The Guardship

for the river to be illuminated by the pirate’s broadside. Waited to see his sloop die in the muzzle flashes of the big guns.

But there was nothing, nothing more, no more heavy guns. Perhaps it was some of the drunken brigands making fireworks to amuse themselves. He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, forced himself to relax, hoping that the exercise would help him to see in the dark. He opened his eyes again, avoiding those lights on the north shore, and looked over the starboard side.

Now he could just make out the pale outline of sandy beach that ringed the northern banks of Hog Island. It was just abeam. He moved his eyes forward, scanning along what he reckoned were the tops of the trees, and there, just beyond the island, he saw the masts.

They thrust above the denser foliage, just visible where the dark sky met the darker horizon, skeletal limbs reaching up to heaven. Both ships were there, Vengeances old and new. He did not know which the pirates would be aboard. He did not know if he would be able to see well enough in the dark night even to maneuver the Plymouth Prize alongside.

There was another sound now, a popping like a rope under a heavy strain. Small-arms fire? Marlowe turned his ear toward the noise. Yes, that was what it was. Was it possible that the Northumberland was engaged? Marlowe had felt unwell for the past hour, as his meeting with LeRois drew closer, but the thought of Bickerstaff and James embroiled in a fight, and he himself unable to join in, made him positively sick to his stomach. He grabbed tighter onto the shroud.

And then another big gun went off and Marlowe nearly tumbled out of the rigging. He could see the muzzle flash this time, spewing its flame out into the night. It illuminated the side of the pirate ship, the smaller one, and the water out one hundred feet from her side. The Northumberland was nowhere to be seen.

Marlowe swallowed hard, forced himself to be calm. It had been years since he had felt this kind of fear. The last time, in fact, was when he had finally summoned the courage to tell

LeRois that he was leaving, and that had been the closest he had ever come to being killed.

He climbed back down and stood on the quarterdeck rail, one hand on a shroud to steady himself. The Plymouth Prizes were at their guns, craning their necks out of gunports and twisting in odd ways to see around the barrels. They had a true believer’s faith in him, and that would have to sustain them now, for he could think of no inspiring words to get them riled up for the coming fight. He wished he could, but he could not, and he did not trust himself to speak.

Just as he was wondering how in all hell he was going to negotiate the shallows around the island, two more guns went off in rapid succession, one, two, and this time they fired south, straight into the Wilkenson Brothers.

“Good Lord!” Marlowe cried, despite himself. The blast from the guns lit the big pirate ship up in two quick flashes, like shuttering and unshuttering a lantern.

The after end of the old Vengeance seemed to glow with a light from within, and that light was reflected on the water around her stern section. Marlowe squinted, shook his head. Then the flames burst up around the quarterdeck and up the mizzen rigging. The ship was on fire. And the fire, no doubt, had set off the guns.

Marlowe watched the flames running over the quarterdeck and up the mizzen yard as the dry canvas of the mizzen sail was consumed.

The burning ship was a threat to them. If the Plymouth Prize caught fire, with her hold full of powder, the resultant explosion would rock the colony, would kill every man on the water, pirate and Prize alike.

The fire was throwing off an ever-widening circle of light. It crept out over the water, fell across the Northumberland, which was attempting to circle around the pirate ships undetected and come up on their far side.

So much for that idea, Marlowe thought. It was the only trick he had in his bag.

“Damn me,” he said out loud, though he always figured that God would grant that request unbidden. The Wilkenson Brothers was two hundred yards away. He could hear the chaos of the pirates getting ready for a fight, the rumble of big guns running out, the clash of small arms made ready.

“Damn.” He glanced around, fidgeted with the hilt of his sword, opened his mouth to give an order, closed it again. His trap had been found out before it had sprung. Every one of his tingling nerves told him to put the ship about and retreat upriver, to abandon the fight until another day.

That thought gave him a great sense of relief. It was the only reasonable thing to do. He grasped at that excuse like a drowning man grasps at his rescuer, pulling them both down.

But it was nonsense. If he was to have this elusive thing called honor, this thing that somehow had become so important to his life-real honor-then he could not lie to himself. If he were to retreat, it would be because he was afraid.

What was more, explaining to Nicholson et al. why he had broken off the attack, mounting this attack again, going again through the awful hours leading up to his meeting with LeRois, it would all be more terrible than just doing it now.

“In the waist!” he shouted. “Mr. Rakestraw, we shall be falling off a bit, make ready at the braces. Gunners, you know your duty! Two broadsides, small arms, then over the sides! Listen for my orders, or Mr. Rakestraw’s, if I should fall!”

If I should fall. He felt no twinge at all when he said those words. LeRois could do no more than kill him. He took a deep breath and turned to the helmsmen and said, “Fall off, two points.”

The bow of the Plymouth Prize came around, aiming for that stretch of water between the two pirate ships. There was no question of being able to see now; the fire aboard the former Vengeance had broken clear of her great cabin and filled the quarterdeck. It ran halfway up the mizzenmast and was spilling down onto the waist. All of the water one hundred yards around the ship was brightly lit; it reminded Marlowe of the great bonfires they used to build on the beaches around which they

would have their drunken, frenzied orgies back in his days in the sweet trade.

The side of the Wilkenson Brothers looked like burnished gold as the fire washed the new black paint with yellow light and cast deep shadows along the side. The light from the flames spilled over her sails in their loose bundles, the black standing rigging, the muzzles of the guns, even the steel of the weapons that flashed in the hands of men along her rails, and made it all that much more frightening.

The pirates were starting to vapor, to chant and bang on the sides and the rails, clashing cutlasses together. Marlowe felt the sweat crawling down his back and his palm slick on the hilt of his sword. They were one hundred yards away and closing quickly.

Someone was beating bones together with that distinctive hollow clunk clunk clunk. And then someone was chanting “Death, death, death,” and Marlowe realized that this was his own men.

He pulled his eyes from the flickering ghostly enemy and looked down into the waist of the Plymouth Prize, now as clearly illuminated as if they had a fire going on the main hatch. It was Middleton, standing on the rail by the foreshrouds and chanting “Death, death, death,” and beside him another man had two beef bones and he was banging them together. Marlowe saw smiles flashing in the firelight, and more and more of the guardship’s men began, “Death, death, death…”

The Plymouth Prizes swarmed up into the rigging and along the rail, and they, too, were banging their swords on the sides, chanting and screaming. Someone on the pirate ship fired a pistol into the air, and it was met with three from the Plymouth Prize. Marlowe wanted to order them to stop, to save their fire, but the vaporing was doing more for his men’s state of mind than any amount of preparation could accomplish.

They were fifty yards from the Wilkenson Brothers, and the cumulative force of the men’s voices-king’s men and pirates-seemed to be drawing the ships together, seemed to suck all of the air out of the space between the two vessels. Every chant, every shout, every pistol shot on either side drove all of them to great heights of frenzy. They waved swords and beat swords and fired pistols and shrieked with the urgent lust to kill one another.

Marlowe’s carefully issued orders, repeated many times, had been entirely forgotten. There was no thought of broadsides, no thought of small arms. The men lining the rails and the channels and screaming and vaporing and flashing their swords in the weird flickering light of the burning ship did not want to think. They wanted only to