Marlowe watched the flames running over the quarterdeck and up the mizzen yard as the dry canvas of the mizzen sail was consumed.
The burning ship was a threat to them. If the Plymouth Prize caught fire, with her hold full of powder, the resultant explosion would rock the colony, would kill every man on the water, pirate and Prize alike.
The fire was throwing off an ever-widening circle of light. It crept out over the water, fell across the Northumberland, which was attempting to circle around the pirate ships undetected and come up on their far side.
So much for that idea, Marlowe thought. It was the only trick he had in his bag.
“Damn me,” he said out loud, though he always figured that God would grant that request unbidden. The Wilkenson Brothers was two hundred yards away. He could hear the chaos of the pirates getting ready for a fight, the rumble of big guns running out, the clash of small arms made ready.
“Damn.” He glanced around, fidgeted with the hilt of his sword, opened his mouth to give an order, closed it again. His trap had been found out before it had sprung. Every one of his tingling nerves told him to put the ship about and retreat upriver, to abandon the fight until another day.
That thought gave him a great sense of relief. It was the only reasonable thing to do. He grasped at that excuse like a drowning man grasps at his rescuer, pulling them both down.
But it was nonsense. If he was to have this elusive thing called honor, this thing that somehow had become so important to his life-real honor-then he could not lie to himself. If he were to retreat, it would be because he was afraid.
What was more, explaining to Nicholson et al. why he had broken off the attack, mounting this attack again, going again through the awful hours leading up to his meeting with LeRois, it would all be more terrible than just doing it now.
“In the waist!” he shouted. “Mr. Rakestraw, we shall be falling off a bit, make ready at the braces. Gunners, you know your duty! Two broadsides, small arms, then over the sides! Listen for my orders, or Mr. Rakestraw’s, if I should fall!”
If I should fall. He felt no twinge at all when he said those words. LeRois could do no more than kill him. He took a deep breath and turned to the helmsmen and said, “Fall off, two points.”
The bow of the Plymouth Prize came around, aiming for that stretch of water between the two pirate ships. There was no question of being able to see now; the fire aboard the former Vengeance had broken clear of her great cabin and filled the quarterdeck. It ran halfway up the mizzenmast and was spilling down onto the waist. All of the water one hundred yards around the ship was brightly lit; it reminded Marlowe of the great bonfires they used to build on the beaches around which they
would have their drunken, frenzied orgies back in his days in the sweet trade.
The side of the Wilkenson Brothers looked like burnished gold as the fire washed the new black paint with yellow light and cast deep shadows along the side. The light from the flames spilled over her sails in their loose bundles, the black standing rigging, the muzzles of the guns, even the steel of the weapons that flashed in the hands of men along her rails, and made it all that much more frightening.
The pirates were starting to vapor, to chant and bang on the sides and the rails, clashing cutlasses together. Marlowe felt the sweat crawling down his back and his palm slick on the hilt of his sword. They were one hundred yards away and closing quickly.
Someone was beating bones together with that distinctive hollow clunk clunk clunk. And then someone was chanting “Death, death, death,” and Marlowe realized that this was his own men.
He pulled his eyes from the flickering ghostly enemy and looked down into the waist of the Plymouth Prize, now as clearly illuminated as if they had a fire going on the main hatch. It was Middleton, standing on the rail by the foreshrouds and chanting “Death, death, death,” and beside him another man had two beef bones and he was banging them together. Marlowe saw smiles flashing in the firelight, and more and more of the guardship’s men began, “Death, death, death…”
The Plymouth Prizes swarmed up into the rigging and along the rail, and they, too, were banging their swords on the sides, chanting and screaming. Someone on the pirate ship fired a pistol into the air, and it was met with three from the Plymouth Prize. Marlowe wanted to order them to stop, to save their fire, but the vaporing was doing more for his men’s state of mind than any amount of preparation could accomplish.
They were fifty yards from the Wilkenson Brothers, and the cumulative force of the men’s voices-king’s men and pirates-seemed to be drawing the ships together, seemed to suck all of the air out of the space between the two vessels. Every chant, every shout, every pistol shot on either side drove all of them to great heights of frenzy. They waved swords and beat swords and fired pistols and shrieked with the urgent lust to kill one another.
Marlowe’s carefully issued orders, repeated many times, had been entirely forgotten. There was no thought of broadsides, no thought of small arms. The men lining the rails and the channels and screaming and vaporing and flashing their swords in the weird flickering light of the burning ship did not want to think. They wanted only to kill.
The pirates were lining the rail as well, screaming back, dancing men and dancing shadows, and there were far more of them than there were Plymouth Prizes. Had the Prizes any grasp of reality left they would realize how perilous their situation was, but they were swept up in the frenzy, they were berserk, and they thought they were invincible.
Twenty yards, and the Plymouth Prize was in a perfect position to use her cannon to great effect, with the pirates standing as they were on the rails, having forgotten the punishment the Prize had doled out weeks earlier. But the men of the Plymouth Prize were also on the rails, their big guns abandoned.
“Lay us alongside!” Marlowe shouted to the helmsmen. “Right alongside, bow to bow!”
The helmsmen nodded, pushed the tiller over a foot. Marlowe dashed down into the waist. Found the linstock at the first gun he came to, but the match was out, raced to the next tub. The match on that linstock was still glowing, but barely. Marlowe blew on it, blew again. It flared to life, glowing a dull orange. He twirled the linstock in his hand and ran back to the first gun.
Through the gunport he could see the Wilkenson Brothers’ mizzen chains, crowded with howling men, her quarterdeck rails lined as well. He did not see LeRois, but he hoped a desperate hope that the man was there, right in line with the muzzle, as he pushed the glowing match down into the powder train.
He leapt back as the train sputtered to life, was halfway to the next gun when the first fired off, slamming inboard. He could hear crushing wood and howls of outrage and agony, and he touched off the next gun and then ran to the next.
Each blast seemed to momentarily kill the vaporing, and then it was back again, louder, more confused, more vehement. Marlowe ran down the line, firing each gun, never pausing to see what destruction he was doing. He put the match to the penultimate gun, prayed again that one of those killed would be LeRois.
Marlowe was reaching the match to the forwardmost gun when the two ships hit. The Plymouth Prize shuddered to a stop, throwing him off balance. The glowing match missed the trail of powder as Marlowe struggled to keep on his feet. From over the side came the wrenching, shattering sound of the two ships grinding against each other.
Thomas regained his balance, shoved the glowing match in the train of powder. The gun was actually touching the side of the Wilkenson Brothers when it smashed its load into the merchantman’s frail bulwark and blew it clean away.