Of Quests and Kings

by Robert Adams

  The tall, brown-haired ship captain smiled broadly, despite the renewed and intensified pain that such movements brought to his gashed jaw. He smiled with the deep satisfaction of an assigned task well done. He also smiled with the pleasure that captaining the ship and commanding this action had brought him. It was all much less of a deadly danger than riding a skittish horse into a battle with the bullets humming all around you and uncountable yards of cold, sharp steel flashing ahead of you, with your bowels turning to water and your bladder nigh to bursting, your mouth as dry as ashes and your eyes bugging out at the sight of the man beside you still riding along, still erect in his saddle, and still grasping both reins and broadsword but without a head, a great ropy gouts of red blood spouting up out of his jagged stump of a neck and showering over everything behind him.

  No, this naval business was much preferable to the service he had seen in King Arthur's Horse.

  * * * *

  From atop a small ridge some hundred yards away from the nearest of the lines of palisades, all those who could crowd upon it watched, many of the humbler sorts awestruck, as the lugger's well-aimed and highly destructive cannon fire wrecked the guns and defenses that had for so long thwarted their aims and ambitions. But when the defenders left their positions and their now-useless six-pounders, dropped their calivers, and fled toward the city, only to be almost all cut down by the fire from the ship, the humbler besiegers—and not a few not so humble—screamed, shouted, cheered, and hugged each other in an excess of unbridled glee.

  Bass, on the other hand, felt no joy at the sight, only a soul-deep sickness. Yes, it had been mostly his plan, but the carrying out of that plan had been a butchery, not a combat. None of the defenders had had even the ghost of a chance to strike back at the attackers. Yes, the butchery had been a necessary butchery, under the present circumstances, but a disgusting, sickening butchery nonetheless.

  The palisades were all set afire after the cannon had been dragged away and all usable weapons, supplies, and equipment had been garnered. When the half-dozen leaders of the rebel besiegers seemed intent upon staging an immediate all-out assault upon the city, Bass demurred, pointing out that the walls of the place still stood undamaged and still mounted cannon and bombards enough to make such an assault by men unsupported by their own artillery very, very costly and quite possibly doomed to failure from its inception.

  It was not until he told them of the big, hard-hitting, far-ranging cannon that he had ordered be brought in from the seacoast that he was able to convince the leaders to wait. Grumbling from the ranks he handled by the simple expedient of ordering the entrenchments lengthened, continued on through the once-palisaded area to entirely encompass the city with an endless ring of trenches and emplacements for the promised siege guns.

  They all waited for two more days, and fidgeting and grumbling was once more beginning to fill the ranks in the trenches, but then proceeding from the southeast came a long column of wains, each drawn slowly by twelve to thirty span of lowing oxen, the shrill protests of ill-greased axles screaming out far ahead of them. Walid Pasha had arrived with the big guns, and Bass breathed a sigh of relief, for he had by that time about run out of convincing arguments to use in further forestalling a suicidal assault against Oentreib's walls and guns.

  Another day was required to get the tubes out of the wains, set back on their trunks, and dragged or wrestled up to the places prepared for them, protected as well as possible with combinations of packed earthen embankments, palisades, logs, and thick bundles of faggots on three sides and doorframes to which were hinged thick plank doors to give protection during reloading operations.

  A week to the day after the destruction of Oentreib's sad excuse for a port and its indefensible defenses, the first resounding boom of a thirty-two-pounder demicannon from off His Grace of Norfolk's ship Revenge sent an explosive shell over the walls of Oentreib into the streets of that unhappy city.

  With Walid Pasha's batteries fully engaged and Sir John Stakley's rifles firing over the heads of the entrenched besiegers against the lough side of the city, within three days every gate had been blown down if not apart, much smoke and occasional flames could be seen above walls that were themselves beginning to show clear signs of damage and weakening of fabric with the repeated pummeling of iron cannonballs and cylindrical explosive shells. Counterbattery fire from atop the mediaeval-style walls had been mostly from huge but ancient bombards throwing stone balls, and those few guns that had seemed to cast too accurately for comfort had quickly been sighted and subjected to concentrated fire of every besieging gun that would bear, or could by rearrangement be brought to do so, until put out of action. Now, counterbattery fire from the walls had become desultory, the dwindling number of losses from gun crews mostly being the result of long-range sniping with big bore wall-mounted matchlock calivers, but there seemed a dearth of notable marksmen within the city, for hits were rare, though the inch-or-more-in-diameter balls were almost certain to be the death of anyone so unfortunate as to be caught in the path of one.

