by Robert Adams
"But let us two touch now upon the subject of geography, eh? There is a largish island just to the west of England, is there not, your grace?"
Di Bolgia nodded curtly. "Yes, your eminence. It contains a number of tiny, so-called kingdoms, plus one leader who calls himself something equivalent to regno grande but usually has even less land than any of the others and no real power over them. The folk are called 'Irlandese,' and I've soldiered with many of them over the years. They are good fighters individually, but respond ill to any sort of discipline and seem to stay drunk most of the time."
"I know little of the internal politics of the land, save that I am led to believe that the various kingdoms have been warring amongst themselves constantly for generations at least, possibly for centuries. There seem to be three or more racial strains native to the island, and they make war along racial lines, too."
"It is rumored that one of these little kingdoms has implanted one or more colonies called in totality 'Great Irland' somewhere south of Vinland and north of Nueva Espana."
D'Este nodded, smiling. "You are well informed, your grace. Now, tell me, would you hire out yourself and your company for an initial contract of two years' service in Irland?"
Timoteo sipped delicately at his wine and dabbed at his full, sensual lips with a lace cuff before replying with a question of his own. "Under what circumstances of initial service, your eminence—aggressive or defensive? That is, will we be expected to quit our ships and make an opposed landing under fire from the Irlandese? Such tactics are always risky and could cost me a hefty percentum of my company in killed, drowned, and wounded."
D'Este held up a hand and shook his head vigorously. "Oh, no, your grace, you are assured of a safe landing, offloaded from ship to quay directly, under the numerous guns of a fortified port city which will be your base of operations, thenceforth. The port city is one of the principal cities of Rome's firm and steady ally, King Tamhas of Munster."
"Until very recently, King Tamhas was being very hard pressed by the troops of the high king, Brian VIII, and he has lost more than a third of his realm to his enemy. But now the high king has withdrawn the bulk of his forces from the disputed lands and is devoting his far from inconsiderable talents to an attempt to do that which never has been done in all of known history. It is Brian's aim to unite all or at least the most of Irland under his leadership against Rome and Holy Mother the Church."
"This vital monarch has already won over some of the other kings, and he and they throughout all the lands they control have seized Church-owned properties and treasures, ships, gunpowder mills and supplies of gunpowder and priests' powder. Shocking to state, some Irland-born clergy have turned renegade and are now making powder for the high king, unhallowed powder."
Although he listened in respectful silence, this last did not impress di Bolgia. He knew how to make gunpowder himself, from scratch, and hallowed or unhallowed, it all did the same deadly work in pistol, arquebus, cannon, or petard. And he liked what he was hearing of this High King Brian. Small, relatively weak states lay constantly at the mercy of larger, stronger ones, and the only answer was to get out and conquer, consolidate lands, become a larger, stronger state oneself, a state to be feared and therefore respected by its peers-in-power.
Such a man as this King Brian, he thought, should make an interesting antagonist, and when once his two-year contract to Rome had been filled and he and his company would be in Irland anyway, he might explore the possibility of hiring on with the armies of the high king. After all, every legend he had heard over the long years had reputed Irland to be a land rich in gold, silver, and jewels.
"Sebastian Bey," said Walid Pasha solemnly, "it were wise now to arm. For after the close and exchange of broadside cannonades, to order grappling, I shall, and then we all must board and fight or die as God wills. The two larger sloops have orders to await the end of the cannonade, then to sail up and lock onto the enemy galleon at stem and at stern and board her from those directions; the plan will give us more men on board her and force her complement to fight foes at both front and rear, which should serve to disconcert them to a degree."
Bass had long since ceased being amazed at the overall competence of the master of the ship they had renamed the Revenge. He would find a way to accomplish virtually whatever task he was set, and he would accomplish it well, with his own special flourish.
Nor did the other officers and men of the warship seem to resent the fact that, for all their apparent freedom, they were little better than military slaves. There was no animosity—either overt or covert—toward the Englishmen, Welshmen, Irishmen, and Scots. The Mediterraneans deferred to officers and sergeants, of course, but seemed to accept the mass of other ranks as just another batch of landlubber soldiers shipped aboard to do the fighting and, they hoped, the dying while they the sailors handled the ship.
