Ships from the West

there.'

The man was in deep shock. Rovero shook him angrily, baffled. 'Get below to the sickbay. You there - Grode - help him down the hatch. Stand to your weapons, you whoresons. Remember who you are!'

All around them in the wall of mist it was possible to see the red darting flashes of small-arms fire, and seconds later to hear the muted crackle of distant volleys through a far surf of shouting. The other ships of the fleet were enduring a similar assault.

A knot of bodyguards, Hebrian and Astaran, joined Abe-leyn, Mark and Hawkwood at the taffrail with drawn swords. They were in half-armour with open helms, glaring about in bewildered determination. Something swooped out of the fog above them, was lit up saffron as it wheeled into the light of the stern lanterns, and smashed full-tilt into their ranks. The men were sent sprawling like skittles. One was knocked over the ship's rail and splashed into the sea below without a sound. His armour would sink him like a stone. Hawkwood, in the midst of the tumbling, chaotic flailing of arms and legs and impotently swinging blades, glimpsed a winged shape, featherless as a snake - wickedly swiping claws, a long bald tail like that of a monstrous rat - and then it was gone again, the fog spinning circles in the draughts stirred by its wing-beats.

All the length of the ship, men were fighting off this attack from above. Scores, hundreds of the creatures, were diving down out of the fog, raking mariners and marines to shreds with their wicked talons, and then disappearing again. The masters-at-arms were manning the quarterdeck swivels and indiscriminately blasting the air with wicked showers of metal. Ropes and lines sliced apart by shrapnel came hissing down on the struggling men below; falling blocks and tackle cracking open skulls and adding to the mayhem. Hawkwood saw what must have been the main topgallant yard - thirty feet of stout wood frapped with iron - come searing down like a comet trailing all its attendant rigging and tackle. It speared through the deck and disappeared below, dragging with it two gunners who had been caught up with its lines. The splintered wood of the deck tore their bodies to pieces as they were yanked through it.

'They're breaking up the ship from the masts down,' he cried. 'We must get men back into the tops or they'll cripple her.'

He ran forward towards the quarterdeck ladder. Behind him, the two Kings were helping their heavily armoured bodyguards to their feet. Another one of the winged creatures swept low and Hawkwood swiped at it with his iron cutlass, hacking off one of the great talons. It crashed full into the taffrail in a stinking flap of beating bone and leathery wings. The six-foot stern lantern above it shuddered at the impact, tottered, and then fell to the deck in an explosion of flame, burning oil spraying everywhere. King Mark of Astarac was engulfed and transformed into a blazing torch, the body­guards beside him likewise drenched, roasting inside their armour. Some threw themselves overboard. The King tried to bat out the flames but they rushed hungrily up his body, blackening his skin, withering his hair away, melting his clothes. Dazed, and on fire himself, Hawkwood saw Astarac's monarch rip the flesh from his own face in his agony. Abeleyn was trying to smother the blaze with his cloak, but it caught too. One of the Hebrian bodyguards pulled his King away and lay on his body, smiting the flames which had caught in his sleeves and hair. Hawkwood rolled across the deck and beat to death the burning droplets on his own clothing. 'Fire party!' he shouted. 'Fire party aft!' The skin peeled off the back of his hands in perfect sheets and he stared at them, transfixed.

The stern of the ship was ablaze, the fire igniting the pitch in the deck seams and catching in the tarred rigging of the mizzen backstays. When the heat reached the second stern lantern, it exploded, spraying fiery oil as far as the quarter­deck. As the inferno took hold, it touched off the poop culverins and they detonated one after another, rearing back on their burning carriages. The spare powder charges stored beside them went up with a sound like a series of thunderous broadsides and blew huge jagged holes in the superstructure of the Pontifidad, the massive timbers that formed the skeleton and ribs of the ship tossed like twigs into the air along with fragments of burning men. The ship groaned like a maimed beast and there was a great tearing crack as the mizzen gave way and toppled over, tearing free the shrouds and stays and crashing into ruin down the ship's larboard side. The vessel began to list.

