by Robert Adams
Ax-wielding men rushed to where the grapnels had imbedded themselves and some few were able to ax through the taut lines before being transfixed by short arrows from the small but powerful bows of the Turks aloft in Revenge's rigging. They were, Bass noted with a part of his mind, far more valuable than would have been an equal number of arquesbusiers in that their "reloading" took split seconds, so that they could drop the original axman in one breath and the man who rushed to take up that ax in the very next.
One more salvo was fired from the sakers in the waist and the swivel guns, poured full into the mob in the waist of the enemy galleon—which rode some two feet lower than did the larger, four-masted Revenge—then the waiting planks were tipped over and thudded down to sink their spikes into the Frenchman's rails. At once, soldiers and seamen swarmed onto the narrow, springy footing, weapons out and ready.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
The three cardinals, di Bolgia, Sir Ugo, and the lieutenant had arisen and now stood about a large table in a better-lit area nearer to the glass doors. With goblets and hands they were anchoring a huge parchment map d'Este had just unrolled. Using an antique ballock dagger's slender blade as a pointer, d'Este explained, "Your grace and his company would board ship here, in Palermo harbor. There will be three large ships—two three-masted galleons and one four-masted—so there should not be overmuch crowding on the voyage. The two three-masters are really merchant ships owned by a man I know quite well, but still the both of them are well enough armed to hold their own against most marauders."
"The larger ship, on the other hand, is a line-of-battle ship, leased from the King of France and originally scheduled to take part in an attempt to revictual and resupply the besieged City of London. Unfortunately—or, possibly, very fortunately, since that entire fleet was sunk or captured by King Arthur's navy—this galleon was very late in arriving at Livorno and missed the sailing date of the supply fleet by over a month. She and her French captain and crew have been in Livorno since, but I have dispatched a message summoning them down here, to Palermo. After all, their rent is paid for a twelvemonth; no profit in letting them sit useless."
"Beyond the Pillars of Hercules, your ship captains will have orders to stand southwestward along the Afriquan coast to the port of Anfa Antiqua. There, additional persons, cargo, and ships will be added to the fleet, and all will, allowing God's grace of decent weather, proceed immediately due north to Irland and your landfall."
"Once landed, your grace should report at once to Archbishop Giosue di Rezzi. He will be our—your grace's employers'—voice in Irland, and though ostensibly you will be King Tamhas' general, you will be answerable only to the archbishop. Understood?"
"Understood, your eminence," Timoteo said, then asked, "But this archbishop . . . there is a retired condottiere, a very great captain in his time . . . ?"
D'Este replied, "The archbishop is a younger brother of the still-esteemed Barone Mario di Rezzi, though it is my understanding that the two brothers differ in many ways."
"But back to our subject. In addition to the troops with which your grace lands in Irland, you will be expected to take in hand and reorganize some two thousands of Flemish mercenaries—both foot and horse—who were routed, badly battered, by a much smaller force of Irlandese under the King of Lagan, last year. Their captain was slain in that action, and they retreated behind the walls of Dublin City, from whence they were brought down south by ship by King Tamhas at the instigation of Archbishop Giosue, subsequent to the departure of their erstwhile employer. Cardinal Mustapha il-Ganub."
"They are rather dispirited, I understand, but a captain of the well-earned reputation of your grace should be able to whip them back into shape. Your grace has carta blanca in this matter; flog, maim, or hang as many as necessary to make them reliable soldiers once more. You and those of your officers and sergeants involved in this task will, of course, receive additional recompense."
"The port fortifications and the principal citadel in King Tamhas' capital city are commanded, officered, and partially manned by Venetian specialist-cannoneers serving long-term contracts to the king. The archbishop attests them to be a prickly lot and easily offended, but your grace can only do his best to remain on at least civil terms with them."
"The third and largest group of fighting men will be King Tamhas's Royal Munster Army. Being supposedly the king's hired general, a part of your job will be to see what can be done to make this army battle-ready."
