The Tiger’s Prey

There was no room to swing a sword in the cabin. Aboli extended his arm, blade in hand, and ran the pirate through the neck. He dropped to the floor clutching his throat. Blood gurgled through the wound. The spoons and candlestick clattered to the deck.

‘On me, Centaurus!’ Tom ducked through the door out onto the lower deck. It was a scene of utter carnage: men hauling bales of cloth from the hold, tipping out seamen’s chests, spilling precious spices across the planking. Further forward, some had broken open a cask of rum and they were drinking from the bunghole.

None had their weapons in hand. Most didn’t see the men emerging from the cabin, or didn’t realize who they were.

The Centaurus’ boarding party rushed at them. Dorian and Aboli were experienced warriors, veterans of countless fights. Zama and Tula, who had grown up with tales of their father’s wars, fought with the ferocity of young men given their first taste of battle. Alf Wilson and the rest of the crew had followed the Courtneys into more contests than they cared to remember. They knew precisely what they had to do.

The pirates barely realized what was happening to them, before most were felled without a fight. A few tried to protect themselves with whatever came to hand – navigation books, tankards or bales of cloth – but they were cut down swiftly. From the corner of his eye, Tom saw Dorian pressing forward with sharp, precise movements. One of the pirates had a knife in his hand. Dorian disarmed him with a flick of his sword, turned the blade and slid it between his ribs and through the pirate’s heart. With a twist of his wrist, the sword came out cleanly, in time to punch the steel guard into the next man’s face. The man reeled back, and Dorian stepped forward and ran him through.

But a few of the pirates had managed to escape up the forward ladder. ‘Up on deck,’ shouted Tom. Some of the pirates above must have worked out what was happening. If the pirates battened down the hatches, Tom and all his men would be trapped between decks.

Tom shot up the companionway, taking the blood-slicked steps three at a time. A man appeared at the top; Tom drew one of his pistols and shot him left-handed. At that range, he couldn’t miss. The man toppled towards him. Tom sidestepped him, took the last steps in a single bound and landed on the main deck.

With his senses heightened by the rush of battle, he took in the scene at once: the knot of prisoners corralled at the back, surrounded by armed pirates; the captain on his knees, bleeding from his face and arms; and the woman pinned down on her back, skirts spread, with a bearded pirate holding his sword between her thighs.

Tom raised his second pistol and fired. Too quick: the ball went wide of the mark and hit one of the men behind. The pirate captain jerked up. With a snarl of rage, he raised his sword to stab it through the woman beneath him.

Another shot rang out. Dorian had come up beside Tom. Smoke blew from the pistol in his hands; the pirate captain dropped his sword and stumbled back, bleeding from his wrist.

Tom grinned at his brother. ‘Good shot, Dorry.’

‘I was aiming for his heart.’ Dorian jammed the spent pistol in his belt, and swapped his sword back to his right hand. A pirate lunged at him with a pike. Dorian sidestepped the blow, caught the man off balance and lunged with his sword. It took him in the centre of his chest and the blood-smeared point appeared a hand’s length from between his shoulder blades.

Aboli had already cut his way back onto the quarterdeck. Tom followed him up the ladder. Another fierce melee boiled across the ship’s stern. With cries of ‘huzzah’ and ‘Dowager’, the merchant’s crew had turned on their captors. They were unarmed, but the pirates were off-guard. Some had gone to join the looting; others had been too busy watching Legrange toying with the woman. Some of them had put down their weapons, and now they were caught from both sides. Sailors wrestled swords from the pirates, or grappled them so closely they couldn’t bring their weapons into play. Tom moved through the melee, searching eagerly for the pirate captain.

His foot caught on something. His eyes flicked down. It was the woman he’d seen earlier, curled into a ball, holding her torn skirts around her. Nearby, he saw a smouldering brazier sitting on the deck, utterly forgotten as the fighting raged around it.

Even in the heat of battle, Tom felt a spike of alarm. Fire was every sailor’s worst fear – the one thing that could reduce a ship to black ash in minutes.

