Opening Atlantis

XIII

W illiam Radcliff's secretary was a plump, nearsighted man named Shadrach Spencer. William was making a complicated calculation about just how much to charge for Terranovan pipeweed in London when Spencer stuck his head into the office and said, "I beg your pardon, sir, but there is a…gentleman here whom I think you should see."

He didn't casually say such things: one reason he'd worked for William for more than fifteen years. "Well, send him in, then," William said, setting down his quill. "Let's find out what he has to say."

As Radcliff expected from his secretary's tone, the individual in question was no gentleman, but a backwoods ruffian who put him in mind of his distant cousin, Marcus. The man carried a parcel wrapped in cloth. He wore a wool shirt and suede breeches with fringes; no razor had sullied his cheek for several days. All the more reason to receive him as if he were the heir to a duchy. "Good day, sir. I am William Radcliff," William said, bowing. "I fear you have the advantage of me."

"My name is Dill, Hiram Dill." The backwoodsman shook hands politely enough, then remarked, "Thirsty work, riding in from past the edge of town."

"Shadrach, tend to that, would you?" Radcliff said.

"Certainly, sir." His secretary bustled off, returning a moment later with a flagon of fine-or at least strong-gin from Nieuw Haarlem and two glasses. He poured for William and his guest.

"Your health, sir," William said to Hiram Dill, raising his glass.

Dill drank. His eyes got wide. "I'm bound to be healthy if I pour this stuff down," he said. "It'd poison anything that tried to sicken me, and that's the Lord's truth."

Courteously, Radcliff poured him a refill. As Dill drank it down with as much alacrity as he'd shown for the first sample, William asked, "And what was it impelled you to ride in to Stuart from, as you say, past the edge of town?"

"Well, I was hunting for the pot last night, and I let fly with my shotgun at a pigeon flying by, and I bagged me…this here." Hiram Dill had a sense of the dramatic, whatever his other shortcomings might have been. He undid the cloth around his loosely wrapped parcel.

It was a pigeon, as ordinary a pigeon as ever hatched. Atlantis boasted several varieties of extraordinary pigeons. One was cream-colored, with bright red eyes. One, too big and heavy to fly, had a feathery crest that looked like curly hair. One was a dark green bird that disappeared completely against the needle-filled branches of redwoods and pines.

But this was a plain English pigeon, like the ones that cooed and strutted in the streets of Stuart hoping for handouts. Its head was green, its body shades of gray and white. The only unusual thing about it was a bit of parchment tied around its right leg.

"A message?" William asked. Hiram Dill nodded. William asked another question: "You've read it?"

"Well, sure," Dill answered. "Couldn't very well know you needed to see it if I hadn't, now could I?"

"No, indeed," Radcliff said gravely. "And what does it say?"

"See for yourself," the backwoodsman replied. His scarred and callused fingers surprisingly deft, he undid the message from the bird's leg and handed it to William.

The fine, tiny, spidery hand defeated William's sight, which was beginning to lengthen. He called in Shadrach Spencer. "Read this out for me, if you would be so kind."

"Of course, sir." His secretary held the parchment so close to his eyes, it all but bumped his nose. "It says, 'In Stuart harbor nine ships of the line, twelve armed merchantmen, fifteen lesser ships. Sailing soon against Avalon.'"

"I am not surprised to learn we have a spy amongst us, but neither am I heartened to learn it. The iniquity some men will embrace…" William shook his head. Then he brightened. "As for you, Mr. Dill, I freely own myself to be in your debt."

Hiram Dill didn't say anything. His face, however, bore an expression remarkable for its cupidity. He had brought the pigeon to William for no other reason than to hear those words from his lips. William spoke to his secretary in a low voice. Spencer nodded and hurried off, as he had when Radcliff asked him to fetch the gin.

This time, he needed longer to return. When he did, he pressed a small velvet sack into William Radcliff's hand. Radcliff, in turn, presented the sack to Hiram Dill. "With my compliments, sir."

Judas could no more have kept from counting the wealth he'd got from the Romans than Dill could have stopped himself from opening the sack and seeing what lay inside. "Five pounds!" he exclaimed. "God bless you, Mr. Radcliff! I didn't look for so much, and that's the Lord's truth, too."

