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.
The gunfire dropped off, the fighting was done.
Stanley and Smith were staring over at him, panting, swords drooping.
Nicholas was breathing hard but felt calm.
Vizard too had appeared in the hatchway, arm in a rough sling, and was staring at him, with a look in his eyes almost like fear.
Stanley came slowly over.
‘You killed five men,’ he said quietly, his voice a strained mix of disbelief and admiration.
Nicholas could think of nothing to say. Then he said, ‘They were trying to kill me.’ He looked about. ‘Where’s Hodge?’
‘How much blood is yours?’
‘Just my back, I think. Where’s Hodge?’
‘Down below. He took a blow to the skull, but it’s a thick Shropshire skull. He’ll live. Though he’ll probably wake thinking he’s a Frenchman.’
‘I doubt it.’
Stanley raised Nicholas’s shirt with the point of his sword and clucked. ‘A scratch. That constable’s whip back in England made a deeper impression.’ He dropped his shirt again. ‘Truly your only injury?’
Nicholas frowned and felt about. ‘Truly, yes.’
Again a look in the knight’s eyes. Then he said, ‘Find a clean shirt. We all need a cleansing today.’
15
The corsair captain and eleven of his men were dead. The captain’s brother still lived, his shoulder wound roughly staunched.
Of their own, Stanley and Smith had taken a good few cuts and bruises, none to kill them. Smith’s left ear was sliced so a portion hung down and flapped when he turned his head.
‘Like a spaniel,’ said Stanley.
Smith showed his teeth, rimmed with blood. ‘Get your needle and horsehair out, mother dear.’
Eight corsairs still lived, variously wounded, in an abject state. They stood huddled on the slathered, bullet-pocked deck of the listing Swan, chained hand and foot. The mariners treated them cruelly as they chained them, stripping them of what gold and silver they wore. The tables were turned, the sun was smiling, and these Mohammedan dogs were theirs now. They would fetch a fair price in the slave market back at Cadiz.
One of the dogs muttered a curse in guttural Arabic. Faster than the eye could see, Smith’s mighty fist shot out and hit the fellow’s face like a battering ram. His head jerked back, blood spraying out in a circle from his flattened nose, and he slumped to the deck unconscious. The other corsairs bunched closer together, like nervous cattle, eyeing this glowerng blackbeard of a Christian.
‘I thought you said never to use your fist,’ said Nicholas dryly.
Smith’s hammer-fist appeared unharmed. ‘Quite so. But there was no time for otherwise. Besides, you did not understand what this one said.’ He looked down at the battered fool. ‘He may insult me, but not my Saviour.’
‘You understand Arabic?’
‘And speaks it,’ said Stanley. ‘As fluent as the Prophet himself, no peace be upon him. There was plenty of time to learn on the galley.’
‘You were on a galley?’
Smith said nothing.
Stanley shook his head. ‘Ask no more, lad,’ he said softly. ‘Only a barrel of troubles that way lies. None but a madman would reminisce about his time as a galley slave.’
Hodge came back on deck, barely able to speak, and desperate for water. His head was thickly bandaged. Nicholas greeted him with a bear hug and then stood back a little embarrassed.