The Sea Beggars (21 page)

The Spanish greatship was coming about, to follow the
Wayward Girl
. Clearly she meant to close with the smaller ship and grapple with her. Her great bulk lay between the
Wayward Girl
and the open sea, pinning the little ship against the coast, and on her decks men crowded thick along the rails, ready to board her and overwhelm her.

Mouse yelled, “There's another ship!”

He was pointing away down the sea. Jan glanced there and saw nothing and fixed his attention on the
Wayward Girl
again.

Pieter was trying to get his ship back up north of the hulk again, so that he could run down before the wind and take her in tow; but the Spanish greatship, lumbering powerfully along on a near parallel course, farther out to sea, was rapidly running her out of sea room. Jan bit his lips. He drummed with his hands on the rail of the hulk. Pieter was losing the wind. He had to come about soon, or run aground, and when he came about he would fly into the teeth of the greatship and her heavy guns and her boarding party.

“Come on!” He could stand still no longer. Kicking through the rubble on the deck, he found a well-dressed corpse with a saber in its hand, took the sword, and began hacking away the swaddling debris that clogged the hulk's deck.

“Here comes the other ship!” Mouse cried.

He put his shoulder to a broken spar and heaved it overboard, and with it went a mass of rigging and sail. The hulk seemed to rock up, lighter in the water. Mouse shouted again. Jan raised his eyes.

An oath escaped him. There was another ship, running down in the wind's eye from the north. A two-masted cog, whose round bow and stern proclaimed her Dutch built. On her high-stepped fore- and afterdecks were ranks of men with muskets. A gaudy banner of gold and green fluttered from the peak of her mainmast, and other, uglier trophies dangled from her yard ends—bodies, swathed in rusty black cloth. With the wind behind her this strange vessel swept down on the Spaniard, and the Spanish ship swung clumsily around to meet her.

Jan yelled. With the greatship thus distracted, the
Wayward Girl
had a clear path out to the open water, and Pieter seized the moment and brought his handy little ship about and made for the safety and sea room that stretched out beyond the greatship's stern.

The greatship lost the wind. In coming about to meet the strange craft she had missed her course. Her sails slatted and drooped flat against her masts, and she wallowed in the sea like a washtub. The strange ship bore down straight at her. Jan wondered if she meant to ram her. The newcomer was half the size of the greatship. Yet she charged down on the Spaniard with every sail spread.

“Jan!” On the dinghy, bobbing in the lee of the mastless hulk, Aart was standing up to yell at him. “What is going on?”

“There's another ship out here fighting the Spaniard!” Jan swept the sea with his gaze, looking for the
Wayward Girl
, and saw her far out on the water. Her square mainsail shortened to a vertical line. She was turning. “Here comes Pieter. Get ready.”

From the greatship came a roar of voices. The newcomer was sweeping down on her. At the last moment the strange ship swerved off a little, to pass astern of her, and the Spanish ship fired her guns.

The crack of splintering wood resounded across the water. A cannon-ball skipped over the waves and buried itself in the sea with a splash that went up like a tree of spray. The strange ship glided past the Spaniard's stern and muskets cracked and snapped on her decks. Along her stern overhang ran the words
Christ the Redeemer
. Still the greatship lay stubbornly dead in the water while her crew scrambled through her rigging and over her yards, trying to fill her sails with wind to give her life again. Between her and the strange ship the stretch of water widened as her course carried the newcomer away down the wind.

From the Spaniard's far side suddenly the
Wayward Girl
appeared, racing down so close to the greatship that Jan howled with fear and anger at his uncle. Distracted, the Spanish had not seen her; one or two of the huge Spanish guns went off, but the
Wayward Girl
, sailing almost under the greatship's rails, fired the bow gun, the waist culverin, and the two stern guns pointblank into the Spaniard's hull, and leaning with the wind she was racing off light as a deer before the greatship could recover.

Jan whooped. “God, the old man can sail!”

