Read Across a Moonlit Sea Online
Authors: Marsha Canham
Across a Moonlit Sea (2 page)
On deck, Pitt’s crews opened the remaining gunports and hauled the cannon into position for firing. Pitt raised his arm, waiting for the initial roll to subside as the
Virago
completed her turn. The Spaniard was directly on their beam, cleanly in the sights of all twelve heavy guns that
comprised their larboard battery. Gunners stood with wicks soaked in saltpeter and spirits of wine, the fuses glowing red hot. Others stood at the ready with wadding, shot, and powder, ready to reload the instant the gun was discharged.
“Now!” Pitt brought his hand down with a vengeful roar. The wicks were lowered to the touchholes and ignited the charge of powder in the cannon breeches. An instant later the guns erupted almost simultaneously, the deck juddering underfoot from the tremendous impact of the carriages jumping back with the recoil.
A cloud of gray, acrid smoke creamed back over the deck, engulfing the men as they scrambled to haul the guns inboard for reloading. Two hundred yards away, gouts of splintered wood exploded from smashed rails and bulkheads. Men screamed and died where they stood or were thrown in bloody fragments as high as the topsails. A second salvo from the
Virago
struck before the crew of the stunned galleon could loose a single shot, and now the added chaos of falling shrouds and blasted spars created bedlam on the shattered deck.
The
Virago
raced past, reloading as she ran. An order to the helm had her sheering hard to larboard again, cutting around behind the burning galleon while at the same time bringing all of her heavy, and now double-shotted, guns on the starboard battery to bear on the five remaining ships in the crescent.
The five had already begun to fall out of their orderly formation, but the
Virago
managed four hot rounds before the closest galleon could gain position to return fire. The zabra’s guns erupted in fiery rosettes, clouding the sea in boils of smoke, sending a volley of shot across the Virago’s beam. Canvas screamed overhead as it was gashed and torn from its spars, but even as the sails collapsed, men swarmed aloft to cut away the damage. A second volley exploded
deck rails and cracked the bowsprit, a third swept two men over the side and blew half a dozen more out of the smashed tops.
Simon Dante paced the afterdeck, shouting orders and encouragement. His cheek was bloodied from a flying fragment but it was nothing more than a scratch. His ship had taken some hits, more than he had anticipated, but not nearly as devastating as the damage his
Virago
had wrought. One Spaniard already sat low and broken on the churning sea, her decks enveloped in flames, her masts and rigging dragging behind her like drooping wings. Two more showed damage in their tops; another had had one of its guns blown from its carriage and it hung over the smashed remains of the gunport, the snout pointing straight down to the sea.
But the zabras were regrouping. They would know what to expect this time and not stay so obligingly clumped together. Moreover, they would load with chain and aim high for the sails, hoping to cut the Virago’s speed and maneuverability.
Dante’s pale blue eyes scanned the clouds of smoke that still obscured the tiny island they had left behind. The Talon should have emerged from cover by now and with the wind in her favor, would be racing up on the Spaniards with swift, lethal surprise.
A warning shout from Pitt drew Dante’s attention back to the Spaniards. The two largest galleons were closing fast, coming up on either side of the
Virago
, clearly intending to take her in a crossfire.
“Mister Brighton, bring her about! Hard to starboard. Hard to starboard now!”
The helmsman had anticipated the order and was already straining against the tiller, throwing all of his weight into turning the arm that controlled the rudder. A loud
crack and tearing of timber sent the tiller swinging hard against the bulkhead, the sudden freedom throwing Brighton with it. He fell hard onto his knees and scraped a layer of skin off his chin as it made contact with the planking, but he was on his feet an instant later, cursing orders to the topmen to correct their trim to compensate for the lost rudder.
The
Virago
faltered briefly off her course, allowing one of the galleons to gain way.
“Mister Brighton—!”
The banshee scream of chain shot cut through Dante’s orders, cut through the helmsman himself in a fanning red spray. Dante was knocked to the deck by a section of rail and lay there, stunned, for almost a full minute. Lines and rigging were torn from their stays and the screams of his men echoed the shrill tearing of canvas overhead.
Dante fought to regain control of his senses and his body, struggling to his feet as another wailing salvo struck his ship. He limped to the rail, his left leg numb from the knee down and awash in blood. Pitt was below, struggling to clear bodies and debris away from the guns. The deck was littered with wreckage. Cables swung free and sails hung in shreds from yards that were broken and dangling free of their braces. Blood ran from one side of the planking to the other following the roll of the ship, tracing spidery patterns on the sun-bleached oak.
Cold, silent rage filled Dante’s soul and he whirled, shouting orders aloft. If he could coax one more pass out of the
Virago
, surely the
Talon
would be there, beating in to support them. And wounded though she was, the valiant privateer responded, tacking with a graceful slide against the wind, taking herself away from the one vulture who had found his range and throwing herself under the guns of another who had not. Pitt fired his cannon, kept his
crews swabbing, reloading, tamping, and firing until their hands blistered from the heat.
Dante made his way to the bow and manned one of the falconets, swiveling it on its mount and taking aim on the target, now less than a hundred yards off the larboard side. His eyes were burning from the smoke but it was his ears that brought him the vindictive satisfaction of broken timbers and dying men. He breathed through clenched teeth and watched as the Spaniard returned fire. His eyes narrowed and he wiped at them savagely to clear them of sweat and blood, and when he looked again, such a roar came out of his throat, even Pitt heard it over the thunder of the guns and came running up onto the foredeck in panic
“The bastard! The filthy yellow bleeding bastard!”
