Steel (9 page)

Jill leaned on the rail, face into the wind, feeling salt spray kiss her skin after it splashed against the hull. She could almost feel the
Diana
moving faster, cutting through the water more smoothly without all the gunk on the hull. And she found herself smiling, actually happy to see the island receding, blue waves rolling away in every direction, to hear canvas rippling and ropes creaking. Happy to be sailing again.

Captain Cooper continued shouting orders, and the crew continued scrambling. More sails unfurled, more rigging came into play, and the ship picked up speed, almost leaping over the waves.

“There she is! Ship ahoy!” Henry shouted from the lookout at the top of the mainmast. He pointed off to starboard. Jill looked to the horizon but didn’t see anything. As she squinted against the sun, the scene all looked like water and haze.

More orders, more rushing, more lines pulled, knots tied, sails unfurled. Jill didn’t know how fast they were moving, but she had to hang on to one of the ropes on the mast to keep from losing her balance. Even with the delay, they caught up to the other ship.

She saw it by the spray of water. Knowing where to look now, she could make out the shape of it, its hull and sails, like a tiny picture of a toy boat, except it was obviously moving, cutting through waves, ocean splashing around it.

“Hoist the colors! Man the cannons!”

This was different than when they’d overtaken the slave ship. Nobody cheered, nobody laughed. Nobody ran up to the gunwales to see what was happening, waving swords and pistols over their heads. This time, everyone was busy, serious, bent to their work, and if they stole a moment to look over the water, it was with a frown. The crew who weren’t trimming sails, helping the ship fly to its target, pounded to the cannons. Jill heard a new sound; rattling as hatches flew open in the sides of the boat, creaks and slams as those eight sleeping monsters were awakened, unlashed from their places, and rolled forward, ready to be loaded, fired. The whole ship groaned like a waking leviathan.

The next time Jill looked out over the water, the other ship was definitely closer. She could see people moving around on its deck, specks of urgent motion.

From the
Diana
’s mainmast, the leering skull with the rose and sword crossed beneath it snapped and sang, a herald of doom.

Jill looked for Henry in all the chaos and saw him emerge from the aft hatch in the deck. He had an armful of weapons.

He caught her gaze across the deck. “How are you with a pistol?”

Jill shook her head. “I’ve never held a gun in my life.”

The quirk of a smile returned to his lips, making him look a little crazy. He said, “Well then, you’ll just have to keep hold of your sword and wait for the real fighting.” He ran off on another chore, leaving her gaping.

“Wait a minute—sword fighting? We’re not really going to…there’s not really going to be—”

Well, she’d just about asked for it with all the practicing, hadn’t she?

A boom of distant thunder made Jill flinch. Across the water, a cottony puff of black smoke burst from the side of the ship and floated. Then another, and another. More thunder followed.

We’re all going to die
, she thought, too numb to be scared.

T
hirty or so feet out from the ship, columns of water sprayed upward, a row of giant splashes as a cannonball skipped over the water, impressive but harmless. The other ship’s cannon fire had missed.

Captain Cooper shouted from the helm. “Ha! He’s wasting his gunpowder on us, my mates. Let’s show him how a real ship fights!”

Her crew shouted. Even the ship seemed to jump in echo of her words.

“Is it really Blane?” Jill saw the smudge of a black flag flying from the other ship’s mast, but she couldn’t see its details. She wanted to think she’d been mistaken about the broken rapier reacting so violently.

“Yeah—look at the flag, the shape of her, the set of her sails,” Henry said. “And we wouldn’t go after any other pirate folk like this.”

The ship had a gunnery mate—Tennant. His voice hollered across the deck. “Powder! Ram!”

Then came a pause, as if everyone on board held their breath. Sea splashed and gulls cried, and both ships seemed poised on the water. They might have frozen that way forever, until everything happened at once.

Cooper called, “Stand by to fire!”

“Ready!” Tennant shouted.

“Let go the sheets! Go to larboard!” Sails flapped, and the ship turned, just a hair, leaning to the left as if she was going to turn away from the
Heart’s Revenge
, until the
Diana
’s starboard side faced her. Then the captain shouted, “Tennant, fire, damn you!”

Every cannon on that side fired. Jill buckled over, covering her ears. The whole ship vibrated, rattling, and didn’t stop, as if the force of the guns would shake apart every timber. Shiver me timbers….

The air filled with smoke and fire. She coughed at the reek of sulfur in her lungs, which only made her inhale more of the thick, ash-filled air. Some of the crew had tied scarves over their mouths. She still had her scarf from the beach, and she did the same.

Henry was laughing, but Jill couldn’t hear the sound, only see his mouth open.

Leaning close to her he said, “There’s your broadside!”

Everyone who wasn’t tending guns or sails looked out to see what effect the round of cannon fire had had. Jill couldn’t see, but then she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. Smoke obscured both ships. The
Heart’s Revenge
seemed to be bobbing in the water, as if it had stopped moving entirely. Its sails seemed loose, confused.

