Chapter 12

Time to do what they pay us for, Cony,” Lewrie said decisively, shoving away what was left of his cold breakfast. “Damme all Banyan Days.”

Gruel, cheese, hard biscuit and small beer, with a banana for something sweet in place of a duff. Several days of the week were meatless, according to the strictures of the Victualling Board, and Lewrie felt no desire to end up paying for anything he wasn’t given permission to issue, even in foreign climes.

“Seems t’ me, sir,” Cony said with a rueful expression, “if’n they warnts us t’ fight strong an’ all, they’d make allowance fer a battle, they would.”

“Wish to God somebody would,” Alan grinned in return. He put on his coat, squared away his sword and donned his hat.

He stepped out onto the quarterdeck, just forward of the sweep of the tiller, and leaned one hip against the after capstan-head. The crew had stowed their hammocks away already, and stood swaying to the motion of their little ship. Evidently, they were not very hungry this morning, either. The cook was shoveling coals into the sea off the lee side, and his assistant was hauling up a bucket of seawater to put out his galley fire.

“Good morning, captain,” Hogue said from his station to leeward.

“Good morning to you, Mister Hogue. Any signal from Telesto?”

“Nothing yet, sir.”

But even as Hogue spoke, there was a tiny, shielded light that appeared on Teiesto’s taffrail far ahead of them, a tiny spark from a single lantern to show them where she was, followed by another from Lady Charlotte.

“Mister Hogue, prepare to put the ship about onto the wind,” Lewrie ordered. “We shall tack in succession.”

“Aye, sir!”

“Second light, sir,” Murray pointed out. “Her helm’s down.” And the two weak glims swung slowly into line as one, then ghosted to the right across their bows. A minute later, Lady Charlotte did the same. And when Lady Charlotte’s faint glimmer was directly on their starboard beam, so, too, did Culverin.

“Shake out our night reefs, Mister Murray. Mister Hogue, beat to Quarters,” Lewrie ordained. “And hoist the colors now.” Furniture, chests, provisions, livestock from the manger and any flimsy temporary partitions were struck below out of harm’s way. The decks were sanded for better traction for the gunners and brace-tenders. Fire-buckets were filled, and slow-matches lit in case the flint-lock strikers of their carronades did not function properly in the damp of a tropic dawn. The guns were run in on their wooden recoil slides, the tampions were removed from the muzzles and stowed out of the way. Serge powder cartridges were rammed firm, then heavy twenty-four-pounder solid shot were trundled down the barrels and seated with a thump from the rammers. Charges were pierced with metal prickers to give vent for the ignitions to come, and the secure lashings on the gunports were uncleated. They would wait to prime their guns until they had the enemy in sight, since the humidity might spoil the powder in the pans. With the pans empty, they check-snapped the flints to see if they had a good edge that would spark well against their checker-scored metal frizzens, then covered them with leather flaps to keep them dry.

“Stand easy,” Hogue instructed from the gun deck. “Mister Owen, I’ll see to those swivel-guns now.”

The night was still dark as a boot, with the island and its harbor a faintly heavier darkness ahead of their starboard bows. A thin line of charcoal grey heralded the false dawn to come, against which the masts and sails of the leading ships could almost be seen now and again. For a lookout gazing to seaward, they would still be invisible, their wakes lost in the general roil of offshore waves, to leeward of the rising sun.

“ ‘Ope this last’un’ll do fer all, sir,” Cony muttered, fetching Lewrie one last bracing mug of coffee.

“This coffee, or this battle, Cony?” Lewrie asked, amused in spite of the circumstances.

“Be nice t’ see England agin, sir.” Cony smiled. “Be damned nice to see tomorrow’s sunrise.”

“The battery to our rear is silenced, Sir Hugo,” Chiswick told his commanding officer, breathless from a quick jog-trot. “Mindanao pirates, mostly, with four Frenchmen to supervise. We lost four men.”

