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1629. The West Indies are held in Spain’s iron fist, and no challenge to that absolute rule is tolerated. But one threat will emerge as the most dangerous of all: the buccaneers.
Camped on the shore of Hispaniola, these half-wild men eke out a living hunting the island’s feral livestock. Among them, Jean-Baptiste LeBoeuf — hulking, silent, deadly with musket and blade — lives out his exile, content that no one in the hunters’ camp is at all curious about his past. But when a deadly hurricane sweeps through the Caribbean, it leaves in its wake opportunity, a chance for a new life for LeBoeuf and his fellow hunters. This stroke of luck, however, is not all it seems, and when even greater violence is visited upon them they find themselves locked in battle with some of the most powerful and ruthless men in the Spanish Empire. |
The Buccaneer Coast sample chapter
Chapter One
A soft blanket of sound settled over the open, hilly country, woven from the buzz of the insects hidden in the fields, the birds lost in the distant canopy, the palm fronds and mango leaves rustling in the light breeze. And that was good. As quiet as the hunters were — and they were very quiet — they welcomed anything that helped cover their approach.
They were well out of the trees now, having emerged from the cool, green forest into an open country of tall, dry grass and stunted, straggling brush. The land rolled away in a long series of hills like the swells of the sea. There was no relief from the sun now as it beat down on the fields and on all of Hispaniola, on all of the Spanish Main, without respite or mercy. But the hunters were used to that. There was not much in that part of the world that showed any respite or mercy.
There were two men hunting that patch of island. They were nominally equals, though in practice they were nothing of the sort. The foremost of them was on the move, advancing forward at a crouch, his musket in his left hand, the ramrod in his right. He knelt and jammed the ramrod into the ground beside him like a small flagpole. He held the musket in both hands now, and with the long barrel parted the grass that blocked his view.
The heat seemed to engulf him, to wrap itself around him. He felt a line of sweat creep out from under the thin canvas cap he wore on his head. His right hand was resting on the musket, thumb on the hammer of the flintlock, finger just brushing the trigger, but he let go of the gun and wiped his arm across his forehead. It was futile and he knew it, but he needed to keep the perspiration out of his eyes, at least for the next few moments.
Putain de chaud… he thought, but he was pretty much resigned to the heat. He figured he would live out his life on the Spanish Main and then certainly be cast into eternal flames after that, so there was really no getting away from it.
He was a big man, six feet tall and then some, weighting eighteen stone. His hair was long and tied in a queue that hung down his back. It had once been chestnut brown but now was bleached nearly yellow by sun and salt water. His face was half-covered in a beard like the impenetrable undergrowth of some ancient forest which made him look considerably older than his twenty-six year. A powerful man, he spoke little, and his reactions, physical and otherwise, seemed slow, sometimes nonexistent. Brawny and oversized, quiet, unflappable: that was as much of an impression as anyone seemed able to form of him. An enigma, hard to fathom and not worth trying. Most men reckoned him stupid. He was known simply as LeBoeuf. The Ox.
LeBoeuf heard, behind him and on either side, the sound of soft panting and he turned his head to the right. His chief hunting dog was crouched at his side, coiled and ready. He was a big, sinewy beast which LeBoeuf had raised from a pup and trained well for his work. He had named the dog Gros Chien. Big Dog.
Big Dog met his eye as he turned, and LeBoeuf could see the animal was trembling in its eagerness to be at the game.
“Patience,” LeBoeuf whispered. He turned his head and looked over his left shoulder, to where his other dog, a bitch he called Other Dog, was also crouched and ready. Behind him he knew there were three more of the creatures, each of which he called simply “Dog”, and they were all in similar states of eagerness.
“Patience,” he said again.
There was rustling in the brush ahead, grunting, the crunch of dried vegetation. LeBoeuf looked down the barrel of his musket where it was parting the tall grass in front of him. This was an ambuscade, a trap carefully set. LeBoeuf knew that his quarry would come, because he knew their habits and he knew the trails and the fields and the forests of that part of the island, the north west coast of Hispaniola.
The first of the pigs emerged from the brush fifty yards away across the open ground, a boar leading its drove. It moved with confidence, its bristled back arched high, its tusks visible even from that distance. He was wily and dangerous and he seemed to know it. But he did not know that LeBoeuf was there, down wind and hidden by the grass, watching. Waiting.
