Daubeney had the eagerness of most very young warriors, and that urgency to spill blood characteristic of so many young men who were not long past crying at the sight of their own, seeping from childhood grazes. Since he came aboard at Tynemouth, Daubeney had listened dutifully to Ryman’s tales of the old wars, nodding in the right places, expressing admiration when it was required. But Jack Stannard could see the blankness in Daubeney’s eyes, and those tell-tale little shakes of the head which proclaimed that yes, perhaps that was how you oldsters waged war, but we, the young, with our new weapons, our new tactics, and our new minds, know better.
‘Ho, Master! Yonder!’
The lookout’s cry was shrill, and heard at once on the Eagle and several of the other ships in closest company to the Blessing. Jack ran to the little fo’c’s’le, erected hastily when it was first known that two Dunwich ships were going to the war.
‘What ho, George?’
George Copping, the lookout, a skinny lad of fifteen from Saint Peter parish who possessed the keenest sight in the town, pointed to the south-west, to the tight assemblage of masts, cranes and warehouses that stood on the shore, a mile or two distant from Edinburgh town.
‘Yonder, Master Stannard. Two hulls, being towed out of the harbour.’
Jack screwed up his eyes. Yes, two hulls. Large ones, three hundred tons or so, but lower and narrower than many of the tall English ships. Galleasses, then, almost certainly. Cut for many gunports, even if they were presently closed. Longboats full of men, towing them out into the Forth. Hard work against the flood, but once they were in the stream, much easier.
Ryman and Daubeney joined him.
‘What’s afoot?’ demanded the young captain.
‘The Scots are moving two men-of-war,’ said Jack. ‘Big ones, the biggest in Leith haven, there. Intending to tow them upstream beyond our reach, I’ll venture.’
‘I recall the French king gave the Scots two great ships,’ said Ryman, ‘before their King James died.’
‘The Salamander and Unicorn,’ said Daubeney. He straightened himself and put on what he must have thought of as a stern expression. ‘That’s what they’ll be, then. Our duty is clear, Master Stannard. We must stop them getting those ships away. We must attack. I can order you to attack by virtue of my commission. But I know it is your ship and you take it where you will, so I don’t doubt you could somehow obstruct me if you wished it. But I say to you that it is your God-given duty, your duty to your king, to obey me, John Stannard.’
Jack bridled at the younger man’s tone, but caught the amused look on Ryman’s face, and said nothing. Instead, the master of the Blessing looked around, north and then east. The great royal men-of-war were too far offshore, covering what they expected to be an unopposed invasion, and would have to tack several times to try even to approach the fleeing Scots. But if they attempted to do so, their own transport fleet would obstruct their most direct course. The Scots were known to have formidable blockhouses upstream, where the Firth narrowed, and if they could get their two great ships beyond those, they would be safe.
Jack looked for a command flag, for some senior officer who could overrule Daubeney, but he could see none. The lumbering London ships lay between him and the nearest royal vessel, and every other ship round about was taken up from the ports of the kingdom, just as his was, and had one order alone, which was to take the army into Leith haven and disembark it there. Lord Admiral Lisle had not anticipated that the Scots might try to save their largest men-of-war, and Jack knew that most shipmasters would not, of their own initiative, risk their precious hulls to attack without order. Every instinct he possessed told him to hold his course, to obey the letter of his orders and nothing more.
Not quite every instinct. There was one more, and it was encapsulated in the faces of Daubeney and Ryman, who were both looking at him intently. It was encapsulated in his remembrance of Alice. Blood on the blade. He turned and leaned on the starboard rail, closed his eyes, and offered up silent prayers to Maria maris stella, his name-saint John the Baptist, and Saint Florian, whose day it was. When he opened his eyes again, his mind was clear.
He turned back to the two soldiers, the old and the young.
‘Very well, Captain Daubeney,’ he said, ‘you have your way. We attack.’
* * *
Christopher Eagle and the Peter followed the shouted order from the Blessing, as did the five ships nearest to her. The shout did not come from John Stannard, as no ship, other than his own and Eagle’s, would follow the order of a mere Dunwich merchant, and such a young one at that. But although Daubeney was even younger than Jack, he was a soldier, and he was of high birth. Thus, in war, he commanded by natural right, and none of those within earshot would have dared challenge the order of their very temporary, very local general.
