The Clarity of Cold Steel
Chapter 16

HIS CHOICE IS DEATH. Specifically mine. Their haka explodes abruptly into a madcap dash. The Maori Chieftain’s leading, and though he’s a massive hulk he still moves fast as a son of a bitch. I trip, stumbling to jump the gunwale and know I ain’t gonna make it. So I choose the bitch of two options: I turn and I fight.

A pair of size-fifteens clomp towards me as the Zulu Breakers roar madness in their descent upon the Cartagena, swinging over on grappling lines or just bloody leaping across chasms. For the good it’ll do me, they might as well be on the moon.

Smart as a street samurai, I draw my small sword as the Maori Chieftain bulls into me. Through me. Wind knocked out, I’m off my feet, on his shoulder, but I take him through the chest, feeling nothing as my steel pierces his core. But it doesn’t slow his razorback charge and I’m hurled down, crashing, rolling, screaming. That greenstone mere rifles down, grazing my head as I spin away, scrambling aside a cacophony of stomps.

A boot mashes me spinning through a forest of legs and the mast’s suddenly to my back as the Maori Chieftain catches up. Glaring down at me and with the flick of his wrist, he breaks off the hilt of my blade still lodged in his chest. He whips it at me, clanging into my hand as I go for my gun, and then he’s got me dead to rights, standing over me, that bloody mere ripping down toward my demise.

The next instant he’s gone, swept away as tall black bodies rain across the deck like gale-driven anthropomorphic hail. A bang-stick discharges and a Zulu’s head is blasted concave. A Maori grins as the Zulu Chieftain stabs him bloody from below with his short-spear and drives him on piston legs across the deck.

A body falls from the rigging with a crunch.

My gun’s out in throbbing fist as I’m up, ducking and dodging, leaping behind a bulkhead as a pair of Zulus steamroll a Maori past. The Maori hip-tosses one but the other bashes him dead with an iron-ball club.

I empty my gun point blank into a Maori stomping a Zulu, hit him in the neck and the face and all over, pincushioning him into oblivion. A shotgun’s raised my way so behind the mast I duck an instant before the blast.

Hunkered low, I reload.

Before me, the two chieftains command the deck. One’s wide and solid as a mountain, the other’s tall and perilous slender as his war-spear. Amidst the riot of blood and salt, they come to grips, two titans of old, weapons reigned in high, greenstone against flashing steel. In a circle, they stomp, close fighting, smashing each other, ripping, gouging, trying to force an opening or throw one another off balance.

White teeth grimace as the greenstone club filets open the Zulu Chieftain’s leg from hip to knee, but with a duck and a twist and a long loping stab from below, the Zulu skewers the Maori Chieftain up through the gut and under the ribs, nearly lifting the twenty-stone monstrosity off his feet as he drives him back back back across the deck and hurls him over the gunwale and into the ravenous sea.