The Heretic Kings

FOUR

The first shot sent the seabirds of the gulf wailing in distracted circles about the ships and puffed up a plume of spray barely a cable from the larboard bow.

“Good practice,” Dietl, the carrack’s master, admitted grudgingly, “but then we are broadside-on to them, as plump a target as you could wish, and the galleasses of the corsairs carry nothing but chasers. No broadside guns, see, because of the oars. They’ll close and board soon, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“We can’t outrun them then?” Abeleyn asked. He was a competent enough sailor, as Hebrion’s king should be, but this was Dietl’s ship and the master knew her like no one else ever could.

“No, sire. With those oars of theirs, they effectively have the weather gauge of us. They can close any time they wish, even into the wind if they have to. And as for those pig-slow nefs your men are in, a one-armed man in a rowboat could overtake them. No, it’s a fight they’re looking for, and that’s what they’re going to get.” Dietl’s earlier diffidence to the King on his quarterdeck seemed to have evaporated with the proximity of action. He spoke now as one professional to another.

All along the decks of the carrack the guns had been run out and their crews were stationed about them holding sponges, wads, wormers and lint-stocks-the paraphernalia of artillery, whether land or naval. The thin crew of the merchant carrack which Abeleyn had hired in Candelaria was supplemented by the soldiers of his retinue, most of them well used to gunnery of one sort or another. The deck had been strewn with sand so the men would not slip in their own blood once the action began, and the coiled slow-match was burning away happily to itself in the tub beside every gun. Already the more responsible of the gun captains were sighting down the barrels of the metal monsters, eyeing the slender profiles of the approaching vessels. Six sleek galleasses with lateen sails as full and white as the wings of a flock of swans.

The carrack was heavily armed, one of the reasons why Abeleyn had hired her. On the main deck were a dozen demiculverins, bronze guns whose slim barrels were eleven feet long and which fired a nine-pound shot. On the poop deck were six sakers, five-pounders with nine-foot barrels, and ranged about the forecastle and up in the tops were a series of falconets, two-pounder swivel guns which were to be used against enemy boarders.

The sluggish nefs a mile behind on the choppy sea were less well armed, but they carried the bulk of Abeleyn’s men: over a hundred and fifty trained Hebrian soldiers in each. It would take a stubborn enemy to board them with any hope of success. Abeleyn knew that a galleass might have a crew of three hundred, but they were not of the same calibre as his men. And besides, he knew that he was the prize the enemy vessels were after. The corsairs were out king-hunting this bright morning in the Fimbrian Gulf, that was certain. He would have given a lot to know who had hired them.

Another shot ploughed into the sea just short of the carrack, and then another. Then one clipped the waves like a stone sent skimming by a boy at play and crashed into the side of the ship with a rending of timbers. Dietl went purple. He turned to Abeleyn.

“By your leave, sire, I believe it’s time we heated up the guns.”

Abeleyn grinned. “By all means, Captain.”

Dietl leaned over the quarterdeck rail. “Fire as they bear!” he shouted.

The culverins leaped back on their carriages with explosions of smoke and flame erupting from their muzzles. The main-deck almost disappeared in a tower of smoke, but the northerly sent it forward over the forecastle. The crews were already reloading, not waiting to see the fall of shot. Some of the more experienced gunners clambered over the side of the ship to gauge their aim. Abeleyn stared eastwards. The six galleasses appeared unhurt by the broadside. Even as he watched, little globes of smoke appeared on their bows as the chasers fired again. A moment later came the retorts, and the high whine of shot cutting the air overhead. The King saw holes appear in the maincourse and foretopsail. A few fragments of rigging fell to the deck.

“They have us bracketed,” Dietl said grimly. “There’s hot work approaching, sire.”

Abeleyn’s reply was cut off by the roar of the carrack’s second broadside. He glimpsed a storm of pulverized water about the enemy vessels and the flap of white canvas gone mad as the topmast of one galleass went by the board and crashed over her bow. The carrack’s crew cheered hoarsely, but did not pause in their reloading for an instant.

From the maintop the lookout yelled down: “Deck there! The northerly squadron is veering off. They’re going after the nefs!”

Abeleyn bounded to the taffrail. Sure enough, the farther squadron of vessels was turning into the wind. They already had their sails in. Under oar power alone, they changed course to west-nor’-west on an intercept course with the two nefs. At the same time, the remaining three galleasses seemed to put on a spurt of speed and their oars dipped and rose at a fantastic rate. All three of their bows were pointed at the carrack.

Another broadside. The galleasses were half a mile off the larboard bow and closing rapidly. Abeleyn saw an oarbank burst to pieces as some of the carrack’s shots went home. The injured galleass at once went before the wind. There were men struggling like ants on the lateen yards, trying to brace them round.

