Ison of the Isles (8 page)

Harg motioned Gill to follow him, and set out for the foredeck to spy out the action ahead. As he walked the length of the deck he shouted out encouragement, though he couldn’t any longer hear his own voice. He knew that the gun crews were in a strange trance of routine motion: swab, load, ram, prime, run out, train, cock, fire, again. When he passed, their sooty faces grinned at him with a weird elation, like damned souls that didn’t yet know they were in hell.

Ahead, he could see that the
Ison Orin
and
Pimpernel
had their opponent in a ship sandwich and were battering it mercilessly. The last five Inning ships were still riding at anchor, unopposed and useless. No, not quite useless—one was firing a mortar into the melee. “Idiots,” Harg said. In these close quarters they were as likely to hit their own ships as their enemy.

When he returned to the quarterdeck, Jonci appeared at his side. “The
Discipline
’s fire has slowed a lot since
Smoke
came up on her larboard side,” she said. “We must be doing some damage.”

“We’ve got them sweating in their pretty uniforms,” Harg said. He felt a surge of fierce glee. He clapped her on the back. “By the horns, we’re in the right place today, Jonci! This is where we were meant to be. Your crew—”

His words were cut off by a hot blast of wind past his ear. The concussion knocked him sideways, and he staggered into Gill. Jonci was no longer beside him. He looked around for her, and finally saw her, writhing like a smashed bug, halfway across the deck. Her right arm and shoulder were missing.

Gill was clutching his arm. “Harg, are you all right?”

His skin was tingling strangely; he had to gasp for breath.
Don’t think
, he told himself.
Don’t even try
.

“Get the captain below!” he ordered. “Who’s her lieutenant?”

“Me, sir,” a white-faced young man said. Too young, Harg thought with a wild stab of remorse. For an instant he wanted to shout,
Go home! Get out of here!

“Have the gunners step up their fire. Tell them they’re turning the battle.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Look, Harg!” Gill pointed ahead. The next Inning ship in line had been dismasted. Now a stray shot had severed her anchor cable and she was floating downwind, trailing a mess of rigging in the water. For an instant it looked like she was going to foul Barko’s ship, but the wind carried her past it, toward shore.

One enemy out of action. “We’ll finish her off later,” Harg said. “Signal our ships to move on to the next in line. No, wait.”

Something was happening toward the downwind end of the Inning line. The five ships, the big ones with no opponents, were raising sail. Harg squinted through the smoke-haze to see their course. Beneath his feet the deck vibrated with the redoubled effort of the gunners; his teeth felt like they were shaking out of their sockets. He guessed the Innings were going to try to tack upwind and come down on the line of fighting ships from the side. His mind was working ferociously, graphing out their course, the timing, the best way to meet the attack. Then the five ships veered downwind.

“They’re running away!” Gill exclaimed in disbelief.

“The bastards!” Harg said. He wished he could see the faces on the
Discipline
’s deck, when they saw their best ships abandoning them.

Escaping. Harg cursed at how slowly his mind was working. He couldn’t let them get away. They would still be a danger to be tracked down and attacked, perhaps under less favourable circumstances. But the battle he had started was not yet won.

For an instant Harg weighed a near-sure, but incomplete, victory against the chance of winning or losing it all. He glanced at the
Windemon
’s rigging to evaluate the damage, then roared, “Lieutenant!”

Jonci’s first lieutenant came up. “What’s the state of your ship?” Harg asked.

“We’ve got some holes below water line. She’s taking on water. The lower gun deck is bad; three guns out of commission . . .”

“The rigging, man. Can she sail?” Harg asked impatiently.

“Give me ten minutes to repair—”

“No. Get her under whatever sail you can, and repair as we go. We’re following those ships.” Harg turned to Gill. “Hoist a signal for
Ison Orin
and
Pimpernel
to pursue the enemy. The rest can finish up here under Jearl’s command.”

“We can’t catch them,” Gill said.

“We can’t if we don’t try!”

When the
Windemon
pulled ahead through the gap in the line left by the grounded Inning vessel, and her guns fell silent, Harg felt he must surely have gone deaf, so quiet it seemed. He was astonished to note it was almost noon; they had been pounding the
Discipline
for two hours. For the life of him he couldn’t account for the time.

