Sir Ali held the backplate 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 breast plate 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 JSebastian Foster, Duke of Norfolk, strode out onto the deck of his flagship, it was without the plastron. His missed the familiar feel of scab-barded 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 handguard 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-leathern 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 flameshot 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 gunlaying an impossibility. After studying signal flags displayed by the caravel Krystal, Walid said, “That must be a big fire on those gundecks, 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 gundecks 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.