If I were to view my situation at face value, I had achieved what I had set out to do. I had a group of armed men proficient in combat at my disposal, and I could unleash them against the Tartar or the Turk since they too seemed to be enemies. However, this was not my reality. I had, in fact, been placed here as Barrett’s puppet – nay, not even that. I was a mere figurehead. A puppet could be controlled, but I did not even know the drill commands in English enough for me to give the simplest order to march forward. I would need help.
So, I sought out the help of the arrogant fop who put me in this most embarrassing position. He stood on the quarterdeck, surveying his “kingdom” of a ship.
“Captain Barrett, Your Nobility, I want help with soldiers.”
The captain, understandably perplexed at my failure to communicate my specific intent, raised his eyebrows at me.
“What sort of help would you need, Lord Krym? Also, while I do not disapprove your use of such a lofty address as “Your Nobility,” it is common custom amongst the officers of the admiralty to address superior officers simply as ‘sir.’”
“Yes… sir. I want… perevodchik, like Andrei, for soldiers,” pointing to Andrei, I shook my head and said, “This man knows no soldiery.”
Andrei gave the captain a wide, sheepish grin, and said nothing to defend himself.
Barrett stoked his chin for a moment and narrowed his eyes before realizing what I meant.
“Do you mean you need an interpreter? Of course! All the great foreign commanders of men had interpreters as associates.”
I pointed at Eirene, who was just then being freed from her chains, and exclaimed, “That one. I know him.”
“Very good then, you have my permission. Now, if you will excuse me, Lord Krym, I must attend to other duties. Try not to make too much trouble for me.”
After the captain had walked back to his cabin and shut the door, Eirene scoffed at me and smirked.
“Oh, thank you gallant knight,” she said in Russian, her words dripping with sarcasm, “you have come to rescue the helpless princess from a life of drudgery and manual labor.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “If you want to break your back working as a common sailor, then I will not stop you!”
“Excellent,” she said as she rubbed her wrists from the cuffs and turned away from me, “I will see you soon then, God bless!”
Realizing my error, I grabbed her hand. “Wait, I need you!”
“Yes, to speak English to your men. I heard your entire conversation, and I think Andrei Vasilyevich would be perfect for that. You two can play soldier while I do real work with the rest of the sailors.”
“Ah… Your Nobility?” said Andrei with a squeak. “I would much rather prefer if you took Monsieur Kazansky up on his offer.”
Eirene raised her eyebrows. “You would much rather prefer? I am very surprised at you, Andrei Vasilyevich. Normally a serf such as yourself would never voice his opinion unless asked.” She gave him a friendly punch on the shoulder, making him whimper. “I like this change in attitude. Every man should be free to say what he wants. So, tell me, where would you rather be?”
Andrei pursed his lips and looked at his shoes before returning his gaze to Eirene’s. “Your Nobility, I would actually be much happier in the kitchen.”
“Of course you would, Andrei Vasilyevich,” said Eirene as she tousled his wig, much to his exasperation. “Now go along and report to the cook, but beware that you don’t set one foot onto the quarterdeck, that’s for officers only, and you are but a common sailor! Run along now!”
The way Andrei scampered off reminded me of the way a child would go off to play with friends.
“Well, I have just lost my translator, Your Nobility. How do you intend to remedy that?”
“I accept your offer, Gospodin Kazansky,” she said with a flourishing bow.
Gospodin – “lord” how irony hung on that word. But I was happy to have her on board with me just the same.
“On one condition,” she continued. “I want my rank to be reinstated.”
“I beg your pardon? You never lost it. You have always been a lieutenant in the Czarina’s Amazon Company, and you still are, as you stand before me.”
“I stand before you as an ordinary sailor of the British Navy. You, despite your inadequacies in language and lack of knowledge of military command have inexplicably been given the rank of captain, and it is within your power to promote me to lieutenant.”
I scoffed, “Surely your reinstatement can’t be so simple as me saying a few magic words.”
Eirene nodded at me with stone-faced seriousness.
“Very well then,” I chuckled. “I hereby promote you to lieutenant. How do you feel?”
She snapped to attention and gave me a scowl. “Ready, sir. I feel ready.”
I tried hard to suppress my laughter. It was hard to take her seriously when she asked for such a trivial thing like this. She was still dressed in the ragged clothes of a common sailor, but acted like she was on the parade field.
“We will have to get you a proper uniform. I do not believe the men will take kindly to being barked at by someone dressed in… what are those?” I said, referring to her brown trousers that might have been white once upon a time.
“The men call them tarpaulins. I much prefer them to dresses, they’re very comfortable. A corset limits my breathing, the heavy skirts make it hard to walk in, and there is a constant fear of tripping. With these,” she said as she wiggled her bare toes, “Tripping is impossible, and they are quite airy.”
“Well, I’ll give the orders for now; you may translate as we agreed upon. What is the English word for smirna?”
“Attention, sir.”
