The Flag of Freedom (7 page)

As he scrambled up, groping for his sword and pistols in the dark, cursing his idiocy in not keeping them about his person, the Spaniards came leaping aboard, screaming their exultant battle cry of
‘Sant' Iago!'
Nathan found his pistols, cocked and fired them one after the other, but it was like throwing stones into the advancing sea. There was no visible effect and the sea kept coming.

The British sailors in the bows were buried under the first wave, but the rest of his crew had dropped their oars and taken up their weapons. Pistols flashed in the darkness, their loud reports providing the percussion for the frenzied clash of steel and the harsher cries of the men. One man, almost as big as the late, lamented Connor, was wielding a broad axe like a Saxon warrior of old, while emitting a great roar, rising and falling with each stroke. Nathan threw his pistols one after the other at a man seeking unfair advantage by climbing up the rigging, and had the satisfaction of seeing the second bounce off his head, causing him to lose his hold and fall backwards into the sea. Then he took up his sword and hurled himself into the fray.

It was his second mistake of the night, for their attacker, after backing oars, had come at them again from astern. Half a dozen Spaniards had leaped aboard before Nathan realised what was afoot. He turned to meet them but was taken aback by the fury of the attack and could only retreat, desperately parrying with sword and dirk as he
tried to keep his footing on planks now greasy with blood. He saw the pike thrust coming, but as he twisted to avoid it, he felt a savage stab of pain in his left hip. It was violent enough to bring him to his knees but he parried the next blow with the metal guard on his sword and stabbed upwards with his dirk. A scream of pain and his assailant fell back.

Nathan struggled to his feet but was knocked down again in the rush of his own men as they moved to tackle this new threat in their rear. By the time he found his feet again, the remaining Spaniards had been forced back into their own boat or swept into the sea. Then there was a flash and a roar at his shoulder and he whirled round to see the young sailing master, Prebble, bent over the starboard swivel gun. He had fired at point-blank range into the Spanish boat and was already leaping across to its twin on the opposite gunwale, heaving it around across his startled shipmates. They threw themselves down across the thwarts an instant before he fired and Nathan, who had sensibly dived with them, heard the wind of the grapeshot above his head before his ears were assailed by the roar of the explosion. The canvas bag of shot, torn in shreds, distributed two dozen leaden musket balls down the length of the crippled Spanish vessel, and what was left of her drifted away into the darkness.

Nathan put a hand to his hip and felt the sticky mess of blood, but at least it was not pumping out of a severed artery and the bone felt sound enough. He tugged off his stock and pressed it against the wound. Then he looked about him. All along the line of his miniature fleet, battle was joined. A tangle of boats and oars, struggling
figures – in the water and out – a wreath of smoke like a sea fog, palely gleaming in the moon light. And through it, the stabbing orange flash of pistols and muskets and occasionally something more substantial.

And in one of these brighter flashes, to his complete astonish ment, he saw Nelson. He was standing in the stern of a barge, a sword in one hand, a pistol in the other, his teeth bared in a snarl of rage. Then the darkness closed on him and Nathan wondered if it was some spectre of his imagining. But no. Another flash and a roar and he saw him again, hatless now, his hair streaming about his ears. Nathan felt a momentary exhilaration, then wonder. What in God's name was he about? An Admiral hurling himself into a fight like this, like some young midshipman anxious to make his name.

He had brought up reinforcements, but so had the Spaniards. There must have been more than fifty small boats engaged in this frenzied, vicious brawl off the shores of Cadiz, like some ancient battle of the fighting galleys: Greek against Persian, Roman against Phoenician, but without the elegance, its authenticity betrayed by the flash and roar of the explosions.

