A Ship for The King (23 page)

‘I have, sir. And precious little it is if you are seeking an engagement.'

‘It may be a Frenchman, or a Dutchman, or a Spaniard or Portugoose . . .' Faulkner remarked. Walker stared out over the deep and heaving blue of the Atlantic.

‘That's a Moor, sir. No self-respecting Dutchman, nor a damned Spaniard or Portugoose would set a topgallant like that. We've taught them much but not quite how to set a topgallant . . .'

‘It could well be an undermanned merchantman, Mr Walker,' Faulkner said.

Walker sucked at his teeth. ‘It
might
be,' he said with such emphasis on the conditional, that its negative quality put the matter beyond doubt.

Something caught Faulkner's eye and he again raised his glass. In response to their own ensigns, one flying from the peak and the other streaming from the main-truck, the approaching vessel had hoisted a large red flag, bordered in blue, the crimson field of which bore blue discs. Faulkner knew it for the colours of Sallee – here was a pirate that had not been mewed-up and blockaded by their arrival but had probably been lying off Safi awaiting the turn of events further north.

‘You are right, Mr Walker. We shall have to fight. You had better repair to your magazine and make up as many cartridges as you are able, and please send Mr Lazenby and Mr Norris to me.' A few minutes later the two lieutenants stood beside him. Faulkner snapped his glass shut. ‘Yon ship is a Sallee Rover; we have only a few rounds left, so hold your fire until you can make every shot tell. I would have you go round the guns and tell the captain of each that is my wish, and if they value their lives they had better attend to the order. Also make certain that every man has arms of some sort. They will likely try and board and will probably outnumber us. You are used to the Jamaica trade but you, Mr Norris, have served in a slaver, I think . . . ?'

‘Aye, sir, I have.'

‘Then you know what to do. No quarter is to be given, no quarter whatsoever, or we shall end up enslaved.'

‘No quarter, aye aye, sir.'

As they moved away Faulkner resumed his study of the enemy. She was, he thought, Dutch-built; a prize perhaps, or the possession of a Dutch renegade – he knew there were a number of them, alongside Englishmen turned Muslim. She could be well handled, or she might not be: that topgallant looked well-enough set to him. After a few minutes he lowered his glass and took a turn about the decks, then rattled out orders.

‘T'gallant sheets, there! Clew-up!'

When the topgallants were hauled up in the bunt, and the yards had been dropped down to the caps, he ordered the fore and main courses likewise clewed-up. The
Perseus
slowed her headlong rush and under topsails quietly bobbed upon the swell, instantly manoeuvrable and awaiting the other to reveal her intentions. Within a few minutes the oncoming ship had done the same and done it well; it was clear that they were meeting a ship of some force and expertise.

‘Stand to your guns, men!' he called, so that those men released from the guns to handle the sails returned to their action stations. That was one drawback of hiring armed merchantmen as commissioned ships: they always fell short of what the Royal Navy considered an adequate complement. Faulkner doubted if his opponent suffered any such deficiency.

Under reduced sail the two vessels were approaching one another on opposite courses. Relieving the
Perseus
of her press of sail enabled her to manoeuvre on a more even keel and he guessed that the enemy, still on the lee bow, would brace up sharply, cross ahead and rake them. Faulkner walked across to the two men at the helm. From there he shouted to Lazenby, who was commanding the starboard guns, ‘Starboard battery! Double-shot your guns, knock out the quoins and aim high, but wait for my word!'

Lazenby lifted his hand in acknowledgement and Faulkner waited only long enough to see the flurry of activity round the guns in the starboard waist. He had a ruse, but it depended on his men holding fire and the enemy holding his nerve long enough to close the range. In this he was not disappointed as the two drew closer and closer. Whoever the enemy commander was, he was an experienced fighter and this led Faulkner to conclude he was probably a renegade, rather than a native Moor. The latter were less willing to take on an opponent not easily dominated, because their business was piracy, not annihilation. An apostate Dutchman, or Frenchman, or Englishman, come to that, would be unwilling to fall easily into the hands of a European, still less his former countrymen.

