The Mark of Ran (36 page)

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.