“Marines!” Sharpe was shouting. “Marines!” He had gathered thirty-two marines and supposed the rest were dead, wounded or else guarding either the magazines or the French prisoners on the poop. These thirty-two would have to suffice. “We’re boarding her!” Sharpe shouted over the bellow of the guns. “You want pikes, axes, cutlasses. Make sure your muskets are loaded! Hurry!” He turned as he heard the sound of a sword scraping from a scabbard and saw Midshipman Collier, bright-eyed and still drenched in Lieutenant Haskell’s blood, standing under the fallen French mainmast that would be the boarding bridge. “What the hell are you doing here, Harry?” Sharpe asked.
“Coming with you, sir.”
“Like hell you are. Go and watch the bloody clock.”
“There isn’t a clock.”
“Then just go and watch something else!” Sharpe snapped. The weather-deck gunners, bare-chested, blood-streaked and powder-blackened, were assembling with pikes and cutlasses. The lower-deck guns still fired, shaking both ships with every shot. A few French guns answered, and one ball smashed through the gathering boarders, driving a path of blood across the Pucelle’s deck. “Who’s got a volley gun?” Sharpe shouted, and a marine sergeant held up one of the stubby weapons. “Is it loaded?” Sharpe asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then give it here.” He took the gun, exchanging it for his musket, then made sure his cutlass was not blood-crusted to its scabbard. “Follow me up to the quarterdeck!” Sharpe shouted.
The fallen mast jutted across the weather deck, but was too high to be reached unless a man stood on a hot gun barrel and hauled himself up. It would be easier, Sharpe reckoned, to go to the quarterdeck, then return along the Pucelle’s starboard gangway. From there a man could step onto the mast. He would then have to run, balancing himself on the broken pine spar, before jumping down onto the Revenant’s deck, and because the two ships were moving unequally in the long high swells, the mast would be pitching and rolling. Jesus, Sharpe thought, sweet Jesus, but this was a terrible place to be. Like going through the breach of an enemy fortress, he reckoned. He ran up the quarterdeck steps, turned down the gangway and tried not to think of what was about to happen. There were French marines on the opposing gangway, and a horde of armed defenders waiting in the Revenant’s blood-drenched waist. Montmorin knew what was coming, but just then the forward carronade sent a shattering cask of musket balls into the Revenant’s belly and belched a pall of smoke above the ship.
“Now!” Sharpe said, and clambered up onto the mast, but a hand held him back and he turned, cursing, to see that it was Chase.
“Me first, Sharpe,” Chase chided him.
“Sir!” Sharpe protested.
“Now, boys!” Chase had his sword drawn and was running across the makeshift bridge.
“Come on!” Sharpe shouted. He ran behind Chase, the heavy seven-barreled gun in his hands. It was like traversing a tightrope. He looked down to see the sea churning white between the two hulls and he felt dizzy and imagined falling to be crushed to death as the two hulls banged together, then a bullet spat past him and he saw Chase had jumped from the shattered stump of the mast and Sharpe followed, screaming as he leaped through the smoke.
Chase had gone left, jumping into a space cleared by the carronade, though it was still cluttered with twitching bodies and the deck was slick with new blood. He stumbled on the corpses and the Frenchmen saw him, his gold braid bright in the smoke, and they shouted as they charged, but then Sharpe fired the volley gun from the spar and the bullets twitched the French back in a cloud of smoke. Sharpe jumped down, threw the volley gun aside and drew his cutlass. He had leaped into the smoking madness of battle, not the deliberate calm of disciplined fighting when battalions fired volleys or when stately ships exchanged cannon fire, but the visceral horror of the gutter fight. Chase had fallen between two of the Frenchman’s starboard guns, and they protected him, but Sharpe was exposed and he screamed at the enemy, flicked a pike aside with the cutlass, lunged at a man’s eyes, missed, then a marine jumped onto the Frenchman’s back, throwing him forward, and Sharpe stamped on the man’s head as the marine was piked in the back. He swung the cutlass to the right, inadvertently foiling another pike thrust, then reached and seized the French seaman’s shirt and pulled him forward, straight onto the cutlass blade. Sharpe twisted the steel in the man’s belly, wrenched it free. He was shrieking like a fiend. He used both hands to swing the cutlass back to his left, driving away a French officer who stumbled over the dying British marine and fell back out of range. The dead were making a barricade to protect Sharpe and Chase, but a French marine was climbing over one of the guns. Chase scrambled to his feet, lunged his slender sword at his attacker, then fired a pistol across the other cannon. Sharpe swung the cutlass again, then cheered as a rush of British marines and seamen dropped to the deck.