“Sails, port forward!” the lookout of Port Mandu called down to Captain Wilkie. “It’s Pinquickle!”
Wilkie looked at the sun high above and nodded, mumbling, “Right on time.” To the lookout, he called, “How far’s Massayo, and how far’s the Crocodile?”
“Pinquickle’s sails are at the edge, so might be three leagues,” the lookout replied. Then, a moment later, she called down, “Two for the Crocodile.”
Wilkie wetted his finger and held it up, gauging the wind. He looked to his pennants for confirmation, satisfied that he had properly anticipated the speed and direction.
The winds were favorable now, strong from the east off the hot summer sands, which meant that the larger but less agile Crocodile was gaining maximally in the current conditions. Wilkie measured that expected gain against the time it would take him to rendezvous with Massayo, and with enough leeway to put him in the better wind position for the confrontation.
With his jib setup, Captain Wilkie was certain that he could do more with less wind, certainly more than Aketz might achieve. He turned to his helmsman.
“Keep her steady for another hour, mate. Soon as she calls down from the nest that the Pinquickle’s turning north, we’ll begin our leeward veer.”
With that, he went to his cabin for a drink. He wanted a nap but didn’t dare. He had plotted this out with little breathing room. A change in the winds, higher seas, or a mistake by Massayo would force Port Mandu to improvise quickly.
There was no room for failure.
Captain Wilkie Dogears laughed as he considered that, since he didn’t think there was much of a chance of success even if they were perfect. He couldn’t see the Crocodile from the deck, of course, since she was still more than six miles away.
He was glad of that.
He didn’t want to see the Crocodile.
“Yes, yes, I understand that, but will it work?” Massayo asked Quauh as they watched the powries hooking the blocks and sheaves in place on the framework.
“I know little of Captain Aketz’s new weapon, perhaps no more than you know, and less than Chimeg, who saw its power against the Swordfish,” she admitted.
“Then all of this is just a guess?”
“How many times will you ask me?”
Massayo looked to the east, where Port Mandu was now clearly visible, tacking and working her jibs hard to keep ahead of the Cipac, which was also quite clearly visible, and angling to intercept Port Mandu’s run.
“It is a logical guess,” Quauh told him, understanding his concern now that the moment of truth, and very possibly of doom, was upon them.
“We have to do more than minimize the effect of that weapon,” Massayo remarked.
“I know.”
“And if we do not?”
“Then we break south, Port Mandu north, and we run, as we agreed,” Quauh bluntly replied. “Very likely, Captain Aketz will chase Captain Wilkie.”
“And destroy him.”
“Almost certainly.”
“And destroy us before he ever has to give chase to our friends?” Massayo pressed. “A single volley of those jaws and a hundred flaming arrows should make short work of this little sloop.”
“Less certainly, but very possibly.”
“Twenty to starboard, Benny,” the captain called. “Give Wilkie a little more room to make his turn and gain the wind’s favor.”
“I told you that our victory was not without doubt,” Quauh reminded.
“I know, I know, and you’ve been honest and loyal through it all. I’ll not forget that.” Massayo glanced to the northeast and the distant frigate and shuddered visibly. “I am just thinking that perhaps I should have retired in Behren. Too late for that, I suppose.”
“Unless we win,” said Quauh.
“More likely, unless Aketz decides to kill Port Mandu and we somehow survive the first rounds.”
Quauh wanted to disagree. She looked forward, where the powries had hit a snag in the ropes as they were trying to feed it through from the golden sheets to the frame. She could only sigh.
Soon after, Port Mandu crossed before Pinquickle’s Folly, who fell behind in her wake as they continued a bit more to the north before beginning their turn back to the east, with Captain Wilkie determining the best wind advantage he could salvage when he made the straight run at the Crocodile.
In all that time, Quauh stood by the mainmast, watching the work on the frame, staring at the bullhead, and recalculating her plans, over and over again. Would her father and her lahtli Ayot approve of her strategy here, of how she had reshaped this watery battlefield to afford her ships the best possible chance?
She nodded, finding her courage, which was sapped again almost immediately as she realized that while they might be impressed by the thoughtful strategy, that would be all they would approve of from Quauh the traitor.
If she failed, then her plan failed, and so be it.
If her plan didn’t fail, a frigate, the pride of the Tonoloya Armada here in the east, would perish, along with hundreds of her fellow Xoconai.
How had it come to this?
“They led us into an ambush?” an incredulous First Mate Cayo said to Captain Aketz when they saw the two buccaneer vessels running in a line to the north.
“Or this is their desperate attempt to try to get as many away as they can,” the captain replied. “They might want us to pick our target and give chase as the other one flees. Likely, Captain Wilkie has transferred to the sloop, thinking we’ll again go after the ketch. If they split, we sink the sloop, and both captains with her. Then we’ll see what fight the fools on Port Mandu have left in them.”
