The Protector's War (32 page)

“I hope God's listening—or Poseidon, Captain!” Nigel shouted back cheerfully.

And I actually
feel
cheerful,
he thought in mild amazement, as he and Hordle went down the companionway.
I rather thought that wouldn't happen again.

The bigger, younger man held the door open for him—no easy feat, with the wind this strong. The howl of it gave way to a low toaning moan as the rubber-edged steel shut behind them, and they hung their oilskins and sou'westers on a rack over a trough to catch the drips; a dim lantern behind thick glass lit the narrow corridor. Hordle hurried forward then, and while Loring was still struggling with his boots he came back with a great covered mug of tea and a small basket of the scone-like soda bread the Australians were fond of, buttered and spread with marmalade—Royal Cornish Reserve, probably a gift from someone at court to the Tasmanian emissaries.

“Thank you, Sergeant,” he said, yawning. “You should go get some rest.”

Hordle's face was still running with seawater. “Going to go chat up that cook's apprentice some more, sir,” he said. “Sheila, her name is. I can see she fancies a well-set-up lad, and I can sleep when I'm dead.”

Or when you're fifty-two,
Nigel thought, as he toweled himself down in the tiny cabin.

Weariness struck despite the strong hot tea, despite the pitching and rolling. He barely had time to finish the last scone before his head hit the pillow.

 

“Sound as a bell,” Captain Nobbes said happily. “Didn't even lose a sail.” The
Pride
's nose was west of south now, and the wind was behind them, on their starboard quarter. The sun was hot despite the fresh wind, and the ocean was a deep purple-blue frothed with lines of whitecaps; the schooner bucked almost playfully as they cut the swell. The deep iodine scent of the sea and the tarred rope of the running rigging went together well; Nigel found himself looking forward to lunch, which was to feature tunny steaks in cheese—the lines trolled overside had been productive this morning.

“That's La Palma?” he asked. The mountain was rising gradually from the sea ahead.

“Unless we're all worse navigators than we're likely to be, or the chronometer's gone for a Burton,” Nobbes said. “We stood farther out to sea on our way up from the Cape, but we'll see about wood and water here this time. It's uninhabited now, eh?”

“Nearly,” Alleyne said grimly. “Unless you count Moorish corsairs stopping in now and then.”

“I thought you said…never mind. Later. We'll keep a sharp—”

“Ship ho!” called the masthead lookout, sitting braced where the t'gallant yard crossed the main topmast. “Over that spit ahead.”

“What rig?” Nobbes called sharply.

“No bloody rig at all, Skipper!” the lookout called. “And she's not alone, either. Looks like boats putting in and out from the shore, or something like that.”

Nobbes looked at his XO without needing to speak.

“Helm, fifteen degrees west—thus, very well, thus,” she said.

The schooner turned smoothly, falling off the steady westerly breeze. The island ahead was an irregular cone, greener higher up the slopes, arid-barren below where the irrigation systems had collapsed. Before the Change it had lived mainly off tourism with a minor sideline in exporting specialty crops; neither had proved much help afterward. But there were still sheltered coves, and springs where you could get good water, and wood in the ravines if you didn't mind the scattered bones. There were even feral goats and pigs whose ancestors had hid very, very well, and a few villages of survivors further south.

“That's the
Sark
!” Alleyne said as they rounded the spit of land.

The bay beyond was a perfect semicircle, with white ruined houses on the shore above the rugged cliffs, and a fringe of palms at the top. The ship was afloat half a mile away from the northern point the schooner rounded, and anchored an equal distance from the shore.

“Poor bitch,” Nobbes muttered.

It took Nigel a moment to realize that the seaman meant the ship; he leveled his binoculars for a closer look. The
Cutty Sark
certainly seemed deserving of pity; down by the head and listing to port, with all three masts off at the tops and the rigging a crazy tangle of broken wire and knotted rope amid a few jury-rigged scraps. Water spurted out from her decks as the pumps worked in what was obviously a losing race with the inrushing sea; her gunwales were far closer to the surface than they should be. At a guess sections of planking had come loose in the storm, and she'd limped in here hoping to make repairs—or at least find a spot where the crew could wait for rescue when she went under. Ropes over the side held sails fothered over patches of the bottom. Two longboats put off from the shore as he watched, pulling hard for the ship and abandoning a fire that sent a slim pillar of smoke up into the azure sky.

The other boats coming around the southern point of the bay were worthy of attention as well, and certainly why the shore party was hurrying back. The pumps also stopped as he watched, the jets of water pulsing and then dying to trickles as the crews went scrambling for harness and weapons.

“Moors,” he said grimly to the Tasmanian captain. “And far too many of them for comfort.”

The boats that spider-walked into the bay were long and low and narrow, with sharp knifelike prows and sterns that looked identical; they were giant versions of the Senegalese sea-fishing pirogue, and those ocean-going canoes had often been up to sixty feet long even before the Change. These averaged a hundred feet, fitted with twenty oars a side rather than paddles, and each had a single mast and lanteen sail. Their hulls were caravel-built, made from overlapping planks adzed to fit and painted a blue-green color that made them surprisingly hard to see even at close range; and they were dark with men. He suspected the interior bracing was salvaged metal, though that was much rarer in Senegal than Europe—still, there were the ruins of Dakar and St. Louis to mine.

“And there are a round dozen of them,” Nobbes said. “How many men?”

“Alleyne?” Nigel asked, handing him the glasses.

“Rough counting, sixty to eighty a hull,” the sharp-eyed younger Loring said after a moment. “Call it between seven and nine hundred in all.”

Nobbes grunted; half thoughtful, half sounding as if he'd been belly-punched. The
Pride
's total crew was less than a tenth of even the lowest estimate. The whole British army wasn't much larger these days. Africa below the Sahara had suffered gruesomely in the Change and its aftermath, but not as badly as the lands farther north.

