Yancy watched the path of their flight across the dark room, marked by the fuses that glowed and hissed. He was watching one of them bounce at the far end of the hall when the first exploded, then the second and the third and in the same instant the final two.
The howls of confusion turned to shrieks of agony, screams of terror, and then Yancy stepped farther into the room, and the men behind him followed and spread out, and they began to empty their pistols and muskets into the crowd.
From the darkness a few muskets answered back, and behind him Yancy heard more gunfire, and he knew that the officers, who would have been sleeping in the upstairs rooms, had come rushing to the sound of the fight and had run into the twenty men he had dispatched to lie in wait for them.
The gunfire made a relentless noise, a grand orchestra of priming and powder, so that no one shot was distinguishable from another. Then through that din came the first cry of “Quarter! Quarter!”
“Hold!” Yancy shouted, and the gunfire ceased abruptly. Nearly all of the guns would be expended by now, and there was no need to engage in fighting with cold steel if it was not necessary.
“Lay down your arms!” Yancy shouted. He did not know at whom he was shouting. The brilliant light of flash in the pans and at the muzzle ends had ruined his eyes for seeing in the dark. He was aware only of the dim shapes of the high windows in the great hall, and in the circles of light thrown off from the lanterns he could see dead men and living men and pools of blood.
From the dark came the clatter of muskets hitting the stone floor. The gunfire behind him had ceased. Yancy was once again lord of St. Mary’s.
He wondered what horror the dawn would reveal, once he was able to see the results of his slaughter. He wondered, but he did not care very much, and it was only a vague sort of curiosity. There were prisoners enough to clean up the mess and burn the dead.
For him it was just more preparation. He felt suddenly very weary, overcome with the strain of it all. He was ready to kill Press and be done with it.
Or rather, he was ready for Press and Marlowe to sail back into his arms so that he might begin the protracted process of killing them both.
Chapter 21
FORTUN A FORTES fauct… Marlowe thought. Fortune favors the brave. But still he felt uneasy.
He wondered about the nature of luck. Had he been lucky to escape from Press in London? Real luck would have been never meeting with Press in the first place. On the balance was he lucky or not?
He had been lucky to get himself and Elizabeth out of St. Mary’s alive. But did that count as luck when set against the very ill fortune of crossing paths with the lunatic Yancy?
Must see what Bickerstaff thinks about all this.
This internal debate, as philosophical as Marlowe was wont to get, took place, as such debates so often did, high aloft, as Marlowe stared out at the horizon.
The horizon always made Marlowe thoughtful. It was the edge of mystery, the unknown in any direction. At sea one’s fortunes, be they in the form of prizes or enemies, landfalls or foul weather, came up over the horizon. Staring at the horizon was like trying to peer into the future.
In this case it was a wild ride. The Elizabeth Galley was lying to under bare poles to make her top hamper more invisible to any vessel that might come up over that sharp blue line in the distance. There was a moderate swell running with the ten or so knots of wind, and without the steadying pressure of the sails the Galley was rolling hard in the sea. Standing on the main topmast crosstrees, Marlowe and the lookout were swinging through great arcs as the ship rocked back and forth.
It was a motion that would have made most landsmen, and not a few seamen, sick, and even climbing aloft in that swaying top hamper would have seemed a daunting task to one not bred to the sea, but Marlowe did not give it a thought. With the cry of “Sail, ho!” and the report that this new ship’s bearing meant she was coming down the Bab el Mandeb from the Red Sea, the motion became nothing more than an annoyance as he raced up the shrouds, thinking only of identifying the ship, preparing to take it, dreaming of the riches in her hold.
They had been on station, waiting, for two days. South of them the dry headland of Ras Bir was visible from the masthead. To the north of their position the topgallants of the Bloody Revenge flirted with the horizon, sometimes appearing, sometimes dropping below the blue line. From his masthead Billy Bird should be able to see the coast to the north of his position. Between the two vessels they could watch every inch of the passage from the Red Sea.
The Bloody Revenge was not visible now, nor had it been for the past five hours.
Billy Bird, you son of a bitch, now where are you off to? Marlowe wondered as he once more scanned the horizon for some sign of the brig. He speculated that perhaps the Bloody Revenges had spotted a vessel to the north and headed off to take her alone, deciding in the end to deny the Elizabeth Galleys their part of the booty. Quite possible.
It was also possible that the brig was just below the horizon, perhaps, like the Elizabeth Galley, under bare poles and thus invisible to Marlowe and his glass. If that were the case, then they would certainly hear the gunfire from the battle that Marlowe guessed would commence in an hour or so. Gunfire would draw the pirates like sharks along a bloody trail in the sea.
He shifted his glass back to the approaching ship, hull up now. A great, fat lumbering thing, flying the colorful flags of some Moorish state that Marlowe did not recognize. She threw off bright glints of light as the sun beat down on gold trim, silver helmets and halberds, and brass cannon barrels. She was under a full press of sail, but still she wallowed, her high poop deck swaying back and forth, back and forth, like a stout woman doing her best to hurry.
Marlowe tried to temper his excitement, no simple task with the men on the deck below buzzing like the cicadas back home as they stared and pointed and counted up the riches in their heads-or out loud. This was the one. If she was not the treasure ship of the Great Mogul, then she was near enough.
He slung his telescope over his shoulder, climbed back down to the deck. “Mr. Flanders, the Bloody Revenge is not in sight. Let us give her the cannon signal, then get ready to go after this bloody great bastard! Hands aloft to loosen sail!”
He could not resist the dramatic flourish in that last statement, so taken was he with the high energy on deck. The men cheered, howled, banged the flats of their swords against the bulwarks. The sail looseners swarmed up the rigging, and also some who were not sail looseners but who wanted to see the sails set with all the alacrity the ship could manage. Flanders hurried forward, conferred with the gunners on the starboard side.
The sails spilled off the yards, and the guns went off, two in quick succession, a pause, and then a third. It was their prearranged signal, and it meant “Prize in sight, close with us.” And if that did not bring them, then the broadsides that would soon follow should. This treasure ship would have to fight now; she could not outrun the Elizabeth Galley.
And if he does not come, then that is his damned hard luck, Marlowe thought. If Billy Bird were off chasing some other ship, to which he had failed to alert his newfound partners, than that was his business, and a sorry bastard he would be.
The Moorish ship was a good mile off at least when she began to fire. Pathetic, Marlowe thought as he saw the puffs of smoke from her ample sides, the black streaks of the balls’ trajectories, the spouts of water as the round shot plunged into the sea in a wild and random pattern, and at the same time the flat rumble of the gunfire, just catching up with the shot.
Pathetic. None of the shots had hit, of course, but none of them were even in line with the Elizabeth Galley. They fell into a patch of water at least an acre wide.
She was a big one, too, bigger even than Marlowe had first suspected. By his best guess, for he was too far to see with any certainty, she mounted sixty guns. And they would be big ones, thirty-twopounders at least. The Moors did not play around with popguns.
He was likewise too far away still to see the number of people aboard her, but he imagined that her complement was massive.
