Men fell, breathing their last from shattered bodies oozing bloody runnels. Combatants stepped through dying sobs, trod on keening shrieks, and pushed aside those begging for life with whimpering tears streaming despite nearby infernos. Faces surrounding Van Reiver bulged with wide-staring eyes, projecting new depths of anger, agony, frustration, defiance, or uncomprehending disbelief at death holding forth a welcome. If you reached out, the nightmare would be over. Fuck. Fuckity-fuck, fuck, fuck.
"Comace!" Van Reiver bellowed, "Fight to us!" From his peripheral vision, he caught a brief acknowledgement with a bloodied sword, but he had to focus all his concentration on what was in front of him to keep himself alive. The light played strange games with his eyes. Smoke and fires narrowed everything into glinting weapons and blows flashing in the firelight amid cries, screams, curses, or gasps as men burst into view. How long had it been? So long, he'd murder a drink. Anything wet to sate fear's fire and a mouth gluing tongue to teeth.
Despite their sacrifice, more boarders struggled aboard to jeer before attacking. Fresh holes appeared in the railing as hooks snagged into the timber from below. New boatloads of invaders scanned for victims. Merciless, with strange, overly thickened wooden swords which glinted glassily and sharpened obsidian headed axes and spears. Their weapons came from an older, more feral time. Brutal killing tools which chipped when parried with steel, but still lethal in powerful hands.
A seaman toppled, clutching his chest as his feet snapped away. Before he could rise, a red bandanna wearer stamped on his neck, swung a murderous two-handed sword between his legs, and sawed. Hatch elbowed a frozen Van Reiver aside and swung at the exposed head. He missed, the swirl of bodies pressed them apart as fast as it had thrown them together. Oddly decorated, murderous faces under elaborate feathers preached a deadly fanaticism. Many a stout-willed man froze as Van Reiver had, but they had nowhere to run and no option but to stand.
Stepping over a marine, Van Reiver cringed, unable to fend off the dying gasps. The unfortunate man clutched a throat, pumping out blood in time to the frantic beating of his heart. Russet runnels spurted between desperate fingers, slick with death. With a straining grunt, Van Reiver thrust at the killer. To his frustration, he had his sword parried by a wicker shield with leather tassels. Shove, high jab, duck, ball slice, frantic shove.
"Fucker!" He gasped, shocked by an obsidian-edged sword snaking over the shield to tear through his coat. It sliced through his shirt and across his collarbone like a razor. Using his superior height, he balled his fist on his shield straps and slammed it into the bastard's blocky face, staggering him. Once, twice, his sword was free. He lunged, but it was blocked by the sword so hard his hand stung. He almost dropped the blade as his fingers numbed around the hilt. That'd be bloody awful timing. Van Reiver switched focus and rammed into the man to off-balance him, lunging the instant his sword had space. It sank deep into the stomach with a grisly crunch hit bone somewhere, making his grip slick.
Dropping like a rock, the man flopped limp, his green feathered headdress rolling to the ship's side, then vanished. To Van Reiver's fortune as he tracked the object, the corpse conveniently tripped the next man already swinging at him. The swordsman never recovered; before he landed, a stocky marine booted the supine skull and flicked his longsword at the back of the man's head. Then again, with greater savagery, spilling grey brains into a greasy puddle, with the top of the skull and topknot forming an island. Van Reiver vomited his terror as the burning maelstrom in his stomach faded to a cyclone of cavorting acid and fear.
12
His breath came in gasps, a mutter of "bastards" with every other vomit-tinged rasp. Van Reiver burst through creeping fog into a fresh enshadowed melee. Ducking a spear, he plunged his sword into the neck of the last invader and, with a twist of his wrist, bundled him aside. Wheezing to a halt and wrapping an arm around Tryphon's stumped foremast, he finally linked up with Third Mate Comace.
Van Reiver ignored the gurgle of the soon-to-be corpse and peered through the flame-lit darkness at his shipboard nemesis. The young man radiated relief. A discordant expression to his usual arrogance that seared into Van Reiver's mind like the carnage he'd just carved a path through from the aft castle. Tryphon's navigator winced at how few of his party remained, with only Petty Officer Hatch by his side. So few straggled to join them, Van Reiver let Hatch inspect them; the broken-nosed former brawler was the man to terrify his fearful sailors into returning aft. To safety, of a sort.
