Taking Darn Alive

Mother Quenby kept them standing on the shingle at Gull Ness for a quarter of an hour before she came down from her house, and Rusk knew to the minute why.

Fifteen years ago, on a bright morning off the Ness, he had kept her standing on the deck of a Compact cutter for a quarter of an hour. His bosun had broken open her fish hold meanwhile and brought up the brandy. Forty casks of it, under the herring. He had been thirty-three, and very sure of himself, and he had made her wait while he wrote out the seizure in his best hand.

Gull Ness was a pilots' village on a bare hook of land on the north shore of the Reach, twelve miles from Darn and well outside every field. The sun had set an hour ago, a real sunset, red under a bank of cloud in the west. Lamps were lit in the cottages. Twelve boats lay drawn up on the shingle below them, broad, deep, tarred pilot boats, and men stood by them in the dusk with their hands in their belts, watching him. Orris sat on an upturned keg at Rusk's side with his splinted leg out in front of him and his crutch across his knees.

"She's enjoying this," Orris said.

"She's earned it," Rusk said.

"Drown me. You're going to be humble. I can't watch." Orris shifted the leg and winced. "I've never once in my life seen you humble. It'll be like watching a cow dance."

Mother Quenby came down the path at last with a lantern. She was sixty-five and built like a bollard, in a man's sea coat and sea boots, with a clay pipe in her teeth. Four men came after her, all big, all with her heavy jaw. They stood behind her on the shingle in a line.

She looked at Rusk over the pipe.

"Captain Rusk," she said.

"Mistress Quenby," Rusk said.

"Mother. Everyone says Mother. Even the Compact said Mother, in the end, when they wanted the north channel sounded." She took the pipe out of her mouth. "These are my sons. Ambrose, Barnaby, Gabriel, Joseph. Gabriel was eleven the day you took my boat. Do you remember what you did with my boat?"

"I held her for the season."

"You did. The fine was forty marks, and I'd have paid it. But you held the boat as well, for an example, and that was the herring season, and we had no boat. Ambrose went to sea in a grain ship at fourteen to keep us fed that winter. He went round Cape Harl in January in a leaky Halsey bucket, and came home with two fingers gone to frost." She pointed the pipe stem at her eldest son without turning, and Ambrose Quenby held up his left hand, where the two last fingers were missing. "That's what your example cost."

Rusk looked at the hand.

"I was right to stop you," Rusk said. "You were running brandy into Greyhaven under the Compact's nose, and it was my duty. I'd stop you again. I should never have held the boat. The fine would have served. I held it because I wanted every smuggler on the north shore to hear about it, and I didn't care who went hungry for the sake of that. It was a cruel thing, and a vain one, and I'm sorry for it." He turned to Ambrose. "I'm sorry for your hand."

The sea rattled on the shingle. Mother Quenby put the pipe back in her teeth.

"Well," she said round it. "He said it. Pay up, Gabriel."

Gabriel Quenby took a copper penny out of his coat and handed it to his brother Barnaby without a word. Orris let out a breath that was half a laugh and half a groan.

"Twelve boats," said Mother Quenby. "My sons and their crews. We'll take your small craft into Darn tomorrow at the evening bell, through the north gut, over the harbor sill on the top of the springs, where no Admiral's pilot would dare. After that, the Darn yard repairs every boat of ours that's damaged, first, before any warship. And the Ness gets a share in whatever's taken in Darn, by the pilots' old rule. That's my price. The apology was just for me."

"Done," said Rusk.

"I know it's done. I'm not asking." She turned to go up the path, and stopped, and looked back at Orris on his keg. "Orris Fen. You were in that brandy too. Half of it was yours."

"Mother," said Orris, with great dignity, "I've no idea what you mean."

Darn's walled harbor faced east. Rusk had it drawn in his head as he stood in the stern of Ambrose Quenby's boat at half past five on the evening of the twenty-sixth. They lay at the edge of Covenant's dark, twelve pilot boats and nine Carrick boats round him in the black water. The dry dock and the pumping works were on the south wharf. The warehouses stood along the north wharf, with the great sail loft and the timber store at the inner end. The two wall-heads made the harbor mouth between them, a hundred yards wide. Three miles south-west, Covenant lay at anchor in the Race, and its five miles of dark covered all of it: the town, the yard, the harbor, the boats, and him.

He could see nothing of the engine. He could see the harbor lamps of Darn two miles ahead, and away to the south-west, low on the water, a long cluster of lights where Covenant lay with its towboats and its guard.