"Does his eminence know aught of the general makeup of the army of this pocket-king?" asked di Bolgia slowly, keeping his gaze on the map and pulling absently at his lower lip.
D'Este shrugged. "Very little, really. Archbishop Giosue avers that while a large force for those climes, most of it is ill trained and not very reliable. The best, he says, of all the pack are a contingent—numbers unstated—of Irlandese noblemen who have all soldiered elsewhere than Irland and one or more units of a class of soldier called 'galhogleses' or some similar barbaric term."
"'Gallowglasses,' your eminence," corrected di Bolgia politely. "I, myself, have yet to see aught of them, but I have both heard and read reports concerning them and their origins, uses, strengths, and weaknesses. Originally, they were all footmen, employing as principal weapon-of-choice an early variety of poleax. But over the years they are become a type of dragoon, all mounted. They still carry an oversized ax and can wreak as bloodily afoot as ever they could, but now they wear half-armor and carry pistols, swords, fuzees, and, sometimes, even darts or throwing axes. There are not over many of them in any one generation, and they seem to fight no place save in Irland, for all that the most of them come not from Irland but the western islands of the Kingdom of Scotland."
"Your grace seems wondrous well versed in these matters," the youngest of the cardinals, Murad Yakubian, commented. "That is, for one who claims never to have soldiered in Irland or England."
Timoteo picked up his goblet and sipped at the rare, no doubt expensive vintage. He kept his face blank, impassive. After all, the Armenian goat-fucker hadn't actually called him a liar, hadn't actually accused him of concealing portions of his past. He had concealed certain aspects of his experiences in the north, but nothing that had any bearing upon this current matter.
"I doubt not, your eminence di Yakubian, that you assiduously seek out those returned recently from distant lands that you may learn from them of those topics which most concern you. I do the same, ferreting out all that I may hear of a military nature. For ever do I try to think of new, untried, and better ways of waging war."
"Now if your eminence feels me to be deceitful, feels that I have withheld knowledge or personal experience that might have a bearing upon the enterprise at hand, perhaps it were better that I withdraw, thanking you all for your kind hospitality, and return to the service of his highness of Naples, leaving your eminences free to secure the services of a captain you can trust. For few are the mutually agreeable contracts entered into by signatories basically distrustful the one of the other."
Which was a mouthful of pious claptrap, thought Timoteo, and if you don't know it, my red-capped friend, you are far dumber than I think.
Yakubian smiled lazily. "What need of contracts at all, if all men in this world trusted one another? But you misunderstood, your grace. I was but commenting upon your rather surprising erudition—surprising, that is, for a professional warrior—not suggesting that you had misled us as to your campaigns and your other travels in foreign lands."
"King Tamhas has a largish personal guard for so relatively unimportant a monarch," d'Este went on. "In addition to perhaps half a hundred Irlandese noblemen, he has for long employed a band of some two-score Rus-Goths who call themselves something on the order of 'Ulfhednarren.' Does your grace possibly know aught of this rare type, also?"
Timoteo shook his head. "I've never been as far east as Rus, your eminence, nor conversed with many as have. Sweda-Goths all consider Rus-Goths to be a strange, barbaric folk with ancient,
near-pagan customs and practices; some are no longer even pure Gothic, having intermarried with Finns and Kalmyks and other, singular, pagan peoples, over the centuries. Someone of the Order of Teutonic Knights could probably tell you much more of the Rus-Goths, since they have been fighting them for many a year."
D'Este nodded. "Well, then, your grace, how long will it require for your company to march to Palermo?"
Timoteo grinned. "They will be under the city walls by the end of this week, your eminence. They are on the march, even as we converse. When will the ships be here for them to board?"
