by Robert Adams
More than a little conscience-stricken, Bass simply turned and walked away, pretending not to understand the pidgin spoken by the Dane or the words shouted after him as he strode away. It was not until he returned to England that he heard of how the Danish captain had hanged himself in the hold wherein he and his crew had been cast while the prize crew manhandled the cranky, overloaded, unfamiliarly rigged flute back to friendly waters.
Examination of the capture's papers revealed that, oddly enough, this one, too, was bound for the Port of Gijan.
Another French coaster, this one sailing out of Seine-mouth laden with sailcloth and cheap wine—and bearing for none other than Gijan-port—was easily overhauled and taken by two smaller escort vessels in waters too shallow for the draft of the Revenge.
But a three-masted galleon running in from the Atlantic before a stern wind first essayed to outrun the squadron, then, as the fickle winds shifted and slacked off abruptly, turned and fought furiously and tenaciously.
It was the first real toe-to-toe, broadside-for-broadside sea battle between equal or near-equal ships in which Bass had ever taken part, and after that one he never sought a part in any other.
Walid Pasha, clinging like an ape high in the standing rigging, studied the enemy galleon as the Revenge bore down on her, driving bows-under at a speed of at least eight knots and wetting every man forward of the mainmast on the upper decks with flung spray. Finally closing and casing his long-glass, the captain slid rapidly down to the rail and leaped lightly to the deck, where he disclosed the fruits of his reconnaissance to Bass, Fahrooq, Sir Ali, and the rest of the officers.
"Yon galleon was probably built nigh to a century agone, but she has been refurbished and refitted often and is generally well-found, to judge by her appearance and sailing qualities. She means to fight; the gunports were being opened even as I spied. And it will be a fight, if your grace choose to engage her. Her port side is pierced for fifteen guns, her stern for four chasers, which last were already run out and looked to be long fifteens or eighteens, bronze or brass. She has soldiers, or at least many men in armor, on board, too. Well, Sebastian Bey, do we accept or decline?"
"What would Walid Pasha advise?" Bass questioned. "My experience lies on land, on horseback, mostly."
Walid signaled his boatswain to slow the galleon's speed, lest they overhaul the pugnacious stranger before any decision or preparations had been made to fight, then turned back to Bass Foster.
"Your grace, were it this galleon alone, understrength as we are from losses to the prize crews, facing so strong-looking a ship, I would say to decline the offer of battle. But backed as we are by the caravel Krystal and the three sloops of Paul Pasha, I must say to accept, fight, and conquer her. She will make a splendid addition to the squadron of Sebastian Bey."
"Besides, y'r grace," added Sir Calum, "we must attack her, now she's seen us so close for so long, else we'll have every bateau de guerre from Brittany to Navarre out looking for us. And that right speedily."
Bass sighed and nodded. "And the squadron would be of scant value to his majesty on the bottom of the sea, and that's where we soon would be if we had to fight full-armed warships every day, for our every prize. Very well, Walid Pasha, engage them. Yours will be the overall command; you've done this before."
At a distance just beyond the range of smoothbore broadside cannon, Revenge and Krystal, one behind the other, sailed slowly in a great circle around the galleon, which now had run up a French battle ensign along with several other, unfamiliar colors.
Using the three new rifled cannon developed by Pete Fairley, which each of these larger ships now mounted on swivels at bow and stern, they pounded the target mercilessly, while return fire dropped into the sea or went skipping over the waves before sinking.
As Bass watched, Nugai and a Fairley-trained gun crew opened the breech, swabbed the bore from the chamber end, slipped a long, pointed, fused shell into the rifling grooves, following it with a waxed-linen cartridge, slammed the breech and gave the handle the half-turn that locked it, then pricked open the powder cartridge, filled the vent with priming, and carefully sighted the gun. Balancing easily on his short, bowed legs, the self-appointed Kalmyk gun captain stood like a yellow-brown statue, awaiting the precise moment that the Revenge began her upswing before laying his smoking slowmatch directly atop the filled vent.
