Paul Kearney: The Mark of Ran

Rol saw a cannonball rolling along the deck-an eighteen-pounder by the looks of it. This was heavier metal than he had ever thought to encounter-he was outgunned.

But the men who served the Revenant ’s guns were not novices, and their blood was up. Broadside after broadside continued to roar out, and they heaved at their sakers with sweat streaming down their naked torsos, faces black with powder, blood trickling from minor wounds.

The broadsides were ragged now, though. Only four guns still firing on the larboard side, and those thinly manned. Damage-control parties were working steadily; putting out fires, plugging shot-holes, splicing rigging, and heaving bodies or parts of bodies over the taffrail. This could not go on. The heavier metal of the barque would prevail, in the end.

The two ships were still cruising side by side a cable’s length apart, the air between them a fuming cataclysm of smoke and hurtling iron. The Revenant had the wind on the starboard beam and thus possessed the weather-gage: in theory she should be able to close with her enemy anytime she chose.

Rol turned to the two surviving helmsmen, who were still holding steady the splintered wreck of the ship’s wheel.

“Hard a port!” he shouted.

The Revenant obediently turned to his left, and with the wind now on her starboard quarter she picked up speed, closing the two hundred yards that separated her from the barque with breath-catching rapidity.

“Brace yourselves!” Rol bellowed, the second before the two ships collided.

The Revenant ’s bowsprit smashed through the barque’s bulwark just aft of her fo’c’sle and exploded into a splintered nightmare of wood and rope. The Revenant kept going, and the hulls of the two vessels came together with a concussion that knocked every man aboard them off his feet. Rol found himself flung over the quarterdeck rail like a discarded child’s toy, and landed in a pile of canvas and bodies. There was a searing crack, and the Revenant ’s entire foretopmast came crashing down over the waist of the barque, entangling the two ships hopelessly and forming a bridge that Gallico and his boarders now clambered shrieking across.

The cannon-fire had stopped for the moment as the two ship’s companies picked themselves up and collected their wits. Rol wiped blood out of his eyes and drew Fleam. The scimitar was trembling in his hand. “Come on, Revenants-get the guns going. Don’t go to sleep on me now!”

The dazed crews stumbled back to their sakers and mechanically began reloading. On the barque, a confused scrum of men were fighting viciously to repel Gallico’s boarders. A surf of shouting and screaming rose up out of her hull. Rol picked his way through the wreckage of the waist and climbed up onto the fo’c’sle. It was like navigating through a storm-felled forest. Behind him, the Revenant ’s guns started up again. A damage-control party was hacking at the tumbled topmast with axes. Creed was in their midst, shouting orders and looking half-demented.

“Forget about that now, Elias. Follow me. Gallico needs a hand.”

He gathered a motley crowd of perhaps twenty men and led them across the topmast that joined the two ships together. One man lost his footing and fell into the dark, choppy sea between the vessels’ hulls. The rest did not pause, but followed Rol onto the barque, brandishing axes, cutlasses, and boarding-pikes and yelling like maniacs.

Gallico was there, towering over everyone else in the melee, his face transformed into a demonic mask of battle-rage. He was laying about him with a massive baulk of broken timber, cutting men down as though they were corn, sending bodies flying to left and right. He was the apex of a solid wedge of Revenants who were struggling to advance down the waist of the barque. Resisting them was a mass of the enemy crew, some in the loose garb of sailors, others in the breastplates and helmets of soldiers. In places, men of both sides were so tightly packed together that they could not even raise their arms to strike one another. An enemy officer stood at the barque’s quarterdeck rail urging on his men. He wore black-trimmed scarlet hose and his breastplate shone like a mirror. His handsome, bearded face was framed by a cascade of raven ringlets and there was lace on his cuffs.

Rol drew forth one of the pistols at his waist, cocked it, and shot the man in the throat. He tumbled head-first into the affray below.

A cry went up, and the barque’s crew seemed to flinch. Instantly, Gallico waded forward, and the men facing him retreated hurriedly. Some moral advantage seemed to have passed to the Revenants. The fight opened out. Rol led his men into the gap, shot a raging soldier with his second pistol, skewered another through his open mouth, and kicked a third aside whilst ripping his sword free. He found himself at Gallico’s side. The massive halftroll grinned horribly, his eyes two green windows into hell.

“Well met, Rol. A hot day’s work.”

“Too damned hot by half.” Rol slashed out at an enemy sailor, opening up his bowels. The man shrieked despairingly as they poured steaming down his thighs. Gallico crushed his skull with one blow from a gnarled fist.

A wicked, vicious melee in which men hacked and clubbed one another to death and the deck of the barque ran slick and scarlet with their blood. Rol, Gallico, and Creed were in the forefront of the Revenants, battling their way aft to the barque’s quarterdeck. The enemy sailors streamed away but the armored soldiers in their midst gave a good account of themselves; they were Bionese marines, some of the finest professionals in the world. They asked no quarter and did not retreat, but gathered in knots and fought stubbornly, and Rol’s unprotected mariners were no match for them. The fighting swayed backwards again, and the Revenants began to waver. Though Rol, Gallico, and Creed fought on in one tight, unyielding triangle, the rest of the crew were retreating back to the fo’c’sle.

The enemy marines gave a shout and pressed home their advantage, slipping on the bloody deck, tripping over bodies in their haste to hack at the unprotected backs of the Revenants. Rol turned his head to shout, to rally his men, and the flat of a sword blade struck him just above his left eye. He fell to one knee, and the jubilant marine would have had his head off in the next second had not Gallico’s fist smashed the man backwards. Rol staggered, vision blurred, head ringing, and as he collected himself, he could feel something stirring inside him.

It was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. He laughed out loud as raw bull-like strength flooded his limbs and a white rage began to rise behind his eyes. In his fist the new-moon length of Fleam began to shake and shine, bloody over the hilt. “On me!” he shrieked in a voice that did not sound like his own, and rising to his feet he powered forward alone.

One sweep of the scimitar’s wicked edge cut through the breastplate and ribs of an enemy marine and laid his heart bare. Rol reached in and plucked the beating muscle from the man’s chest, ripped it free and threw it at his comrades. The awful laughter continued to cackle out of his throat, and from his eyes now the smoking whiteness spilled out and Fleam began to glow white and the blood boiled off her hot steel. To those about him it seemed their captain grew in size, and looming white wings of flame rose from his shoulders. His sword arced back and forth in a brightness painful to look at, and the Bionese marines about him were cut to steaming pieces by the snick of the terrible blade.

The marines broke and began climbing over one another to get away from the terrifying light. Even the Revenants turned tail on their captain and began clambering back over the tangled wreckage to their own ship. Only Gallico and Creed remained at Rol’s shoulders. He pursued the fleeing enemy back to the quarterdeck rail, to the ship’s wheel, and finally to the very taffrail itself, where they crowded like sheep yammering before a wolf. They threw away their weapons and jumped over the barque’s stern, or stood slack-jawed with terror and were cut to shreds. Fleam came down on the back of the last as he was trying to clamber over the stern and sliced clear through him, burying herself in the wood of the taffrail. The marine toppled overboard in two pieces.