“Idiots,” Cayo said with a laugh. “These sidhe are such predictably stupid creatures.”
The two watched as the larger ship, Port Mandu, began her next turn, to port, and continued to port until she was directly lined up with Cipac’s bowsprit.
“Are they truly thinking to fight us?” Cayo asked.
“Watch for the sloop,” Aketz warned. “Do they think to cripple us, slow us enough with a fight, for their leaders to flee on the smaller craft?”
“What do I do?”
“Ready your wave of light to dry her,” the captain reasoned. “We will light her up and run past her to pursue the sloop. We’ll need no magic to put that pathetic tub to the bottom.”
Cayo called to the other augurs, who took their places around the golden mirrors and the crystal on Cipac’s forecastle. They began chanting as soon as they were assembled, and the crystal ball began to glow.
“Let them build the power of Scathmizzane,” Cayo explained to Captain Aketz.
“Ready our jaws,” Aketz called to his bosun. “Assemble the archers.”
“One shot,” he told Cayo. “We hit them and run by them.”
The augur nodded, but even as he did, both he and Aketz gasped in surprise to see the charging ketch drop to battle sail, and then the sloop, which they had figured to be running straight back behind the visual barrier of the larger ship, appearing beside her, full sail, and running past her, turning back in to replace Port Mandu’s line.
Coming straight at Cipac!
“The fools are going to try to ram us with the sloop!” Captain Aketz reasoned. “Go to your weapon, Cayo, and send forth the wave!”
“They are launching their wave early,” Chimeg called down when the bright light appeared at the prow of the warship and began snaking out toward the buccaneers.
“They think we have been put in front to ram them and cripple them,” Massayo replied, and he stared at Quauh as he did, for she had predicted exactly this. “How did you know?” he asked her.
“Because that is what I would do,” she answered. “You minimize the sacrifice to get out of an unwinnable situation. Were we to sail hard into the Cipac, they would never be able to repair and give chase fast enough to hope to catch Port Mandu before she reaches the southern haven.”
“Maybe we should have done that, then,” said the captain.
Quauh smirked at that, not sure she disagreed. She tried to hold faith in her plan—she had orchestrated this fight, from the split of the two ships ten days before all the way to this moment, and hopefully to the end of the battle.
“If it comes to that, perhaps we still can,” she replied.
That seemed to startle the captain, who stared down at her with obvious concern.
Quauh understood more than Captain Massayo wanted to let on with that expression. He would have supported a plan to send the smaller Pinquickle in to ram the Cipac, but he surely wouldn’t have stayed aboard!
So be it, she thought, and she decided not to judge him too harshly.
“The screen?” Massayo asked.
“Wait until the last moment,” she answered. “We cannot let them decipher our intent or they’ll surely turn and make it all much more tentative.” She turned and looked over her shoulder to Toomsuba, who had just finished stretching the bullhead band all the way back and setting it down low for maximum elevation of the shot and maximum range. She motioned him up front to the rope on the starboard side of the frame they had built, with McKorkle and Perridoo holding the one to port.
Her gaze drifted up the mainmast to Chimeg, who had moved into position, standing against the mast extension, her anklet securing her against the gemstones in the strap.
Be perfect in your range estimations, Quauh thought as she looked at the grim-faced To-gai-ru archer, who had watched her friends die from this very weapon and enemy. Quauh didn’t bother calling that up to Chimeg, though. She had never met a more competent person in her life.
Chimeg had to be perfect in her sighting, so Chimeg would be perfect. It was that simple.
The ships charged toward each other, the wave of brilliant light extending farther and farther from Cipac, closing in on the fast-sailing sloop.
Quauh moved to the back of the forecastle, to the side of the bullhead. Massayo stood on the main deck just below her, moving about nervously. She ignored him—she had to!—and kept her focus on that wave.
“Come on,” she urged quietly, speaking to the ship and the wind, and to Chimeg high above.
They had to get in range before that wave reached them, but they had to stay out of the range of Cipac’s jaws and archers when they executed the plan. The bullhead could outdistance those side-mounted catapults, certainly, as well as the archers, particularly since the wind was at Pinquickle Folly’s back, but the margin for error remained slim and the cost of failure remained complete.
“Crocodile at three hundred, the light wave at two!” Chimeg called, at last, and Quauh relaxed just a bit. This magnificent bullhead Massayo had created could throw two hundred yards with some accuracy. A land catapult could exceed that, certainly, but those on the Tonoloya Armada warships couldn’t go far beyond a hundred fifty with any hope of hitting anything. She wasn’t sure about these side-mounted weapons, which were unique to the Cipac, but Quauh doubted they could even reach that.
“The light will be on us before we get in range!” Massayo called up from the deck.
Quauh nodded. “That was the plan.”
“If it gets around your mirror…,” Massayo warned.
Quauh didn’t answer.
“Two fifty for the Crocodile!” Chimeg called.