“Oh, I am most dreadfully sorry, sir,” Sir Hugo replied, but it was a perfunctory sort of sorrow. He dragged out his pocket watch and read the face with more ease. “False dawn. Quarter past five.”

“Yes, sir.”

“No enemy to our rear? No scouts or sentinels along our front, to your determination, Captain?” Sir Hugo went on.

“No, sir.”

“Very well. Rejoin your company and stand by.”

Sir Hugo paced out in front of his command. He could barely see most of it. The grenadier company lined up two deep, spaced out wider than he’d like, instead of shoulder to shoulder, but they would have to suit. The bandsmen with their drums and fifes, and Ayscough’s borrowed pipers, tricked out in cast-off red tunics. The six-pounder field guns, and behind them, the coehorn mortar crews. The color party nearest him. The other companies were too far away, too deep in the fringes of jungle.

He could see them in his mind’s eye, though. Could imagine the formed ranks standing easy with their muskets, with their officers to the front. One word of command and they would be erect as ramrods, ready for what this bloody morning would bring.

It was hot and close, the air like a steaming barber’s towel, and just as moist. There was no hint of rain, and the ground across which they would advance was dry and firm. It was simply the humidity of these climes making a slight mist that tried to hide the village from them. And hid his regiment from the foe.

Willoughby paced farther out in advance, with his subadar-major, the senior native officer, and his bearer, Chandra, by his side, until he was about twenty paces forward of his color party.

He consulted his watch again.

“Sah!” his bearer gasped with a quick, indrawn breath.

Willoughby looked up to see a woman and a boy child, not fifty paces off. They had arisen early, perhaps to fetch water or firewood for the morning cooking. They froze in place, almost froze in mid-step, as they might at the sight of a tiger. Then the woman gave out a shrill yelp and turned to run back to the village.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Sir Hugo groaned, “You brainless old bitch! They’re not even friends of yours, and you’d warn ‘em?”

“Mebbe jus’ frighten, sahib” Chandra commented, outwardly calm though his luxuriant white mustaches quivered as he chewed the lining of his mouth.

“Either way, she’ll give the alarm,” Sir Hugo sighed. He took a deep breath and opened his mouth.

“Reg’ment!” he boomed out loud as Stentor, and could hear the bushes in the jungle shiver as his men awoke from their standing doze.

“ ‘Tal’ion!” came the answering shouts from Gaunt and the other half-battalion commander.

“ ‘Shun!” Sir Hugo roared as he drew his smallsword from its scabbard. Lush green stamping of feet, muffled by vegetation. “Uncase the colors!”

Two color parties came forward from the jungle, the flag-staffs held low like pikes, until they were out in the open. The leather condoms were stripped off, and the colors rolled out to hang limp in the light breeze. Two British ensigns, one borrowed from a warship; the King’s Colors. Two Regimental Colors, one real, and one made up from light canvas and painted to resemble the pale yellow silk of an authentic regiment.

“Light companies will advance, fifty paces forward!”

The light companies left their extreme flank positions to trot out ahead of their line companies as skirmishers. Once in position, Sir Hugo turned to face the front, raised his sword on high and gave the decisive order. “The regiment will advance!”

There was a ruffle of drums, an eldritch wailing moan, a thump of a bass drum, and then came music—of a sort. It would be the first time anyone on this island, any Lanun Rover, had ever heard it—perhaps the first time French seamen had ever heard it—as the pipes began “All the Blue Bonnets Are O’er the Border.”

And the regiment emerged from the jungle. Two light companies. Two color parties. What seemed to be two grenadier companies massed in the center. And two ranks of men in red coats and white puggarees, with their muskets held at shoulder arms, legs moving to the lilting skirl of the pipes and the crash and roll of the drummers’ sticks, more urgent, more compelling than the stately one hundred steps a minute of a usual line battalion. As the ranks approached, Sir Hugo could see the expressions of his sepoys. First the same sort of alarm he wished to see on his foes, their eyes rolling at this strange new invention, and then the grins of delight. It wasn’t feringhee tootles on fifes, this strange new music. It was wild, heathen, barbaric and brutally martial. They seemed to like it.