Following the shot with his binoculars, Bass saw it crash through the upper level of the stern castle, and a split second later, he saw what looked like a door blasted down into the crowded waist, while a sheet of fire and a hail of small debris burst out of the stern castle's rear windows.
After a single broadside from each of their full batteries, the French wisely ceased use of the outranged guns, only essaying shots whenever the Revenge or the Krystal lay athwart bow or stern, where the longer-ranged chasers could be brought into play. And the French gunners quickly proved their expertise, scoring a total of five hits on the two ships, none of which, however, did any real damage or inflicted any injuries.
The same, unfortunately for the French, could not be said of what was being done by Pete Fairley's fearsome breech-loading rifled cannon. Binoculars and long-glasses showed not a few still or thrashing bodies on her decks, along with a couple of spars and a decent-sized jumble of rigging, tackle, and shredded sailcloth. There was at least one fire on her gun decks to judge by the amounts of smoke billowing out of the still-open gunports. Occasionally, the wind bore down to the attackers the rattle of a drum or a thin wail that might have been a scream of agony. Like so many ants at this distance, tiny figures scurried about, fighting the fires blazing in both fore- and stern castles, apparently oblivious to the shells still bursting among them, up in the rigging or in the fabric of the ship herself.
Had there been sufficient supply of the cylindrical shells, they well might have continued to bleed the French galleon at a safe range until the ship was so crippled or her crew so reduced as to ensure a quick, easy victory on closing, but the numbers of the explosive shells had been limited at the very inception of the voyage and several had been used as chaser shots in earlier actions. So when the bottommost layer of the shell boxes was reached, Walid Pasha ordered the long-range shelling halted and the second, more normal and far more dangerous phase of his plan of battle commenced.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
Abbot Fergus had been journeying back from Edinburgh when the great, fearsome thunderbolt had set the thatch roof of the abbey barn afire. The monks and the lay brothers, the few hale guests, as well as folk of all ages who'd run up from the village at sight of the flames, and even some of the patients—for this was a nursing order—had done all that was humanly possible to save the contents of the ancient stone buildings, while the whipping winds of the tempest had imparted murderous life to the flames.
The all-devouring conflagration had leapt from one building to another and another and yet another, while terrified kine bawled, while men and women shouted and howled and shrieked and screamed. Tonsured cleric and hairy smith risked their lives side by side to rip loose and throw down great armsful of the heavy, stinking, smoldering thatch. Others ran into buildings already afire to bear out the few poor treasures, furnishings, stores, and sufferers too ill to help themselves.
In the cold, misty forenoon that followed that hellish night, Abbot Fergus arrived at his journey's end and, in company with Brother Paruig, his longtime secretary, walked the grounds and, amongst the still-smoking ruins, compiled mental evaluations of the losses and began to frame in his own mind the letter and detailed report of the calamity which he soon must dictate and send off to the parent house in the Western Isles. Such damages as he saw before him would cost far more to make right than he thought he could obtain locally.
". . . three cows, one of them big with calf, alas. The roof of the byre collapsed, flaming, ere the last two could be led out. As for the other, she was found dead where she had been tethered, and no burn or other mark upon her."
"The oxen all were saved, God be praised, likewise the asses and the small mule that was willed to the monastery last year. The fires never got to the cellars, so we'll not lack for food and drink, at least, nor the beasts for grain, though every one of the nearer haystacks burned and—"
"But the folk," broke in Abbot Fergus. "What of the folk, brother?"
Brother Paruig sighed and signed himself, piously. "Two of our brothers we know are dead—Brothers Gilleasbuig and Donnochadhogh—one of a broken skull when he fell off a roof, the other burnt with the last brace of cows he had run in to lead out to safety. Father Mark the Sassenach is missing; so also are two of the lay brothers who were sharing the night watch in the main hospital."
"Their names, these lay brothers?" prodded Abbot Fergus.
"Gilliosa Hay. Brother Gilliosa Hay, he and that wild Highlander barbarian, Ian MacBean."
"And our charges, the sick and injured for whom we were caring in their need?" demanded Abbot Fergus. "Were all of them saved?"