“Powries! Toomsuba! The ropes!” Quauh ordered, for the wave of light was barely thirty yards ahead now and closing fast.
The two powries port and the huge man starboard began hauling immediately, watching each other as they had practiced to make sure that one end of the golden shield didn’t go up faster than the other, jamming the lines with a bad angle.
The first sheet of gold unfolded from the stack and climbed within the frame, then the second right behind, then the third and the fourth, putting a six-foot-high, seven-foot-wide wall of magical Xoconai gold across the prow at the base of the bowsprit.
As soon as the shield went up, the haulers secured their ropes fast, then went rushing back to get over the forecastle rail and behind the low wall.
Quauh held her ground but shielded her face and mostly her eyes with a hood as the magical light reached Pinquickle’s Folly.
Most of it was reflected back, causing a thicker and brighter glow between the closing ships, but more than a bit bled around the mirrors, and she felt the sting of the heat, and could almost hear the wood of the sloop’s prow drying.
She growled against the pain and told herself repeatedly that this was the best she could have hoped for.
The shouts and groans up by the prow alerted Captain Aketz to the problem. He rushed up the ladder, and he too cried out as his gaze met the brilliance of the shine of the approaching sloop and the sheer intensity of the light growing between the ships—growing and now flowing over the front of Cipac. Drying the beams, the planks, the lines, as with their enemy, and stinging the augurs profoundly.
“That’s their play?” Aketz called out, shielding his eyes and his face, but snickering. “They think to defeat us with a mirror?” he laughed, trying to buoy those around him, but he recognized that there was some element of danger here. The buccaneers were conditioning his ship to burn more readily, as he was doing to their lead boat. His first instinct was that this would do no more harm than bring them back to an even field with the pirates, as it was before Cayo and that magical device he had installed. On that even field, Aketz would have no trouble handling a sloop and a ketch, certainly.
But he understood that he might take a serious beating if the enemy could get some fires onto Cipac. The victory could come at a great cost.
The light continued to grow, the glow intensifying and the wave coming forth more slowly, it seemed, from their prow, as if the magical light itself was a tangible thing.
The augurs stuttered, and raised their hands to block the pain, and tried to continue their chanting.
The ships were barely two hundred yards apart.
Less than two hundred.
“Captain!” First Mate Cayo pleaded.
“Cease, then!” the angry Aketz yelled back. “They are dried to burn! Ready the catapults! Archers, lift your bows!”
“Protect the payload!” Massayo yelled, for the forecastle was thick with light. “Quauh!”
Quauh stood at the trigger. She understood Massayo’s urgency—if the light reached the three crates loaded into the bullhead’s throwing pocket, it would be the end of them all.
“Come on,” she urged. She could no longer see the Crocodile, for the light was simply too intense. “Come on, Chimeg,” she whispered.
“One fifty!” the lookout yelled.
That was exactly what Quauh had hoped for, and she tugged that lever for all her life, and wisely fell back, dropping from the forecastle and squeezing her eyes shut as she curled into a ball behind the shielding wall.
For the boxes, specifically weakened, broke apart from the power of the throw, spewing forth their contents, scores and scores of powrie flares, above the golden shield Pinquickle’s Folly had raised.
Some flew through enough of the intense magical light to ignite before they ever left the sloop, becoming white-hot as they flared, while most of them arced up into the air as spinning gray metal, floating out across the distance to the enemy ship and dipping again into the intense glow as they descended, fourscore little magnesite fireballs swarming the prow, the forecastle, the forward sails of the Cipac.
They embedded themselves in magically dried beams and planks, set afire parched rigging, ignited the sails, ignited the archers and crew at the large ship’s forecastle!
“She’s burning!” Chimeg yelled.
“Hard to port, Benny!” Quauh ordered, and the sloop bent in a left-hand turn almost immediately.
Their work was done here, at least for now, and what a beautiful and terrible job they had done, Quauh noted as the sloop bent out of the magical light and she could better view the warship, her nose roaring in flames, her augurs and crew screaming in pain as the magnesite flares melted through them, and her deck popping with explosions whenever any of those flaming bits of metal got splashed by the spray, or by a crewman foolishly trying to douse a flare.
Captain Aketz watched the rain of fire sweep over the front of his ship, lighting everything, wood and rope and sailcloth, and a dozen crewmen, including three of his five augurs.
First Mate Cayo was at the back of the forecastle, looking down at the captain, when a flare punched through a keg of water sitting beside them.
Cayo was there.
The sudden flash of the keg blowing apart blinded Aketz for a moment, the thunder of the blast shaking him nearly from his feet. He blinked open his eyes, noting one woman with a curved plank from the barrel driven through her belly, splintered shards stabbing her face and shoulders.
The captain turned back to call for his powerful augur.
But Cayo wasn’t there.
Nor was the rail anywhere around where Cayo had been standing.
Aketz stumbled and blinked repeatedly. Where had his first mate gone?
