Chapter 229: Thunder for Thunder
It came as a hundred thunderclaps, all at once, landing in the same heartbeat, until nobody aboard either ship could tell his own guns from their rival.
There was nothing to do but keep firing and wait for the smoke to thin enough to find out who was still standing.
Farrow’s gun spoke, and spoke true, the very piece he’d blessed. Her breeching rope pulled tight with a groan as the gun kicked back into battery.
The cannonball went into planks already torn open across San Felipe’s forward hull, and timber that had survived constant harassment finally crumbled.
"Told ye there’d be a ship o’ the line in that harbor."
Farrow slapped the smoking barrel like an old dog that had finally learned the right trick.
"Didn’t say she’d walk away from us either."
San Felipe’s reply came instantly.
Her broadside tore through the Rose’s waist, and sailors went down folded over the barrel they’d been ramming, chest cracked open by the shot, blood pouring through shirts and dripping from fingertips. Some were simply gone from the place where they’d stood a moment before, leaving only torn rags and spray of blood across the gun carriage.
The volley raked upward through the shrouds, and a length of splintered rail caught Jim high on the forearm and lacerated through his sleeve.
Blood welled immediately, dripped down his wrist, and spattered the deck beneath him.
Jim looked at the wound much like a bill he knew was coming and had no choice but to pay.
"Nineteen!"
He wrapped his free hand around it without releasing his own line.
"Nineteen brushes wi’ death now, and not one o’ the bastards has had the decency to finish me proper!"
Anne, Milagros and Kwaku’s guns fired together.
San Felipe’s waist was caught on the crossfire, and bright orange fire pushed through her smoke where the canvas had taken the spark.
"That’s for makin’ me learn to splice rope in this heat, ye ugly bitch!"
Anne howled across the water, as the burning ship had personally made her miserable. Milagros only laughed, low and pleased, then spat over toward the fire she’d helped start.
San Felipe answered with the volley that ought to have broken the Rose from bow to keel.
It slammed into her flank hard enough to stagger every crew aboard. The deck jumped beneath their feet as oak burst inward in a shower of splinters, smoke, and dust. Sailors ducked too late, hands to faces and eyes as the broken timber came screaming across the deck.
By every rule a shipwright could name, the Rose ought to have come apart around the hole.
She didn’t.
⚙ [PERK ACTIVATED] — Devil’s Hull
The timber held, blackened and groaning, but whole. Whatever the Spaniards had paid for that shot, the Rose had no intention of paying them back.
The blast caught Tomás across the shoulder, and he staggered half a step while jagged splinters tore through cloth and flesh, blood darkening his shirt almost at once. Then he calmly finished his prayer, and continued to attend the guns.
The swivel guns barked next, Bert working the piece with oddly polite attention.
San Felipe threw her last weight into one its final shots, sending them together as though she meant to settle the battle before her guns went silent for good.
Kwaku’s position was hit squarely.
A length of splintered rail mauled a gash across his ribs deep enough to show pale bone beneath the blood. Blood washed freely down his side, soaking into his shirt and dripping from the torn cloth onto the deck.
He looked down at it without hurry, much as he might inspect a stain on a coat he had never liked much to begin with.
"How disappointing."
He went back to the rammer.
The timbers beside the wheel were struck and blew apart, oak exploding around the wheel in a cloud of splinters. From the impact, one huge length of oak spun clear of the wreckage and drove straight through James’s shoulder.
[Discretion] was half the reason his whole arm wasn’t split in an instant. As for the other half.
⚙ [PERK ACTIVATED] — The Rose’s Luck
James dropped to one knee, hands still locked around the spokes, blood spilling hot down his chest and dripping from the wound onto the deck.
🏴 [TITLE ACTIVATED] — Against All Reasonable Odds
Cudjoe reached him in an instant, ready to drag him to the cabin.
"Get below, ye daft bastard, there’s oak stickin’ clean through ye, and dinnae tell me it’s nothin’!"