D'Este answered the grin with a pleased smile. "It is most refreshing to deal again with a direct, honest man, your grace. As regards the ships: one is presently unloading here after a voyage from the Spanish Indies; after that, a few days should suffice for the crew to refit her to carry men rather than cargo. The second is due in port any day now from Joppa. As for the French warship, I should estimate a fortnight or something less."
Timoteo gave a brusque nod of his head. "Very well, your eminence. That will give me the time to sail over to Naples, collect the last of the monies due me from his majesty, and notify him at the same time that I am signing a contract with the Holy See for service outside Italy or Sicily. This last should somewhat ease his mind, for one reason he has for so long retained me was his fear that one of his many enemies would hire me to fight against him; the service he has had me and mine doing for the last year or more could have been accomplished much more cheaply by a far less expensive company or even by the Neapolitan Guards."
"When I come back from Naples, I'll expect the contracts to be ready for the signing and sealing. I'll also expect to be paid the initial third of the agreed-upon sum, in new-minted gold, please—Spanish onzas would be fine and should be easy to come by in a mercantile city such as Palermo."
"Your grace, then, distrusts the coinage of his prospective employer, the Holy See?" inquired old Cardinal Sicola, with an inscrutable demeanor.
"Your eminence," replied di Bolgia, "a coin that contains less than nine of ten parts gold is not and should not be called a gold coin; and when put to the Archimedean water test, a truly distressing number of Romish gold coins have proved to be as little as three-quarters gold, worth their stated value nowhere save in the states ruled directly from Rome . . . if there."
The condottiere braced himself for some sort of indignant explosion, a burst of ecclesiastical wrath from old Sicola. But it failed to materialize. The old man seemed almost to be pleased by the blunt, if unpalatable, truth.
"Very well, your grace," d'Este agreed, smiling, "the contracts will be drawn and ready for the signing, sealing, and witnessing immediately upon your return from Naples. Your gold will be here too, in Spanish onzas, as you request."
Bass Foster had but just placed foot to bridging board when a culverin mounted immediately below that board in the Frenchman's main starboard battery was loosed off, point-blank into the very bowels of her attacker. Bass felt the slippery, springy board rise and shift under his bootsoles, then he was falling and, terrified, he tried to brace himself for impact with the cold water that he knew would so very shortly envelop him. He seemed to fall forever, thinking with one part of his mind that it would be suicidal, most likely, to come up between the two ships and be ground between the hulls; but with this much weight on, staying down until he had swum around to the stern or portside of Revenge should be no problem. The problem for him would be in swimming at all, and then in the right direction, while underwater.
The impact of his body slamming full-length on its back on the hard deck momentarily stunned him, sending a galaxy of multicolored stars and suns and planets spinning before his eyes. But then arms were under him and hands were pulling him erect, giving him support until his legs again became a true part of him and could assume their job.
"Luck mit you still iss, mein Herr von Norfolk," the familiar voice of his ever-faithful bodyguard and servant, Nugai, spoke from close beside him. "One foot more on zee plank out had you been, between zee ships fallen you vould!"
Then, with Nugai's aid, he was back upon the rail and out on a plank for seeming eons—a plank which bucked and pitched and seemed determined to dump him off to be drowned or crushed. But then, in an eye-blink, he was across, a strangely carven ship's rail was underfoot, and a maelstrom of breast-to-breast combat lay just ahead and below him.
With other boarders pushing from behind, no more anxious than he had been to spend more time than absolutely necessary on that swaying, treacherous plank bridge, Bass eyed the seething boil of battle as well as he could through his somewhat restrictive visor, seeking a bare spot of decking on which he might light. The search seemed vain and he was deciding he would just have to jump onto one of the embattled men when a large number of the heavy belowdecks guns roared out almost simultaneously and the French galleon heeled over to port, tilting the entire ship enough to send a sizable proportion of the battlers slipping and sliding into a dense mass against the portside rails.