"You have earned it. I would say, earned it and more, did I not fear that would make you importunate," William said with a smile. "I have known for long and long that the pirates of Avalon spied upon Stuart. How they spied upon us, no one here knew-till now."

Hiram Dill grinned back. "I expect there'll be a deal of pigeon hunting in town the next little while."

"I expect you are right, Mr. Dill," Radcliff replied. "I expect you are just exactly right. And I expect someone will be very unhappy when we uncover him for a polecat, for a lying, tricking snake in the grass."

"What will you do to him? Something worth watching, I hope," Dill said.

"Oh, yes." Radcliff nodded. "I don't know yet what it will be, sir, but I promise you that anyone who sees it will remember it to the end of his days."

Red Rodney Radcliffe was not a happy man. When he was unhappy, he thought himself duty-bound to make everyone around him unhappy, too. "Damn it to hell, why haven't we heard from Stuart?" he growled. "Somebody over there has his thumb up his bum. How are we supposed to know when the God-cursed fleet is sailing if they don't send pigeons?"

"Maybe something's gone wrong with the birds," Ethel suggested.

"No doubt. They've come down poxed, on account of wasting their silver at the bird brothels. They need a better class of pigeon pimps." Red Rodney laughed. He thought he was funny, and that was all that mattered to him.

His daughter was harder to amuse. "Maybe the fat fools back there have finally twigged to your using pigeons, and they're shooting all the birds they see going out."

"Good luck to 'em!" Rodney said. "They'd do better to shoot the bugger who sets the birds free."

He meant that as a sardonic retort to put Ethel in her place. But the words seemed to hang in the air. The more he mulled them over, the likelier they felt. Ethel must have felt the same way, for she asked, "What can you do about it if they have shot him?"

"Damn all, I fear," Red Rodney said morosely. "I'd have to get somebody else with pigeons to Stuart. That might not be easy, not if the bastards there are waiting for me to try it."

"You could put pigeons on a scout ship up near North Cape," Ethel said. "They wouldn't give as much warning as birds from Stuart would, but they fly faster than any ship can sail."

Radcliffe started to trot out all the reasons why that was a foolish notion, but stopped with his mouth hanging open. Try as he would, he couldn't find any. Instead, he gave Ethel a big, smacking kiss. "The Devil fry me black if you won't command the Black Hand after I'm gone. You've got the natural wit for it."

"And the charm, too." Ethel simpered. She wasn't old enough yet to have the kind of charms she wanted. But she also wanted to take a pirate crew into battle. Even now, she would likely do a good job of it.

He tousled her hair. "Your day will come, sweetling, but not quite yet." Ethel pouted. He took no notice of her, which was her good luck; had his temper flared, he would have made her sorry.

Instead, he called for Mick. The master of the dovecote nodded and knuckled his forehead when Red Rodney told him what he had in mind. "Aye, skipper, we can do that-damned if we can't," he said. "You were in a sneaky mood when you thought of it, eh?"

"I'm not to blame," Radcliffe said, not without pride. "It's my daughter's notion."

"Well, good on Ethel, then," said Mick, who knew which side his bread was buttered on.

That very afternoon, a pinnace slipped out of Avalon harbor. Armed with only a handful of four-pounders, the little ship couldn't hope to outfight even the lighter vessels that would be sailing from Stuart. But she boasted a broad spread of sail, so she had a chance of getting away. And she carried several pigeons in wicker cages, so even if the enemy did run her down she could warn Avalon that danger neared.

Ethel was wild with rage when she found out the pinnace had sailed without her. "Why didn't you let me go?" she shouted at her father. "You said I could've done it!"

"I said your day was coming. I didn't say it was here," Rodney replied.

"I say it is!" Ethel screeched.

"You can say all sorts of things," he said. "That doesn't mean you can back them up."

"Who says I can't?" She drew her pistol with startling speed and aimed it at his chest.

The bore of any firearm pointed straight at you seemed six or eight times as wide as it really was. Red Rodney made no sudden moves. Furious as she was, Ethel might have squeezed the trigger first and thought about it only afterwards-which would have been rather too late for him. "Put that thing away," he said. "She's already sailed, and she's miles from here by now. I can't call her back."