And it was by their light he saw Nelson's barge assailed by a much larger vessel, a gun brig under sweeps, its decks crowded with men waving swords, pikes and pistols, and yelling their frenzied invocations to St James. Gathering his shattered wits, Nathan made a swift appraisal of his remaining strength – above a score of men, though several like him, clutching wounds. He stumbled back to the helm and issued a stream of orders that had them falling to the oars, most still, marvellously, hanging from the rowlocks.
Setting his teeth against the pain, he folded the mess of skin and cloth back over his wound and stood with one hand on the tiller, the other at his hip like some mincing fop on the Haymarket, save that fops did not normally mince with one leg soaked in blood from hip to heel; he could feel it squelching in his ill-fitting shoe. They rounded the stern of the brig and swarmed up the side that was not engaged. Nathan was past swarming, but he heaved himself laboriously aboard, helped by an undignified push from the mad axeman.

Prebble, he noted, had taken the lead with the inspiring, if surprising cry of ‘God and Saint George!' which clearly marked him as a gentleman of breeding and religious inclination. Nathan's own exhortations were of a less devout nature but he suspected his men needed no officer, pious or profane, to teach them the basics of this bloody business. They cleared the decks of the brig in the first wild rush and followed the boarders into the Admiral's barge.

Pausing at the rail, Nathan glanced down and saw Nelson again. He was still on his feet but hard pressed, his face wild and bloodied; and in that instant he saw him fall, swamped by a horde of charging men. Then Nathan jumped –

– into a heaving, slashing, kicking, swearing, brutish brawl of bodies. God, St George and St James were buried under a stream of Saxon and Spanish profanity. It was too frenzied, too one-sided to last. The Spaniards, caught between two fires, sought refuge in surrender, or the sea. Nathan fought his way through the press of wounded or exhausted – or exhilarated – men, thinking to find one dead Admiral, only to find two living ones: Nelson, with
two swords now, and a man he introduced, with whimsical formality, as the Spanish Admiral Don Miguel Irigoyen, who had taken charge of the gunboats. He was curiously amiable, and as over-excited as his captor, and they were bowing and exchanging compliments like a pair of dowagers at a ball. Suddenly sickened, Nathan turned away, and found a thwart to sit upon, poking gingerly at his wound.

After a moment he became aware that something was amiss – something other than his damaged hip. The
Thunder
had stopped firing. He could see her masts against the sky but they were no longer illuminated by the flash of mortar or howitzer. And the
Urchin
, too, was silent.

Nathan was not the only one to have noticed. Nelson was looking decidedly less cheerful. Wearily, they took the Spanish brig in tow and rowed across the intervening stretch of water to the dormant volcano, where a distraught Mr Gourly confessed that his precious mortar was dismounted and could no longer be brought to bear, while the howitzer was useless, he said, as he had always known it would be, at such a range.

Nelson was clearly unimpressed.

‘And can you not advance any closer?' he demanded coldly.

For answer another shot skimmed off the surface of the water and smashed into the hull of the battered vessel. Her timbers were sprung, the lieutenant explained, and they were taking water – already above a foot in the well. And without the mortar … he shrugged helplessly.

And so, with obvious reluctance, Nelson called off the attack.

‘We will try again tonight,' Nathan heard him say. ‘If your damned mortar can be brought to bear.'

It was dawn when Nathan climbed aboard the
Theseus
. The effort opened up his wound again but he was not the first to soil those holystoned decks with blood. He followed a trail of it to the cockpit and found it groaning with the night's harvest, most in far worse shape than he.

In the cut and thrust of battle there was little thought of the damage that you might inflict on another human being – any more than of the damage he might inflict on you. It was kill or be killed, a frenzied shambles of an affair; there was even a fierce kind of joy in it. If you thought of anything at all, it was not life or death; it was of victory or defeat.

But here it all was. Laid out, as if for his inspection, by the light of the smoking lanterns: the faces slashed to the bone, the missing ears and noses, the severed and halfsevered limbs, the bleeding stumps … The men who, if they lived, would never be whole again.

