by Kage Baker
John kept with his messmates, looking out anxious to see if he could spot a little figure dropping from the Mayflower. By him, Blackstone and the two boucaniers sat, quiet and calm, passing a whetstone back and forth as they put fresh killing edges on their blades. Bob Plum and Pettibone sat either side of the Reverend, on a fallen palm trunk, mopping their faces and complaining of the heat and the flies. The Reverend showed no sign of minding the heat, though he wore his black coat buttoned up high, and a black neck-stock tied tight. He only nodded his head over his big, scarred hands, clasping them together in prayer.
“There’s our lieutenant-colonel coming ashore,” remarked Blackstone, pointing with his cutlass. John looked out and saw Bradley arriving at last, gazing at the jungle as he stepped from the boat. Someone shouted:
“Columns come to order!” and sand was kicked up in flurries as four hundred men scrambled to their feet and formed ranks, grumbling and muttering.
“How like the army,” said Blackstone. “Hardly what one expects of sea-robbers bold and free, eh?”
“Oh, shut your face,” said John, looking around for the pennant he had been assigned. He raised it up; it hung fluttering limply in the glare of the tropical sun. He looked down, blinking his dazzled eyes, and when his vision cleared he saw the girl had slipped in beside him, silent, and stood now at his elbow. She had dressed herself, with her bubbies bound down flat, and tied the red silk scarf about her cropped hair, and smudged her fair countenance with soot.
John heard another gasp. He half turned and saw Dick Pettibone regarding the girl in horror.
“You—what are you—” began Pettibone. The girl reached out, swift, and seized Pettibone’s arm tight, and muttered something into his ear. Pettibone stepped back, looking appalled, but he said nothing more.
At the head of the column, Bradley was consulting with a villainous-looking fellow, a thief they’d pulled from the Spanish dungeon, who’d volunteered to guide them for sheer spite’s sake. Bradley’s second-in-command, Captain Norman, walked up and joined them, gesturing. They seemed to agree on something; Bradley squinted at the sun, just then dead overhead, and swept his arm up in the signal to march.
Two hours they plodded along, keeping to the beach where they could, fighting uphill and inland through the jungle where the headlands stuck out into deep water. The first column tried to hack their way through with cutlasses, though the boucaniers among them frowned and shook their heads; that was no way to do it, they said, it only blunted blades and made a lot of noise. In the end Bradley agreed with them and gave orders to lay off. The boucaniers fell out and went ahead, slipping through the branches without noise, and the rest followed. The girl marched by John’s side, steadfast, without complaint.
Over the last hill, and there were the bastions of San Lorenzo, peeping between the trees. The column of men fanned out now, moving in a thin line through the jungle, and came to a wide cliff’s edge where the land had slid, leaving the trees with their roots hanging out over the air. John parted the leaves with his standard and peered down.
“No more than six or seven feet,” he announced. “We can jump it easy.”
So the men pushed forward, dropping down one by one through the brush and scrambling to their feet below; and the first wave to land turned and stared about them amazed, and soon horrified.
The forest had been cleared from where they stood to the very walls of San Lorenzo itself, making an open plain where there wasn’t so much as a blade of grass to cover them. John could see the Spanish gunners on the near palisade grinning at them, they were that close. He had just time to notice that before he heard the first shots cracking, and a scream from somewhere on his left, and then John was scrambling for his life back up the slope to the cover of the jungle.
“Back! Back!” Bradley was howling, and something big struck the earth right by John’s head with a whap and traveled deep into the clay.
“Ba—” Bradley’s voice broke off. John reached desperately for the creepers, and saw Jacques and Blackstone reaching down to grab for him. He caught their hands and they pulled him to safety. Other men were being hoisted up, here and there among the trees. John saw Bradley being dragged out between two stout fellows, and him bleeding and cursing a blue streak. Down below, though, there lay a score of men who hadn’t turned in time, pierced through with shot or the arrows of the Indian archers. Some were crying for their mothers. Some were quiet for ever and aye.