This is good, the breeze, LeBoeuf thought. He had no delusions about the way he smelled. His raw hide breeches and canvas shirt were caked with dirt and dried blood, and now both were nearly soaked through with sweat. He could smell the stink rising off of him, and he knew the boar would smell it as well, if the light air had not been in LeBoeuf’s favor.
He looked over to his right. The other man was there, one hundred feet away: LeBoeuf’s partner in matelotage, the means by which the hunters on Hispaniola lived and did their work. The men in the matelotage were partners. They hunted together, lived together, shared in all things. To some the partnership was more like that of man and wife.
LeBoeuf was not bothered by that sort of thing — he had seen enough of it in his travels — but it was not an arrangement he would embrace. In truth, the entire concept of matelotage was not the sort of thing he would embrace, and he did not in any real way.
His partner was called simply Le Rongeur. LeBoeuf did not know if that was his real name and he did not care. Le Rongeur was a filthy, thieving, vile bit of humanity, but he was wiry and quick, an expert at sneaking around, which seemed to be his natural state, and an extraordinarily good shot, all of which made him an excellent hunter. He greatly admired LeBoeuf, and he was also jealous and terrified of him, and those conflicting forces seemed to keep him where LeBoeuf wanted him. He had learned to never ask personal questions of any sort, and though he was naturally talkative, he knew to speak to LeBoeuf only when speech was necessary, which was not often.
This was the sort of partnership LeBoeuf was looking for. One that was not really any sort of partnership at all.
Le Rongeur sensed LeBoeuf’s eyes on him and turned his head so they were looking at one another across the open ground. Le Rongeur was also crouching, also holding his long musket so that it peered through the tall grass at the drove of wild pigs slowly stepping out into the open, following behind the boar. Four dogs lay crouched behind Le Rongeur as LeBoeuf’s five were crouched behind him.
LeBoeuf glanced back at the pigs and then back at Le Rongeur. He held up one finger, then pointed to himself, then held up three and pointed them at Le Rongeur. Le Rongeur nodded and turned back to peer down the barrel of his gun.
The sweat was running freely down LeBoeuf’s face now and he gave his eyes one last wipe then settled his hand on the flintlock. His thumb found the hammer and he eased it back, pulling gently on the trigger as he did, then eased the trigger forward so that the weapon was cocked without even the slightest click of the lock. He lifted the barrel of the gun with his left hand, his left elbow resting on his knee. He sighted down the long, dark steel shaft, then moved it a fraction of an inch until the sight was just a bit above and to the left of the big boar in the lead.
He knew exactly how his gun would behave, in the same way that he knew how his hands and arms would behave. Like them, the gun was a part of him. He knew that at this distance the ball would drop and tend to the right, just slightly, but enough to require an adjustment of aim if he wanted to put his ball through the beast’s head. Which he did.
One hundred feet away, Le Rongeur was taking aim at the third pig in line, another boar, smaller than the first but potentially just as dangerous. They were the only two boars visible. Between them they seemed to be sharing the half-dozen sows that moved in company with them.
Pigs… LeBoeuf thought, and pulled the trigger. The big musket slammed back against his shoulder with enough force to half twist him around, which took considerable force indeed. The gun was still in its recoil, and LeBoeuf was leaping to his feet, when he heard Le Rongeur’s musket go off as well.
He stood at his full height and looked out over the cloud of smoke that had jetted from the muzzle of his gun. The big boar was down and motionless, which meant the lead ball had hit him in the skull and made a hash of what brains he had, killing him standing. The other boar was also down, also motionless. Le Rongeur, too, had put his bullet in the beast’s skull.
The sows were frozen where they stood, too surprised and confused to move. But that would not last for more than a few seconds, and then they would bolt, running in terror in half a dozen directions.
“Allez! Allez!” LeBoeuf shouted, the two words for which Big Dog, Other Dog and the Dogs had been trembling in anticipation of hearing. The last syllable had not left LeBoeuf’s lips before the animals were up and crashing through the tall grass, baying as they raced forward.
LeBoeuf watched them as he hefted the musket and pulled the hammer back to half-cock, snapping the frizzen shut. He dropped the wide butt of the gun to the ground as he reached behind him and pulled a paper cartridge from the leather box on his belt. He had never used paper cartridges before arriving in Hispaniola, where he had learned of them from the hunters there, but he had quickly seen the advantage they offered and embraced the idea.