"Not fair!" Ethel wailed. The pistol swung away from Red Rodney. He darted forward and grabbed her wrist. The gun went off. Something smashed. He didn't see what, and he didn't much care. As long as that heavy lead ball didn't thump into him…

Ethel was tough and brave and strong-and not nearly big enough for any of that to do her the least bit of good. Rodney got her over his knee and smacked her behind. Her wails-or maybe the pistol shot-brought people on the run. "Only a mistake," Red Rodney told them. "She's finding out better now."

"Oh, no, I'm not!" Ethel yelled.

"Oh, yes, you are, by God!" Her father continued to apply himself to her seat of learning. "You don't aim a damned gun at somebody unless you aim to kill him. And you'd damned well better not aim to kill the bastard who spawned you. Have you got that, you little hellcat?" He did his best to make sure she'd got it.

By her tears, by her red, blotchy face, and by his own hot, red palm, his best was plenty good. He didn't stop, though, until she sobbed, "Enough, Father! Enough!"

That took longer than he'd thought it would. He admired her strength to hold out-but he would have gone to the rack before he said so. "Mind from now on. Do you hear me?" he growled.

"Yes, Father." She stared down at the floor. She didn't try to sit down after he let her go; he suspected she would sleep on her stomach when night came.

"This isn't a game, dammit," Rodney Radcliffe said roughly. "This is a war. If the buggers in Stuart win it, they'll knock Avalon flat and they'll hang everybody they can catch. You had a notion that gives us a better chance. I'm going to use that notion the best way I know how, with you or without you. I don't have room to do anything else. Have you got that?"

"Yes, Father." Ethel kept her eyes downcast.

"All right, then. Remember it."

"Oh, I'll remember, Father." She looked him in the face then. "You don't need to worry about that." She turned and walked away. Red Rodney felt as if a goose-or, by the weight of the strides, a honker-had just walked over his grave. No, Ethel wouldn't forget till she was dead or he was. And her expression told only too clearly which one of those she wanted.

Royal Navy ships carried Royal Marines: bullocks, sailors called them with affectionate scorn. They were tough, stolid men in red uniforms who fired from the fighting tops and led boarding parties and raiding parties. The ships of the line from Nieuw Haarlem had similar contingents aboard. The Dutch marines might have been stamped from the same molds as their English counterparts, save only that they wore different clothes.

William Radcliff's merchantmen normally took no marines with them. Traders fought only in emergencies, not as a matter of course, and couldn't afford so many mostly idle hands aboard. Everything that happened between Stuart and Avalon, though, would be in the nature of an emergency. William recruited hunters from all over English-speaking Atlantis. They would not be so well disciplined as their counterparts in the men-of-war, but he thought they would serve.

His distant cousin Marcus Radcliffe came to Stuart at the head of a company of sixty backwoodsmen. They had no uniforms. Each wore what suited him and carried the kind of musket he liked best. If they came from a mold, it was not from the one that had produced the English and Dutch marines.

Marcus gave William a salute that would have provoked an apoplexy in a sergeant of Royal Marines. "Well, coz, here we are," he said. "Hope we can give those pirates a bad time one way or another."

"One way and another, I suspect," William said. Yes, the backwoodsmen were sadly short on spit and polish. He thought they could fight anyway, and wished the rest of his recruits left him as confident. "From now till the fighting's over, you're a captain, with a captain's pay."

"Good," Marcus said matter-of-factly. "I don't chase silver as hard as you do, but I don't scare it off when it ambles into my sights, either."

"Fine. I'll put you and your men into the Pride of Atlantis." William pointed to the ship. "And do you recollect what we spoke of when last you visited Stuart?" He didn't go into detail, not when he hadn't yet tracked down the pigeon fanciers who kept Avalon informed of what went on here.

Marcus nodded. "I'm not likely to forget. Come the time, you won't find us behindhand. You may count on that."

"Good. I didn't think I would find you so, and I intend to count on it." William sketched a salute, then made his way down to the Royal Sovereign.

