“On if we attack that ship or not.”
The men talked. They voted. Ten minutes later they opted for piracy. There was a surprising amount of unanimity in the vote.
James had not seen that coming, not at all. He felt as if he had been punched from behind. There had been talk behind his back, he knew that, and he did not doubt that Madshaka had been doing the talking.
For that matter, there may have been talking right in front of him. And even if he wanted to stop running the ship by vote, his explanation would have to be filtered through Madshaka, and James no longer trusted the grumete enough that he would try.
So pirates they would be, and all that James could do was to fulfill the peoples’ wishes as best he could.
The Spaniard wore around again, presented a new broadside, fired, the iron smashing into the black pirates’ ship.
She was well handled, or at least better handled than her attacker. She had tacked and wore around and fired round after round and skillfully eluded James’s attempts to lay alongside and board her.
James looked down at the men at the tiller, yelled, “Halloa!” They looked up at him and he pointed over the larboard bows and the men pushed the tiller to starboard.
“Madshaka!” James called forward, and when he had the man’s attention he pointed aloft and Madshaka nodded and began to shout out orders for bracing around to the new heading. It was slow and awkward and by the time they were squared away on the new heading the Spaniard would no doubt alter course again, pelt them with another broadside, and gain a cable length or more on them.
James was standing on top of the quarterdeck bulwark. He could feel the warm oiled wood of the caprail under his bare feet, callused though they were. His loose sailor’s trousers slapped at his legs. Around his waist he wore a wide leather belt, his sheath knife in the small of his back, a vicious dagger hanging at his right side.
He was bare-chested, save for his leather jerkin, and two buff leather shoulder belts that made an X on his chest. Two braces of pistols were clipped to the belts. A cutlass hung at his left hip. His head was bound in red damask over which was a cocked hat.
He was a frightening sight, piratical in the extreme. That was the intent. He did not wish to kill anyone if he could avoid it. If the Spaniards could be frightened into surrendering, then they might be able to pull off a bloodless victory.
But it would do no good, in terms of frightening an enemy into surrender, if they could not close.
At first they had tried their ruse de guerre, acting as a ship in distress, the ensign flown upside down, the gun to leeward. The Spaniard had responded by flashing out more sail and bearing away. They had not been fooled.
And so it had devolved into a stern chase and the Africans had closed the distance, slowly, slowly, by virtue of their ship being the faster. But their ship handling, their sail evolutions, were so awkward and slow, thanks to inexperience and language barriers, that they could not capitalize on their speed.
In the bow, their own chaser went off but James did not even look to see where the shot fell. The gun crew had only just been trained. It took them five minutes to load and fire the gun. It was the first time that any of them had actually put their hand on a piece of artillery.
James recalled some story from the white religion like that, where men were trying to build a tower and none could speak the same tongue. He understood now the impossibility of it. The Spaniard had smoked their weakness and forced them into a game of sharp maneuvers rather than a flat-out race. Wear ship, pound them, and then sail away; wear ship, pound them, and sail away.
Tempers were getting short. There had been a fight already between warriors of different tribes. Madshaka had pulled them apart, using his great strength to shove them each to opposite sides of the deck where their fellows could hold them at bay. It was the first time that had happened since they had sailed away from Virginia.
James heard Madshaka sing out the word that he recognized meant “belay!” and the braces were made fast. The bow chaser went off, the ball sent a waterspout aloft, not even close to the Spaniard. It was quiet again, settling into the chase.
It had been a long morning. James could feel the keen edge of his alertness growing dull. His mind began to wander and he let it go. Back, back to the Northumberland and the Chesapeake Bay and the simple pleasure of driving the sloop through blue-green water under flawless skies.
And then a shout forward and the Spaniard was wearing ship, turning her stern through the following wind, turning to bring her broadside to bear. One by one the guns went off, from forward aft, slowly. James guessed that each was being aimed by the gunner personally, who was walking aft from one to the other.
And a good shot he was. A ball smashed into the bow, sending a shudder through the ship. The next hit the fluke of the best bower with a thunderous clank like a bell dropped from a great height. Shrapnel screamed through the air and tore holes through the mainsail.
And just as the men on deck had recovered from the shock of it, breaking into raucous laughter with the ebbing of the sudden terror and pointing at the rents in the sail, just as they began joshing and shoving each other, a ball came straight through the forwardmost gun-port and plowed into a knot of men standing by the foremast fife rail.
It happened so fast that some men were still laughing as those in the way of the ball were torn apart, limbs flung through the air, hot viscera pouring out of rent bodies onto the deck, blood pooling fast, running in streams for the scuppers.
Someone vomited, another screamed. James leapt down, hurried forward, and he and Madshaka met each other at the scene of the carnage.
James paused for a second to look over the damage. Four dead, three wounded, and one of those would not live. And the fife rail was smashed, the lines in a great tangled mess. The pull of the topsail and topgallant sheets on the shattered wood threatened to wrench the last tenacious bits of the rail right out of the deck, and then the chase would be over.
He was more worried about that than he was about the dead men. There was nothing to be done for the dead men.
He grabbed up the severed legs on the deck at his feet and hurled them over the side, yelled, “Madshaka, tell them, clean up this!”
And then one of the Africans was shouting, pointing, waving a finger at James.
“He say, these Kru, his people,” Madshaka translated. “They have death ceremony, don’t throw in sea.”
James shook his head. “Tell him this is a battle. No time for that,” and as Madshaka spoke to the man James grabbed the shattered body of one of the dead men, slick with blood, clothes saturated and still warm. He looked into the dark and lifeless eyes, and then with two steps was at the rail and the body was over the side.
And then the Kru warrior was there, his cutlass in his hand, waving it at James, screaming, and James jerked a pistol from his shoulder belt and held it out, straight-armed.
A ball from the Spaniard struck the side, just aft of them, made them stagger. The man stopped his advance, but his shouting did not diminish.
“Madshaka! What you tell him?”
“I tell him what you say, this a battle, no time for ceremony. He say, ‘Later, don’t throw man in the sea!’ ”
James looked at the furious African over the length of his pistol and wanted nothing more than to squeeze the trigger. No time for damned barbaric ceremonies, not now.
He lowered the gun. Barbaric ceremonies? How had those words ever come to his mind? “Tell him to do what he wants.” He turned to Cato and Good Boy, who were behind him, and said, “Fetch up selvages and handy-billys and let us get these sheets squared away.”
And so it went on through the morning, with the big Spaniard wriggling further and further from their grasp. At noon the women, who had been taking shelter below with the children, poked their heads on deck, and seeing that there was no immediate danger of a fight, prepared dinner on the portable oven.
It was hopeless. James wondered if the others realized as much. He climbed down from the bulwark, stiffly, his joints protesting, and sat on one of the small guns aft.
One of the women brought him a plate of food and he was able to give a smile by way of thanks and then set it down on the deck and did not look at it.
They had to break off the chase. They would never catch this one, and there was always the chance of one of the Spaniard’s shots doing real damage.