He lifted the cartridge to his mouth and bit off the end, holding the lead ball between his tongue and teeth as he spilled the powder down the barrel. He spit the bullet down after it and then wadded up the paper and shoved that down as well. He snatched up the ramrod and drove it down the barrel, driving wadding and bullet down on the powder. He jammed the ramrod back into the ground and at the same time thumped the butt of the gun against the earth to drive power out of the touchhole and into the pan, priming the weapon to fire.
All this he did with his eyes fixed on the leaderless drove of pigs. He lifted the gun again as his dogs and Le Rongeur’s reached the panicked animals, circling around them as they had been trained to do, coming in behind the pigs. Their barking and snarling sent the sows running in terror, running right toward the hunters’ guns.
LeBoeuf put the sight of his gun on the foremost pig, swiveling at the waist to follow the animal’s flight. He pulled the trigger again, and again the gun slammed against his shoulder as the first and second pig went down. For an instant LeBoeuf though he had killed them both with a single shot, then realized that Le Rongeur had fired at the same instant, the sound of his gun lost in the deafening blast of LeBoeuf’s own.
Once again LeBoeuf’s hands went through the motion of loading the long gun, his eyes on the dogs circling the sows, corralling them as best they could, trying to keep them penned in the killing field. LeBoeuf was spitting the ball into the muzzle when he saw a sow, more terror-stricken than the rest, charge at one of Le Rongeur’s dogs and knock it high in the air as it raced for the shelter of the grass.
The dog came down whimpering on its side and the sow was gone. LeBoeuf thumped the butt of his gun down, lifted it, cocked it, found another of the sows and fired. He saw the animal knocked sideways, kicking and thrashing as it went down. Then Le Rongeur fired his third shot and another dropped and the last of the drove of pigs charged off into the grass, Big Dog, Other Dog and the rest at their heels.
LeBoeuf put two fingers in his mouth and blew three short, sharp whistles and the dogs stopped their chase and came trotting back, moving more slowly and reluctantly than they had on the attack.
“Good dogs,” LeBoeuf said. “Good dogs.” That was all the praise they would get, but that and a couple of haunches from one of the feral pigs would be reward enough.
LeBoeuf snatched up the ramrod that was still standing upright in the dirt, wiped the end on his breeches and slid it back into its housing under the barrel of his musket. He pushed forward through the tall grass and out into the open ground where the dead pigs lay scattered about. The dogs were trotting and circling around him with a new found eagerness, as if they had all just remembered what came next after the quarry was dead.
One hundred feet away Le Rongeur also pushed through the grass, the two men converging on their kill. They stopped next to the boar and looked down at his ugly face, his massive, muscular body, the tusks that gleamed in the brilliant sun.
“Big bastard,” Le Rongeur observed. LeBoeuf nodded.
“Don’t much want to carry this son of a whore back,” Le Rongeur said next. LeBoeuf grunted, a noncommittal sound that Le Rongeur would correctly interpret to mean that he, LeBoeuf, did not give a single damn what Le Rongeur did or did not want.
He looked away from the boar and surveyed the other pigs. Nearby lay one of the sows, the top of its head taken clean off by the heavy bullet from LeBoeuf’s gun. The smallest of the lot.
LeBoeuf pulled a long knife from the scabbard on his belt and pointed toward the sow. “That one we give to the dogs,” he said. He stepped around the dead boar to where the sow lay. Le Rongeur followed dutifully behind, with the dogs leaping and panting and twirling in circles in their growing excitement. LeBoeuf knelt and laid his musket carefully on the grass. He lifted the pig’s hind leg and reached in with his knife to cut the haunch free. Le Rongeur did the same with the fore-leg.
Le Rongeur’s knife had just pierced the animal’s flesh when he paused and looked up, his expression one of concern, a touch of fear.
“Oh, merde…” he said, cocking his head to one side.
“What is it?” LeBoeuf said. Le Rongeur had extraordinary hearing, which was pretty much what LeBoeuf would expect from Le Rongeur’s sort. LeBoeuf’s own ears functioned well enough, though his hearing had not been improved by years of close proximity to heavy cannon fire.
“Horses,” Le Rongeur said standing and looking off toward the east. LeBoeuf wiped his knife on his breeches and slid it back into its sheath as he, too, stood and looked off to the east.
Horses. That meant Spanish lanceros most likely, sent out from Santo Domingo. Mounted soldiers armed with swords and long, deadly lances, dispatched in companies to kill the wild pigs and cattle and deprive the hunters of their prey. Or, if the lanceros got lucky, to kill the hunters themselves. Spain would suffer no interlopers on her New World colonies, as insignificant as their impact might be.
