He took a fat gold ring out of a strongbox and pressed it onto one of Jenny’s fingers. It was too big for anything but her thumb. Red Rodney didn’t care. “Keep it, sweetheart,” he said.
She kissed him. He was generous enough, but not usually so generous as this. “What did I do? What did I say?” she asked.
“Never mind,” he said. “You’re you. That’s plenty.”
Jenny stared at the thick gold circlet. “But I want more!”
“You always do,” Red Rodney said, not without affection. “You make a good pirate, Jenny.”
“Huh!” That didn’t suit her the way it would have suited Ethel. He might have known. She wanted to be a fine lady. What she was doing in Avalon with a dream like that…Well, people didn’t always end up where they wanted to. You had to do what you could with what life gave you—either that or you had to give it a good swift kick and make it do what you wanted. Women had a harder time there than men did.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than someone knocked on the bedroom door. He and Jenny were decorously clad this time; she didn’t have to duck under the covers. He opened the door. There stood Mick. “Ha!” Rodney said. “Is it word from Stuart at bloody last?” Maybe he’d worried over nothing.
“No, skipper—from the pinnace.” The Irishman held out an unfolded scrap of parchment.
“Give me that!” Radcliffe snatched it out of his hands. We are not far from North Cape, he read. Enemy now coming into sight. Fleet is about the size you guessed it would be. Will get away if we can. The message was dated the fourteenth. “What’s today’s date?” Red Rodney demanded.
“The fifteenth, isn’t it?” Jenny said from behind him. Mick nodded.
Rodney Radcliffe calculated how fast the enemy fleet could sail. With reasonable winds, they would get to Atlantis in three or four more days. They would, that is, unless they were stopped. He had the chance to do just that.
“We move!” he shouted, so that both his mistress and the pigeon man jumped. He went on shouting, too, so that first his own crew and then the rest of the corsairs of Avalon would pay attention to him. And they did. The ragged, mismatched fleet sailed the next morning. Aboard the Black Hand, Red Rodney wore a smile that stretched from ear to ear. If William Radcliff wanted the pirates wrecked, he would have to do it the hard way.
William Radcliff looked discontentedly toward the Atlantean coast. Here in the west, with the warm current bathing the shore, the weather stayed mild much farther north than it did on the other side of the Green Ridge Mountains. “I wish we’d been able to sink that pinnace,” he grumbled.
“Don’t worry, Admiral,” Elijah Walton said. William thought the Englishman used the title to pacify him, the way a mother might give a baby her breast. Walton went on, “We made the bastards aboard it beach themselves so they wouldn’t be caught. They won’t pass word on to the freebooters that we bear down on Avalon—we’ll get there long before they can.”
“You are a clever man, sir—but, perhaps, not so clever as you might be,” William said. “How have the pirates been spying out our every move in Stuart?”
“By pigeon. But you seem to have put a stop to that.”
“Well, I can hope I did.” William Radcliff shrugged broad shoulders. “Whether I did or not, though, I couldn’t very well stop the men aboard that little ship from loosing whatever birds they had. And I think it very likely they had some. Why was that ship there, if not to spy out our coming? No other reason makes sense. And they would pass word on to Avalon as quickly as ever they could. They would know we’d have swift ships aplenty, and that they might be overtaken themselves. Only pigeons make sense, then.”
Walton chewed on that with even less enthusiasm than he used for eating at sea. He was not a good sailor, not when the ocean turned rough, as it had in the voyage up from Stuart to North Cape. “Well, you are right,” he said at last. “You are right, and I wish to heaven you weren’t.”
“Oh, so do I,” Radcliff replied, “but what difference does that make? If we fail against the freebooters, the ones who ran off the beach before we burnt their pinnace will come down to Avalon sooner or later and find their fellows carrying on just as they were before.”
A regiment might be unable to sustain itself traversing a long swath of Atlantean terrain. Marcus Radcliffe had made that all too plain to William. But a smaller group, as long as they kept their heads, would not have much trouble finding enough to eat.
