Tide of War (38 page)

Nathan, severely disheartened by the belaying pin which had struck him a glancing blow on the temple, sat down on a hatch cover with some notion of reviewing the situation.

This design was thwarted by a large red-haired man with a pistol and a cutlass who came charging down the deck towards him removing such obstacles as presented themselves in his path by the simple expedient of shooting one and disembowelling the other. This was clearly not a man to be trifled with and Nathan moved to abandon his sedentary position with some alacrity. He might still not have been fast enough had his assailant not slipped on the blood which his own efforts and those of lesser mortals had spilled upon the decks. Nathan seized the opportunity to draw one of his own pistols with the intent of shooting him in the head but this excellent plan was betrayed by a subtle combination of events.

The pistol was one that Nathan had acquired in Paris: short, stubby affairs made in Belgium. They were not accurate, he had discovered, beyond a range of about twenty yards but he considered them useful in close quarter encounters and the configuration of the muzzle and the butt made for a satisfactory club after they had been discharged. They also had the facility of a small metal cap which fitted over the firing pan and preserved the powder from damp, a serious consideration when fighting at sea. The sole disadvantage of this device was that it had to be removed before firing and this Nathan had neglected to do with the consequence that when he pressed the trigger the hammer fell upon the metal cap and the powder failed to
ignite as effectively as if it had been thoroughly soaked in seawater.

With an oath directed as much at his own incompetence as at the manufacturers of the pistol, Nathan threw the weapon at the head of his assailant and sprang to one side with sufficient agility to avoid a blow from the cutlass that would have split his skull from crown to chin. The force of this blow was so great, in fact, it caused the sword to lodge itself in the hatch cover and Nathan was able to draw his own sword and prepare a more adequate defence than he had hitherto been allowed.

Beside his naval training Nathan had been instructed in swordsmanship by no less an exponent of the art than Henry Angelo, son of the famous Dominico Angelo Malevolti Tremamondo of Livorno, whose fencing school in Soho was patronised by some of the most accomplished and aristocratic blades in England and which Nathan had attended at his mother's expense, she being in funds at the time, as a twenty-first birthday gift.

Signor Angelo's methods, however, being of the Italian school and laying heavy emphasis on subtlety, dexterity and the Machiavellian artifice of the feint, were possibly more suited to a duel on the palazzo than to the chaotic conditions of a hand-to-hand encounter on a ship of war, especially as Nathan's opponent, in this instance, had clearly been exposed from an early age to the Irish school.

“If you have the clear head,” Signor Angelo had maintained, “you will find the point always has the victory over the edge.” A dictum with which Nathan was entirely in agreement. The proviso, however, was that you had “the clear head” and this posed something of a problem when it was reeling from a blow to the temple, half-blinded by blood and preoccupied with avoiding the series of wild, exuberant slashes and thrusts available to an energetic and enraged graduate of the Irish school.

Several wild swipes drove Nathan back to the rail before he recovered his poise sufficiently to step to one side and pierce his assailant neatly through the shoulder in a manner that Signor Angelo and even his esteemed father might have approved.

The cutlass clattered to the deck and Nathan withdrew the sword and applied the point to the man's chin. “Yield,” he instructed him, with some notion of chivalry.

“Be fucked to dat,” replied the Irishman, seizing the sword in a clenched fist and bending it away from him, while driving his knee into Nathan's groin. Ill-tempered from this blow, but not quite crippled, Nathan wrenched the sword from the man's grasp, stepped back a pace and drove it decisively into a point a little below his throat and above his breastbone. He drew it out to release a shocking amount of blood and turned to face a new attacker he sensed coming up on his right.

But it was Tully.

“You're alive,” Nathan observed with relief.

“So it would appear,” said Tully, “and yourself?” Gazing in concern at the top of Nathan's head.

“I will let you know,” Nathan replied, “in a day or two.”

