"You see, mon ami?" de Crillart crowed. "Now, encore!"
Guns charged and shotted, run out through the ports, cartridges punctured and vents primed. Slowly, clumsily, guns squealing and complaining on their low trucks, tacklemen taking forever-one side of a piece hauled too forcefully, the other too weakly, jibbering them about before the ports as if they were iron mastiffs hunting for a scent.
The corvette had fallen off the wind-had to fall off, with her windward-driving jibs gone, all unbalanced. She showed her profile, but also began to display a line of open gunports, parallel to Radical.
Quoins inserted deeper this time, lowering the aim of the barrels, gunners shouting and babbling, waving their hands to instruct their raw assistants to shift the lay of the guns with crow levers and handspikes to right or left. Then the excess crewmen were hustling away to avoid the recoil, the roar and the stink, after overhauling the tackles. A last once-over, then matches were blown on, lowered near the vents…
On the uproll. "Tirez!"
Another brutal clap of sound, another howling broadside! Guns rolled backwards to snub on the breeching ropes, making the stout bulwarks cry, rope groan, iron ring-bolts squeal. They juddered and they reeked, some slewed off-line, gushing thin trails of spent smoke. And their frigate, shaken to her heart by the force of the run-back.
A moaning in the air, a shrill shrieking, as round-shot returned towards them. Dull thuds, splashes alongside towering over the bulwarks, iron ball flying across the ship, sizzling sibilantly. Crisp bangs up above, where the furled main-course yard was struck, one end turning to a shattered stub as the ball glanced off.
The corvette twitched anew, her main-mast struck this time. More destruction rained down from aloft onto her decks, to dangle in her overhead boarding nettings. There was a hole in her spanker where bar-shot pierced it, a handful of men in her main-mast fighting-top spilled out by a whirling multiple bar-shot. Her main t'gallant mast above shook, then slowly leaned forward under the press of the wind, as upper shroud lines parted, the cross-tree braces shattered.
More fire was returned, raggedly. As if in retribution, a shot screamed over Radical's quarterdeck, slapping a hole in her spanker… just over Lewrie's head. Forward, the starboard gangway bulwark caved in as an eight-pounder round-shot pierced it, making a rent about two feet across, and the air was awhirl with jagged oak splinters. Three French infantrymen standing behind the rent were ripped away, tossed over the rope railings into the waist, onto the gun deck, riddled with wood and iron shards. Another ball struck lower down, below the gunwale, with a dull thonk, creating wails of sudden terror among the noncombatants on the orlop deck. A third hit a closed gunport, behind which tacklemen were sheltering, waiting for orders to throw themselves on the guns once more. There were screams of pain and disbelief as two volunteers were cut down, cries from a dozen more throats as they beheld the ruins of men, twitching and thrashing bloody at their feet. Lieutenant de Crillart and his senior gunners were there in an instant, to shout them down, shove them back to their duties, urging them to be brave… no longer gently tutorial. The time was past for that.
"Loblolly boys!" Lewrie shouted, directing the pasty whey-faces framed in the midships companionway hatch. "Help 'em, damn yer eyes!" The dentist appeared, seized the one at die top of the companionway ladder and dragged him out. They skittered fearful, as low as hounds to the decks, following him with a mess table turned into a stretcher. Three men were dead, abandoned round the base of the main-mast, while two who screamed and wept were carried below to whatever further horrors awaited them at the surgeons' hands.
The range had closed to about three-quarters of a mile. Alan took a quick look astern for the second corvette. She was coming on, still on the wind, bows pointed almost directly at him. There was a bloom of gun-smoke from her larboard forecastle chase gun. Still about a mile off, he decided; still time to hurt the other even worse.
"Hit her again, Charles! Rip her guts out!" he shouted. "Hurry!"
Shocked as they were, though, the gun crews hadn't much "hurry" in them. A well-served artillery piece could average three rounds in two minutes, in Royal Navy practice. These poor fellows were lucky to get off one in a minute and a half.
The corvette managed to fire again, a ragged, stuttering broadside. More shot coming for them, trembling volunteers flinging themselves flat on the deck to hide from it. Radical quivered as she was struck twice, thrice… then thrice again.
Not bad shootin', Lewrie thought, for a crew who'd been in port so long, without much chance for live-firing practice. Quivering in his boots himself, willing himself not to flinch or duck. Damme!
There was a crash above his head, a groan of livened timber, and he looked up to see their mizzen-royal and t'gallant masts shot away, to come down in a spiral like a badly sawn tree!
"'Ware below!" he shouted, scampering aft, away from its arrival. Jack-knifing upon themselves, the masts dropped, trailing rope rigging and furled canvas, yard ends flailing blindly, ripping across the face of the mizzen tops'l before the entire mess speared into the deck just at the forward edge of the quarterdeck, hung up by the broken spars on the nettings over the waist. Down with it had come two topmen, and one of the aristocratic French marksmen from the fighting-top.
"Cut it away, sir?" Spendlove yelled through chattering teeth at his side.
"No men to spare," Lewrie groaned. "No, leave it. But see to the men who were aloft."
"Aye, sir," Spendlove nodded, his eyes wide. But he dashed off on his errand, chivvying loblolly boys to their ministrations.
"Prйparez!" de Crillart screeched from forward and below, ordering his spare tacklemen away to the sides. "Tirez!"
Slow they might be, quaking and gulping hot bile in near terror, but the gun crews were still slaving away, sticking to it like men. A broadside lashed out and away, ordered, controlled and well aimed by the steadiest older men. Eight-pounders yapping, twelve-pounders erupting in harsher barks… and the four eighteen-pounders bellowing, almost going off as one immense avalanche of noise, fired on the uproll, when the ship would hang pent for a breathless second of steadiness.
The French corvette took the brunt of it, as the sea beside her frothed with near misses and ricochets from the lighter guns. Heavier twelve-pound round-shot tore through her sides this time, flinging bulwarks and scantlings into trash, flicking planks into the air. And her main-mast was shot away completely! It was shorn off, halfway between gun deck and fighting-top, that massive trunk carved in twain. It jumped, hung suspended for a second upon the very air, then the shattered butt slid forward, and it teetered, half-turned and fell to starboard, and all above it came crashing down in disparate bits, the fighting-top to hammer itself onto her starboard gangway, crushing everything beneath its brutal weight! She showed her coppering as she rolled and rocked.
"Cheer, lads, cheer!" Lewrie shouted, encouraging his English sailors. "Charles! Vivats, vive… what you call 'em! Make 'em yell and cheer! Look what they just did!"
The poor, scared buggers, he thought. Aye, cheer, you bastards. Put some heart in yourselves, at last! You can do it, if you try!
For a moment, they gaped in total disbelief, then began to yell, to throw their hats in the air, clap each other on the back, embrace and buss in Gallic fashion, and exult.