Two escorts guarded the engine and the port. Rusk knew them both by sight from the Skerrow: Ardent and Cutwater. One of them lay at the harbor mouth. Resolute was somewhere out in the dark to the south, with Venn below in a cot with her ribs strapped. Sabin had her deck, with the Pale Fleet's signals for the day in his head.

It was spring tide. High water at Darn would come at seven. The harbor sill had nine feet over it now and would have fourteen at the top. Rusk had the times written on a card in his pocket, and had not looked at it since noon.

Nera sat in the boat's waist with her adze across her knees, beside Ivo Kerrow and Joss. Marr was in the next boat with Dunning and twenty marines, bound for the dry dock. Every boat had a lantern, shuttered. Every boat had grapnels, boathooks, and men who had been told what to do with them.

"There's the bell," said Ambrose Quenby.

Rusk heard it, faint across two miles of water: the Darn yard bell, ringing six, the end of the day shift. It rang every evening of the year. Tonight, when it stopped, Agathe Moll's people would take the food stores in the long granary behind the yard and open the dry dock's sea gate to the harbor.

The bell stopped, and the last stroke went away across the water.

"Give way," Rusk said.

They went in through the north gut, along the foot of the north mole, in single file behind Ambrose Quenby's boat. It was a ditch of a channel through a shoal that dried at half tide, and no Admiral's pilot would bring a boat through it in the dark. The Quenbys did it without a lamp, by the feel of the oars on the bottom. Rusk sat in the stern and let Ambrose steer.

Ahead and to the right, a red glow rose suddenly over the harbor's south side. Shouting came across the water. Someone in the yard had set a fire, or the garrison had, by the granary. A bell began ringing, harsh and fast, and the drum at the yard gate beat to arms.

To the south, far out, Rusk saw lights move. One lantern went south fast across the dark, a ship's lights, with another following it. Resolute had made her signal: strange sail to southward, investigate in company. Whatever the Skerrow's guard ship had seen two nights ago, a ship slipping her cable in the dark, nobody had yet told Darn whose. Ardent had seen the right lamps from a ship she had sailed beside for a year, and had left her station at the harbor mouth to follow. Now there would be a fight out there that nobody could explain away.

Rusk took his eyes off it. That was Sabin's fight.

The boats came over the harbor sill on the flood and into Darn harbor. He could see it all now in the lamps along the wharves. The north wharf lay on his left with its long dark warehouses, and the south wharf on his right, with the dry dock's black mouth and the pumping house beside it. At the far end the slips came down to the water, with the timber pond beyond the wall. Marr's boats peeled away to the right toward the dock gate. It stood open. The great timber leaves of the dry dock's sea gate had swung back, and there were figures on the dock edge waving lanterns.

"Moll's done it," Nera said.

The water round the boats moved.

Rusk saw a hand come up over the rail of Gabriel Quenby's boat, beside him. A white hand, and an arm, and a head with its hair streaming. Another came up beyond it. Another, at the oars of the next boat, gripping the blade of an oar and pulling.

"Dead in the water!" Rusk shouted. "Hooks and oars! Break their arms! Keep pulling!"

The garrison had kept dead men in Darn harbor all month as watchmen, and Covenant held every one of them from three miles off. They rose all round the boats now, reaching for oars, for rails, for legs. Joss knocked one off the oar beside him with a boathook. Ivo Kerrow took one by the wrist as it came over the side, and wrenched it off the rail, and threw it back. In Gabriel's boat a man went over the side with a dead man's arms round his neck. Gabriel went in after him with a knife in his teeth and came up with him.

Rusk watched the water. The dead already here were Covenant's, and they could pull a man down as well as any.

"Pull!" he shouted. "North wharf! Pull!"

The north wharf was two hundred yards of stone, lined with warehouses three stories high, with loading doors at every level and cranes jutting out over the water. At the inner end stood the two that mattered. The sail loft was long and tall, with its upper doors open. The timber store was a great barn of a building, low and broad, where Darn kept its seasoned oak and its mast timber stacked under cover to dry.

The boats came in under the wharf face, and the crossbows began.

They came from the loading doors of the sail loft and the timber store, forty and fifty feet up. They came from behind a barricade of barrels and carts at the head of the wharf steps. A bolt took a man in the boat behind Rusk in the shoulder. Another went through the bottom boards a foot from Joss's knee, and water spouted. Men threw themselves down in the boats. Somebody screamed.

"Under the wharf!" Rusk shouted. "Get in under the wall! They can't shoot down the face!"