He had to let the thought go, for the Cipac was still moving forward and the magical weapon was down, but the light remained, now flowing deeper onto the ship, drying it out, aiding the fires.
“Port! All you can to port!” he called frantically to his helmsman, and the wounded frigate began her awkward turn, her foremast burning, her mainsail behind it flapping wildly on her starboard side.
Captain Aketz rushed about, calling his crew to stations, trying to assess the damage and figure out how they might minimize it. He heard a splash and turned to see a thick rope lying on the deck, its end smoking.
They had lost their forward port anchor.
Finally, they came out of the glow.
“Drop the mizzen sails!” one crewman yelled, and Aketz recognized his bosun’s voice.
“Water to the mizzen!” another cried.
“Smother the fires where you can. Let ’em burn where you can’t!” the bosun instructed. “Check those side-mounted slingers!”
“Archers hold ready!” Aketz added when he caught sight of the sloop, moving out of the way but replaced by Port Mandu, coming on at battle sail.
“Oh, you think you’ve won, fool Wilkie?” Aketz muttered under his breath. Yes, his ship was wounded and would take a long time to get back under sail, but if Port Mandu came into range, he still had a large catapult on his quarterdeck, untouched by flames, and two ballistae that could outgun anything the ketch could offer.
He looked to the magical glob of light hanging over the rolling ocean, taking heart that it was diminishing by the heartbeat. These pirates couldn’t hit him with flares again to any great effect.
“Starboard jaw’s broken!” one man yelled from the front.
“Port jaw’s intact,” another said.
Captain Aketz nodded, his mind whirling as he considered all that he and his crew must do not only to get out of this, but to win the day.
“Get a gunnery crew on that forward jaw,” he barked. “And another to repair the starboard jaw!” He turned about and ran for the stern, yelling to the gunners on the main catapult to load her thick and be ready to throw.
As soon as he said it, Aketz understood the problem here, for the Cipac was rolling and turning to the commands of the sea, not her wheel. He ordered the remaining forward anchor dropped, along with both off the stern.
They could not maneuver, but from a stable platform, those two lesser ships would be easy prey, from whatever angle they chose to engage.
“She’s turning!” the lookout called down.
Aketz ran to the starboard rail. The magical glow was almost gone and no longer impeding his view, and far to starboard now, he noted the sloop coming for him once more.
“Come on, dogs,” he muttered, then told the man with him to go to the quarterdeck catapult. “When she gets within one fifty, let fly,” he instructed.
The woman ran off and Aketz turned his gaze to the larger buccaneer ship, which had turned to starboard as he had turned to port and now was out there, some three hundred yards away, he thought, sailing easily to circle the wounded Cipac.
Captain Wilkie was measuring the Cipac’s wounds, he knew.
Aketz did the same. They were considerable, he had to admit, but the ship wasn’t bleeding much anymore, the crack crew working brilliantly to contain the damage.
“Round incoming starboard!” the lookout yelled.
Aketz spun back to regard the sloop, and the large ball flying in at his ship. He almost yelled for his gunners on the quarterdeck to return fire, but realized that the little sloop was still well over two hundred yards away.
“How?” he asked, and stood straight, and stayed right there as a volley of heavy stones splashed into the water, cracked hard against Cipac’s starboard broadside, and bounced across the deck and masts, blasting the life from more than a few of his crew.
Luck alone stopped Aketz from being pummeled.
Bad luck, he thought fleetingly, but he shook it away. He had no idea how that little ship was carrying a weapon capable of reaching them from this distance, but whatever it might be, he understood that the sloop wasn’t capable of carrying enough rounds to do more than minor damage.
The sloop turned again and began running parallel to Cipac, circling left to right around the stern, while Port Mandu circled right to left around Cipac’s prow.
“Barracuda waiting for the crocodile to die,” Aketz remarked. He started as he noted several of his crew near him, all staring at him nervously.
“We’re not going to die,” he told them with a wicked smile. “We’re just going to find a way to make them think we are.”
The Xoconai crew, warriors all, nodded grimly. “If any of those pirate dogs come within range, I want a hundred arrows sweeping their deck.”
“Aye, captain,” every voice around answered.
“I cannot find Cayo, Captain Aketz,” a man, an augur—the last remaining priest on Cipac—said to him then.
“And you will not,” Aketz assured him. He looked back to the blasted, scorched corner of the forecastle, and almost laughed at the absurdity of it all when he noted a single shoe, Cayo’s shoe, sitting there, smoke wafting from it.
“We can run now,” Massayo told Wilkie when the two ships came together some three hundred yards off the wounded Crocodile’s port rail. “They’ll be a week and more rigging it up enough just to limp home.”
“And then what?” Wilkie replied.
“And now what?” Massayo returned. “We have the range, but nowhere near enough shot to take her down. He’s still got a hundred archers if he’s got one.”