Thomas Ryman smiled to himself. Daubeney sounded the part, that much was certain, but whether he would be quite as convincing with a sword in his hand would soon be tested. Oh, I have seen you before, Ryman thought. I have seen scores of you, veritable hundreds. The Lord Viscount Lisle, he was you, twenty years ago. And I have seen so many scores of you cut down, as was he, very nearly.
Ahead, the Scots almost had the first of their ships out into open water. There were six large longboats ahead of her, the towropes taut as the men heaving on the oars struggled against the rushing tide, and another two at the stern to keep it from swinging. But each longboat had a score of men in it who were not at the oars, and even from a distance, Ryman could see that they carried a formidable array of weapons. Then there were the men on the upper deck and in the castles of the huge ship. He could count the best part of a hundred, but there were probably others below. Even with the numbers embarked in their own little fleet of seven ships, the odds would be close, and that was without counting the similar numbers of Scots who were bringing out the second ship. Daubeney was convinced that they would not come to the aid of their consort, once the English had fallen on it; surely, the young captain stated with confidence, the enemy’s only concern would be to use the attack on the first ship as a diversion, enabling them to escape upriver. Indeed, Ryman had to admit that it was the most sensible course by far, the one that he himself would have taken. If the Scots committed their second ship in defence of their first, there would surely be ample time for the English royal ships to come up and overwhelm them both. But Ryman had fought with them and against them, and he had never once known any Scot to be sensible in war. They were the first to charge, the first to the breach, the first to propose attacking against the most impossible odds. If they had followed the sensible course at Flodden, King Jamie the Fourth would probably be reigning in Whitehall to that very day, rather than his corpse mouldering in a woodshed and his head being employed as a football.
‘Sergeant Ryman,’ said Daubeney, rudely tugging Tom away from his thoughts. ‘We have no priest, but we have need of prayer. A friar surely knows all the words, even if he is not consecrated.’
‘Not consecrated, and no longer a friar, Captain. There are no friars in England now.’
‘I could order you.’
‘Nowadays, I serve no army other than my own.’ Thomas held the young man’s hostile gaze for a moment, then smiled. ‘But if I am the closest we have to a man of God – aye, well, then so be it, although I fear the chaplain of Kenninghall would be greatly amused by the notion.’
He went to the rail of the forward castle, and looked out over the expectant soldiers and sailors in the waist of the ship. Ryman raised his hand in the air, made the sign of the cross, and uttered the timeless words, ‘In nomine patris, et filii, et spiritus sancti, amen.’ The men below crossed themselves and echoed the amen.
Ryman closed his eyes, and for a moment he thought himself back in the church of the Greyfriars in Dunwich, about to sing the hours of compline or nones with his fellow friars. He could see the faces of Anselm, Martin and the others as plain as if they stood before him. All gone now, scattered to the four corners o
f the kingdom or buried in some alien soil, the dream of a godly community scattered and buried with them. Then he heard the first faint sounds of defiant screams from the distant Scots, opened his eyes, and spoke loudly the words of the eighteenth psalm.
‘Diligam te Domine fortitudo mea. Domine petra mea et robur meum et salvator meus Deus meus fortis meus sperabo in eo scutum meum et cornu salutis meae susceptor meus…’
Aboard the Blessing, all was silent, but for the whistling from the sails, the water breaking at the bow, the creak of the hull, the shrieks of the seabirds, and the mumbles of the few men who knew the words. John Stannard was not one of them, his schooling in theology having ended abruptly when he was torn from the embrace of Cardinal College. Despite Nolloth’s misgivings, Jack had taken the Blessing’s helm himself, guiding the ship inexorably on a course toward the first Scots man-of-war. But as he listened to Ryman’s recitation of the psalm, he prayed for Alice, for Tom and Meg, for all those he loved, even for his father, and for Dunwich. He prayed, above all, for victory.
And thus the Blessing sailed into battle.
SEVEN
‘Set a course for the man-of-war, shipmaster,’ said Daubeney, the excitement palpable in his young voice.
Jack bridled at being addressed thus aboard a Stannard ship, but he complied nonetheless. It was his own inclination too: let the ships following in their wake deal with the longboats, he and Eagle’s Peter would make directly for the great prize that lay before them. There lay the glory, there the honour, there the reward.