The Spanish indulged themselves in catcalling and threatening no end, or at least that was what John reckoned they were doing. He was too busy binding up Bradley’s leg to pay much attention.
“What do we do, Captain?”
Bradley had bitten a dry stick clean in half, in his pain. Now he spat it out and glared at John.
“Bring up the grenades!” he said. “And send one of the boucaniers to reconnoiter. Where’s that damned thief? I’ll cut his heart out—”
“He’s down there,” said Blackstone, crawling close. “If he betrayed us, he’s been well and truly paid for his trouble.”
Some men crept up into the trees, and from the screen of leaves took potshots at the Spanish, who kept up an answering fire. In a while, Jago climbed back down.
“Pretty bad,” he said. “Other side of the field, deep deep ditch, the palisadoes they go up straight on the other side. He runs across the field alive, get his death falling down the ditch.”
“We ain’t getting at ’em that way,” said John. “We better fall back, sir, whiles we think what to do.”
“I’ll shoot you dead,” said Bradley, baring his teeth. “Come back here, you sons of bitches! Dick Norman! Take two squadrons with grenades and charge again! They’re only wooden walls!”
John, peeping out through the leaves, saw what he meant; for instead of being stone, San Lorenzo’s bastions were made of wooden planks shored up with posts. Fire might do for them; and John understood why so much trouble had been taken rowing all those barrels of grenades ashore. They were dragged forward now and handed around, and Captain Norman stepped to the fore and led his two squadrons down on that bare ground, where they rushed screaming for the walls.
It was a slaughter. They never got so far as the ditch; half their number were mown down on that field. Though one or two of them managed to hurl their grenades across the ditch and into the dry brush at the base of the palisades, it was no use. The fires caught readily enough, the weather being very dry, but the Spanish soon flung down enough sand to smother them. Bradley, propped up against a tree, watched it all and swore bitterly.
John watched too, and thought he had never seen such a close likeness of Damnation: the dead and dying sprawled across that bare field, frying in the heat and glare of the sun, and here and there a grenade bursting in the dead hand that clutched it, or sputtering down to add its acrid smoke to the smoke coming up out of the ditch.
Captain Norman ordered a retreat, like a sane man, and the survivors regrouped under cover of the trees. There proceeded a fierce debate amongst them, the two opposing points being: that they could not take San Lorenzo, and that they must take San Lorenzo. As these points went back and forth for the next hour, getting louder and more profane with each repetition, John listened close to his mother telling him that there was no sense in him getting himself killed.
He looked round on his messmates with a cool eye. The Reverend and his mates hadn’t been out yet; they sat quiet and pale, all three seemingly praying together. Jago and Jacques were enjoying a quiet pipe, passed between them. Blackstone had stretched out with his hat over his face, cold-blooded fellow that he was. The girl sat still, looking through the leaves at the battlements of San Lorenzo. John sidled up to her.
“See, now?” he said, quiet. “See what a nasty business this is? You’ve had your soldier march; it’s time to go back to the beach. Much safer place for a pretty girl. I’ll take you; let’s just slip away, sweeting, eh?”
She never so much as looked up at him. “I’d not have
taken you for a coward,” she said. “A big man like you.”
John fell all over himself trying to deny he’d meant to desert; he was only afeared for her, on his life and honor, and had meant to come straight back and storm the wall himself, single-handed, once he’d seen her to safety. His mother wailed in his ear, asking was he mad, that he’d rather face death than disgust in the eyes of a slip of a girl. John made no answer to that.
The girl shrugged at his fine words anyway. “Not long until sunset now,” was all she said.
John walked away feeling like an empty wine-skin, and saw Blackstone sitting up, grinning at him.
“What are you smiling at?” said John, cross as a bear.
“The follies of the heart,” said Blackstone. “You may as well rest yourself, man. Unless they’ve sent out a party to come around and attack from the trees, we’re safe enough here; and when night falls it’ll be a different game altogether.”
