The King`s Commission

More shot screamed in, and Desperate reeled with its impact. More screams from the waist, a puff of smoke from the nettings that set hammocks writhing like a box of worms as a round-shot scattered them. A Marine keened and fell from the gangway clutching his belly. Dull flames licked around the torn canvas from a small explosion, and men from the larboard side rushed to pour water on the fire before it could take hold and eat their ship.

One cable's range now; two hundred yards. Alan went forward to the quarterdeck rail to look down into the waist. A larboard gun had been overturned and its crew decimated. As he watched, the loblolly boys dragged another screaming unfortunate to the midships hatch, a man as quilled with jagged wood splinters as a hedge-hog. The dead Marine was being passed out a larboard gunport and someone was retching bile as he used a powder scoop to shovel up the man's spilled intestines. The gun crews labored away with their scarves around their ears to save their hearing, intent on their artillery. Burney, up by the fo'c'sle, and Avery in the waist, were pacing among their men, shoving them to their places and speeding them along. Then the guns were barking and recoiling back against their breeching ropes, hot enough now to leap from the deck instead of rolling backwards on their small trucks.

Another broadside from the French, and this one felt like an earthquake. Alan clung to the hammock-nettings as the ship felt as if she had been slammed to a halt. Something whined past his head, and the hammocks before him punched him in the crotch. He looked down as he was bent over by the pain and saw a chunk of the bulwark, nearly three inches across and a foot long, sticking from the far side of the barrier.

'Bloody Christ!' he yelped, feeling his crotch in fear he had been de-bollocked, and was relieved to feel that his 'wedding-tackle' was still.there. The deck continued to tremble with each strike and there was a lot of screaming from back aft as he winced with his pain.

'Lewrie, stir yourself!' Treghues bellowed, pointing behind him to the wheel, where men lay torn and bleeding.

Alan limped aft, bent over. Mr. Monk was propped up by the binnacle with Sedge bending down over him. The rotund sailing master had been struck in the leg with a grape-shot ball, a full ounce of lead that had almost ripped his limb off above the knee, and was now hanging by a few tattered sinews. Sedge was seizing a piece of small- stuff about the upper thigh to staunch the copious spurting of blood, and Lewrie knelt to aid him.

'Sedge, ya've more experience, do ya take charge,' Monk gasped from a pasty white face sheened with shock- sweat.

'Aye, I shall, Mister Monk,' Sedge promised as the surgeon's assistants rushed to his side with a carrying board.

'At least Dorne won't have ta saw much to take this bugger,' Monk tried to jest, too freshly wounded to feel much pain yet. The loblolly boys rolled him onto the board, strapped him down, and made off with him by the larboard ladder, and Monk began to moan as the pain hit him. 'Hurry me below, damn yer blood!' he cried out.

'Spare quartermaster to the wheel,' Sedge barked. 'Hot work, ain't it, Lewrie?'

'God's teeth, yes!' Alan concurred.

Sedge laughed and strode away to assist Toliver the bosun's mate in ordering the afterguard into shape once more, leaving Lewrie by the wheel with two new white-eyed quartermasters who flinched every time something whined nearby, their feet slipping in the blood trails of their predecessors.

'Watch your helm,' Alan told them, being careful to station himself to windward, using them and the wheel drum as a shield.

The guns were now firing as fast as the frightened and weary crews could load and run out, all order lost in the maelstrom of battle. Every few seconds there was discharge, followed by one from their foe. Lieutenant Peck and his Marines were now firing by squads from the rail, and the masts of the French frigate were towering alongside, nearly as high as Desperated own; less than half a cable off, perhaps sixty yards and adequate musket-shot. To confirm it, a volley of balls hit the quarterdeck, one warbling off the rim of the compass bowl, another raising a large splinter from the deck before Alan's feet.

Desperate reeled again like a gut-punched boxer.

'Mister Lewrie, come here!' Railsford yelled through a speaking trumpet. 'Go forrud into the waist and take charge!'

'Aye, sir?' Alan said, dashing to his side.

'Gwynn is down!' Railsford snarled, shoving him to the larboard ladder. 'Go, no time to chat about it! Keep the guns firing!'

Alan hammered down the ladder to the waist. The master gunner Mr. Gwynn was stretched out on the deck to larboard, his shirt and waist-coat sodden with blood, and flecks of bloody spume on his lips as he tried to breathe.

'God save me!' Alan whispered, then mastered himself. 'Avery?'

'Aye, sir?' a white-faced David Avery asked, trotting aft.

'I'll take charge. Go aft and tend the gunners there. Is Burney still alive?'

'Aye, sir.'

'Good. Quarter-gunners!' Alan bawled, glad to have something concrete to do. 'Pace your damned gun- captains! Ordered firing!'

Alan watched as the senior quarter-gunners passed among their charges and stilled their individual efforts, making them work in unison once more, loading and touching off together. He bent down to peer out a gunport at the enemy.

'Direct these guns at the same aiming point, here! Base of the main-mast is your target. Punch a hole clean through her! Burney, do you aim at the base of their foremast!'

'Wait for it, ya stupid get!'

'Prime your guns… point your guns… on the up-roll… fire!'

Three at a time, the guns barked and leaped backwards, first Burney's charges, then Alan's, then the guns below the quarter-deck in the cabins aft.

'Better,' Alan snapped. He strode aft to look at the hands as they swabbed out and began to load. Gwynn gave a mournful groan as one of the men did him the merciful favor of smacking him on the head with a heavy mallet to knock him unconscious. He was too badly hurt to live, and the surgeons could do nothing with such a savage chest wound. Out cold and knowing nothing of the indignity, he was passed out through a larboard gunport where he splashed into the sea to drown quickly.

More French iron hammered into them, and Alan fell to the deck as a rammer man staggered into him. A covey of splinters took flight like passing quail over his head, and his head rang with the shock wave of a concussion somewhere. The rammer man was sprawled across his lap with his back flayed open to the spine, and Alan gave it a long thought before shoving him off and getting back to his feet. Damned if it had not felt rather safe flat on his back, out of the line of fire.

'Spare man from the larboard battery here,' Alan directed, and a rabbity man darted forward to scoop up the discarded rammer and take his place in the starboard battery.

One of the new midshipmen, the youngest and stupidest, tugged at his coat tails, and he turned to look down at the child.

'Mister Railsford says prepare the larboard battery as we're… we're…' The boy fumbled, his teeth chattering in fear.

'We're ready to what, damn your thin blood!' Alan barked like an exasperated commission officer. It felt damned good to yell at the boy instead of musing on his own quaking.

'We're to come about and rake her, sir,' the boy finished.

'Larboard quarter-gunners, to me!' When they had gathered round he told them to ready their pieces, double- shotted with grape for good measure.

'We'm short, sir,' a grizzled older man told him.

'Then fetch the hands from the starboard chase gun,' Alan told him. 'That six-pounder is only making them sneeze. Run out as you are ready and get those ports open now. Starboard battery, load and stand by for broadsides!'

''Ware below!'

'Oh, Jesus!' Someone cringed as the repaired main yard came down with a crash across the cross-deck beams where the boats usually nestled.