It took a moment for Pitt to see what was causing such rage in Dante’s face, and when he did, he stopped breathing, stopped thinking, stopped time itself from intruding between one heartbeat and the next.
Far off in the distance, the wind filling every sail she could mount on her masts and tops, the
Talon
was racing across the blue of the horizon.
Racing north.
Racing away from the smoke-filled arena.
She was fleeing to the safety of wide open sea, leaving the
Virago
and her crew to face the circle of predators alone.
S
he emerged from the receding bank of mist like a ghost ship. The air was dead calm, the water smooth as glass. The lines of her rigging were frosted with dew and glistened with a million pinpricks of light as the first rays of the morning sun found her. She had originally carried four masts, but the mizzen and fore were badly damaged, the latter cracked off halfway up the stem and folded over on itself, suspended in a harness formed of its own ratlines. What few scraps of canvas she carried were reefed, as if she knew she was going nowhere fast. The huge mainsail hung limp, half of it in tatters, the rest valiantly patched wherever it was possible and bolstered by a new array of lines and cleats to give it some hope of catching any breeze that might whuff by. There was more damage scarring her rails and hull, and she was listing heavily to starboard, weary with the weight of all that hope.
Captain Jonas Spence frowned through the thick wire fuzz of his eyebrows. “I see no lanterns. No signs of life on any of her decks.”
His second-in-command, Spit McCutcheon, duplicated
the frown but he was not looking so much at the silent galleon as he was the dense gray wall of fog behind her.
“There could be a dozen ships out there, lyin’ in wait, an’ we’d not know it,” he muttered through the wide gaps of his front teeth. “’Tis just the kind o’ trap a bloody-minded Spaniard would set. Use one of our own as bait to lure us in, then”—he leaned over the rail and spat a wad of phlegm into the water twenty feet below—“pepper us like a slab o’ hot mutton.”
Spence’s frown deepened, the lines becoming crevices in a face already as weathered and hardened as granite. He was a tall bull of a man, as broad across the beam as his ship, as bald as the pickled gull’s eggs he ate by the crockful. “Mutton?” He glared at McCutcheon. “Did ye have to say mutton, ye flat-nosed bastard? Now I’ll be havin’ the taste of it in my throat the whole blessed day long.”
As if to verify the prediction, his stomach gave an angry rumble, one heard by most of the group of crewmen gathered behind them on the forecastle. Several smiled, despite the tension. Their captain’s appetite and capacity were infamous, and when his belly protested a lack, it was like the ominous grumbling from a volcano.
“Mutton.” Spence snorted again and raised his hand to his eyes, shielding them against the molten silver glare of what little dull light did manage to break through the dissipating clouds. He took a slow, careful sweep along the half of the horizon that was clear, halting when he came upon the ghostly galleon and the gray miasma of mist behind it.
“We’ll send the jolly across,” he decided. “If there are a dozen papist bastards out there, they’ll be goin’ nowhere, either, in this cursed calm. An’ if she’s genuine, there might be souls aboard who need our aid. Helmsman! Ye’d
best haul us in. Keep a square or two aloft for steerage in case a wind does come along.”
The order was relayed and almost immediately there were men clambering nimbly up the shrouds and steadying themselves on the yards while others released the tension in the rigging lines and allowed the sails to be reefed and lashed to the spars. It was slower work than normal, for the sails had been well soaked with seawater to swell the canvas and take advantage of any breath of air. They had been becalmed three days now, and aside from the occasional cat’s paw that scudded over the surface of the water, they had drifted no more than a league or two in that time.
That was why, when the dawn began to melt away the morning mist, the sight of another ship standing so close at hand had tightened more than a few sphincter muscles. Nearly every one of the Egret’s crewmen lined the rails; none had moved away over the past hour, few had raised their voices above a whisper. They were still in dangerous waters and without wind to move them, they would be easy pickings for enemy gunners.
The low, thick ceiling of cloud that had hung over them for the same three days had made it near impossible to take any kind of a reading from the sun during the day or from the stars at night. The helmsman’s best guess to their position had them stalled square in the middle of Spain’s busiest shipping lanes. They were homeward bound, still four weeks out of Plymouth; low on victuals and fresh water, lower still on any inclinations they might have to engage a strange vessel in enemy water. They had heard rumors, before their departure from the Caribbean, that King Philip’s plate fleet had cleared Hispaniola two weeks before them. The huge galleons, burdened by the gold and silver mined in Panama and Mexico, would be slower moving than the
Egret
, and it was not inconceivable they could
have caught up. Moreover, these plate fleets traveled under heavy escort from India guards whose decks bristled with guns of all sizes and calibers, whose captains had no compunctions about attacking stray ships and collecting English crews to enslave in their galleys.
McCutcheon’s concerns were genuine and Spence took his wiry mate’s counsel to heart. Spit had been on the sea more years than most ships in the English fleet. What few spikes of hair he had sticking out on his scalp and chin were gray, and if he stood on tiptoes the top of his head might reach Spence’s armpit. They had been together nigh on fifteen years, one of the oddest couples on the Main, and known by nearly every merchant and investor in Plymouth for the quality of sugarcane rum they ran up from the Indies.