A Lanun Rover was making water off the parapet of the low palisade. He had roistered with his fellow pirates all night long, drunk deep of coco-palm arrack. Had had his way with a frightened Filipino girl, who had known better than to complain, not if she knew what was good for the health of her family, and her own life.

She’d wanned from fear to resigned sullenness to his play, and he’d left her one tiny Spanish coin.

In the midst of his plashings, though, here had come a woman and child running for their lives from the forests. And he could barely see some strange men standing out in the open by the edge of the jungle. Oddly dressed men, but he had shrugged it off. There was no telling what the French would do next. And then had come a great shout. A series of shouts. And the most hideous screeching and howling he had ever heard in his life. A whole raped village or ship had never made such a noise!

And then he could see men. A lot of men, all dressed in red, with muskets at their shoulders, and between groups, he could see a cannon or two! Just like the tale the survivors had told of the slaughter on the island. He realized he’d forgotten his original order of business entirely, and had pissed down the entire front of his pareu. He drew a trembly breath and gave a great shout.

* * * *

Capitaine Guillaume Choundas liked the Orient, liked Oriental women. They were so tiny compared to the Breton girls back home, or the languid cows he’d had in Paris, all beef to the heel as if they had to emulate some artist’s reproduction from the classics. Tiny, childlike and helpless. Chinese girls were all right, he supposed, but he much preferred the fine-boned slim-ness of these Filipino natives. Indian whores in Pondichery were fine, but sometimes too European in their features, too wide across the beam, and cursed with heavy thighs.

Something had awakened him, and he lay there for a while, with the girl beside him. She’d fallen into an exhausted sleep after he’d used her well into the evening. She twitched and shuddered in some dream, perhaps reliving the memory of what he’d forced her to do in that endless night. As he relived it, he became prick-proud. He reached out to touch her smooth, peachlike bottom, and she stiffened, her breath halting as she awoke on the mats in his shore hut.

Tiny to begin with, not over fourteen years old and coltishly slim to top the bargain. He rolled over atop her, took hold of her wrists to hold her face-down, and insinuated a knee between her legs.

“Tuan!” she begged. He liked it when they were aware of what was in store. The first time was delicious. Whore or virgin, to be forced was outside their experience. But to repeat the act, and feel their fear, even their revulsion, that was sweetest of all. This was ancient Gallic, this rapine.

He used his thighs to part hers, to push her adolescent bottom up in the air a little so he could enter her from behind. She was panting in fear now, whining with pain as he forced his large member between the dry lips of her entrance, could almost taste the wetness waiting inside her once he was past the gates ...

“He”, merde!” he exclaimed, as he heard the strange noises, freezing in mid-stroke. “Zut! Putain!”

The bamboo door was kicked open and his first officer stood there, bending down. “The English are here! Troops and guns to the east, Capitainel”

Choundas shoved the girl away from him and scrambled for his breeches and stockings. “From the east? And just how did they land, eh, Gabord? Get back to the ship and prepare to up-anchor. We’ll have the ‘biftecs’ sailing into harbor with the sun behind them. I join you as soon as I stiffen our miserably blind allies. Go!”

He stood and donned his shirt, and gave the crawling girl a kick of frustration. “Goddamned useless, all of them! Putain!”

* * * *

“Reg’ment!”

“ ‘Tal’ion!” came the chorus.

“Halt!”

Rather a lot of ‘em, Sir Hugo thought, surveying his enemies. The village had come to a boil, and what seemed a brigade of pirates had emerged, swords, spears and antique muskets waving, each done up in gold, silk and batik-printed cotton as sleek and shiny as an army of poisonously colorful sea-snakes.

“Reg’ment will load!” he shouted, stepping back toward his color party. “Skirmishers, engage!”