  On the morning of the fourth day of the bombardment, at about the third hour after dawn, Walid Pasha received a message from Sebastian Bey and ordered a colored rocket fired up into the sky above the embattled city, whereupon all the guns ringed about the place ceased to fire.

  After some of the debris had been cleared away, a mounted party of men debouched from out the damaged arch where once had stood the main gates of Oentreib and walked their horses slowly to the verge of the first line of entrenchments, the rider following the stout man at their head bearing a rectangle of white cloth bound to a reversed pike shaft.

  There was no way to get the horses across the broad trench, but boards were brought up and thrown down over it to make a springy but passable footbridge so that the party might cross to the spot where the commanders of the besiegers waited in the space between the first and second lines of trenches, one of their number also bearing a plain, near-white banner.

  Face to face with the Righ, Bass found him to look anything but regal, while his manner and bearing seemed more those of a swineherd than a ruler of men. Standing a bit behind Bass, Sir Conn translated the discourse that followed.

  "Where in the fuck did you get that shitty ship and those fucking guns, Lugaid?" Righ Conan Ruarc Mac Dallain demanded angrily.

  He was answered by Father Mochtae, however, who said in a mild tone, "Your Majesty might say that they were a gift from God, were Your Majesty not a heathen murdering bastard, unfit to sit on any throne, much less the high and ancient and holy throne of Ulaid."

  Snarling, his face suffused with clear rage, the Righ grasped his sword hilt and started to step toward the priest, only to be frantically restrained from doing either by the men flanking him, for to break the truce here in this place would be quick suicide, death for all of them, not just the Righ . . . who more than one of them was silently thinking should be dead, and soon, for the good of the rest of them.

  Halted, but not in the least cooled down by his lieutenants, Righ Conan Ruarc raised his left hand where all might clearly see the huge diamond mounted in a massy golden ring on the thumb of his big, hairy bridle hand. In a ringing voice, raised purposely to reach those in the trenches as well as those leaders now before him, he spoke.

  "Hear me, men of Ulaid. You back-stabbing, ill-born rebel swine and your pig-turd great guns may drive me out of Oentreib, but in it or out of it, I still will be your rightful and lawful king so long as I bear or wear this, the Sacred Jewel of Ulaid. And because God has recognized me as lawful Righ of Ulaid, this ring will not, cannot leave my thumb. You see?"

  He lifted up his right hand as well and gave what looked to Bass like a real effort to pull or twist the ring over the joint of his thumb, but the band would not pass the obstruction.

  Behind him, Bass could hear an increasing spate of whisperings and mumbling among the humbler men who made up the most of the rebel force. A few yards down, he saw some of them beginning to clamb
er up from out of the trenches, dropping their makeshift weapons and milling about aimlessly. A few more minutes of this bastard's oratory and showmanship to the superstitious common men whose dispositions and mindsets he seemed to understand so well and this almost-victorious rebellion just might fall apart at the seams.

  "I wonder," he mused, "I wonder if he really tried to get that ring off?"

  Without really conscious planning, Bass peeled down the cuff of his left gauntlet and drew out the small heat-stunner. After setting the stud for heat, he tried to point it from the hip, so as not to be noticed, then depressed the stud as Hal had shown him to do.

  For what seemed like at least a quarter hour to Bass, nothing at all untoward happened: the Righ continued to orate and more men came up out of the trenches to swell the throng already out and empty-handed and murmuring amongst themselves. Frantically, he tried varying the direction of the device by fractions of millimeters—up, down, left, right.