And so it was. Bradley bawled and thundered, persuading the men they’d be worse off if they deserted now. Maybe all he’d needed to make him a decent commander had been pain and rage; if he’d shouted like that when he’d been cruising the Main, he’d have had better luck. Word went out that they’d try again come night, and all parties settled down to wait for dark.
The sun dipped low; the shadows slanted away, and the wind rose, and changed, and blew from the jungle out to sea. All around, in the underbrush, men were getting up and priming their muskets, and rummaging in the crates of grenades.
Then the sun was gone. Bob Plum got up in the purple gloom and led Reverend Hackbrace to the edge, and parted the branches to show him the Spanish gunners outlined against the red sunset. He began talking to him in a low voice. John saw the Reverend begin to shake and clench his hands.
Blackstone watched them sidelong as he wound a twist of slow-match through his buttonhole. Jago and Jacques appeared from somewhere—they came and went silent as cats—and waited beside him on the edge, looking through the screen of leaves. John glanced over at Captain Bradley, who was limping along looking up at the musketeers he’d stationed in the trees. Bradley muttered something to Norman; Norman turned and passed the word, and all along the ragged line men grabbed up grenades and poised themselves to drop.
John felt a squeeze on his hand. He started and looked round. The girl pulled him down, kissing his dry mouth. There was a light in her eyes like the green flare before a thunderstorm. He had a moment’s unease at what anyone should think, seeing him kissing a pretty boy. Then he decided he didn’t give a damn, them being all about to die anyway.
So they dropped, stumbling down the ploughed-up slope, and ran like madmen but without a sound, as they’d been ordered. Meanwhile the musketmen in the trees sent covering fire, picking off the Spanish sentries backlit so nice and sharp as they were. It was what should have been done the first time, and it worked now. Shadows skipping over the bodies of the dead, near invisible in the twilight, the grenadiers were to the ravine and down one side before the Spanish knew what was what.
Their Indians saw what was happening first, and had the presence of mind to start shooting arrows down into the ditch. Even so, John saw the Reverend, frothing at the mouth, going up the side like a spider scaling a web, tearing at the rotten wood with his nails. Bob Plum followed him close, shoving lit grenades all along the base of the wall and scrambling on. Fifty pieces of eight for them, thought John.
He lit a grenade whilst running and lobbed it high and far as he could. The Spanish sentries had made themselves a nice palm-thatched sunshade that ran the length of the rampart, for their ease in keeping watch under the noonday sun no doubt; but it made a pretty target for firebombs now. John missed, but heard his grenade burst and voices howling behind the rampart.
Jago dashed past him, a glint of white teeth in the smoke, his knotted hair bristling. John looked up just as the arrow struck home clean through the saddle of Jago’s shoulder. The force knocked him back on his heels; Jacques was by him at once crying, Petite, ma petite, but Jago’s eyes were red and mad. He pulled the arrow out, not seeming to feel it at all, and shoved it down the muzzle of his musket, making to fire it back at the bowman.
“Wait!” The girl appeared out of the smoke, pulling the red silk from her head. “Here!” She tied the silk about the arrow’s shaft and held an end of slow-match to it. It kindled up bright straightaway.
“Ah!” Jago was laughing as he took aim. Bang, and the arrow flew like a bird and lighted in the palm-thatch sun shade, lighted indeed, for the leaves curled back and the bright fire spread and licked along. The girl was laughing, they were all laughing to hear the shrieks from above as the Spanish tried to put the blaze out, but it seemed all their sand was gone.
By the firelight John could see plenty of arrows scattered along the bottom of the ditch, as could all the other grenadiers. He grabbed up one and tore off a piece of his shirt for kindling; all along the ditch others were doing the same; up went the flight of little phoenixes, and some stuck in the thatch and some in the wooden palisades. The inshore wind, gusting down the ravine, fanned the flames like Hell.
From behind them came a roar as Bradley gave the order for the marksmen to advance, and John heard them dropping from the trees now, charging the field, coming on toward the ravine. They kept up a steady fire the whole time, reloading on the run. John scrambled to and fro, finding dropped grenades, relighting them and pitching them as fast and as far as he could go; for he had a strong right arm then. The girl flitted here and there, bringing him grenades too, and they laughed together to hear the Spanish scream so, when the whole of the burning thatch collapsed on the walls.
