George’s father had been the Company’s commander at the time and the use of shade tents to keep his men combat-ready in the hot sun had been his idea. At the time, the Company was outside the walls fighting against the Byzantine defenders holding the walls; now it was inside the walls fighting to hold the walls against attackers trying to restore Byzantine rule. Such was the lot of an English free company trying to earn its coins in an ever-changing world.
Interestingly enough, for those who care about such things, both George and Richard had attended the Company’s school at Restormel Castle and had been schoolmates, and both had learned about the tents and to gobble and scribe Latin and both had been ordained as Angelovian priests with the school’s properly bought papal dispensations so that its students could lead normal lives and know women if they served on active duty in the Company.
Similarly, both had been accepted as being fit to make their marks on the Company’s roll and serve in the Company rather than being rejected as inadequate and shunted off to grub for coins in priests’ positions somewhere far from Cornwall. Their abilities and their preference for women instead of young boys probably had a lot to do with their being allowed to join the Company.
******
The rain was slowing, but still coming down, as the Venetian galley with the ambitious captain slowly made its way towards the shoreline where a small band of men seemed to be waiting to gobble with them. Everyone on the galley’s deck could see the little band of nine or ten men waiting at the shoreline and realized their galley was slowly making its way towards them. They were watched intently. It was first time many of them had ever seen an Englishman up close.
Aboard the Venetian, the captain was so anxious to get a surrender before any more of his fellow Venetians arrived to share the prize money, that he did not consider the possibility that he would not be able to talk about it with the waiting men because he spoke only the Venetian version of Italian and the Englishman spoke only the dialect of crusader French that was becoming known as English. It turned out not to be a problem.
Richard walked his little group of archers all the way up the shoreline where the sand was still wet. He gave them their orders as he did.
“Get your spare bowstrings ready for quick changes. We will let them get closer before we string. And when we do push, everyone is to go for the men on the forward castle roof until they are down.”
A smiling Venetian raised his hand in return. He was smiling because the English galleys on the strand would be worth a fortune in prize money even if he had to share it. The deck of his galley was absolutely packed with men. They were silent because there was a sailor in the galley’s bow casting a depth stone and constantly calling out the results of his casts.
Richard smiled back at the approaching Venetian, waved his hand most friendly in acknowledgement, and began giving orders to his men. He could see the Venetian captain clearly now. He was rather portly man with a dark beard and wearing a fine tunic over what was almost certainly a chain shirt.
The bow of the Venetian galley was less than a hundred paces off the shoreline and coming in slowly with only two oars rowing on each side when Richard gave new orders and raised his hand in a friendly greeting towards the men on the galley’s roof.
“The men on the roof may be wearing chain so use your heavies,” he said with a smile as he nodded benignly towards the Venetian captain.
“Get ready to string your bows when I give the word, but wait to pluck a heavy from your quivers until you hear me give the order. We will let them row in a little closer, all the way in if possible. And when you do string, do it leisurely and do not reach for an arrow or nock one. We do not want to alarm them, do we?”
Richard gave the order to string a few moments later. The Venetian galley was now only fifty or so paces from the shore.
“Be casual and string now, lads. Everyone string and do your best to keep them close to you so they stay dry, but do not pull any arrows out of your quivers until I give the word.”
Richard waited and gave the order when the bow of Venetian galley was almost to the shoreline, and its hull was about to touch bottom.
“NOW LADS, GET THE BASTARDS.”
Nine veteran English archers pulled arrows from their quivers and began pushing them into the men standing on the roof of the approaching galley’s forward castle, and they began doing so before anyone on the galley realized what was happening. Each of them repeated the process every four or five seconds until they needed to take a few seconds to change to dry bowstrings. The nine men kept changing bowstrings and pushing out arrows until their quivers were empty.
Chaos, screams, and shouts began as soon as the first arrows hit home, although it is doubtful that the captain and his lieutenant and sailing sergeant ever knew it, the captain especially. He was still thinking about the prize money and smiling when the first of at least five iron-tipped arrows passed through his chain shirt and took him deep in his chest.
The lieutenant and sailing sergeant lasted but a few heartbeats longer before they too took multiple arrows and went down. The archers were all long-serving veterans. It would have been embarrassing if any of the arrows had not hit their targets at such a short distance.
Surprise and dismay were clearly visible on the faces of the hundred or so men standing on the galley’s deck with their swords and spears. Even better, there was no one in command of the galley to give its rudder men orders to turn around or its slaves to stop rowing. As a result, its rowers just kept slowly rowing and brought the screaming and shouting men on its crowded deck closer and closer to the hard-eyed archers who were standing at the water’s edge pouring arrows into them at close range. The galley kept coming until its hull began grinding over the shallow bottom and slowly began turning sidewise.
