The French Admiral (41 page)

“Should we . . .” Alan began.

“Nah, Burgess'll be makin' his move 'bout now.” Mollow laughed.

“But . . .” The infantry had fired the second rank volley into nothing, and then they came on at the charge themselves, now that they had an enemy on the run, wanting to be in at the kill before the cavalry earned all the honors. The mounted officer with them loped alongside them, waving his sword over his head and urging them on.

“Looky thar!” Hatmaker, the private soldier, called out over the sound of battle. “More o' the shits.”

“Thort they wuzn't ta come down hyar 'thout they brung a whole passel of 'em,” Mollow said, pointing out the second company of troops that was emerging on the road, led by the third officer in blue and white with the tricorne hat. “Virginia Militia, looks like.”

They were an outlandish-looking bunch of soldiers, some dressed in purplish long-fringed hunting shirts, some in castoff blue and white tunics over a variety of civilian breeches and waistcoats, some in gray or tan tunics without facings. They formed well enough, though, and came on at a trot, four columns abreast with ten men in each file, jogging forward to the north of the road through the tobacco plants as though they meant to flank the fighting and skirmish through the woods, swinging wide of the cavalry.

The change in sound from the south got Alan's attention, and he turned his head to see the first cavalrymen spur their horses and soar up and over those fences. The roars of challenge changed to shrill and womanish screams as they came down on the double row of
chevaux-de-frise
that had been hidden in the shadows. Mounts neighed in pain and terror as they skewered themselves on the sharp wood spikes. Those cavalry that had been balked and were milling about in front of the fence suddenly came under fire from Burgess and his men, and gaudily dressed troopers were spilled from their saddles, their useless sabers spinning in the air.

There was time for Governour to get off a volley as well, directly in the face of the charging infantry, punching their officer off his horse before they faded back into the woods for the first of their lines of rifle pits, bringing the French charge to a sudden halt as half a dozen more of their men were smashed down. They stopped to reload, and the quicker-loading and quicker-firing snipers in the woods knocked down more of them before they could raise their weapons to return fire.

“Should we stand ready for this bunch?” Alan asked as the militia seemed to trot forward on a beeline for their own low dead-fall log ramparts.

“Lie down an' keep quiet, now, but do ya be ready ta rise up an' give 'em a volley when I give ya the word,” Corporal Knevet ordered, calm as a man in church.

“Steady, men,” Alan seconded him, crawling along his line of sailors, who clutched their borrowed rifles with white-knuckled hands. “You can get off two volleys to their one if you're steady. They can't face that. We're going to give it to them point-blank and run their ragged arses all the way back to Gloucester Point.”

And I wouldn't believe me for a second, he thought fearfully.

“On, boys, we got the bastards skinned!” the militia officer was encouraging his panting soldiers. He was off his horse, having left it in the rear, a heavyset, sweating man in a too-small uniform wrapped with a large red sash of command, with a gaudy bullion epaulette on each shoulder like a general, far above his true rank. Alan peered out from a gap between two of the mossy dead-fall logs as they came on, swishing through the weeds and the dried leaves of tobacco, their accoutrements jangling and thumping on their bodies, musket butts knocking against each other as they jogged shoulder to shoulder for comradely support.

“Now?” Alan asked Mollow.

“Not yit, be quiet, young'un,” Mollow cautioned. “They's swingin' off ta our left. Let 'em get in real close fuhst.”

“'Ware them logs thar!” someone yelled to their front.

“Shit,” Corporal Knevet groaned, realizing they had been spotted. “Stand to! Take aim . . . fire!”

They stood up from behind their barriers, to find the militia company not thirty yards away, turned slightly oblique to them and stumbling to a halt at the sight of their weapons. The volley was a blow to the heart, right in their astonished faces, a ragged crackling of shots that took the front rank and the nearest column of files down, so close Alan could see the blood fly from the nearest men struck.

