Chapter 20
Twenty
As the gun’s last recoil rocked a bruised D’Arcy back onto his heels, Vitaliy gave orders across the companionway to drop the courses, swing the yards back, and fly. Then it was cat-and-mouse—with the mouse’s impossible flight pulling the cat by imaginary leading strings into the traps.
Vitaliy had calculated not only the speed of the San Telmo and its dead reckon towards them, but the wind’s effect on the harpoon’s flight, the push of Gulf current on the floaters, the time it would take the snagged warship to almost reach the Sévère.
He had apparently done this in his head, all while seated at Everard’s side in the shrouds; he hadn’t seen him write a thing down. Genius indeed.
Out of nine torpedo mines, five threw up miniature frothing waterspouts, harmless in the broad middle of the Gulf; another failed to detonate entirely.
Three clung like burrs to the San Telmo and struck target.
They triggered all against her larboard hull, just as she came within cannon range; but Everard didn’t need to order a single volley.
By the time the Spanish warship managed to come close, she was thoroughly holed, and had heeled so sharply to larboard that she needed most of her men to plug the leaks, and had no energy or portholes available for gunning.
She began slowly to wear to her starboard, away from the Sévère.
Still she raised nothing white.
To Everard, this seemed nonetheless a victory, a retreat, if only Vitaliy would take advantage and flee.
But the crew’s energy was restless, muttering, anticipation wasted, and Vitaliy said nothing.
Then the San Telmo raised her final signal: the black.
Vitaliy didn’t appear at all surprised.
“Bring her alongside,” he said calmly. “We will board her.”
To this, there was crew cheering.
In the greatcabin, Vitaliy pulled sword and pistol and axe from their mounts on the wall and strapped them on, one by one.
Around his arm he’d tied a band of sailcloth dyed with bright indigo, the same as the crew.
Over his chest he buckled a bandolier that held a massive, arm-sized knife.
He drew it forth and back again in its sheath as a test: it was a rectangular, hook-pointed, finely serrated fishing knife.
All Everard could see was that knife snatched and used against Vitaliy himself. This didn’t detract from his fury. It made him all the angrier, the futility and unnecessity of it.
He shut the door behind him, pressed his back against it like a guard. “You knew she was pirate,” he accused, low. “This whole time.”
“And whose she is,” Vitaliy admitted, unblinking, without guilt.
“Jean Lafitte.”
Vitaliy nodded.
“If you’d only said—”
“It changes nothing.” He cinched his belt. “Many will still die.”
Everard threw up his hands. “Not if we’d fled! You lied to me.”
“No.” Vitaliy’s eyes had gone wide and warning. “It is a Spanish anti-revolutionary. Lafitte is allied with the Spanish, as I said. He will do everything they would, and more.”
“Deception by omission, then, if we are to debate semantic nuance. Por Dios.”
“One man doesn’t make the difference,” Vitaliy snapped.
“Now, look—now you are lying outright. I’d bet he’s the reason entire you’ve done every bit of this! Is he who betrayed you, Vitya? This is your revenge?”
“Ah, fuck,” Vitaliy cursed, apparently quite beyond. “No, I do not have time for this. For this, with you.” He brushed past Everard, a glancing sidestep, and put his hand on the door. “Are you boarding her or staying behind?”
“Am I—” Everard drew in a breath through his teeth, also quite beyond. He grabbed at Vitaliy’s shoulder. “What?” he demanded. He waited, with sick anticipation, for Vitaliy’s glance to drop meaningfully to his hand. “Why in hell would you ask that?”
The dark gaze didn’t waver from Everard’s own. “I don’t ask it of you. If you—”
“No, no. I’m sorry, I’ve said it wrong: why would you wonder that? Is it a heavy question in your mind, whether or not I am a coward? Incapable?”
Vitaliy went still beneath his palm. The anger wisped out of him, dissipated like cooling steam.
“Ah. No, Everard,” he said. He put a hand to Everard’s face, the juncture of jaw and neck, softly clutching. “I question nothing. What you did for me in Kingston proved you to be one of the bravest, most capable persons I have ever met. I don’t need battle to confirm what I already believe.”
“Oh,” Everard said. Proof. Belief.