Arrows did not stop being pushed into the Venetian galley until the last of the archers ran out of bowstrings and arrows. By then the galley had turned sideways to the waterline and those of the men on its deck who were still not hit were lying below its railing amongst their dead and wounded mates in order not to be seen by the archers standing a few feet away on the shore.
“Well, they are not likely to forget that for a couple of days, are they?” said one of the sergeants with a great deal of satisfaction and excitement in his voice.
A few minutes later Richard and his jovial band of sergeants had turned and were briskly walking in the warm rain on their way back to the galleys. It was whilst walking back to their galleys that the implications of what had just happened dawned on one of the other sergeants. He too, like the others, had been able to keep changing bowstrings until he had run through all the arrows in his quivers. Now he was out of arrows and all of his bowstrings were wet and useless.
“Our lads coming to reinforce us will have wet strings as well, I expect?”
The sergeant addressed his question to Richard, but his warning was clear.
“My God, you are right.” Richard said softly a moment later when he fully understood. “The bowstrings of the archers on the wall will be wet just as ours have become. How can they reinforce us if they have nothing with which to fight?”
A moment later he shouted and broke into a run towards the nearest of the galleys.
“Everyone to the galleys. Hurry men, run. The archers coming to reinforce us will have wet strings too. We need to get the swords and pikes out of the galleys and into the tents for them to use, and fast. And search everywhere for dry bowstrings. Paul, you check the wounded.”
Richard and the archers were soon so desperately busy retrieving weapons from their galleys that they did not pay much attention when the oars of the wounded galley began beating the water as it moved away from the shoreline and two other Venetian galleys came alongside to assist it. Indeed, they barely looked up as the three Venetian galleys moved towards the harbour entrance to report the situation to their rapidly approaching fellow Venetians.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Confusion on the str
and.
Swords and shields were still being pulled out of our empty galleys and hurriedly carried to the shade tents when a long line of Venetian galleys began entering the harbour. Their decks were crowded with men. It was about then that the first of the archers sent from each galley company to fetch swords and shields for their mates began to arrive.
A few minutes later, one after another, the Venetian galleys nosed into the shore and began unloading the Venetian sailors and soldiers they had been carrying. They were landing them about two thousand paces west of the nearest Company galley on the strand.
Normally it would not have been a good place for the Venetian captains to land their men because almost every bit of it could be reached by arrows pushed out by archers on the nearby city wall. Indeed, the harbour had been selected by Harold as the place to bring the Company’s galleys ashore for that very reason. But now it was raining and the archers’ bows had become useless because of their wet bowstrings.
So was the Venetian commander a very smart and decisive man who had moved quickly to seize the unexpected advantage the rain had handed him, or was he just stupid about military matters and lucky that it was raining? It was an important question that everyone was too busy to ask. Besides, at this point it really did not matter why the Venetians had arrived at that particular time. They were coming ashore and it was raining.
Even worse for Richard and his men, the Venetians were wading ashore from their galleys and appeared to be forming up for an attack in the open area on the west side of where many of the Company’s galleys had been pulled up on to the sandy strand.
The Venetians decision to land to the west of the Company’s galleys was unfortunate for the archers because that was the side which had the gate in the city wall which opened on to the harbour. It meant the archers’ reinforcements, if any came from the men stationed on the wall, would have to march along the top of the wall past the harbour, and then use the next gate which was some distance further to the east along the wall to get out on to the strand. And then they would have to run back along the narrow strip of the strand between the city wall and the water to get to where the galleys had been pulled ashore.
The Venetians were still coming ashore when everyone got a big surprise. The gate, which the city’s Varangian guards had closed and barred as soon as the Venetians began landing nearby, suddenly opened—and the first of what turned out to be the “Evens” coming to reinforce Richard and his men began pouring out. They were about forty men from the galley company assigned to the enclosure closest the harbour
It was hard to tell who was the most surprised at seeing the other, the “Evens” who were coming from the enclosure nearest to the harbour, or the Venetians who had waded ashore from the first of at least twenty Venetian galleys that were coming in to unload their men.
******* Archer Stanley Jack’s son of Galley Thirty-nine
All of us “Evens” from our galley’s company began double-timing to the galley harbour as soon as the word was passed down the wall and reached our captain, Captain Ford. Lieutenant Jones, the Welshman who thought he was the best archer in the entire damn Company, immediately formed us up and led us in a column of twos along the top of the wall. We were in a hurry to get to the harbour and moving at the double.
I was in the middle of the column, about ten men back, with Roger Small next to me. Roger was from London and sometimes quite full of himself because he thought it made him better than the rest of us because his father had worked as a money changer. We were carrying our longbows even though all our strings were wet and totally useless.
Lieutenant Jones led us along the top of the wall for quite some time until we came to some stone steps and ran down them to the ground inside the wall on the city side. The stairs were slippery from the rain and someone behind me went down with a great deal of swearing all around him, and knocked the man in front of him off the stairs.
