Heart of Steele (10 page)

And there was nothing I could do about it!

Then a pistol roared, and the pirate arched his back as his chest sent out a gush of blood. The force of the blast threw him stumbling across my uncle and into Shark. The pirate chief roared in rage as the body of his own man slammed him back into the wall. They were barely down before the dead body was hurled to one side and Shark was staggering back to his feet.

“Careful, boy,” he snarled. “Ye keep that up and someone’s liable t’ get hurt.”

Captain Hunter tossed aside the pistol with which he had saved my uncle’s life, and drew his cutlass. “Oh, I can almost guarantee someone is. It is Shark, is it not?”

“Last time I clapped eyes on ye,” rumbled Shark, “ye creased my skull with a pistol ball.”

“Too bad my aim was off.”

“That mouth is gonna get you killed, boyo—right now!” And Shark launched himself over the living and the dead, his heavy cutlass already swinging down for a killing blow.

Captain Hunter got his own blade up just in time to parry Shark’s thrust, and then they were at each other. Their cutlasses rang like broken bells every time they struck. This was no head-to-head like Shark and Uncle Patch. They were back and forth across the deck, leaping and thrusting and cutting. Never a word they said to each other as they went at it like wolves over a dead deer.

Slowly the fighting around them began to stop as both sides became aware of the great battle going on. Now the two men were in the middle of a great circle on the
Aurora
’s main deck. It was almost like some battle of old Irish warriors out of the stories my mother used to tell me, as much dance and stamina as swordplay and skill. Captain Hunter smiled grimly as he worked, but Shark grinned, teeth visible from ear to ear.

Finally the tip of the captain’s cutlass sliced through the skin and muscle on Shark’s chest. Blood began to pour forth, gushing over his tattoos, almost obscuring them. He laughed and leaped forward, spraying blood and sweat everywhere, and drove the point of his blade into Captain Hunter’s left shoulder. The captain fell back from the pain,
and in that instant Shark, with a great wide sweep of his blade, sent the captain’s cutlass flying from his hand.

“You’re mine, boyo!” Shark laughed as he drew back for the killing stroke. Captain Hunter dropped to one knee, his injured left arm hanging limp. But his right arm swung down and came back with a dagger he had in his boot. The swing continued under the gleaming cutlass and slammed in below Shark’s tattooed breastbone. The pirate looked down at the hilt in the center of his chest and then at Captain Hunter, who was painfully climbing to his feet.

“My aim is better now, Shark.”

Then Shark began to grin again and the red blood gushed from between his clenched teeth. “Your ship’s wrecked. Crew’s wrecked. Name’s wrecked. Compliments o’ Cap’n Steele, laddie, compliments o’ …” His eyes rolled up into his head and he pitched forward, stark dead, onto the deck.

For a moment, the only thing I could hear was Captain Hunter’s labored breathing. Then he did the most amazing thing. He reached down, grabbed the dead pirate by his belt and shoulder, and with a
grunt of effort heaved the body up over his head.

“Shark is dead! Shark is dead!” he shouted, and threw the compact body over the side of the
Aurora.
I heard it crash into one of the longboats.

Nothing happened for another second, but then a wailing cry came up from the pirate invaders. “Shark is dead!” And suddenly they were breaking for the remaining longboats, all the fight gone out of them. It was a total rout. Our men harried them every step of the way, and many of our foes died before the longboats began to pull away.

Mr. Jeffers and his crew rolled out one of the guns and commenced firing as fast as they could. I saw another of the longboats shatter, hurling its desperate crew into the air and into the sea.

As for me, I flew down the ladder two steps at a time until I finally reached my uncle. He lay in an untidy heap on the deck, deadly pale, but to my joy he was still breathing. Blood flowed from a huge lump above his left temple. I tore the sleeve off his grimy shirt—it was ruined anyway—and began to use it to dress his wound.

“Have a care,” mumbled a groggy voice. “That was my favorite white shirt.”

“Forget the shirt.” I worked feverishly trying to stop the blood from flowing.

