The Protectors war

Nobbes glanced at Nigel as the hoarse beat of a drum and a volley of orders broke the immobility of the crew, turning them from spectators to a purposeful mass, breaking open the weapons locker and pulling the tarpaulin covers from the catapults. Others bustled about pulling bolts and raising what looked like sections of the deck. Those turned out to be heavy wooden screens, secured to the rail with quick-release metal clamps to make a continuous chest-high barricade around the bulwarks save where the catapults needed a clear field of fire.

"They'll come in on either side of the Sark?" Nobbes asked.

"Two deep," Nigel agreed. "They're a vicious lot and they hate us like poison, but they're not stupid in my experience. That'll let them maximize their numbers, and they'll try and finish the Sark before we can intervene. Alleyne, let's get into our harness."

"Those Ned Kelly suits?" Nobbes said. "You'll go down like Ayers Rock if you go overboard in those!"

Nigel gri

"Well, Captain, we'll just have to make sure that the enemy are the ones who fall in, eh, what?"

"There they go," Hordle said, his voice taut.

The Pride was ghosting into the bay, with all sails set. That did less good than they had hoped, with only the faintest breeze from over the ridge to the west to help; the sails were hanging nearly slack, rippling at their edges with each puff. She moved with a dreamlike slowness, while the Moorish galleys darted like water bugs. That made him feel like a spectator, and he didn't like that at all. The hot late-summer sun made him sweat like a horse, too; he could feel it soaking into the gambeson under his mail shirt, and smell it along with the hot pine of the deck. The leather-wrapped grip of the bow made patterns in the skin of his left palm until he forced himself to relax.

The Moors were closing in on the British ship; the Sark lay silent. The schooner was close enough for them to hear the yelping, screeching war cries of the corsairs, as they swung up on either side of the crippled sailing ship. He could see a black giant, naked save for a twisted rag loincloth, in the bows of the lead pirogue swinging a grapnel on the end of a long rope, then tossing it with a shouted Wau-wau- ho!

A dozen more flew out from the pirate vessels, trailing their cords like a malignant spider's web. The rowers snatched their oars in, moving in trained unison, and then tallied on to the lines and drew them hand over hand.

"Are those useless Poms going to do anything!" Sheila asked, fingering the cutlass at her side. The crew waited, armed and tense.

"They will," Hordle said. Though I don't know how many are fit for duty, after the battering the ship took in that effing storm. "Just about: "

Scores of strong arms drew the corsair vessels in alongside the British ship, two on either side and one under the stern. More crowded in to grapple with those, making a bridge of boats for boarding. Men crawled over the long slender craft like flies on dead meat; each of the corsair craft had twenty oars a side, and most carried as many men again as the forty needed to row. Many of the pirates were olive-ski

"And: about: now!" Hordle said, feeling his teeth skin back from his lips.

The sides of the Cutty Sark seemed to ripple for a moment in a wave of greenish brown, as the men who'd been lying flat on their decks came erect, standing in three staggered rows on each side-forty to port and as many to starboard, drawing their bows to the ear.

The savage screaming of the corsairs cut off with a horrified sudde

Then a hundred bowstrings snapped as one, a massed cracking sound like bamboo breaking. The archers were shooting at point-blank range, and that close even the best suit of plate could not stop a shaft. The broadheads went through the simple hide-and-wicker shields and improvised armor of the corsairs as if it were the cloth and naked skin that was all the protection most of them had. Many of the shafts went through two men each in a quadruple splash of red, or through one man and through the planks of the pirogues' bottoms.

"Rapid fire!"

The archers drew and shot, drew and shot; the pirogues along each side of the ship were suddenly wallowing funeral barges full of the dead, and of a heaving, moaning carpet of the wounded and maimed. The delta-shaped arrowheads slashed wounds the width of a man's paired thumbs through limbs and bodies, and almost instantly the water around the locked vessels turned from blue-green to pink. A few questing triangular fins were there already, as the first men staggered overboard and screaming into the water with arrows through limbs and torsos and faces.

If they break… Hordle thought.

That was probably what the Sark 's commander had counted on and why he'd held fire until the last minute, the sudden massed shock at close range sending the rest fleeing. But they did not. Instead more men poured forward as the arrows slashed into them, leaping across the piled dead and screeching out the name of their god. The islanders answered them with a crashing threefold bark-a deep-chested Hurrah! -and a hissing sleet of arrows. The honed edges of the arrowheads twinkled briefly as they flew, like the sun sparkling on bits of glass.

Hordle answered it with a shout of his own, half encouragement and half aching frustration: "Eat that, you sodding pirate bastards!"

At the stern, the Moors had no arrow storm to face. Instead the full-armored men who commanded the company of bowmen stood along the rail, rising from their crouch with their shields up and their visors down. Most carried longswords, held up overhead with the blade parallel to the deck; a few had poleaxes, or war hammers with serrated heads. He saw one of those come down on a pirate climbing up with a curved knife between his teeth, smashing the man's head like a melon dropped on concrete; the ugly, thick, wet pop-crack sound was clear to his mind's ear. The swords flashed, bright silver for a few moments, then throwing red arcs as they chopped and stabbed; the knights stood like a wall of steel along the rail, but a dozen spearpoints probed for each.

A pain in his jaw from the force with which he clenched his teeth brought him back to full awareness of his surroundings, and he made himself breathe. Not far away Sir Nigel and Alleyne stood; the younger Loring was literally quivering with eagerness, the plates of his steel suit rattling. His father stood in earnest quiet talk with Nobbes. The Tasmanian kept shaking his head, and then reluctantly nodded.

"Volunteers!" Sir Nigel shouted; he wasn't a large man, but the call went from one end of the Pride's deck to the other effortlessly. "Volunteers for a longboat sortie. No members of the catapult crews or the first deck watch-half with Lieutenant Loring, half with me. Quickly now, and we have them!"

There was a stampede; Hordle helped sort it out, and draw the two launches alongside. Alleyne took one, sliding down the boarding rope with nerveless aplomb, as if he didn't have sixty pounds of steel strapped to him-and it was a long muddy walk across the bottom of the cove to shore. Hordle went into the other boat along with eleven of the Pride's crew and Nigel Loring. The little baronet was peering out from under his raised visor-and probably seeing things a bit blurred, but that never held him back: