He sheathed the cutlass, forcing the blood-clotted blade into the scabbard’s throat, then ran through the defeated Frenchmen to where the forward companionway led down to the lower deck. The Revenant was the Pucelle’s sister ship, indeed it felt to Sharpe that he was fighting on the Pucelle, so alike were the two vessels. He pushed his way through the enemy, going into the shadow of the forecastle. A gunner halfheartedly rammed a cannon swab at Sharpe, who thumped the volley gun’s butt onto the man’s head, then shouted at the bastards to get out of his way. Marines were following him. Two Frenchmen cowered in their galley where the big iron stove had been torn apart by gunfire. Sharpe could hear the big guns firing below, filling the ship with their thunderous pounding, though whether it was the Revenant’s guns that fired or the Pucelle’s, he could not tell. He swung down the companionway into the lower deck’s gloom.
He slid down on his backside, landed with a thump and just pointed the volley gun down the lower deck. He pulled the trigger, adding to the smoke that writhed under the beams, then he drew the cutlass. “It’s over!” he shouted. “Stop firing! Stop firing!” He wished he knew French. “Stop firing, you bastards! Stop firing! It’s over!” A gunner, deaf to Sharpe’s shouts, and half blinded by the smoke, pushed a powder-filled reed into a cannon’s touch-hole and Sharpe slashed him with the cutlass. “Stop it, I said! Stop firing!”
Two shots from the Pucelle hammered through the ship. Sharpe drew his pistol. The nearest French gunners just stared at him. Dozens of dead lay on the deck, some with great wooden splinters jutting from their bodies. The mainmast had a great bite gouged from one side. The deck was scorched where the cannon had exploded. “It’s over!” Sharpe screamed. “Get away from that gun. Get away!” The Frenchmen might not speak English, but they understood the pistol and cutlass well enough. Sharpe went to a gunport. “Pucelle! Pucelle!”
“Who is it?” a voice called back.
“Ensign Sharpe! They’ve stopped firing! Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”
One last cannon belched smoke and flame into the Revenant’s belly, then there was silence at last as the big guns ceased. A gunner crawled out of one of the Pucelle’s lower gunports and scrambled into the Revenant where Sharpe was walking down the deck, stepping over corpses, climbing a fallen cannon, gesturing that the French gunners should kneel or lie down. Three marines followed him, bayonets fixed. “Down!” Sharpe snarled at the wild-eyed, powder-blackened enemy. “Down!” He turned to see more marines and British seamen coming down the companion-way. “Disarm the bastards,” he shouted, “and get them on deck.” He stepped over the splintered remains of one of the ship’s pumps. A French officer faced him with a drawn sword, but he took one look at Sharpe’s face and let the blade clatter on the deck. More of the Pucelle’s gunners were crawling out of the British ship’s gunports and clambering into the French ports, coming to plunder what they could.
Sharpe crossed a patch of blackened deck where one of his grenades had exploded. The French watched him warily. He pushed a man aside with his cutlass blade, then turned down the aft companionway into the ship’s cockpit which was lit with a dozen lanterns.
He almost wished he had not come down the ladder for here there were scores of men bleeding and dying. This was death’s kingdom, the red-wet belly of the ship, the place where foully wounded men came to face the surgeon and, in all likelihood, eternity. It smelled of blood and excrement and urine and terror. The surgeon, a white-haired man with a beard that was streaked with blood, looked up from the table where, with hands red to the wrists, he was delving into a man’s belly. “Get out of here,” he said in good English.
“Shut your face,” Sharpe snarled. “I haven’t killed a surgeon yet, but I don’t mind starting with you.”
The surgeon looked startled, but said nothing more as Sharpe walked into the gunroom where an officer and six men lay bandaged on the floor. He forced the cutlass into its scabbard, gently moved one wounded man aside, then seized the ring of the hatch leading into the Revenant’s lady hole. He hauled it up and pointed the pistol down into the lantern-lit space.