"The admiral!" the boatswain cried, and piped him aboard. All the men on deck saluted as he came up the gangplank. The naval salute was knuckles-out, so the person honored couldn't see a sailor's pitch-dirtied palm.

Among the men saluting on deck was Elijah Walton. "We await your orders, Admiral," he said with no irony William could hear.

Standing by him was the Royal Sovereign's captain, a red-faced veteran mariner named Adam Barber. He was the man with whom and through whom Radcliff would have to work. "Take us out of the harbor, Mr. Barber," William said, wincing at his accidental rhyme. "Once we're on the open sea, we'll have the leisure to shake ourselves out into a proper line."

"Aye aye, sir," Barber replied. He shouted the necessary orders. Signal flags fluttered up the lines to let the other ships know what they were supposed to do. Were pigeons flying out of Stuart even now, letting the corsairs of Atlantis know their doom was on the way? Men with shotguns waited southwest of the city, but the odds of stopping the birds were slim, and William knew it.

Sweating, swearing sailors hauled up the anchor and the heavy rope that attached it to the ship. Slowly, slowly, they made the capstan turn. The noise it made was half rumble, half squeak. Their chanty, rising over that noise, was loudly and jauntily obscene.

Sails unshrouded. The masts and spars filled with canvas like a tree-an imported tree in Atlantis, where most of the natives were evergreens-coming into new leaf in springtime, but a thousand times faster. The Royal Sovereign slid away from the pier, slowly at first but then with more speed and more confidence.

"Nothing like getting under weigh, is there?" William said.

"Well, sir, I don't think so, and that's a fact," Captain Barber replied. "I suppose other folks can have other notions." He turned to the pilot, a Stuart native who knew the waters of the harbor as intimately as he knew the contours of his wife's body. "I place myself in your capable hands, Mr. McCormick."

"And I'll try not to make you sorry for it, sir," David McCormick answered. As the Royal Sovereign slid past a clump of barrel trees, he swung the wheel a couple of spokes' worth to port. "The deeper channel here lies this way. We'd likely not go aground anyhow, not unless the tide were lower, but all the same-why take the chance, eh?"

"If I have to take a chance in battle, that's one thing," Barber said. "It comes with my station, you might say. Taking a chance on the way to battle…is something I don't care to do, thank you very much. Choose the deeper channel every time, sir."

"That is well said," William Radcliff put in. "Enough danger we can't steer clear of. What we can avoid, best we do."

Captain Barber eyed him in some surprise. "Meaning no offense, sir, but you have better sense than I was led to believe." Elijah Walton tried to hide in plain sight.

"Well, perhaps I do and perhaps I don't," William said. "Either way, though, we'd do best to save our fighting for the pirates. Quarreling among ourselves won't get us anywhere but into trouble."

Red Rodney Radcliffe waited for a pigeon from Stuart letting him know the enemy fleet had sailed. He waited and waited, but no bird came. Something was wrong. He didn't know what, but something was. William Radcliff wouldn't wait, not with all his ships assembled.

"They must have caught your bird fancier," Jenny said when the pirate chief grumbled about it.

"Too bloody right they have," Rodney said gloomily.

And if they had, what did that mean? It meant he was waiting and waiting for a message he wouldn't get. It also meant he was damn lucky he'd sent that pinnace north. God bless Ethel, he thought. Without the little ship and the birds aboard it, his unloving and unloved cousin's ships might have come up to Avalon unannounced and undiscovered.

A surprise would have meant disaster, nothing less. The whole point of fighting the enemy men-of-war was keeping them far away from the corsairs' base. If they took Avalon…If they did, individual pirates and pirate ships might go on here and there. But the present order of things, where the freebooters were almost a nation and where their vessels ruled the Hesperian Gulf, would die.

He took a fat gold ring out of a strongbox and pressed it onto one of Jenny's fingers. It was too big for anything but her thumb. Red Rodney didn't care. "Keep it, sweetheart," he said.

She kissed him. He was generous enough, but not usually so generous as this. "What did I do? What did I say?" she asked.

"Never mind," he said. "You're you. That's plenty."

Jenny stared at the thick gold circlet. "But I want more!"