The captain yelled another set of orders, and the ship turned, looking to cross in front of the enemy ship. They sailed, running fast, like hunting down easy prey. Jill could start to make out individual lines among the other ship’s rigging.

Cooper was shouting, Tennant was ordering the cannons to reload, Jenks was yelling at the crew to do incomprehensible things to the sails, and that still left a chunk of the crew—Abe among them—gathered by the side of the ship, muskets, pistols, and swords in hand, waiting. Unlike the encounter with the slave ship, they expected to bring the
Diana
alongside and fight.

Judging distance and speed on the open water was deceptive. The
Heart’s Revenge
looked like she wasn’t moving, but in fact she’d been swinging around, just like the
Diana
was. While the
Diana
was trying to get in front of the other ship, the other seemed to be turning, preventing her from doing so, keeping its own cannons pointed toward her.

All Jill could guess was that there’d be more cannon fire, more smoke, and more chaos.

“We’re coming in too fast,” Henry murmured.

Jill didn’t have time to ask him to explain. Another roar of thunder sounded, another mass of smoke erupted from the
Heart’s Revenge
. This time, the
Diana
was within range, and this time, the longest side of her enemy, and the most cannons, were facing them.

“Get down! Down!” Abe shouted, and everyone fell. Hit the deck, Jill thought, wondering if that was where the phrase came from. She curled up against the foremast, arms covering her head. Something exploded, and debris fell.

Another round of cannon fire burst from the other ship, which didn’t make sense to Jill—she’d been paying attention to the
Diana
’s cannons; she knew how long they took to reload. Then she realized: The
Heart’s Revenge
had only fired half its cannons in the first round. They fired the other half while reloading the first.

The
Diana
returned fire almost in the same moment, so that the whole ocean was nothing but thunder, shot whistling overhead, smoke, and the stink of gunpowder. How could anyone see in this? How could anyone even dare to lift their head to see what was going on and decide on the next move?

Or maybe it was like fencing, a duel of move and countermove, only between two ships instead of two people with swords. That she could understand. What she didn’t get here were the moves. This was nothing like parry and riposte. This was about putting yourself in the right place to blow the crap out of the other person, without getting blown up yourself. There were no other defensive moves except to just not be there.

Captain Cooper was so determined to get at the
Heart’s Revenge
that she’d put the ship in a position to get the crap blown out of it.

The ship heeled over in a sudden change of direction, causing the deck to slant at an unbelievably steep angle. Jill lost her place and rolled, convinced that the whole thing was going to tip over and dump them all in the water. But a wave caught it and set it to rights. No longer huddled by the side, Jill was able to look around.

Instead of dark, weathered wood, several places, including part of the mainmast, now showed pale splinters. It looked like some large animal had gnawed a piece from it and left shreds of splinters hanging out.

And still Cooper hollered at the crew not to back down, not to waver, to keep the helm heaving over, steering them into the maw of those cannons. The
Diana
shuddered as her own cannons fired a volley in reply. Cannonballs screamed, slicing through the air.

Jill tried to be calm. She tried to imagine herself in a bout, in a quiet gymnasium during the finals of a tournament. There, she could always calm herself, center herself, focus outward, and do what needed to be done, let the skills she’d practiced until they were worn into her muscles come to the fore and guide her.

It didn’t work. She was in the middle of a war of noise and stench.

The best and smartest thing she could do would be to find a place to hide, curl up there as small and out of the way as she could, and wait for it to end. But she didn’t, because she couldn’t think of any place on the ship that would be safe from the thunder, from the pounding of cannonballs that could rip through the thickest wood.

Then there was the screaming.

Members of the crew had fallen. Some of them picked themselves up; others didn’t, but instead writhed and moaned, clutching their heads or arms. Blood spilled from them. Again, blood soaked into the nice clean deck she’d spent so much time scrubbing. Jenks had a gash on his face, but he didn’t seem to notice; he kept going from mast to mast, shouting up at crewmen working the sails, trying to keep the ship moving.

In the middle of the deck, a young sailor named Saul tried to pick himself up, but he couldn’t. Even through the smoke and the haze, Jill could see the bleeding wound in his arm and the splintered bone showing through skin. She didn’t have a job, not in the middle of all this, and she didn’t know what else to do, so she ran to him.

Stumbling to a crouch beside him, she grabbed his good arm and propped him up. “Don’t move. Your arm’s broken.”

He looked at the wounded arm, maybe for the first time, then turned his gaze skyward, wincing. “Oh Jesus!”

“It’s going to be okay, we can go someplace safe, belowdecks.” Away from where the cannons were roaring and the ship was splintering around them. Cannons rumbled on wooden wheels against the deck, sparks flew, the stench of sulfur choked away the good air, and Tennant’s shouting echoed. The deck was roasting, heat radiating from the iron cannons. Many of the men who worked the cannons went shirtless, and their skin gleamed with sweat.

“I fell, fell off the yard. Stupid!” Saul said around gritted teeth.