“Maybe a band of copperskinned renegadoes or escaped blackamoors will fall on them before they reach their promised land,” Walton said.
“Maybe, but not likely, not in this quadrant of Atlantis,” William Radcliff said. “Far more Negro slaves in the French and Spanish holdings in the southeast, and the same holds true in lesser measure for the Terranovan natives. This is the least settled part of the land.”
“A pity, for it seems no less fruitful than any other, and rather more so than some farther east,” Elijah Walton said. “The only thing holding it back is its remoteness—well, that and the dampening effect a bloody nest of pirates is apt to have on the settlements of honest men.”
“Its time will come.” Radcliff spoke with sublime confidence. “One day—and sooner than many believe, especially back in England—this land will be as well settled as the home islands, and far more populous and prosperous.”
Walton looked shoreward himself. No axe had ever touched these redwoods. No farmhouses stood out in the meadow. No cattle or sheep or horses grazed upon them. No smoke betrayed human habitation anywhere close by. A honker, symbol of all that was old and wild about Atlantis, stared incuriously out to sea. The Englishman neither said anything nor needed to.
Stubbornly, William Radcliff said, “That time will come, sir. Not in my lifetime or yours, perhaps, but it will. You may rely upon it. We shall also continue with the deposition of the Terranovan savages from their longtime haunts until they cease to encumber the western continent.”
“There I can scarcely disagree with you, not when some of the savages have gold,” Walton said. “A great pity the Spaniards jumped on them first, but we have not got poor on Spain’s leavings, indeed we haven’t. If the corsairs plundered only Spain’s ships, I should not mind them a bit.”
“Nor I,” William said. “But, since they plunder me and mine, I will end them if I can. And with a fleet like this under my command, I believe I can do nothing else.”
The fleet was a grand sight, spread out across the sea, the great ships of the line bunched together in the center, with faster, more nimble vessels on either wing. Nothing matched the splendor of a big sailing ship’s stately passage over the sea. It put Radcliff in mind of a dowager gliding across the dance floor in skirts that swept out and concealed all the motion of her lower body. But for the thrum of the breeze in the rigging and the laundry-line sound of a sail filling with wind now and then, the journey was almost silent, which only added to its grandeur.
However grand and splendid it might be, it wasn’t fast enough to suit the admiral. He didn’t know what he could do about that. Well, actually, he did know: he could do nothing. Even with a breeze from the north, the fleet had to make headway against the warm current that came up from the other direction. Farther out in the Hesperian Gulf, the current did not flow, but the added distance and the unending uncertainty about longitude made evading the current anything but a sure time-saver.
“We may still come upon Avalon unawares,” Walton said.
“We may, yes, but I doubt we shall,” William replied.
“Oh, ye of little faith.” The Englishman’s smile took most of the sting from the words.
“I have faith,” Radcliff said. “I have faith that the freebooters are less foolish than you make them out to be.”
And his faith, such as it was, was vindicated when shouts from the fleet’s crow’s nests came down to the decks: “Sail ho! Sail ho! Sail ho!”
“Sail ho!” the lookout shouted from high in the Black Han
d’s rigging. “Sail ho! Sail ho!” The third repetition seemed to carry an almost desperate urgency.
Red Rodney Radcliffe peered north. He couldn’t see anything from the brigantine’s deck. He would soon enough, though—all too soon. Sailors had known the world was round long before landlubber scholars realized as much. The way things came up over the sea’s long, smooth horizon showed it plain as plain.
“Send form line of battle abreast!” he shouted to the Royal Navy renegade who made signals for him.
“Aye aye, skipper!” Quint answered with a grin, and ran up the flags.
Not far away, the nominal admiral’s ship would hoist the same signal, and hardly anyone would know Red Rodney had ordered the move first. He only hoped the freedom-loving captains who commanded the other ships would take the order seriously.
The bastards on the other side would do what their admiral told them to. Rodney Radcliffe was only too sure of that. He usually despised the men of Stuart and England and Nieuw Haarlem for their slavish obedience. In battle, though, he knew how much it mattered.
