If they attacked the ship, there was a chance they might all be killed.
If they did not get food in a day or so, then people would most definitely start to die.
The options were possible death versus certain death. There really was no decision. He stuck the telescope in his shirt and headed down again.
Chapter 11
King James poured a little trail of powder in the cannon’s touchhole, stepped back, and gestured to the men on the train tackles to haul away. They pulled; the gun rumbled up to the gunport.
They were small guns, four-pounders, and of all the men aboard, James alone had any experience in loading and firing such weapons. He had not bothered training the others. It was pointless. They would never win a fight with guns.
He gestured for the ad hoc gun crew to stand clear, and when they were out of the way he brought the match down on the powder train. A hiss, a spark, and then the gun went off, blowing smoke out over the empty sea. It was not an attack. It was a signal. A cry of distress.
James looked aloft. The sails were hanging half in their gear, sloppy, flogging in the wind. The ensign was flying upside down. The ship looked very much as she had the first time he had seen her, coming through the capes. But this time the black men were not chained down in the hold. This time they were armed and crouching out of sight behind the bulwarks.
He looked at Madshaka, wondered if he himself looked as foolish as the grumete did. Madshaka’s face and hands were painted white, with paint they had found in the bosun’s locker, as were James’s. They were wearing bits of the officers’ clothes that they had collected from those men who had been wearing them: coats, waistcoats, breeches. Like the paint, it was enough to give the right impression from a distance.
James felt like an idiot, painted up in that way. But it had been his idea, and he could think of no other.
He looked up at Cato, stationed as lookout high up on the mainmast, could see he had nothing to report.
“Tell them to haul the gun in,” James said to Madshaka, and Madshaka repeated the words. An unshotted gun did not hurl itself inboard like a loaded one. James picked up the wet swab, thrust it down the muzzle, ladled powder into the barrel once more, then rammed wadding home and gestured for the gun to be run out again.
Once the distance between the two ships had closed, there would be no mistaking their ship for anything but what she was. All the scrubbing and brimstone in the world would not wash away the stink from a blackbirder.
If a blackbirder were to run down on a strange vessel, she would immediately arouse suspicion. If an approaching merchant ship were to see black men on a slaver’s deck, they would haul their wind and bear away. No ship, save for a man-of-war, would knowingly approach a vessel that had suffered a slave uprising.
They had to get their victim to come to them.
More powder in the touchhole, the glowing match, and the gun went off again. The blast was still ringing in their ears when Cato called down. “Hauling her wind, James! Here she… here she goes, staying now!”
“What he mean by that?” Madshaka asked.
“She turning, coming up to us. I guess she believe we a ship in distress.”
Madshaka smiled again, wicked, piratical delight. Translated James’s words to the others, and they smiled as well.
“Tell them to get out of sight, behind the bulwark. We get aft, on the quarterdeck.”
The two men went aft and stood beside the lashed tiller, waiting, waiting. Tension undulated around the deck like heat from a furnace. The women and children were down below in the great cabin and the smaller cabins along the alleyway. They would not go back in the hold.
When the approaching ship’s topgallant sails were visible from the deck, James called for Cato to come down. “I think we set the foresail, you and me,” he said to Madshaka. “That don’t look wrong, that shouldn’t scare them. Then we can close faster, get down to them.”
Madshaka nodded and the two men went forward, all eyes following them, not knowing what they were about. The yards were not braced perfectly, but close enough. They did not want to look perfect in any event.
James cast off the buntlines and the foresail tumbled down into a big, flogging sack of canvas, the lower corners still held up by the clew-lines. He spun the weather clewline off the pin, let it run through his hand, and Madshaka took in the sheet as fast as he could.
The wind filled that half of the sail, bellied it out, and Madshaka could pull no more. James clapped on to the sheet and together they hauled away. They pulled together, in a steady rhythm, falling naturally into the work. Madshaka was a head taller than James, but both men were powerful, and soon they had the sail sheeted home despite the breeze’s trying to tear the line from their hands.
They crossed the deck and did the same on the leeward side. The bow of the ship began to turn, her bowsprit pointing toward the ship coming up with them. James unlashed the tiller, brought it amidships, steadied the blackbirder on a course to intercept the Samaritan that was speeding to their aid.
Coming to our aid indeed, James thought. In a way you will never guess. “You told them, we only going for food?” he said to Madshaka. “And we ain’t going to kill no one unless we have to?”
“I told them.”
The distant ship tacked and half an hour later tacked again, and by then she was hull up, no more than a mile away. With the foresail set and the blackbirder running with the wind between two sheets, the distance was dropping away fast.
Through the cracked telescope James could see figures moving around on the deck and he instructed Madshaka to wave his arms over his head, as if trying to attract their attention. There were not many people on the other ship, as far as James could tell, and he did not see very many guns. He did not think she was a man-of-war.
“Madshaka, tell them just a few minutes more,” James said, and Madshaka hurried forward again, along the bulwark, speaking to the men crouched there.
A quarter mile from them the other ship rounded up into the wind, foresails aback. She was heaving to, as James had guessed she would. A moment later he could see a boat lifting off the booms. They would want to find out what the trouble was before committing themselves. If it was fever on board, for instance, the aid they would offer would be limited to floating supplies down to them in a boat.
The boat pushed off, pulling for them, and there was no alarm that James could see. By the time they realized that the blackbirder was not going to heave to it would be too late for them.
The blackbirder was making a good three knots with just her foresail set. She swept past the yawl boat with never a word to its confused crew, her bow aimed at the merchant ship one hundred feet away.
On the merchantman’s deck, men were running like roaches, flinging off lines, but it was too late for them. Their foresails were bracing around, filling with wind, when the blackbirder struck, amidships, with a great rendering crash, smashing down bulwarks, snapping her own spritsail yard, sending a shudder like an earthquake through both ships.
The blackbirder was still driving herself into the merchant ship, the grinding, crunching, snapping still loud, when Madshaka wheeled his cutlass over his head and charged forward. He was screaming-it did not sound like words of any language-but the meaning was unmistakable.
From behind the bulwarks the waiting men sprung to their feet, raced after Madshaka, down the blackbirder’s deck, up onto the bowsprit, out along that spar for a dozen feet, and then down onto the quarterdeck of their unhappy victim.
James ran too, as fast as he could, more angry with Madshaka for charging off than worried about the fight. There were no more than a dozen white men on the merchant ship’s deck, terrified men, looking with wide eyes and gaping mouths at the black host, fifty strong, coming from the bowsprit above them and dropping to the deck, swords, cutlasses gleaming, all of them screaming in their alien and barbaric tongues.