‘Stand by to put your helm up,' Faulkner said quietly to the helmsmen, who swiftly grasped his meaning. They could see the shrinking distance between the two ships and watch the relative vertical motion between them rising and falling with the swell, as the wind, steady enough, drove them down towards each other.

‘Keep her full and bye,' Faulkner added, anxious to maintain speed and steerage-way for the disarming manoeuvre. His heart was pounding in his breast and it came almost as a shock when Lazenby called out that the starboard guns were all ready.

‘Thank you, Mr Lazenby,' he said, remembering those long agonizing minutes off the Varne ten years ago when he had run from the Frenchman. Did a man have a quotient of luck, like a cat's nine lives? If so, how did one calculate where one stood in Dame Fortune's regard?

Faulkner crossed the deck, raised his glass and steadied it against a stay. He could see something like movement in the waist of the enemy, a slight density of darker hue above the foreshortened rail. ‘He's sent his hands to the braces,' he muttered to himself, then turning his head he called to Norris, ‘Send your larbowlines to the braces, Mr Norris, trim the yards as and when we swing!' Then he shouted: ‘Stand-to, Mr Lazenby!'

‘All ready, sir!'

Faulkner no longer needed the glass but he was undisturbed by the movement of Norris's men which was heard rather than seen. Someone forward called out, ‘They're swinging the yards, sir!' and he saw the enemy ship – now no more than two hundred yards away – swing to larboard, across their bow. The enemy captain had to move his ship some seventy yards ahead before he commanded the length of the
Perseus
. As Faulkner ordered his own helm put up to swing the
Perseus
to larboard he would shorten that distance, but also the time, perhaps catching his opponent out by a few seconds, perhaps delivering his own ship to perdition by as much. He watched the two rigs, each of three masts, move against each other and as they did so selected his moment, praying that it would come on the upwards roll.

‘Fire!'

As the concussion of her starboard broadside rolled over her decks and the
Perseus
shuddered to the thunder of the discharge and the recoiling gun-trucks, lurching to leeward in reaction, Faulkner observed the cloud of smoke from the enemy's own guns. A second later the air was rent by the tearing noise of the passing shot: a few holes appeared in the sails and a rope under strain parted with a twang, so that the fore topgallant yard swung unconstrained by its severed brace. A thump or two told where a few balls had hit the
Perseus
and an explosion of splinters came from at least three places along her starboard rail. Someone amidships staggered back and another seemed to disintegrate as a gobbet of scarlet blossomed and then spread in a wet and lurid stain across the white planking. A sharp laceration ripped across his own cheek and he felt first the warm wet blood pour down his face and then the sear of the pain as the splinter passed him like a thrown knife-blade.

He experienced a moment of hesitation and doubt, his left hand flying up to his torn cheek. Then, as the flare-up of pain subsided, he heard the ragged cheer and stared through the smoke. The corsair had lost his main and fore topmasts, but was fast dropping astern.

‘Wear ship!' he roared. ‘Wear ship!'

Already the helmsmen were heaving the helm up again, allowing the
Perseus
to pay off. In the waist Norris was dashing about, shouting to men to man the lee braces and rushing to the starboard pins to cast off those a-weather. Despite his flesh wound Faulkner grinned; no naval lieutenant would have used his initiative and done that. They would lose ground to leeward but might yet come up to cross astern of the corsair and rake him. It all depended . . .

But once round on the larboard tack they found they could not lay a course sufficiently hard-up on the wind to pass across the stern; the best they could do was rake her from an awkward angle as they passed ahead. The guns would have to fire independently, losing the crushing effect of a broadside, but Faulkner hoped that his disabling broadside had had a demoralizing effect, if nothing else.

In the event, the leeway of the disabled pirate caused her to drift rapidly so that, instead of passing ahead, the
Perseus
was obliged to pay off and, in the lee of her enemy, further lost way. Faulkner could see the enemy crew mustering in the waist, readying to board: there must have been sixty or seventy of them.

‘Fire when you can, Mr Norris! Clear away those boarders! Mr Lazenby, starbowlines to the larboard rail and repel boarders!'