Comace hunched and closed the staring eyes of their sailing master. A man he had no tolerance for and a strange, almost noble gesture. The stout, grey-bearded master oozed innards from a rent across his ample stomach. It was not a pretty sight—if someone could ever call a corpse that. Comace held his left arm as he straightened. Dirty and terrified as everyone else, his wild darting eyes sought hope from anywhere—from anyone, including Van Reiver.
"Serious?" Van Reiver croaked, nodding at the bandage. He spat to clear the foulness from his mouth as Comace shrugged and muffled a whimper.
"The bastard had a glass shield spike, sir. I think my arm is broke." The third mate seemed close to tears. Van Reiver ignored the damp trousers—they mattered little in dire circumstances—even from an obnoxious, noble-born bastard of a man. Comace had gathered the surviving deck crew and half a dozen top men, only to be trapped against the blazing fallen mast, capstan, and the carnage by the ship's side. Van Reiver grimaced. If Comace's attackers had headed aft to double the numbers he'd fought, they've annihilated his party to a man. The youth had saved more lives than he knew, and even Van Reiver's own, in the mother of all ironies.
The fires caused by the exploding catapult platforms amidship had darted into the lower sails, setting the running rigging and the lower spars alight. Burning lines dripped flames like a hellish drizzle onto anyone unlucky enough to be underneath. It would be an impossible task for the crew to extinguish fires now, with attackers clambering the sides of their trapped cerrack at will. Van Reiver sighed, knowing it was only a momentary respite. Dirty faces and hollow eyes stared back, knowing and fearing what awaited as the smoke thickened to embrace the lull.
"Is there only a dozen of you?"
Petty Officer Cephill rose from a crouch, gesturing the others to stand. Another deckhand held one of their foes' broad glass-tipped one-handed swords, and many an eye stared at the horrific wooden weapon. "Half our lads lacked arms," Cephill growled. "We'd a bucket chain where the deck's alight. Dozens were snabbed in seconds. The fuckers got our fat master, the bosun's mate, and one of the young cadets. The poor little sod never saw it comin', which was as well as his head's behind you."
"We were lucky not to lose everyone," Comace agreed. "We fought them off with buckets to get into a weapon locker. I can't believe these fiends are men. This is not how I imagined a battle." The young man glanced at the deck strewn in debris and body parts and bit his lip, struggling not to cry.
No one would care if he did. Van Reiver didn't and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. It trembled. He looked, did a double-take and shook it as a slice of skin, complete with a striped cat tattoo, flapped away like an autumnal leaf. Acid surged in his throat, a spontaneous flood rising to choke him. "Fuck." He gulped down his disgust, glad the flesh wasn't his. Comace's eyes bulged.
The taller of the two marines who'd led Van Reiver's charge moments earlier barked a nasty chuckle. "There's nothin' heroic fightin' at sea. Nowhere to run, so you just do whatever it takes. If you hesitate, people die. It has a smell of its own. A musk of blood, fear, piss, shit and puke. That never comes across in the sagas, eh, sirs?"
Cephill bobbed his head. Streams of blood ran unheeded on his neck, yet his gaze stood steady, flames dancing in the reflection. Minutes for Tryphon's crew had seemed like days, and Cephill nodded an uncharacteristic welcome at Hatch as the petty officer led a last pair of stragglers over. The two experienced hands rearranged the fit from both ravaged parties, with a second marine covering t
he route back aft for their casualties.
Comace wiped the blood and tears from his face with his good hand. He stared dumbfounded at the blaze beyond the wrecked mast, as though only now seeing the totality of the disaster. His shoulders bunched, and he turned to Van Reiver, "Your orders, sir?"
It was the first time he'd spoken to Van Reiver with respect. At any other time, Tryphon's navigator would have collapsed with shock. Instead, seeing the injured youngster straighten, Van Reiver felt a surreal twinge of pride. Too little, too late… his inner voice mocked, regurgitating the near hysteria he'd felt moments earlier when entering the melee before being rescued by Hatch and the now talkative marine. Melee. The solitary word didn't bring justice to the seething scrum of terror he'd forced his men through across seventy feet of the deck. A sensual assault to unleash nightmares on the soul. Realising he hadn't responded, he shook his head to clear it.