"You always do," Red Rodney said, not without affection. "You make a good pirate, Jenny."

"Huh!" That didn't suit her the way it would have suited Ethel. He might have known. She wanted to be a fine lady. What she was doing in Avalon with a dream like that…Well, people didn't always end up where they wanted to. You had to do what you could with what life gave you-either that or you had to give it a good swift kick and make it do what you wanted. Women had a harder time there than men did.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than someone knocked on the bedroom door. He and Jenny were decorously clad this time; she didn't have to duck under the covers. He opened the door. There stood Mick. "Ha!" Rodney said. "Is it word from Stuart at bloody last?" Maybe he'd worried over nothing.

"No, skipper-from the pinnace." The Irishman held out an unfolded scrap of parchment.

"Give me that!" Radcliffe snatched it out of his hands. We are not far from North Cape, he read. Enemy now coming into sight. Fleet is about the size you guessed it would be. Will get away if we can. The message was dated the fourteenth. "What's today's date?" Red Rodney demanded.

"The fifteenth, isn't it?" Jenny said from behind him. Mick nodded.

Rodney Radcliffe calculated how fast the enemy fleet could sail. With reasonable winds, they would get to Atlantis in three or four more days. They would, that is, unless they were stopped. He had the chance to do just that.

"We move!" he shouted, so that both his mistress and the pigeon man jumped. He went on shouting, too, so that first his own crew and then the rest of the corsairs of Avalon would pay attention to him. And they did. The ragged, mismatched fleet sailed the next morning. Aboard the Black Hand, Red Rodney wore a smile that stretched from ear to ear. If William Radcliff wanted the pirates wrecked, he would have to do it the hard way.

William Radcliff looked discontentedly toward the Atlantean coast. Here in the west, with the warm current bathing the shore, the weather stayed mild much farther north than it did on the other side of the Green Ridge Mountains. "I wish we'd been able to sink that pinnace," he grumbled.

"Don't worry, Admiral," Elijah Walton said. William thought the Englishman used the title to pacify him, the way a mother might give a baby her breast. Walton went on, "We made the bastards aboard it beach themselves so they wouldn't be caught. They won't pass word on to the freebooters that we bear down on Avalon-we'll get there long before they can."

"You are a clever man, sir-but, perhaps, not so clever as you might be," William said. "How have the pirates been spying out our every move in Stuart?"

"By pigeon. But you seem to have put a stop to that."

"Well, I can hope I did." William Radcliff shrugged broad shoulders. "Whether I did or not, though, I couldn't very well stop the men aboard that little ship from loosing whatever birds they had. And I think it very likely they had some. Why was that ship there, if not to spy out our coming? No other reason makes sense. And they would pass word on to Avalon as quickly as ever they could. They would know we'd have swift ships aplenty, and that they might be overtaken themselves. Only pigeons make sense, then."

Walton chewed on that with even less enthusiasm than he used for eating at sea. He was not a good sailor, not when the ocean turned rough, as it had in the voyage up from Stuart to North Cape. "Well, you are right," he said at last. "You are right, and I wish to heaven you weren't."

"Oh, so do I," Radcliff replied, "but what difference does that make? If we fail against the freebooters, the ones who ran off the beach before we burnt their pinnace will come down to Avalon sooner or later and find their fellows carrying on just as they were before."

A regiment might be unable to sustain itself traversing a long swath of Atlantean terrain. Marcus Radcliffe had made that all too plain to William. But a smaller group, as long as they kept their heads, would not have much trouble finding enough to eat.

"Maybe a band of copperskinned renegadoes or escaped blackamoors will fall on them before they reach their promised land," Walton said.

"Maybe, but not likely, not in this quadrant of Atlantis," William Radcliff said. "Far more Negro slaves in the French and Spanish holdings in the southeast, and the same holds true in lesser measure for the Terranovan natives. This is the least settled part of the land."

"A pity, for it seems no less fruitful than any other, and rather more so than some farther east," Elijah Walton said. "The only thing holding it back is its remoteness-well, that and the dampening effect a bloody nest of pirates is apt to have on the settlements of honest men."

