The Mountain of Gold (27 page)

Francis Gale came on deck and contemplated the sight. 'Should I recite the prayers ordained for battle, Captain?' he asked.

'Aye, Francis,' I said, 'for I think at this moment we need God's assistance.'

The chaplain of the
Seraph
stood at the quarterdeck rail and addressed his somewhat preoccupied congregation. In truth he had few immediate listeners, for most of the crew were about their duties upon the yards or at the guns. But Francis had a powerful voice, the sea was calm and it was a small ship; few of our men could not have heard his words, even above the dreadful cries of the oncoming Salleemen. The earnest clerics who had composed the Book of Common Prayer no doubt intended their sentences to bring consolation and steadfastness to seamen about to face the perils of battle; but this was the second time I had heard these prayers uttered, and I found that they only heightened the foreboding that every man on the
Seraph
(or perhaps, all except one) felt in their hearts.

'Oh God,' Francis continued, 'thou art a strong tower of defence to all that flee unto thee; O save us from the violence of the enemy.'

The efficacy of the prayer was lessened by the arrival upon the quarterdeck of Phineas Musk, whose curious features and perennially disapproving expression made him the perfect harbinger of doom. He threw a large canvas sack down about the deck. The contents clanked loudly, interrupting Francis Gale's flow.

'Breastplate,' panted Musk, 'and sword, and pistols. I'm too old for this carrying, that I am. Time you got a young servant or six, like every other bloody captain in this infernal navy has got.' He squinted at the approaching galleys. 'Damn. Always thought I'd die in a whore, not cut to pieces by some stinking heathens.'

Despite his complaints, Musk assisted me into my armour. I suspected that even if I did take on some youthful servants, they would find themselves with precious little to do; whatever his nominal rank, and however loud his grumbles, Phineas Musk would never voluntarily relinquish the proprietary rights that he seemed to believe himself to possess over the entire House of Quinton, and over Captain Matthew Quinton in particular.

Suitably accoutred for battle, I turned my attention once more to the oncoming enemy. The shrieks and ever more rapid drumbeats were louder by the minute, a hellish cacophony of approaching doom.

'Their speed, Mister Castle?' I demanded.

'Six knots, perhaps. Maybe seven.'

'And ours?'

The log-line was just being hauled in. 'Two knots!' cried a Cornish voice.

I looked at our limp sails and ensign. In desperation, I asked Francis Gale to offer up a prayer for a stronger breeze, and that generous soul obliged, although his face betrayed ample doubt in the efficacy of the gesture.

'Can we not set more sail, Mister Castle? Mister Farrell?' Their shrugs told me what I already knew. We had all sails set—even stunsails, then a new-fangled innovation frowned upon by many veteran seamen. But with such a feeble breeze, we might as well have set every inch of canvas in England, and my Lady Castlemaine's breeches with it, for all the good it would have done us.

The galleys were manoeuvring to approach from dead ahead, dead astern and from the quarters, where our formidable broadside, our one and only weapon, would be ineffective against them. Despite this, I ordered the decks cleared and the guns manned and run out on both sides; we did not need many men aloft, and perhaps some lucky shots might disable a galley or two. Yet as I gave my orders, two conflicting thoughts occurred to me. One was a memory, dim and elusive, of something that Tris had once made me read. The other was a stratagem so unlikely that it was unworthy of being spoken. Yet the prospect of being hacked to pieces by a blood-crazed horde has a way of drawing the strangest of words from a man's mouth.

So it was that I turned to Brian Doyle O'Dwyer, alias Omar Ibrahim. 'Colonel O'Dwyer,' I said. 'You have long experience of commanding such craft as those. You will know better than any of us what they can do, and what they will expect us to do. So, sir, in the name of the king and the God whom we both serve—' Francis Gale raised an eyebrow at that—'how would you advise us to evade them?'

The Irishman looked at me in seemingly unfeigned astonishment. He would have known that every man on that deck believed the Sallee fleet had come to rescue him. He would have seen in our eyes that we suspected him of arranging to bring it down upon us in the first place. If that was so, he would never assist us, his enemies, to evade the approaching galleys, his friends.

Yet as rapidly as the Salleemen were closing us, we still had the best part of a glass before they would be alongside. Ample time for Captain Matthew Quinton to order the execution of an Irish renegade who lied, or said nothing.

