False Colors (8 page)

By mid-morning the xebec’s sails were visible, even from the deck, as a shining white tree on the horizon. To port, Sardinia loomed in craggy cliffs and inlets of white rock, scrubbed over with dark pines. The water beneath the keel, glass-clear, showed the sandy bottom fathoms below and even the little crabs that lived in the dragging skirt of weed choking the
Meteor
’s hull.

The
Meteor
rounded Capo Ferro and sailed cautiously on into the Strait of Bonifacio. Immediately she seemed alone. The shadow of Sardinia’s cliffs swept over her, and all the sailors aboard could feel the shallowness of the seas, the loom of land to their lee. Here the ketch’s small size and excellent maneuverability were an advantage, allowing her to pass above or between submerged boulders that would puncture the hull of its pursuer. Alfie stood by the lead and listened to them call the depth of the water beneath them; “by the mark, five, sand and soft shale,” “by the mark three….” On the bow sprit the lookout lay gazing through the clear seas as they felt their way forward.

The decks had been swept clear from fore to aft; John’s cabin had been disassembled and the pieces taken down to the hold, stacked next to the chickens and the goat. Slow match smoldered in tubs along the deck, and at a sound of whispered cursing Alfie strode swiftly down from the quarterdeck to find Captain Richardson of the Ordnance Corps berating the lever he was using to remount the mortar.

At the companionway, the head of one of the boys he had sent to help the doctor popped up, giving an excited signal to say all was ready below. Alfie passed him with a pat on the back and went down to the gun deck, where the rest of the Ordnance Corps were huddled around the fire-box of the galley range with sweating, intent faces and a red glow in their eyes.

“All prepared?” Alfie swept a professional eye over the lines of cannon, run out and with their crews standing by, then peered with more curiosity at the cherry red metal of the galley, more customarily used for boiling stew than for heating cannon balls. He took note of the buckets of water and sand standing ready to throw over any accidental blaze, the long tongs poised in the ordnance officer’s hand, and the silent, awestruck sailors who attended on the corps’ attempt to heat the shot. “This isn’t going to set us aflame, is it?”

“I can’t promise you that,” said the soldier in charge. “This operation is not designed to take place on ship. I could promise you perfect safety—within reason—if we were ashore on a stationary rock built fort, and we had the correct furnace for the job. As it is, well, we’ll have to take our chances.”

“Understood.” Alfie cast a jaundiced eye over the men, who saw through his pose at once and grinned at him, already looking more like pirates than like Britons, with their scarves tied around their heads to soak up the sweat, and their shirts off. “Hear that? The teams I’ve picked to work the hot shot will be responsible for
not
setting the ship on fire—if you do, it comes out of your pay. Regular gun teams, you are responsible for getting the hell out of their way while they work.

“Everyone remembers how we left Algiers, yes? So you don’t need me to tell you what they’ll do to us if they capture us. Suffice it to say, it won’t be pretty. If you don’t want to end your life being force fed your own balls for the Dey’s amusement, then there’s nothing for it but to fight until we beat the bastards. That’s all.”

The thought of making himself an example almost closed his throat. Remembering Algiers was a roil of nausea in his belly. But every man aboard had seen him brought back broken; what better to play on their fear and their desire for vengeance? And he… he propped himself briefly on a knee of the deck above and breathed away the tremble of fury. He would show them that their pity was neither needed nor welcome, because he was fully fit again and perfectly capable of command.

Going out into the light again, Alfie saw that the helmsmen had taken the ketch between a rocky island and the shore. The sails had been furled and the sweeps put out, oarsmen gently, silently keeping the
Meteor
in her place, hiding behind a rock. As he watched, two of the topmen swarmed up the cliff and lay down among the colony of gannets on top of the island, glasses fixed on the bright sea beyond the headland. An overpowering scent of guano drifted down from the rock, and it was cold in its eternal shadow. Snails crawled up the walls all around them.

“Everything’s in readiness, sir.” Alfie returned to the quarterdeck almost on tiptoe, and gave his report in a low voice, conscious of cold and silence.

