Fire over Swallowhaven (5 page)

It seemed a great pity to Trundle, as red-hot cannonballs rocketed to and fro around him, that he wouldn’t survive to tell her exactly what he thought of her navigating skills.

“H
ang on everybody!” yelled Esmeralda’s voice through the roaring of the guns and the hiss of the crisscrossing cannonballs and the billowing of the smoke. “I’m going to try escape maneuver R.”

Trundle was about to ask what escape maneuver R involved, when suddenly the
Thief in the Night
seemed to stand on its nose and go plunging downward at breathtaking speed.

“Arrrrggghhh!” he yelled as they burst out of the
cannon smoke and he found himself staring in horror at a sky full of distant, wheeling islands. The skyboat was falling vertically and spinning like a top. Jack was clinging to the boom with one arm and clutching his precious rebec with the other, a fixed and manic expression on his face, while odds and ends from the skyboat were whisked away on the wind.

Esmeralda sat in the stern, grinning like a lunatic and ducking and dodging the debris as they plummeted. Then, just as Trundle gave himself up for dead, she stamped down hard on the boards and heaved at the tiller, her teeth gritted and her eyes screwed shut. With a sickening and stomach-twisting suddenness, the skyboat’s prow lifted, and it hurtled upward again. For a horrible moment, Trundle thought they were going to loop-the-loop, but then Esmeralda let out a yell of jubilation, and suddenly the quivering
Thief in the Night
was on an even keel again.

“Whoooo!” Esmeralda hooted. “That was fun! Shall I do it again?”

“Nooooo!” Trundle and Jack yelled in unison.

“Babies!” Esmeralda shrieked with laughter. “Now then,” she shouted, looking up, “let’s see how the battle is going.”

Trundle peered up. Above them, the arrowhead formation of the pirate fleet was still heading for Swallowhaven, but Admiral Firwig’s brave little windships were darting in and out and back and forth, peppering the decks of the pirate windships with arrows and crossbow bolts.

“By crikey,” exclaimed Jack, jumping excitedly up and down, “they’re certainly giving those pirates something to think about. Good old Firwig!”

“And here comes Captain Wilde!” cried Trundle, punching the air as he spotted the six scarlet war galleons, with their rams and giant crossbows, shooting out from Underhaven, sails billowing. “Hoorah! Hoorah!
Hoorah!
”

“And I only count twenty-one pirate ships,” said Jack.

“Oh, crumbs,” gasped Esmeralda. “Look!
There
are the other four pirate windships—and they’re sailing right out of the sun, the rotters. We have to go and warn the admiral, or the Swallowhaven ships will be taken totally by surprise.”

A yank on the tiller and a swing of the boom, and they were speeding upward again toward the embattled Swallowhaven windships. It really was a dreadful sight! The pirate windships were constantly rocking back and forth from the recoils of their mighty cannon, and the whole sky seemed smeared and stained with puffs and swirls and streaks of smoke.

All of Admiral Firwig’s vessels were engaged, but it was a very one-sided conflict. Even as Trundle watched, a fusillade of cannon fire ripped through the rigging and sails of the
Sarky Cut
. The mainmast
cracked and snapped, and to his horror, Trundle saw the basket of powerstone break loose.

At once, the stricken windship keeled over. Animals slid across the leaning decks to spill helplessly over the side, tumbling through the sky like autumn leaves. Slowly and horribly, the doomed windship began to fall, gradually gathering speed until it plunged past the
Thief in the Night
and went spiraling down and down until it was no more than a dot in the blue—and then, dreadfully, it was gone.

Enraged by the loss of all those lives, Trundle drew his sword and brandished it at the pirate windships. “You cowards!” he raved. “You murderers!”

Jack’s hand rested on his shoulder. “Try to keep your head; there’s a good fellow,” the squirrel said gravely. “People die in battles—the best we can hope to do is to avenge them.”

“Hey! What’s going on now?” shouted Esmeralda. “What’s Amery up to?”

It was a question well worth asking. Four of the six scarlet war galleons had gathered around the
Bolt from the Blue
and were bombarding it with massive wooden harpoons. The other two windships were speeding toward the
Iron Pig
. But far from ramming the pirate vessel, they slipped past it and joined in formation with the rest of the pirate fleet.

“The dirty filthy turncoats!” shrieked Esmeralda. “They’ve changed sides!”

“I knew it!” howled Trundle. “My old dad always told me never to trust wolves and foxes.”

“Oh, my, we’re right in the
soup!” groaned Jack. “I’ll never get the chance to write my battle song now.”

“Where are the steam moles?” cried Esmeralda. “Why haven’t they started fighting?”

Captain Wilde’s treachery had clearly thrown the Swallowhaven windships into disarray. As the
Thief in the Night
at last came up level with the battle, Trundle saw the
Gilded Lily
swinging this way and that, trying to avoid the fast-moving pirate windships that had come upon it out of the sun. These vessels seemed not to have cannon but were smaller and lighter windships that darted above the larger, clumsier galleon while the pirate crew lobbed grenades and bombs down onto its decks.