Just as the marksmen came to the ditch, something behind the wall exploded, with a crash to tear open the sky and a blaze of light like day come early; John heard later it was the biggest of the Spanish guns. Red-hot bronze shrapnel came out of the air and fell like hail, wounding all men alike. Someone yelled beside him and he turned to see Blackstone on the ground, clutching his head. Someone else yelled above him. John looked up and saw the palisade beginning to collapse, eaten through as it was with flame, and a great wave of earth and stones burst from behind it and came down the slope into the ditch.
When John knew anything again he was clear down the far end of the ditch, toward one of the other bastions, and he and the girl were dragging Blackstone between them. Blackstone was slick all down one side with blood, and he was saying over and over, “My ear, my ear, they’ve blown off my fucking ear,” and there were more explosions sounding.
The palisades had collapsed nearly all the way across, and the earth they had had packed behind them all gone down into the ditch, filling it in in some places, so Captain Bradley’s marksmen had a nice open window through which to shoot at the Spanish who ran to and fro, exposed as though they were on a theater stage. Some were trying to put out the fires; some were fighting hand-to-hand with privateers who’d crawled up over the fallen palisade. John caught a glimpse of one unlucky bastard fending off Reverend Hackbrace, who was on him like God’s own werewolf.
But the defenders weren’t done for yet; some among their officers were rallying to drag over guns from the other batteries, aiming them out at the gap to slay all comers that way and any of the marksmen out there in the night. They loaded the cannon with musket-balls and fired point-blank into the waves of men coming up the hill, and washed them back down in blood. Others of the defenders had run and fetched their own grenades, or even chamber pots, flinging down anything they had to repel the privateers.
John was all for finding a cool place in the dark and waiting for the bullets to do their work up above, once they’d bound up poor dear Blackstone’s bloody head; but the girl went sprinting over the fallen earth with her cutlass drawn, screaming like an Irish witch. To John’s amazement he found himself scrambling after her, and so was Blackstone, dodging grenades and shite. They all three gained the top at about the same moment, and looked straight into the faces of the Spanish def
enders, and then it got nasty for a long while.
Now and again John had a moment to notice things, over the red hours; that he was wet to the elbows like a butcher, and that Dick Pettibone had somehow gotten his fat bulk up the slope and was cutting the throats of the wounded, and that the girl seemed to be everywhere at once, lithe as the flames that spread, and spread, and that the Reverend was roaring out a hymn that wasn’t about any little lambs, and that at last the gray dawn was showing up eerie and cold beyond the walls.
The Spanish weren’t firing anymore now, whether from a wish to save powder for the last assault or because they’d used it all, John couldn’t guess. He slumped down behind a mass of smoldering timbers, trying to get his breath, watching dully as the girl bound up a cut that had laid his upper left arm open. He wondered when that had happened. He could see down the causeway the fallen earth had made, where Captain Bradley was in conference with a group of boucaniers, Jago and Jacques amongst them. They were passing their muskets to a couple of Bradley’s aides, who collected them like bundles of firewood. Then they drew pistols and cutlasses.
“It’ll be close work, now,” said the girl, laughing. John looked at her in wonderment. Then he understood: they were readying for the last push, and Bradley must intend for the boucaniers to be the spearhead. It seemed like a dream, or a story someone was telling him. If he turned his head he could see down to the green trees and the Chagres River winding gray away between them, and one and then two and three canoes moving up its placid water. Deserters, he thought. Don’t blame them.
The sun came up, red as a wound in all the smoke and stink; the Spanish had retreated to the inner buildings, seemingly, for there was no sign of them but the dead ones on the bastions. There came a shout from below. John looked down and saw the boucaniers formed up for the charge. Over they came, yelling, Victoire! Victoire!
The Spanish began to fire again, but it was scattered now, and as the Frenchmen rushed over the edge the other privateers followed after them.