“Aye, she ain’t sinking,” Wilkie admitted with a shake of his head. But he did offer a wide smile to Massayo, and mostly to Quauh, who had formulated this wild plan. “But we hit her good, eh?”
“Maybe we hit her a couple more times with the bullhead, then ask Aketz to surrender,” Massayo offered.
“He will not,” said Quauh. “Never.”
“Well, your plan worked brilliantly,” Wilkie said to her. “Got another?”
Quauh could only shrug. “We can run, safely,” she offered.
Wilkie considered that for a moment, then went across his deck. “Run up a flag demanding surrender,” he told his first mate. To others, he called for the tripod and megaphone to be set, aiming for their wounded enemy.
He waited for the responding flag and wasn’t surprised by its red color, a flat refusal to even parley, let alone surrender.
“Ye can’t win, Captain Fury!” Wilkie called out.
“Not today,” came the reply. “But soon.”
“We’ll let ye go without further troubles if ye remove yer curse on our Letters of Reprisal and let it be as it was!” said Wilkie.
“You played your hand,” came the response. “The pot is yours. And I will take it back from your hull on the bottom o’ the Mirianic!” Captain Aketz promised.
Wilkie walked away from the bullhorn and waved for it to be broken down. Over at the rail across from Massayo, he said, “We’ve a couple of flares. We’ll put one over her when the moon’s set and the night is dark so you can line up the throw. Put one on her deck in the dark of night and might that Captain Fury there will rethink his stubborn ways.”
Massayo winked and smiled in reply, and Pinquickle’s Folly lifted her sails and began to circle once more.
“He won’t rethink anything,” Quauh assured Massayo as they pulled away form Port Mandu. “You will have to sink them or kill Captain Aketz to get any kind of offer.”
“Then maybe we’ll put the throw right under his quarterdeck and spin the fool about in his bunk,” Massayo replied with that toothy, wicked grin.
Quauh returned the smile but knew the boast for what it was. At the range they needed to maintain, in the dark of night with the seas rolling about them, they’d be lucky to hit the frigate at all, let alone target their shot to any specific point.
He turned to face his working crew, a fat and stubby finger banging against his pursed lips, then silently mouthing, “Quiet, quiet.”
Slowly, the legs turned.
He turned back to his mirrored spyglass, looking forward into the angled mirror that looked up at a second angled mirror looking down, showing him what was forward of his boat.
He started in surprise when the view lit up before him, a flare, arcing beautifully on the other side of the large ship, backlighting it like the moon rising behind a dead tree.
Fitting, he thought, and he smiled to realize how close they were.
Captain Thorngirdle turned and called, “Now, me boys! Push it with all ye got!”
Ten powrie pedalers leaned forward and began pumping their legs with all their strength, all of them growling and driving hard.
The flare came to life forward of Cipac, rising high in the night sky.
“Throw! Fire!” yelled Aketz, and the working front side-mounted catapult let fly, and the crew at the rear turned their cranks to get the bigger catapult in line, and Xoconai archers bent their bows and sent missiles into the darkness.
Captain Aketz rushed to the forward rail and leaned out, staring, following the ball of glowing pitch that soared ahead.
And then splashed into the ocean, very near the ketch, but causing no damage.
“Come on!” he screamed back to his aft gunners, wanting to strike that pirate down there and then.
His bosun beside him shook his head, though. “They have to put it over our own masts,” he explained. “Too high an angle. We’d just waste the load.”
“Then ready the forward thrower, and get that second one fixed, damn you!”
“Aye,” the bosun replied, and moved away.
Aketz turned his attention to the flare, which now arced gracefully high above and came down, illuminating the frigate’s starboard rail.
And blinding him to what might be beyond it, he knew.
“Throw that aft load starboard!” he called. “Archers, full volley starboard!”
Barely had he finished the orders when he heard a great splash just forward of his ship, and the sly captain grinned at his cleverness.
The flare from the ketch had been only to allow the sloop to move in to fire its strange weapon.
“Ballistae to starboard!” he yelled. “Throw! Throw!”
They couldn’t see the sloop, for it was outside the glow of the flare, but it was out there, and Aketz meant to make life very uncomfortable for the buccaneer rats. He slapped his hand on the rail, calling for a bullhorn so he might taunt them for their miss. How many loads could that small ship carry, after all?
The jolt came behind him, near the stern on the port side, and hit with such force that many crewmen were thrown from their feet, one tumbling over the port rail. The frigate groaned in protest, her stern pushed to the limit of the anchor lines and more.
Captain Aketz’s thoughts spun. In other years, he might have thought that a whale had rammed them, but out here in the east, he understood the dangerous truth of it.
“Lights to starboard!” he yelled, turning and moving that way.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flicker in the flare light, and he spun back just in time to see a second barrelboat streaming in for the starboard prow.
“Powrie!” he yelled, reflexively moving back from the rail and jabbing his finger in the direction of the closing hunter.