LeBoeuf still could not hear the horses, but the dogs could, and their enthusiastic barking in anticipation of fresh-killed pig had turned to low growls as they moved slowly away from the hunters and toward the sound.
“Down,” LeBoeuf said and his dogs dropped to the ground. Le Rongeur gave the same order to his own dogs.
“The Spanish whores’ sons, they heard the guns,” Le Rongeur said, and LeBoeuf could sense the rising panic in his voice. “We better go. Run.”
“Too late,” LeBoeuf said, nodding to the far hill as the first of the lanceros came up over the crest. He was a couple hundred yards away and riding hard, and more soldiers were on his heels. Their steel helmets flashed in the sun, their lances were held straight up, the wicked points high over their heads. Their gear, helmet and leather armor, sword, lance, possibly a carbine, was nothing fancy, nothing compared to the finest of Spanish soldiers, but it was serviceable, and their horses were nimble and well-trained.
LeBoeuf knew perfectly well how far he and Le Rongeur were from the tree line, and he could see how quickly the riders were approaching. He was well used to calculations of speed, time, and distance, and he knew that he and Le Rongeur had no chance of fleeing now. The lanceros would ride them down and kill them if they tried.
He reached down and snatched his musket up from where it lay in the grass. “Load,” he said as he pulled back the hammer, his hands going through the familiar moves once more, fast but unhurried. He heard Le Rongeur curse as he fumbled with his own weapon.
There was no question that the lanceros had seen them. They charged down the hill and straight for the hunters, their horses parting the tall grass like ships through the sea until they broke out onto the more open fields. One hundred yards away and they lowered their lances, leaning forward in their saddles.
A dozen of the bastards…not so bad… LeBoeuf thought as he thumped the butt of his gun on the ground. Sometimes the horse soldiers would come out in patrols of fifty or more, but this column was considerably smaller. Small enough that they might just be able to fight them off if they were lucky, though LeBoeuf had to admit he had not felt very lucky as of late.
He raised the musket to his shoulder, thumbing back the hammer as he did. The dogs were snarling louder now and squirming in place. “Patience,” LeBoeuf said, loud this time since the need for stealth was long past. The snarling and the squirming withered, but it did not die.
LeBoeuf swung the gun until the sight was just ahead of the lead rider. The man was close enough now that LeBoeuf could see the dark slash of a moustache under his nose, the black hair spilling out from under his helmet. He was leading the others, likely the officer in command, and thus the one to put down first.
“I have the first, you take the second,” LeBoeuf barked at Le Rongeur. “Take care, aim well, or you’re a dead man!” As he spoke, he kept his eye trained over the barrel of his gun and as the last word left his lips he pulled the trigger. The gun banged into his shoulder and the world was lost in a glut of gray smoke. Then the breeze whipped the smoke away and LeBoeuf could see the riderless horse pulling up short in confusion, could see the lancero twisting and kicking on the ground behind it.
Le Rongeur, standing a little behind LeBoeuf, fired in that instant, the muzzle just a few feet from LeBoeuf’s ear, the sound so deafening that LeBoeuf could not even hear himself curse. Through the smoke from Le Rongeur’s muzzle he could see the second rider knocked back in his saddle, his arms flying up in the air, his lance sailing off into the grass. He tumbled off the side of the horse but his foot remained in the stirrup as his body hit the ground, his arms flailing as the panicked horse twisted to the side, dragging the lancero around in a wide circle.
All this LeBoeuf watched as once again his hands went through the motion of loading his musket. The ten riders who were left seemed less eager now to be at the hunters, their pace slowing as they came on.
Stupid bastards… LeBoeuf thought. Now was the time for them to charge, while the two men were reloading. But happily it seemed not to have occurred to them, or perhaps the sight of the lead riders shot out of their saddles had made them gun shy. Either way, their slower speed just might give him and Le Rongeur time to get off another shot.
LeBoeuf thumped the butt of the gun on the ground to prime the pan and lifted it to his shoulder, sweeping the barrel across the line of approaching riders. “I have the one center left!” he called to Le Rongeur. “You take the one center right! Don’t miss the bastard!”
Before Le Rongeur could reply, LeBoeuf pulled the trigger. He saw the man he was aiming for, center left, twist around and drop his lance and clap a hand over his shoulder as he slumped in the saddle. Not dead, not dismounted, but out of the fight and that was good enough.