James got his feet underneath him instead, one hand clamped hard over the wound, the blood slick and warm beneath his fingers.
He laughed through it, short and ragged.
"Takes more than a wee splinter to shift me off this wheel, Cudjoe."
He spat, having bitten his tongue clean through without noticing. A thin line of blood ran from the corner of his lips.
"Guns! Give her everythin’ we’ve got left, and give it to her now!"
The Rose answered before Cudjoe could argue with him any further.
Every gun still standing loosed together in one ragged, furious volley, and tackle and breeching rope groaned from one end of the deck to the other.
⚙ [PERK ACTIVATED] — True Shot
The volley found the clean, ugly path every gun aboard had been hunting for all afternoon, down through San Felipe’s deck and into whatever magazine she kept below.
The whole center of the ship lifted for one impossible instant, timber and Spaniards and fire snapping up together.
Sailors were thrown bodily into the smoke. Planks, spars, and burning canvas erupted skyward with them, and pieces of shattered timber came down across the deck in a rain of debris.
Then the explosion came thundering back across the water hard enough to shake the Rose’s deck beneath every crew’s boots.
What remained of San Felipe afterward hardly deserved the name she brought into the fight.
Fire climbed from her waist to her rigging, and her crew abandoned whatever guns still stood, throwing themselves into water already thick with wreckage and drifting men.
Some never reached the water. Spaniards stumbled through the smoke with their clothes burning, fell against the rail, or disappeared beneath falling timber, or hit the sea among broken spars and burning wreckage, their voices lost beneath the crackle of fire and the sinking ship.
Her mainmast leaned, held for one groaning breath, then went sideways in a tangle of burning canvas and dragged half her quarterdeck down with it.
The collapse smashed through the deck in a roar of breaking wood, crushing whatever sailor and guns remained beneath it. More burning canvas spilled across the wreckage as the mast dragged rigging and splintered timber into the sea.
She was the biggest ship in the whole Havana Armada, and dying, she took her sweet, terrible time about it. Every man aboard the Rose stood watching.
James kept one hand on the wheel and the other pressed to his shoulder, then shouted the only order left worth the trouble.
"Bring her about. We’ve made our point here, and I’ll not have El Morro remindin’ us they’ve still got guns of their own once they’ve finished reloadin’."
Cudjoe, at last, agreed with his decision.
"Aye, and none too soon, or I’d have had tae listen tae ye brag about it for a week."
James hauled the Rose around himself, pushing her away of the shallows, and put what distance he could between the lass and the forts of Havana.
San Felipe finally went under behind them, her colors the last thing to vanish beneath the water, still flying from a halyard not a soul alive had thought to strike.
Beyond her, the whole bay lay open and beaten.
Guadalupe rode low and wounded off toward the Grand Dame, her hull scarred and smoking, her crew too busy fighting the sea to cause trouble.
Rosario drifted dismasted and holed wherever the Queen Anne had left her, neither sunk nor struck, simply finished.
Whatever fight remained across the flanks had gone the same way. Sloops were scattered, sunk, or fleeing, and not one gun left had the huts to answer her.
The Rose broke into noise the instant San Felipe’s topmast slipped beneath the water.
Kit was the first to find his voice. He dropped from the rigging in one reckless slide and landed hard enough to stagger, grinning anyway.
"CONQUEROR OF HAVANA!"
He bellowed it at the whole bay, both fists in the air.
"Ye heard it here first, lads, and now the whole bloody ocean’s heard it too!"
"Twenty!"
Jim shouted straight over him, waving his bleeding arm like a trophy. "Twenty brushes wi’ death, and I’ll have the whole thing wrote down before Havana’s even finished burnin’!"
Cudjoe hauled James upright by the good arm, muttering about fools and oak splinters.
James let himself be hauled up, laughing despite the pain, and looked out over the smoking ruin of the Spanish Armada like he’d just been handed a very expensive joke.
"Well." He looked out over the bay. "Reckon that settles who’s got the better ship."