“Load!” Alan cried, not knowing where his first shot had gone. His hands seemed to have plans of their own as he cranked the breech of the Ferguson open, flipped up the pan cover, and dug into the pouch at his side for a fresh cartridge to rip open with his teeth.

“Face left!” the officer was screaming, waving a huge straight sword and shoving numb survivors of that fatal volley off to his left to lead out the unharmed files. “Form two ranks!”

Mollow, Knevet, Hatmaker, and the other soldiers got off another volley as they shambled into order, quickly followed by Alan and his men, who were less familiar and comfortable with the rifles. Alan saw some of his sailors grounding their rifles to begin the process of loading from the muzzle, as they had been trained on the Brown Bess muskets aboard the ship, before coming to their senses, or being swatted by a senior hand.

More enemy soldiers were being laid out on the ground, groaning and crying in terror as they were hit.

“Front rank, kneel! Take aim . . . fire!” the militia officer yelled.

They got off a volley, and at that close range it was deadly, no matter that half the militiamen had not even bothered to do more than stick their muzzles in the right direction. Volunteers and sailors shrieked in agony as they were smacked down behind the log barrier, which suddenly seemed to be about knee high instead of waist deep.

“Charge 'em!” the officer screamed.

“Fire when ready!” Alan screamed back, trying to be heard over all the noise. Rifles cracked, his own slamming back into his shoulder, and the white-bearded older man who had been running at him was struck on the breastbone and was slammed backwards as though jerked on a rope to drop to the ground with his heels flying in the air.

“Better fall back ta the boats,” Knevet suggested.

“Once my boys run, there's no stoppin' 'em,” Alan shouted right into his face. The enemy charge was coming forward, bayonets pointing for them big as ploughshares and shining wickedly.

The men were fumbling at the loading and firing of their Fergusons, hands trembling like fresh-killed cocks at the sight of the enemy at the charge. If they waited to get off a last volley, they would be all over them, and he was still outnumbered.

“Boarders!” Alan howled, drawing his pair of dragoon pistols and dropping the Ferguson. “Away boarders! Take 'em, Desperates!”

Alan brought up the first pistol in his right hand, aimed, and lit off the charge as his men began to surge forward over the barrier to meet the militiamen. He did not hear the explosion, but a ragged man with a half spontoon leveled like a pike spouted a scarlet bloom below his chin.

Alan dropped the spent pistol and transferred the other to his right hand. He fired, and a soldier in dirty blue and white almost up to the barrier gave a great silent scream, and his waistcoat turned red over one lung.

Then Alan was over the barrier himself, cutlass in his right hand and one of his own pistols in his left. A bayonet lunged for him, and he nicked his blade into the wood of the fore-stock, shoving it out of the way, then slashed back to his right, inside the soldier's guard. He sank his cutlass into flesh and bone on the man's right arm, knocking him down to the dust and the weeds, chopped downward again and laid his opponent's face open. Another man was close, and Alan brought up his pistol and fired. There was a soft pop, but that man's face writhed in terror and he dropped away, clutching at his stomach and dropping the musket that had been near to taking Alan in the chest.

There was a lot of screaming going on, but he heard little of it, for he moved in an unreal fog, a swirling, shifting kaleidoscope of colors through which he waded. Grays and blues and tans, flesh and blood, dark wood and bright metal. He discharged his last pistol somewhere along the way and had no idea where the ball went, found his dirk in one hand and the cutlass in the other as he slipped in under someone's guard and took the man in the abdomen. He was in among the trampled and broken dry tobacco plants, slashing about as though he was cutting a path through them to get at the enemy.

He came face to face with the sweaty, obese enemy officer with the glittering epaulettes, his hat gone and his eyes huge with fear and shock. The man brought up that heavy straight sword, big as a Scottish claymore, but Alan smashed it aside as easily as a feather and the man opened his mouth to scream before he turned to flee, dropping his sword in fright.