As they closed, they heard ever more clearly the Scots’ howls, screams and obscenities. Then, suddenly, there was a new sound, that of several loud cracks. Little spouts of water rose from the waves ahead of the Blessing. The enemy was firing on them.
‘Not many guns,’ said Ryman, who had concluded the psalm and returned to the poop. ‘And they should have held fire until we were within range. Now, those who’ve fired won’t be able to reload in time. Give thanks that they don’t have any guns behind those gunports, otherwise they’d have shattered us long before now.’
The shots were joined within moments by arrows loosed by bowmen in the castles of the Scots’ vessel. The bowmen were pitifully few, but they knew their business. There was a scream from the waist of the Blessing, and Jack saw one of Daubeney’s soldiers turn sharply, an arrow having unluckily struck hard into his neck, only just above the protection of the gambeson. The man’s fellows tried to hold him up, and one pulled the arrow from the flesh, only to unleash a fountain of blood that spattered a dozen men or more.
Now the Dunwich ships replied in kind. Daubeney had no archers or handgunners among his men on the Blessing, but his sergeant had two dozen of each aboard the Peter. As Jack brought the helm over to larboard, Eagle held his course, directly for the bows of the Scotsman, and the men on the poop of the Blessing heard the sergeant’s successive commands – ‘shoot!’ ‘give fire!’
A shot shattered part of the midships rail, and four Scots, who had been pressing hard against it, fell flailing into the sea, one of them minus the right leg that had been torn off by the ball fired from the Peter.
Aboard the Blessing, Daubeney’s men were screaming defiance and readying their weapons. Their young captain moved among them, giving encouragement. Jack had most of his own men in the foreword castle, holding grappling irons. With a nod, Jack handed the helm to Nolloth, and went forward with Thomas Ryman.
‘Your first battle,’ said the old man.
‘Not so,’ said Jack. ‘Was once in a fight with pirates off the North Foreland, and with a Scotsman off the Lemon and Oar in the last war.’
‘Those were fights, Jack. Mere skirmishes. Yonder, a hundred or two Scotsmen. Some of them will have served as long as me. Mostly fighting each other, true, but there are few battles as ugly as Scot against Scot. They’ll have as many scars, I’ll wager. Beating off a few pirates is one thing, my boy. Today, you fight an army. Today, John Stannard, you discover what battle is truly like.’
The Blessing came in alongside, midships to the Scots’ man-of-war. Jack’s men tried to affix their grappling hooks to gunports, to wales or cables, to whatever might give them a hold. But all the while, enemy soldiers from the deck and castles above sent down arrows, ballast stones and pitchers of caulkers’ tar, screaming obscenities as they did so. Daubeney’s soldiers responded as well as they could, both with missiles and with choice oaths of their own, but the defenders held the advantage.
Jack looked astern. Eagle was up with the nearest of the longboats, and two Blakeney ships were tacking round to gain the advantage of the wind before attacking from the west. There, the odds were reversed, the longboats much lower in the water than the English ships, and unable to manoeuvre while their towlines remained secured to the man-of-war.
‘God for King Harry! God for Saint George!’ cried Daubeney, evidently fancying himself quite the Achilles.
Jack turned back, and saw that two hooks were securely fastened, one to the footings of the aftercastle, the other to one of the gunports. Two soldiers were trying to lever this open with halberds, and at last, it gave way. It was the last thing the men saw: seeing the danger, the Scots had massed men behind the port, and pikes impaled the two Englishmen. Daubeney ordered more men forward, while three of Jack’s own men hauled themselves up the cable toward the aftercastle.
The Scots ship shuddered. Jack looked astern, and saw the reason at once: the longboats had cut their lines, the crews knowing it was the only chance they had to save themselves. The headway came off the great ship, and that served to pull forward the Blessing, which was still under sail and answering her helm. That, in turn, would swiftly bring the sterncastle of Jack’s ship level with the waist of the Scotsman.
Ryman saw the danger and the opportunity at once.
‘Captain Daubeney!’ he shouted. ‘Give me the rearmost score of your men!’
Daubeney, who was pushing forward to lead the assault on the open gunport, may have been young and raw, but he seemed to grasp Ryman’s meaning at once.
‘God go with you, Sergeant Ryman!’ he cried.
Jack did not need to be told where his own duty lay.
‘Blessings, with me!’