"Get the wounded into the aftcastle and keep that gangway clear. We'll buy you the time."
Comace demurred. Spent like others—like how Van Reiver felt, if honest.
It felt unreal to Van Reiver that it took a crisis—and the likely doom of Tryphon and every man aboard—for Comace to show he possessed the potential to be a fine officer. The thought bubbling up, at this of all times, was as bizarre as their flagship being ambushed in mid-ocean. Mixed emotions closed in tighter than the surrounding mist. Van Reiver shivered and turned a nervous tingle into a straightening of his belt while Comace coaxed the injured aft, showing a care Van Reiver never imagined him possessing.
Van Reiver chanced a glance over the side and almost lost his head. An arrow punched through the fog with a fluttering twitter past his earlobe—the one healed once already this evening. He gave an undignified squawk as Hatch hauled him aside by the collar like an unruly child.
The second mate stumbled, his boots scrabbling on smooth planking where the caulked seams smouldered under human offal. With an incomprehensible roar, dozens of figures scampered onto the deck. Several dropped twitching to ankhbow bolts from the aft, but the rest stampeded on. Yelling, jeering, they hurdled wreckage and fires as if it wasn't there. Trampled corpses and dying underfoot and closed in. Face and form a masked blur for fear-stricken sailors to identify.
Driven by an unseen urgency, the snarling horde crashed into Van Reiver's party. Crunched into it like a ship driven onto rocks. Splitting it. Decimating it. They hacked apart three men with shrieks barely formed in a single beat of Van Reiver's pounding heart. The dark-haired attackers left two more maimed with hand axes hurled into their bodies, their blood joining the fallen flesh swimming across the deck beside abandoned fire buckets. Lifted off his feet, Van Reiver slid backwards.
"Form a wedge! Get the fuck behind me!" The talkative marine yelled. It was another name Van Reiver would need to ask to place face to deed, and by the gods they needed a respite, or divine intervention. Van Reiver shoved his way in pursuit of the marine and his less talkative comrade, kicking and punching a path as they moved like wolves.
It stalled the attack, with chainmail and shield splintering alien weapons. Fragments of glassy teeth glittered as they blunted thick wooden blades. Other attackers sought with surreal nobility to duel the pair of chain-clad fighters. It exposed them to Van Reiver and Hatch, who carved into exposed flanks as sailors finished the fallen. A precious second to allow Comace to flee.
Everything went red. Seamen were red, the very air was red, speckled with an obscene bloody mist, and everyone dripped strings of meat. Hell erupted on Tryphon's deck, vomiting carnage and despair, and the dwindling crew descended to unheard levels of brutality. Honour meant death, butchery meant a chance at life, and every crewman sought to live. Sought vengeance and freedom.
The remaining deck crew, cajoled by threats and curses from Hatch, scuffled with attackers on the sides, but with their numbers, it was desperation. The marines held firm against impossible odds for vital seconds, trading blow after blow with disciplined strokes, and parries, as Van Reiver lunged past them and flicked away spears aimed at the marine's flanks.
They collapsed, just as it seemed they might hold. A whiff of success vanished as freedom faded, the blossom of hope crumbling to blood-soaked ruin. A barrage of darts fired from more figures on the fo'c's'le, hammered into their ragged defence. Somehow their assailants had snuck through the inferno uncooked and unseen, found their way to a higher elevation. Death loomed, shrouded in fog, and held forth her hand.
Van Reiver felt the wind of passing projectiles—he'd escaped that touch by a miracle—but one sailor stabbing past him with a stolen spear collapsed. The seaman's linen shirt bloomed an ever-expanding crimson circle as he fell. Glancing over his shoulder, Van Reiver saw more boarders climbing behind them. They were fucked. Hopeless. Outmanoeuvred. They'd lost the deck. Van Reiver felt suffocation strangle him as they were engulfed. A body crashed into him, sending him skidding, breath exploding from his lungs.
Tryphon's attackers had tied off further aft and were clambering up the planking with ease to reinforce their comrades already aboard. More climbed the rail. Over, under, through. Some armoured; most not. All charged, and a handful dropped. The deck gave way a pace from their feet in the booming roar of an opened furnace. A torrent of fire roiled heavenwards, consuming the air.