Nathan stood for a moment taking it in: a detail from a painting of Hell by one of the Dutch masters, even down to the demon winding someone's entrails round a stick, or was he merely some loblolly boy trying to stuff them back in again? Then he found a corner with a patch of still unbloodied sawdust and lowered himself carefully to the floor, his left leg stretched out stiffly in front of him. He felt desperately tired and depressed – a deflation that came to him in the wake of every battle. Victory or defeat, it was all the same afterwards. Blood on his hands, blood on his clothes, the stench of it in his nostrils, and an infinite self-disgust.

He leaned back against the solid oak timbers and closed his eyes, and despite the pain of his throbbing hip, the ache behind his eyes, the images in his head and the screams of the men under the surgeon's knife, he was instantly asleep.

It was not a bad wound, the surgeon told him, he had seen far worse – as he sniffed it and swabbed it and sewed it up. ‘Report sick,' he said. ‘Do nothing for a few days, rest up.'

It was wise advice. Nathan wished he had taken it, and not only for the sake of his wound. But some stubborn wilfulness or pride led him to report for duty. Perhaps because he had seen so many worse wounds than his own. Perhaps because he was on Nelson's ship and it seemed like the right thing to do. Though later he did wonder if he was entirely in his right mind. Men were maddened, it was said, by the noise of battle alone, never mind the sights they saw, the things they did. Their minds were numbed, incapable of rational thought. He should have drunk a pint of rum and slept for a day or two.

But he was pure gunpowder from the neck up, and it was the news from Cadiz that lit the fuse.

The attack had been a failure. Only a few shells had landed on the port. A few houses had been demolished, and a convent. Several priests had been killed. Also a child, a baby girl. And the child's mother had lost an arm.

Nathan was appalled.

So was Admiral Jervis, though for a different reason. He was appalled that the
Thunder
had not gone closer inshore, appalled that the boats had cast off the tow,
appalled that the mortar had failed. He had ordered a new attack as soon as it was mended. The honour of the service demanded no less.

‘Be damned to him,' Nathan swore, ‘and his honour. I'll have none of it.'

‘Well, you have done your bit,' declared Fremantle, when Nathan's decision was imparted to him, ‘and may safely plead incapacity on account of your wound.'

But this would not do for Nathan, not in his present mood. Whether from light-headedness due to loss of blood, or weakness of intellect, or some deeper, more pervasive cause, he must needs write a letter to the Admiral protesting that his own sense of honour – and the honour due to his country – would not permit him to make war upon women and children, or even priests of the Church of Rome, and that he respectfully declined to take any further part in the action.

He regretted the impulse almost as soon as the letter was despatched.

It was wildly out of character. He had been long enough in the service to know that if there was one thing worse than an official protest, it was an official protest on a matter of principle.

But it was too late.

By way of reply came a sergeant of Marines and four men with an order for Captain Peake's immediate arrest and his detention upon the Rock of Gibraltar until such time as arrangements could be made for his court martial, lest the honour of his country be further tarnished by his continued association with the loyal subjects of King George.

T
he port of Tripoli baked in the heat of the afternoon sun. All along the waterfront, nothing stirred. Flea-bitten curs sprawled comatose in the shadows. The flags drooped limply from the mastheads of the corsair galleys moored in the harbour. Even the flies were moribund.

And Spiridion Foresti lay in a darkened room in the English Consul's house, dreaming of Ithaca. Spiridion was, in fact, a native of Zante, one of the neighbouring islands of the Ionian Archipelago, but Ithaca was the home of his latest paramour whose affections he sorely missed. It was also, according to legend, the island of Ulysses, and Spiridion had been wondering, just before he dropped off, if the victor of Troy had been happy when he finally arrived home. Or had he missed his adventures, his siren voices, even his monsters? In his dreams Spiridion saw the
old warrior – or it might have been himself – sitting under a tamarind tree in the cool of the evening with his favourite dog at his feet, drinking wine from a glass that was at least half-full and watching a distant ship approaching from the sea. He was, he thought, content – but there was a stirring of hope in his breast that the ship might bring change or challenge.