Chapter 313 The Ankle Biters

The thunder stopped.

Nearly a mile out from the bend, a half-deaf man sitting in a hole was the first to know.

A limestone shelf covered half the hole, and mangrove roots hung over the rest like a dirty curtain. Underneath it lay the Silent Mouse and the Plump Partridge, bows turned inward, ten guns apiece, all run in and lashed down, masts covered in cut branches and their oars upright, dripping.

The entrance was a crack between two coral heads that no King’s leadsman would have called a passage. The Runts had finally found a use for being small.

Land crabs clicked among the roots. The place stank of mud, tar, and sailors who had been sweating in the dark since dawn, which wasn’t a combination anyone had asked for.

Nat stood with his palm flat against the Mouse’s mast. He felt the vibration leave the wood, like a pulse stopping beneath his fingers, and that was all the warning he needed.

Then he bellowed. "THEY’VE STOPPED! I FELT ’EM STOP, ME BABBERS, RIGHT UP THROUGH ME BONES! ’TIS DONE! ’TIS BLOODY DONE!"

His roar struck the limestone and came back twice as loud, sending every head in both crews snapping around as Tap, the Mouse’s boatswain, clapped a hand over his captain’s mouth.

From far away came a few dry pops, like snapping twigs, then nothing.

Tap tapped Nat’s shoulder with his free hand, two short beats and one long. It was the only language the captain never had trouble understanding.

Nat’s eyes went round as saucers above Tap’s palm, and the breath that blasted out between the fingers rattled the bosun’s knuckles. "MMPH! I’M WHISPERIN’! MMPH! IS YOU CAN’T HEAR ME, YOU DEAF OLD BASTARD, NOT THE OTHER WAY ’ROUND!"

Tap closed his eyes.

"God help me. Give me strength, Lord, or a bigger bleedin’ hand."

He removed his hand and held up one finger. "Right, you shower, admiral’s rule, not a cough, not a fart, not a prayer louder’n a mutter. First man what breaks it, I’ll feed him to the crabs meself, and I’ll say grace over him."

Grappling hooks lay coiled across both rails, and boarding planks lay along the waists, a rope to each end. Sailors sharpened cutlasses beneath rags, pistols sat wrapped in oilcloth, and every face was black with lampblack.

Even the thole pins had rags tied around them.

On the Partridge, Ladle the cook, a broad woman who wore a ladle through her belt, hauled a rope with Big Tiny. Together they hauled a canvas sling up through the hatch, with a captain sitting in it.

Wat hung there, slick with sweat and wheezing.

"Lor’ love us... hhhff... that hatch... gets narrer-er... every blessed year."

"Open wide, ye great lump o’ lard, an’ hush yer whingein’."

Ladle loaded a salt-pork biscuit into his mouth with brisk tenderness.

Wat chewed, swallowed, and inspected the deck. "Grapples... hhhff... thirty fathom a-piece... flaked proper, lovely. Larboard plank lashin’s... slack, it is. Fix it, some poor sod."

A sailor went to fix it, and no one bothered to ask how Wat had spotted the problem from inside a sling. There are questions a crew learns to ignore.

At the Partridge’s rail, Amen Abel whispered with his eyes squeezed shut. "Saint Elmo for the masts, see, an’ Saint Nicholas for the water, an’ Saint Jude for the hopeless cases, Lord, an’ plentiful they are aboard this vessel, isn’t it?"

On the Mouse, a boy called Biscuit hugged a cutlass longer than his leg.

"I’ll top six, I will! Six o’ the buggers, you watch! I’ll ’ave their boots an’ all!"

"Aye, an’ that’s no a cutlass, laddie."

Noted Galley Gabe, an old sailor whose forearms looked like hawsers.

"That’s a boat-hook."

Big Tiny, the largest man aboard either sloop and gentle as a nun’s cat, had turned the color of tallow.

"Eeh... mate... there’s a crab. It’s gone up me leg, it has. I can feel its little feet."

"Is in yer breeches next, lad. Only wants somewhere warm, don’t it? Stands to reason."

Big Tiny closed his eyes.

"Then tell it I’m cold. Tell it I’m ever so cold, love, there’s nowt warm in ’ere, nowt at all."

"Don’t you fret, big lad. Fust thing in a month what’s took a fancy to yer, innit?"

"Aye mate, have a bit o’ pride."

Across the gap, a sailor on the Mouse hissed,

"Oi, Partridge, yer cap’n’s that fat, the whores in Port Royal charge him by the ton."

Ladle drew her knot tight with a short sharp tug, a hangman finishing a noose. "Ah, an’ yer cap’n’s that deaf, he’s never heard a word the whores say of him. Lucky for his heart, so it is."

Tap exhaled, and then facepalmed with both hands.

The wait dragged on as Amen Abel finished his third decade of prayers, the flies found Wat’s second biscuit, the black pillar above the pines at the bend showed no sign of leaning, and the stream kept muttering among the roots.

Then a hand appeared over the rock.

Hawk Hobb dropped from the overhang onto the deck. He was a thin man with a squint who swore he could spot a flea on a gull from two miles away, and nothing had ever shaken his confidence in his eyesight.

He reported confidently. "Two sloops, comin’ down the channel, one’s mast leans like a drunk at a weddin’, while t’other’s got a hole in her side you could drive a goat through. Twenty sweeps in splinters. I checked every one meself, my handsome, and I never miss."

Nat had read every word from his lips. "SWEEPS DOWN, YOU SCURVY BEAUTIES! SWEEPS DOWN, AN’ PULL LIKE THE DEVIL’S GOT HOLD O’ YER BREECHES!"