This conversation, though brief, was permitted them only because the battle appeared to be at an end. Nathan crossed to the starboard rail. The cutter was still at its mooring, still apparently unmanned. He looked for Holroyd and saw him leaning against the rail, looking sick and holding something bloody in his hand.

“What have you got there, Mr. Holroyd?” Nathan asked, distracted for a moment.

“My ear, sir.” He exposed his broken teeth in a shaky grin. “I thought the surgeon might sew it back on.”

“Good man.” Nathan was warming somewhat towards the midshipman after fighting three battles together, if only because they had both survived them. He would be almost human without the spots—the scarf had been a considerable improvement—but now it was clutched to the side of his head where the ear had been, apparently in an attempt to staunch the flow of blood.

“In the meantime, do you see that cutter there?”

Holroyd indicated that he did.

“I want you to take it out for us, do you think you can do that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good man. Take the gig you will find tied to the stern and three seamen—not guffies—and sail her out to the
Unicorn
where she belongs.”

“Yes, sir.”

Nathan had promised Adedike the brig but not the cutter. It was his cutter. He had come all the way from England for it and put up with a great deal of inconvenience on the journey; he was damned if he was going to leave it here.

He looked down at his other boats. Two were intact, the third was filled with bodies and bloodied water. God only knew how Tully had survived. He called him over.

“See if any of them are still alive,” he instructed him, “and bring them aboard if you can.”

But even as he spoke the launch filled up and sank. Nathan swore an oath. He looked up at the sky, then around the shambles of the decks. Bodies everywhere, some his, the majority not. Most of the mutineers had fought to the death, knowing what would happen if they were taken, but there were two prisoners—one little more than a boy, another wearing the uniform of a master's mate in His Britannic Majesty's Navy.

“Take that off,” Nathan commanded him savagely.

The fellow struggled to obey but the right sleeve was soaked in blood, his arm slashed from wrist to elbow.

“Leave it,” said Nathan wearily. “You would be Keane, I suppose?”

“I would,” said Keane. “God help me.”

“And where is the man called O'Neill?”

“He is over there, the bastard,” said Keane, venomously, “with his throat cut, just as he cut the captain's.”

Nathan saw that he meant his red-haired assailant. He went to look.

“So I killed him,” he said, wonderingly, to Tully as they stared down at the body. “They sent me all this way for that.”

But it was not over yet.

They laid the dead and the wounded in the launch belonging to the
brig. They had lost ten men, most gone down with the boat, and half a dozen wounded, two so badly Nathan did not think they would live.

Nathan permitted Tully to bandage up his wounds and then went down to the captain's cabin to see if he could find anything of interest. He took the log and a bundle of charts, a sextant and a compass, and some papers written in English and French. Then they climbed down into the boats and set off for the jetty.

The whole shoreline and the battlements of the fort were lined with men who had been watching the battle. Nathan caught a glimpse of red on the walls of the barbican. Adedike. She kissed her hand to him and then he saw her face change to concern as she saw his. Tully had pressed a wad to the wound and tied a bandana around his head to stop the bleeding but his face was a mask of blood.

They unloaded the small arms and the powder and shot.

Nathan glanced up at the fort. Adedike was gone from the battlements. He saw Olumiji coming down from the gate with his bodyguard, doubtless to make sure he had his guns. Then Adedike came running out of the gate, her red robe streaming out behind her.

Nathan stepped ashore.

“That's the lot,” said Tully.

“Thank you,” he said. Then he turned and began to walk towards the fort.

“Where are you going?” Tully called after him.

Nathan kept walking. He heard Tully running after him and felt his hand on his shoulder, spinning him round.

“I have to stay,” Nathan said. “That was the arrangement.” He managed a shaky grin. “She needs a captain of artillery.”

“Bollocks to that,” said Tully. He took out a pistol and pressed it under Nathan's chin. “Back in the boat.”

“What in God's name are you doing?” demanded Nathan, truly astonished.

“Back in the fucking boat.” Tully manhandled him back to the jetty, yelling orders to the startled men in the boats.

Nathan could hear shouts from the direction of the fort.