He was too busy looking to port and starboard to see what his colleagues and comrades were doing to pay much attention to what lay ahead for some little while. When he did turn his eyes to the north again, his stomach lurched as if he were prone to seasickness. He had never seen such large ships so close before. A pirate with an ounce of sense sheered off when he spied a first-rate ship of the line. He wasn’t likely to last long against one in a straight-up fight.
They were in line of battle, the men-of-war and their accompanying scavengers. All their ships sailed as if animated by a single will. So Rodney thought, anyhow, till he spied the gaggle of Dutchmen keeping station on one another rather than with their English comrades. But they didn’t do much harm to the enemy line, and conformed to the movements of the rest of the fleet.
His own ships, on the other hand…
If he hadn’t known they’d practiced staying together and fighting as a group, he never would have believed it. They straggled all over the sea. If they formed a line, it was a line drawn by a drunk.
At least they sailed toward the enemy fleet. The wind blew from a little north of west, which gave the enemy the weather gauge and the choice of fighting or declining battle. The big ships sailed forward, their masts blooming with sails. They weren’t here to pull back.
Neither was Red Rodney Radcliffe. He glanced toward those men-of-war. Then he looked west, out toward the edge of his own ragged line—and beyond. Looking that way meant looking into the westering sun. Red Rodney smiled to himself. In some ways, this couldn’t have worked out better if he’d planned it for months. He had planned to fight, but knowing when the fleets would meet…. That was luck, nothing else. And luck favored him now.
Luck favored him as long as he could make a fight of it, anyhow. A bow chaser on one of the enemy ships fired. He saw the puff of smoke and the belch of fire before he heard the cannon go off. Bow and stern chasers were long guns, which gave them more range than the pieces on the gun decks.
The iron ball splashed into the sea several hundred yards short of the closest pirate ship. By the size of the splash, it was a twelve-pounder. Rodney muttered to himself. Twelve-pounders were broadside guns on the Black Hand. Would a ball from one of them even pierce a ship of the line’s thick iron planking?
He’d find out before long. William Radcliff and the men who sailed with him would want to slug it out at close range. Of course they would—they had all the advantage that way. A broadside from one of those monster ships could smash a brigantine to ruins. The corsairs’ fight was slash and dart and run away.
But Avalon couldn’t run. Red Rodney hated his cousin with a loathing all the more profound because William Radcliff understood that too well. Individual freebooters could survive even if the worst befell their town. Their reign over the Hesperian Gulf? That would be over, over forever.
“Shall we answer them, skipper?” called a pirate at the Black Hand’s bow gun.
It was a pipsqueak four-pounder, good for nothing more than frightening ships that couldn’t fight back. Red Rodney nodded all the same. “Yes, by God!” he shouted. “Let ’em know we’re here to give ’em what for!”
A moment later, the little popgun roared defiance at the approaching fleet. Its ball also fell short, but by less than the first gun’s had. The pirates manhandled it back into position, swabbed out the bore, thrust in the worm to dispose of any bits of smoldering wadding, and then rammed home powder and ball and fired again.
Several other bow chasers on both sides went off. One ball struck home with a crash that echoed across the water. Red Rodney eyed the enemy fleet with wary apprehension. When William Radcliff or whoever was in command judged the time ripe…
As smoothly as if they’d practiced together for years, all the ships of the line and the smaller vessels with them swung to port. “Hard to starboard!” Red Rodney shouted to his own helmsman, and then, to Quint, “Signal hard to starboard!”
His own fleet’s broadside would be puny next to the one that came at it, but he had to stand the gaff at least once. Yes, the corsairs would take punishment, but they would also dish some out. And they would hold the enemy in position for a little while. Rodney Radcliffe glanced west again. They needed to do that if they were to have any chance of discomfiting the dogs out of Stuart.
