Chapter 223: Queen Anne’s Baptism

The Rose’s turn had yet to come, and would keep a while longer. That left the Queen Anne’s Revenge, and her fight had no easy way out like the Dame’s had.

Fifty-six guns and a mortar against sixty guns split between two galleons looked close enough on paper. The trouble was that one ship could answer only one quarter of the compass at a time, while the other two had only each other’s timing to worry about.

Thatch knew more than enough to know precisely what awaited him if the Carmen and the Rosario closed together and caught him between two broadsides at once.

Every gun was run out already, matches glowing low against the wind. Israel Hands stood with his arms folded, watching the two galleons sail their way and find their courses.

Then he reported. "Two of ’em and only the one of us. So long as we hold the gage, we choose which one closes first and keep the other masked behind her for as long as the sea lets us."

Thatch grinned at that, wide and easy, every inch the man his crew knew him to be.

"Load and lay her, then. Let’s put a hole in one of ’em before she’s close enough to complain about it."

The Carmen came about first, turning herself onto a course that would bring her hard against the Queen Anne’s starboard side. The Rosario held back, swinging wide to leeward, happy enough to let her sister take the first risk and wait on the far quarter for whatever came of it.

"They ain’t racin’ each other for us, Captain."

Hands didn’t like the look of it at all.

"That’s the part wants worryin’ about."

Thatch grunted. "Aye, means one of those Spanish bastards has finally found the little scrap of sense his mother forgot to drown at birth."

The mortar crew found their elevation and sent the shell up and over in a long climbing arc, and it came down square on the Carmen’s forward deck.

The explosion tore through the planking in a burst of smoke, flame, and splintered timber. Rail and rigging flew apart together, ropes whipping loose through the smoke as sailors were thrown across the deck and into the wreckage.

Blood spattered the torn deck around the ragged hole, while cries rose briefly beneath the thunder. Whatever bow chasers had been there vanished beneath the wreckage, their crews scrambling or crawling clear as the ship lurched beneath them.

Carmen wallowed on regardless, her bow sagging under the damage as loose timber and torn rigging dragged across the deck. She lost enough speed to fall half a length, but her crew fought on through the wreckage, dragging the shattered gear aside and struggling to bring the guns back into use as she went.

Hands watched the smoke thin.

"Won’t sink her, hull’s too heavy for mortars to finish."

It was in that stretch, with the Carmen limping to find her wind again and the Rosario holding her arc, that Thatch simply stopped.

Every man on that deck had heard him loud for months, boasting, needling, laughing enough to carry over a gale. None of it had prepared them for what came over him now, all at once, in the middle of a word, like a door slamming below.

The sailors noticed the change before they understood what had changed.

"Caesar."

His voice had dropped so heavy that pirates three feet away took a step back.

"Fetch me the matches."

Caesar came back across the deck with a coil of slow match smoking faint and orange at one end, the same cord that fed every gun aboard. He checked the wind with a wet thumb briefly.

Thatch, holding the wheel with one hand, pulled off his hat and held it out. Caesar worked the lengths in beneath the brim with his big hands, tucking each one snug beneath it until the whole rim bristled like a crown made by Hell itself.

"Then let them see the Devil." Thatch snorted, and put the hat back on.

The Englishman who had stood on that quarterdeck a breath earlier had become wreathed from head to shoulder, smoke pouring up beneath the hat and down through his beard as though some demon was present, here and now, his eyes catching what light came through it like two ember coals.

The knot of sailors near the mainmast froze and watched it happen. These battle-hardened men whispered to the Almighty, crossed themselves and spat over the rail, quick and superstitious, as though they wanted no part of whatever came next.

"Christ. That’s Blackbeard."

Farther back came out some short nervous laughs, more frightened than amused.

Thatch, no.

Blackbeard then bellowed. "Get to work, you God-rotted pack of bilge rats! Haul, load, climb, lash, and MOVE! I want this ship dancing before I have to come down there and start throwing the damned idle overboard myself!