In the stern-castle cabin that he had insisted they share with him aboard the crowded ship, Sir Ali and Nugai assisted Bass to arm. After stripping down to his silken drawers and crotch-length linen undertunic, he first strapped on a horn-and-boiled-leather codpiece and made certain that his penis and scrotum were tucked well inside the protective device and were not in danger of being pinched by its edges. Then he pulled on a pair of tight-legged breeches which incorporated broad straps under the instep of each foot. Squatting, Nugai gartered these just below the knee to prevent them riding up the leg should the straps break.
While Sir Ali held it gaped for him, Bass slipped head and arms into a long-sleeved, hip-long quilted garment—soft finished leather outside, fine velvet inside, raw wool in between—and the nimble yellow-brown fingers of the waiting Nugai secured the dozen points that fastened upper and lower garments together.
Bass stepped into his cavalry boots, made to his exact specifications by a bemused and wondering bootier. Into stitched pockets spaced closely all around the leg of the boot and extending from just below the knee down to the ankle, Sir Ali and Nugai inserted splints of fine armor steel. The steel cop to guard the patella was built into the thigh-high boots, as too was the panel of ring mail that protected the tendons in the backs and sides of the knee. Additional stitched-pocket, steel-splint arrangements on the thigh leathers' fronts and exposed outer sides gave reasonable leg protection without the cumbersome leg armor still worn by many horsemen over their boots.
Bass had decided to do without a mail hauberk, but Sir Ali and Nugai would not hear of such insanity, and he grudgingly but obediently knelt and held up his arms that the two shorter men might fit the thirty-odd pounds of riveted-steel rings. It sagged to well below his crotch, but Sir Ali, searching out certain larger rings and threading through them a length of hide thong, gathered up several inches of length and belted the armor so that a portion of the weight was carried by his hips.
This armor was all of the best quality; it had been made for him, to his exact measurements, by King Arthur's own resident Milanese armorers. Due mostly to continual badgering on the parts of Sir Ali, Nugai, and certain other members of his well-meaning staff, Bass had spent many a long hour in this armor—afoot and ahorse, practicing with a plethora of weapons, tilting and riding cross-country in good weather and foul. But none of that meant that he had learned to like wearing the hot, heavy, confining, and basically uncomfortable collection of steel plates, mesh, bolts, rivets, and buckles.
Sir Ali held the back-plate in place while Nugai strapped it on over the hauberk, then they reversed roles, with Nugai holding up the breastplate while Sir Ali inserted the hingepins on one side and did up the buckles on the other. The gorget was placed over a length of linen lapped around Bass's neck and throat before the two arming men added spauldrons on the shoulders, rerebrace plates over the long sleeves of the hauberk to guard the upper arms, and vambrace plates on the lower arms. Then they strapped couters and elbow cops between the two.
Around his hips, loins, and buttocks, they attached the taces. Tasset plates were buckled to the lower front edges of the
taces to protect the upper thighs. The two were upon the very point of adding a plastron, or reinforcing plate, over the breastplate when Bass called a halt.
"Good Lord, Ali, any more weight and I won't be able to move, much less jump from one ship to another and then fight! As it is, I'll have to be very mindful of my footing, for if I hit water, it'll be goodbye Bass Foster; I'll sink like a stone and be long drowned before I can get a tenth of this scrap iron off me."
"Nonsense, your grace," the crooked-nosed Arabian knight reassured him. "A century ago, when armor was heavier and less easy to move in than this modern stuff is, one of the tests of a prospective knight was to swim a river or lake or bay fully armed. Be a man a good swimmer and uninjured, his armor alone won't drown him."
"But, your grace, you really should let us put on the plastron. Superb as is the quality of your breastplate, it simply lacks the thickness and strength to stop a harquebus ball at close range."
