Dewey Lambdin - The King

"A guinea for that gunner, Mister Owen, my word on it!" Alan vowed.

"And a quarter less five!" the leadsman called out over the roar of the battle.

"Damme, sir, we could get inshore even closer!" Hogue shouted. "We're dead astern of Poisson D'Or's anchorage. Deep water, sir!"

"Luff up again, quartermaster. Pinch us closer inshore!" Alan commanded. "Mister Owen, load your next broadside with canister and grape-shot! Put an iron hail on the beach and skin the bastards!"

Culverin rounded up into the wind, ghosting almost to a stop with her sails shivering and thrashing, until the leadsman found only three fathoms of water. The quartermaster put his tiller over to the windward side to fill the sails with wind, and she heeled hard for a moment before riding back upright. They were now only a single cable off the beach, two hundred yards, just as the central part of the village came abeam. Pirates were falling back in disorder through the town, massing on the beach and heaving to launch their boats for an escape.

Alan could almost hear the sudden fatalistic sighs, the groans of alarm, as they saw the trim little ketch with her guns run out and the muzzles staring them between the eyes.

"As you bear… fire!" Lewrie called.

Five carronades lurched inboard on their recoil slides. Five crashing bellows of noise, stink and shudders. Five great blooms of smoke towered over her sides and drifted away to leeward through her sails. Five fists of God struck the beach, hewing away everything they touched, taking down the bamboo log palisade behind the beach, scything the palms above the high-tide line, lashing the thatched rooves. But most particularly, flailing the sand into a bloody cloud and scattering Lanun Rovers, bowling them over like nine-pins. And when the smoke cleared, the beach had been abandoned by the living, with only the broken dead and whimpering wounded remaining.

"Merciful God in Heaven!" Murray whispered in awe at what they had wrought. "Bloody…"

"And again, Mister Owen!" Lewrie bade. "Grape and canister!"

The next broadside only thrashed at the heels of the pirates, who fled that threat of death, back into the palisaded village for shelter, bold sea-rovers too afraid to save their ships.

"They're afire up yonder, sir," Murray pointed.

Lewrie raised his glass and looked toward the eastern end of the harbor. Praos were burning there, smudging the dawn with greasy coils of smoke and ruddy flame. "I see soldiers on the beach there!" he rejoiced. "Mister Owen, direct your fire upon the village walls and clear the way for the troops!"

"Aye, sir!"

"And a half, two!" the leadsman warned.

"I believe we may haul our wind a point or two for now, men," Lewrie told his helmsman. The long sweep of the tiller was put over to starboard, and the bows swung off the wind. Deck crew flung themselves onto the belaying pins to free the sheets and ease the set of the sails to draw more wind.

And Culverin slid to a stop.

"One fathom and a quarter!" the leadsman called out, much too late.

"Well, shit!" Lewrie fumed, turning red with embarrassment at running solidly aground, right in the midst of a battle. Of all the places to choose from, he'd staggered right onto an uncharted sandbar!

"Uhm, she struck mighty easy-like, sir." Murray frowned, his mouth working hard. "Prob'ly didn't do no damage t' her quickwork. Her gripe an' her cut-water is solid enough, and she's a tough old lady, she is, sir. Rat-run bottom, too. Ahh… er, that is, fer when the tide goes out, sir."

"Ah," Lewrie sighed, wishing it was possible to die of mortification. "Hmm. Yes. The tide. Bloody hell!"

"Aye, sir," Murray commiserated, taking a pace away.

"Well, damn my eyes!" Lewrie sighed heavily, one hand on his hip and gazing up at the masthead for clues. "Look, have 'Chips' go below and sound the forepeak to see if there's any leakage. A hand that's a good swimmer over the bows to see how hard she's… stuck! And boat crews into the launch and cutter to see if we may tow out the stream or kedge anchor and work her off. Before we're left high and bloody dry 'til supper-time."

"Aye, sir!" Murray replied, knuckling his brow.

"Damn all hard luck, sir," Hogue told him.

"I feel like such a goose-brained… twit!" Lewrie confessed.

"Happens to the best, I'm told, sir," Hogue added, though he had to work at keeping a straight face.

There was a shattering explosion just at that moment, which spun them about in their tracks. Something had set fire to Cuddalore, anchored farther to the east-perhaps a few die-hards from the prize crew Choundas had put aboard to safeguard her from being plundered by his allies. She had just gone up in a titanic blast as her magazines burst, ripping her into a plume of fragments.

Farther east, and out in deeper waters, Poisson D'Or was still fighting, with Telesto close aboard on her left beam as they fell off the wind to the north for the chain of tiny islets that guarded this harbor from the opposite Monsoons. Lady Charlotte had continued on easterly as she could, to cross the French ship's stern and rake her before turning north as well on the far side, to lay Poisson D'Or in a savage cross-fire.

'To think that but for a moment of stupidity, we could be a part of that!" Lewrie said with a bitter growl. "God, what a glorious fight they're having. And we've missed it!"

"Grand seats, though, sir," Hogue replied cheerfully. "Right in the stalls, as it were, to witness it."

