Gene Wolfe - Pirate Freedom

Out in the harbor, our ships were faking an attack on the fort. Tom Jackson was in charge of that, and from what I have heard he managed it pretty well. They would run in toward the fort, then turn away when they came in range.

Then Novia saw smoke coming up from the landward side of the town, where some houses had caught fire. She made another run, only this time she meant it. The Spanish in the fort were short on men because of the party they had sent to reinforce the stockade, and they were expecting her to turn back when she got in range.

Here I have to explain something about hot shot, which all the shore batteries I ever heard of use. You heat the cannonballs in a furnace near the guns until they are bright red but not white-hot. When you load the guns, you follow the powder with a dry wad and a wet wad. The dry is to keep the powder from getting wet, and the wet is to keep the hot ball from burning through.

When you have done that, you have to fire the gun pretty fast. Otherwise, either the hot ball will burn through both wads and fire itself, or it will cool down to the point where it will not start a fire on the ship it hits.

That was why there was only cold shot in the Spanish guns when Novia made her run for the harbor. The other thing that helped her was that the guns were elevated way high to shoot at our ships when they were turning away. They had to be lowered before they would bear.

Two of the Spaniards' five fifty-pounders were fired before they bore. One ball carried off the maintop, but that was all the damage they did. The rest could not be lowered before Sabina got off a good broadside. It killed quite a few soldiers and dismounted a gun. One of the other two holed Sabina at the waterline. It was serious and had to be fixed, but it did not start a fire or sink her. After that, the rest of our ships came in behind her. They had half crews, but even half of a pirate crew is big. With all hands hoy, there were enough to manage the sails and man the starboard guns.

After that, the fighting in the town did not amount to much. There were too many of us and too few of them who would fight. We looted the whole town and put the screws to anybody we thought might have money hidden away. That could be very rough.

To tell the truth, I did not pay a lot of attention to it just then. I was running through the town looking for Novia, who was running through it looking for me. Finally we found each other and hugged and kissed and all that. And every time we thought we were finished, we did it some more.

Eventually we went off looking for food and wine that was worth drinking and found an innkeeper hiding in his own cellar. We made him fix us a decent meal, telling him that if either of us got sick afterward we were going to shoot him. It was good, and between the two of us we killed a bottle of what he swore was his best wine.

Somewhere in there I asked Novia what had gone on, and why she was not on the ship, and she said, "You think I would wait to watch you die through my glass, Crisoforo?"

We went back to the Sabina to sleep, and that was when I found out she had been holed. The hole had been stuffed with hammocks and spare canvas, but she was taking on a lot of water. We rounded up some of the Spanish prisoners and put them to pumping. It was hard work, but better than getting your fingers cut off by somebody looking for money you did not have.

In the morning we had a sort of meeting to talk about the fort-did we want to make another run for it, with the battery shooting at us, or would it be better to take it?

I stood up. "It'll be cheap and easy to call on it to surrender, and if we do maybe they will. If they won't, we can storm it from this side. They won't be able to shift fifty-pounders around in time to use them on us."

Pretty much everybody agreed with that, so that was what we did. Capt. Burt and I went out with a white flag just about like we had at the stockade, what I said was pretty much the same. The officer on the wall said his comandante had been wounded and could not come up there, but he wanted to talk about terms of surrender. Would we come in and talk with him?

We said we would, and they opened the gates-very strong oak gates bound with iron-and let us in. As soon as we were inside, we were grabbed from behind. Our weapons were taken, and we were roughed up quite a bit. It reminded me of the Spanish who had taken my gold back on Hispaniola, and I got madder and madder.

After a while, they carried the comandante out in a chair. His leg had been hit by a fragment of stone. It had laid the leg open, he said, and broken the thighbone. "So you see, Senors, I am quite incapable to fight you. My men, however, will fight to the last drop of blood, and we shall be reinforced within a day or two, as you will see."

Capt. Burt wanted to know about that.

"You have not the gold that was to arrive here. Had you taken it, we should have seen you loading it. Thus it has not arrived. You met with a company of my men in the forest? I think it must be so."

I said that we had met more than a hundred Spanish soldiers before we got to the stockade.

He smiled and nodded. He was middle-aged and beefy, and he needed a shave. I hated him from the minute I laid eyes on him.

I told Capt. Burt what we had said, and he said, "They were going out to meet the gold. I should have guessed it, Chris. The officer in charge of transporting it must have heard the shooting and turned back."

The comandante chuckled, so I knew right then that he spoke some English. Still talking to Capt. Burt, I said, "Our men will be rushing this place any minute, Captain, and when they do, we'll be shot. How can we stop them?"

He must have caught on, because he just shrugged.

"You," the comandante told me in Spanish, "will tell them not to. You will tell them they must surrender. An army is marching on this place to defeat them, and you will die at once if they attack it."

There was more palaver, and the upshot was that I was marched up on the wall by an officer and two soldiers, knowing I would probably die up there. Portobello is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. I should already have said that, but I will say it right now. It is a death trap and the Devil's port, a place where healthy men get sick and die in a month. Just the same, nobody could ever imagine how lovely it looked from the top of that fort up on the little hill overlooking the harbor. A west wind was blowing, the sky was blue, and the sun was just getting hot and flashing on the blue water.

I had a good look all around, and waved in case Novia was watching the fort through her glass. After that, I took a couple of deep breaths, and wondered whether they would throw my body outside the fort or down into the courtyard.

The officer poked me in the ribs and told me to start talking to our men.

I said, "They cannot hear me, Senor. They are too far from fear of your guns."

He said to wave to them to come closer.

"You should have brought Captain Burt up here." I was waving as I spoke. "The men are accustomed to obeying him, not me."

"We will bring him here if we must. We will have to, because you will be dead."

Clouds and blue sky are gifts from God, but He gave me something even better just then. He showed me that there was no railing for the inside of the walkway. On the outside there was the top of the wall, with spaces between the stones for soldiers to shoot through. But on the inside there was nothing. If you stepped over, you fell maybe twenty feet onto the stones of the courtyard.

The officer started crowding me the way they will sometimes, wanting to talk right into your face. I kneed him between the legs. He must have gone over-when you knee somebody like that, he generally grabs the place and takes two or three little steps back-but I never saw him because I was slapping the musket out of the hands of the nearest soldier. When I had it, I brought the butt up and got him under the chin.