He grit his teeth, watching the rest of the riders come on, waiting for Le Rongeur to fire. He did not bother reloading now — the lanceros would be on them long before he was halfway done. Le Rongeur had to take his man down and then they would somehow deal with the remaining eight.
“Le Rongeur, shoot! Now!” LeBoeuf shouted. He could not imagine what the man was waiting for. He turned to see what the problem might be, and the answer was immediately obvious: Le Rongeur was not there.
They were well out of the trees now, having emerged from the cool, green forest into an open country of tall, dry grass and stunted, straggling brush. The land rolled away in a long series of hills like the swells of the sea. There was no relief from the sun now as it beat down on the fields and on all of Hispaniola, on all of the Spanish Main, without respite or mercy. But the hunters were used to that. There was not much in that part of the world that showed any respite or mercy.
There were two men hunting that patch of island. They were nominally equals, though in practice they were nothing of the sort. The foremost of them was on the move, advancing forward at a crouch, his musket in his left hand, the ramrod in his right. He knelt and jammed the ramrod into the ground beside him like a small flagpole. He held the musket in both hands now, and with the long barrel parted the grass that blocked his view.
The heat seemed to engulf him, to wrap itself around him. He felt a line of sweat creep out from under the thin canvas cap he wore on his head. His right hand was resting on the musket, thumb on the hammer of the flintlock, finger just brushing the trigger, but he let go of the gun and wiped his arm across his forehead. It was futile and he knew it, but he needed to keep the perspiration out of his eyes, at least for the next few moments.
Putain de chaud… he thought, but he was pretty much resigned to the heat. He figured he would live out his life on the Spanish Main and then certainly be cast into eternal flames after that, so there was really no getting away from it.
He was a big man, six feet tall and then some, weighting eighteen stone. His hair was long and tied in a queue that hung down his back. It had once been chestnut brown but now was bleached nearly yellow by sun and salt water. His face was half-covered in a beard like the impenetrable undergrowth of some ancient forest which made him look considerably older than his twenty-six year. A powerful man, he spoke little, and his reactions, physical and otherwise, seemed slow, sometimes nonexistent. Brawny and oversized, quiet, unflappable: that was as much of an impression as anyone seemed able to form of him. An enigma, hard to fathom and not worth trying. Most men reckoned him stupid. He was known simply as LeBoeuf. The Ox.
LeBoeuf heard, behind him and on either side, the sound of soft panting and he turned his head to the right. His chief hunting dog was crouched at his side, coiled and ready. He was a big, sinewy beast which LeBoeuf had raised from a pup and trained well for his work. He had named the dog Gros Chien. Big Dog.
Big Dog met his eye as he turned, and LeBoeuf could see the animal was trembling in its eagerness to be at the game.
“Patience,” LeBoeuf whispered. He turned his head and looked over his left shoulder, to where his other dog, a bitch he called Other Dog, was also crouched and ready. Behind him he knew there were three more of the creatures, each of which he called simply “Dog”, and they were all in similar states of eagerness.
“Patience,” he said again.
There was rustling in the brush ahead, grunting, the crunch of dried vegetation. LeBoeuf looked down the barrel of his musket where it was parting the tall grass in front of him. This was an ambuscade, a trap carefully set. LeBoeuf knew that his quarry would come, because he knew their habits and he knew the trails and the fields and the forests of that part of the island, the north west coast of Hispaniola.
The first of the pigs emerged from the brush fifty yards away across the open ground, a boar leading its drove. It moved with confidence, its bristled back arched high, its tusks visible even from that distance. He was wily and dangerous and he seemed to know it. But he did not know that LeBoeuf was there, down wind and hidden by the grass, watching. Waiting.
This is good, the breeze, LeBoeuf thought. He had no delusions about the way he smelled. His raw hide breeches and canvas shirt were caked with dirt and dried blood, and now both were nearly soaked through with sweat. He could smell the stink rising off of him, and he knew the boar would smell it as well, if the light air had not been in LeBoeuf’s favor.
He looked over to his right. The other man was there, one hundred feet away: LeBoeuf’s partner in matelotage, the means by which the hunters on Hispaniola lived and did their work. The men in the matelotage were partners. They hunted together, lived together, shared in all things. To some the partnership was more like that of man and wife.
