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"Now the grenades!" Blackbeard yelled eagerly as soon as the last of the healthy Navy sailors had disappeared down the hatch.
The pirates happily got busy lighting the fuses protruding from the shot- and powder-filled bottles, and, as soon as a sputtering fire was near a bottle's neck, pitching the thing across the gap onto the Navy vessel's deck. With a staccato series of bangs the bottles exploded, flinging shot in all directions, ravaging the corpses on the deck and finishing off any Navy men who had been too badly hurt to get below.
"They're all dead, except three or four," Blackbeard yelled, drawing his cutlass. "Let's board and cut 'em to pieces!"
Boarding proved easy, for the tide was pulling the Navy sloop toward them, and Blackbeard was able to leap across the gap onto the shot-raked deck; at the same instant the hatch cover was flung back and the officer in charge of the Navy sloop, a lieutenant by his uniform, scrambled up to the deck. Blackbeard bared his teeth in a grin so full of recognition and welcome that the lieutenant actually glanced behind himself to see what old friend the pirate-king had spied.
But behind him was nothing but a crowd of his own men scrambling up the ladder, the eighteen - of the original thirty-five - who could still wield a sword or fire a pistol. The pirates were leaping and clambering aboard right behind their chief, and the lieutenant and his men scarcely had time to draw their rapiers before the yelling pirates were upon them.
For the first few moments the deck was a chaotic riot of howling, clanging, stamping, chopping savagery, punctuated by the occasional bang of a pistol shot, as the pirates used their heavy cutlasses to hatchet through the line of Navy men and then turn back upon them again, and many of the Navy men's rapiers were broken in attempting to parry the sledgehammer blows of weapons that caused nearly as much damage striking flat as they did striking edge on. The deck was soon slippery with the blood that spouted from wrist-stumps, undone bellies and opened throats, and the air that shook with yelling and clanking was foul with the hot iron smell of fresh blood.
But the Navy men had all along been trying simply to evade the ponderous swings of the cutlasses rather than oppose their own fragile blades to them, and, after the first brutal couple of minutes, the panting, sweating pirates worked their ten-pound chunks of steel with less quickness and force, and the light rapier blades were able to dart in around the slow strokes, and puncture throats and eyes and chests. Though damaged less spectacularly, as many pirates were falling now as Navy men.
Blackbeard had wound up fighting by the mast, back to back with one of his men, but when a rapier point spun around the other pirate's descending cutlass and sprang in to transfix his heart, and he tumbled instantly limp to the deck, Blackbeard stepped away from the mast and with his left hand drew his last pistol.
The Navy lieutenant, standing in front of him, drew one of his own.
The two shots were nearly simultaneous, but while Black-beard's ball missed and went skipping away across the shoals, the lieutenant's ball punched straight into the giant pirate's abdomen.
It rocked him back, but a moment later Blackbeard roared and leaped forward, whirling his cutlass in a chop that broke off the lieutenant's rapier blade an inch from the hilt; Blackbeard raised the cutlass again to split the man's head - but another Navy man stepped up behind the pirate and, with a full over-the-head swing like someone driving a stake, brought the heavy axelike blade of a pike down onto Blackbeard's left shoulder, barely missing his ear. The collarbone snapped audibly and the pirate was slammed down onto one knee. He raised his head and then, incredibly, straightened his massive legs and stood up, swaying back just as the pike came whistling down again, so that it tore open his forehead and cheek instead of crushing his skull.
Blackbeard had dropped the fired pistol, but his good right hand still gripped the cutlass, and he swung it around in a horizontal arc that sent the pike-wielder's head and body tumbling, separately, across the deck.
Another pistol was fired directly into Blackbeard's chest, and as he staggered back, blood spattering onto the deck all around him, two rapiers were driven deep into his back; he whirled so quickly that one of them broke off in him, and his outflung cutlass broke the arm of the man who held the broken sword. Two more shots hammered into him and another blade chugged deeply into his side.
Finally he got his feet solidly under him and straightened to his full height - the Navy men drew back fearfully - and then, straight as a felled tree, he toppled forward, and the wet deck shook when he hit it.
"Jesus Christ," exhaled the lieutenant, sitting down abruptly, his exhaustion-tense hands still locked around the fired pistol and the broken sword.
After a pause, one of the Navy men picked up Blackbeard's cutlass, knelt by the corpse and raised the heavy blade over his head, obviously trying to guess where, under the tumble of tangled black hair, the pirate-king's neck was. A moment later he made up his mind and swung the blade down; it crunched through Blackbeard's spine and into the deck and Blackbeard's severed head rolled over to stare at the sky with a strained but sardonic grin.
When the tide rose again in the early evening, the four battered sloops filed past Beacon Island and out through the Ocracoke Inlet. The surviving pirates were under armed guard aboard the Adventure, and Blackbeard's head swung from the Navy sloop's bowsprit. Blood had stopped dripping from the grisly trophy hours ago, and most of it had long since threaded away in the cold salt water to feed tiny fishes, but one clot had remained solid, and clung now to the hull of the sloop just below the water line.
It was, very gently, pulsing.
Chapter Twenty-One
The bang of the pistol shot rolled away across the long harbor of New Providence Island, and though a glint showed on the deck of the Delicia as one of the Navy officers aboard her turned a glass on the shore, no one leaped up in fear of being murdered, or anticipation of seeing someone else be, as would have been the case six months ago, and Jack Shandy plodded barefoot across the hot sand to the chicken he'd beheaded with the pistol ball. It was evidently too early in the day for drink to have impaired his aim.
He picked up the head. As he'd feared, the beak had letters inked on it, and he let it drop.
Damn, he thought. So much for grilled chicken. I'm glad old Sawney hasn't started magicking the fever into lobsters yet.
He tucked the pistol into his sash and walked toward the fort. The darker-colored masonry of the new sections of wall gave the whole edifice a pied look, and Shandy thought it was probably the physical improvements, even more than the British flag and the presence of Woodes Rogers, the official governor, that had made mad old Governor Sawney move out of the place.
As he trudged toward the cluster of tents he glanced to his left at the harbor. There were fewer boats these days than there'd been before Rogers' arrival, and it was easy to spot the old Jenny. Shandy had abandoned his captaincy when he took the pardon three months ago, and Venner had stepped in and declared himself captain. By that time, though, everybody had taken the pardon, and it was clear to most that the days of piracy were dead, and nobody felt that the issue of who might be captain of one battered old sloop was important enough to dispute, and so Venner's claim had stood. He had careened the vessel, cleaned her up and rerigged her, and it was obvious that he intended to violate his pardon and go back on the account. Shandy had heard that he was furtively recruiting a crew from among the segment of the island's population that missed the bad old days - he hadn't asked Shandy, and Shandy wasn't interested anyway.
The Navy brigantine he'd seen wending its way in among the shoals this morning was moored now, but though supplies were being unloaded and taken ashore, there was none of the festive atmosphere he would have expected - men were standing around in little groups on the beach, talking quietly and shaking their heads, and one of the prostitutes was sobbing theatrically.
"Jack!" someone called. Shandy turned and saw Skank hurrying toward him.
"Mornin", Skank," he said when the young man stopped, panting, in front of him.
"Did you hear the news?"
"Probably not," said Shandy. "If I did, I forgot it."
"Blackbeard's dead!"
