The King

'Captains Repair on Board.' With luck, if we're quick enough, we may have this bastard at last!'

After his successful defense at Spratly Island, Captain Cheney was almost resigned to playing warship one more time, in company with Culverin and Telesto. Sir Hugo peered at the chart for a long time in silence, cocking his head this way and that. When he did leave off an irritating humming, he asked a few questions about the various beaches, what the interior was like, what Ayscough remembered from years before about the terrain.

'Do you put my troops ashore here,' he finally said. 'Three or more miles shy of the village. We shall proceed inland to here, where you remember crops and fields, Captain Ayscough. Open country where I may employ my troops to best advantage. That is, if you're set upon this completely, without reconnaissance.'

'Oh, we'll scout, sir,' Ayscough retorted. 'We'll put a boat down and send her inshore once we're close enough.'

'Then I should request some cloth,' Sir Hugo said, smiling bleakly. 'Something that could resemble yellow silk. A Navy Ensign as well, and some wood for staffs.'

'Hey?' Ayscough asked, perplexed.

'I shall also have need of your pipers, sir,' Sir Hugo added.

Chapter 11

Lt. Alan Lewrie, Royal Navy, paced his tiny quarterdeck as the hours dragged past. Hands in the small of his back, head down deep in thought. And in worry.

A launch from Telesto had assured them that there were two European ships at anchor in the rude harbor at the north end of Balabac Island: one painted a golden ochre with white gunwales and one vessel that bore no masts above her lower masts and tops. There were also at least twenty native praos beached by the Filipino settlement, big seagoing boats with hulls painted blood red. It hadn't been much of a reconnaissance; just a quick peek in from seaward at sundown of the second day after they had discovered the lone survivor from Cuddalore.

Choundas is a clever animal, Lewrie fretted to himself during his limited pacing. He's sure to have hidden batteries on the harbor approaches. Perhaps hidden batteries off-shore on those low islands that to the north shelter the harbor. His minions in Stella Mans had not deployed artillery at Spratly past the palisade's walls, but they could not assume Choundas would make that sort of mistake.

'God help us, it seems he never makes mistakes,' Lewrie cursed in the darkness. 'And sentinels all along the bloody coast, on all the land approaches to…'

'Did you say something, sir?' Hogue asked with a yawn.

'Making my peace with the good Lord,' Lewrie snapped, driving the acting lieutenant away. Who would interfere with a man praying at a time like this, Lewrie thought somewhat cynically.

Since Culverin was so shallow-drafted, she had been chosen once again, that evening, to ferry troops ashore from LadyCharlotte, which had to stand at least a mile off-shore. Three trips they'd made in all, in almost total darkness, with Culve- rin's decks and former mortar wells packed tightly with sepoys and weapons, with field artillery and all the accoutrements for six-pounder carriage guns, two-pounder boat guns on low, wide-wheeled mounts and coehorn mortars with their carrying blocks equipped with four small but wide wheels like dogcarts.

Lewrie also worried about Burgess Chiswick. When he had last seen Chiswick and shaken his hand before he embarked in a ship's boat for the beach with the men of his light company, Burgess' hand had been all atremble. That would seem perfectly natural in any man, but in Chiswick he felt it a sign of his friend's unpreparedness, his weakness.

There had not been time enough to say all the things one wished at a moment like that; there never was. Perhaps that lack of time was a blessing. Burgess had given him a small parcel of personal items he wanted passed on to his family should he fall. A final word for dear sister Caroline, and a promise Burgess had wrung out of him that should he… fall (there, that platitude again), Alan would swear to take care of Caroline, and the rest of his family as well as he was able in his stead. It seemed portended, that fall, and a gruesome farewell.

Parting with his father was much easier.

'Time, damnit,' Sir Hugo had snarled. 'Look here, lad. If we make a muck of this, I'm much happier you're safe aboard this little ship of yours. Think kindly of me if you're able. Lift a glass and toast my shade if you ain't. Take good care of the Lewrie name today, and I'll see to mine. Right! Goodbye, me son.'

They had put the troops ashore starting at eleven that night on a leeward beach on the western shore of Balabac, a little more than a league shy of the village and harbor approaches. Once that was done, the three ships had stood out to sea, Telesto leading and Culverin in last place, making a long lee-board out to sea with the wind up their sterns and all sails double-reefed or brailed up to make it a vexingly slow lee-board which would place them due west of the harbor channel just before first light. There, Telesto would turn east and beat up into the sou'east summer Monsoon winds, close- hauled as she would lie and with all battle-flags flying.

And Lewrie had prayed. He'd been raised Church of England, and as much a Deist as any fashionable young gentleman of his class turned out to be after exposure to the better public schools, the classics and the latest eighteenth-century philosophy. Lewrie had also been tended to by a steady parade of governesses from lower stations in life who trended toward a more personal, vengeful God. Neither curriculum had turned him off the more than occasional venality, but when life got a bit too threatening, and he was at the bitter end of his cable, he found no comfort in a Deist's philosophical detachment, and sought out the sort of God who could wake up, reach down and pluck his arse to safety once more.

He prayed for Burgess' safety. He prayed for God's help that this time they'd comer this Choundas bugger for certain and carve him and all his kind into stew-meat so they could go home. He slung in a thought or two for his father (even if he was a rotten old bastard to me, Lord, he don't deserve gettin' turned off today), and finally, he asked for help so that his crew would not suffer too much, that they would win a victory at a low cost.

'Please let the sentinels be blind as bloody bats, Lord,' he'd muttered in the privacy of his tiny cabins. 'Get us past any batteries without too much hurt. And if you plan to scrag me today, then let it be quick and glorious. I'd rather not know about it when it comes, so let me go like Achilles and don't let the surgeon have me. Better I die a sinner than survive a helpless cripple, Amen.'

'Bloody hell!' Capt. Burgess Chiswick swore softly as his boots sucked and slopped in the muck inland from the beaches. Lieutenant Colonel Willoughby had at first tried to advance up from the strand and find cover in the forests for their forced march. But the woods had turned out to be the ripest sort of mangrove marsh near the shore, and the rankest, densest, sloppiest jungle inland from that. But the artillery he had hoped to deploy on his right flank and center could not be man-hauled through the slop. Indeed, once deep into the over-growth, no one could maintain a proper line of march without constant referral to a compass, and showing any sort of a light was simply out of the question.

So it was only the first light company that made its slow way through the jungle on the right flank, and the rest of the battalion had to march in two company columns nearer the beach, with the guns squeaking along the beach itself in the firmest sand. The second light company led the advance in skirmishing pairs, as scouts, to feel out the way ahead, and silence any pickets they encountered with cold steel or a twisted garotte fashioned from their puggarees.

So far, thank God, they had met none, though it was impossible to know if a scout skulked in the deep jungle, spying out their march and sending reports to the village to prepare them.

Chiswick shivered with a nameless dread. Except for his man Nandu who marched alongside him, he could barely espy any of his sepoys. They were jangli-admi, used to jungle in their home territory of Bengal. Hunters, farmers, poor villagers raised at the edge of a dark green labyrinth where danger lurked. A lush green Hell full of terrors so much greater and more threatening than Carolina woods.