“Good.” John—who had such a nervous look about him in every day life—seemed now as calm as the desert sands; empty of emotion, but scorching hot, burning like lime. Even Alfie found the man a little frightening at times like this.

“Good luck, Mr. Donwell.” John put out his hand, and Alfie took it, holding it for a moment, conscious of the beat of blood through it, living and warm. The devil in his own blood woke then, making him squeeze tighter, turning his smile of thanks into a warmer grin. John snatched his hand back, looking ruffled, just as the lookout on the peak waved his red kerchief to say their pursuer, now their prey, had rounded the cape.

The xebec swept majestically past their little inlet, so close that the lookouts might have dropped stones onto her deck. The designs on the turbans of the men who worked the sails could easily be seen, and their voices heard, ringing out over the spray. They passed as an eagle passes by the nest of a sparrow, and all the men of the
Meteor
, like a sparrow on its eggs, made themselves small and silent until they could see the lanterns of its stern, retreating. Then “out sweeps,” said John. “Stand by to make sail.”

“Make sail.” Danger concentrating their minds, the topmen poured up the rigging, making ready without the usual sequence of commands, pausing occasionally to look at Alfie. Like a conductor with a well-trained orchestra he kept the sequence going with eye contact and small nods, manning the halyards and sheets, hauling taut, letting fall and sheeting home, all in silence. As the oarsmen took her out of the lee of the cliff and the wind filled her sails, Alfie was proud of them all. For a bunch of reject drunkards unfit for any better ship, they had done well.

She filled. Water began to whisper along the sides, then to thrum as their speed increased. With a slice like a knife they drove out of the shadow into the sunlight, and the ensigns streaming forwards on both masts glowed white and red against the deep blue Mediterranean sky. Light glittered on John’s gold braid and made his buttons glint like sovereigns, and Alfie let go of everything except the joy of being alive in this one perfect moment. “Ready, Mr. Richardson?”

In place of their explosive shells, Richardson’s mortars had been armed with makeshift containers of grape shot. One of his men stood by the helm, squinting out at the xebec, making minute adjustments—for the mortars could be aimed only by turning the whole ship. This too, like the heated shot down in the galley, was absolute folly, for the mortars were designed to be fired from a stationary vessel, winched from side to side by spring anchors. She had been built to take the recoil from a standstill, not while the frame of the ship was already strained by the enormous forward force of a stiff wind in the sails. It would double the forces acting on her; be like sailing at twelve knots straight into a wall. But Alfie didn’t care about folly. Neither drowning nor blowing himself up had terrors for him—the only thing he would not abide was to be a slave again.

In a cracking boom of gunpowder, the mortars spoke with tongues of flame. The
Meteor
lurched under Alfie’s feet, lifting out of the sea and slamming back down, almost hurling him to his knees. He clutched at the rail as the masts bent with the recoil and ropes burst, snapping about his head. The whole ship came to a sudden catastrophic standstill, even the wind blasted out of the sails. She groaned and shrieked in protest, but the reinforced hull stood the shock. As the cloud of sulfurous yellow smoke rolled slowly over the
Meteor
’s deck, the sails began to fill again and she moved achingly forward, out of the smoke.

White-faced topmen raced to splice the broken cables, just as the lookout’s cheer came shrill down the wind onto deck. Far beyond the range of cannon, the xebec’s mizzen lateen flew in the wind, shredded, and her deck crew lay in piles, the murderous hail of shot having done its work. Their stern chasers boomed out, but the balls kicked up white spray five hundred feet before the
Meteor
’s head, and as new crewmembers boiled out of her hull to wrestle with the flying sail or stand, shouting defiance, Richardson cried, “Clear away! Fire in the hole!” and the mortars let fly again.

The xebec was turning to meet them, every sail manned. Even Alfie, no stranger to fleet actions, felt a little squeamish as he watched the bodies burst apart, the blood fountain out to stain the white sails red. Blood poured from her scuppers, and a red sea foamed beneath her sprinter’s hull. The chains on the
Meteor
’s foremast gave a convulsive snap, then tightened with a noise like a dragon’s wing-beat in the recoil, and Richardson came striding to the quarterdeck looking singed but smug.