Aboli had seen it too. He picked up the brazier by one leg and hurled it over the side, onto the pirate ship. Hot coals skittered across her deck. One came to rest against a pile of rope, but with all the uproar aboard the Dowager, no one noticed it.

Tom stood over the woman, threatening off anyone who came near, still scanning the throng for the enemy captain. The men from Centaurus, the crew from the Dowager and the remaining pirates were all locked in mortal combat. More pirates emerged from below deck like rats: they kept coming, fighting with a ferocity he’d rarely seen equalled. Men who had everything to lose.

And then, like a shift in the wind, the pirates started to give way. Space opened in front of Tom, space to lunge and strike. He advanced, cutting down men as they ran from him. For a moment, he didn’t realize why they were running. Then he smelled it. It was not the acrid tang of gunpowder that had stampeded them, but the powerful choking scent of burning wood and tar.

Caught between determined foes and a burning ship, the pirates raced to get back to put out the fire that was sweeping through their own ship. Tom skewered one just as he made to leap from the Dowager’s side. He toppled into the gap between the ships and was crushed between their hulls. Tom looked across. Black smoke billowed out of the Fighting Cock; flames licked over her gunwale and started running up her stays.

‘Cut her loose!’ Tom yelled. If the fire jumped across to the Dowager, they’d all burn and drown. Zama started cutting away the grappling ropes with his boarding axe. Two of the Dowager’s men grabbed cutlasses that had fallen on the deck and joined him.

The flames ran higher. Still the ships remained locked together. Looking up, Tom saw the Dowager’s yardarms caught in the pirate’s rigging, forming a high bridge between the two ships.

‘Give me that axe.’ He grabbed it from Zama and ran up the ratlines. Dorian followed him.

He swung himself around the futtock shrouds and out onto the yard. As master of his own ship, he rarely went aloft any longer, but he had not lost the knack. He ran to the end of the yard and started hacking away at the tangle of lines and shrouds that had snagged it. The fire burned beneath him, jumping so high it looked as if the flames were licking the soles of his boots. Smoke made his eyes water. Dorian joined him, kneeling on the yard to cut away a block that had jammed on the clewlines.

Still the ships stayed fast in their mutual embrace.

‘Why won’t she go?’

Dorian pointed to a piece of tackle that had wrapped itself in the braces. He took the boarding axe from Tom and moved towards it.

Something struck the yard. Tom felt the vibration even before he saw the hole gouged in the side of the spar, just by Dorian’s foot. Down through the smoke, Tom saw the pirate captain lowering the musket he had just fired.

He means to kill us both, he thought. Without hesitating, he ran to the very end of the yard and leaped across into the Fighting Cock’s shrouds, swung around and grabbed for a stay. He slid down so fast he burned the skin of his palms, bracing himself as he landed hard on deck. In the smoke and chaos, no one noticed him. Her crew rushed about with buckets, trying to put out the blaze; others were trying to lower her long boat, which hung cockeye on its moorings.

Legrange was reloading the musket. Tom hurled himself at him. They both went down, the musket trapped under Legrange’s body. Legrange bucked and tried to throw him off, but Tom’s weight pinned the pirate down, while he reached for the knife in his stocking.

Under him Legrange reached out blindly, scraped his fingernails across the deck, trying to find a weapon. They closed around a handspike lying forgotten under the carriage of one of the cannons. With all his strength, he swung his arm back and slammed the iron spike at Tom’s head. Tom saw the movement just in time. He rocked back, so that the spike glanced off his shoulder – but that gave Legrange all the space he needed to free himself. He rolled out from under Tom and came to his feet. He snatched up the fallen musket and aimed it at Tom. He pulled the trigger.

The flint struck sparks from the steel. Tom flinched – but the musket had misfired. With a howl of fury, Legrange reversed the musket and came at Tom again, swinging the weapon by its barrel.