“This is mutiny,” said Nathan. “You could hang for it.”

Tully threw him down into the boat and jumped after him and held the pistol to his head.

“I gave my word,” Nathan told him. “I said I would come back.”

“And so you did,” said Tully. “Pull!” he instructed the marines.

Nathan saw the men on the shore raising their muskets.

“Put down your weapons or I will blow his head off,” Tully shouted in French.

Tully cocked the pistol. Nathan prayed to God it was not loaded. He heard Adedike screaming orders in her own tongue. The men lowered their muskets. They were heading out into the mouth of the bay.

“Keep close to the headland,” said Nathan, pulling himself together and remembering the mental notes he had made on his last visit.

Tully gave the order and the three boats crept along the foot of the headland under the guns of the fort. The cutter was already out, her sails set, heading for the distant frigate.

Nathan looked back and saw Adedike standing at the end of the jetty with her arms outstretched. She was shouting something—a plea or a curse. She looked so beautiful he felt a deep pang of regret. But it passed.

“You can put the pistol away,” he told Tully. “I am not going to swim to her.”

“I would not put it past you,” said Tully, but then he remembered his place. “I beg your pardon, sir. I am, of course, entirely at your command.”

But Nathan was past caring who gave the commands. He felt like someone had stabbed him in the chest.

He pressed his hand to the pain, doubling up in agony.

“What is it?” Tully was leant over him, his own face creased with concern.

“I don't know,” said Nathan wonderingly. “It feels like my heart.”

W
ELL, I DO NOT THINK
it is your heart,” concluded McLeish after tapping at Nathan's chest and listening to it through a small instrument held to his ear. “And you did not receive a wee knock in the scuffle.?”

“I received several ‘wee knocks in the scuffle,' as you are pleased to call it,” Nathan informed him, wearily, “but not, so far as I am aware, upon the chest.”

“ Well, let us be having a look at the others and I dare say you may find it a distraction from whatever discomforts ye in t'other region.”

A distraction it was but when McLeish had finished stitching the wounds to Nathan's head and thigh the pain in his chest returned as savagely as before.

“What in God's name can it be?” he demanded. He found it difficult to breathe.

“I can only suppose it is a spot of wind,” suggested McLeish mildly. “Have you eaten anything that might have disagreed with you at all?”

“Wind?
Wind?
It feels like someone has driven a spike into my chest. And I have not eaten a thing for several hours. Dear God, man.
Wind?”

He rolled over on his side in the hope of easing the pain. “Christ,” he groaned, “I fear the witch has done for me.”

“The witch indeed? And which witch would this be?”

Nathan did not answer but Tully who had brought him down murmured in the doctor's ear that he supposed he must mean “the witch woman” that was a kind of shaman to the Army of Lucumi.

“And how might that relate to the pain in his chest?” McLeish enquired with the coolness of a professional whose diagnosis is questioned by an inferior. Neither Tully nor Nathan felt it incumbent upon them to reply and after observing them both for a moment with a frown, McLeish exclaimed, “Dear God, man, never tell me you believe yourself to be hexed by a witch, forsooth? Why, God bless my soul!”

Nathan became aware of a new attentiveness in the crowded cockpit, for they had not been speaking Latin.

“Is there anything I can do?” enquired Brother Ignatius who had been helping to attend the wounded.

“ Well, it is more your province than mine,” replied the doctor. “I received scant instruction in the treatment of curses at the medical faculty of Edinburgh, the last witch being burned somewhat before my time, though it was in my own home town of Kirkudbright, I believe.”

“I had always understood that witches were hanged in England,” the monk remarked with interest.

“That is as may be,” McLeish retorted, “and I am not one to be critical of the English, but Kirkudbright being in Scotland, we have our own ways of dispensing justice and doubtless those that concern themselves with such matters considered that burning was a more reliable means of disposing of a nuisance than hanging, though in a more enlightened age we have recourse to neither but merely consign the poor creatures to the madhouse.”