It was lucky the man who slipped did not do so at the top of the stairs. If he had, the poor sod in front of him probably would have broken his arm or something. As it was, he just picked himself and stood there swearing at the man who pushed him off the steps until a snarling sergeant told him to “shut your goddamn mouth and get back in the ranks.”
There were some of them Varangian fellows trying to stay out of the rain near the gate at the bottom of the steps. Lieutenant Jones ignored them. He headed straight towards the gate so it must have been the gate we were supposed to use to get out to our galleys where they had been pulled ashore. The gate was closed, but the Varangians just stood there and looked surprised when the lieutenant lifted the bar and pushed it far enough open such that we could get out.
We followed Lieutenant Jones and went trotting out on to the strand. And then the lieutenant stopped and we all stopped behind him in a jumble. The rain had slacked off somewhat but it was still coming down.
“Holy shite,” Roger said next to me. That was when I saw all the strange-looking men with swords and shields who were coming off the galleys nosed into the shore in front of us and walking on the strand towards us. Our own galleys were pulled up on dry land off to our left with a line of Company men in front of them. They were standing under what looked to be some kind of galley sails that had been raised to keep them out of the rain.
“Go back men. Back through the gate,” Lieutenant Jones shouted as he turned around. We turned too—and saw the gate closing behind us with the men at the rear of our little column stepping backwards through it in time not to be trapped out on the strand along with the rest of us. We were well and truly up shite river.
“Over here. Run for it,” a voice shouted in the distance. It came from the line of men formed up over by the stranded galleys.
We ran.
****** Lieutenant Commander Richard Ryder
There were moments of great anxiety on the strand about thirty or forty minutes after our arrows had seen off the first Venetian galley. They started when a fleet of twenty or so Venetian galleys began entering the harbour and landing men along the shoreline to our west.
It was hard to know for sure how many armed men they intended to put ashore, but it looked as though it would be several thousand. They appeared to be mostly Venetian sailors, not Greek soldiers, and were almost certainly coming to try to take the Company galleys we had pulled shore.
And the new arrivals had already had an unexpected effect as the first of them walked up on to the strand. Everyone, both our men and the Venetians, had been surprised when more than a dozen men wearing archers’ tunics, apparently the first of our reinforcements, had suddenly come bursting out of the city gate and been briefly trapped between the wall and the first of the Venetian arrivals when the gate closed behind them. Fortunately, they were able to run across the strand to us before the Venetians could get themselves organized to go after them.
Lieutenant Jones of Galley 39 was the lieutenant who led the archers who ran safely to us. He said he and his men were the first of the archers, all of the company’s “Evens,” who had been sent to help us even though their bows were mostly useless due to the rain.
“We are supposed to get our galley’s swords and shields and join you,” the somewhat out of breath lieutenant said with a big smile as he saluted by banging his head with his knuckles and officially reported for duty.
As you might imagine, my men and I were overjoyed to see the new arrivals, and even more so to hear that the “Evens” men of the other companies would soon be joining us. And we were ready for them; we had already stripped the weapons, and everything else that might be useful in a fight, out of the Company galleys that had been pulled ashore. As a result, there were quite a large number of short swords and galley shields immediately available or anyone who showed up to join us.
Much more importantly, however, was that whilst rummaging through the galleys we had come across some dry bowstrings and the makings of more in some of the galleys’ stores chests. And we had also picked up several dozen bowstrings from
the bows and pouches of the wounded and poxed archers sheltering and being barbered in two of our galleys.
Lieutenant Jones and his men, and most of the men of the Evens of the next two companies that had come in behind them, had been given one of the dry strings for their bows. They were all desperately working to string them and test them as the Venetians continued to land their men. The archers who came in after we ran out of dry bowstrings were issued swords and shields.
****** Lieutenant Commander Richard Ryder
Enough additional archer “Evens” had arrived by the time the Venetians finished coming ashore and began gathering in the rain to attack us, that more than a hundred archers with dry bowstrings were waiting under the tents on the west side of our empty galleys. They were busy adjusting their new bowstrings and inspecting their arrows to make sure none had gotten warped as a result of being wet. They were yarning as they worked and everywhere the men’s spirits began to rise. Mine certainly did.
Standing just behind the archers, and also under the shade tents, were almost four hundred of the Company’s sailors armed with swords and an ever-increasing number of exhausted sword-carrying and pike-carrying archers—the out-of-breath “Evens” who, after double-timing along the top of the wall from wherever their company had been fighting, had run across the strand from the closest gate to the east of the harbour to join us. The new arrivals all had their bows and wet bowstrings in addition to their hurriedly issued short swords and galley shields.
The Alchemist's Revenge Page 27