The whine of shot again, some of it going home. The fight seemed to intensify within minutes. The crew of the carrack laboured at the guns like acolytes serving the needs of brutal gods. Broadside after broadside stabbed out from the hull of the great ship until it seemed that the noise and flame and sour smoke were intrinsic to some alien atmosphere, an unholy storm which they had blundered blindly into. The deck shook and canted below Abeleyn’s feet as the guns leapt inboard and then were loaded and run out again. The regular broadsides disintegrated as the crews found their own rhythms, and the battle became one unending tempest of light and tumult as the vessels of the corsairs closed in to arquebus range and, closer still, to pistol range.

But then a series of enemy rounds struck home in quick succession. There were crashes and screams from the waist of the carrack and in the smoking chaos Abeleyn saw the monster shape of one of the culverins up-ended and hurled away from the ship’s side. It tumbled across the deck and the entire ship shuddered. There was a shriek of overburdened wood, and then a portion of the deck gave way and the metal beast plunged out of sight, dragging several screaming men with it. The deck was a shattered wreck that glistened with blood and was littered with fragments of wood and hemp. But still the gun crews hauled their charges into position and stabbed the glowing match into the touch-holes. A continuous thunder, ear-aching, a hellish flickering light. Some fool had discharged his culverin without hauling it tight up to the bulwark, and the detonation of the gun had set the shrouds on fire. Teams of fire-fighters were instantly at work hauling up wooden tubs of seawater to douse the flames.

The ship’s carpenter staggered to the quarterdeck.

“How does she swim, Burian?” Dietl asked out of a powder-grimed face.

“We’ve plugged two holes below the waterline and we’ve secured that rogue gun, but we’ve four feet in the well and it’s gaining on us. There must be a leak in the hold that I can’t get at. I need men, Captain, to shift the cargo and come at it, otherwise she’ll go down in half a watch.”

Dietl nodded. “You shall have them. Take half the crews from the poop guns-but work fast, Burian; we’ll need those men back on deck soon enough. I’m thinking they’re closing to try and board.”

“You’re sure they won’t try ramming?” Abeleyn asked him, surprised.

Another broadside. They had to howl in one another’s ears to be heard.

“No, sire. If you’re the prize they’re after, they’ll try and take you alive, and a rammed ship can go to the bottom in seconds. And besides, they’re a mite too close to get up the speed for ramming. They’ll board, all right. They have the men for it. There’s damn near a thousand of the bastards in those three galleasses; we can muster maybe a tenth of that. They’ll board, by God.”

“Then I must have my men from your gun crews, Captain.”

“Sire, I-”

“Now, Captain. There’s no time to lose.”

Abeleyn went round the guns in person collecting the soldiers who had taken ship with him. The men dropped their gun tools, picked up their arquebuses and began priming them, ready to repel boarders. Abeleyn glimpsed the enemy vessels over the ship’s side, incredibly close now, their decks black with men, the sails taken in and the chase-guns roaring. Some of the sailors had left their culverins and were also reaching for arquebuses and cutlasses and boarding-pikes. From the tops a heavy fire came from the falconets and swivels, knocking figures off the bows of the galleasses.

A crash from aft which knocked Abeleyn off his feet. One of the galleasses had grappled alongside and corsairs were climbing up the side of the carrack from the lower enemy vessel, scores of them clinging to the wales and waving cutlasses, shrieking as they came. Abeleyn got up and ran to a deserted culverin.

“Here!” he yelled. “To me! Give me a hand here!”

A dozen men ran to help him, some of them canvas-clad mariners, others in the gambesons of his own soldiers.

“Heave her up, depress the muzzle! Quick there! Don’t bother worming her out-load her.”

A crowd of faces at the gunport, one broken open by the thrust of a soldier’s halberd. A press of men wriggling over the ship’s side to be met by a hedge of flailing blades. The carrack’s crew defended her as though they were the garrison of a castle standing siege. There was another shuddering crash as a second galleass grappled with the tall ship. Men on the enemy vessel’s yards cast lines and grappling irons, entangling the rigging of the struggling vessels, binding them together, whilst in the carrack’s top the falconets fired hails of smallshot and fought to cut the connecting lines.

“Lift her-lift her, you bastards!” Abeleyn shouted, and the men with him lifted the rear of the culverin’s barrel whilst he wedged it clear of its carriage with bits of wood and discarded cutlasses.

A wave of enemy boarders overwhelmed the carrack’s defenders in the waist. The men around Abeleyn found themselves in a vicious melee with scarcely room to swing their swords. When men went down they were trampled and stabbed on the deck. A few arquebus shots were fired but most of the fighting was with steel alone. Abeleyn ignored it. He grasped the slow-match that lay smouldering on the deck, was knocked to his knees in the slaughterous scrum, stabbed his rapier into a howling face and had the weapon wrenched out of his hand as the man fell backwards. Then he thumped the slow-match into the culverin’s touch-hole.