Owen came up the starboard ladder to the quarterdeck and gave a cough to let them know he was there. " 'Scuse me, sir, but I've flat run outa targets, sir. No more o' those pirates t' be seen, an' half the village knocked down s' far, sir. Want me t' keep on?"

"No, Mister Owen. Continue to fire with one gun only, and I wish to have your other gunners for boat crews. We have to kedge off before the tide runs out too much."

"Aye, sir."

"Sir!" Murray called. "Those boats yonder! From Poison Door, sir! Tryin' t' land on the beach!"

Lewrie seized his glass and climbed up on the shore-side bulwark to peer at the two longboats being rowed ashore.

"Choundas!" Lewrie howled with frustration. "Can we lay a gun on him? He'll get away into the jungle, else!"

"Er, nossir," Owen almost moaned, wringing his grimy hands in frustration. "He's outa our gun-arcs, 'less we had a fo'c'sle chase-gun. An' it don't look like he'll put it anywhere close t' our poor range!"

"He'll get away at last!" Lewrie snorted in disbelief. All of their labors and suffering for nothing… again! "Mister Hogue!"

"Sir?"

"Take charge of the ship, sir," Lewrie exclaimed. "Keep Mister Murray and Mister Owen with you, and defend her should the pirates try to get off the beach and take her now she's aground. Use your artillery over our heads should we run into trouble on the beach. Are the boat crews assembled? Good. Arm them. Muskets, a pistol each and a cutlass. Cony, fetch my case of pistols!"

The cutter had eight oarsmen, a bow-man and Cony as coxswain. The launch had a total of eight men aboard. Instead of a kedge anchor lowered into the stern-sheets, or one of the stern cables, the men were surprised to receive arms.

"Row for the beach!" Lewrie snapped, "Row like the Devil was at your heels. I want yon bastard!"

They cast off and put their backs to it, digging in deep with their oar-blades and grunting with the exertion, Lewrie's cutter in the lead. He stood in the bows, loading his pistols.

"Not straight for the beach, Cony. Take us east up the coast for a ways before cutting in. Closer to them before we ground."

"Aye, sir," Cony replied, angling the tiller-bar under his arm to steer them more slant-wise across the lapping wavelets.

Choundas looked up from gazing at the bottom-boards of his boat with a bleak expression. The eastern palisade of the village was yet being defended, but he could see most of the pirates streaming off for safety, south through the longest wall and over the rice-paddies into the jungle. The remaining praos on the strand were on fire, damaged or under the guns of the ketch-rigged gun-boat. There would have been no safety aboard Cuddalore, minus her topmasts and rigging, so after picking up his tiny watch party from her, he had set her on fire, so the "biftecs" would not have the satisfaction of recapturing her.

"She's aground, I think," he said to no one, turning to look at the saucy little ketch. "And a dropping tide."

No means of escape there, either, even if his small party could take her.

Coehorn mortar shells were bursting farther inland, over those rice-paddies, and he could hear the muffled popping and crackling of musketry in a steady, rolling platoon-fire. They would have to run that deadly gauntlet across the paddy dykes to escape. And from the continual, thin screaming they could barely hear, that way was being turned into a killing-ground.

Choundas swiveled aft to look at his beautiful ship. Poisson D'Or, one of the finest thirty-two-gunned frigates that had ever swum, was almost hull-down up the fringe of islets, wreathed in a mushroom cloud of gunpowder, with two of her masts gone. As thinly manned as she was, after losing La Malouine and his best hands, she was putting up a marvelous fight, but she was going to lose. It was fated.

And he wasn't aboard to lead the fight in her, when she was battling for her life, as a captain, as an officer of the French Navy should be! No, he had waited too long, trying to put some spine into that churlish native chieftain. Who could have expected the damned English to land their troops on the east side of the island and march overland through all that trackless jungle, and then attack him from the west with their ships? Only the insane would beat against the wind and attack from leeward, when the best approach would have been to ghost into harbor with a following wind, with the rising sun at their backs to ruin his gunners' aim. Everything had gone wrong!

"What shall we do now, sir?" one of his surviving garde de la marines asked him in a soft whisper close to his ear. Choundas lifted his face to gaze at him. Nineteen years old, the equivalent of an English midshipman, an officer-in-training.

Choundas wondered just what sort of lesson Valmette was learning today.

"Steer for the beach, timonier" Choundas instructed his new cox'n. "Land us west of the land fighting, but out of range of those guns on the ketch. This side of the eastern palisade. We shall take a path through the village, go out its western side, and get into the jungle away from the 'biftecs' artillery. Then strike down the western coast and find a decent seagoing boat. A prao, perhaps."

"Two boats setting out from the ketch, sir," Valmette warned. "To kedge her off? Could we take her?"

'Too few of us," Choundas snapped, having already counted heads and discounted their chances. "And their boats are no better than ours for deep ocean."

Choundas took a second look. Small as his party was, he had more men, well-armed men, than what appeared in the English boats.

"Hostages, perhaps, mes amis!" Choundas brightened. "For safe passage out of here. Timonier, steer to meet them in the shallows. Men, ready your muskets! I want prisoners. An officer if we can."