On the march, Wolfgang had quickly proved himself to be a true boon; having commanded larger and even more heterogeneous forces on marches through friendly territory so many times in the past, he frequently could act to head off potentially troublesome situations before they even began.
As for the Kalmyks. Bass was quick and surprised to note that usually fearless galloglaiches essayed to start no trouble with them, indeed seemed rather leery of them, which fact went far to relieve his mind on the march.
As he sat his horse there upon the Liverpool docks and watched the loading of the troop horses, he thought.
“There’s little sense in warfare to begin with, but this particular exercise, at its very inception here, is completely nonsensical. Here am I, a twentieth-century American, in seventeeth-century—well, after a fashion—England. Weird? You’re damned tootin’ it’s weird! Not only that, but I’m getting ready to embark on a Turkish ship to lead a squadron of Western Isles Scots and Russian Steppes Kalmyks, officered by Irish noblemen, English and Welsh gentlemen, a Portuguese baron, an Arabian knight, a Spanish knight, and the uncle of the Holy Roman Emperor to the aid of the High King of Ireland at the behest of King Arthur III of England and Wales. Back in my own world and time, if I or anyone else had written so farfetched a story, it would’ve—if any editor looked at it at all—been classed as purest fantasy or science fiction.
“And when you throw into the plot a two-hundred-year-old man originally from the twenty-first century …”
But Walid Pasha had sailed the private fleet of the Duke of Norfolk in with an even stranger, weirder story, plus two extra small ships. The Revenge had sailed into the crowded harbor with a low, sleek, fast-looking lugger under tow. As his tale of her taking went, she had come out of a fog bank almost under the bows of Revenge, her crew as surprised as were Walid and his by the occurrence. But the lugger’s sailing master had recovered quickly enough, crammed on more canvas, expertly trimmed what was already on, and sped away at a good clip, knowing better than to try to outfight a full-armed ship of the battle line. Of course, when the lugger fled, Walid opened fire upon her, but she was very close to making good her escape when a chance lucky shot of the Fairley-made breechloading rifled chaser at extreme range took off her rudder and severely damaged her stern. Walid Pasha had developed a fondness for the fast, handy little lugger and suggested to Bass that she be repaired, there in Liverpool, to become a dispatch vessel for the fleet, and Bass acquiesced.
The mystery came with the other prize, a catte, out of Bordeaux, landen with French wines, cognac, brandies, liqueurs, and other assorted European goods of varied qualities and quantities. There also had been, upon the surrender of the vessel, a passenger, a passenger who had named himself a roving chapman of Provence, bound—as had been the little merchant ship—for the capital of the Kingdom of Munster, in Ireland.
“With the catte turned over to a prize crew. Your Grace,” Walid Pasha had said, “the French crew and the passenger were all locked up in the hold, for all were good strong men and just the kind that slave dealers prefer.The prize had been keeping up well with the fleet when the crewmen below seemed to go mad, shrieking and screaming dementedly and essaying to force open the hatches with bare hands.
“The prize master signaled Revenge and Fahrooq was rowed over with a well-armed detachment. When the hatches finally were sprung and the crew emerged to find themselves surrounded by armored men with ready pistols and long arms, the prize master observed that one man of the number originally battened below and not come up.
“Your Grace, the little ship was thoroughly searched, from stem to stem, and the Provencal chapman was not to be found, only his pack and some of his clothing. Yet there was no way that he could have gotten out of that hold.”
“What did the Frenchman say, Walid?” asked Bass.
The captain of Revenge shook his turbaned head slowly. “To believe the tale they all tell—and they have been questioned seperately, all of them—would mean that a man must temporarily suspend his rationality completely. They aver that they had been immured in that pitch-black hold, listening as the ship was worked above them, for some hour, perhaps. Then, from nowhere and suddenly, a softly glowing casket, wrought of a metal the color of dulled pewter, was there, suspended in empty air beside the chapman. It was rectangular—about six or seven feet long, two or three feet wide, and some cubit or so deep, with a strange design upon its lid and no hinges that anyone could recall seeing
“But when the chapman fingered that design in a certain way, the lid arose and gaped wide, whereupon the chapman climbed into it, not taking his pack, the lid snapped shut . . . and all at once, the casket was no longer there, it, its strange glow of light, and the Provencal chapman all gone together to who knows where.”
“This casket,” asked Bass, “it was in the hold all along, not found by those who inventoried the prize’s cargo?”
Walid Pasha shook his head. “No, Your Grace, the hold was searched thoroughly prior to putting the crew in it. There was no such casket anywhere in it. Nor had any member of the French crew ever before seen it, they say; it was not loaded aboard with the cargo in the Port of Bordeaux, they all swear. And although they carried this same chapman as passenger to Munster once before, they did not see anything like that casket that time, either.
“Your Grace, it all seems as if some djinn of the tales used to frighten unruly children had borne off the chapman. Nonetheless, gone he assuredly is. And all of those Frenchmen so terrified that they have since willingly served as seamen aboard others of the fleet rather than so much as set foot back upon the deck of that catte. For that reason, if for no other, I must believe that they assuredly saw something very like what they all say they saw, rational or not.”
For all that both Walid and Fahrooq had fumbled through its contents, Bass insisted that the chapman’s abandoned pack be brought to Sir Ali, Baron Melchoro. Don Diego, and Nugai emptied it and examined each and every item within it, then dismantled the pack itself in search of anything that might have been hidden.
They found mostly small luxury goods—needles and pins of brass, buttons wrought of many and diverse substances from amber to rare woods, perfume-gloves of doeskin, small scissors and smaller tweezers of both brass and steel, laces, points for fastening clothing, gaudy items of gilt-brass jewelry set with paste stones, small cases of flint, steel, and tinder wisps, folding-blade penknives, a quantity of silken thread in vivid colors, two small, narrow bolts of a very high-quality samite (one a rich blue, the other an equally rich saffron), a double handful of buckles of various sizes and materials, a bagful of dried hare’s feet with the claws removed, containers of a black substance that Sir Ali identified as fair-quality kohl, a cosmetic for darkening the eyes, about two dozen bone combs and a half-dozen of low-grade ivory, plus ones and twos or threes of a vast quantity of small fripperies, mostly feminine-looking.
However, sewn cunningly into the thickly layered bottom of the pack they found two pounds of flat rectangles of solid gold, each about of an ounce in weight.
“Now who ever heard of a humble chapman owning so much find gold?” remarked Baron Melchoro. “And is it not a bit odd that he’d be taking such a fortune along on a trip to a backwater place like the so-called Kingdom of Munster?”
But there was no answer to be given him, not then. The gold went, of course, to Bass, as it had been his ship that prized it. The others took any of the remaining items that tickled their fancies, and the rest was dumped, willy-nilly, into a sack and delivered back to Walid Pasha to be disposed of as he wished.
The examination of the papers of the other prize, the fast lugger, disclosed that she was the property of a group Sicilian merchants. Her last port of call had been Dublin, but she had borne no cargo of any description upon her capture, had rather been in ballast. The sailing master and his mates had been quite silent upon this highly suspect lack of a return cargo for the merchant owners. But when well filled with some of the brandy from the hold of the other prize ship, certain humbler members of the Sicilian lugger’s crew had waxed more voluble, averring that the ship had indeed borne no cargo in the last three trips, either, only passengers, noble passengers, mostly.