Chapter 295: Precisely as I Foretold

The last of the dust shook loose from the merry band like flour from a baker’s shelf.

Thirty-odd pirates stood across the breach in the new sunlight, grey from hat to boot, and not one looked as though he had come to improve the neighborhood.

Twenty paces away, beyond the fallen blocks, the redcoats waited with their ropes hanging slack, their faces gaunt from the flux and their lips cracked and white. The officer stood among them, red-faced, fist pressed to his lace while his plume trembled, glaring across the wreckage.

James returned the look with his grin intact, touching two fingers to his hat brim as pleasantly as he might have greeted a neighbor over a garden hedge.

The drum stopped in the middle of a beat, and deep inside the city an axe kept ringing, lending the silence a peculiar edge, while every redcoat in sight watched a pirate that watched him back, holding the stare a little longer than was comfortable.

The muskets stood stacked in pyramids behind the redcoats, ten strides from the soldiers.

James shifted his feet.

The clerk’s quill stuttered mid-stroke and bled a fat black blot across the page, while he raised his free hand, voice thin. "B-begging your pardon, sir, most humbly, but are these... gentlemen... to be entered in the book? Only I find I’ve no heading for them, and the office is ever so particular about headings..."

"Holy Mary, Mother o’ God... it’s the drowned, the drowned have come up for us!"

"Reckon his lordship foretold this lot an’ all? Funny that, he never mentioned the pirates."

Sam whipped off his hat in a cloud of white dust and bowed so low he swept the rubble, then came up with a bellow. "Precisely as ye foretold, sir! Precisely! God’s truth, I watched that wall come down on the third heave, and I’ll swear to it before any magistrate in Christendom! Why, the Gazette’ll be wantin’ a drawin’ o’f this!"

Only one man on that side kept his focus, the very sergeant, a leathery fellow made thin by the flux, with a halberd at his boot. He watched the cutlasses, then looked at the black coat, shifted his gaze to the muskets, and began to reach for one.

He drew a breath to bellow and got a rag of a cry instead, split down the middle, the one word his wits had left him.

"... Heave!"

A handful of redcoats jumped at the order and hauled on the ropes, though there was no wall left to pull. They stumbled backward, dumping the soldiers hard into the muck in a neat, seated row.

Obedience had done them no good at all.

The sergeant drew a deep breath, and James did the same at precisely the same moment.

"SCATTER!"

James’s roar split the courtyard. "Away with you, you bloody beauties! Harry the whoresons till they’re greetin’ for their mammies!"

The sergeant’s lungs emptied in a cry forty years of parade grounds had honed to a razor, spittle flying. "TO ARMS! To arms, damn your eyes! Stand to, you idle, gawping bastards, or they’ll be in your bellies before you’ve found your own arses! FIX BAYONETS!"

The soldiers rushed for the stacked muskets, bringing half the pyramids down in their haste, and were barely shouldered into ranks as they fired their volley. White smoke burst against the masonry as shots whined over the rubble and smashed into the carved blocks, spattering the breach with chips of old stone.

They had their weapons back, if not their wits, and were making up for lost time with gunpowder.

The pirates scattered into the jungle and the stone passages, ducking through gaps in the ruins and snapping off pistol shots at the redcoats as they ran, Sam’s laugh booming above the gunfire like a ship’s cannon fire.

Bert’s voice drifted through the din, mild as warm milk. "Oh, I do beg your pardon, sir, so very sorry, but I fear this is going to hurt rather a lot. Hold still, if you’d be so kind."

Bones snapped with a wet, splintering crunch.

Jim’s bawl came over the gunfire, gleeful and hoarse. "Ye call that shootin’, ye pox-ridden sods? I’ve been shot at by a Portuguese nun, I have, a Portuguese bleedin’ nun, an’ she hit a sight harder than the lot o’ ye put together!"

Kit’s battle shriek rose above the whole business, and Anne was over the blocks and into a passage, her kerchief flying behind her.

Below lay the drowned city, its terraces above flooded courtyards, its stairways plunging into dark water, and a carved statue staring through the vines on the hill. The drummer found his sticks and began beating the alarm, while James laughed aloud and dropped into the passage after Anne.

The passage was just wide enough for two men to walk abreast, dark water flooding the stones beneath a rotten upper balcony that sagged overhead. Anne was three strides ahead when two soldiers came around the corner in single file, both with bayonets fixed.

The redcoat thrust at Anne, the bayonet grazing her as she twisted aside and hacked down at his hands, splitting his fingers with a scream while the musket splashed into the water between them. Before he could stumble back, she drove her cutlass into his throat and ripped it free, blood spilling down his coat.

He clawed at the wound, choking, then dropped face-first into the flooded passage.

The next soldier came over his companion with a roar, swinging his musket like a club. Anne caught the blow on her cutlass, the shock jarring her arm, then drove her shoulder into him and sent him against the wall. As he fought to recover his stance, she slashed across his face, cutting his cheek to the jaw, and finished him with a thrust beneath the arm.

He sagged against the stones, blood smearing the wall behind him, then slid into the red water at her feet.

James pounded through the blood-spattered water, pulling the oilcloth off [Counterargument] with his teeth, when a musketeer stepped out of a doorway on his left at five paces, his firearm shouldered. The pan flashed and fizzed, but the damp robbed the shot of its report.

The redcoat stared at his musket, lowered it, and charged, only for James to thumb the cock and fire from the hip at two paces. The shot struck him square in the chest, smashing him backward into the flood, where he thrashed once, blood pouring from the hole in his coat, as the water closed over his face and spread red around him.

James stepped over the body. "Trust in God, so the sayin’ goes, and keep yer powder dry. You managed the first, lad, pity about the second."

By then, a hundred other fights raged through the ruins.

Ahead of him, Anne pushed through a curtain of roots into a hole beneath a leaning slab, and James plunged in after her. The hollow stank of rot and burnt powder, while above them a carved statue leered down from the lintel.

The hollow stank of rot and burnt powder, while outside ranks of redcoats walked past, their boots hammering through the water as a sergeant cursed them to keep up.

Anne fisted her hands in his coat and hauled him against her, chest heaving, blood drying on her cheek, her voice a hot rasp against his ear. "Christ, James, I’m shakin’, drippin’ for you like a waterfall and hungry as a she-wolf, so if you’ve a prick in yer breeches and a minute to spare, you’ll have me arse against this slab this instant."

James grinned until his face hurt.

"Och, lass, lass, you’ll be the death of me. Time and place! Time and place!"

A short, ragged laugh broke out of her, and she let go of his coat with a shove. "Fine! Fine, you great tormentin’ tease. Leave a woman wantin’ in a hole in the ground, why don’t you? What now, then?"

James cocked his head toward the roots, dropping his voice to a whisper. "Same as we planned by the creek, lass. They’ve seen us now, so we stay scattered, and hunt the commodore and the stone while the redcoats go chasin’ their own tails like dogs. Whoever’s up by sunset, back to the leaves by the boats."

Anne wound the copper hair into a knot with a vicious twist. "That’s grand, so, come on, then, let’s be at it. I’ve a mind to cut open a few more English bastards before the dinner bell."

James adjusted his hat and thumbed the cock of the second barrel. Through the roots came the drumbeats, the volleys, the cries, and the steady ringing of axes.