explained that if they were taken, the guns were not to be used for defense.
It was not the first time Elizabeth had been relegated to the cable tier with instructions to blow her brains out if the ship was taken. Marlowe did not like it, but there was no other option. He could not get the image of Thomas Tew out of his head-his guts spilling on the deck, his crew surrendering to the Moors. The thought of Elizabeth dead by her own hand was more palatable than the thought of her in the hands of the Moors.
“Loaded and ready,” Elizabeth said. She gave him an alluring smile, kissed him again, and disappeared below. If she was afraid, she would never let him know it. He knew that Elizabeth did not wish to burden him with any additional considerations, and he loved her for that and for many other things besides.
Another broadside from the big ship, two cable lengths away, and this time a few of the heavy balls hit, sending up swarms of splinters and making the vessel shudder from stem to stern, but there was no damage that Marlowe could see.
The men in the waist were silent, their previous enthusiasm waning as the Moorish ship loomed over them, her enormous size becoming more obvious and intimidating with every yard they closed. Marlowe swept the Moor with his glass. He could see the decks crowded with men. He could see white turbans and black beards and bright- colored jackets and the skirts they wore below them. He could see flashing swords and pole arms. There were hundreds of them.
“Mr. Flanders, let us have a few broadsides here!” Marlowe shouted.
That thought seemed to sit well with the Elizabeth Galleys, and they moved with a will to run out the larboard guns.
“On the up-roll! Fire!” And the world was lost in the blast of smoke and the thunder of the guns, and when it cleared, Marlowe could see gaps in the Moor’s bulwarks and rigging hanging in tatters.
“Again!” he shouted, but the men were already reloading and running out. Now he could see wolf grins on their faces, and more than a few of them were shouting at the enemy.
The guns fired again, and some of the Moor’s as well, the two ships blasting metal and smoke at one another over two hundred yards of water. Marlowe saw one of his men go down with a splinter in the arm, another knocked on the head by a falling block, but nothing worse than that. There were more holes in the Moor’s bulwark, and two gun-ports had been smashed into one.
“Grape now!” Marlowe called down to the waist. “Grape and langrage, and get ready to board her!” The two ships were closing fast. Even without a glass he could see the defenders massing at the big ship’s rails, which were a good fifteen feet above the Elizabeth Galley’s highest deck.
“Maximum elevation, let us blow a path through these bastards!” Marlowe’s blood was up now, and he was filled with the fighting madness that swept fear and even good sense away. His men felt it, too, he could tell just watching the way they manned the guns or held their weapons or hopped from one foot to another, eager to be at the enemy.
Someone began to chant: “Death, death, death…” and the others picked it up. That was what Marlowe was waiting for, the vaporing. He had been on both sides of that sound, and he knew how unnerving it was to a ship’s company that was waiting to be fallen upon by pirates.
One hundred feet between the ships. Any closer and the Galley’s great guns would not be able to elevate high enough to reach the massed soldiers.
“Fire!” Marlowe shouted, and an instant later came the roar of the guns, punctuated by the scream of the small grapeshot and langrage, the crash of wood as the shots hit home, the screaming and chanting of the Roundsmen as they worked themselves into a frenzy for boarding the Moor.
The wind rolled away the smoke, lifting it like a blanket, and the Moorish ship loomed over them, a great, gilded, ornate, battered cliff. There were holes in the formerly solid mass of defenders where the Galley’s grapeshot had cut its swath.
Marlowe looked behind him. Bickerstaff had the helm, which was the only participation that he would take in what he considered to be a nefarious act of piracy. He would fight to the death to defend the ship against boarders, but he would not board another, not for a cause such as this.
Marlowe saw Bickerstaff push the helm over and turned back toward the Moor, and the two ships collided. In the waist Honeyman was up on the rail and grabbing the boarding steps on the Moor’s side and racing up, Hesiod at his heels, and behind the black man a dozen screaming Roundsmen. Forward of him Burgess and Flanders were leading more men over the fore channel.
“Aft boarders! To me!” Marlowe shouted, jumping up on the quarterdeck rail and up into the mizzen shrouds. One of the Moor’s great guns was level with his belly, and thoughts of Tew flashed through his mind, but then the others were racing aft to follow him, and it was time to go.
The Moorish ship was so huge that Marlowe had to climb halfway up the Galley’s mizzen shrouds just to get to the bottom of her main shrouds. He leaped across, landed on the channel, that platform jutting from the Moor’s side, climbed up into the Moor’s main shrouds.
On the deck below, the fight was fully involved, dark-skinned, bearded, turbaned defenders firing their ornate pistols and swinging their great swords at the wild men who poured over their decks. All the fighting was forward of the mainmast; no one even saw Marlowe and his band coming up behind, save for the officers on the quarterdeck and the poop. Marlowe heard them shout-a warning to the others, he guessed-but he could not understand a word of it.
He swung down to the deck, sword ready, met one of the officers coming forward. The man pointed a pistol at Marlowe, fired from ten feet, and missed. He flung the pistol away and raised his big, wide-bladed scimitar and attacked.
Marlowe thought he had an easy kill-the man was open-and he lunged, but the scimitar swung around and knocked Marlowe’s sword aside. The officer brought his blade back again, but rather than retreat, Marlowe charged, hitting the man in the chest with his shoulder, knocking him to the deck, driving his sword into him before the Moor even knew what had happened.
Marlowe turned toward the fight in the waist. The men he had led over the main chains were already plunging into it, falling on the turbaned defenders from behind, screaming like the damned, and that was enough for the Moorish soldiers. They flung aside pole arms and scimitars and daggers as they fled for the scuttles and hatches or fell in supplication to the deck.
The Galleys chased them to the scuttles and slammed the hatch covers down on them or held them at sword point in little clusters around the deck. Suddenly the great volume of noise fell off to nothing. The Moorish ship was theirs. There had been little bloodshed that Marlowe could see, and what there had been had been mostly on the side of the defenders.
“Well done, men! Well done! She is ours!” Marlowe shouted, and around him grins, nodding heads, men too winded to cheer.
“Here’s Bloody Revenge, and just in time so she don’t get no one hurt,” called Honeyman. The brig was a cable length away and coming down fast. Marlowe could see men on her deck. They looked as if they were getting ready to board.
“Flanders, quick, haul down that damned Moorish ensign. They might not know the ship is taken.”
Flanders ran aft, tossed off the flag halyard, pulled the big, garish ensign down from the ensign staff, and let it pool on the deck.
Marlowe walked over to the larboard gangway. He wanted to see Billy Bird’s expression when he found that the Elizabeth Galley had taken the Moor without him.
The Bloody Revenge was less than one hundred yards away and showing no sign of heaving to or even slowing her onrush. Marlowe looked to her quarterdeck for some sign of the flamboyant Bird, but he could not see him. He wondered if that was the problem, if something had happened, some shift of power.
Fifty yards, and they still came on. “Don’t he know we already took the fucking ship?” Honeyman asked, voicing the thoughts of many. Twenty-five yards, and Honeyman leaped up on the rail, shouted, “Stand off! Stand off, ya rutting bastards, the ship is ours!”
But they did not stand off, and Honeyman jumped down, and the others fled from the larboard rail as it became clear that the Bloody Revenge was going to hit their prize, and hit her hard.
At the last moment, the Bloody Revenge turned. Her jib boom caught on the Moor’s bulwark and snapped as her helm went over, and then the brig hit the bigger ship with a shudder.
“What in all hell are these arseholes about?” Flanders said, loud. And then a shout from below the rail, and