Brother Paruig wrung his hands and sighed. "No, not all were saved, I fear me. In the dark and the confusion there was . . . was a . . . a regrettable error made. It was no one's fault, really, but . . . but—" A glimpse of familiar and feared fire in the abbot's steely eyes sent Brother Paruig stuttering on with his tale.
"It was simply that . . . that the villagers all thought that we, the brothers, had fetched out the seriously ill patients. We all thought that they, the villagers, had done that deed of mercy. And by the time we—I—realized that . . . that . . ."
The younger monk began to tremble uncontrollably and whimper like a hurt child, while a great gush of tears bathed his stubbled cheeks. Patting the man's shoulder, the old abbot led Brother Paruig to a jumbled pile of boxes and casks and sat him down, beckoning over another monk to care for him. Any man, the abbot well knew, could take but so much and no more; poor Paruig had never been as strong as average, and the horrific events of last night and earlier this morning, whilst he was nominally in charge of monastery affairs, had simply pushed him temporarily beyond his limits of endurance. The two missing lay brothers were found as soon as the monks and villagers got around to delving into the charred ruins of the main hospital building, but the corpse of the priest did not turn up until a trio of husky monks went to feed the three madmen lodged in a row of five low stone-built cells that composed the last remains of the very first monastery to stand upon this ground, possibly as much as ten centuries past.
Abbot Fergus was frantically summoned to the spot to find one of the three madmen gone. In his malodorous little cell lay the naked corpse of Father Mark. The priest's face was horribly contorted and discolored, his tongue protruding well beyond his jaws and lips. His eyes too were bulging from their sockets, and the thin cord which had been used to throttle him—it looked to be made of braided hair—was still knotted deadly tight about his neck and throat.
The priest's warm woolen habit was gone, as was the peculiar foreign footgear he affected—something on the order of Lowlander brogues, but finer and crafted of finished leather rather than rawhide.
Back at the ruins of the monastery, Abbot Fergus penned in his own hand an addendum to the letter to his parent house, noting that Father Mark had been found dead, murdered by a mad Sassenach, one Uilleam Kawlyer, who now was roaming at large in the habit and shoes of the murdered priest.
Sir Ugo led the Duca di Bolgia and the lieutenant along a well-lit interior corridor which debouched into a great hall boasting a high, vaulted ceiling, and with loggias on no less than three sides, one of these being faced with carven wood-and-ivory privacy screens in the Moorish manner and designed to prevent observers from being themselves observed.
From the lavishly decorated and furnished great hall, they entered another short corridor, then climbed a flight of stairs and passed along one of a pair of marble-arched loggias which faced one another over a long, narrow garden of tile walks, manicured greensward, carefully tended shrubs and small fruit trees, flowers, twittering, darting birds, and gurgling fountains.
The loggia they had traversed and now quitted extended on around to the right, and halfway down that stretch, two huge, towering, albeit a little pudgy men with shiny blue-black skins and shaven heads stood obvious guard before a pair of carven and inlaid doors. The ball-butts of a brace of wheel-lock pistols projected from under each blackamoor's saffron sash. Heavy and very cursive scimitars hung from their baldrics, and, in addition, one was armed with a two-barreled wheel-lock fowler with bores looking to be as wide as small cannon, while the other leaned on a six-foot pike.
Di Bolgia knew quite a bit about firearms, and he knew that even as big as that guard was, if ever he had to fire just one of those two-digit-wide barrels without a harquebus prop, he was going to find himself on his arse ten feet back from where he'd started, likely with a caved-in chest, to boot. The two men with their too-smooth faces were probably castrati, which meant that behind those doors lay the women's wing of the cardinal's palazzo. And the cardinal was deluding himself if he thought that that garish duo of Aethiop eunuchs provided any true protection of his harem from invasion by any really determined body.
They were instructed to wait in a chamber whilst Sir Ugo went off somewhere alone. Silently, a servitor entered bearing a silver-gilt tray on which were a ewer and a pair of goblets—ruby-red glass bowls set in heavy, intricately carven silver. Wordlessly, the man poured wine into the goblets and would then have departed had di Bolgia not grasped an arm in one powerful hand.