  All at once, Righ Conan Ruarc Mac Dallain, in the very midst of yet another appeal to the God who had supposedly coronated him to rule Ulaid for the rest of his life or until He signified His Holy displeasure by causing the ring containing the Sacred Jewel of Ulaid to come from off his thumb—why, had they not seen, time and time again on feast-day gatherings in Oentreib and other places, how neither he nor other men and women, noble and humble and even priestly, had been able to remove from his thumb the ring that God Almighty had ordained to there remain?—a look of agony and terror came over his florid face. He moaned softly, then groaned loudly, then half screamed. His features became twisted and the muscles cording his thick neck could be seen all hard and tensed to the fullest, veins stood out and throbbed strongly at his forehead, his jaw joints bulged and worked as he clenched and ground his teeth.

  Then, with a hoarse, bellowing scream, he jerked down his left hand and did some unseen something with the fingers of his right hand. When the bauble dropped from off his thumb, Bass and a few others could see that where it had for so long been emplaced, there now was what looked like a severe and terrible burn circling the thumb, which thumb he then instinctively began to suck at and lick.

  Conan Ruarc Mac Dallain, clearly no longer King of Ulaid, did not suffer but bare minutes. Someone of the men clustered around him—none of Bass' party could see among the press clearly enough to ever say just who—drew and rapidly, cleanly thrust a dagger into the unarmored back of the former Righ. His eyes opened wide, his burn clear forgotten; he fell facedown upon the ground, and the hilt of the weapon could be seen standing up out of his back, just below the left shoulder-blade.

  Looking down at the death-gurgling body of Conan Ruarc Mac Dallain, Bass wondered aloud, "But now who is there to rule in Ulaid?"

  When once he had completed his rather rushed holy rites, Father Mochtae looked up and said. "Oh, ye of little faith. Never you fear, Your Grace, God will provide us a new and a better Righ for Ulaid."

  Not anticipating taking the hideously heavy and unwieldy guns and trucks back the way they had been brought with any real relish, Walid Pasha put men to making of suitable timbers and boards that had been used in the defenses and entrenchments rafts to be towed and guided by polemen down the Ban as far as the ruins of Coleraine, where they could then be gotten back aboard Revenge with far less trouble and strain.

  When the rafts were ready, they were dragged out to water deep enough to float them and launched, then pulled close up to the side of the strongest-looking pier and there tied in place securely while the seamen speedily erected a strong beam and support and stapled and lashed to the beam a huge iron pulley.

  Four of the long, wide rafts had been fully laden and were being poled out to Cassius, that the towlines might be rove, when Sirs Ali, Ugo and Roberto di Bolgia rode up, dismounted, and wandered to the land end of the dock to observe the process being done by a mixed work gang of seamen, ship's officers, marine fighters, and Ulaidians. When tired, sweaty hands seemed to be slipping on a guiding line in the lowering of the bronze tube of a massive thirty-two-pounder demicannon, Sir Roberto hurriedly kicked off his jackboots and ran out onto the wet, mud-slimy, uneven boards to add his strength to the task. Halfway to the work crew, his feet slipped in a muddy puddle and, all the while snarling foul Italian curses and blasphemies, the big, hefty man plunged feet-foremost into the peat-murky water that lapped against the uneven line of pilings.

  As he splashed into the water of Lough Neagh's northern shallows, Sirs Ali and Ugo, Walid Pasha, and the entire work crew paused in place to have a hearty laugh. But Sirs Ali and Ugo, who had come out onto the ill-built pier at a slower and more cautious pace, ceased to laugh and make broad jests at and to their unfortunate companion when he snarled and spoke.

  "Damn your wormy lights, you sons of sows, help me out of here. Something's stabbed me in the sole of my foot, down in that muck. I can't reach the fornicating thing!"

  Hearing the words, Walid Pasha brought a rope, and once Sir Roberto had got a good hold on it, they three and a couple of Ulaidians easily drew him up and out and onto the pier, dripping thick mud and water.

  Squatting beside the soaked knight, Sir Ali grasped one of his muddy ankles and, after a moment, drew the long pin of a brooch from Sir Roberto's sole just under the arch of the left foot.

