Across a Moonlit Sea

by Marsha Canham

  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.

  Chapter 1

  She 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 vo
lcano.

  “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.

  The Egret was armed, as any reasonably minded merchant trader should be, and had seen her fair share of fighting, mostly against Spanish and Portugese privateers who objected to Spence’s interference in their trade monopolies. But as any Englishman knew, a man was only as good as the ship he sailed. Both the Spanish and the Portugee had clung to the centuries-old design of square-rigged masts, which meant they could sail only where the wind took them. English vessels were fore-and-aft rigged on all but the main square sail, adding maneuverability in the yards that allowed them to sail circles around more cumbersome galleons, which could only watch and grow dizzy.

  The wounded galleon before them was definitely English in design and flew the Cross of St. George on what was left of its topmast, though it was as tattered and charred as her other pennants.

  “Below Aulde George, there,” Spence said, narrowing his amber eyes to bring the topmast into better focus. “Do ye recognize the pennon?”

  “Crimson on black. A stag, or a goat, I make it.” McCutcheon shook his head. “The crest is not familiar to me.”

  “Aye, well, it feels like it should be familiar. At any rate, she’s no simple merchant wandered too far from home. She’s showin’ ten bloody demi-cannon an’ fourteen culverins in her main battery as well as falconets and perriers fore an’ aft.” Spence pointed at the monstrous thirty-two-pounders snug in her waist and added out the side of his mouth, “I’ll wager whoever her master is, he’s not one to haggle over the price o’ trade goods.”

  “Mayhap she’ll have shot to spare an’ a tun or two o’ powder if her magazine is not underwater.” McCutcheon’s graveled voice did not betray too much optimism. “Or if she did not use it all gettin’ herself in such a condition.”

  Spence straightened and scratched thoughtfully at the violent red beard that foamed over his chin. It was a cool morning, yet there was a faint sheen of moisture across his brow, glinting off the bald dome of his head. He kept staring at the limp pennant that hung so forlornly in the still air. Something about it was nagging at the back of his mind. Something was making his skin itch and his ballocks tighten—a sure sign of trouble ahead.

  “Well, we’ve no choice but to take a look. An’ no harm in passin’ by the armory on the way.”

  “Aye,” Spit grumbled, and passed the order over his shoulder. “Cutlasses an’ pistols, ten shots apiece. Lewis, Gabinet, Brockman, Hubbard, Mawhinney—” He paused in naming the best musketmen on board and his wizened gaze settled on one particularily expectant face.

  The amber eyes of the captain, which more often than not twinkled with mischief and good humor, had not retained their joviality in his offspring. Solemn and serious most times, Beau Spence’s eyes were large and fiercely proud and more often than not brought to mind a tigress stalking its prey. Thankfully, neither the captain’s ponderous girth nor the shocking red fuzz that dominated his walruslike features had been passed to his daughter. Beau’s hair shone with only hints of red in the brightest of sunlight, and then only on the rare occasions she left it unplaited. Most times she kept the rich auburn braid bound as tightly as her doublet, which, though considerably smaller in size than any other garment on board, did a fair job in flattening and smoothing any distractions that might lure a lecherous eye from his work. Moreover, being the only woman on board a ship full of lusty-minded men, she had shown no hesitation or lack of skill in using the razor-sharp dagger she wore strapped about her waist, or—as one poor gelded bastard had discovered—the wickedly thin stiletto she kept sheathed in the cuff of her boot.

  There had been some who had balked at the notion of a woman joining the crew of the Egret—what soundly superstitious sailor would not? But she knew every plank, spar, and cleat on board. She worked as hard as any of them and ofttimes harder than most, if only to prove she was deserving of their respect. Seven voyages ranging from six months’ to a year’s duration had more than proven it. It was only the captain who tried to test her patience now and then. Four weeks from home and he was starting to take precautions as if he were suddenly remembering he was her father.

  But Spit McCutcheon had no qualms about including her in any venture. She was a dead shot with a pistol and could hold her own with a cutlass against men twice her size. And even if the tiger eyes had not been focused intently on him now, almost daring him to pass her by, he probably would have called her name.

  “Aye, Beau. Fetch yourself a cutlass an’ join the party. Have Roald break out some pipes o’ water as well; no tellin’ what we might find over yonder.”

  Beau followed the others down to the main deck and waited for the weaponry to be distributed. She buckled a cutlass around her waist and slipped a second belt, strung with powder cartridges and a pouch of lead shot, over her shoulder. A brace of pistols completed her arsenal, tucked securely into the sword belt and adjusted like old friends.

  Jonas Spence paid no more heed to his daughter than to anyone else as he raked the small group and pr
onounced them ready. He led the way to the ship’s rail and climbed down the gangway ladder to where four oarsmen were waiting in the jolly boat. He had not troubled to cover his bald head with a hat, but he drew on a pair of leather gloves as the boat pushed away from the hull of the Egret

  The captain’s gloves were specially made, the left one containing two stuffed fingers to replace the ones he had lost to a misfired musket several years ago. It was a small affectation, wanting to appear whole in front of strangers, and extended to include the wooden calf and foot he had learned to use with only a minor limp to betray the fact his leg was shot away below the knee. Despite the impediments, there was not a tar on board who would not have followed him into hell if he asked it of them. The Egret carried a crew of ninety and it was to Spence’s credit as a fair and able master, that the same ninety men, give or take a spate, had been with him since his ship had been launched from the dockyards ten years ago.

  As the jolly boat came within hailing distance of the unknown ship, the crew’s attention was fixed steadfastly on the looming hull. There were still no signs of movement on board, no glimpse of a curious head, no ominous creak of a falconet swiveling on its iron cradle to take aim on the advancing boatmen. There was only the soft rush of water sliding under the keel of the jolly boat, and the faint clinking of two small iron rings that dangled from a broken spar high above the deck.

  “Ahoy there! Anyone aboard?”

  Spence’s booming voice sounded unnaturally loud as it rolled across the gap and echoed off the hull of the wreck.

  Eight hands rested over the curved stocks of eight cocked pistols while all eyes continued to stare intently up at the ship. This close, the damage to her superstructure gave clear evidence she had been involved in fierce fighting. Aside from the scars and pocks that marbled her sheathing, there was fully ten feet of clean board below the waterline indicating a fatal leak somewhere in her keel. Another six feet would bring the sea on level with her open gunports, and inboard flooding would finish the job.