I looked O'Dwyer directly in the eye, and smiled.
If we are to die, my friend,
I thought,
then you will most certainly die before us.

The Irishman returned my stare. It was impossible to fathom the emotions that might have boiled behind those eyes. Finally, he said, 'Well, now. Regardless of all else, Captain, you need headway. That will buy you a little time, and perhaps time will buy you a fresh wind. At the very least, headway will allow you to manoeuvre, and it will give the rover galleys more distance to cover. And with more distance—'

Thucydides.
That was the man. 'With more distance to cover,' I said, 'the more exhausted the rowers will become. They will have to lose speed to recover their strength.'

O'Dwyer bowed his head in acknowledgement. 'Just so, Captain Quinton.'

'Then how do we gain headway?'

Before O'Dwyer could respond, Kit Farrell spoke up. 'Sweeps!' he cried. 'Take the men off the guns, and put out our sweeps. They might give us an extra knot or so, probably no more at first. But as the colonel says, it will buy us time and a little manoeuvrability.'

My order to deploy sweeps was relayed down to the main deck, and no more than two or three minutes passed before the first of the long oars protruded tentatively from the sweep ports below the main deck battery. Relatively few ships in the King's Navy still carried sweeps, which could be used to aid manoeuvring in harbours and calms; they had gone out of fashion some ten years previously, and would duly come back into fashion again some ten years later, for such is the perversity of seamen. But the half-mad master shipwright who built the
Seraph
had insisted on fitting sweep ports: he was convinced our ship was ordained to bring back King Arthur from Avalon, and it would not do for his mythical Majesty to be becalmed. Thus we had fourteen sweep ports on each side. We had used them a little in the Downs: most of my Cornish lads were well accustomed to rowing craft, their vessels of choice for fishing and smuggling alike, but others in the crew were not so practised in their use. I heard not a few grumbles drift up from the deck below to the effect that they were honest English or Cornish seamen, not pestilential galley slaves. Inevitably, it took several strokes for the
Seraph's
makeshift rowers to achieve anything like a coordinated action, with the sweeps on both sides and along the length of the hull breaking the water at roughly the same time. If our movement across the ocean was any faster, it was barely discernible. And all the while the more expert galleys came on, the shrieks of their crews and the beat of their drums growing ever louder.

William Castle pointed to the nearest craft, which was approaching fast, fine on our larboard bow. Her captain, yet another Christian renegade by the pale looks of him, had a hand raised in what might have been a gesture of defiance; or else, perhaps, a salutation to a kindred spirit that he recognised upon our deck. 'He's stretching ahead of his brethren, Captain,' said my lieutenant. 'Stretching a mite too far, I'd reckon.'

O'Dwyer nodded. 'Seeking the lion's share of the booty. My old friends favour acting in concert only until they can sniff prize money in their nostrils: then it's every man for himself.'

I whispered to Castle, for I did not wish the renegade to hear my suggestion. My lieutenant nodded and whispered an urgent reply. I then surreptitiously despatched a boy with a message for Gunner Lindman. A quiet word with Kit Farrell: he sauntered nonchalantly from the quarterdeck down to the waist, as though to attend to some urgent matter there.

Nothing seemed to change. At least, O'Dwyer noticed nothing; he was intent on the headmost galley, approaching us at a sharp angle fine on the larboard bow, safe from the arc of our guns.

Or so it thought. The
Seraph
shuddered. Slowly, painfully slowly, the bowsprit began to swing a little to starboard. Then the turn became sharper.

O'Dwyer ran to the starboard rail. His expression was unreadable, but after some moments he nodded grimly. 'Good,' he said. 'Very good. Very ingenious. Helm hard to starboard, only the forward sweeps on the starboard beam to row, full ahead on the larboard sweeps. A galley manoeuvre.'

'Not quite,' I said. 'After all, Colonel, in a galley you would still have rowers at the starboard rear sweeps. Chained to them, indeed. You would not—could not—have withdrawn them to man the larboard guns.'

O'Dwyer crossed the quarterdeck again to ascertain the truth of my words. The
Seraph
's sudden change of direction had opened up the arc for our larboard broadside. The galley, intent on riches and careless of the risks, was too committed to its course, its rowers too exhausted to respond swiftly to any countermanding orders.

