cannon.
The Anna ploughed on, gently plunging her bow into the slight swell, the whoosh and swish of the waves strangely regular and set-ding. The dim light of the stern lantern showed nothing clearly, but cast a faint luminosity over the quarterdeck, the angle changing and rolling with the motion of the sea.
Who was master and who was servant now, thought Gresham? They were simply six men, with the same skin to feel pain, the same skull to be broken and the same heart to be pierced, six men united by the intensity of risk and fear. The fear that none of them would admit, but which ate away at their guts like a worm eating its way through flesh.
They strained to hear a change in the noise of the waves, a change that would signal another vessel pounding alongside. The minutes dragged on. Had it all been imagination? It was over an hour now since darkness had closed down on Gresham's last sight of the sails. He was about to convince himself that a look-out and a sailing master had been given seriously unnecessary headaches when he heard the noise. A different sound of water being pushed aside, one that did not match the motion of the Anna.
Without conscious thought on Gresham's part the other person who shared his soul took over. This person is calm, icy calm, and does not feel fear. This other person has heightened senses and awareness, can smell every tang of salt in the air, actually hear the wind as it passes through the rigging. This person views the world as if everything has slowed down. This person, back pressed against the upright of the guard rail, seated low on the deck so no head was visible, felt able to twist round and look out into the noisy gloom of the sea. Yes! He had guessed right: put himself on the port side, assuming the enemy vessel would come at them from the land side.
They were carrying stern and bow lights, and two lights hung at the masthead. They cast a ghostly, flickering light onto the deck, and for a surprising distance on either side of them. It was a shock when the enemy vessel suddenly appeared as if it had surfaced from under the very waves, sweeping up from astern, low, lean and menacing, like a sharp-beaked sea monster. Dark as it was, the dim light meant that Gresham could see the men packed onto its deck. Damn! There must be nearer to twenty of them, and a bundle of seamen. Twenty against six. Well, it was time to lessen the odds.
Scrabbling along the deck like comical tortoises, still invisible to their attackers, Mannion, Dick, Tom and Edward moved to each of the four cannon. On the other vessel, two men were swinging grappling hooks, preparing to throw them over the rapidly diminishing gap between the two ships. Half the remainder were already climbing onto the rail, holding with one or both hands to the rigging, waiting to jump across to the other ship. They were good, give them their due, no noise, no excited chatter. All very businesslike.
Hell can be replicated here on earth. Just as the grappling hooks were about to be thrown, Mannion put his fuse to the touch hole of his cannon. Dick, Tom and Edward were a second behind him, if that. The sharp, eye- burning, red and orange tongues of flame that leapt out across the void were more startling than the crashing noise of the explosion. Gresham, his eyes firmly closed, desperate to preserve his night vision, hoped the others had heeded his instruction to do likewise. The glare of the light cut through his eyelids, determined to sear and scar his memory.
The impact of the grapeshot was appalling. It was as if a massive scythe, Death himself, had cut through the men standing on the rail, the nails and metal shards tearing into flesh, gouging and spoiling. There were shouts and screams, but as always they were from those left relatively unscathed. Those scoured and stripped red by the cannons were either dead in an instant, or their bodies forced into instant shock. One man looked in silent horror at where his right leg had been a moment before, and toppled over the side in silence. Yet the irony of war was still in charge, the terrifying random nature of death. One man stood still on the guard rail, unmarked, while those around him were blasted to butcher's meat. He looked to left and to right, uncomprehending, too stunned to realise the nature of his luck. Bodies, still or trembling and in spasm, littered the deck, covered now in sticky blood and human debris.
The men on the Anna were not finished yet. As soon as they had fired the cannon, before the attackers could react from their shock, all four men and Gresham on the quarterdeck bent down and picked up fragile jars, pilfered to great complaint from the stores of the cook at The House. Filled now with lamp oil, oily rags stuffed in their necks, Gresham and all except Jack, glued to the wheel, touched the fuses to them and lobbed them over the gap and onto the deck of their attacker. One, infuriatingly, bounced on the deck but did not break, and a seaman kicked it through the scuppers and over the side. The other four burst into flames, which licked satisfyingly at the deck timbers of the attacking vessel. Two spread their oil over bodies, one dead and one wounded. Gresham swore that the flame of one of them was soused out by the blood pumping from a wounded man. As the fire bit into his clothing and over his hand, the man started to scream. Suddenly it was easy to spot the sailors who were the normal crew of the attacking vessel. For sailors in a wooden vessel held together by tar, fire is second only to water as an enemy. Three or four men broke away and started to stamp out the flames, one of the four clearly in charge, giving orders. He was a small man with a goatee beard.
A surprising number of men had survived the withering blast of grapeshot. How many? Difficult to say in the dark, despite the flickering light of the lamp oil still eagerly seeking to turn the deck to ashes. Certainly ten men, not less, perhaps a few more. Shock. Then anger. And a fierce desire for vengeance. Gresham had seen it so many times. Men either broke when faced with a sudden shock, or became consumed by blood lust. These men would have been hired because they were fighting men. As such, they were responding the only way fighting men knew how. Blood for blood.
A life for a life. Heartbreak for heartbreak. It was the oldest plaint in the world.
Gresham had always known they would be outnumbered, could not rely on the four cannon doing the job for them. The oil was a diversion, dangerous but within the compass of any competent crew to stamp out, literally, before it became a real threat.
He moved to the swivel gun and, as if on an order, Jack slung a loop of rope over the wheel and secured it. It would steer the ship for a minute or more, but if luck turned their way a minute was all they would need.
The wheel of the attacking vessel was manned by one man. The deck of the Anna was still rising and falling, the sea refusing to change its habits simply because men were killing each other.
Earth and Water, Fire and Air,
Which nothing know of human fears.
Earth and Water, Fire and Air,
Which bore hemlock for Socrates.
Earth and Water, Fire and Air,
Which held a cup for Christ's blood tears.
Earth and Water, Fire and Air,
Will hold your cup of death and years.
For some reason the doggerel he had written years earlier came to Gresham's mind. The sea would not mourn the men who had died, or the men who were going to die. In the great scheme of things, no man or woman could be said to matter.
Waiting until the upthrust of the waves, Gresham aimed the swivel gun as carefully as he could at the enemy's wheel, Jack firing at almost the same moment. There was a double-tongued explosion of flame, and caught in it was the helmsman, open-mouthed. One ball ploughed into the deck two foot away from the wheel, cutting a furrow and sending lethal splinters flying through the night air. The other caught the wheel housing at its base, shattering it to pieces and filling the helmsman with so many splinters that he looked like a human porcupine. The ropes in the wheel housing disintegrated, and the rudder of the attacking vessel was no longer under control.
What should have happened then was that the attacker, its steering blasted to hell along with half its complement of crew, should have sheered away uncontrollably, unable to follow the Anna even if the spirit of its men had not been broken.
But war is not an exact science, as Gresham knew to his cost. Seconds before the wheel housing was shattered, a grappling iron arched through the air and hooked into the Anna's guard rail. One man had kept his head amid the panic and bloodshed, and bound the two ships together. It was the same man who had ordered the sailors to stamp out the flames, the small man with the strange beard. For a moment those hauling on the grappling iron were distracted by the carnage unleashed on the wheel housing, but then they renewed their efforts.