She had thought of him as just another one of the crew, one of the rough and snarling pirates, barefoot, with worn clothes and a mocking attitude. Close to him, though, seeing his face tense and lined with pain, she saw that he was maybe even as young as her and Henry. They were all young.

Getting him belowdecks might not be the right thing to do, but she couldn’t think of anything better, so she pulled his arm over her shoulder and urged him to his feet.

“You! Girl!” A new voice was shouting at her. She looked back, twisting to see over her shoulder, and there was Emory, the surgeon. Someone had untied him. He had his own injured man, Martin, his face covered with blood, propped up next to him. “Bring him here! Quickly!” He gestured down the steps.

She helped her injured man stumble over to follow Emory into the depths. They took the stairs carefully, Jill trying to balance both her charge and herself while barely being able to see. The lower deck was dark as a cave after the light and noise of the battle.

Emory led them around the steps into a relatively clear space along the prow. There were already two other men lying there, cradling limbs, covered in blood, moaning. A pair of lanterns hung from the beam overhead. They swung on their pegs, throwing dancing shadows over them all, making the scene even stranger.

“Put him down there,” Emory said, depositing his own burden against a bulkhead. The surgeon looked at her and her injured sailor, and frowned. “God, what a mess. You, go back up and bring down anyone else.”

There wasn’t anything like a hospital here, not even a table or a basin of water. She didn’t know what Emory could do to help them. With a sick feeling in her gut, she realized that maybe he couldn’t do anything, and they were bringing the men here to die, out of everyone’s way.

She ran back up and looked for the next injured crewman.

Cooper still yelled orders, commanding the ship to move, to give chase to the
Heart’s Revenge
, which had now turned, managing to catch a wind that carried it away from the
Diana
. They’d unfurled sails, speeding their escape. Jill couldn’t tell how badly they’d been damaged, if at all; the other ship seemed perfectly functional. On the other hand, the
Diana
wasn’t responding to the captain’s orders. It might have been because there wasn’t enough crew standing to carry them out, but that didn’t seem to be the case because there were certainly enough people running around the deck and shouting.

When Jill looked up to the canopy of ropes and sails that was the
Diana
’s engine, she saw death. Cut and burned lines swung free, useless. Sails drooped from broken yards, slumping across masts and rigging. One of the smaller sails—Jill tried to remember its name, one of the triangular sails tied off to the bowsprit—was still trimmed, spread and ready for action. But it wasn’t enough to move them forward with any speed. It caught the air and sent them slowly downwind.

Captain Cooper leaned over the side, screaming at her adversary, no matter that he couldn’t hear. “That’s it, run like the scurvy worm you are, you couldn’t board me and face me down like a real man because you’re a worm! A craven worm! Dirt under my shoe, Blane, wretched dirt under my shoe!” And so on, with hardly a breath between curses.

The air began to clear, and Jill’s legs turned soft, rubbery. She sat heavily on the deck, right where she was, under a shattered piece of mast and next to a smear of blood. Tipping her head back, she studied the changed landscape of the rigging. What had been smooth and arcing sail, taut rope, a functional pattern, was now chaos. The broken sails seemed tired, and the severed ropes swung back and forth, lazy and purposeless.

“Chain shot,” Henry said. He slumped down beside her, his legs folding as bonelessly as hers had. She looked at him blankly. Nodding toward the wounded rigging, he explained, “They weren’t trying to kill us dead. They weren’t firing all cannonballs. They fired chain through the rigging to rip it all to pieces. So they could get away without us following them. Bloody curs.”

“What now?” Jill said. She thought she knew the answer: Wasn’t much else they could do but fix the sails and rigging, repair the ship, bandage the wounded, and continue on.

Henry shook his head. “Captain’s taking this personal. The crew might have a say about that if she’s not careful.”

Captain Cooper had run out of curses, though it had taken her awhile. Now she leaned one hand on the side and watched the
Heart’s Revenge
race away. The ship had receded back to the size of a toy bobbing on the horizon.

After the last hour, Jill was likely to approach any fight with Blane personally as well.

“Is it always like this? Every time you fight with another ship?”

His grin went crooked. “We hardly ever fight. That’s the trick. This…this is something else. There’s a war been brewing between the two captains. Since before my time here.”

“It’s not worth it. It can’t be,” she said. “Getting shot to pieces by cannonballs, spending the rest of the time waiting to be shot, dying here in a bleeding mess a million miles from anywhere.”

“Everyone dies, see,” Henry said. “I could do it here among friends, or on a merchant ship with a ruddy bastard for a captain getting whipped every day of my life. It’s worth it to me.”

She didn’t agree. Slumping back, she blinked up into the limp sails.

“Hey there, you’re hurt,” Henry said, and touched her arm.

Jill flinched away reflexively, skittish. But she looked down and saw her arm for the first time. It was bleeding. She hadn’t noticed it and couldn’t remember how it had happened. A gash sliced across her left bicep, tearing off half the sleeve of her shirt and biting into the flesh underneath. The wound gaped open and poured blood down her arm. Something must have cut it open when she fell, or some piece of flying debris must have knocked into her. How could she not have felt it happen?