“Ye have the delicate touch of a blacksmith, ye daft lad! Who told ye that ye were any kind o’ surgeon?”

“’Twas yourself, ye fool!” I shouted at him, tears streaming down my face. “Now, shut up and let me save your useless life!”

“There’s others worse hurt,” he whispered, and then mercifully for both of us, he passed out.

When I had finished, I looked around from where I knelt over my unconscious uncle on the deck. All around lay the dead and wounded.

Nearby Captain Hunter stood looking dazed…. “Mr. Adams.”

“Aye, sir?”

“Get some men with axes and cut the
Fury
loose. Then we can tend to our own.”

“Should we search her first, Cap’n?” Mr. Adams was swaying back and forth but his voice was steady.

“I doubt there’s anyone alive left aboard, but—”

Then a loud crash burst from the captured sloop. A furious pounding came from somewhere aboard her. Quick as a flash, a crewman leaped over the side and onto the
Fury
With a few well-timed
swings of an ax, he burst open the door to the cabin.

And out of the doorway lumbered the enraged figure of John Barrel, his wooden leg thumping loudly on the deck. “My sloop! What have the bloody dogs done to me poor, poor sloop?”

Bloody Work

OUR CREWMEN
knocked open the hatches on the
Fury
’s deck, and through them men rushed, blinking and staring about fiercely. One of them pointed to Barrel and yelled, “What’s a-do, John? Be we prisoners o’ these men or partners?”

“Belay your gab, Baulk,” Captain Barrel shot back. “D’ye see chains on your ankles?” He shot a glance at the
Aurora.
“Cap’n Hunter’s took back the
Fury
for us from Shark’s men!”

I was trying to count. Eight, nine … was that all? With Captain Barrel, that meant only ten men of the
Fury
’s crew of forty or so were accounted for. But I had no time to reflect on that. Uncle
Patch was calling for me. He had staggered to his feet, pulling himself up by a dangling line, and he was thundering, “Davy! Confound you, we must get to the sick berth! We’ll have our hands full soon enough!”

I ran to him and he threw an arm over my shoulder. I have said that my uncle was tall and broad-shouldered. He was also most awkwardly heavy, and now he smelled strongly of gunpowder and sweat. We all but tumbled down to the sick berth, where he stood steadying himself with a hand against a bulkhead. He ripped my improvised bandage off. “Take a quick look at this,” he growled, bending his head and holding his long red hair clenched in one hand. “Do I need stitches?”

I lifted a lantern. An ugly lump was swelling just behind his temple, and it had a split in it and was still oozing blood. But by now I knew wounds well enough. “Stitches later, but for now a compress will do,” I said. “Sit and I’ll prepare one.”

“The devil you will,” he said shortly. “There’s no time, for I hear them coming already with that heavy tread of those bearing the hurt. I rely on you, Davy.”

Our first patient was white from the loss of blood, and a jet of it spurted from a wound on his upper left arm with every pulse of his heart. “Artery,” my uncle said. “Pressure on it, Davy!”

A year earlier, I would have been too squeamish to plunge my finger into the wound, find the artery, and compress it, but habit had made that nothing to me. Beneath my finger I could feel the steady throbbing. Uncle Patch fetched a needle already threaded with fine catgut. “So,” he said. “Higher. Yes, I see. A clean cut, saints be praised. Hold him still!”

With darting movements almost quicker than I could follow, Uncle Patch sewed the two ends of the artery together, made sure the mended place was not leaking, and then sewed up the wound, swaying slightly. Already two or three more wounded were waiting for us. “See which needs to be next,” ordered my uncle, tottering on his feet.

The wounded were backing up. “Is Mr. Grice unhurt?” Uncle Patch asked one of the sailors.

“Aye, sir, sound an’ whole,” the man answered.

“Then get him down here at once. Davy, can you stitch this man up?”

That was something I had never done before. My uncle handed me a curved needle and in a few words told me how to take the stitches. “He has passed out, so he should give you no trouble,” he said. “Now put that man up here.”

We had only the one operating table, but it was broad enough for two to lie abreast, or rather head to foot, for that was the way the second man was placed there. He had an ugly fracture of the ribs, with bone piercing through the flesh.