Making a four-point landing on hands and knees, Bass pushed himself almost up, then was smashed down flat as the Frenchman's portside battery suddenly fired off a salvo and the earlier heel and subsequent tilt was repeated in reverse. Before he could even think of again arising, the mob of fighting men were tumbling and staggering back over to the starboard side of the deck, trampling him underfoot, those who chanced to not trip over or fall onto his recumbent armored body.
He levered himself back onto hands and knees just in time for someone to fall directly onto his back, shrieking dementedly and finally sliding down to where Bass could see him—a stocky man with reddish-brown skin, still screaming, while making frantic efforts with blood-slimed hands to hold shut a gashed-open belly.
It was not until he had slid and rolled himself to the sheltering lee of the first level of the stern castle that Bass was able to stand erect once more, look about, and try to sort out just what was going on in the battle royal that the Frenchman's waist and forecastle were become. He decided that Walid Pasha must be right about this being a true ship-of-war, rather than simply a well-armed merchant vessel; nothing else could possibly account for the large numbers of fighters in his sight on the upper decks while there still were obviously enough left belowdecks to serve and fire the heavy guns. He gulped at realization of the distinct possibility that he and his flotilla had, this time around, bitten off a mite more than they could easily chew.
The bulk of both boarding parties—from Revenge and Krystal—were now fighting on the decks of the French galleon, yet so many were the men opposing them that they looked to his eye to be close to evenly matched. The only edge he and they seemed to hold was that they were more fully armed than the most of the French. But he had seen too little of real sea combats to know for certain just how much that might or might not count in the scales of victory or defeat.
The tumult was indescribable, but he was surprised at the few gunshots—and most of them from overhead in the rigging, or from his own ships—until it came to him all at once that the boarders had probably fired their one or two pistols early on and had had neither the time nor the opportunity to recharge the pieces, even if they had managed to hold on to them.
With his mind running in such direction, he hastily drew and checked the priming in all of his own pistols, then drew his sword and hung it securely from his wrist by the knot. And then he took a closer look at the broil, seeking where he could be of best use just now.
There, stalking through the melee in almost full plate—very ornate, highly decorated plate, at that—strode a man about as tall as Bass Foster, roaring something that sounded a bit like a song and was certainly not in French, and swinging to deadly effect something that looked a good bit like a Lochaber ax.
Bass looked at that bloody axblade, looked at his makeshift shorts word, and shook his head. "No way!'' He unslung one of the wheel-lock horse pistols, glanced to see that the pyrites were hard against the wheel, leveled the two-
foot weapon, and squeezed the trigger.
The big pistol belched a yard of flame and a ten-gauge leaden ball, its recoil kicking its muzzle high in the air. When the smoke had cleared, the armored axman was on his back on the deck and other combats were raging over and around him.
Something clanged against Bass's breastplate, then fell at his feet. He looked down to see something that tugged at some part of his memory: a heavy, grooved, rounded stone with a curved hardwood handle shrunk around it and what looked like a single tine from a deer antler mounted on one side of the stone.
But he was granted no time to think where he might have seen the like of this outré weapon, for from out the mob, rushing hard at him, came another axman, armored similarly to the first, but with less complete and far less ornate armor. It was the same impressive, very frightening kind of ax, though, so Bass drew another pistol and shot down this man as well. He was hopeful that the French foe would run out of armored axmen before he ran out of loaded horse pistols.
"I was a goddamned fool to let them get me gussied up and come on this boarding party anyhow. This kind of warfare is a young man's game, and I'm over forty years old! How the hell did I wind up with the reputation of a diehard fire-eater in the first place? All I've done since we first arrived in this blood-soaked slice of universe was try to stay alive and in one piece. The last thing I wanted to do was to hurt anybody."
"So, what happened to old peace-loving Bass Foster? I had to start killing the very first day I got here and I've since found myself being shoved, willy-nilly, from one slaughtering place to another, year after year, expected to make killing and maiming and crippling men my life's work."