“AT YENSHON!” I yelled.
The couple of dozen or so redcoat marines on deck looked at me with expressions ranging from confusion to amusement, until an older, scowling, dog-faced marine with three chevrons sewn onto his jacket sleeves stepped to my side and began barking orders.
“ROYAL MARINES! FALL IN!”
At once, every redcoat on deck scrambled into a neat formation in front of the sergeant and snapped to the position of attention. Every man had his musket shouldered, with his eyes looking straight ahead of him.
“That would be your sergeant, I believe,” muttered Eirene.
The sergeant turned towards me, rigid like a hinge of a door, and produced a ragged looking notebook from his pocket.
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“The Company Roll, sir.”
I took the book from him and scanned for a brief moment before giving up on the strange alphabet. I handed it to Eirene and said in Russian, “Read this English doggerel. What does it say?”
After leafing through the notebook for a short time, Eirene nodded her head and said, “This is a list of all the men. It looks like the previous captain scribbled notes about their personalities in the margins. Appleton: cowardly; Crowley, drunkard; Giles, frail… my, my, you seem to have the greatest warriors assembled under your command. There are fifty names on this list though, yet we only have about thirty men here. Casualties?”
“No doubt. Who is this man in front of me?”
“Sergeant MacRae, sir,” said the senior marine, startling both me and Eirene. “At yer service.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, still dazzled at his ability to understand me in my native tongue.
“Sergeant,” I continued in Russian. “How is it you understand what I’m saying?”
“Sir,” he replied in something that sounded like English, “me da be a Scotsman and me mam be a Rooshian, like ye, sir. I kent both tongues from them when I was but a wee lad.”
“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage, sergeant. You can understand me, but I can barely understand you.”
“That I can ken ye is all that matters, sir,” he said with a wink.
“Well then,” I said, giving up trying to understand him word-for-word, “You know that I’m new to this command. What’s the first thing I should know about the men?”
“Sir, permission to speak plainly?”
“Of course.”
“They all fuckin’ hate ye.”
Eirene put her hands on her hips, “Why so? He has barely been in command for more than fifteen minutes!”
“That be all the reason they need, sir,” muttered MacRae. “The men were fond of our old cap’n, Hamilton was his name. A good man – a fair man. And as long as ye ain’t him, ye ain’t but shite to them… sir.”
“I see,” I said, rubbing my chin. “Why does the company have such heavy casualties?”
“Aye, that be the nature of a marine’s life, sir. Per Mare, Per Terram and all that shite.”
“What?”
“By sea and by land,” said Eirene with a slight smile. “It’s Latin.”
I looked over the thirty men again, and noted their sharpness and uniformity. They stood in sharp contrast to my Cossack brothers whom I used to sail with, who wore whatever they had brought from home and fought with whatever weapons they fancied.
“Sergeant, I would like to see the men perform a mock engagement.”
“Aye, sir,” he said, before turning to the men. “All right lads, let’s show the new cap’n what we can do – COMPANY! Stand by to repel boarders! Larboard side!”
At this command, the marines broke their tidy formation, ran to the larboard gunwales and faced out to sea. The company formed into a dense block of men. I could already see how this would go badly. If I were on an opposing vessel, I would have no problem picking them off – everyone was so close together that if a shot missed its intended target, it would surely hit the man next to him.
“PRIME AND LOAD!”
The marines began to load their muskets, and while their speed was admirable, they chose to do so while standing in plain view, electing not to take cover of any kind.
“MAKE READY... P’SENT!”
At this, the men aimed their muskets at the open ocean, followed immediately by,
“FIRE!”
The loud bangs of all the men’s muskets were fired in one united, roaring explosion of volley fire that shot harmlessly out to sea. As soon as the last flash of powder went off, MacRae immediately yelled “PRIME AND LOAD!” again, and the process repeated. This went on three times, before MacRae yelled for a ceasefire. All three volleys were accomplished in less time than it took to take a piss.
“Three rounds a minute, sir!” he said, after the third volley had been fired. “As prescribed by the manual of arms!”
Almost immediately, Captain Barrett threw open the door of his cabin up on the quarterdeck, his cutlass in one hand and his pistol in the other, with wide eyes and a great menacing grin on his face.
“Have at the bastards!” he yelled. “Where are the foes that we might send them to their deaths?!”
I cringed in embarrassment, since I was the one who ordered the men to begin drilling in the first place. However, before a word of apology could leave my mouth, Sergeant MacRae stepped forward and saluted the captain.
“Apologies, sir! The men were merely conducting a practice drill!”
“A practice drill?” Barrett’s face contorted into a grimace. “A practice drill, man?! You roused me from my slumber for a drill without informing me?!” As Barrett descended down the short flight of stairs from the quarterdeck, I saw that he had no boots on. He looked like he had probably rolled out of bed, grabbed his weapons and rushed for the fight.
