‘You need a certain strength in your arm to fire the creature,’ said Smith with a nod. ‘But if you do it right, the effect is considerable. Now: if they’ve got a cannon, we might get a splash as they close in. You will see that not a drop of water touches the guns. Understand?’
Nicholas nodded.
‘And if they fire up a cannon, and you see the sparks fly at the breech, then look where it’s pointing and make sure you’re not in the way. Remember you can move faster than a cannon on its carriage. But once the ball has left the cannon’s mouth, and is coming straight at you — well then, it is too late to move. You will never see it, nor anything else before you see the gates of heaven.’
‘But I can’t see any cannon.’
The knights scanned the fast-approaching galley. The sea was calm, the sky clear, the sun warm. Good conditions for a shot. And no: no cannon visible. The corsairs would expect to come swiftly alongside this full-bellied, lumbering merchantman, and simply clamber aboard, scimitars whirling. Their usual technique. Some of the Christian dogs would be killed, the rest enslaved, and the cargo of broadcloth their reward in the markets of Algiers.
The master was still swearing furiously at his mariners, urging them to draw on every inch of sail.
‘You cannot outrun, them, sir!’ called Smith. ‘There is not enough wind.’
‘We cannot fight the villains either! Have you seen their numbers?’
Smith shrugged. ‘We have no choice in the matter. Unless you wish to cry for mercy? I’d save your voice.’
‘A good thing it looks like we are struggling to flee,’ said Stanley softly. ‘They suspect nothing.’
The master stared out over the water.
Now twenty or more corsairs could be clearly seen, eagerly lining the galley’s narrow central gangway above the heads of the oar-slaves. They were stripped to the waist, skins every shade from coffee to Ethiop black. Most went shaven-headed — always easier at sea — except for topknots on their crowns, for the angels to pull them up to Paradise on Judgement Day.
Gold torcs and earrings gleamed. So too did scimitars, cutlasses, daggers and pistols. Smith and Stanley had taken up their guns and were crouching down below the bulwarks of the Swan. The high-sided little ship with its sterncastle and forecastle was something of a floating fortress, and evened the odds. But damn it, they should have instructed the boys in how to reload an arquebus by now. They never expected to meet corsairs this far out. Hunting so confidently, so close to the coast of Spain, the most powerful of all the Christian kingdoms. A sign of the times.
‘When we pass you back our guns,’ said Smith, ‘you take them swiftly, lay them down there, and pass the next. With the muzzle pointing skywards.’
The boys nodded.
‘You keep your heads down, and you keep those slow-matches burning. If you catch one of the swine climbing aboard, prick him while he’s still coming up and over. Once he’s on deck and it comes to hand-to-hand fighting — then God be with you.’
Nicholas felt cold to the marrow.
In the prow of the corsair galley, arrogant as a young god, stood the captain. A handsome, shaven-headed and moustachioed Moor, with flashing eyes and a ready smile. He wore an incongruous mix of grubby loincloth and startling red satin doublet, unbuttoned, showing his lean chest and hard stomach, twice scarred with deep swordcuts. He’d taken the doublet from a Genoese ship not a week before, the Christian’s blood still staining the gold piping. A wealth of gold hung around his neck and arms and dangled from his ears. Corsairs tended not to trust their treasure to banks. Two fine ruby rings gleamed on his little fingers. He’d cut them from the delicate hand of a young Spanish bride, sailing off Valencia last summer. The rings were not all they had taken from her, he and his men. He grinned. Life was sweet.
Though the merchantman had shown no white flag, yet look how she wallowed and struggled on the windless sea. She was as good as finished, a goat in a net, with the lion approaching. He spat and then sucked in the clean sea air, his chest swelling, his heart pounding to the drum, his galley surging along through the small waves, face into the sun. Soon they would have the joy of killing again, the joy of victory, the joy of standing on their enemies’ necks. Then the cargo, the cheers of his men, the triumphant return to Algiers. The dirty little whores in the waterfront brothels, and the white clay opium pipe. O, life was sweet.
John Smith and Edward Stanley carefully laid the muzzles of their guns on the top of the bulwarks of the forecastle, moving very slowly so as not to catch a corsair’s eye. The galley was two hundred paces off now. One hundred and eighty. One hundred and sixty. Smith squinted down the barrel of his jezail, finger lightly on the trigger.
His target was clear. The corsair captain, standing plain at the prow. But not yet near enough.
The master and mariners had fallen still, waiting in terror. Some clutched boathooks or little-used blades, and Vizard and Legge both held useful-looking halberds. But they had no hope — unless these passengers of theirs proved of sturdier stuff than they seemed. Certainly they knelt now and cradled their fine guns with a steely determination. Yet the enemy were so many. Already they could feel the manacles round their ankles, the oar and the rowing bench grinding the flesh off their bones, and a slow death coming. Why in hell did they agree to sail beyond Cadiz, into these infested waters?
The corsair galley was a hundred paces off. Eighty. Sixty.
Nicholas’s heart hammered, and his palms were so sweaty, he wondered how he’d ever keep a grip on his sword. Let it not come to that, he prayed with shame. Not yet. Perhaps they will turn away.
Forty paces off. The mechanical movement of the oars at top speed now, and they could hear the swish of the galley’s bow wave from here, see every corsair aboard. The captain in his outlandish attire even grinned, raising his scimitar and waving it as if in greeting.
If only they’d had time to serve and load up the old petrier, that might have come in handy, despite its age. A ‘stone thrower’, blasting out a rough stone ball from a squat iron barrel, it hadn’t much range but at short distances it could do business. And if you struck lucky, and the stone ball hit a piece of metal aboard the enemy ship, an anchor or cleat or even a metal band around a mast, it could splinter into a lethal spray of shards, hurtling in every direction, killing two or three men in an instant, laying low half a dozen more. But there had been no time, and the petrier sat untouched.
Smith breathed slow and steady and pulled the trigger. The steel wheel whirred and sparks flew, there was the powerful report, the smell of burnt gunpowder, a brief puff of dark smoke.
After having knelt so unearthly still, the instant the shot was fired Smith was all activity. Never taking his eyes from the corsair galley ahead of him, he dipped his gun, cleaned it with ramrod, cartridge of powder, ramrod, ball, ramrod, a modicum more powder into the pan, all with perfect smoothness and without once needing to check his actions. He was kneeling up to the bulwark and taking aim again within half a minute.
The galley had slowed and stopped, the oars were still. They could hear the small waves slapping against the sides. It was like a venomous snake that had suddenly had its head lopped off. For Smith’s shot had sent the ball clean through the forehead of the corsair captain, and he was dead before he slumped to the deck.
‘In truth,’ said Smith, sighting down the barrel with a squint, ‘I fire a ball like that only one shot in ten.’
‘Twenty,’ muttered Stanley, also sighting.
Smith grinned. A rarity. ‘The curve of the ball from the barrel, even a barrel so beautifully smooth as this. The wind, the fall … But it looks mighty impressive when it works, does it not?’
Beside them, Nicholas felt his throat too dry to speak.