“There's more ships,” Mouse cried, and pointed.

A whole fleet of strange vessels was strung out along the horizon. The greatship had seen them too. With both her immediate enemies sailing off away from her, she finally gained the wind again. Her pouched canvas billowed and filled taut, and she gathered herself up out of the lap of the sea. The
Christ the Redeemer
was coming about, but she was hardly more nimble than the greatship herself with the wind over her stern, and the Spaniard put her bows straight for the sea and took the wind and ran.

Mouse was dancing on the rail of the hulk, his arms in the air. Jan grinned at him, gay with relief and victory. “Let's go below,” he said, “and see what it is we've been fighting for.” He ruffled the boy's hair. Mouse smiled up at him worshipfully, and Jan led him over to the nearest hatch and hauled the cover back.

“Wool.” Pieter kicked the nearest of the mountain of bales on the deck. The tide was ebbing, leaving the mastless ship solidly aground; Jan and his men had cleared the deck of bodies and rubble and brought up what of the cargo they could salvage. Bursting in through holes in her hull, the sea had gotten into most of the wool and a lot of the cloth. Pieter went on to the row of casks. “What's this?”

Jan pulled up a slat in the top of the cask he had opened and took out one of the sacks that filled it. Pieter kneaded it expertly with his fingers, feeling the contents through the cloth.

“Pepper. Good enough. Are they all the same?”

“I don't know.”

Pieter was looking off across the deck, over the rail, toward the sea. Night was falling. In the darkening air the half dozen ships lying to in the deep water seaward of the
Wayward Girl
were only vague shapes. Jan rubbed his hand on his thigh.

“What are they going to do?”

“I don't know,” Pieter said.

The strange fleet had come up on the heels of the Spanish greatship's retreat. They were all Dutch built, cogs and flyboats, showing the gold and green pennant, and when the Spanish ship fled they had calmly assumed a station just outside of the hulk.

“Who are they?” Jan said.

Pieter grunted. He stuck his pipe between his teeth and tramped on down the deck, past the heaps of cargo. “Anything else?”

Jan led him over to a wooden chest by the stump of the mainmast. Aart was standing there, his arms crossed, his back against the butt of the mast. Jan tipped up the lid of the chest with his foot.

“Hunh.” Pieter started to squat down, to get closer to the heaps of silver coins in the chest, and thought better of it. “Who else knows about it?”

“You and me. And Aart,” Jan said. He shut the lid again.

“Get it onto the
Wayward Girl
. Swim it over if you have to.” Pieter threw another narrow look toward the strange fleet.

“Who are they?” Jan asked him.

The old man puffed on his pipe. “Beggars,” he said. “Sea Beggars. Willem Lumey de la Marck and his pack. Pirates disguised as men of religion. You saw the meat hanging from his yardarms?”

Jan remembered the corpses dangling in their black shrouds and nodded.

“Priests. Lumey hates priests.”

Jan turned to Aart. “We have to get that chest over to the
Wayward Girl
if we mean to keep it.”

Pieter went over to a heap of little kegs and bent over them. “They're just waiting until we do the work here,” he said, forcing up the bung of the top keg with the tip of his knife. “Then they'll take it all. God-damned pirates.” The bung popped out with a squeak. Lifting the keg, he poured red wine into his mouth.

“I'll take the dinghy,” Aart said, and stooped to pick up the chest.

“You will not,” Jan said. “They'll know we're doing something.” He picked up the chest in both hands; it weighed as much as a good-sized child. “You can't swim with it; you'll go straight to the bottom.”

“Here they come,” Pieter said, and clicked his teeth together. He thumped the bung back into the hole in the little wine keg.

From the dark fleet that hemmed them in against the shore came a little boat, bobbing across the water toward the hulk. A torch blazed in her bow. Jan frowned, trying to make out how many men sat behind the hot glow of light, but could see only shadows. He wheeled around.