I glanced at Castle and Kit Farrell, who nodded in unison.

'Give fire!' I cried.

A nearly simultaneous roar from the eight cannon of the larboard battery on the main deck.

True to his word at my first meeting with him, Lindman had drilled our gun crews relentlessly during our voyage from the Downs. Cornishmen and Bristolians had been cajoled and cudgelled into working together until their gunnery could stand comparison with any crew afloat.

So it proved now. At Castle's suggestion, I had ordered four of the guns to be loaded with round shot and to aim low; the other four to be loaded with chainshot and grapeshot, and to aim high. The round balls smashed into the fragile bow of the galley. The range was so close, perhaps two hundred yards or less, and the scantlings of the galley's hull so light, that we could not fail to hole her fatally beneath the water line. On her upper deck, the lethal combination of chain and grape had their accustomed effect. Parts of what had so recently been men splashed into the sea or spattered the mast and deck. A few grasped hold of the crimson sockets where their limbs had been and screamed in death-agony. The waving captain's hands now covered his eyes, attempting in vain to staunch the streams of blood that flowed down his cheeks.

The galley lost momentum. A few men on her deck—her other officers, presumably—shrieked and waved scimitars at us in defiance, but their men seemed to have little appetite for a fight. Her two fellows to larboard of us slowed, appalled by what they had witnessed, and signalled to their westerly consorts. After all, rovers and corsairs alike were used to attacking fat, near-defenceless merchantmen, overwhelming them by a combination of speed, terror and weight of manpower; but against a royal warship, even one becalmed and outnumbered five to one in hulls, those advantages were at least partly negated. Lindman's gun crews returned to their sweeps and the
Seraph
gathered speed on her new course, south and west, toward the horizon which was bound to shelter the
Jersey
—and if we assumed that, then so would the Sallee rovers and their fast-tiring crews.

As I watched the stricken galley fall astern of us, a wisp of cloth brushed my cheek. A loose strand from our ensign.

The breeze was strengthening. The king himself had assured me that the
Seraph
could outrun anything on the world's oceans; it was time to see whether that claim was yet another example of a mad shipwright's ravings and of divine-right bravado alike. As I turned to give the order for the men to abandon sweeps and man the sails, their natural environs, I caught a glimpse of O'Dwyer. He stood at the rail, looking intently upon the sinking Salleeman. It might have been the breeze, or something else entirely, but as Francis Gale intoned the prayers for the dead and dying, there appeared to be a tear in the Irishman's eye.

We were back in company with the
Jersey
and
Prospect of Blakeney,
on course once again for our rendezvous with O'Dwyer's dubious mountain. I was in my cabin, writing a report of our escape from the rover fleet for the eyes of my monarch and Lord Admiral, when I was interrupted by Shish, the carpenter, with a sombre expression upon his young face. He reported bleakly that the chain pumps were failing fast; much faster than through natural wear-and-tear. Our precipitate escape from the Salleemen, straining every sinew of the hull once the wind was properly filling our sails, must have brought the problem to a head, he said. I summoned Lieutenant Castle, and we three went below to examine the problem.

Under the main deck was the alien world of the hold, the storerooms, and at the bottom of it all, the bilges. I have rarely been in a place so unremittingly foul. It was so low that I was bent almost double. There was little light, and the bilge-stink made me retch; on some particularly dirty ships, those rancid gases have been potent enough to kill men, and—it is said—to blow up the entire vessel. Here, beneath the waterline, the constant roar of water passing along our hull gave a real sense of the fragility of our poor craft. I knew little of the workings of our chain-pumps, but I knew all too well what the consequences would be if they failed to function: the Atlantic would seep insidiously between our planks and frames, for not even the finest caulking in the world could prevent that, and with nothing to carry it away, the water would rise within the hold. The
Seraph
would sink.

Shish led Castle and myself to the starboard of our two pumps; the other was in the same state, he said. The carpenter handed his lantern to Castle and then took away a panel that partly encased the chain-pump well. It was a simple mechanism. A chain belt fitted with plates named burrs was worked by men at winches upon the gundeck; the water then discharged from the burrs into a tube which carried it out of the hull.