However, when his grace, Sir Sebastian Foster, Duke of Norfolk, strode out onto the deck of his flagship, it was without the plastron. His missed the familiar feel of scabbarded Tara steel slapping against his left leg, but he had deliberately left the blade ashore, correctly estimating the long cavalry broadsword to be ill suited to shipboard combats.
In the place of that priceless weapon, his baldric held a hybrid of his own design—an old cinquedea two-foot dagger blade rehilted with the quillions, pommel, and pierced-steel hand-guard from a Spanish broadsword captured at the Battle of Bloody Rye. In its present configuration, the century-old blade—some four inches wide just below the quillions, double-edged, and tapering to an acute point—had never been bloodied. This day would either prove or disprove its worth for the task it faced.
The broad belt cinched around Bass's waist over the armor was fitted with brass hooks along its lower edge. From four of these dangled wheel-lock pistols, two of them double-barreled weapons, all full-charged, primed and spanned, ready to fire. Two other hooks—one on each side—supported daggers, one a metal flask of charging powder, and one a stiff-leather wallet containing cast-lead pistol balls, greased patches, a small flask of priming powder, and a spanner that would fit the wheels of all four pistols.
In the crook of his left arm, as he took his place beside Walid Pasha on the quarterdeck, was his choice of helmets for today—an old-fashioned burgonet covered in bright-green samite and fined with a bar visor; bars and edges had been gilded.
As the Revenge inexorably bore down upon her quarry, Walid Pasha ordered all the remaining shells for the big rifles to be borne forward to the two bow-mounted guns, then ordered them to concentrate their fire on the fighting-tops of the two larger masts—main and fore.
"They are chancy targets at best, Sebastian Bey," he told Bass in explanation, "but even if God fails to smile upon our gunners in this, the shot still will do certain damage to the sails and rigging and thus render her more difficult to control with any certainty in the coming close battle."
But luck did grin. The second shot from the gun Nugai had taken over not only struck and exploded in the crowded and heavily armed maintop, but apparently also set off their own powder supply. A great flame-shot flash and a billow of dense smoke was the first indication of this telling blow. As bodies, pieces of bodies, and debris of all sorts showered onto the waist below and the earsplitting roar of the two merged explosions reached the ears of those aboard the Revenge, the upper reaches of the mainmast—sails, yards, rigging, tackle, and all—tipped, tipped, tipped, then suddenly pitched forward onto the foremast, which also broke through under the excessive weight, smothering the foretop in canvas and cordage.
Walid Pasha smiled grimly as he lowered his glass. "It could hardly have chanced better for our arms, Sebastian Bey. Your Kalmyk is a rare gunner, and a rare naval gunner, which is even less common. But not even he could have told that mast which way to fall. That was God's holy doing."
"Waiting boarders and deck crews often suffer severely from swivels, arquesbuses, and pistols employed by the men stationed in those tops. Now the Frenchman's largest one has entirely ceased to be and the foretop is rendered completely useless until seamen can get up there and ax them free. For some odd reason, that ship lacks a fighting-top on the mizzenmast; a long, narrow platform, right enough, but no provision for swivels or men to serve them."
Revenge had been bearing down on the starboard side of the French galleon, but had drawn only sporadic fire from the big main guns, no concentrated fire from battery or even deck, and as they drew closer a possible reason for this became apparent.
Halfway between stern and mainmast, thick billows of smoke poured from one or more of the starboard gunports, obscuring at least half of the ports and probably making proper gun-laying an impossibility. After studying signal flags displayed by the caravel Krystal, Walid said, "That must be a big fire on those gun decks, for the port batteries are not offering much more gunnery than are these starboard ones, your grace. God has indeed smiled upon us thus far. Let us all pray that we retain His favor."
Slowly, the gap between the two ships narrowed. When some bare hundred yards separated them, Walid sailed past the starboard of the French ship, coming up from the stern, his portside batteries firing on the virtually unmissable target as each gun came to bear. These culverins and demiculverins threw their balls at the gun decks of the Frenchman, while the waist guns, the stern- and forecastle guns, the rail swivels, and the top swivels, as well as the ship's complement of arquebusiers, sped their loads against rigging and exposed personnel.
