Dewey Lambdin - The King

"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!