"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.