They got in. The boats crowded together under the wet stone of the wharf, out of the crossbows' angle, rocking and banging. Above them, at the top of the steps, the garrison was shouting orders. Rusk counted the boats. He had lost none yet. He had six men hurt.

"How many up there?" he said.

"A company," Nera said. "Sixty, Moll said. The garrison's best. They hold the north wharf for the stores. They've had four days to fortify it since the pumping house."

Barnaby Quenby crawled across two boats to Rusk's. He had a fire pot in his hands, a clay jar stopped with tarred rag, and two more were in his boat. His face was black with tar and red with excitement.

"Captain," he said. "We can burn them out. The timber store's dry as tinder. Put three of these through the low door, and in ten minutes every man in it comes out running, or he roasts. The sail loft goes after it. We don't need to climb those steps at all."

Rusk looked up at the dark face of the timber store, where the crossbows were. It was a good plan. It would save the men in these boats, whose names he knew.

"No," said Nera.

She had come up beside him on her knees in the bilge water, with her adze in her fist.

"Rot it, no," she said. "Captain, listen. That store holds every stick of seasoned oak in Darn. Every keel and frame and knee we'll cut this winter. There's one mast timber in it long enough and sound enough to make the Kestrel a new mainmast, one, I've seen it, a Halsey pine eighty feet long. Burn that and it goes. And the fire won't stop at the store. The sail loft's next door, and every sail in it. Then the cranes, then the slips. Once it's going, it'll burn the whole north side of the yard down to the stone, breeze or no breeze. We came here to take the docks. Burn that, and we've nothing to take."

Barnaby glared at her. "And how many men will it cost to take it by the steps?"

"I don't know," Nera said. "More than it costs to burn it. I know that."

Rusk looked at her. He looked at Barnaby, with his fire pot. He looked up at the timber store again. He could feel the time going.

Orris was at Gull Ness with his leg. Marr was across the harbor at the pumping works. Nera was here.

"Nera," he said, "you're sure of the mast."

"I'm sure," Nera said.

"Then we take it by the steps." He turned to Barnaby. "Keep your pots. If we can't take it, we'll burn it then, and I'll answer for the order. Not before."

Barnaby nodded, short and hard, and crawled back to his boat.

The steps came up from the water to the wharf in a single flight of twenty, eight feet wide, worn and slippery. At the top was the barricade, and behind it the open wharf: sixty yards of bare stone to the timber store's low door, with crossbows above on both sides.

Rusk drew the hanger at his side, a short heavy sword he had carried for twenty years. He looked round at the men crowding the boats under the wall. Joss, white-faced. Ivo Kerrow, with a cooper's adze in one huge hand. Gabriel Quenby, soaked from the harbor. Forty men from the boats who had never stormed a stair before tonight.

"When I go," he said, "come up after me fast and keep going. Don't stop at the barricade. Don't stop on the wharf. The crossbows can't reload fast enough to stop us if we don't stop. Get to the store door and get in under the eaves. Ivo, the door."

"Aye, Captain," the men said.

Rusk went up the steps.

The first bolts came while he was halfway up. One rang off the stone by his foot. Another took the man behind him in the leg, and the man fell back down the steps into the men below him. Rusk went on. At the top, the barricade was a heap of barrels and a cart turned on its side, with men behind it. A face came up over a barrel and a pike came at him. He knocked it aside with the hanger and caught the barrel with his left hand and pulled himself over it, with his bad shoulder wrenching at him, and he was among them.

It was cramped and dark and frantic. A man swung at his head and he took it on the hanger's guard and cut back, low, and felt the blade go in. Another grabbed his arm. Joss came over the barrel beside him and hit that man with a belaying pin, and Gabriel Quenby came over after Joss. Then the barricade was full of men from the boats, fighting with pikes and axes and boathooks and fists, and the garrison men behind it broke and ran for the warehouses.

"On!" Rusk shouted. "Don't stop!"

They ran across the wharf.

The crossbows above them loosed into the running crowd. Rusk heard the bolts strike. He heard men fall. A boy from Carrick went down beside him with a bolt in his chest and did not cry out. Rusk ran on. Sixty yards. Forty. The timber store's low door was shut, oak, iron-bound. Thirty. A bolt went through his coat at the hip and he felt the hot slash of it along his skin and kept running. Twenty.

Ivo Kerrow reached the door first. He had picked up a capstan bar somewhere, a great bar of ash six feet long, and he drove its end into the door beside the lock with his whole weight behind it. The door shuddered. He drew back and struck again. Something cracked.