Clearly, Admiral Firwig was too preoccupied with keeping his vessel in one piece to be able to send the signal to the
Black Velvet
to join the battle. Captain Darkside and his four ironclad windships still must have been lurking in Underhaven, waiting to be called on.

“We have to get to the steam moles!” shouted Trundle. “They’re our only hope now!”

And a pretty feeble hope, too, he thought as the
Thief in the Night
tacked hard to starboard and went racing down into the cold gloom of Underhaven. They found the four sinister gray windships hanging in the air, their funnels belching dark smoke, their sides echoing with mechanical clanging.

Trundle put the copper chart tube to his mouth again. “Ahoy, Captain Darkside!” he shouted as they came up alongside the
Black Velvet
. “Message from Admiral Firwig. The wolves have changed sides—you’re needed immediately or everything will be lost!”

As the
Thief in the Night
zipped in between the great unmoving windships of Hammerland, Trundle wondered for an alarming minute or two whether Thaddeus Darkside was going to do anything at all.

But then raucous sirens began to hoot and honk, metal bells clanged and clonged, and a tremendous
uproar sounded from beneath the gray iron decks of the four windships. Steam moles began to scuttle around the decks as the lumbering vessels clanked into slow, ponderous motion.

Trundle groaned. “These great lumps of metal aren’t going to be any use at all against the pirates.”

“Don’t be so sure, Trundle, my lad,” said Esmeralda. “Looks ain’t everything! I’ve got a sneaky feeling there’s more to these steam moles than meets the eye.”

“There’d need to be!” said Jack.

The four windships began to cleave through the air with a steady
chugga-chugga-chugga
noise that gradually got faster and louder until it was a continuous metallic screech that set Trundle’s teeth on edge and gave him the feeling that someone was running nails down the inside of his skull.

And the Hammerland ships were quick, too! Much quicker than anyone aboard the
Thief in the Night
had expected. They quite took Esmeralda by
surprise as they whizzed past, trailing thick plumes of white smoke. She twisted the tiller, and they went speeding after the ironclad windships as they came out of the dark and into full sunlight.

As the
Thief in the Night
chased after the steam moles, Trundle saw that the tarpaulins were being drawn back off the lumpy shapes in the bows of the four windships. He stared at the weird devices that were revealed. Riveted to the decks, they were made of copper and iron with thick iron-ribbed pipes leading to and from them and long metal nozzles that pointed out over the bows through slots in thick, curved iron shields. Trundle couldn’t imagine what these great things were for. More than anything else, they reminded him of the old pump-handled fire engines that would be dragged through the streets of his hometown of Shiverstones: antique machines with handles that could be pumped up and down to send a spurt of water jetting into a burning building.

So what were the steam moles planning—to squirt water at the pirates? Was
that
their secret weapon?

The
Black Velvet
was the first to engage with the pirates. And then Trundle learned the purpose of the strange machines!

Steam moles ran to either side and began to pump hard on the handles. A few moments later, great gouts of liquid flame came shooting out of the nozzles. The fire splashed across the first of the pirate vessels, setting rail and deck and rigging and mast and sail alight, all in a blazing moment!

The pirate windship went up like dry kindling, and in no time at all it was ablaze from stem to stern. Burning like a torch, it began to spiral downward, its ragged sails flapping like fiery wings as it plummeted.

By then, the other ironclad windships were busy among the enemy, spewing out their deadly fires over the pirate vessels and creating havoc and consternation among Captain Grizzletusk’s astounded fleet.

“Oh, my word!” gasped Jack, his wide eyes reflecting the flames as Captain Darkside’s fleet went jinking in and out of the columns of pirate windships, spraying fire and leaving mayhem in their wake. “Have you ever seen the like?”

“No, never,” said Trundle with a shiver. “I’m glad
they
didn’t turn traitor!”

“Speaking of traitors,” exclaimed Esmeralda, “I think Captain Wilde has bitten off more than he can chew. Let’s go join in the fun!”

Trundle saw what she meant. The
Bolt from the Blue
had been harpooned by the
Scarlet Scavenger
, but Captain Wilde wasn’t having things all his own way. In fact, from what Trundle could see, Dolly Wideawake’s Amazons were giving Amery Wilde’s crew a good walloping!

Whooping with battle fever, Esmeralda steered them into the heart of the battle. As they drew closer, Trundle noticed that there was something not quite
right about a couple of the pirate windships. They were no longer firing their cannon but were just hanging in the air, doing nothing. And as they came alongside, he saw that the crews were behaving very oddly indeed. Some of them had dropped their trousers and were waving their bottoms in the air, prancing about with wild abandon. Others were hitting themselves over the head with their own pistols. Yet more were hanging upside down in the rigging, laughing madly or singing, and a few were jumping overboard, flapping their arms like wings and chirping like birds as they hurtled downward to their doom.

“I think
we’re seeing the effects of that dark lotus juice that Firwig mentioned,” said Jack. He grinned a savage grin. “These Swallowhaven fellows aren’t as helpless as they look, are they?”