"Vous!" the gaudily dressed captain said, a tall and lean man with a wide but slim set of mustachios… and a sword in his hand.
"Strike, ye thievin' cut-throat!" Lewrie roared back. A burly pirate with a cutlass leaped between, shoved forward by Lanxade. The cutlass and Lewrie's hanger rang together once, twice, the pirate two-handing his sword. Lewrie binded him, brought up his Manton with his left hand, and gave him both barrels in his lower chest with the muzzles against his skin, and the man shrieked and lurched backwards like a pole-axed steer, his shirt on fire.
"Strike, damn you!" Lewrie roared again, tossing away his spent pistol, cutting the air with his sword.
"Va te faire foutre, vous sanglant cochon!"'Lanxade spat, whipping his long, old-style rapier through the air as well.
"Fuck yourself." Lewrie retorted as Lanxade sprang at him with a distracting foot-stamp and an inarticulate screech of battle rage. Their blades met, parted slithering and chiming, met edge to edge with the next slashes, both men iron-wristed, iron-willed.
"Comin', sir!" he heard his Cox'n Andrews vow.
"Hell ye will, he's mine!" Lewrie shouted.
"Son!" Boudreaux Balfa shouted in immense relief when he recognised one of the weary swimmers in the water and quickly sculled over to pick him up. Mademoiselle Charite was there, too, with Jean, that little La Fitte brute. Fusilier clambered in first, then aided the girl. Balfa considered leaving Jean, not trusting him one inch, but Fusilier reached for him and hauled him in, while the mademoiselle knelt on the soleboards, coughing up water, as drenched as any wharf rat. Balfa spun his boat about, got Fusilier and Jean to seize hold of two oars, and started north, up the bay,
for escape.
"Capitaine Balfa!" Charite finally found strength to say. "You must go back! Those cowards took all the boats. My brothers!"
A mere hundred yards off the beach, Balfa could hear the firing and the clash of blades, the desperation of French-speaking or Spanish pirates… and the encouraged battle cries in English.
"Naw, cherie," Balfa sadly said, "dere nothin' t'be done. Best we can hope is we get away. De game's done did."
Charite knew it in her heart, too, as she crept aft near Balfa to cling to the boat's gunnl's and peer at the battle on the mounds.
"Helio!" she yelled, sitting up on her knees and waving as her elder brother appeared at the back of their mound's flat top, pistols in both hands, looking seaward, looking at her. He shouted something, waved as if to drag back the only boat still in sight.
Two horrid red splotches suddenly blossomed on his white shirt, the fine linen and lace punctured through-and-through with.75 calibre musket balls! Helio stumbled forward, dropping his guns, and almost knelt as if to recoup his strength… then pitched, tumbling and sliding down the back slope of the mound like a bundle of cast-off clothes from a rag-picker's barrow.
"Nooo!" Charite screamed, grief, protest, and horror together.
"Gotta go, chers," Balfa urged. "Vite, vite!"
Topman Willy Toffett scrambled up the slope of an earth mound, gasping, almost clawing with his free hand for purchase, grasping his heavy Brown Bess Sea Pattern musket in his right. He had been scared at first, but seeing so many pirates-some he even recognised from his ordeal in their grasp, their marooning on the Dry Tortugas -on the run, or dying, had perked up his courage considerably. A Marine ahead of him, Private Doyle, a fair-decent bastard for a Lobsterback, was kicking muck in his eyes as he scrambled, howling eagerness, his musket held in both hands. "Hah… hah!" Doyle cried as he engaged a pirate who rose up atop the lip of the mound, bringing his bayonet-fitted musket level, thrusting at the sword-armed foeman's belly, but the pirate whipped up a pistol and shot him in the chest.
One of 'em! Toffett thought, panicked again as Doyle fell back the slope, head-down and instantly killed. He was one of 'em aboard that schooner, the one who killed Midshipman Burns, all those slaves in the water! Toffett howled inarticulately as he reached the top and swung his musket like a quarterstaff at the man's legs, knocking him off his feet long enough for Toffett to take proper hold and get into the drill he'd been taught four times a week since "volunteering" into Proteus. Thrust!-partially parried by the bastard's sword. Recover. Thrust again, step forward inside guard. Butt-strike, up from below-right to level, the heavy brass-footed stock smashing into the bastard's mouth with a toothy Crunch! to send him sprawling on his back! Plant left foot forward! Thrust! Toffett screamed just as loud as the pirate as he sank six inches of triangular steel into the foe's belly, folding him up like a jackknife! Twist, stamp, and Recover! "Yew murd'rin' son'fabitch!" Stamp! Thrust, into the enemy's unguarded throat! Lean on the musket like shoving a capstan bar, and twist and grind, saw back and forth! "Yew filthy goddamn whoreson! That fer Mister Burns! That, fer them Cuffies! That, fer ol' Doyle!"
"Don't make a meal of 'im, lad!" Marine Sergeant Skipwith said almost in his ear, beaming with delight. "Six inch o' bayonet's good as a yard fer his sort!"
And Don Rubio Monaster, whose aristocratic ancestors had been hidalgo since the Reconquista of Spain, and charged into battle with El Cid against the Moors, died with the taste of blood and cold metal in his mouth, and his elegant breeches full of shit.
Hippolyte de Guilleri could only hear a whistling noise in his ears as he scampered to the back of the mound, terror making an empty, cold pit in his middle, and his bowels watery. Time and motion slowed to a crawl as he saw Rubio get spitted, as he took hopeless guard with his sword to oppose the sailors and soldiers running at him, him alone as the last defender, all by himself, and it was so unfair, he didn't mean to kill all those people, and he pleaded with God that he was now sorry to have taken such perverse pleasure from killing, but hadn't it been in a righteous cause, for Louisiana, for France, so…!
Hippolyte stamped his foot and slashed with his sword, howling at the hard-faced men who swarmed at him from every corner, trembling inside despite his wish to be brave, go game.
Maman, don't let it hurt! he wailed to himself as his blade was easily knocked aside, and he saw the flicker of a heavy cutlass coming at him sideways. It cleaved like an axe into the side of his neck… and it did hurt, very much, a white-hot agony in his head, his throat, and a second was rammed into his groin with so much force that he was lifted up on tiptoes. It redoubled the agony, brought forth a scream through the bubbling blood he was drowning in, his last breath.
And then there was an officer in a blue coat standing over him as he sank to his knees struggling for air; raising a pistol in his face, inches from his eyes, and the bore was as wide as a cannon, and then there was a hot, reeking, scalding wind on his face, bright amber light like the fires of Hades then… rien. Nothing.
He ain 't a hop master! Lewrie wearily thought as he caught his enemy's blade on his, twisted his wrist so it slid off his own, jabbed under to force him back, then swept his hanger up to high-left to stop another slash, counter-sweeping under at his belly, again, missing…