A bolt took him from above, between the shoulders.

He went down on his knees at the door with the capstan bar still in his hands. Rusk reached him as he fell. Ivo looked up at him with an expression of great surprise, and then he looked at nothing at all.

Rusk took the capstan bar out of his hands. Nera was there, and Gabriel, and three more, and they took the bar between them and drove it at the door, and the lock tore out of the frame, and the door went in.

The inside of the timber store was dark, and smelled of oak and resin, and was full of men.

The great stacks of seasoning timber rose to the roof in long aisles, with lamplight moving among them. The garrison company had fallen back into the aisles and up the ladders to the timber lofts. A sergeant was shouting at them to hold. Rusk went in at the head of the men from the boats with the hanger in his hand and Nera beside him with her adze.

It was a fight among timber stacks in the half dark, and it went on and on. A man came out of an aisle at Rusk with a short pike, and Rusk beat it aside and closed with him and put him down. Another dropped on him from a stack above and bore him to the floor, and they rolled among the oak baulks. Rusk got a knee into the man's stomach and the hanger's pommel into his face, and got up. Nera stood in the main aisle with the adze held two-handed. When a garrison sailor ran at her with a cutlass, she took his blade on the adze's head and tore it out of his hand, and knocked him flat with the handle.

"Not the stacks!" she was shouting, at everyone, at both sides. "Not the stacks, you fools, there's lamps! Keep the lamps off the timber!"

Up in the lofts the crossbows were still loosing down into the aisles. A Carrick man fell beside Rusk. Gabriel Quenby went up a ladder after the crossbowmen and came down again with his arm hanging and blood running off his fingers.

Then, behind the garrison, from the inner end of the store, Rusk heard a new sound: the steady tramp of disciplined men, and a voice he knew, very cold and clear.

"Marines! Front rank, kneel! Take aim!"

Marr had come through from the pumping works. She had come along the inner harbor behind the north wharf with Dunning and twenty marines and a crowd of Darn workers with axes. They came in through the timber store's yard door at the far end. The garrison company was caught between them.

"Garrison of Darn!" Marr called down the aisles. "Commander Marr, Compact Navy. You're surrounded. Lay down your arms, and you'll be held as prisoners of war, fed and unhurt, and sent south when this is over. You have my word. Fight on, and we'll take this building from you one stack at a time. Choose."

The fighting faltered. Rusk heard men calling to each other in the dark among the timber.

"Choose!" Marr said.

A cutlass clattered on the floor somewhere. Another. A garrison sergeant came out into the main aisle with his hands up and his face streaming blood. Behind him the others began to come out, one at a time, and lay their weapons on the floor.

They took Darn alive that night, and it cost them nineteen dead.

Rusk walked the north wharf with a lantern after the last of the garrison had come down out of the sail loft, and he saw every one of them. Ivo Kerrow by the timber store door. The Carrick boy, whose name was Will Hendry. Two of Marr's marines from the pumping works, where the guards had fought hard at the pit. A Darn woman named Ida, who had held the dock gate open under crossbow fire with three of Moll's people, until the bolt took her. And on the open stone of the wharf, between the barricade and the store, nine men from the boats, in the places where they had fallen running. Five more lay among the timber stacks.

He made himself learn their names.

Resolute came in through the harbor mouth at midnight with her fore-topmast shot away and eleven men hurt. She had fought Ardent for an hour in the dark off the Race and driven her south with her rigging in pieces. Sabin brought the news to the wharf himself. Venn had stayed in her cot until the first crossbow volley, he said, and no one aboard had been able to make her go back to it.

The garrison had lost thirty dead. Most of the rest had surrendered. The others had gone over the south wall in the dark, and Moll's people were hunting them through the yard. The commandant of Darn had been taken in his office at the head of the yard with a fire going in his grate and an armful of papers half into it. The cooper's shed by the gate had been broken open, and the four carpenters' wives Sorn had named came out of it into the firelight.

Nera had got there first. She had come straight from the timber store with her adze still in her hand. When Rusk came into the office, she was kneeling on the hearth beating out a smoldering ledger with her bare palm, swearing like a shipyard. The commandant sat in a chair with Dunning's hand on his shoulder. He was thin and careful, with a clerk's stoop, and he would not look at the grate.

"Look at this," Nera said. "Captain, look."

She spread the papers on the commandant's table. Some were scorched at the edges. Most were whole.