I had time just for a glance as I passed the needle through living flesh, drawing together the lips of the wound as I had seen my uncle do. I fear my stitches were not as neat as his, or as fast, but at last I had put seventeen in and pulled the wound together. “Done!” I said.

“Good enough.” My uncle turned to the sailors. “Get this man into a hammock and let’s have the one with the bloodied head next. Lively!”

Before long, Uncle Patch had to kneel on the deck, so dizzy was he with his own hurt, but old Phineas Grice, the sailmaker, could stitch as well as he and had sewn up his shipmates before this. He and I shared the table. The hardest patients were
those who were least hurt, for they were conscious of the pain. Mr. Grice took these.

Even with the three of us working, it took hours. At last my uncle was tending to the last patient, Mr. Vickery, a stoic old gray-haired buccaneer, setting his broken leg and plucking some painful but not lethal splinters from his thigh. “All done?” Uncle Patch asked in a dazed voice. “All the conscious men have had their rum?”

No, they had not, for I had been kept too busy working on them. But I ran to fetch it and used the better part of a bottle pouring the tots for our survivors. The injured had spilled out of the sick berth. Their hammocks hung as far forward as the foot of the foremast. I almost wondered if we had enough sailors left on two feet to sail the
Aurora.

With a hand clapped to his head, Uncle Patch spoke to every conscious man, offering encouragement, a kind word, an awkward joke or two. Then he and I went back to the compartment we shared, and he sank groaning into a chair. “Bandage this for me now,” he said, pointing to the wound behind his head.

I wound the bandage around, padding the great
lump that now showed all the way through his coppery red hair. “Done,” I told him.

He looked up at me. “Look into my eyes,” he said. “Are my pupils of equal size?”

I stared hard into his green eyes, undecided for a time whether the left was the smallest bit larger than the right. But that was a trick of the lantern light. “They are,” I said at last.

“Bring the lantern close and see if they get smaller at the same rate.” I shone the light into his face, and he winced. “Saint Joseph, but that sends lances into my brain!”

“They look the same,” I said, shading the lantern.

“Good. Then I have no bleeding in the brain, let us hope. Davy, be a good lad and fetch me a small glass of brandy, for I’m shaking like a man with the palsy.”

I brought it, and he tossed it off in three gulps. Then he held out his hand. “Help me up, now, and onto the deck. Let us see what’s what up there.”

He had to lean on me even more heavily going up than he had coming down, but we emerged at last. The crew had cleaned up the deck, to a point. “Mr. Adams,” my uncle croaked feebly. “What of the day?”

“Are you all right, sir?” Mr. Adams asked, his beefy English face showing his shock.

Uncle Patch waved his concern away. “I shall do. How many dead?”

Mr. Adams looked around. “Twenty-seven of the enemy that I counted. Barrel’s men heaved all the pirates over the rail without so much as a byyour-leave.”

“We killed twenty-seven of them?” I asked, startled.

Mr. Adams lowered his voice. “‘Twas twentyseven they heaved overboard. I have my suspicions that not all were dead.”

I was staring at a long row of white forms, like mummies stretched out on the deck. These were our men—ten, eleven, a round dozen of them, dead and sewn up into their hammocks.

“Where’s the captain?” Uncle Patch asked. “He was wounded, I know, but he did not report to sick berth. How is it with him?”

“He had me tie up his cuts,” Mr. Adams told him. “He said he would have you do a proper job in time.”

Behind Mr. Adams, Captain Hunter emerged slowly from the cabin. He wore no coat, only his
shirt and breeches, and the shirt was nearly as red as it was white. His face was deathly pale. “Sir!” I cried out, and ran to offer him support.

Captain Hunter’s pale blue eyes seemed not to recognize me for a moment. Then he murmured, “I thank you, Davy.”

My uncle said, “William—”

“In a moment, Patch,” Captain Hunter said, sounding as if he were speaking in a dream. He patted my shoulder and then limped forward. I saw that he carried a prayer book.