Alan seemed to float forward like some vengeful Greek god masquerading as a man in the
Iliad
under the walls of Troy; he brought down that heavy cutlass blade and cut the officer's back open, tumbling him into the dirt and mud of the field between the tobacco rows, brought it down again and almost severed the head from the shoulders, hacked on the body until he began to hear things beside the ringing in his ears.

“Load up!” someone was ordering. “Load 'an face the road!”

Mollow was at his side, fending off his bloody cutlass with his rifle stock as Alan thought him another foe to deal with. “Hold on, thar, boy! Git yerself a rifle, an' we're gonna do some hawg-killin'!”

The closest weapons Alan could find were militia muskets, and he did not have the right caliber ball for them. He searched back and forth across the fields until he came across the soldier Hatmaker, who had been shot in the chest and would no longer need his rifle.

“Form ranks, form two ranks!” Knevet was shouting, man-handling stunned sailors and surviving riflemen into some sort of order. There seemed too few to be credited. “Spread out, ten foot apart! Load up an' stand by ta fire!”

Alan loaded Hatmaker's rifle, wiping the blood from the breech and stock as he did so. He looked up to see French soldiers from Lauzun's Legion stumble from the woods south of the road, along with a few men from the militia company who had run off from the fighting and had gotten mixed in with them. Cavalrymen in shakoes, sabers abandoned and bearing short musketoons and dragoon pistols, infantry in bearskin headresses with muskets, a wounded officer with a sword in hand being helped along by his orderly. There seemed too damned few of them to be credited, either. As he watched they turned to fire back into the woods from which they came, then spun about to continue running.

“First rank . . . fire!” Knevet called, and six or seven rifles made a harsh sound, spewing out a thick cloud of powder. “Reload! Second rank . . . fire!”

This time, Alan aimed and fired, his hands so weak that he could have just as easily hit either the ground at his feet or the bay beyond. A third volley sounded from the woods by the zigzag fences as Governour, Burgess, and their survivors came into sight, and they had the French and Rebels caught in an L-shaped killing ground, just about one hundred yards away, too far for accurate musket fire even for steady men, but as Governour had predicted, close enough to do terrible practice with Fergusons. The enemy melted away, spun off their feet to fall like limp rags.

“Kill 'em! Kill 'em all, goddammit!” someone ordered.

“Close 'em!” Knevet said, and the two ragged ranks began to walk forward, angling right to keep up with the fleeing foe as they finally broke and fled. There were not a dozen left on their feet, then eight; another volley and there were three, a few scattered shots and there were none left standing, only the writhing wounded crying out for quarter as the soldiers walked among them with their bayonet blades prodding at the dead.

Wanting no part of such a gruesome activity, Alan sank to his knees and concentrated on drawing breath into his lungs. He felt as though he had run a mile, and every limb of his body ached as though he had carried something heavy as he had done so.

“Ya hurt?” Mollow asked him, kneeling down by him.

“No, I don't think so,” Alan panted. “You?”

“Cut 'r two, nothin' much.” Mollow grimaced. He swung his canteen around from his hip and took a swallow, then offered it to Alan, who half drained it before handing it back reluctantly.

“Bastards worn't ready fer this kinda fightin',” Mollow commented. “Bet them Lauzun boys thort they'd tangled with red Injuns back in them woods. Them Virginia Militia put up a good fight fer a minute thar, though.”

Alan got to his feet and looked back to the north. He could follow the trail of the fighting through the tobacco fields where plants had been knocked flat by struggling, falling men, like a swath left by a reaper. And the swath was littered with bodies all the way back to the log barrier, bodies spilled on the ground like bundles of clothing empty of the men who had worn them, looking sunk into the ground in ungainly postures, a few squirming back and forth in pain still.

“God Almighty in Heaven,” Alan muttered in shock.

“Purty bad, wuhst iver I seen, an' I seen me some fightin',” Mollow went on as they walked stiff legged back toward the north. “You an' yer Navy boys stand killin' better'n most, I'll 'low ya that. Whoo, all them cutlasses aswangin' an' them sailors ayellin' and stampin' fit ta bust, like ta curdled my jizzum!”