A flash, and a frenzied roar as it went off, flying back off its precarious perch. It fell over, crushing half a dozen of the enemy boarders. Abeleyn’s own men surged forward, cheering hoarsely. A hellish cacophony of shouts and screams came from over the ship’s side. Abeleyn struggled to the carrack’s larboard rail and looked down.

The galleass had been directly below and the heavy shot had struck home. The deck was closer to the water already, and men were diving off it into the foam-ripped sea. The vessel was finished; the cannonball must have blasted clear through her hull.

But the boarders from the second galleass were clambering into the waist in droves. Abeleyn’s defenders were outnumbered five to one. He seized a broken pike, raising it into the air.

“To the castles!” he shouted, waving his pike. “Fall back to the castles. Leave the waist!”

His men understood, and began to fight their way inch by murderous inch towards the high fore- and sterncastles of the carrack which dominated the waist like the towers of a fortress. A bloody rearguard action was fought on the ladders there as the corsairs sought to follow them, but they were held. Abeleyn found himself back on the quarterdeck. Dietl was standing there holding a rope tourniquet about one elbow. His hand had been lopped off at the wrist.

“Arquebusiers, form ranks!” Abeleyn screamed. He could see none of his officers present and shoved his men about as though he were the merest sergeant. “Come on, you God-damned whoresons! Present your pieces! You sailors-get a couple of those guns pointing down into the waist; load them with canister. Quickly now!”

The Hebrian soldiers formed up in two ragged ranks at the break of the quarterdeck and aimed their arquebuses into the raging press of men below.

“Give fire!”

A line of stabbing flames staggered the front ranks of the boarders down below. Men were flung back off the ladders, tumbling down on those behind them. The waist was a toiling mass of limbs and faces.

“Fire!” Dietl yelled, and the two canister-loaded sakers which his mariners had manhandled round erupted a few seconds later. Two groups of shrieking corsairs were levelled where they stood, and the bulwarks of the carrack were intagliated with gore and viscera as the thousands of balls in the canister shot tore through their bodies. On the forecastle, another rank of arquebusiers was firing, dropping more of the enemy, whilst the men in the tops were blasting almost vertically downwards with the little falconets. The corsairs who had boarded were thus surrounded on all sides by a murderous fire. Some of them ducked into the shattered hatches of the carrack, seeking shelter in the hold below, but most of them dived overboard. Scores of them left their bodies, or what was left of them, strewn across the reeking deck.

The gunfire petered out. Farther to the north they could hear broadsides booming as the nefs fought for their lives against the other squadron, but here the corsairs were drawing off. One galleass was already awash, the sea up to her scuppers and her bow half submerged. Another was drifting slowly away from the carrack, the men in the tops having cut her grappling lines. The third was circling just out of arquebus range like a wary hound padding round a cornered stag. The water about the four vessels was crammed with swimming men and limp bodies, pieces of wreckage and fragments of yards.

“They’ll ram us now, if they can,” Dietl panted, his face as white as paper under the blood and filth that streaked it. He was holding his stump upright with his good hand. Bone glinted there, and thin jets of blood spat from the severed arteries despite the tourniquet. “They’ll draw off to gain speed and pick up their men. We have to hit them while they’re at close range.”

“Stand by the starboard guns!” Abeleyn shouted. “Sergeant Orsini, take six men and secure any enemy still on board. Load the starboard culverins, lads, and we’ll give them something to remember us by!” He bent to speak through the connecting hatch to the tillermen below, who all this time had been at their station keeping the carrack on course through the storm of the fighting. “Bring us round to due south.”

“Aye, sir! I mean Majesty.”

Abeleyn laughed. He was strangely happy. Happy to be alive, to be in command of men, to hold his life in the palm of his own hand and tackle problems that were immediate, visible, final.

The gun crews had rushed back down into the waist and were loading the starboard batteries, unfired as yet. The enemy galleass was struggling to brace round the huge lateen yards; both vessels had the wind right aft now, but the square-rigged carrack was better built to take advantage of it than the fore-and-aft yards of the galleass. She was overtaking her foe.

“Tiller there!” Dietl shouted, somehow making his failing voice carry. “Wait for my word and then bring her round to sou’-west.”

“Aye, sir!”

Dietl was going to cut around the bow of the galleass and then rake her from stem to stern with his full broadside. Abeleyn spared a look for the other enemy vessels. One was visible only as a solitary mast sticking above the packed sea. The other was taking on survivors of the failed boarding action and reducing sail at the same time. The sea was still stubbled with the bobbing heads of men.

The carrack gained on her enemy, sliding ahead. The gun crews, or what was left of them, crouched like statues by their weapons, the slow-match smoke drifting from the hands of the gun captains as they awaited the order to fire.

