Chapter 120: Run Them to Ground
⚔ [BATTLE OVERVIEW]
ALLIED — PIRATE ARMADA
Bloody Rose — Moderately Damaged, Combat Ready
Black Fortune — Heavily Damaged, Combat Ready
Revenge — Moderately Damaged, Herding Prey
Marianne — Moderately Damaged, Herding Prey
Cormorant — Heavily Damaged, Herding Prey
Barsheba — Lightly Damaged, Herding Prey
Postillion — Lightly Damaged, Mopping Up
Providence — Lightly Damaged, Mopping Up
Auxiliary Swarm — Moderately Damaged, Combat
ENEMY — HOMEWARD FLEET ESCORT
HMS Falmouth — Crippled, Sinking
HMS Tartar — Heavily Damaged, Combat Ready
HMS Lyme — Heavily Damaged, Combat Ready
HMS Royal Anne Galley — Crippled, Adrift
Cuban Flank — Heavily Damaged, Combat
Bank Flank — Heavily Damaged, Combat
Rear Escort — Heavily Damaged, Combat
The battle hadn’t waited for James to settle his score with the old duchess, and it certainly wasn’t going to wait now.
Rain slashed sideways across the sea, driven so hard by the wind that his coat had stopped feeling like cloth long ago. The world had narrowed to the distance a man could shout, grey water fading into grey sky somewhere beyond sight.
Even so, it took him only a glance to see what the rest of the pirate fleet had been doing while he finished with the Falmouth.
The armada had driven the merchant convoy toward the Bahama Bank instead of chasing it blindly into the open sea. The shallows broke the worst of the waves, turning a murderous sea into one a boarding party could still fight upon, and while the merchants gained a little shelter from the storm, they run exactly where the pirates wanted them.
Now, with nowhere left to flee but through waters their deeper keels feared to cross, each prize was being run to ground in turn.
The Revenge had a merchantman pinned tight against her broadside, the poor ship already taken too much punishment to escape. Thatch’s crew poured over the rail with cutlasses in hand, steel already stained before half of them hit the deck.
Whatever courage the merchant sailors still had vanished when Thatch split the second man from ear to ear, dark blood spraying across rain-slick planks bright enough to show even beneath the storm.
"Down, ye bastards! Down, or join him!"
Thatch’s roar carried through wind and rain alike.
The survivors dropped to their knees almost at once.
The Marianne worked her prey with patient confidence, the way a sheepdog wore down an injured ram. A swivel gun swept her deck once, then again, grapeshot shredding rigging and men together.
By the time Black Sam led his boarding party across, almost nobody remained willing to fight.
"Easy now. Easy."
Sam’s voice drifted over the distance between the ships. Friendly, even with a bloody sword in his hand.
Cormorant left the ugliest scene behind. Vane possessed all the patience of a starving shark, and James caught only the end of the slaughter through a break in the rain.
The bodies were hung over the rail, some half-spilled against the planks, others left dangling with their limbs broken at ugly angles, as if the ship itself had displayed them for all the sea to see. Blood ran in dark sheets down the boards and dripped from the gunwales into the churning water below.
Somewhere in the middle of it all, Vane still laughed, his blade red to the hilt. "That’s how ye do it, ye lily-livered pack o’ fish-fuckers! On yer knees or in the drink! Makes no difference to me!"
His bellow cracked through the storm with enough venom that even some of his own crew flinched.
By then the Lyme and the Tartar had already abandoned the fight, a battle they’d lost well before admitting it. The sloop that had crossed broadsides with the Postillion and Providence had been sunk some time ago. That contest had ended before James ever looked its way.
He turned back to his own ship and found Grey still at the wheel, soaked to the skin and squinting through rain that seemed determined to drown every soul aboard.
"You’ve done enough sailin’ for the both of us today, Grey."
James reclaimed the wheel and clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to rock him. "My thanks. You kept her steadier than I’d have managed myself, and that’s no small thing in weather like this."
"Glad to be rid of her."
Grey stepped aside at once, already reaching beneath his coat for the chart case he carried everywhere.
"I trust a compass over a wheel any day God sends. Twice over in weather like this."
James kept both hands on the wheel, but his eyes had already moved beyond the ship. Four merchantmen still sailed together through the rain, with one single escort sloop near them, and unlike the rest of the scattered convoy, none of the five had broken away.
No pirate sloop wanted to face five ships together for the sake of one prize.
The Rose and the Fortune were no sloops.
He lifted a hand toward the Fortune through the rain, only to receive a reply through a scrap of canvas. Both ships altered course together, falling onto the merchants’ heading.