The light companies broke off into skirmishing pairs, one man standing, and one kneeling. With a howl of rage, the Lanun Rovers lurched forward, thousands of them in an avenging mob. The flat crack of muskets sounded from the light companies as they opened fire. Once a man had discharged his piece, he would retreat a few paces behind his rear-rank man, who would cover him while he reloaded, and take a shot of his own. Back they came, giving ground slowly and raking the leading pirate ranks with ball, dropping a man here, a man there. The pirates checked, shying away from being the first man to die, while their leaders urged them on.

“Light companies, retire!” Sir Hugo howled. “Reg’ment! First rank, kneel!”

Emboldened by the seeming retreat of the skirmishers, the pirates found their courage again, and started walking forward. At first uneasily, then with greater boldness. Some began to trot, to save their lungs and strength for hand-to-hand combat later. Some braver souls broke into a run.

Sir Hugo stepped forward again, to ascertain that both light companies were safely out of the line of fire on the flanks.

Brown Bess was a hideously inaccurate weapon. Massed gunfire shoulder to shoulder settled the day, delivered at a man-killing sixty yards. To strike a man in the middle, one aimed high for the neck at that range, even so. With his regiments deployed in only two ranks Sir Hugo had to wait to let them come even closer.

“Cock your locks!” Sixty yards, and mechanical crickets sang.

“Present!” Fifty yards, and barrels were leveled with sighs.

Forty yards. “Fire!”

The long line of musketmen erupted in a wall of gunpowder and the crackling reports of priming pans and rammed charges sounding like burning twigs. Pirates screamed in surprise, and went down like wheat.

“Second rank ... cock your locks! Present ... fire!”

He could hear the rattle of ramrods just before the second rank pulled their triggers and the snapping and crackling rang up and down the line. More pirates howled, with pain this time, and he saw men driven backward, thrown off their feet and back into their mates by the sledgehammer blows of .75 caliber lead ball.

“Guns!” he yelled, turning to glare at Captain Addams. And the artillery went off, rippling from the center half-battery of six-pounders out to the flanks where the converted boat-guns barked and reared on their trails.

“Well, Goddamn!” Sir Hugo spat. He’d never seen the like, not in the last war certainly, not at Gibraltar for sure. The air was so moist with humidity that when the artillery discharged, those brutal barrels not only flung out a huge cloud of spent powder and sparks, they split the air with their loads, leaving a misty trail behind.

The best one could expect from any field gun loaded with canister and grape was about five hundred yards, and one usually saw the end result, but not the passage of shot. But this time, it was as if each barrel had flung out a giant’s phantas-magorical fist of roiled air that went milky as the shock wave passed through it. Like a row of shotguns, the artillery cleaved great swathes from the enemy ranks. Densely packed as they were, they went down by platoons. Before each piece, there was a mown lane of dead and dying twenty yards across and three times that deep!

“Platoon fire!” Sir Hugo roared. Now for the grim business to continue in normal fashion, to create a continuous rolling volley of fire up and down the line. No one could fire faster and with more effect than an English-trained regiment.

The pipes had been skirling out something Sir Hugo had never heard before. Now, with no need to set a marching pace, they broke into civilian strathspeys and reels. “The Wind That Shook the Barley,” “The Devil among the Tailors” and “The High Road to Linton.” Hard-driving, frightening in their hurried pace, for all their gaiety, dance tunes turned to the Devil’s business amid the rattling of musketry and the deeper-bellied slamming of the guns.

“They’re breaking!” Major Gaunt shouted. “They’re retiring!”

“Cease fire! Load! Fix bayonets!”

“Fix ... bayonets!” the officers repeated eerily, and the sudden silence was broken by the slither of steel, steel that winked and glittered in the dawn.

“The 19^th will advance!”

The pipers cut off their latest reel, extemporizing themselves back into a march as the coehorn mortars began to fire. Explosively fused round-shot lofted overhead to burst in mid-air above the wavering hordes of pirates, who had just begun to screw their courage back to the sticking post, and were ready to charge once more.

