Dewey Lambdin - THE GUN KETCH

"Just 'round this outcrop, seventy yards or so," Lewrie grunted, calling a halt at last. "Mister Parham, your boat-gun at the foot of the shelf. Mister Mayhew, your two-pounder atop the shelf with Cony and his marksmen. Grape, canister or langridge at first, and keep 'em away from their boats as I bade you. Right. The rest of you lads, I want you ready to rush out and form a skirmish line from Mister Parham's gun to the beach."

There was a faint rustle in the air, and Lewrie pulled out his watch to check the time, which made him nod grimly. The rustle became a sizzling swoosh of roiled air, then a quavery moan. Alacrity's guns had just opened fire a mile-and-a-half away, shooting almost blind at the bluffs. Fowles' first ranging shot was on the way.

There was a thunderclap so close it seemed it went off in his pocket as the bluff to the north above the sea caves was struck. The iron ball exploded in a bright yellow flash of sparks, metallic shards, and shale, starting a small avalanche of gravel.And the sunrise echoed with the soft Fumm-umm of an unseen gun.

"Now where are you, you silly bastard?" Lewrie fretted, turning to look for Aemilia across the channel. Once she found her proper position, even her puny four-pounders could rake the beach, and the anchored vessels, across the quarter-mile strait. He was relieved to see a bowsprit protrude from behind the low foliage, and the first starkly pale tan panels of her jibs stood out against the dark green and dun.

Another round-shot droned in from the reefs, fired at maximum elevation with the quoin block removed from below the barrel's butt, and this struck short of the bluffs to raise a great pillar of foam in the inlet, about half a cable short of the anchored schooner.

The pirates were up, now, stirring and circling in hungover and bleary-eyed confusion. Some lay still, too comatose from rum or their excessive indulgences to be wakened. Women camp followers screamed or cursed in a cacophony of dialects and languages. Orders were shouted that for the moment went unheeded. They mostly dashed to the piles of weapons, drew swords to brandish against just what they did not yet know, stampeded first toward their boats, then back to the shelter of the piles of goods, or the bluff and the dry-cave entrance, as a ball moaned overhead to bury itself in the sand.

"Come on, Coltrop, come on!" Lewrie hissed to speed the cutter as she made her entrance as slow as a one-legged dowager trying to go up a flight of stairs. Aemilia was turned bows-on now, rounding the first western tip of the islet, her gaff mains'l winged out alee and her commissioning pendant streaming as long as she was. "Oh, bloody hell!"

Coltrop had run her aground on a sand bar! She canted over a little to leeward and came to a stop, slowly pivoting on her bows to show her starboard side, far short of the near tip of the islet where her guns would be in good range.

"I warned him that channel was tighter'n virgin's quim!" Alan raged. The bottom was hard sand, though, so he might yet get her off it, if he tried… but no!

Coltrop fired from where he was, the two four-pounders in her starboard battery coughing out round-shot at the schooner. They hit short and ricocheted once, almost rocked her as the ripple patterns expanded, but the range was too great to do any harm to her, or the beach.

There was no help for him, then. Lewrie and his party of fifty were on their own, with six men tied up in serving the boat-guns. Up against sixty or seventy alert and armed pirates!

"Mister Parham, shift your aim for the thickest throng yonder. Open fire," he ordered, hoping to cut the odds down, niceties bedamned.

"There are women among them, sir!" Parham protested, shocked.

"Cut-throats' whores, Mister Parham, cut-throats themselves, if they get their hands on you. Shift aim and fire! Mister Mayhew? Canister, up there! Volley into the next-biggest batch." Mayhew's face appeared over the lip of the rocky shelf for a moment, turned pale as he gulped, then withdrew.

"Anyone with a weapon, you are to kill," Lewrie told his hands. "And I mean anyone."

The boat-gun gave out a chuffing bark, a Rrrupp! of anger that startled a cloud of sea birds which had fled Aemilia's rude disturbance of their morning back out into mid-channel. A moment later, Mayhew's gun on the ledge barked as well, both explosions echoing and re-echoing along the rocky bluffs.

Two spreading shot-gun blasts of tightly packed canister flayed the sands, creating twin dust clouds. Shrieks of alarm, cries of pain erupted, as pirates and their fell women who had clumped together for mutual comfort in the face of danger were scythed down from behind, too intent on Aemilia, or the artillery fire from seaward.

"Skirmish line!" Lewrie shouted, stepping out in front. "Form line! Cock your locks! Level! Fire!"

Trigger mechanisms clacked, flints flew forward to scrape on frizzens' filelike rasps, pans ignited with tinny, high cracks, and Brown Bess spat out a sputtering ripple of musketry to raise even more screams, more terror, confusion and agony. And more pirates down.

Lewrie strode out in front as his men hastily reloaded, sword in hand, in the coat, cocked hat with dog's vane and gold lace, of a Sea Officer.

"In the King's name!" he bellowed in a quarter-deck voice. "I order you to lay down your arms, put up your hands, and surrender!"

Even the cries of the wounded ceased for a long, startled moment. Several of the nearest buccaneers did drop their weapons, while others further on ran about like headless chickens seeking an escape.

