A King's Cutter by Richard Woodman Page A

their guns and swept over the rail. Forward and aft lashings were caught round the lugger’s rufftree rail and the two ships ground together in the swell.
    Drinkwater leapt across the gap, stepped on the lugger’s rail and landed on the deck. He was confronted by two men whose features were pale blurs. He remembered his own orders and screamed through clenched teeth. Behind him the two helmsmen came aboard, their faces blackened, like his own, by soot from the galley funnel.
    Drinkwater fired his pistol at the nearer Frenchman and jabbed his hanger at the other. They vanished and a man in front thrust at him with a boarding pike. He parried awkwardly, sliding on the deck, taking the thrust through his coat sleeve and driving the muzzle of the discharged pistol into the man’s exposed stomach. His victim doubled over and Drinkwater savagely struck at the nape of his neck with the pommel of his sword. Something gave beneath the ferocity of the blow and like a discarded doll the man dropped into the anonymous darkness of the bloody deck.
    He moved on and three, then four men were in front of him. He slashed with the hanger, hurled the pistol at another then whipped the second from his belt. Pulling the trigger the priming flashed but it misfired and with a triumphant yell the man leapt forward. Drinkwater was through the red-rimmed barrier of fighting madness now. His brain worked with cool rapidity, emotionless. He began to crouch instinctively, to turn his head away in a foetal position, but his passive submission was deceptive; made terrible by the sword. Bringing the hilt down into his belly, the blade ran vertically upwards between his right ear and shoulder. He sensed the man slash at where he had been, felt him stumble on to the exposed sword-blade in the confusion. Drinkwater thrust with his legs, driving upwards with a cracking of back muscles. Supported by fists, belly and shoulder the disembowelling blade thrust deep into the man’s guts, through his diaphragm and into his lungs. Half crouched, with the dying Frenchman collapsed about his shoulder, he felt the sword nick his own ear. The weight of the body sliding down his back dragged the hanger over his shoulder and he tore it clear with both hands as another man pointed a pistol at his exposed left flank. The blade came clear as the priming flashed. In a terrible swipe the steel scythed round as the pistol discharged.
    Drinkwater never knew where the ball went. Maybe in the confusion the fellow had forgotten to load it or it had been badly wadded and rolled out. Nevertheless his face bore tiny blue spots where the grains of spent powder entered his flesh. His left eye was bruised from the shock wave and blinded by yellow light but he went on hacking at the man, desperately beating him to the deck.
    Drinkwater reeled from the discharge of the pistol, his head spinning. The other men had disappeared, melted away. The faces round him were vaguely familiar and he no longer had the strength to raise his arm and strike at them. It had fallen silent. Oddly silent. Then Jessup appeared and Drinkwater was falling. Arms caught him and he heard the words ‘Congratulations, sir, congratulations
    ‘ But it was all a long way off and oddly irrelevant and Elizabeth was giving him such an odd, quizzical look.
    When he awoke he was aware that he was in the cabin of Kestrel and that pale daylight showed through the skylight. He was bruised in a score of places, stiff and with a raging headache. A pale shape fluttered round other men, prone like himself. One, on the cabin table all bloody and trembling, the pale form, ghostly in a dress of white bent over him. Drinkwater saw the body arch, heard a thin, high whimper which tailed to a gurgle and the body relaxed. For a second he expected Hortense Montholon to round on him, a grey-eyed Medusa, barbering in hell and he groaned in primaeval fear, but it was only Griffiths probing a wound who looked round, the front of his nightshirt