With the fore and mizzen sails set, there was a momentary lull in activity on deck. Harg picked his way across the wreckage. The planking was grooved and pocked where shot had glanced, and littered with smashed wood and fallen rope. One gun whose barrel had burst was still smoking, having blown up its own gunport. Here and there exhausted gunners sprawled against the gun trucks. Harg paused by one who sat, knees drawn up and head buried in his arms as if to block out all the world. The sight reminded Harg of himself, once. How many years ago had it been, that first battle when he had thought his senses permanently unhinged? Only six years. It seemed much longer.

The wounded and dead had not yet been taken below, merely dragged aside in the rush and piled like lumber between the gangways. Harg skirted the area, wishing his deafness had lasted so he would not have to hear the voices.

“Go see how Jonci is,” he said to Gill.

Gill looked at him oddly. “She’s dead.”

“Oh,” Harg said.

When he mounted the quarterdeck again he could see the line of battle behind them. The northernmost ship in the Inning line still lay anchored, unopposed since the start, but trapped between the battle and the sandbar, her broadsides useless, unable to move without running onto her own allies.
Spinneret
,
Smoke
, and
Lark
were still duelling it out with their opponents. The departure of three rebel ships seemed to have heartened the defenders, and the lagging pace of the salvos had picked up again. Harg guessed it would not last long, if Jearl kept pressing them. It was something in the body language of the Inning ships; it spoke to some sixth sense of their hopelessness at being trapped, abandoned by their friends, in the storm of a ferocious attack.

“Harg, look,” Gill said. “
Wavedancer
got free.”

He was right; the rising tide had evidently lifted her from the shoal, and now she was sailing in to join the fight. “Quick, signal her to join us,” Harg said. It was a godsend—a fresh ship, as if dropped from the sky. The odds were still long against them, but it helped.

Then he noticed activity at the harbour’s mouth. Two rowboats were out there, pulling aside the boom, and a cluster of sails was billowing out behind.

“Ha! Dorn’s coming out to join the fun,” Harg said.

“It’s about time,” Gill scowled.

Harg trained his spyglass on the leading ships of Dorn’s fleet, to see which way they would turn—to help Jearl polish off the ships already under attack, or, as he hoped, to join him in pursuit of the others. But as he watched in disbelief, they set course due west.

“The rotting cowards!” Harg said. The pirates had seen their chance, and were fleeing the scene of the engagement.

The hopes of every man on deck had risen at the prospect of reinforcement, and now they were staring after the pirate fleet with betrayal in their faces. Harg collapsed his spyglass with a click. “So much for solidarity,” he said in disgust.

He turned to scan the sea ahead. The Inning ships had a formidable head start. Under normal circumstances, Harg’s ships would have been faster; but with damaged rigging and hulls their small advantage was gone. For an instant he thought of calling off the chase and turning back to finish off the battle he could win.

“Sir,” the lookout called, “they’re only under topsails.”

Harg frowned and squinted into the distance to confirm this inexplicable news. To escape pursuit, they ought to be crowding on sail for dear life.

“Do you suppose they haven’t seen us?” Gill said.

Harg suspected something grimmer. They weren’t fleeing at all; it was only a ruse to draw away part of the islander fleet to a distance where they could turn and overwhelm it. And Harg had taken the bait.

“I wonder how they knew what I’d do,” Harg said.

“What do you mean?” Gill hadn’t yet figured it out. Harg glanced at the four ships with him. The
Ison Orin
was strongest, but looked badly damaged; the
Pimpernel
was just barely a warship; the
Wavedancer
, far behind them, was only a frigate. They would be outgunned, facing undamaged ships and fresh crews. The Innings must be laughing up their sleeves.

“Lieutenant!” Harg called. The
Windemon
’s new commander—Harg still couldn’t remember his name—had emerged from the companionway, looking grim and harried.

“We’ve got to get
Windemon
in shape,” Harg told him. “We’re going to be in battle again soon.”

