The Pirate Round

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.

The Moors lacked nearly all of the Europeans’ traditional naval skills. They were not practiced gunners or skilled seamen. Their ships were not nimble or well handled. What they were was big. The Great Mogul and those who sent tribute to him and those who carried pilgrims to Mecca tried to compensate for a lack of naval tradition with overwhelming size-in their ships, in their guns, in their crews.

Generally it did not work. Marlowe’s thoughts naturally turned to Thomas Tew, who had first stood on the deck of an English privateer and watched one of those fat ships roll down on him, just as he, Marlowe, was doing now. The ship Tew had attacked was even bigger than this one, over one hundred guns, if Marlowe remembered correctly. Three hundred soldiers.

Tew had told his men that despite all her guns and men, the Moors were wanting two things: skill and courage. They took her in fifteen minutes of fighting, with never a one of the Amity’s men even injured.

Marlowe imagined that the Moors were wanting a third thing, and that was motivation. It was not easy to conjure much enthusiasm for dying in defense of a tyrant’s treasure, not a sou of which you would ever see. Put up against the highly motivated Roundsmen, the Moors were at a great disadvantage indeed, despite their numbers.

Another broadside exploded silently from the big ship’s side, and again the jets of water, shooting up over a great span of sea, were accompanied by the rumble of the guns.

How long between those ragged and ill-coordinated broadsides? Marlowe wished he had timed it. It was a few minutes at least. He did not need to time their rate of fire to gauge their ineptitude.

He thought of Tew again. He had not been so lucky the second time around, his belly shot away by a cannonball, his men surrendering with no further resistance. What a hell the rest of their short lives must have been, enslaved by the Moors. Marlowe wondered to what brutal work the Great Mogul would have put his Christian slaves. Christian slaves who had tried to rob him of his tribute, no less.

Tew got off easy. Marlowe wondered what it was like to hold in your guts with your hand. He realized that his palm was pressing against his midriff, as if he were practicing the stance.

“On deck! Sail, ho! One point abaft the starboard beam! Reckon she’s the Bloody Revenge!”

Damn. Marlowe frowned, looked to the northward. This bloody complicates things, he thought.

If they had taken the Mogul’s ship with no help from Billy Bird, then the matter was clear: the Bloody Revenges had no claim to the treasure. If they had taken her with Billy’s help, then it was equally clear: the treasure would be divided between the two ships.

But now what? What if they took her in sight of the Bloody Revenge but without their help? Would Billy Bird and his men expect their part? Would the Elizabeth Galleys agree? Would the two pirate crews go at one another?

“Listen here, you men!” Marlowe shouted, taking his place at the rail at the forward edge of the quarterdeck. “Looks like yonder comes the Bloody Revenge. If they’re in sight, they got a claim to the booty, but that doesn’t mean we have to do all the work for them. We’ll drive this bastard north, get him between us. I don’t reckon the Moors’ll give us much fight, but what they do give, we’ll let them other fellows share!”

This met with a cheer, the men shouting and banging, and then, like a counterpoint, the rumble of the Moors’ guns. Marlowe had not even noticed them fire, did not bother watching where the shot fell.

The Moor was sailing full and bye with larboard tacks aboard. The Elizabeth Galley was on a dead run, riding those late-winter winds that flowed from the Indian Ocean and channeled northwest through Bab el Mandeb and the Red Sea. Twenty minutes on their generally converging courses, and they had closed to within half a mile of one another. The Bloody Revenge’s topgallants were visible from the Galley’s deck, and the man aloft was certain of the brig’s identity.

“We’ll give them a cannonading! It’s a long shot, but give it to ’em as best as you can!” Marlowe called down his encouragement to the gunners, then stood back and fixed the Moor with his glass. He heard Flanders in the waist shouting “On the up-roll!” and felt the Elizabeth Galley heel with the swells, and then the cry, “Fire!” and the starboard battery went off, eight six-pounders, deafening in their proximity.

The weight of iron was pathetic compared to what the Moor could hurl with a single broadside, but Marlowe could see through his glass that more than half his gunners had hit their mark, and he knew that a six-pound ball that hits is worth more than any size ball plunging into the sea.

He looked down into the waist. Half the guns were run out again. Thirty seconds later, and they were all of them loaded and ready.

