The bulk of both boarding parties—from Revenge and Krystal—were now fighting on the decks of the French galleon, yet so many were the men opposing them that they looked to his eye to be close to evenly matched. The only edge he and they seemed to hold was that they were more fully armed than the most of the French. But he had seen too little of real sea combats to know for certain just how much that might or might not count in the scales of victory or defeat.
The tumult was indescribable, but he was surprised at the few gunshots—and most of them from overhead in the rigging, or from his own ships—until it came to him all at once that the boarders had probably fired their one or two pistols early on and had had neither the time nor the opportunity to recharge the pieces, even if they had managed to hold on to them.
With his mind running in such direction, he hastily drew and checked the priming in all of his own pistols, then drew his sword and hung it securely from his wrist by the knot. And then he took a closer look at the broil, seeking where he could be of best use just now.
There, stalking through the melee in almost full plate— very ornate, highly decorated plate, at that—strode a man about as tall as Bass Foster, roaring something that sounded a bit like a song and was certainly not in French, and swinging to deadly effect something that looked a good bit like a Lochaber ax.
Bass looked at that bloody axblade, looked at his makeshift shorts word, and shook his head. “No way!” He unslung one of the wheellock horsepistols, glanced to see that the pyrites were hard against the wheel, leveled the two-foot weapon, and squeezed the trigger.
The big pistol belched a yard of flame and a ten-gauge leaden ball, its recoil kicking its muzzle high in the air. When the smoke had cleared, the armored axman was on his back on the deck and other combats were raging over and around him.
Something clanged against Bass’s breastplate, then fell at his feet. He looked down to see something that tugged at some part of his memory: a heavy, grooved, rounded stone with a curved hardwood handle shrunk around it and what looked like a single tine from a deer antler mounted on one side of the stone.
But he was granted no time to think where he might have seen the like of this outre weapon, for from out the mob, rushing hard at him, came another axman, armored similarly to the first, but with less complete and far less ornate armor. It was the same impressive, very frightening kind of ax, though, so Bass drew another pistol and shot down this man as well. He was hopeful that the French foe would run out of armored axmen before he ran out of loaded horsepistols.
“I was a goddamned fool to let them get me gussied up and come on this boarding party anyhow. This kind of warfare is a young man’s game, and I’m over forty years old! How the hell did I wind up with the reputation of a diehard fire-eater in the first place? All I’ve done since we first arrived in this blood-soaked slice of universe was try to stay alive and in one piece. The last thing I wanted to do was to hurt anybody.
“So, what happened to old peace-loving Bass Foster? I had to start killing the very first day I got here and I’ve since found myself being shoved, willy-nilly, from one slaughtering place to another, year after year, expected to make killing and maiming and crippling men my life’s work.
“And part of what scares me about it is that I do it so well, so naturally, that even career ruffians like de Burgh and the rest of the galloglaiches are sure that I’m one of them.” In my world, in the world I came from, people like what I’ve become here are locked away for life in soft rooms, not cheered and honored and rewarded. …”
His momentary musing was interrupted by the onset of a fresh, though smaller, wave of boarders. They came pouring out of the stern- and forecastles, the men from the two Bigod sloops.
Bass halted the couple of dozen armed men before they could all exit the sterncastle and become lost in the madhouse in the waist. Raising his visor for recognition, he ordered, “Go below, to the gundecks, and kill every gunner you can catch. Two or three salvos at this range are about all that the caravel can tolerate, and they’re not doing my flagship any good, either.”
As the men disappeared into the bowels of the embattled ship, Bass peered again into the shifting, gory fracas in the waist, trying in vain to spot Sir Ali ibn Hussain or Nugai the Kalmyk. He could not see them anywhere on their feet . . . and most of the bodies on the decks could not be seen long enough between the legs and feet of the combatants to be identified.
Unbeknownst to Bass, the heel of the French galleon following the first salvo, that which had flung him face down onto the deck, had precipitated the Arabian knight into the water between the Frenchman and Revenge. But what had happened to Nugai had been of even more singular a nature. Beset with the strain of the sudden lift and tilt, the overly springy boarding bridge had come loose of the spikes and, snapping back from its forced arc, flung the wiry warrior bodily, as if hurled by a seige engine, up into the rigging of Revenge.
Sir Ali had learned to swim in the warm sea near his Arabian home and he did not fear this one, for all that it was colder by many degrees. He allowed the weight of his armor and weapons to bear him down, out of the dangerous area between the two hulls. Then, trusting in his sure directional sense, he struck out with strong strokes, leftward and upward, to finally surface almost at the very side of Bigod’s sloop, Lioness, where willing hands first threw him a line, then drew him up from the sea.
By the time that Lioness’s grapnels had bitten deep and the sloop had been warped tight to the bow of the Frenchman, Sir Ali had drawn the wetted loads from his pistols, recharged and reprimed them, dried off his sword, borrowed a helmet and a spikebacked boarding ax, and wangled a place in the very first wave of boarders to clamber up onto the bow of the enemy vessel.
No sooner had any of them set foot on the galleon than did a suicidally courageous French gunner turn about and fire a long swivel piece. Had the two-inch bore been loaded with langrage or even with a handful of pistol balls, it might have done—like a huge shotgun—for the first wave, then and there. But it was loaded with but a single bore-sized stone ball . . . which chanced to take Sir John Hailey in the face left exposed by his visorless bascinet, wrenching off both helmet and head and flinging the blood-spouting body back down onto the heaving deck of the sloop Lioness.
The gunner turned to run, but had taken only a single step when Sir AH’s hard-flung ax took him between the shoulder-blades. As he wrenched the weapon free, the Arabian assumed the command that had been the responsibility of the so recently deceased Sir John Hailey.
Waving the red-edged ax, he shouted, *’These damned gunners the most dangerous are. Let’s get down below and from their warrens drive them up, away from their guns. You, there, and you, stay here and the next wave send after us to the main batteries.”
Sir Ali and his force found no living men in the forecastle or on the deck immediately below their point of entry. Descent to the main gundeck revealed that they were blocked off from most of it by a smoldering, intensely smoky fire, so they all continued downward to the lower gundeck.
There they proceeded to wreak bloody slaughter among and upon the near-naked, ill-armed, or completely unarmed gun crews. The few French who survived the savage depredations only did so by dint of throwing themselves out open gunports. Then the red-handed butchering-party ascended to the main gundeck by way of one of the stern ladders.
Hurled high into the main shrouds, poor Nugai’s helmeted head was slammed hard against an oak-and-iron pulley, stunning him, and he would surely have fallen the twenty-odd feet to the waistdeck had not a nearby archer grabbed, held, and steadied him long enough for him to regain full consciousness and equilibrium.
Before the Kalmyk could thank his savior, a large-caliber arquebus ball struck the Turk’s forehead with a splattering sound and, with a gasp, the archer slumped limply against the waistband that held him secure in the shrouds, letting go his short, powerful bow.