H.M.S. COCKEREL - Dewey Lambdin

Beyond that, Lewrie's theory got a little vague; he'd never had the greatest head for numbers. Falconer's, under Range, listed a table of practice for sea mortars, giving the specific weights of propelling charges, and the proper fuses to use. For instance, he could discover that at forty-five degrees of elevation, a thirteen-inch mortar took an eighteen-pound charge to hurl the shot, which resulted in a flight of twenty-six seconds, and range of roughly 2,873 yards. And for the fuse to explode at the right moment, burning at the rate of four seconds and forty-eight parts to the inch, would require a premade fuse of the exact length of five inches, seventy-two parts, to be selected from the "laboratory chest." Then, of course, there was the niggling matter of the gunners who would light the fuse, and the mortar's touch hole, with slow match, doing both at the same instant. But Alan assumed that the Spanish bombardiers, and the insufferably laconic Don Luis, might know what they were doing, and if they made a hash of it, then it was their own damned fault.

Lavishly re-equipped from those mountains of French supplies in the basin's arsenals and warehouses, they sailed Zele, her new sails almost virgin-white, from the docks, through the opening between the bomb-proof jetties, and out to join St. George and Aurore, just after first light on the 24th.

* * *

"Springs on the cables, sir," Lieutenant Scott informed him.

"Wash-deck pumps going? Filling room and magazine passageway?"

"Aye, sir."

"Let's be at it, then," Lewrie grimaced, his stomach chilly with trepidation at the unknown nature of their work. And over the danger, which was very known, of any clumsiness or inattentiveness.

"Might as well be, sir," Scott dared to assay a tiny, wry grin. "It appears the Frogs already are."

They walked amidships, to peer down into the mortar wells, then tip their hats to de Crillart and Esquevarre, who stood close together by the rearward lip, evidently engaged in some heated discussion.

"Non non, Comandante, Le Blond…" Charles de Crillart objected gently. "Alain… mon capitaine, I attemp' to tell zis… monsieur Le Blond say ze s'irty pound' charge eez beau-coup, mais zis… ze Comandante insist…"

Don Luis de Esquevarre rattled off an expostulation in rapid Spanish, out of which Lewrie caught perhaps the odd word in ten, most of those mildly insulting.

"Senor," he said, whipping out his copy of Falconer. "Allow me to quote, and do you translate, Lieutenant de Crillart… aha, here it is.

Mr. Mutter in his Treatife of Artillery, very juftly obferves, that the breech of our 13-inch fea-mortars is loaded with an unneceffary weight of metal. The chamber thereof contains 32 pounds of powder, and at the fame time they are never charged with more than 12 or 15 pounds by the moft expert officers, becaufe the bomb-vessel is unable to bear the violent fhock of their full charge."

" 'E say eez Inglese bull-sheet, mon capitaine," de Crillart translated back. "Zat eez on'y pour ze cyUnder chambre, et we 'ave een zis bombard, ze conical. 'E also say 'e eez tres esperi-ence viz artillery, an' 'e 'ave no need to be tol'… 'ow to soock eggs? Comment?" de Crillart shrugged in bewilderment.

To de Crillart's even further confusion, Lewrie laughed out loud, prompting a tiny upturn of one corner of Don Luis' mouth in return.

"Senor Comandante, I have implicit trust in your experience," Lewrie cajoled, phrase by phrase as de Crillart transposed for him, "but this is a ship, not a firm battlement or well-prepared battery… do you see here, under Range… practice table? Weights of charge?"

"Ah, si, capitan!" Don Luis brightened, pulling from a voluminous pocket of his ornate uniform coat a much-tattered, oft-rolled and thumbed table of practice, expostulating eagerly.

Fumm-fumm! Umumm. Scrreee-BLAM! BLAM! All this time, Republican shot had been falling into the Little Road, St. George belching displeasure, and Aurore's six- and twelve-pounders, breeches resting flat on their carriages for greatest "range at random-shot," had been barking away. And once in a while, other floating batteries had erupted in fog banks of powder smoke.

"Ze tres petit malentendu… ze lettle mis-un'erstan'ment?" Charles said with relief, at last. " 'E eez 'ave een min' ze less of ze powder. 'E ees s'inking ze, uhm… nine poun', at firs'?"

"Whew!" Scott breathed out.

"I defer to his greater knowledge, tell him, Charles," Alan said, doffing his hat, making sure he was grinning when he said it.

Up from the orlop came a powder charge, sacked by the called-for weight. Spanish bombardiers used paper cartridges. From the filling room came a shell, two burly Spaniards grunting with effort to carry it by its small, slippery handles. Don Luis and his aspirante, or ensign-in-training, and a hirsute, cursing bear of a man, a sergeant-gunner, Diego Huelva, directed the work of heaving the after-mortar, the left hand of the pair as they faced the coast, into line. Then began to elevate it to forty-five degrees. They fussed and hopped, peered and tinkered at screws, until satisfied, then waved for the shell to be brought forward.

Down it went into the well, as the powder charge was rammed deep into the chamber, and the priming iron was thrust into the touch hole to both clear the vent and puncture the bag. Slowly the fixed shell was lowered into the stubby bore, handles and fuse hole up.

Don Luis took a deep breath, almost made to cross himself, as he waved the excess hands away and ordered the tallow seal on the fuse to be opened. "Fosforo, preparado…!" he cried. "Fuego!"