“Well, we know we're not being chased any bloody more,” he said. “Those poor bastards on the
Sark
aren't going anywhere.”

“The Moors don't take prisoners,” Nigel said. “Except as slaves. And they, ah, surgically modify those.”

Nobbes winced and licked his lips, glancing around, obviously conscious of eyes on him from all along the deck. He looked at the calm surface of the bay. “Not much wind in there,” he said meditatively. “If we go in, we'll have to break them before we can get out—wouldn't be able to run if it went against us. The land shelters the bay from the westerlies…think they could hold out on the
Sark
until we arrived?”

Unexpectedly, it was Hordle who answered; the two Lorings stood silent, respecting the Tasmanian's authority as Captain.

“Yes, sir,” Hordle said. “They might not be able to drive them all off, bunged about as they are, but they'll put up a stiff fight.” Pridefully: “They'll know they've had English archers to deal with! Best thing Charlie ever did was make practice with the bow compulsory, and those'll be professionals, regulars.”

Nigel waited, willing himself not to tense. At last Nobbes shook himself and shrugged. “Blood's thicker than water,” he said, and went on with a laugh: “especially among the First Families of Tasmania—who were transported pick-pockets married to whores, like my great-great-great-great-granddad. Sound to quarters, Number Two. I want us two hundred yards off her stern, and we'll anchor with the bow to shore, make it a T. And get the toaster ready.”

Nobbes glanced at Nigel as the hoarse beat of a drum and a volley of orders broke the immobility of the crew, turning them from spectators to a purposeful mass, breaking open the weapons locker and pulling the tarpaulin covers from the catapults. Others bustled about pulling bolts and raising what looked like sections of the deck. Those turned out to be heavy wooden screens, secured to the rail with quick-release metal clamps to make a continuous chest-high barricade around the bulwarks save where the catapults needed a clear field of fire.

“They'll come in on either side of the
Sark
?” Nobbes asked.

“Two deep,” Nigel agreed. “They're a vicious lot and they hate us like poison, but they're not stupid in my experience. That'll let them maximize their numbers, and they'll try and finish the
Sark
before we can intervene. Alleyne, let's get into our harness.”

“Those Ned Kelly suits?” Nobbes said. “You'll go down like Ayers Rock if you go overboard in those!”

Nigel grinned; he felt a good deal more comfortable coming to the rescue of his countrymen than he did running away from them.

“Well, Captain, we'll just have to make sure that the enemy are the ones who fall in, eh, what?”

 

“There they go,” Hordle said, his voice taut.

The
Pride
was ghosting into the bay, with all sails set. That did less good than they had hoped, with only the faintest breeze from over the ridge to the west to help; the sails were hanging nearly slack, rippling at their edges with each puff. She moved with a dreamlike slowness, while the Moorish galleys darted like water bugs. That made him feel like a spectator, and he didn't like
that
at all. The hot late-summer sun made him sweat like a horse, too; he could feel it soaking into the gambeson under his mail shirt, and smell it along with the hot pine of the deck. The leather-wrapped grip of the bow made patterns in the skin of his left palm until he forced himself to relax.

The Moors were closing in on the British ship; the
Sark
lay silent. The schooner was close enough for them to hear the yelping, screeching war cries of the corsairs, as they swung up on either side of the crippled sailing ship. He could see a black giant, naked save for a twisted rag loincloth, in the bows of the lead pirogue swinging a grapnel on the end of a long rope, then tossing it with a shouted
Wau-wau-
ho!

A dozen more flew out from the pirate vessels, trailing their cords like a malignant spider's web. The rowers snatched their oars in, moving in trained unison, and then tallied on to the lines and drew them hand over hand.

“Are those useless Poms going to do
anything
?” Sheila asked, fingering the cutlass at her side. The crew waited, armed and tense.

“They will,” Hordle said.
Though I don't know how many are fit for duty, after the battering the ship took in that effing storm.
“Just about…”

Scores of strong arms drew the corsair vessels in alongside the British ship, two on either side and one under the stern. More crowded in to grapple with those, making a bridge of boats for boarding. Men crawled over the long slender craft like flies on dead meat; each of the corsair craft had twenty oars a side, and most carried as many men again as the forty needed to row. Many of the pirates were olive-skinned Moors in long robes and turbans, some with an end of it drawn across their faces, or darker Peul dressed likewise; others were tall, muscular, ebony-black Serer and Wolof tribesmen in anything from scars and nakedness to long white nightshirtlike garments now kirted up around their knees. Some wore crude armor of leather with bits of metal sewn on and a few had helmets under their turbans; their weapons were broad-bladed spears, machetes, axes and some crude, curved, slashing swords hammered out of scrap steel. Edge and point sparkled and swirled in the bright sunlight as they crowded forward screaming their war cries, and a flurry of javelins went before them.

“And…about…
now!
” Hordle said, feeling his teeth skin back from his lips.

The sides of the
Cutty Sark
seemed to ripple for a moment in a wave of greenish brown, as the men who'd been lying flat on their decks came erect, standing in three staggered rows on each side—forty to port and as many to starboard, drawing their bows to the ear.

The savage screaming of the corsairs cut off with a horrified suddenness, and the command came over the water, thin with distance but distinct: “Wholly together—
loose!
”

Then a hundred bowstrings snapped as one, a massed cracking sound like bamboo breaking. The archers were shooting at point-blank range, and that close even the best suit of plate could not stop a shaft. The broadheads went through the simple hide-and-wicker shields and improvised armor of the corsairs as if it were the cloth and naked skin that was all the protection most of them had. Many of the shafts went through two men each in a quadruple splash of red, or through one man and through the planks of the pirogues' bottoms.