Then a musket shot sang past his ears like a fat bee, and some desperado shouted with derision. They knew they would hang iftaken, and some would rather go game, be slain, than face the noose. "Take 'em, lads! Them or us!"

"Mister Parham, fire!" Lewrie yelled, stepping back as several more shots rang out defiance. "They had their chance!"

The boat-guns lashed out again. Lewrie's muskets came back up, and locks were cocked. The barrels leveled. And fired.

"At 'em, Alacrities!" Lewrie called, waving his sword over his head to spur them on, and drawing his first of four pistols. "Come on! Take the boats!"

They surged forward at a shambling trot in the deep sand, going for the luggers first to deprive the raiders of an escape by water, to the beached longboats where they could kneel and fire. "Aemilias, take cover and shoot! Alacrities, with me!" You want to escape, he thought grimly-want your boats, hey? Then come and take 'em from us, you bastards!

The pirates did come, spurred by desperation. Without their boats they were nothing-crippled sailors, no matter how they had besmirched the noble calling of the sea. But they had to come across the bodies of their dead from the boat-guns' lashings, over whimpering and shattered wounded, so it was not a daring, neck-or-nothing charge. Blades clashed as Lewrie and his seamen met them. Some pistols popped, and white-faced men shouted in each others' faces to fan alight their flagging courage. They met and merged, and swirled in melee.

But when bayonets jabbed, when muskets swung or butt-stroked, when boarding pikes lanced wicked points forward, and when Navy hands went into the fearsome full cutlass drill, shoulder to shoulder, there was nothing in the world that could stand before them.

Right foot stamp, downward slash! Left foot, backward slash! Advance and balance motion, stamp and slash… slash and advance!

Alan crossed blades with a coppery skinned man with long and greasy hair, bare but for too-tight breeches and a flowered waistcoat and sash. His heavy cutlass rang on Alan's hanger all the way up his arm. He drew back to slash and Alan lunged low, giving him eight inches of steel in the belly! He moved right to face another foe armed with cutlass and dagger. This one Alan shot in the chest. A third came at him, a black armed with an ornate smallsword which he poked with inexpertly like a spear point.

No swordsman, Alan noted-a slavey just out of the fields. He parried, slashed to his right, shying him. Flying cutover to reengage steel against steel, a ringing double parry to force him high to open his guard, so he could raise a foot and kick him in the balls. The man doubled over, dropping his sword, and Alan chopped down into his neck and shoulder, then trampled over him. A seaman following put a pike into the fellow's stomach to finish him off.

"Madre de Dios!" A skinny little fellow paled as Alan advanced on him with gore sliming his threatening blade. He turned to run and the pikeman behind sprinted forward, shouldering Alan out of the way and jabbing the fellow through the kidneys.

Lewrie drew a deep breath and pulled out another loaded pistol while he had time, his hands shaking too hard to stuff the empty one into a coat pocket He let it drop to the sand to retrieve later.

More pirates were throwing down their weapons, those wounded and unable to fight longer, those who had given up all hope of escape. They threw themselves on their knees or curled up in fetal positions, waiting death or capture.

John Canoe trotted past, a huge West Indian seaman who'd taken his name for the manner he'd escaped his former owners years before. He engaged one of the few pirates who still had fight in him, a man as big as himself with a thick beard. John Canoe battered the man's cutlass aside with easy strength, then ran him through to the hilt, and lifted him up off the ground to dangle and wriggle like a piked salmon, keening shrilly in terror around his bloody vomit.

"Watch out, Canoe!" Lewrie shouted." 'Ware left!" as a black woman camp follower rose up and ran at him with a carving knife to avenge her man. Lewrie skipped to his left for a clear shot, took careful aim, and bowled the howling harpy over from a dead run with a.69 caliber ball in the chest, to skid bawling and writhing at Canoe's bare feet.

"Ya silly wo-man! Ya who'!" Canoe cursed her as he dropped her dying man on top of her. "Heah be ya whi' mon lovah, bitch! Wot kine o' fool ya be, ya fock de ones dot whipt ya, gahh!" Then he turned to Lewrie and gave him a sudden, radiant smile. "Ah thankee berry moch, cap'um, sah!"

Those freebooters who still hoped for escape had by then retreated into the cave at the top of the beach, and were sniping at the sailors.

"Take cover up here, lads!" Lewrie shouted. "Behind these boxes and chests! Shoot slow and steady to keep 'em busy. Mister Odrado?"

"Si, senhor capitan," the Portuguese bosun's mate panted, coming to his side, weary with the effort expended on killing."Round up the whole prisoners and put 'em at the base of that ledge down the beach. Tell off ten of the Aemilias to guard 'em. I want 'em searched close for weapons, mind. Don't let any more of the lads take hurt now this is almost over. The wounded may lie as they are for now. Theirs, that is. Get ours down to the boats."

"I do it, senhor capitan." "Early?"

"Aye, aye, sir," the quartermaster's mate answered. "Take three hands with muskets, just in case, and scale up the goat path yonder to the headland to signal Alacrity to cease fire," Lewrie ordered, as a broadside of five rounds warbled in short. "Canoe." "Aye, aye, sah."

"Go tell Mister Parham to bring his boat-gun here so he may put shot into the cave. Tell Mister Mayhew to cover the schooner for now with round-shot. Got that?"