Vitaliy wouldn’t say those words lightly.
Vitaliy said, “If you object to fighting, it won’t make me think differently of you.
I object to fighting,” he admitted bitterly, “but I haven’t the choice of it, because of Varfolomey.
The creature I’ve made him—myself—into. So, I am asking you.
Asking, not assuming, because you still do have a choice, if you want it. ”
Everard dropped his hand; Vitya caught it in his other.
“You are my matelot. My partner in all things. If you do choose, and we are to cross the rail together, it will be back-to-back, protecting the other. I pledged that, too. I would make you aware that I will fulfill it to the death. Either way, I will never let Lafitte give you to La Corona.”
“Oh,” Everard said. “No, you… needn’t worry over that.” If the Spanish weren’t hunting Varfolomey—supposedly—they absolutely weren’t hunting him, a complete unknown. “They shan’t get you, either. Not if I’ve say in the matter.”
Vitaliy didn’t blink. His steady gaze said simply: I know. I believe you.
“Well, then!” Everard said. “I’ll need sword and axe.”
Back-to-back, shoulder-to-shoulder, Vitya kept his word.
Under cover of musket fire, they were up and over the gunwale in three heartbeats, a froth of screaming, jangling metal, creaking rope.
The San Telmo was heeling so hard, they landed on a weather deck made into an uphill battle; worse, its new-built planking had been slicked with oil and water.
They and six others plonked straight onto their arses first thing, which flattened them against the Spaniards’ receptive fire but nearly slid them into a miniature cheval-de-frise of sharp pikes beneath the rail.
When in hell, Everard wondered, had they had time to build that?
Vitya swore, thunked his axe into the deck for purchase just in time, knuckles white, his grip painful beneath Everard’s left shoulder as he pressed him bodily down, but it halted their slide. He bellowed, “Sand bags!”
These flew, hitting dully around them and bursting; one grazed Everard like a punch, and he kicked it, coughing, spreading the sand.
A bit ahead of schedule, but they would’ve needed them for the blood, anyway.
Then a pirate—an enemy—with Quixote-era mustachios swung down to them from the high quarterdeck.
The spike of his axe loomed towards Everard’s head.
Everard raised his cutlass—crack—and the arc of the man’s axe jerked and collapsed into loose strings and floppy limbs, a marionette abruptly freed.
Nothing Everard had done: a musket ball had spun its way through his ochre bandanna, exiting over the ear.
D’Arcy, he thought dimly, but couldn’t look back. He touched his filled glove to his lips and away in a kiss, tasting iron, and pushed the man and his brains off his lap. First blood.
Louis-Michel Alarie ran past, boots flinging sand, flanked by several of the Sévère’s pirates, screaming war. As if spurred, Vitya hauled Everard up; they went on.
Above them, the jolly roger threw a wavering noonday shadow. But Jean Lafitte was nowhere to be seen.
Vitaliy’s intuition had at least been correct about the San Telmo pirates; they were not slaves, but majority white men, Spaniards supplemented with mercenaries, from the sound of them, German, Irish, and American, sailors and infantry alike. There weren’t as many as expected—another advantage.
Everard had forgotten how to breathe, it seemed, but not how to fight.
With every step, every swing of sabre, worry and hunger and shuddering nausea shoved down to a tiny corner of himself, forgotten.
But as they crossed the chaos of the deck, something peculiar happened, over and over: Everard’s opponents spotted him and hitched, took a breath, paused.
Close quarters meant no one had much choice in their combatants, and in fact if one could easily tell friend from foe in the writhing chaos and the smoke, it was a lucky thing, even with the indigo armbands.
But men went the way of least resistance, and in battle Everard had never been avoided so much as pushed aside, assumed to be neither a challenge nor an easy target.
Today, however…
Another Spaniard fell before him, kneecap shattered from Everard’s sabre hilt, and in the frenzy’s brief pause, Everard looked askance.
Yes, that would do it. Vitya—tall, broad, copper-haired from blood, teeth gritted and breathing hard—was certainly not the way of least resistance. Brutality surrounded him like an indestructible soap bubble, glimmering rainbow and poison swirl.
To Everard’s eyes he was half-unrecognisable.
