William Napier - The Great Siege

Nicholas had gone to help Vizard with his one serviceable arm to slither down the ladder to below decks. At the hatchway he felt a sudden dread and heard the weakened mariner gasp. He turned and there close behind him was a corsair, a black fellow twice his weight, scimitar gripped in a bulging fist, its blade already bloodied. His breeches dripped saltwater. Vizard gave a low groan and pulled free from the boy, kneeling exhausted in the hatchway.

‘Run for your life, lad. Over the side.’

The corsair’s teeth were white with a smile.

Every other man aboard was in caught in the mêlée, and Nicholas was alone. Over by the starboard rail lay the young landsman who’d been keeping starboard lookout, his head half cut from his neck.

Nicholas was pinned up against the sterncastle, hatch behind him, a wounded man at his feet. If he moved away, the corsair would finish Vizard. If he stayed, he would be trapped.

He gripped his cinquedea, stepped from one foot to the other. The corsair had killed over a hundred men, this was nothing to him. He waited. The fight raged behind him. Then he swung his scimitar swift and low to open up the boy’s guts, giving him no room. But the boy dropped right down on his belly like a snake, fast like the young can, and was up again. The scimitar came back in a trice, lower this time, and Nicholas clutched at a brace and vaulted over it. Then he stepped away. The corsair turned with him, dark eyes fixed. This Christian was as hard to catch as an eel. He’d have to chop the wounded one after.

He made two cuts, one feint and one real. The boy moved wrongly, the second cut would have finished him, but an oar jammed down on the deck and blocked him. His blade stuck fast in it. He cursed. It was the wounded mariner, fighting one-armed with a short oar seized from the ship’s longboat. He kicked out at the oar and freed his blade and cut down hard on the mariner’s head, but the white-faced kufr backed up enough to miss it. Now the corsair was angry. They were humiliating him.

He sped up, moving much faster on the eel-boy. The boy tripped backwards and sprawled on the deck and he had him. No fancy wide sweeps now. He jabbed down hard with his scimitar’s broad point to end it. It struck only wooden deck and the boy was rolling onto his feet again. Shaitan and Baalbub, these two would suffer for this.

Nicholas snatched off Vizard’s felt cap, and the corsair hesitated for the blink of a bird’s eye. What the devil? Then the cap flew and hit him in the face, he closed his eyes and turned his face instinctively, though it was but a bit of felt, and when he had mastered himself again, the boy’s blade was deep in his side. He roared and twisted, but the boy managed to keep a hold of his blade, stuck between his ribs though it was, and pulled it free. Blood gushed down his side. From the corner of his eye he saw the wounded sailor with the oar moving behind him. So he would be killed by a beardless eel-boy and a half-finished mariner, filthy infidels both, porkmeat still stuck between their teeth. He swung again wildly, roaring, blood on his lips.

Nicholas snatched the oar from the tottering Vizard and jabbed it hard in the corsair’s chest. He staggered backwards and suddenly knelt. That wound in his side was telling, his strength was gone. Nicholas stepped close, eye on the scimitar all the time, but it lay loose in the giant blackamoor’s hand, and thrust his cinquedea straight into the fellow’s muscular throat. He pulled it out, hot blood flooding over his hand, and the giant fell forward, his forehead thumping down on the deck with a bony clunk.

There was no one else now, there was just Nicholas and his short sword and the oar useful in his left hand, more corsairs coming at him. Vizard scuttling back to the hatchway, leaning to one side like a hunchback, and more killing to be done. He felt very cold and clear and moved very fast, never stopping. There was another corsair, dripping with the sea, and his scimitar seemed to move like a falcon’s wing. The boy blocked it with the oar but the corsair moved just as fast. The instant his blow was blocked he switched his blade back and spun fancy on his heel in a wide swipe at the boy’s other flank. Not fast enough. Nicholas stepped back and clouted him with the oar, not very hard. The corsair grunted.

In that fleeting moment — the moment that always comes if you wait for it, when your enemy can do nothing but struggle for breath and a clear head, and is exposed — in that one precious speck of time, you must kill them. The bloody cinquedea drove forward hard into the corsair’s guts and he gave a horrible gurgling scream. His body fell far forward and Nicholas lost his grip on his buried sword. The dead man fell on top of it.

He stepped back, his arm coated with gore to the elbow.

He moved mechanically now, in a dream without emotion. Others moved around him watchfully, but they seemed to him to move quite slowly. At one point, beyond them, he saw Stanley surrounded by Moors, looking over in his direction, blue eyes wide.

Two more corsairs came. Never taking his eyes off them, he rolled the dead man off his blade with his foot and scooped it up and flicked the blood off it at his attackers. It flecked their faces, they spat. One cursed. What the devil was that?

Nicholas grinned. He felt the evil of it, the wide grin, the blood coating him. The corsairs circled, hesitant. A blood-fevered grinning madman here.

They caught him between them and a scimitar swept across his back and cut him open. It was nothing. He brought up his sword short in a fierce lightning jab when he should have been trying to save himself from the cut, and the unexpected strike went straight through the fellow’s forearm, between one bone and the other. The corsair bellowed and snatched back his arm, and Nicholas held onto his sword tight this time. He was learning. He flailed the oar, the two gave him space, the first fellow’s arm coursed with blood.

His ears were full of noise, of screams and explosions, yet they were very distant. In the foreground of his hearing was nothing but cold, murderous silence and slow time. He caught the second corsair an unexpected blow on the back of his head with the short end of the oar swiftly wielded, the fellow lurched forward, and ruthlessly Nicholas hit him again, and again, until his skull opened, bones splintering under the oar’s weight. The corsair’s eyes rolled up to the whites but he still stood, so Nicholas slipped near and then past him in a single move as smooth as a dancer, drawing his sword hard across the fellow’s throat as he went. His throat gaped open like an obscene mouth and he slumped down.

The second corsair began to back away jabbering, glancing over his shoulder, then turned and dashed for the ladder up to the sterncastle. A third was behind him.

Almost without noticing him, certainly not thinking now, Nicholas spun and sent him reeling with the long end of his oar, the short end jammed tight under his arm. The fellow slipped and sprawled. Nicholas turned back and tripped the fleeing corsair at the foot of the short ladder, turned back on the first one and struck him once as he knelt up again, clean through his right arm. The fellow remained kneeling before him as if in prayer, or like a heifer about to be poleaxed, and with a third blow he struck into his neck. The fellow’s head hung forward and he toppled sideways. Then he was standing over the corsair who had tripped, driving his sword hard down into his back, feeling the blade grating against his spine. The corsair spasmed crazily, arms out wide, slapping the deck, then Nicholas finished him with another stab in the back of the neck.

He stepped back. There was blood in his eyes, he didn’t know whose. He wiped it away with his left sleeve as best he could. His right sleeve was drenched and sticky.