It was the guns that decided the matter. Slow to roll between the company ranks, the regiment had to stay to a half-step pace even with the pipes urging them on, so that they looked as if they minced forward, but with both ranks bearing musket-stocks held close to the hip, barrels and wicked bayonets inclined forward. And for bayonet work, the sepoys had to be closer together, shoulder to shoulder, reducing their front to a bare two hundred yards.

With an unintelligible shout, the native pirates came forward to meet them once more, sure they could sweep around both flanks and encircle them this time, and chop them to bits at last.

“Reg’ment ... halt!” Sir Hugo screamed. “First rank, kneel! Cock your locks! We’ll serve ‘em another portion of the hottest curry they’ve ever tasted, by God!”

Chiswick pulled back the fire-locks of his two pistols, stuck his smallsword into the turf in front of him, and stood ready, with his nerves singing a gibbering song as that manic horde came on.

“By volley ... first rank ... fire!”

Twenty muskets discharged at sixty yards. Perhaps nine foe-men went down, trampled by their fellows in their rage to get at Sir Hugo’s men.

‘Too damned soon!” he cursed himself. “Second rank, present! Fire!” Another eight or nine pirates were hammered backward.

Too few once more! The artillery subadar looked at him, and he waved his arm vigorously. Both boat-guns bucked and reared, slashing the front of that implacable mob with grape and canister, and finally they checked their headlong rush, shying away for a second.

“Goddamnit!” Chiswick moaned. He had shot all his bolts, and there was nothing left. Although his immediate front was cleared, there were at least a hundred foe sweeping his right flank. He fired both his pistols, and took down one man, then cast them aside and drew his sword from the earth. “Bayonets! Charge!”

His troops went in at a rush, weapons fully extended, to be met with shields, spears and sword blades. At first, they carried all in front of them with bayonet and musket-butt. Chiswick carved a spearman’s face open, reversed and ripped the belly from another to his left. Nandu gave a great scream as he was shouldered backward and stumbled under the point of a third. Chiswick hammered the edge of his blade across the foe’s back; the man screamed like a rabbit with his spine cut in half, then twitched uncontrollably.

“Dahnyavahd, sahib, dahnyavahd!” Nandu shivered as Chiswick helped him to his feet. “Achcha!”*

*”Thanks, sahib, thanks! Good!”

* * * *

“Bloody young fool!” Sir Hugo grumbled. “Captain Yorke, face right, double time and reinforce the right flank! Support the guns! Nineteenth! Charge!”

Once again, two slim ranks of musketeers had shattered pirate ambitions, and the guns had strewn the ground with howling, broken wounded. It was time to go in with cold steel, or be driven back.

“One more charge!” Choundas insisted.

“No tuan, boats!” his interpreter shouted back as the pirate chieftain raved and slobbered with wrath. “He want go now! No good this place no more! No good fight on land!”

“He’ll sail off and leave all his treasure?” Choundas sneered coldly. “Sail off and abandon all my gifts? All the muskets and shot?”

“He say, you want, you stay and keep, tuan” the interpreter finally replied. “He go Illana. Steal more nex’ year.”

“Filthy cowards,” Choundas whispered. “Filthy pagan brutes!” He turned on his heel and stalked off for the waiting launch, his face burning with anger at this final failure of his ally, this final proof of their utter uselessness. And with his own failure as well. He had no hope now of a raiding season. He’d seen the two regimental colors and the massed bands, all the artillery that only two one-battalion units could array. Where had the heretical English gotten so many ships to carry that many troops, and then land them on the eastern shore, where he had not expected them? Only an overt operation with the full strength of the Royal Navy could put such an expedition at sea and support it this far from India. Something had happened to force the English to take the lid of secrecy off. Had another war broken out back home of which he was unaware?

“To the ship,” he snapped at his waiting boat crew as he sat down in the stern. “And quickly!”

“He’, merde alors!” his new coxswain groaned, pointing out to sea. “Les Anglais!”