“Back me,” Vitaliy gasped then, as though it needed repeating, “to amidships.” He hefted the axehead closer into his palm, looking oddly frustrated. “Change of plan. Something’s wrong.”
Everard nodded. He was amazed at Vitya’s clarity of thought; he himself felt encircled, cushioned from reason by gun smoke and blood-spray fog. He shook himself.
This is what they respect him for, he thought. This mask he wears. What a damned waste. Violence was common. Expected. Not particularly difficult.
They made their way, ducking, shoving, sabres outflung, to the midships rail, where Vitya applied his axe blade in wide, powerful swoops into the cheval-de-frise beneath, dismantling it to crumbles and splinters. His goal seemed to be the San Telmo’s yardarm braces.
Vitya swung at the larboard braces, rapid and accurate; rope after thick rope was cut. Like felling trap-set saplings, the braces sprang free from tension and flew high. The mast groaned as the wind took the yards round and got hold of the freed sails, setting them flapping.
Everard discouraged a sharp-toothed, junk-beribboned pirate—no indigo—away and down to the deck with a thrust of blade to the shoulder. He looked up. He yelled, “Vee, you’ll dismast her!”
Vitaliy withdrew his knife from the bandolier with his left hand and stepped over the pirate still bleeding at Everard’s feet.
“Yes.” He bent, quick and unceremonious, and slit the pirate’s throat.
It was then that Everard realised: he meant to disable the San Telmo irreparably.
“You know,” Everard said, “I don’t think he would’ve got up?”
Vitaliy grimaced as he straightened. The look in his eyes was frightening: as flat as the night sea.
But then, they’d flown the red. No mercy; no quarter.
Then, quick as a flash, he raised his pistol from his belt and shot it over Everard’s shoulder; there was a thud as someone hit the deck behind him, their weapon clattering away.
“New plan,” Vitaliy growled. “I was wrong.” He brushed sticky blond from his forehead.
Everard spun, clutching his ear, to goggle backward. Vitaliy’s aim wasn’t terrible, either—ball straight through the neck—though Everard could’ve done to keep his eardrum intact. “So, kill everyone is your recompense for it?”
Vitaliy shook his head. He backed against the rail and began to reload his pistol with Marine efficiency.
Everard covered him, back to his front, sabre ready, though the battle had already begun to stale, fizzle in their favor.
One after another, the pirates of the San Telmo were realising their fate and running.
“It’s Lafitte’s ship,” Vitaliy said. Everard heard him spit cartridge paper, heard the hiss of powder. “Lafitte’s flag. Lafitte’s men, Spaniards, mercenaries. But he is not aboard. This is a captainless ship.”
“What?” Everard said, shoving off a man who’d decided to make a last stand, bashing him in the head with the sabre hilt.
“A captainless warship?” The man collapsed.
Everard rationalised: drowning while unconscious was better than bleeding out.
Surely. “Is that even bloody possible? And if that is the case, then—do pardon my French—what in blasted hellfire are we doing?”
Vitaliy grimaced again, pulled back on the hammer. He shoved the gun into his belt. “Someone wants this ship. We must ensure she does not return to Cuba—with or without her new leadership.”
Vitaliy crossed the deck to the starboard mizzen-yard braces, and cut those, too, swift thunks of his axe. No one tried to stop them; the battle was nearly over.
New leadership, Everard thought. A slot-in captain for the Spanish San Telmo. Someone waiting in the wings of the Sévère with her crew. Someone who had been sailing with them, waiting for their chance, their rendezvous. Someone who worked for Lafitte, or La Corona, or both.
Someone who knew Vitaliy, who had maybe expected a ship from him, who would use a meregildo to defeat a man-o’-war. Someone who had stayed on with them beyond Havana instead of leading the Birch.
Romilly René, bells rang in his head. Romilly René. It must be.
Louis-Michel Alarie appeared from the smoke, covered in sand and viscera, and launched himself up onto the quarterdeck. He leaned out far over the rail, swinging an enemy hat like a flag.
“Indigo pirates of the Sévère!” he bellowed, to an answering cacophony, up and down the deck. “We have our victory! Take what prizes you may carry… et retournez dans le navire!”
The second cheer was deafening.