Then the enemy broadside spoke, and Red Rodney thought he’d fallen into the end of the world. The flame, the smoke, the thunder…A heavy cannon ball smashed into the Black Hand’s rail and decking. The brigantine staggered; Radcliffe felt the shudder through his feet. Whistling, whining splinters flew everywhere. A man not six feet from him went down with a gurgling scream, clutching at the jagged length of timber that speared his throat. Blood poured from the wound, and from his mouth. He was a dead man, one who wasn’t quite finished dying yet.
The corsairs’ broadside answered the one from the enemy. Even to Radcliffe’s ear, it sounded thin and ragged. It didn’t have the crushing weight of metal the English and Dutch and eastern Atlanteans enjoyed, and it was disrupted by taking hits from those big guns. Even so, a mast on one of the men-of-war toppled. On deck, sailors on that ship ran like ants when a foot comes down. Red Rodney whooped.
He wasn’t so happy when he turned his eye toward his own side. One pirate ship was on fire, another slewing helplessly out of line with rudder shot away, yet another with both masts down. The men-of-war fired again, this time ship by ship. They were happy enough pounding pirates to pieces.
Red Rodney looked west once more. He could only hope the enemy admiral wasn’t doing the same.
XIV
William Radcliff watched in somber satisfaction as pirate ships crumpled under the thunderous barrage from his fleet. Aboard the Royal Sovereign, sweating, swearing, bare-chested sailors reloaded and ran guns forward to fire again. Petty officers urged them on with shouts and with strokes from rattan sticks.
“They are fools, to try conclusions with us,” Elijah Walton said. A little to the east, a pirate brig caught fire. Men scurried like mice, trying to douse the flames. William didn’t think they’d be able to.
“They are fools, to turn corsair to begin with,” he said. “Sometimes you have to beat a fool’s folly out of him.”
A roundshot slammed into the Royal Sovereign’s oaken flank. Screams following the crash said the cannon ball or its splinters did their vicious work. The pirates were brave enough. They were almost madly brave, to challenge ships so much larger and stronger than their own.
As if echoing that thought, Walton said, “This unequal combat makes me wonder what possible hope of victory the brigands had.”
“Sir!” A midshipman still too young to shave dashed up to Radcliff. “Sir! There’s signals from out of the west! Fireships, sir!”
“Fireships!” William Radcliff said, and then something much more pungent than that. Fireships were every honest sailor’s nightmare. You had to get away from them, regardless of wha
t that did to your line. Let fire get hold of a ship full of men and it became an oven on the instant.
Fireships could do worse than that. He still remembered the Hellburner of Antwerp from the century before—as who did not? It had been loaded with tons of gunpowder and more tons of metal junk and stones—and it blew hundreds, maybe thousands, of Spaniards halfway to the moon. If Red Rodney Radcliffe remembered the Hellburner, too…
“Tell the signalman to raise each ship to act independently,” William said.
“Each ship to act independently. Aye aye, sir!” The midshipman darted away.
Walton peered west, shading his eyes with the palm of his hand. “Damned setting sun makes them bloody hard to spy,” he said.
“Yes.” William nodded. And had his unloved and unloving cousin counted on that, too? William didn’t know exactly how smart Red Rodney was. Tough and hard? Yes, no doubt. Smart? It wasn’t so obvious. Or it hadn’t been so obvious, not till now. The pirate chief knew what he was doing, all right.
Again, Elijah Walton thought along with him: “This must be why the bugger accepted battle with us to begin with. He wanted to hold us in place whilst launching his incendiaries at us.”
“That seems much too likely,” William said unhappily. He too peered west. Now the plumes of smoke from the burning vessels were plain to see, befouling a sky that should have been pristine. Also plain to see was his fleet’s disorder. His ships steered every which way, trying to escape those flaming harbingers of doom.
The pirates had nerve. They hadn’t just launched their fireships and then abandoned them to wind and wave. The weapons would have been much less dangerous if they had. Instead, men stayed on the burning vessels as long as they could, steering them toward ships in William’s fleet. Only at the last possible moment did the skeleton crews dive into the Hesperian Gulf and swim toward boats the fireships towed.
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