Shadows undulated, and a monstrous man loomed. A full seven feet of leather-strapped death tore a path through the smoke. He swung a barbaric notched two-hander like it was a stick, hacking through the running deckhand's legs. The sailor dropped wailing onto spurting stumps. The human boulder continued with a casual roll of the shoulder, lifted the blade high and crunched through the skull, silencing the howl.
Van Reiver's men goggled as the sailor's face plopped skin side up on the deck between severed legs like a discarded mask with bulging eyes and a mouth elongated in a silent scream. They flinched away a pace from the apparition as it stamped forward, implacable, each foot a beat on the drum of doom. Then another, as the monstrous man smirked and licked a dripping jet-black tooth on his weapon. The razor-sharp facets gleamed with a hellish reflection, except where dull with fresh blood.
Two paces backwards became five, back-stepping through steaming tendrils as the inferno undermined the ship's structure. Fiery tentacles crept through seams, devouring pitch-caked caulking, and now weakened the support frames. Holes appeared over a hellish crucible, causing Van Reiver to concede to events as he and the huge warrior shared a moment of apprehension.
"Back to the stern!" he hollered over the crackle, seizing upon the fragment of hesitation in the behemoth to thrust his remaining men sternwards. He desperately hoped Comace and Cephill lived, and their way remained clear. Van Reiver despaired they would never return to the relative safety of the aftcastle. These new attackers were better armed and skilled. The night had turned into an unmitigated disaster. Small clusters of men fought and died. Trapped by sword, by fire, and with smoke and mist cutting down visibility to mere yards.
Close up, their feral foe looked strange to Van Reiver. Much darker skin tones than the weathered sailors, but not as black as a man like Merizus with Nubian or Afrique ancestors. Why did these painted-faced attackers come with strange wooden swords and axes? Every other race has used steel for millennia. They gave scant regard to their fallen as they purged the deck of Tryphon's crew. Ruthless in imminent victory, their voices rose. United in a yodelling roar.
The second mate jerked his blade from a body unthinking, releasing a bubbling scream. The man babbled something unintelligible in a strange tongue, words exploding from a mouth with tusk-like decorations, and as though sensing a distraction, he tried to snatch Van Reiver's sword. Panicked another attacker would glean an advantage, Van Reiver heaved and tugged. Wriggling, grasping, the snaky-fingered foe sought to prevent his retreat. The hand smeared blood over Van Reiver's grip, trying to break it, but the man's strength faded, pooling around their feet as they wrestled. Fingers slipped, and then the weight vanished, adding to the barricade
of bodies.
A spear poked between Van Reiver's arm and Hatch's torso as they fought momentarily side by side with a three-fingered pox-blighted seaman. Half-hand's back arched, breath bubbling as rough hands snatched him away. He fell. Mewling. Forgotten.
Cadet Onvice burst through the melee like a wraith. Twisting and dodging, with child-like hands stabbing. Stabbing, kicking, punching. A score of seamen and marines poured through the tear he made, half armoured, half not. It made no sense. Saved by a boy with a blade. A boy! Even the most sensitive youth had become feral to survive.
One long-haired fighter burbled an oath and staggered, caught unprepared by the youth. Tattooed fingers scrabbled to stem crimson spurts. The boy's attack gave Van Reiver and a fat sobbing topman their opportunity. A second amongst the death gods dance for flight. Dying. Rent asunder, guts flopping. Blue-circled fingers tumbled like discarded knucklebones as Hatch trampled the man. Cast down to join the meat littering the deck. To foretell a hellish fate within fire and fog.
"Retreat!" It was the easiest order Van Reiver had given. Tryphon's navigator asked himself for what must be the hundredth time in as many minutes—why hadn't he ignored the small boat when spotted and left the fucker until it rotted and sank?
13
Below the deck the crew fought across, Grimm hurried to carry out Bullsen's instruction to kill Tryphon. He slid into the steerboard hold, ignoring his earlier injuries. His footsteps echoed as he hurtled past the aft pump, towards the mainmast with the massive tabernacle. It was easy to see the barrels with the dreaded red stamps and leather anti-rubbing bands stacked and padded against side timbers as thick as his waist. The containers lashed to iron cleats were the ones he wanted.
THE TRYPHON ODYSSEY (The Voyage Book 1) Page 12
