Chapter 19
Nineteen
“Larboard-aft battery, run out guns!” Everard bellowed.
The second-deck guns were hauled forward to their ports.
Everard crouched to run behind the line of cannon, making an ungainly almost-crawl across the deck as he craned his head to take their sights.
It wasn’t what an officer usually risked doing, and it wasted time, but he had to be sure he still had a high angle before smoke overcame them.
Vitaliy was abovedecks, calling for the Sévère to tack into the wind, the madman, and the mizzen was backed and straining to brink. The effect was she heeled sharply to larboard, making a high cannon-shot trajectory a tall ask.
Through the port Everard watched the horizon rise, the San Telmo and her gun ports upon it. Now, now, now—
“Fire!” He slid clear of the last gun.
Two dozen wicklights came down; the second gundeck went bright with sparks; sleds creaked and rumbled with kickback.
Everard picked himself up and breathed deep. He hadn’t been this close to burning sulfur in years.
“Sponge!” he called, in cadence just the same as he’d said a hundred times in battle, but never here. “Shot your guns! Fast as you can go, boys; again!”
Miracle of miracles, they listened. The Sévère had no gunner, nor formal gun crew. She was no longer a warship, but a pirate, half-merchant. She had almost nothing left in the way of orderly procedures of warfare.
What she did have was the bones to support the machine of war: 110 named cannon, shot, powder, and plenty of skilled crew.
Everard, too.
“Run ’em out!”
Suppressing fire, Vitaliy had ordered—told—him. Keep them outrange. Aim as high as you can.
Everard sighted just one gun this time. High, all right. “Fire!”
Sparks lit the deck into firework orange and smoke and shadows, and another volley was let free.
He didn’t know why Vitaliy wanted high suppressing fire when he had initially refused to tack and flee; nor why he was tacking and fleeing now, and risking being overtaken with raking fire from the San Telmo if they were unable to complete the turn.
But he wasn’t captain. It wasn’t his place.
“Sponge! Shot!”
He did wonder how much of the cargo Vitaliy was interested in keeping dry and intact. A man concerned for his profit—and his crew—would have fled long since.
Above them, the mizzen and main yards creaked as they were braced to larboard; feet stomped and ropes sang in their blocks. The Sévère began to heel less and less, levelling; they were almost directly in the wind now and would soon lose their broadside.
“Run out, run out!”
In guns, the Sévère had the advantage of numbers over the San Telmo, 110 to seventy-four; but as it had stood with the wind and the heeling, her third-deck ports had been nearly in the water, making their numbers skirt equal. Now, however… there was an opportunity.
“Fire!”
As the smoke streamed, Everard barely waited for the kickback to settle before he threw himself down the hatch.
“Third-deck larboard-aft battery, run out your guns!” he bellowed; there was a flurry of activity as the order was repeated.
He thought he could time the cadence so that there was hardly a pause between the second and third decks’ firing.
He hadn’t controlled a three-deck gun crew before, much less a three-deck not-gun-crew, without subordinates; but he was damned well going to try.
Beneath his feet he could feel her begin to heel starboard, which meant she was really tacking. It was excellent news, but it also meant now or never, if he wanted to utilise the third deck broadside—
“Fire!”
She was really turning now. He stomped back up the ladder.
“Second battery, secure larboard guns and run out to starboard! Third battery, sponge and ready once more!”
Everard stomped back down. He needed a subordinate. Three. But third deck’s guns were pointed; good.
“Fi—”
“Belay that!” came a snarl just in time. Vitaliy came down the ladder, eyes wild. “For fuck’s sake! I said aim high, top decks only, matelot!”
Everard’s built-and-tested cadence died to a whimper, beats of a failing heart. He had never seen Vitaliy quite so angry.
Nevertheless, he snapped, “You certainly hadn’t!” incensed to be interrupted, overruled. “You said suppressive fire! Which is effective only so long it is sustained!”
The crew halted, watched them uneasily. Shite. The start of battle, and him undermining Vee’s authority—
Vitaliy clutched his arm, pulled him close. “You will blow us all to heaven,” he muttered in his ear. “No,” he said, as Everard stiffened, “don’t be insulted; it is nothing to do with skill. I will show you why.” He ordered up to the second deck, “Repeat larboard fire ’til we’ve tacked about!”
They did, guns ablaze; and just like that, Everard was made redundant again.
“I’ll blow us to kingdom come, will I? But a crew with no cadence, firing at their leisure won’t?”
Vitaliy ignored this and released him. “Come down with me. They can spare you.”
“Of course they can,” he said bitterly. He thought now he must’ve looked quite the fool, running up and down, trying to rope a pirate crew into a Navy rhythm.
