Blue Sea Burning (9 page)

The Fangs

I TOOK THE COMPANIONWAY STEPS
two at a time. When I reached the gun deck, the floor was gritty with sand, and there was so much smoke in the air I could barely see through the haze. I was halfway up the next flight when the
Grift
's guns erupted again.

The recoil nearly knocked me off the steps.

As I stumbled out into the open air of the weather deck, a cloud of smoke from the guns was rising like a curtain on the port side. Before the smoke choked off my view, I glimpsed a familiar-looking frigate half a mile off port. Its foremast was leaning at a crooked angle, one huge sail cut loose from its spar and billowing uselessly across the ship's deck.

It was Ripper Jones's ship, the
Red Throat.
As it disappeared behind the veil of smoke, half a dozen muzzle flashes blinked from its gun ports.

I hit the deck as cannonballs ripped through the sails over my head. A moment later, a hundred pounds of rigging crashed to the deck behind me.

Right away, I realized I'd been wrong. As bad as it was down in the hold, not knowing what was happening above, this was worse.

I got up and ran for the quarterdeck. Burn Healy was standing at the wheel next to his pilot, Pike. When I got a look at my uncle, I gasped. A bloodstained bandage covered the upper half of his head, including one full eye, and streaks of crusted blood ran down his face and neck to his shirt, which was stained a copper red down to the chest.

In spite of the wound, he was grinning from ear to ear—until he saw me, and then the grin vanished.

“The patch in the hull is bust!” I yelled. “Carpenter says, ‘Take her down to six and no turns to port!'”

Healy's good eye widened at the news. He turned to Pike.

“Reef the tops. When the next round's off, bring her to starboard.”

Then he ran past me, headed for the companionway. Not knowing what else to do, I followed.

Healy moved fast. By the time I caught up, he was on the steps of the hold, yelling past the bucket line at Quint. Three burly pirates had their full weight pressed against the failing patch, which was still squirting water around its edges. Two more crewmen were pulling lumber from the carpenter's room on the far side of the water barrels.

“Not even reinforced?” Healy was yelling.

“Not at speed!” Quint yelled back.

“Then how fast?”

Quint's face twisted in a pained grimace. “Eight . . . ?”

“Oh, —!”

I'd never heard my uncle curse before. He turned and pushed past me, back up the steps, bellowing as he went.

“THIRD MATE!”

Ismail came running. As he approached, Healy barked orders at him. “Pull a crew from the port side to back up the carpenter!”

“Roger that,” replied Ismail as he leaped up the steps for the gun deck.

Healy turned to me. “You're off carpenter duty and running messages for me. Find the gunner, tell him I need cannon at the aft gun ports. Aft! Understand?”

“Cannon at the aft gun ports,” I repeated.

“Then find me in my cabin. Go!”

THE SHIP'S CANNON UNLEASHED
another round just as I was repeating Healy's message to the soot-blackened gunner. The noise was so deafening that as I ran back up to Healy's cabin, my ears rang like someone was hammering sheet metal inside my head.

Healy was standing over the table with Pike and Spiggs. Pike was gesturing at a chart that was unscrolled in front of them.

“Anything more than two hours from high tide, we'll run aground at the far end,” Pike was telling my uncle.

Healy looked at Spiggs. The first mate shook his head. “It's too big a risk. Unless we know what the tide's—”

“We're doing it,” said Healy, cutting him off. “Chart the course and brief the sailors.”

Pike and Spiggs both winced. Whatever was about to happen, they didn't like it.

Healy opened the door to his cabin and nodded in my direction. “Tell the gunner all hands starboard and aft. We're running the Fangs.”

WHEN I RETURNED
from delivering Healy's message, he was back at the ship's wheel, and the
Grift
was in a turn so tight I had to grip a rail with both hands to stay on my feet next to him.

Looking ahead, I realized for the first time that we were close to shore. I could see the coast of the New Lands off our port side, and straight ahead to starboard was an offshore island, stretching east as far as I could see. A channel no more than a couple of miles wide separated the coast from the island.

The
Red Throat
was still half a mile from us, off starboard now and so far aft that I had to crane my neck around the poop deck to find her. A mile or two farther back in the haze were the massive bulks of the two Cartager men-of-war. The only signs of either
Frenzy
or
Blood Lust
were two smears of black smoke on the horizon.

We came out of the turn and the
Grift
leveled off, our bow pointing straight at the channel between the coast and the long island. The
Red Throat
's muzzles flashed again. I hit the deck, but the volley sailed wide of us. When I got back up, my uncle was watching me with an amused smirk.

“Son, when your number's up, ducking won't cheat the reaper. What happened to your wrist?”