He should have held the rail instead, for he found himself unceremoniously dropped on his butt when that second barrelboat speared the Cipac.
“Back, back and keep backing!” Thorngirdle ordered his boys, who reversed their pedaling with growls of determination, pulling the tapered spear-like ram free of the frigate. Normally they would have stayed there, embedded, and come out to board and fight, but they were twelve and the crew of the large ship nearer to two hundred.
Stick and run, was the plan. Back into the darkness.
Working the rudder far aft, the powrie kept them perfectly straight as they moved away form the warship.
They heard the arrows tap-tapping their topside hull, like a heavy rain, and waited in silence for a larger throw from a ballista, or maybe those devilish chains that had jammed the rudder and propeller on one of their boats in their last fight with this frigate and doomed both ship and crew to a horrible and irretrievable death.
They breathed easier with each passing minute, and finally were far enough away for Captain Thorngirdle to order a turn, all the way about, so One o’ Two could pedal off into the night.
He could only hope his second boat had found the same good fortune.
“It was a good try,” Quauh said to Massayo after their shot missed the distant Cipac. Better this one miss than the one full of flares from the initial encounter, she thought, but did not add.
The returning fire had been more dangerous than their bullhead attack, obviously, with the deck of Pinquickle’s Folly sporting a dozen new feathers, all on the back of Xoconai arrows. A ballista bolt had skipped through the water right past the fleeing sloop’s starboard rail. Only good fortune had prevented a damaging hit on her stern.
“It was a foolish try,” Massayo admitted, nodding at the first mate, who had counseled him against it. He ended with a sigh of dispirited resignation, for he so badly wanted to be rid of the Crocodile and her vicious captain.
But now he had to resign himself to the truth of the fight. For all their successes the previous day—the frigate would likely need to replace her foremast—and for all their advantages in maneuvering now, there was little more they could do against the formidable battle station. They could move about just beyond the range of the Crocodile’s archers and catapults, yes, but from that distance, their chances of inflicting any real damage on the large ship was small, and they would fast run out of loads to throw. And as good as the bullhead was performing, Aketz could adjust his two ballistae to return fire.
And that clever captain would likely come up with a few other tricks to add to Massayo’s misery.
Every passing hour, it was becoming more and more likely that Port Mandu and Pinquickle’s Folly would be taking an early exit to the south this year, possibly never to return.
Given Massayo’s grander plans, already insanely expensive and already well under way, that pain was all the more acute.
“Keep us moving, and not predictably,” he instructed Quauh. “Set watches along all rails and tell them to remain alert. It would not be a surprise to see Captain Aketz sending out small boats of archers to strike us in the night. I am off to get some rest. The deck is yours.”
“Aye, captain,” she answered.
Massayo didn’t intend to sleep, but he was out very soon after rolling into his hammock, sheer exhaustion overwhelming the many questions and concerns that followed him to his bed.
He was awakened suddenly, jostled by Quauh, and opened his eyes to find her staring down at him.
“To the deck, captain,” she said. “At once.”
“Trouble?”
“It would seem so, but not for us.”
Massayo rolled to the side and put his long legs to the floor. It took him a moment to steady himself, a moment in which he realized that the sun was up. He stumbled out of his cabin, yawning, and noted that most of his crew, Quauh included, were at the port rail, and also that his ship was barely moving and that Port Mandu was right before her.
“What?” he asked, walking up near Quauh and noting the distant frigate.
“She’s low and she’s listing,” Quauh explained. “She took a lot of water, it seems, and is likely taking more.”
Massayo peered more intently and shifted to get a better view.
Unmistakably so, he realized, the Crocodile seemed lower in the water, and, after he ruled out a roll from a swell, he saw that she was listing to starboard at perhaps fifteen to twenty degrees.
“Did we hit her?” he asked. “Perhaps the stone splashed right before her waterline and still got to her hull.”
“If we had, it would have been on her port side,” Quauh reminded him. “Whatever happened, she’s wounded. Perhaps the flare fires got belowdecks.”
Massayo didn’t answer other than to shake his head slightly. That didn’t seem plausible.
“Wilkie?” he asked.
“As befuddled as we are,” Quauh answered, “they spent their night watching for small attack boats, as we were, and saw the same surprise as we when the sun showed us our enemy.”
Massayo called for his spyglass, then studied the frigate more closely. “Even if he somehow gets his mainsail up this very morning, he’s not going to get that ship to port anytime soon. And if he’s still taking water, and I think he is, that crew will not see land again.”
“Unless we rescue them,” Quauh remarked.
That surprised Massayo for just a moment, until he considered the source. Quauh was a decent one, to be sure. Decent to any and all. The impracticality of such a move was hard to get past, of course, given that the Crocodile had more than four times the crew, warriors all, than Pinquickle’s Folly and Port Mandu combined.
“We’ve got company coming to starboard!” Chimeg called down from the lookout nest.
