William didn't mind letting a good many of them precede him up onto the palisade. They were younger and stronger and better trained than he was. But he swarmed up a ladder himself. He hadn't come this far only to watch. He aimed to fight, too.
He almost didn't get the chance. A bullet cracked past his head as he hurried toward the closest stairway down into Avalon. Marcus Radcliffe was a few feet behind him. The backwoodsman chuckled. "Nothing like it when they shoot at you and miss, is there?"
"Better that than their shooting and hitting," William agreed.
Marines formed lines and advanced through the streets. Some people fled before them, screaming in fear. Others charged at them with whatever weapons came to hand. Marcus' backwoodsmen shot down several of those before they got close. The leathery, nondescript Atlanteans carried rifles accurate to a much greater distance than the usual smoothbore musket. The marines took little damage from the pirates who closed. The pirates fought as individuals, the marines as a team. They killed methodically, without much malice and without much waste motion.
Following their lethal line, William Radcliff didn't think he'd have to do much himself. But a man with a cutlass lurched out of a grogshop, stared blearily, and rushed him. William fired his pistol at point-blank range-and missed. He threw the pistol at the corsair's head. It struck the man a glancing blow, and gave Radcliff the chance to draw his own rapier.
The first stroke from the cutlass almost broke his blade and almost knocked the long, thin, straight sword from his hand. His own first thrust almost spitted the pirate, who sprang back just in time. But the freebooter's foot went out from under him in the mud. As the fellow staggered, William skewered him.
The pirate howled like a hound. He didn't crumple, though, the way William hoped he would. He kept right on fighting.
"Stick him again!" Marcus shouted. "People aren't as easy to kill as you'd think."
How do you know? William wondered. But that was a question for another time. His next thrust caught the corsair in the throat. Blood rivered out. The man gobbled something and finally fell.
"That's the way, coz!" Marcus said. "Let's go on and finish the job."
William brandished the blood-dripping rapier. "Yes, by God! Let's!"
"You see?" Red Rodney shouted. "They haven't the stomach for landing!" With all the freebooters on the sea wall, he wouldn't have wanted to land there, either.
Whether the enemy wanted to land or not, though, they went right on cannonading Avalon. Every so often, a roundshot would tear a bloody slice out of the corsairs or knock over some of the palisade, which caused more casualties.
Casualties or not, the English and the Dutch and the men from Stuart could pound away from now till forever, and they wouldn't break in. Radcliffe cursed them and shook his fist and cheered whenever the gun Ethel went on commanding shot at the ships offshore. So much powder smoke drifted in from their guns and the ones fired at them that he coughed between cheers. His eyes streamed. His face was probably black as an indigo-growing slave's down in southeastern Atlantis.
A man tugged at his arm. "Red Rodney!" the fellow cried.
Even through the roar of the guns, Rodney heard the fear in his voice. "What is it?" he asked, an ominous rumble in his own.
"They're in the city! They're over the palisade and in the city!"
"What? Are you daft? We're holding 'em out!"
"No. I wish I was." The pirate pointed south. "They're over the palisade down there. Swarms of 'em-great bloody bullocks in red coats, killing anything that moves."
"Oh, Christ Jesus! Bugger me with a worm!" Rodney Radcliffe said. And the enemy had buggered him-buggered him and Avalon. They'd drawn all the defenders here to the sea wall, and then come right up the town's arse.
"What do we do?" wailed the man with the bad news.
"What can we do? We've got to fight 'em," Radcliffe said grimly.
He started pulling men out of the struggle on the sea wall and pointing them back into Avalon. He shouted. He punched. He cajoled. He swore. Little by little, he started getting the corsairs to pay attention to him.
They didn't escape the hell of battle even after descending from the wall. Roundshot from the enemy fleet crashed down at random. Sometimes they would come down on a man, or on a clump of men. When that happened, it wasn't pretty.
All the same, Red Rodney shouted, "Keep on, damn you! Keep on! The bloody marines will murder us if you don't!"
Other pirates with loud voices also urged freebooters into the fight. Maybe they were captains, too. Maybe they were just men with eyes to see where trouble lay. It didn't matter. As long as they could see that much, nothing else mattered.
Avalon was not a big city. The pirate from the sea wall didn't need long to bump up against the bullocks. When they saw the men in the red coats, they roared in rage and charged with whatever weapons they happened to hold. Stinging volleys of musketry drove them back, and bayonets outreached swords. The marines were ferociously well disciplined. Red Rodney had always thought sheer fury could overpower anything that stood in its way. Discovering he was wrong was bitter as gall.
It was also almost fatal. A musket ball tugged at his left sleeve. When he looked down, he discovered his arm was bleeding. It was only a scratch, which didn't mean he wanted it. Had the ball flown a few inches to the right…He didn't even want to think about that.
"Musketeers! Pistoleros!" he bawled. "Into the houses! Shoot from cover! Don't make it easy for those poxy whoresons!" He'd always been proud of the pirates' independence. When every man was as good as every other man, no man could tell any man what to do. If the freebooters wanted to listen to him, they would. If they didn't…
If they didn't, they would die. The marines surged forward. The ones with bayonets plugged into the muzzles of their muskets used the weapons as spears, impaling corsairs who couldn't get at them to reply. Other marines kept a deadly hail of bullets in the air. So did some enemy fighters in plain clothes. They could hit a man at two hundred yards, sometimes farther. There weren't that many of them, and they didn't fire fast, but they caused trouble all out of proportion to their numbers.
Red Rodney sprang like a wolf. He beat a bayoneted musket aside with his sword, then struck the marine holding the piece. His stroke clove the bullock from crown to chin. The man toppled, dead before he hit the ground.
But another marine lunged at Rodney Radcliffe, forcing him to jump back or be spitted. The pirate chief managed to escape. The marine in the second rank stepped up to the first, and the line rolled ahead as it had before. One dead marine? So what?
Radcliffe had always scorned such regimentation. A man, he thought, should fight for himself, for his hope of glory or gold or women, willing or otherwise. To fight because it was your job, as if you were a chandler or a cordwainer? Where was the glory in that?
Nowhere at all, which didn't mean it didn't work. The marines, job or no job, advanced. The corsairs, glory or no glory, fell back-or else they just fell, and did not rise again. The marines systematically finished them off, one after another. For all Red Rodney's cries and exhortations, he couldn't stop the foe. Fear began fighting fury in his heart.
William Radcliff stood with a pair of marines on the roof of a three-story building in southern Avalon. "Hoist the red flag," he told them.
"Right you are, sir," they chorused. They probably would have said the same thing if he'd told them to jump off the roof. (The building was a house of ill fame. To the bullocks' undisguised disappointment, the girls had fled.)
One of the marines had a big square of red cloth. The other carried a long pole that would do for a flagstaff. William had some tacks with which to fasten the cloth to the pole. Once that was done, they waved the makeshift flag. You could see it a long way. With luck, even the sailors in the fleet would be able to spy it.