  Whistling softly, he held the brooch on the palm of his hand, saying, "A lucky fisher you are, my fine Italian friend. If I am not blind, this thing that came out stuck to your foot is pure gold, heavy stuff, too, and set with what look much like small rubies, six of them. Now, what's gotten into these men, Walid?"

  The two Ulaidians, upon seeing the brooch, even before Sir Ali had pulled it free, had dropped to their knees and were shouting a spate of Gaelic words to their fellows still working. The only words any of the non-Irish could understand were "Righ" and "Ulaid."

  CHAPTER 12

  In a windowless, doorless, stone-walled, -floored, and -ceilinged room well hidden within the recesses of the Ard-Righ's royal palace at Lagore, Brian the Burly sat once again in his backless arm-stool at the table on which rested a velvet-lined tray taken from the only unlocked and opened chest of all the many lining the walls of the strong-room.

  Where once, not too long ago, only two of the oddly shaped depressions sunk into the tray had been filled, now five were occupied, with but three still gaping empty, and so one would have expected Brian VIII, Ard-Righ of Eireann, to be pleased with himself and with recent events, but such was not the case, far from it, in fact.

  Poking roughly at a diamond set in a ring of heavy gold that filled one of the depressions, Brian snarled like some wild beast, talking to the otherwise empty chamber as if to another person.

  "I had thought—and that not too long since, either—that never would you grace this tray with your presence, you Sassenach pretender, yet here you are, for all the good your ownership does me or can do me or will do me. But who would ever, could ever have imagined that a Jewel—the long-centuries-lost original Jewel of Ulaid, having lain hidden in the mire and peat of Lough Neagh for near a full millennium—would've suddenly appeared, reappeared in this world of men, sunk into the foot of a damned Italian knight-for-hire, fulfilling to the very letter a prophecy made who knows how many hundreds of years ago? Hell, it makes one almost believe in the old religion that gave genesis to such arrant nonsense."

  "Sir Roberto di Bolgia, Righ of Ulaid—the very words are enough and more to make a shit-eating dog puke. I hope the Italian swine gets the damned black-rot from the wound that that blasted Jewel put in his foot! Damn him and his damned impudence to the deepest, hottest, foulest pits of hell, anyway! The sly, backbiting by-blow bastard of a Satan-spawn Italian proceeds to send this now-valueless—well, for my purposes, valueless—piece of shit to me by way of Sir Ugo d'Orsini, along with a letter written as if to an equal in rank, saying that in a short while, when he has settled affairs in his kingdom, he will consider whether or not to continue the practice of exchanging hostages with me and the other kings a
nd advise me in due time of his decision on the matter."

  "The southern-bred pig! Why, not long since he was squatting in Corcaigh with the rest of the honorless mercenaries sent to Munster by the Jew-shrewd Cardinal d'Este to foil my then plans. Now, thanks entirely to a stroke of luck so incredible that a superstitious man might think he'd signed a pact with Satan—and maybe he did, I've long thought that Satan was certain to be an Italian, if not a Moor, pest take them all!—this foreign trespasser on the sacred soil of Holy Eireann is being hailed by every caste of the people of Ulaid as the authentic, God-sent king that will restore their lands to the power and the glory they think their distant ancestors enjoyed. Pah, the fools are all self-deluded; Ulaid was never one of the original Fifths, only a part of one."

  Knotting up his right hand into a fist, he slammed its scarred knuckles into his hard thigh once, twice, thrice, each time harder than that preceding, the pain and action helping him to drain away his righteous indignation and rage.

  Then, almost wistfully, he said, "This new, alien Righ might at the very least have sent me the real, the ancient Jewel of Ulaid, for surely his brother, Dux Timoteo di Bolgia, has told him of my needs, my high aspirations of completely uniting all of Eireann, of making my kingdom a force as strong in the world as the Empire or as Rome herself. It would've been returned to him . . . eventually. Well, at least he would've received back a facsimile so perfectly wrought by my goldsmiths that no one not knowing exactly what to look for and exactly where to look could've told the difference between the old and the new. And I would never have told a living soul of the substitution . . . unless the time came that I thought it best for Ulaid and Eireann that he be deposed and replaced."