The man’s voice had a shrill, overstressed edge. “I’ve got forty wounded in the cockpit, and thirteen dead. We’re leaking like a sieve; there’s four feet of water in the well, and making fast. The lower gun deck’s like a knacker’s yard—”

“Stop whining at me!” Harg exploded. “I don’t want your complaints, I want something
done
” He realized his own voice was edging up the scale, and forced his jaw shut. This wasn’t good; they sounded like fishwives.

But his outburst had actually calmed the young officer, given him a focus for his anger. “Aye aye,
sir
,” he said icily, and turned away.

For an instant Harg felt his weariness. His nerves were tight as stays. He sank down on the signal chest rather faster than he’d intended. He took out his pipe to steady himself. “Have that youngster over there fetch us something to eat,” he said to Gill, trying to sound unconcerned.

When he had eaten and smoked, he looked out again over the deck, and it seemed like a different ship. The
Windemon
’s weary crew had gotten all her sails up and pulling, and the rhythmic thump of the pumps sounded from below, at work reducing the water in her bilge. The ship was straining forward before the north wind, wounded but game, as if eager to meet the almost certain death ahead.

Gill lowered his spyglass with a low whistle. He had been studying the enemy. “Are we going to take on that three-decker?” he asked.

“Don’t worry,” Harg said with a false lightness; “it’s not how many guns they have, it’s how many hits they get.”

“You’ve got a plan, don’t you?”

He said it with perfect trust. In his tone there was not a shade of doubt that somehow Harg would pull them through. That trust was everywhere, in the glances the crew cast in Harg’s direction as they worked. They could see that he was leading them into a bloodbath, and they still trusted him.

Harg glanced upward to hide his thoughts. Clouds had rolled in from the north, and the sky was overcast and angry. Above their main top a seagull was gliding, an escort from the Ashwin. Looking at it, Harg suddenly had a rock-sure premonition that he was going to die.

Oddly, the foreknowledge had a settling effect on his mind. The anguish of others’ deaths faded before the fact of his own. Seized with a mad serenity, he smiled down on the main deck bustling with his loyal, doomed crew, and felt already the bond of death drawing him tight to them. He had to be cruel; there was no choice. It was necessary to betray the individuals in order to bring to life the greater being they formed collectively. Now Harg could feel that being, almost as if his nerves were tied into it. Every eye in the squadron was his eye, every ear his ear. Its sails were his limbs. It was his instrument, subsuming his individuality till even his own death made no difference.

“Yes,” he said to Gill, at last answering his question. “I’ve got a plan. Fight like devils.”

He had entered a new state of complete concentration. “Signal the other ships to fall back within hailing distance,” he said. Soon they would be drawing within firing range; being upwind, it was the rebels’ choice when and how to attack.

When the
Ison Orin
was close, he leaned over the gunwale, hands cupped around his mouth, and shouted, “Time for a reel! Pick a partner and dance! We get the big one.”

The people who lined
Ison Orin
’s gunwales shouted comments and eager catcalls; the
Windemon
’s gunners, roused to the occasion, hooted back raucously. Soon an epidemic of high spirits, fuelled by an unacknowledged panic, had spread to all four ships.

“Hoist the signal to form line of battle,” Harg said.

“Harg,” Gill said quietly, “Jonci’s lieutenant. He’s already in a panic, and we haven’t fired a shot. He’s demoralizing the crew. You’ve got to do something.”

The man was clearly in line to take over; if Harg put someone else in his place, it would be a crushing slight. But this was no time to be thinking of hurt feelings.

“Lieutenant!” Harg said. The young man came up. “You’ve done a good job getting the ship ready. I’m going to need you in charge of the main battery below. I’ll take over Jonci’s duties here.”

No explanation, no excuse; it was just a fact. The lieutenant flushed, saluted without a word, and turned to go below.

“Well, that was easy,” Gill said.

Easy for him to say. Harg clasped his hands behind his back to keep from fidgeting. He had never intended to command the ship himself. He squinted out over
Windemon
, trying to think of some strategic advantage.

“Hoff!” he shouted at the marine sergeant, who hurried forward. “Station some men in the tops with rifles to shoot down on their decks. Take along some baskets of grenades as well. Line all the yards with men.”

“Yes, sir.” Soon there was a flurry of activity.