Three long strides across the deck took any concern from Massayo, for he came in view of a pair of powrie barrelboats, slowly approaching Port Mandu. Captain Thorngirdle sat on the top of one, leaning back rather comfortably, it seemed, against the vertical brace beam.
“Put a couple o’ holes in her last night while yerselves were throwin’ flares and such,” the powrie called. “Sea’s bleeding into her, bow and stern, don’t ye doubt.”
“Ye hear that, Captain Massayo?” Captain Wilkie called from his rail.
“I did, indeed.”
“Run up your green-and-white,” said Wilkie. “I think our Captain Fury friend might be interested in talking. You will speak for Port Mandu, and…” He looked to Thorngirdle.
The powrie snorted. “Don’t got much to say. Said it all already with the pointy end. Get the goldfish off the ship soon enough and me boys and I will gladly go and see if she’s got anything worth salvaging.”
“Run up the pennant,” Massayo instructed Quauh. “Toomsuba, put a load of chains and grape in the pocket and stretch the bullhead to ready. Battle sail,” he added to Columbine. “If they show their pennant, bring us in slowly.”
He lifted his spyglass and considered the wounded frigate then, and also Thorngirdle’s words. There was something on the Crocodile he wouldn’t mind salvaging.
Two somethings, actually.
The responding pennant went up Cipac’s line, and Pinquickle’s Folly began her approach. They got to a hundred yards, noting that the Xoconai captain had set up his large bullhorn, and turned broadside to the frigate, starboard to starboard, with enough sea between them to afford them a good chance of safely fleeing.
“We are here to discuss terms,” Massayo called. “You are sinking, clearly. You have lost. We could stand back and let the sea take you, then hunt any dinghies you launch and easily destroy them. We both know this, so…”
“The terms start with our guaranteed safety and an escort to a safe harbor,” Captain Aketz called back. “Do not think you have won, pirate. We can bail and stay up, and we have enough supplies to outlast you. If you help tow us in, I will offer a probation to you and to Captain Wilkie. You can sail these waters as honest traders. Only as such.”
Massayo turned a skeptical look to Quauh.
“He’s sinking,” she quietly answered that expression. “He knows that he cannot survive without our tow.”
“Do you think he would hold to the deal?”
She nodded without hesitation. “He is vicious, but he is a captain in the Tonoloya Armada. His word must be good.” She paused, and Massayo saw her curiosity clearly. “Are you thinking of accepting?”
“It’s more than I expected,” he admitted.
“And Captain Wilkie? And Captain Thorngirdle?” Quauh asked.
“Never,” came a voice from above, that of Chimeg, who had moved down to the main yard and was watching the two with a sour look.
“Still, a good start,” Massayo told her, and she snorted and climbed back up the mast.
“We will tow the Croc—the Cipac, into Azucar,” Massayo called back. “It is not so far a sail. But only on the word of Captain Aketz that he will lift the order of unmarque from all of us, and that he will retire to the west, where he and his people properly belong.”
Aketz started to protest, but Massayo yelled long and loud into the bullhorn until the man relented and let him finish.
“And before any of this, I will see two hundred bows, a thousand arrows, two ballistae, and the arms of your catapults thrown into the sea.”
Captain Aketz sputtered and snorted like a raging hog for several moments. “Are you mad?” he yelled. “Do you see the flag you now insult? I’ve a deck lined with the best archers on these waters and two ballistae and a catapult ready to take you from the water right now!”
High above the deck, Chimeg stood against the rail, listening to the shouting, but hardly hearing the words, her gaze locked on the vicious Captain Fury, the man who had tortured her friends and tied poor Jocasta to the prow of the Swordfish and let the tide slam it, and her, into jagged rocks.
Aketz continued his tirade into the huge bullhorn, scolding Massayo, retracting his initial offer, and making a second one, far less enticing. He promised to hunt the sloop, the ketch, and the powries until they were all properly keeled or hanged or fed to sharks if Massayo didn’t agree right then to tow them in.
And he kept going, the ravings of a man who thought himself impervious, who was verbally spitting on them as if they were his lessers, as if they were sidhe.
Hardly aware of her actions, Chimeg reversed the magnetism in her ankle bracelet and threw herself out in a swing to Pinquickle’s Folly’s stern, then came swinging back in and used the magic to shift her momentum and throw her out above Massayo and Quauh and the others, out beyond the sloop’s starboard rail.
Her bow came up, an arrow nocked, and what a marvelous target the wide end of the bullhorn made!
The missile skipped into the megaphone and was funneled right to Captain Fury’s opened mouth, catching him in mid-roar and driving through the back of his mouth and his brain stem.
He uttered no sound, but just dropped to the deck.
In that moment of shock, the first to react were Toomsuba and the four powries, lifting the sails, while Benny worked to get them away.
“What did you do?” Massayo called up from the deck, while Quauh was telling the crew to find cover.