“On the up-roll! Fire!” and once more the Elizabeth Galley blasted her iron into the great barn of a vessel that carried the Mogul’s treasure.

The Moorish captain clearly understood as well as Marlowe the relative worth of round shot that hit compared with round shot that fell into the ocean. Likewise he seemed to understand the limitations of his own ship, and clearly he knew better than to try to tack that behemoth, despite the decent wind and miles of sea room.

Marlowe watched with some amusement as the great gilded beast began her ponderous turn, the bow pointing more and more toward the Elizabeth Galley, the masts coming into line, the huge, ornate poop lost from view behind the courses as the Moor laboriously wore around.

The heavy yards swung in short, jerky stages as the stern passed through the wind. At last the treasure ship came up on a starboard tack with her yards braced round and bowlines hauled taut. The entire evolution had taken over ten minutes, but finally they settled on their more northerly course, away from the Elizabeth Galley and toward the Bloody Revenge, which Marlowe guessed they had not yet discovered.

“Hands to braces!” Marlowe cried, and the sail trimmers left their guns and went to the pinrails, and a moment later the Galley came up on a starboard tack as well, like the Moorish ship and half a mile astern. But the Galley sailed half again as fast as the Moor; Marlowe could pretty much choose the moment they would board her.

They chased on for another hour, the Galley sailing a somewhat higher course than the Moor so that they could continue to pepper her broad transom with round shot.

The Elizabeth Galley was a quarter mile astern when the Moors spotted the Bloody Revenge, a mile north of them, and turned more easterly again, sailing as close-hauled as she could, which was not very. She was a big, clumsy cow set upon by two nimble wolves, and the more she tried to flee, the more pathetic and vulnerable she appeared.

“Very well, Honeyman,” Marlowe said to the quartermaster, who was standing beside him on the quarterdeck. Before St. Mary’s he would have chased the man away, but now he was happy to have him there.

There was no question, of course, of a divided command. They were in a fight now. Marlowe was absolute ruler of the ship.

“Very well,” he said again, “enough of this nonsense. We’ll lay her alongside and board her. By the time we come right up with her, the Bloody Revenge should not be far behind.

“Aye, Captain,” Honeyman said. He hurried forward, relaying Marlowe’s words in a loud voice, in a tone untainted by excitement or fear or emotion of any kind. The boarders saw to their cutlasses and pikes and pistols; the gun captains took pains to load with the roundest of shot, and grape on top of that. The men massed in the waist and on the quarterdeck, waiting.

The Elizabeth Galley closed fast, with the Moor caught between the pincers of the two Red Sea Rovers. Marlowe climbed up the main shrouds halfway to the main top, shifted his glass between the Moor and the Bloody Revenge and back. Billy Bird was making no extraordinary effort to get into the fight. The Revenge would come up with them a good fifteen minutes after the Galley had laid alongside the Moor.

“Damn you, you bloody…” Marlowe muttered. The word “coward” was floating just below the surface, but he could not bring himself to voice it. It was too heinous an accusation, even to be made in private, without greater evidence than he had.

After all, the Revenge might have sprung a plank, or her bottom might be covered with weeds, or the men might have decided to become insensibly drunk. Any number of things might have happened that were beyond Billy Bird’s control.

Marlowe climbed down, regained the quarterdeck. “Elizabeth, my dear,” he called to his wife, who had been all the while standing aft, keeping out of the way. “We will be at them directly. I think it would be best were you to retire to the cable tier.”

“Of course, my love.” Elizabeth stepped over, kissed him. Bold as she was, they both knew that the decks would not be the place for her when the fighting got hot.

Marlowe glanced down at the two pistols thrust in her sash. “You are all loaded, then?” he asked, trying to make his voice sound as cheery as possible. He had insisted that Elizabeth take two loaded guns with her. He had 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 they heard the sound of men swarming up the side, and then the first of the Bloody Revenges appeared over the bulwark, swords and pistols in hand.

“Hold! Hold!” Marlowe shouted. “The ship is ours, the Moors are below! Hold, there!”

It was like shouting at deaf men. The Revenges did not pause for a beat before they fired a volley into the stunned men of the Elizabeth Galley and then fell on them-those still standing-with sword and cutlass.