Wind whipped the smoke away. Behind Legrange, Tom saw that the two ships were drifting apart. Dorian had cut the Dowager free. He had to get across to her – but Legrange was blocking his way, brandishing the musket like a club. Tom edged backwards, ducking to avoid the pirate’s furious blows. The fire was taking hold; most men had abandoned any attempt to fight it and were instead trying to save themselves. Still Legrange came on, too quickly to allow Tom any chance to pick up a weapon from the littered deck.

Tom took another step back – and came up short against the ship’s side. He vaulted up onto the gunwale, just avoiding another wild swing of the musket.

Balanced on the narrow ledge, he darted a glance at the water below him. The ship was drifting down wind. If he fell he realized that he would be pushed under her hull and cut to ribbons by the razor-sharp barnacles that coated her bottom. That was if the sharks did not get to him before that happened.

Legrange knew it too. He paused a moment to savour the situation. He didn’t know who Tom was, where he had come from or how he had got aboard, but he knew he had cost him his prize – and probably his ship also. Snarling with fury, he lunged at Tom with the musket to force him overboard.

Tom anticipated the blow, and jumped backwards off the gunwale. To Legrange’s astonishment, he did not drop into the waves below but he swung out into space, flying out from the ship’s side as if he had sprouted wings.

Legrange had not noticed the taut halyard attached to the ship’s yardarm high above, that Tom had seized hold of. Tom reached the limit of his arc and started swinging back, gathering speed as the ship’s hull rolled and gave him impetus. He pulled his knees up onto his chest and then shot them out as he swooped back at Legrange. Both his booted heels slammed into the pirate’s forehead, driving his head back so hard that clearly Tom heard his vertebrae snap. Legrange staggered backwards with his legs giving way under him. He fell into the leaping flames that were sweeping across the deck towards him. They engulfed him instantly. For a second, Tom had a hellish vision of Legrange wreathed in fire. His beard, hair and clothes alight and the skin of his face blistering and shrivelling.

Tom swung out over the water on the halyard, and when he reached the limit of its arc he released his grip and dropped into the water. With powerful overarm strokes he covered the distance to the Dowager easily, before the sharks could scent the blood on him. Dorian was waiting on the bottom rung to give him a boost aboard.

‘Where are Sarah and Yasmini?’ Tom gasped, before he had fully recovered his breath. Desperately he scanned the waters around the Dowager and then exhaled with a great sigh of relief as he saw her well clear of the burning hulk of the Fighting Cock.

Tom switched his attention back to the pirate ship. Pillars of fire engulfed her masts and ran along her yards, devouring the canvas and outlining her in flame. Men hurled themselves into the water, flames leaping from their backs. The pirates who had been trapped aboard the Dowager fared no better. The crew were in a savage mood: they’d been given no quarter, and they offered none now.

‘We should lower a boat,’ said Dorian, pointing to the pirates floundering in the ocean. Screams rang out across the water as the sharks closed in on them.

‘It would be no mercy, rescuing them so they could be hanged in Cape Town,’ Tom pointed out.

Just then an enormous explosion sucked the air out of their lungs, then blew it back in an angry breath. A huge wave rocked the ship and sent the men staggering across the deck. Burning debris rained down on the roiling waters. But the Fighting Cock had vanished. All that remained were charred timbers settling on the water.

Tom pulled himself upright. There was no point searching for survivors now. Any men in the water would have been knocked unconscious and drowned by the force of the blast.

‘Her powder magazine must have caught.’ A weather-beaten man joined them at the ship’s side. He’d lost his coat; and he was bleeding from his arm and an open wound on his cheek. Even so, Tom recognized the air of command that was imprinted on his face.

‘Are you the master of the Dowager?’

‘Josiah Inchbird.’ The man nodded at the remnants of the Fighting Cock, the wide field of flotsam spreading across the water. ‘Good riddance to her and the thieves that sailed in her.’

Tom waited for him to pass comment on the battle, to acknowledge the help he’d received. But Inchbird said nothing further.

‘It was lucky we were in sight when you were boarded,’ he said pointedly. ‘We saved your ship.’

Inchbird took his meaning at once. ‘You’ll get no salvage,’ he warned sharply.