Castaways in Time by Adams Robert

After Cromwell had formally delivered the summons, he cheerfully accepted Foster’s invitation to share some of the bounty of food and wine provided by the Spanish.

Under the direction of Sir Ali, Nugai and his new gallowglass assistant had butchered and dressed a kid, stuffed it with a mixture of walnuts, almonds, spices, and its own chopped lights, then roasted it to crackly perfection on a spit over coals, liberally basting it with oil and wine. Preceded by Sir Ali—who had appointed himself majordomo of Foster’s field establishment—Nugai and the hulking Samhradh Mon-aghan bore in the huge platters containing the kid and a quartet of large stuffed and roasted fowls, while trooper-servitors followed behind with crusty loaves of fresh-baked bread, cheeses, bowls heaped high with exotic fruits, spiced bean pasties, sweetmeats, and confections.

Sir Richard appeared vastly impressed by the lavish board and even more so by the score of rare vintages offered in accompaniment. “Winter in the King’s camp was hard, Lord Forster,” he admitted. “Almost as hard for us under the walls, I trow, as for those within them, with both food and fuel at a premium and fodder for our beasts all but nonexistent. Too, there was much illness—camp fever, rheums, fluxes and the like, such as always afflict siegelines. This will be the first decent meal I’ve set tooth to since Christmas, when our good Lord Admiral drove off the escorts of a Papal fleet and captured the victualing vessels intended to succor London.”

Then the stocky captain laughed and slapped his thigh. “On the day after the feast, King Arthur had twoscore earthen pots of dung catapulted over the city walls, noting that he was certain his sister-in-law would not mind if hungry men passed her provisions through their bowels before sending them on to her. The camps chuckled for weeks over that rare jest!”

“Speaking of the Lord Admiral,” Foster injected, “1 have a present for him in the form of three fine Spanish caravels, of which we shortly shall enjoy part of the cargos. He needs but to send crews to man them, since their previous complements are either dead or occupying a prisoner pen down near the waterfront.”

Cromwell stopped with a joint of kid halfway to his mouth and he fixed Foster with widened, ice-blue eyes. “Now, dammit, Lord Forster, Fll be first to grant you the new model Alexander, but just how does a brigade of horse go about naval operations?”

It had been absurdly simple, to Foster’s way of thinking.

Three days after the battle, the morning sun had glinted upon the three suits of sail beating up from the south and, later that morning, the Spanish victualers had sailed into the harbor, bold as brass. The plan had actually been hatched by Sir Ali and Sir Ruaidhri de Lacey, both of whom had had wide-ranging careers as mercenaries and both of whom spoke flawless Spanish.

Rowed out to the flagship of the minuscule convoy, the two knights had spoken at length of the disastrous fire that had leveled much of Lyme, engulfing even the wharves, the ships tied to them, and eke the beached smaller craft and fishing boats—that their own rowboat had been charred here and there bore out their tale. Then they had launched into a story concerning the capture by the Spanish force of a London-bound English siege train, including a score or more of huge, infinitely precious bombards, which guns would be entrusted to the ship captains for transport to and sale in Spain, if only a way might be contrived to get such large, heavy, and bulky monsters on board the ships. Naturally, as cavalrymen, none of the land force knew anything of such labor.

Just as naturally, as the two knights had well known in advance, the ship captains and their crews were old hands at loading and off-loading all manner of bulky and weighty objects, and, fully appreciating the immense value of the booty, their shrewd minds were no doubt hard at work calculating the very maximum percentage of the sale prices they could hope to squeeze out for their services, even as they smilingly assured the two emissaries that the task could not only be accomplished but would be a great honor to them.

When the last boatload of supplies had been piled upon the beach, the two larger ships had eased up to either side of a hastily repaired wharf. The third, smaller ship rolled at anchor, all save two of its crew members having been sent to beef up the working parties of the two larger vessels. Just landward of the wharf, the muzzles of three cannon gaped seaward—not bombards, any of them, but large enough, nonetheless; each a full cannon, capable of throwing a ball of at least a half-hundred weight… or its equivalent.

And that equivalent was just what the unsuspecting seamen received, to their horror, but not until the ships were firmly tied up and decks and wharf thick with men rigging heavy tackle under the supervision of officers and mates. Then, suddenly, all three of the waiting cannon roared, at pointblank range, like monstrous puntguns at a flock of unsuspecting waterfowl. Packed nearly to the muzzles with canister and langrage—the former bore-sized cylinders of thin wood filled with arquebus balls and the latter bags packed with odds and ends of iron, brass, and lead—the effect of the close-range volley upon the ships’ companies was terrible. So shocked and devastated were the stumbling survivors that most surrendered meekly to the troopers and gallowglasses who rushed them with pistols, axes, and broadswords at the ready.

Sir Richard Cromwell had sent gallopers off for both the royal camp and the fleet headquarters base on the Isle of Sheppey with news of the fantastic victory of cavalry over ships, and by the time he, his charge, and their respective retinues had made the long, muddy journey ahorse, the three newest royal prizes were already riding at anchor in the waters of the Thames, just downstream of the siegelines.

But King Arthur was not to be found in his pavilion and Sir Richard’s party was redirected to Greenwich, and so great was Foster’s relief at being able to quit so soon the nauseating stenches and generally pestilent surroundings of the siege camp that he could not put any real feeling into his part of the chorus of curses that the road-wearied men trailed after them on this last and unexpected leg of the journey.

The officer of the day for the pavilion guards had been summoned from a game of draughts and was curt to the point of surliness, but that spry, ancient little factotum Sir Corwin Shirley had been his usual effusive self. Foster had not seen the wrinkled but highly energetic little man since the day of William Collier’s downfall, but for all the brevity of that one meeting, Sir Corwin recognized him at once.

“Oh, my, yes,” he had chirped, wringing his blue-veined hands, smiling and bobbing a bow all at once, all the while shifting from one foot to another as if performing a dance. “I do believe that it’s the Lord Commander of the Royal Horse, Sir Sebastian Forster. Oh, yes, young man, His Majesty is most anxious to see you, most anxious, indeed.

“But you do all things so fast, Sir Sebastian, you were not expected for the best part of another week, no, and His Majesty is at Greenwich, yes. There’s so much sickness in the camps, yes, and His Majesty has need to entertain some high-ranking gentlemen from Scotland, Ireland, Burgundy, and the Empire. They all went down this morning on one of those fine Spanish ships, you know, yes.

“My nephew, young Sir Paul Bigod, is pleased as punch, yes indeed. Says the ships are well-found, most manageable, yes, and with all those fine, long-barreled bronze guns, yes. And His Majesty would not but sail down to Greenwich on one of them, yes, His Majesty and His Grace of York and the Reichsherzog and all the foreign gentlemen, yes. And His Majesty strutting and crowing that nowhere else in the wide world could any of them sail on a ship prized by a brigade of horse, yes.

“His Majesty is most pleased with you, just now, Sir Sebastian, yes indeed. My goodness gracious, yes; why this morning, I think me he’d have gifted you half his kingdom, young sir!”

Then a frown had further wrinkled the oldster’s seamed countenance. “But I must send a messenger ahead of your party, yes, indeed I must, for the castle there is not all that large, no. And with all the fine, foreign gentlemen and their folk and their retinues and with His Majesty and all his nobles, yes. And His Majesty would assuredly be most wroth were his greatly esteemed Lord Commander of the Royal Horse obliged to camp out in some muddy field, yes, or bide in a stable.