"Its time will come." Radcliff spoke with sublime confidence. "One day-and sooner than many believe, especially back in England-this land will be as well settled as the home islands, and far more populous and prosperous."

Walton looked shoreward himself. No axe had ever touched these redwoods. No farmhouses stood out in the meadow. No cattle or sheep or horses grazed upon them. No smoke betrayed human habitation anywhere close by. A honker, symbol of all that was old and wild about Atlantis, stared incuriously out to sea. The Englishman neither said anything nor needed to.

Stubbornly, William Radcliff said, "That time will come, sir. Not in my lifetime or yours, perhaps, but it will. You may rely upon it. We shall also continue with the deposition of the Terranovan savages from their longtime haunts until they cease to encumber the western continent."

"There I can scarcely disagree with you, not when some of the savages have gold," Walton said. "A great pity the Spaniards jumped on them first, but we have not got poor on Spain's leavings, indeed we haven't. If the corsairs plundered only Spain's ships, I should not mind them a bit."

"Nor I," William said. "But, since they plunder me and mine, I will end them if I can. And with a fleet like this under my command, I believe I can do nothing else."

The fleet was a grand sight, spread out across the sea, the great ships of the line bunched together in the center, with faster, more nimble vessels on either wing. Nothing matched the splendor of a big sailing ship's stately passage over the sea. It put Radcliff in mind of a dowager gliding across the dance floor in skirts that swept out and concealed all the motion of her lower body. But for the thrum of the breeze in the rigging and the laundry-line sound of a sail filling with wind now and then, the journey was almost silent, which only added to its grandeur.

However grand and splendid it might be, it wasn't fast enough to suit the admiral. He didn't know what he could do about that. Well, actually, he did know: he could do nothing. Even with a breeze from the north, the fleet had to make headway against the warm current that came up from the other direction. Farther out in the Hesperian Gulf, the current did not flow, but the added distance and the unending uncertainty about longitude made evading the current anything but a sure time-saver.

"We may still come upon Avalon unawares," Walton said.

"We may, yes, but I doubt we shall," William replied.

"Oh, ye of little faith." The Englishman's smile took most of the sting from the words.

"I have faith," Radcliff said. "I have faith that the freebooters are less foolish than you make them out to be."

And his faith, such as it was, was vindicated when shouts from the fleet's crow's nests came down to the decks: "Sail ho! Sail ho! Sail ho!"

"Sail ho!" the lookout shouted from high in the Black Hand's rigging. "Sail ho! Sail ho!" The third repetition seemed to carry an almost desperate urgency.

Red Rodney Radcliffe peered north. He couldn't see anything from the brigantine's deck. He would soon enough, though-all too soon. Sailors had known the world was round long before landlubber scholars realized as much. The way things came up over the sea's long, smooth horizon showed it plain as plain.

"Send form line of battle abreast!" he shouted to the Royal Navy renegade who made signals for him.

"Aye aye, skipper!" Quint answered with a grin, and ran up the flags.

Not far away, the nominal admiral's ship would hoist the same signal, and hardly anyone would know Red Rodney had ordered the move first. He only hoped the freedom-loving captains who commanded the other ships would take the order seriously.

The bastards on the other side would do what their admiral told them to. Rodney Radcliffe was only too sure of that. He usually despised the men of Stuart and England and Nieuw Haarlem for their slavish obedience. In battle, though, he knew how much it mattered.

He was too busy looking to port and starboard to see what his colleagues and comrades were doing to pay much attention to what lay ahead for some little while. When he did turn his eyes to the north again, his stomach lurched as if he were prone to seasickness. He had never seen such large ships so close before. A pirate with an ounce of sense sheered off when he spied a first-rate ship of the line. He wasn't likely to last long against one in a straight-up fight.

They were in line of battle, the men-of-war and their accompanying scavengers. All their ships sailed as if animated by a single will. So Rodney thought, anyhow, till he spied the gaggle of Dutchmen keeping station on one another rather than with their English comrades. But they didn't do much harm to the enemy line, and conformed to the movements of the rest of the fleet.

His own ships, on the other hand…

If he hadn't known they'd practiced staying together and fighting as a group, he never would have believed it. They straggled all over the sea. If they formed a line, it was a line drawn by a drunk.