LeBoeuf was not bothered by that sort of thing — he had seen enough of it in his travels — but it was not an arrangement he would embrace. In truth, the entire concept of matelotage was not the sort of thing he would embrace, and he did not in any real way.
His partner was called simply Le Rongeur. LeBoeuf did not know if that was his real name and he did not care. Le Rongeur was a filthy, thieving, vile bit of humanity, but he was wiry and quick, an expert at sneaking around, which seemed to be his natural state, and an extraordinarily good shot, all of which made him an excellent hunter. He greatly admired LeBoeuf, and he was also jealous and terrified of him, and those conflicting forces seemed to keep him where LeBoeuf wanted him. He had learned to never ask personal questions of any sort, and though he was naturally talkative, he knew to speak to LeBoeuf only when speech was necessary, which was not often.
This was the sort of partnership LeBoeuf was looking for. One that was not really any sort of partnership at all.
Le Rongeur sensed LeBoeuf’s eyes on him and turned his head so they were looking at one another across the open ground. Le Rongeur was also crouching, also holding his long musket so that it peered through the tall grass at the drove of wild pigs slowly stepping out into the open, following behind the boar. Four dogs lay crouched behind Le Rongeur as LeBoeuf’s five were crouched behind him.
LeBoeuf glanced back at the pigs and then back at Le Rongeur. He held up one finger, then pointed to himself, then held up three and pointed them at Le Rongeur. Le Rongeur nodded and turned back to peer down the barrel of his gun.
The sweat was running freely down LeBoeuf’s face now and he gave his eyes one last wipe then settled his hand on the flintlock. His thumb found the hammer and he eased it back, pulling gently on the trigger as he did, then eased the trigger forward so that the weapon was cocked without even the slightest click of the lock. He lifted the barrel of the gun with his left hand, his left elbow resting on his knee. He sighted down the long, dark steel shaft, then moved it a fraction of an inch until the sight was just a bit above and to the left of the big boar in the lead.
He knew exactly how his gun would behave, in the same way that he knew how his hands and arms would behave. Like them, the gun was a part of him. He knew that at this distance the ball would drop and tend to the right, just slightly, but enough to require an adjustment of aim if he wanted to put his ball through the beast’s head. Which he did.
One hundred feet away, Le Rongeur was taking aim at the third pig in line, another boar, smaller than the first but potentially just as dangerous. They were the only two boars visible. Between them they seemed to be sharing the half-dozen sows that moved in company with them.
Pigs… LeBoeuf thought, and pulled the trigger. The big musket slammed back against his shoulder with enough force to half twist him around, which took considerable force indeed. The gun was still in its recoil, and LeBoeuf was leaping to his feet, when he heard Le Rongeur’s musket go off as well.
He stood at his full height and looked out over the cloud of smoke that had jetted from the muzzle of his gun. The big boar was down and motionless, which meant the lead ball had hit him in the skull and made a hash of what brains he had, killing him standing. The other boar was also down, also motionless. Le Rongeur, too, had put his bullet in the beast’s skull.
The sows were frozen where they stood, too surprised and confused to move. But that would not last for more than a few seconds, and then they would bolt, running in terror in half a dozen directions.
“Allez! Allez!” LeBoeuf shouted, the two words for which Big Dog, Other Dog and the Dogs had been trembling in anticipation of hearing. The last syllable had not left LeBoeuf’s lips before the animals were up and crashing through the tall grass, baying as they raced forward.
LeBoeuf watched them as he hefted the musket and pulled the hammer back to half-cock, snapping the frizzen shut. He dropped the wide butt of the gun to the ground as he reached behind him and pulled a paper cartridge from the leather box on his belt. He had never used paper cartridges before arriving in Hispaniola, where he had learned of them from the hunters there, but he had quickly seen the advantage they offered and embraced the idea.
He lifted the cartridge to his mouth and bit off the end, holding the lead ball between his tongue and teeth as he spilled the powder down the barrel. He spit the bullet down after it and then wadded up the paper and shoved that down as well. He snatched up the ramrod and drove it down the barrel, driving wadding and bullet down on the powder. He jammed the ramrod back into the ground and at the same time thumped the butt of the gun against the earth to drive power out of the touchhole and into the pan, priming the weapon to fire.
All this he did with his eyes fixed on the leaderless drove of pigs. He lifted the gun again as his dogs and Le Rongeur’s reached the panicked animals, circling around them as they had been trained to do, coming in behind the pigs. Their barking and snarling sent the sows running in terror, running right toward the hunters’ guns.