She’s inside our range.”
“Very well, Mr. Richardson.” John moved aside as a cannon
ball came screaming up the deck. Alfie could feel its passing like a kick in the chest. “We’ll try the heated shot now, if you please.” John might have been at a garden party, nonchalantly ordering a glass of punch. Alfie’s heart rose into his throat at the glory of
it, making him grin into the freshening wind.
The
Meteor
—reinforced to take the strain of the mortars—
had a hull twice as strong as needed in a ship of her size. The
xebec turned, firing her larboard broadside in a raking fire across
the
Meteor
’s bow, but at this extreme range her shot bounced
off the ketch’s hull and fell into the sea with disconsolate
splashes.
“Helm hard a starboard!” shouted John, as the
Meteor
too
turned, presenting her broadside. Alfie dived down into the
comparative darkness of the gun deck to shout, “Fire!” and “Fire
at will!” to the men of the Ordnance Corps, in charge of the
heated shot. It might have been amusing to see them walk with
such slow gingerness, each new ball held in tongs, heat pouring
off it and making the air shimmer above it, if the infernal things
had not been so dangerous that even one might suffice to set the
whole ship alight. The gun crew nervously rammed home what
looked like three times too much wadding, and rolled the burning iron down the barrel, touching the slow match to the hole
with a gesture that looked like relief—overjoyed to get the
deadly shot far away from themselves.
The cannon leapt into the air, its restraining chains twanging
with a high metallic shriek. The deck beneath them shuddered
with the impact as it crashed back down. Leaning down to look
through the port, Alfie saw the ball pierce the lightly built
xebec—a burst of splinters and a faint wham of impact almost inaudible to his shot deafened ears—and then a wisp of smoke. Days upon endless days of desiccating heat welled out of his
memory and made his heart smolder with the joy of revenge.
“Good!” he said, even as a ball from the xebec burst the hull
asunder on his left. Splinters flew. In a sudden rush of daylight
one of the gun crew crumpled to the ground with a length of
sharp oak through his throat, but his mates ran the cannon out
again without a moment’s pause.
“Dion! George!” Alfie signaled to the men at the end of the
deck, standing by the companionway with a stretcher, helped
them to get the man onto it and turned back to the guns, all
without any real thought. “Let’s have as many of the hot shot as
we can.”
The xebec crowded closer. Above, Alfie could hear the sinister thud and clang of the xebec’s grappling irons hitting the
Meteor
’s side, just before—with a burst of flame and din that almost
stupefied him—her final broadside came hurtling almost direct
through the
Meteor
’s gun-ports. The deck now seethed so full
of smoke he could barely see his feet. When he trod on the severed arm of one of his gun crew he kicked it dispassionately out
through the port, reached down, and found the body it had been
attached to getting in the way of the gun carriage wheels.
Nikolaos Gkranias
, a part of his mind noticed, calmly; a dab hand
with portraits and carving the scrimshaw trinkets the other men
liked to send home to their wives.
Knowing the ship’s safety depended on its officers’ ability to
keep a level head in battle, Alfie shoved aside grief and guilt and
nausea—every emotion that might hamper him from doing his
job—kept them to feel later, in safety. He cleared the tracks of
the cannon and heaved the body too into the sea. Above the
screaming of the injured came the dull trundle that told him the
guns were being run out for one last time.
Pools of red in the fog moved like ghost-lights towards him,
and the faces of the ordnance men, lit from below by fire, swam
like visions of hell into his gaze.
“Gunners report!”
Three of the four gun captains replied. Alfie sent the final
round of hot shot to each working cannon, and stretcher bearers
to those who did not answer. The cacophony of the guns going
off was like being drunk—gloriously, fearlessly drunk, and
yardarm to yardarm as they were, every shot went home. “Close gun-ports! All hands to repel boarders!” he shouted, remembering the sound of grappling irons a moment earlier. Leaving the dead and the dying behind, he drew his sword and
raced up the companionway into battle.
On deck, the fog of smoke was lighter, but the marines in the
rigging plugged away at the xebec’s men with rifles, and as the
wind blew away the cannon smoke, whiter plumes above the
masts remained. Boarders armed with scimitars leaped down