At least they sailed toward the enemy fleet. The wind blew from a little north of west, which gave the enemy the weather gauge and the choice of fighting or declining battle. The big ships sailed forward, their masts blooming with sails. They weren't here to pull back.

Neither was Red Rodney Radcliffe. He glanced toward those men-of-war. Then he looked west, out toward the edge of his own ragged line-and beyond. Looking that way meant looking into the westering sun. Red Rodney smiled to himself. In some ways, this couldn't have worked out better if he'd planned it for months. He had planned to fight, but knowing when the fleets would meet… That was luck, nothing else. And luck favored him now.

Luck favored him as long as he could make a fight of it, anyhow. A bow chaser on one of the enemy ships fired. He saw the puff of smoke and the belch of fire before he heard the cannon go off. Bow and stern chasers were long guns, which gave them more range than the pieces on the gun decks.

The iron ball splashed into the sea several hundred yards short of the closest pirate ship. By the size of the splash, it was a twelve-pounder. Rodney muttered to himself. Twelve-pounders were broadside guns on the Black Hand. Would a ball from one of them even pierce a ship of the line's thick iron planking?

He'd find out before long. William Radcliff and the men who sailed with him would want to slug it out at close range. Of course they would-they had all the advantage that way. A broadside from one of those monster ships could smash a brigantine to ruins. The corsairs' fight was slash and dart and run away.

But Avalon couldn't run. Red Rodney hated his cousin with a loathing all the more profound because William Radcliff understood that too well. Individual freebooters could survive even if the worst befell their town. Their reign over the Hesperian Gulf? That would be over, over forever.

"Shall we answer them, skipper?" called a pirate at the Black Hand's bow gun.

It was a pipsqueak four-pounder, good for nothing more than frightening ships that couldn't fight back. Red Rodney nodded all the same. "Yes, by God!" he shouted. "Let 'em know we're here to give 'em what for!"

A moment later, the little popgun roared defiance at the approaching fleet. Its ball also fell short, but by less than the first gun's had. The pirates manhandled it back into position, swabbed out the bore, thrust in the worm to dispose of any bits of smoldering wadding, and then rammed home powder and ball and fired again.

Several other bow chasers on both sides went off. One ball struck home with a crash that echoed across the water. Red Rodney eyed the enemy fleet with wary apprehension. When William Radcliff or whoever was in command judged the time ripe…

As smoothly as if they'd practiced together for years, all the ships of the line and the smaller vessels with them swung to port. "Hard to starboard!" Red Rodney shouted to his own helmsman, and then, to Quint, "Signal hard to starboard!"

His own fleet's broadside would be puny next to the one that came at it, but he had to stand the gaff at least once. Yes, the corsairs would take punishment, but they would also dish some out. And they would hold the enemy in position for a little while. Rodney Radcliffe glanced west again. They needed to do that if they were to have any chance of discomfiting the dogs out of Stuart.

Then the enemy broadside spoke, and Red Rodney thought he'd fallen into the end of the world. The flame, the smoke, the thunder…A heavy cannon ball smashed into the Black Hand's rail and decking. The brigantine staggered; Radcliffe felt the shudder through his feet. Whistling, whining splinters flew everywhere. A man not six feet from him went down with a gurgling scream, clutching at the jagged length of timber that speared his throat. Blood poured from the wound, and from his mouth. He was a dead man, one who wasn't quite finished dying yet.

The corsairs' broadside answered the one from the enemy. Even to Radcliffe's ear, it sounded thin and ragged. It didn't have the crushing weight of metal the English and Dutch and eastern Atlanteans enjoyed, and it was disrupted by taking hits from those big guns. Even so, a mast on one of the men-of-war toppled. On deck, sailors on that ship ran like ants when a foot comes down. Red Rodney whooped.

He wasn't so happy when he turned his eye toward his own side. One pirate ship was on fire, another slewing helplessly out of line with rudder shot away, yet another with both masts down. The men-of-war fired again, this time ship by ship. They were happy enough pounding pirates to pieces.

Red Rodney looked west once more. He could only hope the enemy admiral wasn't doing the same.