The seven or eight of his men who were nearest to him, armed with a rough seamen’s arsenal of knives and clubs, formed a phalanx behind him. Together with Ryman’s soldiers, they hurried to the aftercastle.
Slowly, the distance between the after part of the Blessing and the midships part of the Scotsman closed. It was easy range for bowmen now, and a Scot in the waist of the great ship loosed a quarrel that struck Oliver Chever, one of Jack’s Dunwich men, hard in the chest. Jack Stannard had known him since childhood, and gasped as Chever took two short steps backward, rolled his eyes toward heaven, and fell dead to the deck.
In the blinking of an eye, the gap closed further, and now the soldiers on the two ships were at pike and bill range, then halberd, then sword. Ryman pressed forward, ducked under a Scots pike with the agility of a much younger man, drove his sword into the man’s unarmoured groin, then pushed himself off the Blessing’s wale and onto the deck of the great ship. Five or six of Daubeney’s men came with him at once, along with Jack and a couple of the Dunwich seamen.
‘Saint George,’ prayed Ryman, ‘guard and keep young Jack this day. I would not want to have to report his death to his father, and face his rage at me.’
With that, he traded blows with a Scotsman, evidently an officer of some sort, who wore a tabard bearing unfamiliar arms. The man was a good swordsman, controlled, cautious, but he fought with a Scots weapon, a basket-hilted broadsword, and in a Scots way, cutting for the flanks.
‘You have not been beyond the bounds of this kingdom, friend,’ thought Ryman, ‘and that will be your undoing. Learn how the Italians wield a sword, and how they kill.’
Ryman parried, feinted left, thrust right, then retreated, tempting his adversary into an advance. Despite his age, he was still nimble on
his feet, and still able to recall the skills he had learned from Brambilla, the Milanese sword-master he fought with in the Pavia campaign. Balance. Feint. Advance. Thrust. Advance again.
The Scot drew back his right arm, thrusting forward the buckler on his left wrist to defend against any attack by the old soldier before him. A less experienced warrior would have moved right to avoid the inevitable cutting stroke from the broadsword. Ryman duly feinted right, but then shifted all his weight to his left side. Rather than thrusting again, he made a backhanded cut of his own, directly under his opponent’s swordarm. The man wore no chain mail and only a flimsy gambeson, and Ryman’s stroke sliced deeply into his flesh, bringing forth a tide of blood. The Scot looked down, horrified, and forgot to keep a tight grip on his buckler, which dropped. It was all the time Thomas Ryman needed to thrust upwards, into the neck and onward into the skull. The man fell dead at his feet.
‘Dona eis requiem, domine,’ said Ryman, and then, to his bloodied sword, ‘Brave work, my angel’.
He glanced up quickly at the bulkheads of the steerage and fo’c’s’le. No murderers, as far as he could see – the evil little swivel guns that could scour a deck and slaughter a score of men with one shot. Mayhap, in their haste to get the great ship to safety, the Scots had simply not enough time to fit them, Ryman thought, and thanked God if that were so.
A few feet away, John Stannard had one eye on potential Scots opponents, all of whom seemed to be engaged with Daubeney’s men, and one on the movement of the ship beneath his feet. No towropes now secured the great ship – the Unicorn, it seemed, from the desperate shouts of some of the Scots defending her. The two longboats astern were very nearly back at the shore, while of the four ahead, one was losing a bitter battle with Eagle’s Peter, while the other three were rowing west up the Firth as though pursued by the hounds of hell. One of the Blakeney ships was manoeuvring toward the starboard bow of the Unicorn, a contingent of fresh soldiers upon her upper deck, all eager to join the fray. If the battle was won quickly enough, it should be possible to take the great ship as a prize. But with every moment that passed, her bow was swinging a little further round with the tide, her head pointing for the shallow channel between a small island and the shore. And whereas the shore further east had been empty, this certainly was not. A large army of horsemen, perhaps five or six thousand strong, was massed along the coast, the saltire standards of Saint Andrew seemingly legion. By Jack’s reckoning, there was less than an hour until the tide turned. Even if they secured the Unicorn within the next few minutes, it might already be too late to stop her drifting into the shallows, where she would run aground; and if they, the English, were not off her before that happened, they would certainly be cut to pieces by the vast army that awaited them. He had to tell this to Daubeney…
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