H.M.S. COCKEREL

There were not many Spanish gunners left alive to obey that command. Lewrie coughed on the smoke, looking down into the ruin of the mortar well. Sergeant Huelva, the aspirante, Esquevarre and the match-men, the loaders… there was a ragged hole where the well had been, blown to the base of the orlop, and both mortars had crashed through it. Ruddy sparks glowed down there on the orlop, and greasy smoke coiled upwards. Of the men serving the mortars at the moment of immolation, there was little sign.

'Sir!' Bosun Porter shouted. He and Spendlove skidded to a stop near him. 'We goin' over, sir?'

'Aye, we are,' Lewrie agreed quickly, trying to take a breath to steady himself. What he wanted most of all to do was jump howling over the side that very instant, anything counter to that wish could just be damned, and God help the trampled!

But he was the captain. If they went over the side in a panic, it would be even worse. And there was the fact that he couldn't swim a stroke! With more courage than he felt he'd ever deserved, he caught that smoky breath, and told his jibbering terror to wait a bit.

'Bosun, gather up oars, spare spars, hatch gratings, whatever is loose. Get it over the larboard side, in the lee, and lash it together. Mats of hammocks, between baulks of timber as floats. Hurry, we don't have much time. Mister Spendlove, gather some hands to help. Cony!' he bawled.

' 'Ere, sir! I'm a-comin'!' came a gladsome shout from somewhere forward. He looked singed as he came through the smoke, but Lewrie had never seen a cheerier sight.

'We have to leave her, Cony. We'll search for survivors first and get them over the larboard side.'

'Got Gracey an' Sadler, sir, an' a coupla t'others. Hoy, here be Lisney!'

'How's it below, Lisney?' Lewrie asked.

'Fires is burnin', sir. Aft, mostly,' Lisney coughed, hacking and spitting, blowing his nose on his fingers to clear soot from his nostrils and throat. 'Transom's blowed clean out, sir. Ye kin see th' daylight through 'er. Floodin' bad.'

'So we sink before the orlop magazine catches fire?'

'They's fires on th' orlop 'neath us, now, sir,' Lisney cried between retches. 'Nothin' big yet, but… after half, I reckon. Me'n th' gunner, an' 'is powder yeomen? Jus' come back. Too smoky t'see wot y'r doin'. 'Ey soaked th' made-up charges an' kegs good, long'z we 'ad water runnin' in th' 'ose, sir.'

'We have to go below,' Lewrie announced, chilling himself at his words, seeing the shiver of fear and awe reflected in his men, at what he was asking them to do. 'There's gear below that'll float, lads. We need it. And, we have to check the magazine. Mister Spendlove, inform Lieutenant de Crillart where we're going, and have him round up as many as he can to assist the bosun. Then, see if you can find Lieutenant Scott. Right, men… after me. Let's go.' Bloody daft, I am, he told himself; daft as bats!

But they followed him below, that clutch of shuddering men; went staggering down the companionway ladders into smoky darkness to gather up stools and armfuls of tightly rolled hammocks, which might make temporary life buoys before they soaked through. They ripped down partitions and doors from warrant and mates' cabins, cut down the mess tables hung from the overheads, and handed them up, looted the unused carpenter's stores for baulks and planks of dry timber.

Lewrie forced himself to enter the magazine, crouched low under the coiling smoke, coughing his lungs out, even so. The felt screen in the doorway was still wet and cool, the door slimy with water. Farther aft, the wooden bulkheads were only slightly warm yet. He felt over a pile of paper cartridges, sickly slick and tacky with water. He worked in the dark-Bittfield, their senior gunner's mate, had extinguished all the lanterns in the glassed-in light room which usually illuminated the magazine. Lewrie's feet slipped and slid in a slurry of wet gunpowder, gritty but soaked. He almost wet himself when he realised it. Normally, only felt or list slippers could be worn in the magazine to avoid sparks; no matter how careful the yeomen of the powder were, a small amount always spilled, and one scrape of shoe leather could set it off like a bomb! He heard trickling water.