“A simple apology will not cover for this mistake, sergeant. You shall have to kiss my feet to make amends.”
My eyes widened in shock as I looked at MacRae. To him, it seemed an ordinary thing, for he looked like the captain had asked him for something as simple as the time of day. It surprised me even more that, without hesitation, he wordlessly knelt to the deck and gave the captain’s dirty, smelly, bare foot a kiss.
“Good, make sure this never happens again,” said Barrett. Turning to me, he added, “Lord Krym, control your men.” After which he walked back to his quarters.
Once he was out of earshot, I saw that Eirene had been gawking at the scene just as much as I had been.
“How could you do that?” she said. “You’re a British Marine! You should be treated with dignity, not like some servant!”
“With due respect, ye are nae a real lieutenant, not yet anyway. Ye have nae papers of commission – and as such I can speak to ye without reservation.”
“I’d prefer if you did, so speak plainly sergeant.”
“The cap’n gives ye a choice – kiss his boot or be flogged. In all truth, I’d pick the boot every time meself. Sir, the men might hate ye for not being Cap’n Hamilton, but they hate Cap’n Barrett for being Cap’n Barrett.”
“Your Nobility,” I said to Eirene, “what is your…”
“No need to call me that, sir. You are the superior officer between us.”
“Yes, ah… lieutenant then? Yes, lieutenant – what is your assessment of the men?”
“Well from my admittedly limited experience with the Amazon Company and comparing them to such, they are performing quite well, and exceed even our own standards of rate of fire. However…”
“However, they fight like they are on land,” I said, shaking my head. “They pretend that the enemy will march at them in a neat line and simply present themselves to be shot at. Lieutenant, will you be so kind as to translate what I say to the men?”
“Of course, sir.”
I nodded at her and began to address the men as I would my fellow Cossacks. Much to MacRae’s surprise, I sat down on a nearby barrel.
“Sit down, comrades. Dyadya Rodya has something to tell you.”
The marines, unsure of what to do, all cast their eyes on their sergeant without moving their heads, who in turn looked at me. I raised my eyebrows, as if to tell him that I did not want to repeat myself.
“Well, ye lot heard the cap’n. Sit down!”
At MacRae’s command, the thirty men sat down where they were, still in a square block.
“This is what soldiering does to you,” I sighed. “Removes your common sense. Come, form a circle around me.”
Once the marines were situated around me, I could finally begin my talk in earnest.
“Boys, our enemies, the Mohammedans, can hit a rabbit on horseback with their bows, and can down a bird mid-flight with their muskets. A single corsair can loose his entire quiver of arrows – if he so wished – in the same time it takes you men to fire a single volley.” I paused, to let those thoughts sink in. “Sergeant MacRae?”
“Aye, sir?”
“How was it that you lost those twenty men during your last battle at sea?”
“The bastards picked us off with their arrows as we were reloading from the gunwales.”
I nodded in agreement. “Were you shooting as fast as you were shooting right now?”
“Aye sir, perhaps even faster.”
“And were you firing as one?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Aha!” I cried. One of the men jumped in his seat. “There lies your problem. You were fifty men aiming fifty muskets at the enemy vessel, in a single line, delivering three rounds of fire every minute. What can you tell me of the enemy? Where were they, what were they doing?” My question was met with uncooperative, dumb silence. “You,” I pointed to a random marine. “What did you see?”
The marine looked at Eirene, who only translated my question again, and then replied, “I… I saw nothing, sir. Just smoke. I couldn’t see through it at all.”
I sighed, “I understand, boy. That’s what you get when you fight on land, too. But here, you will have corsairs shooting at you from across you, far above you on the ratlines of the ship, and from the bow and stern of the enemy vessel. I commend you for standing your ground, for I imagine you would be under a constant hail of arrow-fire.”
“Where would we go, sir? The sea forbids us to retreat. That’s the lot of us marines.”
I smiled, noting the simple poetic truth in his answer. “Death at the hands of the enemy or death at the bottom of the sea. Your lot seems harsh, indeed. What if I told you there was a way to preserve yourselves while delivering the fight to the enemy?”
Before the men could respond, the door to the captain’s cabin was thrown open once again.
“Lord Krym!” yelled Barrett from his doorway. “I invite you to have dinner with myself and the rest of the officers at eight bells! Don’t be late!” He did not give me the opportunity to respond before he slammed the door shut again.
Now, from my time on the Chaesar, I knew that eight bells at this time of day meant noon. That did not give me much time to prepare, and it was very likely that Captain Barrett simply did not want me anywhere near his marines.
“Lieutenant Morozova—”
“Morse,” she corrected.
“Lieutenant Morse, please tell the men I offer my most sincere apologies. The captain cannot be kept waiting.”
“He said that he wanted you to have dinner with the rest of the officers, does that include me?”
Looking her up and down, I realized what she was trying to imply. She was an officer in name, but she was still dressed in the rags of her previous rating.
“We need to find you a new uniform.”