For a while the chase felt less like a pursuit and more like a race between old friends who had almost forgotten there was a prize waiting at the finish.
Spray crashed over in cold sheets, almost gentler than the rain. The Rose slammed into each swell hard enough to throw men off their feet, sending more than one sprawling across planks already buried beneath an inch of standing water.
Off the starboard bow, the Fortune matched her perfectly. Her lighter hull skipped over the waves while the Rose drove through them, yet neither ship gained so much as a single length.
The lads near the foremast started taking wagers on which vessel would catch the merchants first.
Within a minute, the entire crew had money riding on it.
"A shillin’ on the Fortune!"
Pete shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. "She’s lighter by half! She’ll fly over water like this!"
"Ye’d wager on yer own mother drownin’ if the odds favored it, Pete."
Cudjoe never looked away from the sea.
"Two shillin’ on the Rose. I willnae hear another word about it."
"Put me down beside ye."
Anne shoved past the sailors. "I’ve watched this lass outrun one of the King’s frigates. She can certainly catch a pair of half-drowned merchantmen."
"Ye’re only sayin’ that because ye’re sweet on the captain."
"Sweet? I’ll show you sweet when I hog-tie you to a mast, smear your fat with chum, and let the sharks come feed."
She didn’t spare him a glance.
"Now put your coin down or stop wastin’ breath."
James listened silently. The grin tugging at the corner of his mouth was answer enough.
The sea changed beneath them so gradually that nobody noticed at first.
The great swells lost their bite, easing into shorter, gentler rolls. The hard blue-grey of deep water gave way to the pale, cloudy color of weak tea, the hidden sands of the Bahama Bank showing through from below. Even the Rose seemed to feel the difference, her violent plunges softening as she crossed into the shallows.
Grey was already on it before James needed to ask.
"Six fathom."
His voice remained flat and precise. "Five now. Mind her, James. This whole stretch o’ the Bank is coral wearin’ a coat o’ sand, and it’ll tear open a keel whether ye meant to find it or no."
That put barely thirty feet of water beneath the keel, more than enough in the open sea. On the Bank, with coral waiting beneath the sand, it was close enough to make a captain sweat.
"How far can she go before she’s got nothin’ beneath her?"
"Depends how fond ye are of groundin’ a fine ship."
"Less fond than you might expect, I reckon."
Grey didn’t smile, but some of the tension eased from his shoulders. He cast again without another word.
"Four fathom."
The Rose answered sluggishly as the sea beneath her turned strange and uneven.
Then the keel scraped something solid below.
A shudder rolled through the length of the ship, and every man close enough to hear it felt his heart climb into his throat.
"There!"
Grey thrust an arm toward larboard. "Come off her, James! Now! Unless ye fancy explainin’ to Cudjoe why we’re careenin’ on a sandbar instead o’ takin’ prizes!"
James spun the wheel without hesitation. The Rose groaned through the turn, her timbers protesting until deeper water caught her once more.
"Three fathom. Holdin’ steady."
Grey finally let out a long breath.
"Christ, I hate this."
"Bah, you love this part of the job."
"Aye."
Grey gave a reluctant nod.
"That’s what I hate about it."
The Fortune remained nearby, and both ships fought on, half-driving and half-wrestling their way through the shallows, until at last the water deepened enough to free them both.
Only then James managed to spot their prize.
Still carrying every stitch of sail they could spread, the merchantmen fled straight ahead, desperate to outrun their pursuers. What had been a ragged cluster of ships was now a broken mess of hard ground and bad luck.
The first merchantman had her nose buried in the pale sand, her sails still full and useless, snapping and straining like she meant to sail through the earth itself. The escort sloop had crashed in beside her, listing so steeply that her rail was nearly kissing the water.
Behind them, the others had tried to follow and paid for it in kind.
One had slewed sideways and stuck fast with her rudder turned uselessly into the air while another sat cocked on a bar of broken coral, her stern sunk deeper every moment while her foremast leaned like a drunk in a tavern doorway. The last had come in too hard and too near, and now the whole rigging was a ruin of tilted masts, torn canvas, and hulls grounded belly-deep in the bank.
Their sails still bellied in the wind, but it only made the sight uglier. Canvas snapped and strained overhead while the ships themselves sat dead and helpless, trapped on a spit of sand and coral too mean to be called land and too shallow to let them float free.
James looked on the wreck of them for a moment.
Then the grin came slow and broad across his face, all teeth and satisfaction.
They were aground.
Every last one of them.
And the sea had done half his work for him. The other half was his to take.