God, yes! Forward there was a tin-lined water tank, used by the galley to fill the steep-tubs to simmer rations, and as a fire reserve. Bittfield had axed his way through the overhead planking and punctured it, hang the risk of a spark when his steel axehead had bitten into it. The tank was slowly emptying itself into the magazine, gurgling in shoe-heel deep. He felt the massive kegs in the dark. They were wet to the touch. Though Lewrie felt his 'nutmegs' had shriveled up to the size of capers, he decided that the magazine would be safe just long enough for them to get away before it blew. There was double-banked timber on all sides, top and bottom, which would only smoulder and char… for a while. His hideous duty done, he quite happily fled. 'All clear, sir,' Lisney coughed and wheezed at him when he came forward to the companionway, where there was at least the hope of air and a little light. Lisney was fuming that he'd taken so long, that he could not flee himself until Lewrie did.

Can't say that I blame him, Alan thought.

'Hatchets,' Lewrie barked, between coughs. 'Take the ladders, too. Break 'em loose, then we'll haul 'em up after us.'

'Aye, sir,' Lisney whined, impatient to be away. 'Hoy, lads!'

It was a matter of seconds to break the ladders free, to scamper to the gun deck, then sling them upward and to the side. Lewrie followed them to the larboard side, the lee, and looked over. There was no more he could do. It was time to go.

'Half of 'em sir,' Spendlove wailed, standing on the fore-chain platform, clinging to taut stays. 'They just lit out for the beach, and I couldn't stop them! Didn't wait to help, or…'

'It's alright, Mister Spendlove,' Lewrie said, peeling off his uniform coat. 'They can't help it.'

He swung a leg over the bulwarks and stepped down beside Spendlove, on the chain platform. It was only eight or so feet more to the water, but it looked one hellish-far drop. Terrified as he'd been down in the magazine, well… it didn't hold a candle to this!

No wonder they lit out, he shuddered, taking a look aft along the floating battery's side. She was slightly down by the stern, and fires raged unchecked aft, snarling like famished dogs over the forward edge of the quarterdeck, beginning to eat at the gangways on either beam, and the after-half of the gun deck was sizzling with low sheets of flamelets.

And shells were still falling from Fort La Garde, bursting above her, splashing down all about the cove, close aboard. One came down in a knot of swimmers and paddlers, clinging to any old sort of flotsam by the beach. Up rose a pillar of water, mud, gravel… men, or pieces of men; broken coop crates and bits of timber. When the feather collapsed, there weren't four heads to be seen still afloat!

'Mister Scott, sir,' Spendlove cried, tears running on his face.

'Yes?' Lewrie asked, staring at the sea below him with foreboding.

Dear God, if I can't find something solid to cling to…! Alan shuddered.

'Dead, sir!' Spendlove shouted, as if in accusation. 'Blown to… dear God, sir, there were bits of him, scattered…' He pointed aft to the raging furnace of the quarterdeck, where Scott would have taken himself, to ready 74U to up-anchor. Spendlove's shirt front was wet with breakfast, his terrified reaction to his first dead men.

Lewrie could but nod at that sad news, more concerned with surviving himself at that moment, gazing like a hypnotised rabbit under a snake's steely glare, at the sea. Hungry waters lapped and gurgled with what sounded like glee against the side, as if they'd been waiting for him for a very long time.

'See to the men, Mister Spendlove. Get as many ashore as you can,' he ordered. 'Be calm. They'll need that.' 'Aye, sir,' Spendlove gulped, fighting back bis own fears. Waist-coat too, I s'pose, Lewrie surmised; good broadcloth, it'll soak up water like a sponge. He peeled it off and cast it away. Lewrie undid the buckle of his neck- stock and lace front to toss them away, too. This day, he wore old cotton stockings, his worst-stained pair of cotton breeches, the working pair he' d had run up out of sailcloth.

It struck him that they were French, and he giggled. Serge de Nimes, they called the fabric… sailcloth. Bloody Frogs invented it, didn't they? But he could not recall what the French called 'sails.' Vela? No, that was Latin.

Weak and shuddering, feeling a bit faint at his prospect of drowning, chilling all over, feeling his knees buckling, and his death grip on the stay slipping, he imagined he was already a spirit, a shade, freed of his body's mortal husk, outside of himself and distanced from the world. His ears were ringing, not from an excess of noise but from an almost total lack of sound. A shell burst, its fuse wrongly selected, right over the bluffs, and he could barely hear its barking Crack!

'Sir, sir!' from far away. 'Mister Lewrie, sir! 'Old on, Mister Lewrie, I'm a-comin'!'