LeBoeuf put the sight of his gun on the foremost pig, swiveling at the waist to follow the animal’s flight. He pulled the trigger again, and again the gun slammed against his shoulder as the first and second pig went down. For an instant LeBoeuf though he had killed them both with a single shot, then realized that Le Rongeur had fired at the same instant, the sound of his gun lost in the deafening blast of LeBoeuf’s own.
Once again LeBoeuf’s hands went through the motion of loading the long gun, his eyes on the dogs circling the sows, corralling them as best they could, trying to keep them penned in the killing field. LeBoeuf was spitting the ball into the muzzle when he saw a sow, more terror-stricken than the rest, charge at one of Le Rongeur’s dogs and knock it high in the air as it raced for the shelter of the grass.
The dog came down whimpering on its side and the sow was gone. LeBoeuf thumped the butt of his gun down, lifted it, cocked it, found another of the sows and fired. He saw the animal knocked sideways, kicking and thrashing as it went down. Then Le Rongeur fired his third shot and another dropped and the last of the drove of pigs charged off into the grass, Big Dog, Other Dog and the rest at their heels.
LeBoeuf put two fingers in his mouth and blew three short, sharp whistles and the dogs stopped their chase and came trotting back, moving more slowly and reluctantly than they had on the attack.
“Good dogs,” LeBoeuf said. “Good dogs.” That was all the praise they would get, but that and a couple of haunches from one of the feral pigs would be reward enough.
LeBoeuf snatched up the ramrod that was still standing upright in the dirt, wiped the end on his breeches and slid it back into its housing under the barrel of his musket. He pushed forward through the tall grass and out into the open ground where the dead pigs lay scattered about. The dogs were trotting and circling around him with a new found eagerness, as if they had all just remembered what came next after the quarry was dead.
One hundred feet away Le Rongeur also pushed through the grass, the two men converging on their kill. They stopped next to the boar and looked down at his ugly face, his massive, muscular body, the tusks that gleamed in the brilliant sun.
“Big bastard,” Le Rongeur observed. LeBoeuf nodded.
“Don’t much want to carry this son of a whore back,” Le Rongeur said next. LeBoeuf grunted, a noncommittal sound that Le Rongeur would correctly interpret to mean that he, LeBoeuf, did not give a single damn what Le Rongeur did or did not want.
He looked away from the boar and surveyed the other pigs. Nearby lay one of the sows, the top of its head taken clean off by the heavy bullet from LeBoeuf’s gun. The smallest of the lot.
LeBoeuf pulled a long knife from the scabbard on his belt and pointed toward the sow. “That one we give to the dogs,” he said. He stepped around the dead boar to where the sow lay. Le Rongeur followed dutifully behind, with the dogs leaping and panting and twirling in circles in their growing excitement. LeBoeuf knelt and laid his musket carefully on the grass. He lifted the pig’s hind leg and reached in with his knife to cut the haunch free. Le Rongeur did the same with the fore-leg.
Le Rongeur’s knife had just pierced the animal’s flesh when he paused and looked up, his expression one of concern, a touch of fear.
“Oh, merde…” he said, cocking his head to one side.
“What is it?” LeBoeuf said. Le Rongeur had extraordinary hearing, which was pretty much what LeBoeuf would expect from Le Rongeur’s sort. LeBoeuf’s own ears functioned well enough, though his hearing had not been improved by years of close proximity to heavy cannon fire.
“Horses,” Le Rongeur said standing and looking off toward the east. LeBoeuf wiped his knife on his breeches and slid it back into its sheath as he, too, stood and looked off to the east.
Horses. That meant Spanish lanceros most likely, sent out from Santo Domingo. Mounted soldiers armed with swords and long, deadly lances, dispatched in companies to kill the wild pigs and cattle and deprive the hunters of their prey. Or, if the lanceros got lucky, to kill the hunters themselves. Spain would suffer no interlopers on her New World colonies, as insignificant as their impact might be.
LeBoeuf still could not hear the horses, but the dogs could, and their enthusiastic barking in anticipation of fresh-killed pig had turned to low growls as they moved slowly away from the hunters and toward the sound.
“Down,” LeBoeuf said and his dogs dropped to the ground. Le Rongeur gave the same order to his own dogs.
“The Spanish whores’ sons, they heard the guns,” Le Rongeur said, and LeBoeuf could sense the rising panic in his voice. “We better go. Run.”