The chart was Darn's own hand, the Lantern Reach in fine ink, and someone had drawn seven red rings on it with a compass, each round a name. Four of the rings lay on top of one another at Lisk Roads.

"Crown," Nera said, and put her blistered palm flat on them. "Mercy, Northward, Bounty. Vigil off Orra. Shelter off Greyhaven. Covenant in the Race." Beside each ring was a captain's name and the number of its towboats. "That's all seven, and where they sleep."

Under the chart lay three pages headed Active Fittings, a list of every door the enemy had made and where each one was, with the two Greyhaven gate races written in at the foot in a different ink. Rusk set it aside. Sorn had told them that already.

The transit order he went through standing, with the lamp held over it. It was dated the eighteenth of October and signed by Captain Harrow Quill for the Admiral. Crown was to pass east through the deep channel of Orra on the tenth of November, under tow, at the top of the morning flood. Mercy would lie ahead of her in the eastern channel and Northward in the western approach, so that their three fields covered the strait while she went through. Covenant and Shelter were to go west by the Kittle before then and join Vigil and Bounty, to cover Lisk.

At the foot of the order a clerk had added a note on Crown: draft twenty-one feet, laden; not to attempt the deep channel at any state of tide below the springs.

"Twenty-one feet," Rusk said, and went over the note again. "She can't come through on anything less than a spring. She has one tide."

The last sheet had lost a corner to the grate. It showed an engine ship cut through amidships, the vanes in their cages under the keel, the frame compartment, the sea-chest with the fitting in it. And in the ship's side, above the waterline, a square hatch with eight bolts drawn in.

"Maintenance port," Nera said, with her finger on it. "For bringing the frames in and out at the yard. Every engine ship has one. Bolted timber, a foot thick. It's on the drawings for Covenant, and for Patience, the one we broke off Sandle Bay. I'd have seen it on the slip, if I'd known to look."

"Can it be opened from outside?" Rusk asked.

"With the right tools, if you know where the bolts are." She looked up at him. Her face was black with smoke and her hand was blistered across the palm. "And now we know where the bolts are."

Rusk stood looking down at the papers.

"Three of them," he said. "Northward, Crown, Mercy. In the strait, all together, on one tide."

"And four to the west," said Marr from the doorway. She had come in quietly. There was blood on her sleeve that was not hers. "Who'll want to come east and fill the gap when the three are in trouble. Covenant first, by the look of that."

"Covenant goes west at the October springs." Rusk looked up at her. "This is the October springs."

The boat from Orra came in at four in the morning.

It was Abner Daw's, from Holm Ennis, with Abner at the tiller and a boy of Cal Voss's on the sheet. It had come by the Kittle and the north shore, outside the fields, and then into the dark to Darn by the lights. Abner climbed the steps of the south wharf stiffly and asked for the Captain. When they brought him to Rusk, he handed over a scrap of paper. Somebody had written a shutter message on it, repeated from boat to boat across the islands.

HULKS UNDER CLEARANCE AGAIN. HEAVY LIFTING GEAR FROM LISK. WE HOLD. MARIETTA.

"They brought it up two nights ago," Abner said. "Sheer-legs on a barge, and a crane on another. And divers." He did not say what kind of divers. "Cal's people broke one crane with a stone thrower. They've another. She says to tell you, Captain, she can hold the island. She can't hold the channel."

Rusk stood on the wharf with the paper in his hand and looked west, where there was nothing to see but the dark and the scattered lamps of Darn.

At first light by the clock, a little before six, Joss came running along the wharf to him.

"Captain. The engine. Look."

Rusk looked south-west. Out in the dark, three miles off, the long cluster of lights where Covenant lay in the Race had begun to move. It moved slowly, very slowly, as an engine ship moves under tow: the towboats' lanterns ahead in a line, the great mass of the engine's lights behind them, the escort's lights alongside. They were heading away from Darn, north-west, toward the Kittle and the west, at the pace of men walking.

"They're taking it away," Joss said. "Captain, it's going. Doesn't that mean the dark goes with it?"

"In time," Rusk said. He was watching the lights. "It's three miles off, and it has to get five miles from us before we see anything. At that pace it'll be most of the day."

He turned to the wharf, where Nera and Marr had come out of the commandant's office and were watching too.

"They know we have the yard," he said. "They know we'll have the Kestrel on a slip by tonight. And they've one more night with that engine within reach of us before it goes." He looked at the black water of the harbor, where the dead had come up round the boats the evening before. "If I were Vaust, I wouldn't waste it."