Jeremy Walrond slid his hand down the long steel barrel of the flintlock, letting his fingers play across the Latin motto engraved along the top, Ante ferit quam flamma micet. "It strikes before the flash is seen."
The piece had been given to him on his twelfth birthday by his brother Anthony, and it was superb—crafted in Holland, with a fine Flemish lock and carved ivory insets of hunting scenes in the stock. With it he had once, in a stroke of rare luck, brought down a partridge in flight. Now through a dismaying and improbable chain of events he must turn this work of artistry against a fellow human being.
It was true he had been part of the royalist cause in the Civil War, a clerk helping direct the transport of supplies, but he had never been near enough to the lines to fire a musket. Or to have a musket fired at him. The thought of battle brought a moistness to his palms and a dull, hollow ache in his gut.
While the men around him in the trench—all now under his command—reinforced their courage with a large onion-flask of homemade kill-devil, he gazed over the newly mounded earth and out to sea, ashamed at his relief there was as yet no flash of lantern, no telltale red dots of burning matchcord.
The only moving lights were the darting trails of fireflies, those strange night creatures that so terrified newcomers to the Caribbees. In a few more moments the last of the moon, now a thin lantern, would drop beneath the western horizon, causing the coast and the sea to be swallowed in blackness. After that happened, he told himself, he might see nothing more, hear nothing more, till the first musket ball slammed home.
War, he meditated, was man's greatest folly. Excused in the name of abstractions like "liberty" and "country" and "dignity." But what dignity was there for those who died with a musket ball in their chest? No beast of the earth willfully killed its own kind. Only man, who then styled himself the noblest of God's creatures.
He loosened his hot lace collar, hoping to catch some of the on-again, off-again breeze that had risen in the south and now swept the pungent smell of Bridgetown's harbor up along the coast. Aside from the rattle of militiamen's bandoliers and occasional bursts of gallows laughter, the only sounds were night noises—the clack of foraging land crabs, the chirps and whistles of crickets and toads, the distant batter of surf and spray against the sand. Inland, the green hills of Barbados towered in dark silence.
He looked out to sea once more and realized the surf was beginning to rise, as wave after frothy wave chased up the crystalline sand of the shore, now bleached pale in the last waning moonlight. The ships were out there, he knew, waiting. He could almost feel their presence.
Both the trench and the breastwork were back away from the shore—back where the sand merged with brown clay and the first groves of palms, heralds of the hardwood thickets farther upland. Through the palms he could barely discern the silhouettes of the gunners as they loitered alongside the heavy ordnance, holding lighted linstocks. Fifteen cannon were there tonight, ranging in gauge from nine to eighteen-pound shot, shielded on the sea side by a head-high masonry wall cut with battlements for the guns.