Immediately Walid had completed his sail-by, Krystal began the same maneuver on the Frenchman's port side. Then Walid turned the ship about and, at a bit over fifty yards, came by from the opposite direction, bringing his starboard broadside into play. Again, as soon as he had finished, the caravel emulated his actions on the other side of the French galleon.
"Did we not desire to capture the ship in reasonably good condition, your grace." commented Walid Pasha, "now would be the time to come around once more, steer really close, and strive to hull her with the culverins, while pouring red-hot shot from the demiculverins and sakers into her stern- and forecastles and her 'tween decks. Another Turkish captain and I did just this to a Venetian galleon—but that one was a four-master—some years back. Would that we had Marwan Pasha and his great galleon over there in the place of the caravel Krystal."
The return fire, though sporadic and not at all concerted, was not entirely inaccurate. The Revenge had suffered a number of round-shot damages to her fabric—more of them and more severe on her starboard than on her port, of course, due to the lessened range at which the starboard had been presented as target. There was fresh blood in more than one place on the decks visible from the bridge, and barefoot sailors were even as Bass watched shaking sand over the red blotches to improve footing. In his 'tween-decks cubby far below, Master Jibral and his mates already were hard at work with knives, saws, forceps, and needles.
Bass wondered how Captain Edwin Alfshott and Sir Liam Kavanaugh were faring on board the Krystal. Despite the strengthenings and general repairs and renovations done by Sir Paul Bigod's men at the Royal Naval Basin and Yards, the caravel had not been either designed or built to be a warship and it was conceivable that hits that might not do any real or lasting harm to Revenge could irreparably damage the far more lightly built ship.
"Immediately the starboard guns are reloaded, we steer in to close quarters," said Walid Pasha, before beginning to bark orders in Turkish and Arabic to various of his officers. These officers in turn scattered to bark their own orders, and the already busy, crowded waist became a bustle of activity.
Some dozen big iron grapnels were brought out to have lengths of strong cordage rove to their shank eyes and their bits tested for sharpness and, where necessary, touched up with file and stone; then they were laid in convenient spots by the starboard rails.
The ship's carpenter and his mate supervised the bringing on deck of several long, thick
planks varying in width from a foot to about eighteen inches, then set about driving iron spikes, two or three of them, through each end of the planks—boarding-bridges-to-be.
The boatswain and his mates began to pass among the common seamen, arming them with short, heavy swords, dirks, battleaxes, and boarding pikes. They also passed out plain, simple skullcaps of steel to go under turbans or kafiyehs and twine-tied bundles of foot-long fletched darts and a few longer javelins. Last of all, they brought up and carefully unwrapped a few short bows, which were delivered to certain older men, all of them Turks.
Bass noted that the bows must be extremely powerful, for two men's strength was required to string them. Strung, however, no one of them was more than a bare three feet in length, and the arrows, plucked out of lacquered leather cylinders and carefully examined, were short as well, two feet or less from nocks to points. With bows and arrow cases hung down their backs, eight Turks took to the rigging, climbing swiftly and surely up to spots that were obviously predetermined.
When but twenty yards separated the two ships, both of the French galleon's starboard-bow chasers fired loads of langrage at the packed forecastle deck of the Revenge, but with poor results. One piece was fired too soon and the antipersonnel charge was wasted against the bow timbers; the other was fired a split second too late, sending most of it aloft to pepper the sails and foremast.
Then they were gliding alongside the battered French galleon, with a bare three or four yards of water between the two hulls. Every other gun of the starboard batteries was fired, directly at the French gunports, then, while swivels, sling pieces, and other smaller ordnance swept the decks from rails to both castles and fighting-tops, with arquebusiers and archers adding their ounces of lead and feathered shafts to the deadly sleet, brawny arms whirled the grapnels about to gain momentum, then hurled them across the narrow space to thud onto decks and sink their points deeply into rails and coamings, ladders and woodwork. Seamen and soldiers alike heaved at the lines of well-imbedded hooks, slowly warping the ships even closer, as others stood ready with the spiked planks.