enough. Pirates, deserters, mutineers, they’ve no choice left any more!”
More shots found their mark in Halcyon. Her steering had been carried away, or perhaps there were only dead men at her wheel now. She was drifting, but occasionally a single gun would fire at her attacker, despite the range.
Adam said, “You may load and run out now.” The gun captains would know. Single shots this time; an overloaded eighteen-pounder would be useless. He watched the sea boiling away from the lee side, the one thing he had dreaded about holding the wind-gage. Maximum elevation for the first broadside. And after that…
He found that he was holding the locket through his spray soaked shirt. At least she was free of the worry and the strain at every separation.
And I have nobody to grieve for me.
“Sir!” It was Galbraith, reaching out as if to drag him from his sudden despair.
“What is it?”
Galbraith could not seem to find the words immediately. “Halcyon, sir! They’re cheering!” He fell silent, as if shocked at his own emotion. “Cheering us!”
Adam stared across the wind-torn water at the battered, defiant ship, and faintly, above the shipboard sounds and the squeal of gun trucks, he heard it. The hand reaching out again. The lifeline.
He shouted, “As you bear, Mr Massie! On the uproll!”
It was too far, but the other frigate was changing tack. Preparing to fight, and, if possible, to board on their own terms.
“Fire!”
Adam gripped young Deighton’s arm and felt him jump as if he had been shot.
“Go forrard to the carronades. Remind them not to fire until ordered!” He shook him gently. “Can you do that?”
Surprisingly, the youth smiled, for the first time.
“Aye, ready, sir!”
He hurried down the ladder and walked purposefully forward, not even faltering when, gun by gun, the larboard battery recoiled from their open ports. Adam heard muffled shouts and felt the impact of a heavy ball smashing into the side, and thought of O’Beirne below in his domain, his glittering instruments laid out with the same care as these gun captains took with theirs.
“Sponge out! Reload! Move yerself, that man!”
“Take in the courses, Mr Galbraith.” Adam leaned over the rail and saw the spare hands running to obey the call. With the big courses brailed up and loosely furled it was like being stripped naked, with the ship open from forecastle to taffrail.
And there was the enemy. In mid-tack, sails all in disarray, some ports empty, others with their guns already run out for the next encounter.
“Ready, sir!”
Every gun captain was staring aft with raised fist, the gun crews barely flinching as another mass of iron slammed into the lower hull. They were on a converging tack, like a great arrowhead painted on the sea. Two ships, all else unimportant, and even Halcyon’s brave defiance forgotten. The other ship was beginning to lean to the wind on the opposite tack, but just for a minute she would be bows-on, unable to lay a single gun on Unrivalled. A minute, maybe less.
Adam found that his sword was in his hand, and that he was standing away from the rail, and yet he remembered neither.
“As you bear, lads!” How could a minute last so long?
He thought he heard the far-off rumble of heavy guns. Rhodes was still bombarding the fortifications, as timeless as those ancient ramparts in Malta where the invisible orchestra had played for them and they had taken, one from the other. Without question.
The sword sliced down, like glass in the sunlight.
“Fire!”
Gun by gun, each hurling itself inboard to be manhandled and reloaded without a second to fumble or consider.
He saw holes appear in the other ship’s foresail and jib, and long fragments of gilded woodwork blasted from the ornate beakhead. But she was swinging through the wind; they would be alongside and mad for revenge. The boarding nets would merely delay the inevitable.
He heard Napier shout; it was more like a scream. “Foremast, sir!”
Adam had seen some of Unrivalled’s shots cutting through the water beyond the target. It was too difficult for them to lay their guns with any hope of accuracy.
It was impossible, but the enemy’s whole foremast was going over the side, as if severed by some great, invisible axe.
Shots hammered into the deck and he saw two marines fall from the hammock nettings. He heard the bang of swivels from the tops and knew that Bosanquet’s men were following their orders, their marksmen already firing down into the mass of figures scrambling through and over the fallen mast to reach the point of collision. But Bosanquet would never know. He lay with one immaculate leg bent under him, his face destroyed by a splintered ball which had come through one of the gunports.
Luxmore, his second-in-command, was already down there with his own party, bayonets gleaming in the smoky light, all mercy gone as the first boarders leaped wildly across the narrow gap of water only to be hacked down or impaled. Closer and closer, until Unrivalled’s long jib-boom, its canvas in rags, was pointing directly at the enemy’s forecastle.
Adam sliced the air with his sword again. Had the carronade crews understood? Had Deighton managed to reach them or had he, too, been killed? But Deighton was here beside him, and he shook himself, feeling the despair falling away.
It was more a sensation than a sound; the carronades were almost touching the other ship when they belched smoke and lurched inboard on their slides.
Adam yelled, “To me, Unrivalleds!” Then he ran along the gangway, hearing the shots, feeling some of them crack into wood and metal and flesh. The nets hung in shreds, and the massed boarding party was blasted into a pile of bloody gruel.
Men were running to follow him, and he saw Campbell wielding a boarding-axe, hacking down anyone who tried to prevent
Unrivalled’s people from boarding.
And all the while, through the bang of muskets and the clash of steel in the hand-to-hand fighting, and the screams and pleas which went unheard in any language, he could think only of one fact which stood out above all else. Pirates, corsairs, mercenaries, the names by which the enemy were known meant nothing.
Somehow he knew that the man who had offered shelter to the French frigates in the event of Napoleon’s escape from Elba was here in this ship. It was all that counted. Martinez, indirectly or otherwise, had killed Richard Bolitho, as surely as if he had aimed the weapon.
Someone lunged at him with a sword and he heard Jago shout, “Down you go, you bastard!” The man fell over some broken timber to be crushed between the two hulls.
His arm felt like lead and throbbed with pain, and there was blood on his hand, his own or another’s he neither knew nor cared.
They were halfway along the unfamiliar deck, some of the enemy still putting up a fierce resistance, but many falling as his marines directed a swivel-gun from the ship’s gangway.
Massie was down, his hands like claws across his stomach as he fell. Adam saw Lieutenant Wynter stoop to help him, and Massie’s angry rejection, shaking his head as if to urge him back into the fight. Then the blood came and it did not stop. Massie had had his way, and had remained quite alone to the end.
He heard Galbraith shouting above the din, and saw more men climbing over the fallen rigging to join the first boarders and their own captain. There was cheering too, and he wondered how they could find the strength. He hacked a sword aside and felt the pain tear his muscles as the point grated against the man’s ribs before the blade found its mark, choking the scream before it had begun.