“Here.” He grabbed the chest from Aart and put it down again at the foot of the mast. Three long strides took him to a bundle of unfinished cloth that lay against the smashed railing. He yanked it open and tore off an arm's length of it and draped it over the chest. “Now.” Picking up his uncle, he set him down on top of the cloth like a little king. “Sit there and don't move.”

“Get your hands off me!” Pieter thrashed at him. Jan backed away, looking around, saw nothing else to do, and nodded to Aart.

“Call the rest of the men over here. We'll have a fire and drink the rest of this wine and see what can be done with these people who rescued us.”

“They never rescued us!” Pieter shouted.

“They did,” Jan said. “And we may as well admit it. Now, sit up, look smart, and don't move off that chest.”

The other men gathered around them, and hacking up other parts of the hulk, they made a fire in the middle of the deck, and warmed the wine in a pan over the flames. By that time the fleet's boat had come alongside, and the Sea Beggars were climbing up on the deck.

They strode across the blood-stained deck of the hulk into the firelight, eight men, all carrying as many weapons as they could hold, knives and swords in their belts, and pistols in their boot tops, and two with muskets on their shoulders. Their leader strutted forward on widespread feet. His clothes glittered in the firelight, heavy with gold embroidery and chips of jewels; down the center of his heavy surcoat ran the sacred letter
, wreathed in emblems. It was a priest's vestment, used at the solemn high Mass.

“Well, well,” Pieter said, around his pipe. “Lumey de la Marck, I see.”

The man in the priest's coat stopped on the far side of the fire, his fists planted on his hips. “I am Lumey de la Marck,” he said. “But I didn't expect to see you here, Pieter van Cleef.”

“Did you think I was ashore forever? Here's my nephew, Jan van Cleef, as good a hand with a big gun as any you'll find on the narrow seas.”

Jan gave his uncle a surprised glance, startled by the heady praise, and Lumey thrust his hand out to him.

“Well met, Jan van Cleef.”

From behind Lumey came a tall man in sober dark clothes of fine cloth and high boots; the hilts of the daggers and the sword in his belt were of chased silver.

“Van Treslong,” he said, “of the
Peter and Paul
.” And they all shook hands.

After him came a small round man with a wen on his cheek. “Dirk Sonoy, the
Katerina
.”

They greeted him, and one by one the other captains after him. Jan kept his gaze on Willem Lumey de la Marck. He had heard before of the leader of the Sea Beggars, tales of wild courage and butchery which the bold charge of Lumey's ship against the Spanish greatship gave him some measure of. A nobleman, like many of the Sea Beggars. Jan shuffled his feet together, his hands sliding behind him, uneasy.

Pieter leaned forward on his makeshift throne. “Let's have wine all around,” he said. “The night's chill. Aart—Willy—”

There were no cups; they passed the wine in the pan it had heated in, with the dipper from the hulk's water barrel to drink it by. Lumey drank a sip and stood back, running his gaze over the heaps of cargo on the deck around him.

“A fine, big ship,” he said, in his booming voice. “A true mare of Andalusia, and what does she carry, Pieter van Cleef?”

“Wool, as you see, mostly ruined. Cloth to be finished, and some spices.”

“All we've taken,” Jan said, “we'll gladly share with you, for saving us.”

“Oh, ho!” Lumey shouted with laughter. He tramped around in the little circle of firelight, his hands on his hips and his gold-embroidered coat sparkling and flashing. “What gratitude this is, from a good crew of Dutchmen!”

“Well said, I think,” said van Treslong, quietly, and smiled.

Dirk Sonoy was staring away into the dark. He wheeled around abruptly toward Jan.

“Your ship is the
Wayward Girl?
”

“Yes,” Jan said.

“She seems different. I didn't recognize her—I thought she was caravel-rigged.”

“No,” Pieter growled. He stuffed his pipe full of tobacco and reached into the fire for a splinter. “Fore-and-aft rigged, she always was, but the Spanish took her and rerigged her with the gaffsail. And she sails very prettily for it, too.”