“I, um . . .” I didn't want to tell him the truth, but my brain got stuck, and I couldn't come up with anything else. “Fell out of my hammock.”

Healy's smirk widened, and I felt my cheeks turn hot. “What happened to your head?” I asked, just to change the subject.

“Same thing.” He winked at me with his one good eye, and I couldn't help smiling.

The cannon roared under our feet. Healy whipped his head around in time to see the
Red Throat
's crooked foremast fall still farther off its line before the smoke from our guns blocked the view.

“Not bad,” Healy murmured. “Pity we can't finish her here.”

“Because of the patch failing?” I asked.

He nodded. “Do you understand what's happening?”

“Not really,” I admitted.

“Our enemies are down to three ships. And if I hadn't lost the ability to maneuver at speed, we might have settled things right here. But that's no longer an option. So we're plotting a course through the Fangs.”

He pointed at the channel in front of us.

“When we get closer, you'll see why they call it that—it's quite shallow, with a lot of exposed rock sticking up like teeth. Very tricky to navigate, and for all his bluster, the Ripper's a rather timid sailor. Couple that with him losing a mast, and it's likely he'll break off. Take the long way around Finger Island and try to catch us on the other side.” Healy glanced back at the
Red Throat,
which was coming into view again now that the smoke was clearing.

Its muzzles flashed a third time. Healy didn't even blink, and I had to fight the urge to flop onto my belly.

“But I suspect
Li Homaya
's got just the right mix of stupidity and arrogance”—he didn't bother to pause even as the boom of the
Red Throat
's cannon reached us, and its latest round sizzled into the sea not more than ten yards from the ship—“to follow us into the Fangs. If he does, he'll either sink on the rocks or run aground at the far end, and we can finish him off as we please. And if he's got brains enough not to follow us, he'll have to take the long way around with the Ripper. That'll give us time to position ourselves upwind on the far side before we reengage—which should help compensate for the fact that I can no longer turn to port without punching a hole in my ship. Any questions?”

I thought back to the ominous looks on Spiggs's and Pike's faces. “Just, um . . . the tide?”

Healy's mouth turned down at one corner. “That's the one fly in the ointment. If the tide's too low, there's a chance
we'll
run aground. In which case . . . the forward cannon on those men-of-war will make rather quick work of us.”

The voice of a lookout called down from the crow's nest.

“Red Throat's
breaking off!”

Healy looked back at the Ripper's ship. Her bow was nosing around, turning away from us.

Healy smiled. “And so he goes.”

Over the next ten minutes, there were a few final rounds of cannon fire—which kept me sweaty with fear even though they didn't faze my uncle a bit—but soon enough, the
Red Throat
was showing us her stern, the cockeyed foremast poking out to starboard like a broken tree branch.

Healy yawned as he watched her limp off toward the men-of-war, still moving in our direction. “Think I'll snatch a nap while we find out if the Short-Ears are game. You're welcome to string a hammock in my cabin if you don't think it'll end badly for you,” he said with a glance at my wrist.

“That's very kind,” I said. “But if there's time . . . my friend was injured, and I don't know if—”

“Go.”

I HEADED FOR
the surgeon's room
on the lower deck, where the pirates who had pulled Guts from the hold would've taken him.

A few strides from the doorway, I stopped in my tracks, my stomach dropping to somewhere around my knees.

There was a large canvas bag in front of the surgeon's door, the size and shape of a small man. In another location, at another time, it could have been any number of things. But right there, just then, there was no question what it was.

There was a body in there.

I was staring at it, my eyes filling up, when the door opened and a pirate stepped out, his bloodstained shirt open and his chest wrapped in a fresh bandage. As he strode past me, buttoning his shirt, the surgeon appeared.

I pointed to the body in the bag. “Is that . . . ?”

“Fells. He ran messages for the captain.”

I was so grateful to hear it wasn't Guts that I barely registered the news that the last man to hold my new job as messenger was dead.

“Was a boy brought up to you with—”

“Your mate? With the head wound? Yes, a while ago.”

“Is he all right?”

The surgeon frowned. “Hard to say. He's conscious now. But I think there may be brain damage. He's got a bad twitch, and he won't stop cursing.”

“No, he's just like that.”

“Oh . . . Well, in that case, he might just need some time to let the cobwebs clear.” The surgeon jerked his thumb toward a door a short way down the hall. “He's in the purser's cabin.”

I thanked the surgeon and went to the cabin. Guts was lying on a short, narrow bed. The room was so small I could barely stand inside it.

His eyes fluttered open when I came in, and he looked up at me with unfocused eyes. There was a bandage over his forehead. Underneath it, his face was pale and drawn.

“Battle over?” he croaked.

“Not yet,” I said. He looked so awful that for a moment, I worried the doctor had been right about the brain damage.