from the platforms at either end of the xebec onto the
Meteor
’s
deck. As fast as the
Meteor
’s sailors could cut the cables, more
hooks came flying out of the mist to catch against wood or bodies and drag the two ships together.
The quarterdeck seethed with fury, John only visible by the
braid on his hat. As Alfie forced his way up the steps, ramming
into men, using his sword more as a battering ram than a blade, a
scimitar blow knocked the hat off. A glimpse of brown hair was
swallowed up by a scrum of backs and elbows, and the brief but
deadly glitter of steel. For a moment Alfie’s spirit deserted him as
he watched the captain fall, then something wild and hot touched
off in him as if the fuse had finally reached the magazine of his
soul.
He yelled at the top of his voice as he charged into the knot
of men, mad and invulnerable. Sword through a spine here,
blood on his face, kicking the legs out from beneath another man
there and hewing his throat as he fell, Alfie carved his way
through the press to John’s side.
John, on his hands and knees, struggled to get up. A boarding axe embedded in his side dangled, pulling the wound’s lips
open into a mouth of surprise. As Alfie turned to confront the
press of men closing in once more, John took a handful of Alfie’s
coat hem and hauled himself upright by it, leaving bloody prints.
He swayed, white-faced beneath the splatters of gore, then
wrenched the axe out of his flank, turned back-to-back with
Alfie, and fought on, sword in one hand, axe in the other.
There are so many of them!
Alfie hacked and slashed with a
savagery and total lack of finesse that would have appalled his fencing master. But his heart was light and his body felt new again, reacting faster than his mind, strong and sure and utterly without doubt. It was bliss to share this with John; to feel the flex of the other man’s back against his own, to fight as one and breathe as one, alone together in this moment poised just on the
cusp of death.
His arms had only just begun to tremble and the air to burn
his throat as it went down when he felt the swarm of attackers
waver. A voice called over the deck like the muezzin calling the
people to prayer, and as obediently they faltered, began pulling
away. Joy drove Alfie forward; joy like the mounting ecstasy of
sex, unstoppable, undeniable, pushing them back until they
turned and ran—their vulnerable spines exposed to him. He cut
them down as they fled, and saw over their heads the cause of
their sudden retreat—flames licking out of the xebec’s ports,
snaking up her ropes, gnawing voraciously on the edges of her
huge sails.
Even as he watched, something cracked deep in the body of
the other ship, she jerked like a man who had been shot, and the
water around her boiled. The contents of her hold began surfacing in great bubbles smelling of bilge water and human waste. She
buckled in the middle. Masts swayed towards each other, stays
parting, and fell into the increasing inferno on deck. Men were
hurling themselves off her into the sea now, some tearing off their
clothes to swim better, some—unable to swim—crossing their
hands on their breasts as they sank, horrifyingly dignified. On the
deck of the
Meteor
, her sailors took advantage of their enemies’
dismay and distraction to stab them in the back or herd them towards the rail where they would share their comrades’ fate. “Stop them, Alfie…. No massacres on…my ship.” The flame
of battle had ebbed from John’s face, his skin transparent and
blue with shock. He staggered to the capstan and leaned on it in
a vain attempt to disguise the fact that he could barely stand. “Aye, aye, sir!” Not what he wanted to do at all, but Alfie ran
from one struggling knot of combatants to another—offering the Dey’s men the chance to surrender. Uncertain whether he was being a fool, he ordered the boats put out and the swimming men rescued, taken down to the hold to be clapped in irons fastened to the keel. All this with a dread gnawing at him that was more than justified when he returned to the quarterdeck to find John slumped at the foot of the capstan, a pool of blood beneath
him an inch deep.
“You idiot,” he whispered as he lifted the limp body in his
arms and carried it down to the doctor’s station on the orlop.
“You
bastard!
Don’t die!”
“No way…to speak…your commanding officer.” John
opened an eye like a slit of mercury.
“You’d better get well again, sir, so you can punish me,” said
Alfie, and found resilience enough to raise an eyebrow at the innuendo.
John grinned at him, like the grin of a skull.