” her poppa howled.

“Damned h'if we didn't!” Daniel Wigmore marvelled in complete astonishment, ready to feel himself over for wounds as he rose from a handy hiding place near the break of the poop. He had an un-fired pistol and an un-bloodied sword, but he waved them aloft with as much exuberance as the rest. “Damme h'if h'it didn't work, ha ha! Eeek!” he added, as Fredo and Paulo, their “play-pretties” now gone, came loping aft, looking for more excitement. “Jose, come git yer damn' bears, I say! P…please? Jose!”

“Hoy, th' deck!” came a forlorn voice from the main mast truck, astride the furled and gasketed sail and yard. “Kin I come down, now? Is ‘at lion gone, ar-rah?”

H
MS
Proteus
shuddered to another hit, thick oak scantlings crying as they were punctured, and a framing timber under the Number Five larboard gun-port gave out a great groan of pain as the 18-pdr. round-shot
thonked
into it inches deep and lodged there.

“Two feet or more in the bilges, now, sir,” Lt. Langlie had to report, his cocked hat gone, and his face smeared with grey gun-grit.

“Their rate of fire's slackin',” Lewrie commented, giving that dire news but half an ear. The storm was finally blowing itself out, the winds moderating, and the rain coming down in sullen, vertical showers, instead of being whipped horizontally into their faces. The worst of the weather had scudded off Nor'west with its heavy lightning, so if a bolt now struck, it was no longer close-aboard, and there were several seconds between the crack and the rumbling thunder roll.

“There!” Lewrie snapped, pointing at their foe in a weaker glimmer of a distant lightning strike. “See
there,
Mister Langlie! Hands to the braces, and we'll make up a bit closer to her, still. Quartermasters … another half-point to weather!”

The enemy frigate, in that blink-of-an-eye flash, stood revealed as a battered shell, her hull planking stove in, and riddled with star-shaped shot-holes, several of her gun-ports hammered into one, and her starboard bulwarks gnawed away in places, from abaft her cat-heads and swung-up anchors to abeam of her mizen-mast.