Free The Buccaneers by Iain Lawrence

Horn.
    And the next time she rose, the black flag was gone from her masthead. In its place fluttered a blood-colored banner.
    “The sign of no quarter,” said Horn.
    Again she vanished in the waves, again she rose, turning toward us now. The crest passed between us; we soared on its back, and there she was, all sails set, rushing straight at us in a fury of foam.
    The men were in her rigging, in wind-torn clothes of red and black and gold. But now they rode in silence, and all we heard was the ship: the creaking of her rudder and planks, the flutter of her topsail.
    She came fast—incredibly fast—the reefs shaken out of her sails. Abbey tended to his guns, but it seemed hardly worth the bother. He could throw just eight pounds of iron at a ship weighing two hundred tons. His glass eye glowing, his round head wrapped in its scarlet cloth, he went about his business with all the bravery of Nelson. Wedges were driven to lower the barrels; the flintlocks were armed, and men took up the lanyards—Mudge at one, Abbey himself at the other.
    “Wait for it now,” he said.
    The
Apostle
bounded toward us. The foam at her bow tumbled along. Thirty men rode her rigging, and her deck was crowded with figures.
    Abbey fired first, and the ball fell short. With a hopeless little spout it buried itself yards before her bowsprit.
    Horn steered calmly down a wake as straight as a spar. My old uncle Stanley, beside him, tried to seem nonchalant, but his fright showed in his eyes, and in his hands, which went constantly from his side to his collar to his thin hair, made into sodden curls by rain and spray. For me, it was almost too much to bear. The black ship came so swiftly, so purposefully, and we were so helpless against her that I wanted to run and hide somewhere. I thought of the ship we had seen, decorated with dead men, and I felt the scratch of a noose at my neck. I turned away, to hide the tears that came to my eyes.
    I stared forward, at Abbey and his guns. It struck me thathe really had seen the future with his coffin in the sea, that we had all been doomed from that moment on. Through tears I looked at the bowsprit, down the leeward rail, across the waves that swept away toward a land I would never see again. I watched the waves toss and roll—a huge, uncaring sea. And I saw a sail atop it.
    It grew in an instant to a pyramid of sails, and a hull appeared below it, bobbing on the swell. A big, slow ship, she made her way north under canvas whitened by the sun. And I knew then why the
Apostle
was hurrying so, why her men were silent; she wasn't after us at all.
    I spun to face that black ship. In the minute that I'd looked away, she'd come seven times her length toward us. Her bowsprit towered up; the men looked down from the ratlines and the yard.
    “By the guns!” I shouted. “Hold your fire.”
    Horn looked toward me. Butterfield too.
    “She'll pass us by,” I said.
    But Abbey was already tugging on his lanyard. And the four-pounder barked out smoke.
    Splinters flew from the
Apostle's
stern. A chunk of her rail was suddenly gone, and a dreadful scream rose from her crowded deck.
    She'll turn on us now
, I thought. Like a lion we had poked with a stick, she would attack in a blind rage and shred us with her claws.
    But the hull kept passing. Her name, her numbers, marched on by. The guns kept passing, though five men stood at each, naked to the waist, ready with their sponges and their rams. Then her quarterdeck came level with our stern, the shattered railing passing, and I saw a dead manon the deck, another bleeding from the chest. Above them, at the helm, stood Bartholomew Grace.
    There was no one else it could be. Tall, strong, elegant-looking, he wore a gold-trimmed coat and a gold-trimmed hat with a crimson plume in its crown. He steered with one hand, looking ahead, and the wide brim of his hat fluttered round his face.
    Then he turned toward us. Gliding past, he turned his head. He took his hand from the wheel