Paul Kearney: The Mark of Ran

“Don’t run them out, lads,” he shouted at the gun-crews. He wanted the port-lids to remain closed until the last moment, when the Revenant would bare her teeth at her enemy by running out the six twelve-pound sakers of her larboard broadside. Below his feet the ship answered the urgent impetus of the wind with a will.

There-the chase’s topsails had come farther over the curve of the horizon and were visible on deck now. A pennant flying from the mainmast like a spit of far-off saffron, edged round with black. The fighting flag of Bionar.

“Ran’s beard,” Gallico said softly. “She’s a warship.”

“We’ll need your twenty broadsides after all,” Rol told him, smiling. He sniffed the air. The wind was still nor-nor’west, and the Revenant was making a good seven knots before it, whilst the barque was close-hauled, running into it at an angle, the yards braced round until they were almost fore-and-aft like a schooner’s. Rol studied her progress.

“A slow way to sail, it must be said. I doubt she’s making three knots.”

Gallico nodded. There was a tight grin on his face that held no humor in it at all.

“Deck there!” a lookout bellowed. “She’s altered course a point-seems she means to close with us.”

“Stand by to run out the larboard broadside. Elias, run up our colors. Gallico, go you to the fo’c’sle and see about assembling some boarders.”

“Aye, sir,” Gallico snapped, winking, and lumbered off with a swiftness startling in one so huge.

The Revenant ’s pennant was run up the mainmast halliards, and the breeze snapped it out like a frenzied snake. It was a ragged length of sable linen without device. The Black Flag. If she struck after this, there would be no quarter asked or given.

“Larboard crews, run out your guns!”

The port-lids that lined one side of the ship were raised up, and sweating teams of men, six to a gun, hauled their massive, brutal charges outboard with a groaning of rope and thunderous rumbling of wood and iron. A ton and a half apiece, the twelve-pounders’ collective weight canted the ship to one side as they shifted. Sand had been scattered across the deck so that the barefoot sailors might not slip in their own blood (if blood was shed), tubs of water had been set out round the butts of the masts, and the coils of slow-match that would touch off the cannon were already smoldering away in iron buckets beside every gun-team. The acrid, pulse-quickening smell eddied about the waist of the ship. Rol breathed it in as though it were perfume and took up his battle station at the break of the quarterdeck, close to the ship’s wheel. His four quartermasters stood grasping it, keeping the ship on her course. At the quarterdeck rail two more men stood manning the wicked little two-pound swivel-guns.

“You might want these,” Creed said, proffering a pair of flintlock pistols with a wry smile. “They’re loaded and primed; I did it myself.”

Rol nodded, and tucked them into the sash at his waist. Everyone else had a cutlass at his hip, but Rol had Fleam. As the two ships drew closer together, he fiddled unconsciously with the leather-bound flints of his firearms, blessing the breadth of Psellos’s education.

“Steady.” This to the helmsmen. They were doing well, but then most of them were born to the sea. Many had seen action before. He looked up and down the decks, and saw his men standing ready and poised. There was no talk. Gallico had picked them well.

“Elias, the people in the hold-”

“They’ve been warned to stay below. They’re quiet as mice. They’ve taken the children into the bilge-not too pleasant, but safer.”

The oncoming barque was less than three cables away now. At the last moment he would put the Revenant about and present his gleaming broadside. She would have to heave-to then, for fear of being raked. Once they had pounded the tar out of her, Gallico would grapple her forestays to the bow and board her-and every man-jack of the crew would be-

“Skipper-she’s not heaving-to,” one of the helmsmen warned.

“Mind your course.”

The barque’s crew were crowding forward onto her fo’c’sle. Rol saw the gleam of metal on blades there; and then all along her hull the port-lids opened and the sinister shapes of heavy guns were run out. She was going to plow straight on and meet them yardarm to yardarm.

“Hard a starboard!” he yelled, hoping he had not left it too late.

The helmsmen spun the ship’s wheel frantically and the Revenant turned, growling and smashing waves aside. But the run-out guns on her port side slowed the turn. The deck canted and they groaned against the tackles that held them in place. A water bucket slithered into the scuppers and overturned, and one unhandy lubber lost his footing on the sand-strewn deck and followed it.

Too slow.

“She won’t make it. Gun-crews there-lie down on deck! After her first broadside, fire as they bear!”

“Ran be merciful,” one of the helmsmen muttered. He and his fellows had to remain standing to keep the ship on course.

The barque put about her helm a scant half cable from the bow of the Revenant, and then her entire side vanished in a huge fuming storm of yellow smoke. Half a heartbeat later came the tremendous roar of her full broadside, and then the air was screaming and alive with iron and wood and sundered flesh. The cannonballs struck the Revenant fine on the port bow and traveled almost the full length of the ship, slicing rigging, smashing the boats on the booms to fragments, rending her hull, and blasting men to bloody pieces. One shot, which shrieked along the quarterdeck, cut two of the helmsmen in half and burst the ship’s wheel into jagged shards of wood. The two surviving quartermasters fought to regain control of the shattered wheel whilst Rol picked himself off the deck and, panting, yanked a wicked sliver of oak out of his thigh.

“Fire!” he shouted, maddened with pain and fury.

The ship was still answering her rudder, and completed her turn to starboard with barely a check. With blood streaming from her scuppers like that of some wounded giant, her own guns thundered out in savage sequence. A bank of smoke as tall as the mainyard rose up in a billowing cloud, shot through with flame. In the waist the heavy sakers jumped back one by one as their crews jammed smoking match into the touch-holes.

“Pour it into them, boys!” Rol yelled. And to the surviving helmsmen: “How does she steer?”

“She’s all right, skipper.”

“Then make three points to port. Take us right up the bastard’s throat.”

Chaos all the length of his ship. A gun overturned there in the middle of the waist with the corpses of its crew a mangled pulp about it. Men throwing water over a burning heap of cordage, others tossing bodies overboard. The mizzen half shot through, and up on the fo’c’sle a bewildering maze of broken timber and rope with Gallico and his men trying to hack it free of the bow-chasers. Rol looked up. The foretopgallantmast had gone by the board. Sailors were up in the shrouds with axes already, trying to cut away the wreckage that was strangling the Revenant.

God damn them. His beautiful ship.

“Skipper, we’ve half a dozen holes just on the waterline. I need more men for the pumps.” This was Eiserne, the carpenter.

“You shall have them, Kier. Take half a dozen from the larboard gun-crews-no more, mind. Can you plug the holes?”

“Aye, no fear of that. But she’s a fearful mess down below. Some of the passengers have copped it.”

“As long as she floats. Go to it now.” Rol clapped the man on his shoulder, and the carpenter scurried off down the companionway.

Another broadside from the barque. This one was less devastating, as the two ships were side by side now, slugging it out on even terms. Another saker dismounted, and three gun-ports beaten into one jagged hole on the larboard side, murderous splinters of wood spraying across the deck and knocking men down like skittles. The enemy was firing low, into the hull. When going after a prize it was usual to aim high, at the rigging, and so avoid the risk of sinking a valuable vessel. These men were not out to capture, but to kill.