approaching merchant ship were to see black men on a slaver’s deck, they would haul their wind and bear away. No ship, save for a man-of-war, would knowingly approach a vessel that had suffered a slave uprising.
They had to get their victim to come to them.
More powder in the touchhole, the glowing match, and the gun went off again. The blast was still ringing in their ears when Cato called down. “Hauling her wind, James! Here she… here she goes, staying now!”
“What he mean by that?” Madshaka asked.
“She turning, coming up to us. I guess she believe we a ship in distress.”
Madshaka smiled again, wicked, piratical delight. Translated James’s words to the others, and they smiled as well.
“Tell them to get out of sight, behind the bulwark. We get aft, on the quarterdeck.”
The two men went aft and stood beside the lashed tiller, waiting, waiting. Tension undulated around the deck like heat from a furnace. The women and children were down below in the great cabin and the smaller cabins along the alleyway. They would not go back in the hold.
When the approaching ship’s topgallant sails were visible from the deck, James called for Cato to come down. “I think we set the foresail, you and me,” he said to Madshaka. “That don’t look wrong, that shouldn’t scare them. Then we can close faster, get down to them.”
Madshaka nodded and the two men went forward, all eyes following them, not knowing what they were about. The yards were not braced perfectly, but close enough. They did not want to look perfect in any event.
James cast off the buntlines and the foresail tumbled down into a big, flogging sack of canvas, the lower corners still held up by the clew-lines. He spun the weather clewline off the pin, let it run through his hand, and Madshaka took in the sheet as fast as he could.
The wind filled that half of the sail, bellied it out, and Madshaka could pull no more. James clapped on to the sheet and together they hauled away. They pulled together, in a steady rhythm, falling naturally into the work. Madshaka was a head taller than James, but both men were powerful, and soon they had the sail sheeted home despite the breeze’s trying to tear the line from their hands.
They crossed the deck and did the same on the leeward side. The bow of the ship began to turn, her bowsprit pointing toward the ship coming up with them. James unlashed the tiller, brought it amidships, steadied the blackbirder on a course to intercept the Samaritan that was speeding to their aid.
Coming to our aid indeed, James thought. In a way you will never guess. “You told them, we only going for food?” he said to Madshaka. “And we ain’t going to kill no one unless we have to?”
“I told them.”
The distant ship tacked and half an hour later tacked again, and by then she was hull up, no more than a mile away. With the foresail set and the blackbirder running with the wind between two sheets, the distance was dropping away fast.
Through the cracked telescope James could see figures moving around on the deck and he instructed Madshaka to wave his arms over his head, as if trying to attract their attention. There were not many people on the other ship, as far as James could tell, and he did not see very many guns. He did not think she was a man-of-war.
“Madshaka, tell them just a few minutes more,” James said, and Madshaka hurried forward again, along the bulwark, speaking to the men crouched there.
A quarter mile from them the other ship rounded up into the wind, foresails aback. She was heaving to, as James had guessed she would. A moment later he could see a boat lifting off the booms. They would want to find out what the trouble was before committing themselves. If it was fever on board, for instance, the aid they would offer would be limited to floating supplies down to them in a boat.
The boat pushed off, pulling for them, and there was no alarm that James could see. By the time they realized that the blackbirder was not going to heave to it would be too late for them.
The blackbirder was making a good three knots with just her foresail set. She swept past the yawl boat with never a word to its confused crew, her bow aimed at the merchant ship one hundred feet away.
On the merchantman’s deck, men were running like roaches, flinging off lines, but it was too late for them. Their foresails were bracing around, filling with wind, when the blackbirder struck, amidships, with a great rendering crash, smashing down bulwarks, snapping her own spritsail yard, sending a shudder like an earthquake through both ships.
The blackbirder was still driving herself into the merchant ship, the grinding, crunching, snapping still loud, when Madshaka wheeled his cutlass over his head and charged forward. He was screaming-it did not sound like words of any language-but the meaning was unmistakable.
From behind the bulwarks the waiting men sprung to their feet, raced after Madshaka, down the blackbirder’s deck, up onto the bowsprit, out along that spar for a dozen feet, and then down onto the quarterdeck of their unhappy victim.
James ran too, as fast as he could, more angry with Madshaka for charging off than worried about the fight. There were no more than a dozen white men on the merchant ship’s deck, terrified men, looking with wide eyes and gaping mouths at the black host, fifty strong, coming from the bowsprit above them and dropping to the deck, swords, cutlasses gleaming, all of them screaming in their alien and barbaric tongues.
James tried to push his way to the point of the attack but he could not get through the press of Africans racing for the bow and over onto the other ship. He leapt up on the foremast fife rail, craned his neck to see what was happening. Screams, white voices and black, blades raised overhead.
He leapt down again, raced around the larboard side of the bow, and clambered up onto the bowsprit that way, pushing his own men aside to gain his place. Up along the spar, hand on the forestay to balance him.
It was a slaughterhouse on the deck below. Madshaka was leading the charge aft, swinging his heavy cutlass like it was a twig, hacking away at any white man in front of him.
One of the crew threw aside the handspike with which he was defending himself, fell to his knees, arms raised in surrender, and Madshaka brought his cutlass down like an ax, catching the man right on the collarbone, all but cleaving him in two. He fell away and Madshaka jerked the weapon free, looked for the next man.
“No! No! Stop!” James shouted. “No!” His voice could just be heard above the screams of the warriors, the shrieks of their victims, but it did not matter because not one of the men, black or white, could understand him.
He leapt down to the deck, hit the planks with his bare feet, took the shock with his legs. Warm, wet, he was standing in a pool of blood. There was blood everywhere, great splattered patterns shot along the white deck, pools, sprays of blood against the deck furniture.
Running, screaming, chaos, swords hacking at anyone who lived. James leapt forward, eyes on Madshaka’s wide back. Madshaka’s arm lifted again, cutlass in hand, and James grabbed it, spun the man around, his own sword under Madshaka’s chin.
“Stop it! Tell them to stop it, or I kill you here!”
Madshaka’s face was terrifying, subhuman. White paint and red blood and dark skin swirled together, and through it those eyes, dark and bloodshot and utterly wild. He was heaving for breath, and he looked at James with no spark of recognition.
But James too was just hanging on to control, and the fury in which he had killed the captain of the blackbirder was gathering against Madshaka. The shaking in his hand was transmitted through the steel of his sword. The point trembled an inch from Madshaka’s Adam’s apple.
The big man moved his arm, a quick jerk, and James almost drove his sword through his throat.
Then Madshaka let his arm drop and his whole body seemed to relax. He smiled. “Yes, yes,” he said. He turned and addressed the men, shouted out, his voice commanding, cutting through what din was still echoing around the deck. He grabbed a cutlass-wielding African as he ran past, checked him, pushed him back against the bulwark, shouted something in the man’s language.
Fore and aft weapons were lowered, voices silenced, and soon the only sound was the groan of the dying, the crunch of the two ships still locked together.
And in James’s mind, he could see nothing but Madshaka’s face, smiling through the paint and blood. It was the most hideous sight he had seen on that hideous day.
“Congratulations, Captain.” Madshaka was looming over him again, his face a mask of humble admiration.
“You bastard!” James hissed. “I told you to tell them no killing unless we had to! You butchered them! You bloody butchered them!”