The smouldering port-fires touched both fuse and touch hole, and there was a split second of sizzle, then a tremendous blast! Down went the deck, as if shoved by the hand of God, and Zele's timbers groaned.

Not so much a sudden detonation as it was a physical force, Alan felt his lungs rattle, his groin shrink, and his heart flutter when the mortar touched off, felt an invisible wave of pressure shove him back, rattle his coat-tails and hat, and fill his ears with a sound beyond a sound, almost too loud to register, except to set them ringing. Spent powder smoke spurted aloft in a sickly yellow-white column, reeking with sulphur and rotten eggs, smelling singed as lit kindling.

"Bloody Hell, that was…," he coughed, fanning the air for some fresh as the gush of gun-smoke dissipated. "That was magnificent"

He'd loved the great-guns best of all the things he'd learned in the Navy; the power, the stink of them, their recoil and shud-derings. From little two-pounder boat-guns and swivels to long-twelves, from far-firing twenty-four-pounders to the stubby, ship-breaking "Smashers," the carronades, Lewrie delighted in things that went Boom!-and exulted in seeing the damage they caused aboard a foe. It was irrational, brutish and savage, this joy he found in gunnery, so viscerally beneath a reasonable man's ken, so insensible a passion, yet…

"Damme!" Lewrie called, feeling a boyish glee rise in him. "Don Luis! Volver a hacer? Let's do that againl"

That afternoon, St. George retired from the artillery duel, due to depart for Genoa, and her place was taken in the Little Road by the Princess Royal, another 98, Rear-Admiral Goodall's flagship. In lieu of his presence, her captain, John Childs Purvis, commanded. A Spanish 74 joined the bombardment.

French bursting-shell drummed around Zele all day, fortunately never discovering the right solution in propellant charge and length of fuse, though it did get interesting at times when a shell would splash somewhat nearby, raise a feather of spray by its impact, then explode underwater a second or so later to produce an even more prodigious spout of brine which would fall like a cascade on the decks and gangways.

Don Luis Esquevarre concentrated their fire upon the lesser battery to the sou'west, the one with two guns. Patiently, firing perhaps a round every two minutes, he probed the hills, first with the left mortar, then with the right hand. A dram less powder in the charge cartridge, three drams more the next shot; a tiny tinkering with elevation, half a turn on the great screw by the bracing block; heaving to turn about a single degree on the pintle.

"Fosforo… preparado…" he called, coatless and hatless by then, his voice hoarse from inhaling spent gunpowder and shouting for half a day. "Fuego!"

Another monumental clashing roar, and the floating battery shuddering to her very bones, timbers crying in torment. Lewrie stood aft away from the noise, on what passed for a quarterdeck, a telescope to his eye, rested steady on the larboard mizzen-stay ratlines.

"Nineteen… twenty… twenty-one…" Midshipman Spendlove tolled off, counting on his fingers, for his watch only had a minute hand.

Bruml Umumm. Came from the hills.

"Struck, sir. Twenty-two seconds," he announced, and looked up to see a darker gout of smoke rise, almost mingling with the forest-fire pall that hovered continually over the Republican mortar battery. "Oh, well. Closer, I think, though, sir," he sighed disappointedly.

Suddenly, there was a massive eruption of smoke yonder, rising as silent as a squall cloud might on the sea's horizon, as if the French had reinforced the masked battery, and had just let fly half a dozen shells.

Brummmbrummmm-Bummm! spoke the masking hill, later than the gunpowder pall. And the pall swelled upward, outward, turned darker, shot through with dark flecks, with black writhing licorice sticks of smoke-tinged at the bottom, just atop the hill, with dying embers, with a ruddy orange loom-like flickering, like a lighthouse's loom just over the horizon's knife edge.

"Hola!" Don Luis shouted, raspily enthused, and his bombardiers began to cheer and dance, to caper round the deck and in the wells in triumph.

"We did it!" Lewrie cried, ready to dance himself. "We hit 'em! Blew 'em to hell, by Jesus!"

Bumm-bumm-brubrumbumm, more secondary explosions thundered, and the hills quaked to the destruction, and they could feel it in their bones and on their faces, a tremendous distant blast that rattled the earth, the shoals, and transmitted itself through the waters. They'd holed out, not on the mortars themselves, but in their magazine, where fixed and kited shells had been stored. Too many of them, fixed ready to fire, kited too close together, and even being sunk into the earth, protected by wet hides and hair-cloth, hadn't saved them.

Lewrie dashed down to the gun deck where Spanish, French and English sailors cavorted and clapped, tossing their caps or hats into the air and huzzah-ing.

"Marvelous!" Lewrie told Esquevarre when he reached him. "Magnifico! Marveloso! Genius!"

Esquevarre was thumping de Crillart on the back, de Crillart was bestowing Gallic kisses on those lean aristocratic cheeks, and Don Luis tweaked Charles' nose playfully as he stepped back to clasp Lewrie to him and dance him around the deck in a stumbling bear hug.

Must be something in the water, Lewrie thought, not exactly that pleased to be bussed and hugged by a man; bloody foreigners!

"Charles, tell him we'll celebrate," Lewrie called over Comandante Esquevarre's shoulder as they tripped past him in a shuffling circle. "Vino! Plus vin? My treat! We'll splice the main-brace… uh, splice-o las main-brace-o? Si, amigo, si, Don Luis? Bueno!"