“They can spare me, too,” Vitaliy said. “Milly has the helm.”
Curiosity was winning over anger. Slightly.
“Down… to the hold?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“You’ll abandon your post? Now? As they surely overtake and board us?”
Vitaliy frowned. “There’s no one else for this,” he said. He slung himself down the ladder, into the deep, dark hold.
Everard followed. What did that mean? Something Vitaliy couldn’t trust to another soul.
Vitaliy jumped down from the last rung and brushed off his palms. He picked his way across the keel, unerringly pushed through straw bales and hanging stores to the stacks of hogsheads.
Everard, not knowing what he searched for, paused to scratch his comedown-trembling fingers against the velvet skull and flicking ears of a white ship’s cat lounging in its hammock.
It blinked sleepily at him, too full on rats to be more than nonchalant at the scrape and boom of guns directly above.
Vitaliy disappeared aft and didn’t ask him to follow.
Everard felt absurd to be idle.
“White can’t be an advantage to you, down here in the dark,” he murmured to the cat. “Brave little thing.”
The cat splayed claws and kneaded the miniature hammock, and then leapt down to the keel and trotted off, tail high, in the direction Vitaliy had gone.
There was an abrupt lull in the guns, seawater slapping against the hull; they’d completed the tack.
Vitaliy emerged—sidestepping the cat—with a trunk over his shoulder, not much larger than Everard’s own little sea chest.
“Funny the cats haven’t scattered, what with the guns,” Everard said.
Vitaliy glanced back. “That cat is white.”
“And so?”
“White cats are frequently deaf.”
“Huh.” Not such a disadvantage, after all. “What’s in the trunk?”
“I will show you—in the greatcabin.” Vitaliy dug in his pocket, held out the magazine key on a lanyard. “We’ll need a twelve-pound keg.”
“A keg? You’re jesting.”
Vitaliy stared at him. He wasn’t jesting.
“I don’t fit in the magazine. Is that all right?” He hesitated. “Would it… disturb you? Being near to powder?”
Everard laughed. “I won’t fit much better. And that question is a little bit belated, Vitya, when I’ve been breathing sulfur for the past hour at least.”
Vitaliy looked even more concerned; his hand pulled back.
“But no, it doesn’t. I was too close, and never felt the magazine blow.” Everard waved his left hand. “This was a crushing injury: my wrist got pinned, and the fingers swelled. I came to beneath a column of brickwork”—and bodies—“as Preston was pulling me out.”
“Oh.” Vitaliy’s eyes went wide. “York? The magazine in York?”
“Mm-hm,” Everard confirmed. “About a week after we… er… met, in fact.”
Friendly fire. Deadly self-sabotage. Whatever one called it, the major-general of York had ordered the magazine set to blow, and it had: heedless of any and all soldiers within the periphery, including him.
Everard, completely unaware of his retreating superior’s plans, or indeed that he was retreating at all, had pushed together a small line of trembling-knee militia on the road against the approaching Yankee stars-and-stripes, had called something resembling a firing cadence, and—
Powder had gone off, but it hadn’t been the militia guns.
“But in all seriousness,” Everard said, “you want me to carry a twelve-pound keg through three decks of guns and live fuses? What in hell’s name is in that trunk?”
Vitaliy wiped a hand over his mouth, blew out a short breath. “I trust you not to trail a path. Do you trust me?”
Everard slid his shoes off so he stood in stocking feet—for the magazine—and sighed. “You know I do. Give me that.”
Vitaliy handed the key over on an outstretched finger.
Everard grimaced. “The Sévère has need of a powder monkey, do you know?”
“We are not usually a warship.” Vitaliy peered down. “Those stockings have holes in,” he murmured.
“Yes, they do.”
“Wind?” Vitaliy demanded as they crossed into sunshine and salt air.
“Sur’east-by-east,” León promptly replied.
Vitaliy nodded. “Pray it doesn’t change.” He looked up to the foremast, the sails there all filled now that they’d tacked around, and checked his hack watch. “And clew up the foresail and mainsail again.”
Everard pursed his lips. Two courses drawn up? That didn’t make sense. Didn’t Vitaliy want good headway? Were they not fleeing? Had Everard not been scurrying forth and back, maintaining suppressive fire to prevent the San Telmo from overtaking them?
“I want her moving lateral to leeward,” Vitaliy said, unnecessarily—as lateral movement could be the only result of such a bizarre directive. “Slack the starboard braces,” he ordered, and squinted up, “twenty-five degrees.”
A twenty-five-degree swing would put both yards almost abeam, parallel to the wind, slowing them quite a lot.
Everard said, “Hmmm.”