The Montevideo Brief by J. H. Gelernter

Author:J. H. Gelernter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2023-07-11T01:37:13+00:00

20

Grey felt sick.

He’d killed the lion’s share of the pirates himself; his repeating rifle was a staggeringly effective instrument of death. He could fire twenty shots in the time it took a Baker or a musket to fire two. The Americans had put down the rest with arrows. The fire had spread from the first barrack to the next, then to the third and the fourth, leaving nowhere for the pirates to hide. Some had run for the road, bringing them almost head-on to the barrage of arrows. A few had used the cistern for cover and tried to return fire with their Baker rifles—but had been unable to figure out where to return fire to: with no powder flash from the air rifle, and obviously none from the arrows, the pirates looked helplessly into the night, trying to find something at which to shoot. Grey had picked them off with the Girandoni, along with a few others who tried to make it to the stone magazine. It had been like shooting fish in a barrel. And Grey’s contention that pirates were not men and deserved no mercy had proved much easier to make than to believe. In a few moments more, the only survivors would be the four bucket men who’d first run to the battery. Before dealing with them, Grey and the Americans had to walk among another near score of bodies, delivering coups de grâce, checking for heartbeats, making sure the dead were really dead. A few men had burned to death, and the stink of their charred flesh filled the air. Grey had rarely been part of something which so profoundly revolted him. Just a few days earlier he’d seen a clipper full of men he knew and liked blown to shivers; here was the carrion of the earth’s scum, but the death affected him much more deeply. First the sixteen men on the road—now twenty more here. He didn’t wonder if he’d done the right thing; he was certain he had. But it was such a godforsaken thing. A massacre. So methodical a massacre. He felt as if his soul had been soaked in blood, and that there was no way to get at it, to clean it off. He had a sudden inclination, though not a Romanist, to make confession and receive some sort of immediate, divine cleansing. Release the charge in his soul. But he couldn’t. He stabbed Parker’s sword through the heart of a dying man, to end his suffering. The man died with a final cough of foam blood.

That was all. Now, the cannon.

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