Читать книгу Pirates on Dinosaur Island - Mark Edwards - Страница 6

1

The Author finds himself at the mercy of dire and bloody circumstance.

I awoke to the slaughterhouse smell of blood and the sulfur stink of gunpowder. There were muffled cries and a cold internal voice told me, “Your hearing is nearly gone from standing too close to a twelve-pound cannon, and those are cries of the wounded, and when you open your eyes you will wish you hadn't.”

I did open my eyes. The deck of the brig was carnage. Fiercely armed men rushed about, blood flowed from the scuppers, spars were shattered and splintered, a mast and sail had crashed onto the foredeck, and a score of wounded and dead were scattered about.

I could not see out of my left eye, and I reached up expecting the worst to find that I merely needed to wipe a clot of blood from the lid. There was a painful cut above my ear, most likely caused by a flying splinter. My last memory before fainting was of a ball smashing the frame of a nearby gunport.

Any relief I felt at finding my skull intact immediately vanished as a large fellow in a patchwork coat loomed over me, aiming a pistol between my eyes. He wore a grin that would have been rakish if he hadn't cocked the pistol.

“Hold ye,” said a voice from behind me. “They say this one's the surgeon.”

A tall man limped into view, long of leg and pigtails, gripping a cutlass. There was grey in his beard and blood on his black coat. He pushed aside the other's weapon and leaned over me, speaking in a loud fashion, as if he kenned my fuddled state. “You can live, if ye'll stitch and dose our wounded.”

I don't know where my courage came from, since I thought I'd left my honor back in England. “I'll physic your men if I can physic my own,” was my response.

“You can.” The tall man glanced about the deck. “What's left of —’em.”

That is how, reluctantly, I came into the service of Captain Baltizar.