Faulkner put his hand to his sword hilt and realized with a shock that he was unarmed. He could not leave the deck at such a juncture and cast wild-eyed about him, suddenly terrified. Amid the sudden, renewed and now continuous discharge of the guns, near muzzle-to-muzzle, the image of Julia came to him in a flash of self remonstrance. What a fool he had proved! Christ, what a fool! Then he saw Walker on deck, approaching him purposefully with a worried look on his seamed face. ‘Get me a sword, Walker,' he shouted, ‘a cutlass, anything, for the love of God!'

A moment later Walker was pressing a heavy cutlass into his hand and shouting, ‘We've no more powder, Captain. The last cartridges have gone to the guns!'

‘Arm thyself then, and fight for your life!'

The words were hardly out of Faulkner's mouth when he felt the jar as the
Perseus
and the pirate vessel collided and then ground together in the swell. The
Perseus
possessed the higher freeboard, which gave his men a slight advantage as they poked and prodded at the Moors attempting to clamber through the gun-ports as the discharged cannon recoiled inboard, while others sought to gain advantage by scaling a few ratlines and then launching themselves across the gap with savage cries of ‘
Allah akbar!
'

Faulkner hefted the cutlass; it was a brute weapon; unbalanced, crude and difficult to handle, but it was sharp and its blade, given a slashing momentum, was irresistible. Of the bloody carnage that followed, he recalled only small, shocking impressions accompanied by powerful sensations of fear and triumph, which followed one another in bewildering sequence and drove his reactions as he parried and slashed, thrust and parried. He remembered the rent in a bare brown-skinned belly that was girded by a scarlet and gold sash over which a wobbling, twisted and almost liquid stream of intestines suddenly emerged. He remembered also the whistle of a scimitar blade, the noise of which seemed to attest to its extreme sharpness, and the wind of its passing as it shaved his shoulder. (Later he discovered the right shoulder of his coat to be missing.) He also recalled a man's hand, its fist still grasping a sword, pass under his line of vision and thinking only that he must not tread upon it and thereby slip. What of this damage he himself executed, he did not know, though he recollected with perfect clarity the look in the eyes of a man into whose midriff he had plunged the cutlass, before remembering to twist and withdraw it in time to parry the thrust of a pike. He also remembered – would he ever forget? – a moment of pure terror when someone behind him pulled at his long hair and jerked his head back violently, exposing his throat and causing him to topple backwards. The man who had grasped at him may have been in the act of falling, wounded, for as Faulkner himself fell, he felt his hair released and he rolled sideways, somehow regaining his feet and still in possession of the cutlass. But he was bleeding from several cuts as well as the deep gash on his cheek and could feel his strength ebbing. He began to long for the madness to end, but was aware that even as this detached desire flooded him with an infinite weariness, he was hacking and stabbing at what seemed like wave after wave of pirates attempting to gain the deck of the
Perseus
.

Then, as if a curtain lifted slowly, it seemed as if the enemy withdrew; the pirate ship appeared to slowly detach itself and move away, a gap opening up between the two vessels so that the killing was suddenly one-sided, as those Moors left aboard the
Perseus
were murdered in what was rapidly turning to cold blood. Faulkner was to learn later that Lazenby had set the sprit topsail and drawn the two vessels apart, and thereby saved them after a brisk fight of no more than twelve minutes duration.

As Faulkner came to, faint with loss of blood but aware of what was going on about him, and propped himself against the binnacle, Lazenby approached and spoke as though from a great distance.

‘There are twenty-eight of them dead on board and at least half a dozen lost between the ships, sir . . . Are you hearing me, Captain Faulkner?'

Faulkner nodded.

‘And we've lost seven men for certain, with eleven wounded, five of them badly and probably mortally.' Lazenby paused. ‘We lost Ephraim Walker, I'm sorry to say.'

‘Oh, that is sad,' Faulkner muttered. ‘And what of our late friend?' he raised his head in an attempt to catch sight of the corsair.

‘Licking his wounds, sir. I think we should get you below, and get those scratches dressed.'

After being bandaged and taking a draught of wine, Faulkner was back on deck. Norris was among the dead, but Lazenby had proved invaluable and had done what knotting and splicing was necessary to get the
Perseus
under command again. When Faulkner found him he was staring at the pirate ship through Faulkner's own telescope.