Hawkwood had been blasted clear of the burning poop by the powder explosions. They had rendered him deaf, and thus the scene aboard was a surreal, soundless nightmare; a dream which seemed to be happening to someone else. He picked himself up out of a tangle of broken timber and piled cordage. All around him, men were fighting the fire with pitiful chains of buckets, or slashing and shooting at the swooping shadows overhead, or dragging their wounded comrades clear of the flames. There was utter confusion, but it had not yet bled into panic. That was something.

The King. Where was he?

Rovero, one side of his face a burnt bubbled ruin, had grabbed his arm and was shouting something, but Hawk­wood could not make it out. He ducked as another one of the winged monstrosities dived low, and felt the wrench as Rovero was lifted free of the deck. He seized the admiral's hand, but toppled backwards as it came free. Rovero's decapi­tated torso tumbled like a rag across the deck. Hawkwood stared in horror.

Men were lifted struggling into the air and dropped with torn throats. A sergeant of marines was grappling fifteen feet off the deck, digging his fingers into his attacker's eyes while the bald wings flapped furiously about him. Sailors caught the hanging tails of their tormentors and dragged them down whilst their comrades hacked them to pieces. But there were hundreds of the beasts. They fastened like flies on the dead and the living alike, wreaking carnage with no thought of their own preservation.

Hawkwood experienced no fear, just a dazed series of decisions in his mind. He grabbed a steel marlin spike from a fife-rail and stabbed with all his strength one of the winged creatures that was perched on the shattered deck, feeding off a shrieking marine. The beast reared backwards on top of him, the wings beating in a paroxysm of agony. He crawled out from under and knelt upon it, pinning the wings. A human face spat up at him, but the eyes were yellow as a cat's and its fangs were as long as his fingers. Disgust and rage over­mastered him. He punched the face with his raw fists until his knuckles cracked and broke, and the beast's glaring eyes were burst from their sockets.

A silent explosion staggered him - he felt the blast of hot air scorching his skin. He lurched to his feet. Some sounds were coming back, all overlaid with a shrill hissing that filled his head. The ship's wheel was on fire, and the binnacle. The chain of buckets had disappeared. There was no sign of King Abeleyn and his bodyguards - no order left now on board. Men were fighting their own private battles for survival and wielding anything that came to hand to beat off the enemy. No time to reload arquebuses; the marines were swinging them like clubs. Over the formless storm in his ears Hawkwood heard some shouting in despair, and saw them pointing. He turned.

Crawling over the ship's rails were hordes of the beetle-like warriors which had gone down in the caravel. Their pincers made short work of the boarding netting and their spiked feet propelled them over the side with preternatural speed. Hawkwood peered over the ship's rail and saw that a mass of smallcraft was clustered there, and grapnels were being tossed aboard by the score. The Pontifidad gave a lurch to star­board which sent him sliding across the packed deck. A squirming mass of humanity went with him, men sliding off their feet and rolling in the remains of their shipmates. One sailor was pitched from the main hatch square on to a baulk of broken timber that transfixed him. He writhed there in astonishment, grasping the bloody stave that now protruded from his belly, wound round with blue innards.

Crowds of the beetle-warriors swarmed across the Pontifidad like cockroaches crawling over some vast putrefying carcass. There was no escape for the survivors of the ship's company still on deck. They stampeded for the hatches. Hawkwood found himself in the midst of a crowd that bore him along towards the quarterdeck companionway. He fell to his knees, buffeted by the frenzied sailors, but elbowed a space and laboured upright. His numbed mind followed him down the companionway with the others, and at the foot of the companionway he paused, looking about him.

Battle lanterns still burning in the tween decks, though they hung at an angle with the list of the ship. It was suffocatingly hot, and the smoke smarted his eyes, racked coughs out of his heaving chest. He opened the door which led to the officers' quarters aft, and was met by a hungry rush of flame that tightened the skin of his face and shrivelled his eyebrows. Nothing could live there. He slammed shut the smoking door, and headed forward with no thought in his mind except to escape the flames below and the carnage above.

He passed clots of wounded men who had dragged them­selves down here to die, and slipped in their blood as the ship listed further. They must have holed her below the waterline somehow. Then the space between decks opened out into the middle gun deck. Hawkwood found himself in a dark night­mare lit by battle lanterns, crowded with panicked figures who were setting off the great guns in a disorderly broadside. They had something to fire at