The shout rolled among the reefs, where no King’s man could hear it. Nat flung an arm toward the Partridge, and Wat raised one finger from his sling.

"Mouse goes first. Smaller, ain’t she? Stands to bleedin’ reason." Tap hissed.

"Partridge first, an’ I’ll hear no argy-bargy from a man the size o’ a boot!"

Ladle hissed back, and the two glared across the gap like cats on a wall.

Nat roared. "PARTRIDGE FIRST, AN’ THAT’S AN ORDER, YOU SQUABBLIN’ LOT! SHE’S THE FATTEST LASS IN THE FLEET! IF SHE FITS, WE FIT, AN’ IF SHE STICKS, WE ALL GO TO THE DEVIL TOGETHER!"

From his sling Wat waved two sausage fingers.

He had measured the gap in his head and knew his own width to the inch. "She’ll... hhhff... kiss the left ’ead, she will. Let ’er. Better a kiss... than a collision, I always says."

The Partridge’s bow pushed into the narrow entrance and scraped the left coral head with a groan of wood.

"Mouse takes the leaner, Partridge takes the leaker," Galley Gabe muttered.

The Partridge ground through the rest of the crack and pushed her round bow into the light.

The Mouse followed so closely that her bow touched the Partridge’s stern, but Nat guided her through, leaving the passage without a scrape. Being small had its advantages, provided a man knew how to use them.

Both hulls emerged into open water beside a long grey bank of smoke spreading down the channel. The oars struck the water together, two sailors to each sweep, and the little hulls sprang forward with white water curling off their bows.

Tap kept time by rapping a rag-wrapped belaying pin against the rail, while across the gap Ladle struck her pot with her ladle to the same beat.

Two cables ahead, the King’s sloops crawled away through the smoke, the leaner one in front and the leaker wallowing behind with her side open to the water.

Biscuit hung over the bow with his cutlass swinging, and his squeal cracked sky-high with joy and terror.

He meant to whisper, but it came out like a rusty hinge.

"I’m fastest! Look at me go! Fastest in the ’ole bleedin’ fleet, me!"

On the Partridge, Amen Abel pulled the oars and prayed in the same breath. "Saint Jude, Saint Jude, oh sweet Saint Jude, look on us now, mun. We’re the hopelessest cases ye ever did see!"

Ladle pushed more biscuits into her captain’s mouth.

Wat commanded around it. "Lay ’er... hhhff... on the quarter. She’ll swing... larboard... four fingers... exact. Let ’er."

By then, the smoke began to thin, and a marine at the leaker’s stern turned his head and looked straight behind him, panicking as two little hulls came out of the reefs at full speed, their oars flashing and black-faced sailors grinning at every rail.

Beyond him lay the King’s deck, with a row of dead redcoats beneath a torn sail and their boots sticking out. The blood was black on the planks, and sweepers worked with their palms blistered raw while the wounded groaned, the sound carrying across the flat water.

"Sir! SIR! Pirates! Them sloops, sir, they’re comin’ on! They’re ROWIN’!"

"RUN OUT THE GUNS, YOU LAZY SONS OF BITCHES! RUN ’EM OUT, I SAY! RUN ’EM OUT!"

"Sir! Sir! There’s a fat man! On a sling! A great fat man, hangin’ off a rope, sir!"

The lieutenant turned to look, his face the color of a boiled ham. "I do not CARE if the Archbishop of Canterbury is dangling in it! They are SLOOPS, you blithering fools, SLOOPS! Fire! FIRE, damn your eyes, or I’ll have the lot of you flogged round the fleet!"

A ragged handful of muskets cracked across the deck, late and poorly aimed. A lucky shot struck a Mouse’s bowman in the face, while a rower on the Partridge pitched off his sweep with a hole in his chest.

Big Tiny caught the oar before it could fall into the water as two more sailors collapsed across the planks.

The black flags rose on both sterns at the same time.

"NOW, ME BABBERS! NOW! TAKE ’ER! TAKE ’ER AN’ DON’T LET GO!"

"Lay ’er... hhhff... on. Gentle, lads. Gentle as a kiss, an’ no fuss."

The leaker swung to larboard by exactly four fingers, and the Partridge slid onto her quarter. The Mouse’s bow bumped the leaner with a scrape no louder than a chair dragged across a floor.

Every grapple on both rails flew at once, the ropes catching as the sailors hauled until the hulls ground together. A King’s sailor hacked at one of the ropes with a hatchet and took a pistol shot through the cheek for his trouble.

Boarding planks dropped across the gunwales and bowed beneath the boots, while pirates swung over on ropes with cutlasses between their teeth.

"Saint Anthony! Saint Elmo! Sweet Saint Da..."

Amen Abel’s prayer broke off halfway through a saint as he jumped.

"I’m first! I’M FIRST! LOOK AT ME, YOU LUBBERS! FIRST OVER, I AM!"

Biscuit shrieked, flying across the gap on a rope with his cutlass dragging behind him.

A plank sagged under Galley Gabe, but he crossed it calmly.

"Faster, laddie! I’ve seen dead men jump better, an’ they’d a rope around their necks."

"Go on, Ladle... hhhff... leave me swingin’. I’ve... a lovely view."

Wat wheezed from his sling, and Ladle crossed a plank with her ladle raised like a mace.

Above the whole affair, loud enough to be heard over a cannon inside a church, roared the loudest man in the Caribbean.

"OVER THE SIDE, YOU BEAUTIFUL LITTLE BASTARDS! OVER AN’ BITE ’EM! BITE ’EM ALL, YOU RUNTS! BITE ’EM TILL THEY SQUEAL!"