Waving at the goblets, he growled, "You drink first, a good healthy swallow out of each, or . . ." He laid his other hand to the jeweled hilt of his dagger.
With an indulgent smile, but still no words, the servitor padded back over to the table and obediently lifted first one goblet, then the other, taking a double swallow from each, then refilling them from the ewer. With another deep bow, the wordless man turned and left the way he had come. Picking up one of the goblets, di Bolgia remarked to the lieutenant, "That little farce proves nothing, of course. He could have hurried back to a waiting emetic or antidote. His employers might have failed to inform him of the fact that he was to serve poisoned wine. He could even have been willing to sacrifice his own life in order to take mine . . . and yours, too, of course, my boy. But I've found it never hurts to take such rudimentary precautions."
"Ahhh, this is indeed a fine vintage. A hint of sweetness and an aftertaste of well-hung apples. This is a northern wine, my boy, none of this vinegar-sour Sicilian horse piss. His eminence has a superb palate. My estimate of him has risen to new heights, and I've yet to even lay eyes to the man."
From somewhere nearby came a single, dry chuckle. As the two soldiers glanced all around the room, a section of the western wall swung silently open to reveal another, larger chamber wherein sat three men garbed as cardinals. Sir Ugo stood a bit off to one side of the trio.
"Come in, your grace of Bolgia, Lieutenant di Crespa. Bring the wine and we all will share it. It comes of one of my own vineyards located in one of the westerly electorates of the Empire. Viticulture has been practiced in the valley of the Moselle River, there, since the days of the Caesars."
Most of the westernmost wall of the larger chamber consisted of five pairs of doors with clear glass panels letting onto a wide, deep balcony. Silhouetted against the bright sunlight flooding in through these glass doors, no details could be seen of the faces of the three seated clergy.
But, once more, that resonant, well-modulated baritone voice invited, "I say, come in, gentlemen. We have been awaiting you."
Leaving Pandolfo to fetch the ewer, Timoteo strode through the concealed doorway . . . and nearly dropped his goblet. The cardinal in the center seat, he who had been speaking, was none other than the cat-footed, wordless "servitor" he had intimidated into drinking of the wine when first it had been proffered. Setting down the goblet, he hurriedly swept off his cap, dropped to one knee, and kissed the ring on the extended hand. The nails were m
anicured and the hand soft, but with a perceptible hint of steely strength in the muscles and sinews underlying the flesh.
When he had been introduced and had made his obeisances to the other two prelates, Sir Ugo returned to the chamber followed by a column of servitors, who bore in a carven and upholstered chair with arms and back for di Bolgia, an armless chair for Sir Ugo, a backless arm stool for Lieutenant di Crespa, four more of the glass-and-silver goblets, and a second, larger ewer of wine.
When all were seated and the doors tightly closed behind the servitors, Cardinal d'Este began by asking, "Your grace, how much do you know of the English Problem?"
Shifting his baldric slightly, Timoteo crossed his booted legs and leaned forward. "Enough, your eminence, to stay as far away from that part of the world as is humanly possible. That kingdom is become of late a meat-grinder of armies, and not even the Holy See has enough money to hire me and mine to follow in the footsteps of old Conte Horeszko. Nor am I alone in this firm resolve, your eminence. The conte left Rome proud and confident, a living legend amongst professional captains. He came back a humbled and broken old dotard who, they say, will not live long because, disgraced, he no longer has the will to live."
"Therefore, I doubt me that any captain of note would hire either himself or his company out for a campaign in England or Wales. Or even in Scotland, for that matter."
"So, if that is the offer, your eminence, thank you, but no, not for one thousand ducats per day, per man!"
"Your bluntness verges close upon insult, di Bolgia," snapped Cardinal Sicola. The cardinal seemed upon the point of saying more when d'Este waved a placating hand.
"Your grace misunderstands. I have no intention of securing his services for England, for I can see no point in prolonging an affair that it may have been ill-advised to even commence. I feel that a few years of benign neglect by Rome may end in accomplishing far more in England than would the services of a score of armies. So rest your mind on that issue."