“Too late,” LeBoeuf said, nodding to the far hill as the first of the lanceros came up over the crest. He was a couple hundred yards away and riding hard, and more soldiers were on his heels. Their steel helmets flashed in the sun, their lances were held straight up, the wicked points high over their heads. Their gear, helmet and leather armor, sword, lance, possibly a carbine, was nothing fancy, nothing compared to the finest of Spanish soldiers, but it was serviceable, and their horses were nimble and well-trained.
LeBoeuf knew perfectly well how far he and Le Rongeur were from the tree line, and he could see how quickly the riders were approaching. He was well used to calculations of speed, time, and distance, and he knew that he and Le Rongeur had no chance of fleeing now. The lanceros would ride them down and kill them if they tried.
He reached down and snatched his musket up from where it lay in the grass. “Load,” he said as he pulled back the hammer, his hands going through the familiar moves once more, fast but unhurried. He heard Le Rongeur curse as he fumbled with his own weapon.
There was no question that the lanceros had seen them. They charged down the hill and straight for the hunters, their horses parting the tall grass like ships through the sea until they broke out onto the more open fields. One hundred yards away and they lowered their lances, leaning forward in their saddles.
A dozen of the bastards…not so bad… LeBoeuf thought as he thumped the butt of his gun on the ground. Sometimes the horse soldiers would come out in patrols of fifty or more, but this column was considerably smaller. Small enough that they might just be able to fight them off if they were lucky, though LeBoeuf had to admit he had not felt very lucky as of late.
He raised the musket to his shoulder, thumbing back the hammer as he did. The dogs were snarling louder now and squirming in place. “Patience,” LeBoeuf said, loud this time since the need for stealth was long past. The snarling and the squirming withered, but it did not die.
LeBoeuf swung the gun until the sight was just ahead of the lead rider. The man was close enough now that LeBoeuf could see the dark slash of a moustache under his nose, the black hair spilling out from under his helmet. He was leading the others, likely the officer in command, and thus the one to put down first.
“I have the first, you take the second,” LeBoeuf barked at Le Rongeur. “Take care, aim well, or you’re a dead man!” As he spoke, he kept his eye trained over the barrel of his gun and as the last word left his lips he pulled the trigger. The gun banged into his shoulder and the world was lost in a glut of gray smoke. Then the breeze whipped the smoke away and LeBoeuf could see the riderless horse pulling up short in confusion, could see the lancero twisting and kicking on the ground behind it.
Le Rongeur, standing a little behind LeBoeuf, fired in that instant, the muzzle just a few feet from LeBoeuf’s ear, the sound so deafening that LeBoeuf could not even hear himself curse. Through the smoke from Le Rongeur’s muzzle he could see the second rider knocked back in his saddle, his arms flying up in the air, his lance sailing off into the grass. He tumbled off the side of the horse but his foot remained in the stirrup as his body hit the ground, his arms flailing as the panicked horse twisted to the side, dragging the lancero around in a wide circle.
All this LeBoeuf watched as once again his hands went through the motion of loading his musket. The ten riders who were left seemed less eager now to be at the hunters, their pace slowing as they came on.
Stupid bastards… LeBoeuf thought. Now was the time for them to charge, while the two men were reloading. But happily it seemed not to have occurred to them, or perhaps the sight of the lead riders shot out of their saddles had made them gun shy. Either way, their slower speed just might give him and Le Rongeur time to get off another shot.
LeBoeuf thumped the butt of the gun on the ground to prime the pan and lifted it to his shoulder, sweeping the barrel across the line of approaching riders. “I have the one center left!” he called to Le Rongeur. “You take the one center right! Don’t miss the bastard!”
Before Le Rongeur could reply, LeBoeuf pulled the trigger. He saw the man he was aiming for, center left, twist around and drop his lance and clap a hand over his shoulder as he slumped in the saddle. Not dead, not dismounted, but out of the fight and that was good enough.
He grit his teeth, watching the rest of the riders come on, waiting for Le Rongeur to fire. He did not bother reloading now — the lanceros would be on them long before he was halfway done. Le Rongeur had to take his man down and then they would somehow deal with the remaining eight.
“Le Rongeur, shoot! Now!” LeBoeuf shouted. He could not imagine what the man was waiting for. He turned to see what the problem might be, and the answer was immediately obvious: Le Rongeur was not there.