He let that sit for a breath, then added. "And hear me well! The next man who calls me Thatch shall be nailed upside down to the mast, shaved bald with a fish knife, tarred, feathered, and christened by the whole crew with a bucket of boiling piss! I will have his boots filled with crabs, his pockets packed with gunpowder, and his name struck from the Book of the Living before supper!"

The crew froze for half a heartbeat.

Then terror took over.

Pirates who had been dragging their feet a moment before sprang to their tasks with a zeal usually reserved for escaping death. Ropes flew, boots hammered across the deck, sails snapped overhead, and every idle sailor suddenly discovered urgent work. Not a soul looked at Blackbeard. Not a soul spoke. And certainly not a soul called him Thatch.

The ship had never sailed so fast in its life.

Back into the battle at large, the Carmen closed in, her captain apparently valuing wounded pride over wounded planking, and the range fell away fast enough that neither ship needed the order given twice.

Both broadsides went off within a breath of each other, the Queen Anne’s whole starboard battery roaring as she bore, the Carmen barking back through smoke thick between the two hulls.

The Queen Anne’s guns struck with a single concussion that seemed to shake the sea beneath both ships. Iron shot ripped into the Carmen’s flank, smashing through timber in a storm of white splinters.

Planks burst inward and outward together, fragments of rail and rigging flew through the smoke, and the Spaniards caught in the broadside were thrown down amid blood and broken wood. Cries and screams rose from the Carmen’s deck as the wounded and the dead disappeared beneath the drifting smoke.

The Carmen guns erupted through the smoke, and cannonballs slammed into the Queen Anne’s side low and hard. Timber burst inward around the impacts, one ragged hole opening above the waterline as two gun carriages were knocked clean from their trucks.

The crews serving the battery were thrown across the deck amid splintered wheels, scattered gear, and blood, scrambling clear while the ship shuddered beneath them.

Blackbeard stood on the wheel, matches smoldering low beneath his hat, watching the exchange as another might study a hand of cards, uncannily calm and unblinking.

The Rosario spent the whole exchange watching her enemy, holding her wide arc without committing an inch farther than she had to. When the smoke thinned, she had seen what Blackbeard was doing to her sister and wanted no part of the same trap.

She came on slower after that, correcting her bearing a degree at a time, patient where the Carmen had been proud.

The Carmen came round for a second exchange, still smoking, still afloat, and this time both sides paid the price.

The Queen Anne’s second broadside crashed into the Carmen with another deafening roar. Cannonballs tore through her lower hull, ripping open fresh wounds beneath the waterline, and timber splintered outward as water rushed through the shattered planks, while smoke washed across a deck already littered with wreckage and the fallen.

The Carmen lurched under the punishment but kept forward, her wounded hull dragging through the sea.

The reply came back harder than the first.

The cannonballs smashed into the Queen Anne’s aftmost battery dead center. The gun and carriage vanished into a burst of timber, iron, smoke, and blood, while the sailors serving it were knocked down together and buried beneath the overturned wreckage.

Blood ran black across the planks, mixing with powder soot and seawater as the crews hauled themselves back to their feet and fought to keep the battery working.

Across the water a voice rose from the Carmen’s deck, thin and sharp enough to carry despite everything standing between the two ships.

"¡Es el diablo! ¡Miren su cabeza, arde!"¹

Not one sailor aboard the Queen Anne needed the words put into English to understand what had put that pitch into a man’s throat.

It was the Rosario who brought the trap to its end.

She had spent the whole fight waiting for exactly this. At last, she closed the final stretch of distance and came onto the Queen Anne’s port quarter, taking the position Blackbeard had spent the better part of the battle trying to deny her.

The Carmen, wounded and slow and stubbornly afloat, held her own position on the opposite side at the same moment.

Now, both Spanish galleons had a clean shot at once, one on each quarter, the very predicament Blackbeard had spent the whole fight trying to prevent.

The Queen Anne lay between them with smoke streaming from her battered guns, torn rigging hanging loose, and splintered planking showing where the broadsides had bitten into her. Around the batteries, blood and wreckage covered the deck, but the guns were still run out and the matches still glowed.

Blackbeard watched it all, the ember at his temple flared brighter as the wind turned a point.

Whatever legend he had lit for himself was about to be put to its baptism by fire.