“Gave the dog a better death than he deserved,” Chimeg muttered. She continued to swing, setting another arrow to her bowstring, ready to respond to any who fired at the fleeing sloop.
Surprisingly few missiles came forth, however. A couple of archers put arrows into the sloop, while many more let fly at Chimeg. Only one of the ballistae fired, the long spear crashing through the wall of the quarterdeck cabin and hanging there, half-in and half-out.
“Now what?” Massayo asked Quauh, crouching beside her at the rail.
“I do not know,” she answered honestly.
“What would you do if you were first mate on the Cipac?”
She considered the question for a long while, holding her answer until they were far enough away for her and Massayo to stand and head for the quarterdeck. The captain paused and opened the door to his cabin before going up the ladder.
“Right into the side of my desk,” he groused. “My favorite desk.”
He joined Quauh at the taffrail, the two staring back at the immobile frigate.
“Well?” Massayo prompted.
Quauh pointed to the Cipac’s green-and-white, now being pulled down the line. “I’d take the green-and-white down,” she said. “As they are. Then I would survey my crew and replace it with a flag that was only white.”
“Surrender?”
“They are sinking. Two hundred Xoconai will drown or be adrift in small boats—and any of those boats approached by us will have to surrender or be sent to the bottom.”
“I hope you are right,” Massayo said. He directed Quauh’s gaze up to Chimeg, standing once more against the mainmast high above.
“And what do I do with her?” he asked.
“She broke a sacred truce,” Quauh replied. “Even by your buccaneer code, that must be recognized.”
“She watched that beast torture and murder her best friend,” Massayo reminded.
“And?”
“And what do I do?” an aggravated and frustrated Massayo snapped at her.
“You say that Cipac shot first, but Chimeg shot better,” Quauh replied, quite casually.
Quauh was still mulling over that conversation when Pinquickle’s Folly approached Port Mandu, hardly believing that she had spoken such sea-code blasphemy.
But she found, upon reflection, that she stood by the actions taken by the bucccaneers.
“That went well, eh?” Captain Wilkie snorted as the sloop came up alongside.
“Captain Fury is no more,” Massayo replied. He looked up and pointed up at Chimeg. “Right into the bullhorn and right into his big mouth.”
Thorngirdle slapped his thigh and gave a hearty laugh, while Wilkie just guffawed and shook his head.
“It’s their move, and if they don’t make a move, we just let them sink,” Massayo said.
“There’s their move,” Quauh informed him, turning him and the other captains back to the frigate, where a new pennant was being pulled up the line.
Massayo lifted his spyglass, then chuckled, shook his head, and stared at Quauh.
“It is the right thing for the first mate to do,” the woman explained. “He didn’t lose the ship, and the captain who did lies dead on her deck. They’ll put up the green-and-white again shortly. You go to over to Port Mandu, captain, and take all but the powries and Toomsuba with you. And especially take Chimeg. I will go and deliver our terms.”
“And what might they be?” Thorngirdle demanded.
“They throw their bows and arrows into the sea and we will tow them in, just outside of Azucar. There, we’ll let them ferry all their crew ashore and we’ll let the sea take the Cipac.”
“When the goldfish leave her, me an’ me boys’re going aboard,” Thorngirdle said.
“We’ll split whatever treasure we find evenly, four ways,” Captain Wilkie decided. “One for me, one for Massayo, and one for each of your boats.”
“Fair’s fair,” Thorngirdle agreed.
“I want her ballistae, and maybe that back catapult,” Wilkie went on. “And her cloth.”
“Coming out o’ yer cut,” said the powrie captain, and Wilkie nodded.
“I want her jaws,” Massayo announced.
Thorngirdle snorted. “Them front guns? Ha! They’ll weigh the front o’ yer dinghy tub right under!”
“I know, but I want them.”
Captain Wilkie stared at the man after that surprising request.
“You’ll carry them to Freeport for me?” Massayo asked him, and Wilkie nodded, but never blinked.
“Freeport or Inudada?” Wilkie asked.
“Freeport,” Massayo answered. “We’ve time, and we’ll beat word of the sinking of the Crocodile, or maybe we’ll take that word with us.”
Wilkie just stood staring for a few more heartbeats before nodding his agreement.
“South for us,” said Thorngirdle. “Got four more boats to buy and fill.” He leaned over the rail and looked across Pinquickle’s deck. “Ye hear that, ye bloody-capped lubbers? We can get ye back in a proper boat!”
The five all grinned widely at that, but one by one, they politely declined with a shake of their hairy heads.
“Bah! Ye fools!” Thorngirdle said, his light tone belying his snorting. “Yerself and yer boys stinged him, aye,” he said to Massayo and Wilkie, “but don’t ye e’er forget and don’t ye let anyone else e’er forget that it was me and me boys who put the Crocodile down.”
Quauh took it all in, her gaze landing on Massayo and there lingering.
He was up to something, as usual.