“If we bow-rake her, can’t she ram us amidships?” Abeleyn asked Dietl.

“Aye, sire, but she hasn’t enough way on her yet to do us any real damage. Her oarbanks are shot to hell and she’s not too happy with this stern wind. We’ll rake her until she strikes.”

The galleass was on the starboard quarter now. A few arquebus shots came cracking overhead from her, but mostly she seemed intent on putting her oarsmen and her yards in order.

“Bring her round to sou’-west!” Dietl shouted down the tiller-hatch.

The carrack curved to starboard in a beautiful arc, turning so her starboard broadside faced the beakhead of the oncoming galleass. Abeleyn glimpsed the wicked-looking ram on the enemy vessel, only just awash, and then Dietl screamed “Fire!” with what seemed to be the last of his strength.

The air was shattered as the unholy noise began again and the culverins resumed their deadly dance. The crews had depressed the muzzles of the guns as much as they could to compensate for the larboard roll of the ship as she turned. At this range and angle the heavy balls would hit the bow and rip through the length of the enemy vessel. The carnage on her would be unbelievable. Abeleyn saw heavy timbers blasted from her hull and flung high in the air. The mainmast swayed as shot punched through its base, and then toppled into the sea, smashing a gap in the galleass’ side. The vessel lurched to larboard, but kept coming, her ram gleaming like a spearhead.

And struck. She collided amidships with the carrack and the concussion of the impact staggered Abeleyn and toppled Dietl off his feet. The gun crews of the carrack were still reloading and firing, pouring shot into the helpless hull of the galleass at point-blank range. The decks of the enemy vessel were running with blood and it poured from her scuppers in scarlet streams. Men were leaping overboard to escape the murderous barrage, and a desperate party of them came swarming up the carrack’s side but were beaten back and flung into the sea.

“Port your helm!” Abeleyn yelled to the tillermen. Dietl was unconscious in a pool of his own blood on the deck.

There was a grating noise, a deep, grinding shudder as the wind worked on the carrack and tore her free of the stricken galleass. She was sluggish, like a tired prizefighter who knows he has thrown his best punch, but finally she was free of the wrecked enemy vessel. There were half a dozen fires raging on board the corsairs’ craft and she was no longer under command. She drifted downwind, burning steadily as the carrack edged away.

The third galleass was already in flight, having picked up as many of the corsairs as she could. She spread her sails and set off to the south-east like a startled bird, leaving scores of helpless men struggling in the water behind her.

An explosion that sent timbers and yards a hundred feet into the air as the crippled galleass which remained burned unchecked. Abeleyn had to shout himself even hoarser as flaming wreckage fell among the carrack’s rigging and started minor fires. The exhausted crew climbed the shrouds and doused the flames. The carpenter, Burian, appeared on the quarterdeck looking like a dripping rat.

“Sire, where’s the master?”

“He’s indisposed,” Abeleyn told him in a croak. “Make your report to me.”

“We’ve six feet of water in the hold and it’s still gaining on us. She’ll settle in a watch or two; the breach the ram made is too big to plug.”

Abeleyn nodded. “Very well. Get back below and do what you can. I’ll set a course for the Hebrian coast. We might just make it.”

Suddenly Dietl was there, staggering like a drunk man but upright. Abeleyn helped him keep his feet.

“Set a course for the Habrir river. West-sou’-west. We’ll be there in half a watch. She’ll bring us to shore, by God. She’s not done yet, and neither am I.”

“Take him below,” Abeleyn said to the carpenter as the master’s eyes rolled back in his head. Burian threw Dietl over his shoulder as though he were a sack, and disappeared down the companionway to his task of keeping the ship afloat.

“Sire,” a voice said. Sergeant Orsini, looking like some bloody harbinger of war.

“Yes, Sergeant?”

“The nefs, sire-the bloody bastards sank them both.”

“What?” Abeleyn ran to the starboard rail. Up to the north he made out the smoke and cloud of the other action. He could see two galleasses and two burning hulks, one unrecognizable, the other definitely one of the wide-bellied nefs of his retinue. As he watched, a globe of flame rose from it and seconds later the boom of the explosion drifted down the wind.

“They’re lost then,” he said. The weariness and grief were slipping into place now. The battle joy had faded. Three hundred of his best men gone. Even if the carrack had been undamaged, they would take hours to beat up to windwards and look for survivors, and the two galleasses that remained would find her easy prey. It was time for flight. The monarch in Abeleyn accepted that, but the soldier loathed it.

“Someone will pay for this,” he said, his voice low and calm. But the tone of it set the hair crawling on Orsini’s head. Then the King turned back to the task in hand.

“Come,” he said in a more human voice. “We have a ship to get to shore.”