Timoteo picked up his goblet and sipped at the rare, no doubt expensive vintage. He kept his face blank, impassive. After all, the Armenian goat-fucker hadn’t actually called him a liar, hadn’t actually accused him of concealing portions of his past. He had concealed certain aspects of his experiences in the north, but nothing that had any bearing upon this current matter.
“I doubt not, your eminence di Yakubian, that you assiduously seek out those returned recently from distant lands that you may learn from them of those topics which most concern you. I do the same, ferreting out all that I may hear of a military nature. For ever do I try to think of new, untried, and better ways of waging war.
“Now if your eminence feels me to be deceitful, feels that I have withheld knowledge or personal experience that might have a bearing upon the enterprise at hand, perhaps it were better that I withdraw, thanking you all for your kind hospitality, and return to the service of his highness of Naples, leaving your eminences free to secure the services of a captain you can trust. For few are the mutually agreeable contracts entered into by signatories basically distrustful the one of the other.”
Which was a mouthful of pious claptrap, thought Timoteo, and if you don’t know it, my red-capped friend, you are far dumber than I think.
Yakubian smiled lazily. “What need of contracts at all, if all men in this world trusted one another? But you misunderstood, your grace. I was but commenting upon your rather surprising erudition—surprising, that is, for a professional warrior—not suggesting that you had misled us as to your campaigns and your other travels in foreign lands.”
“King Tamhas has a largish personal guard for so relatively unimportant a monarch,” D’Este went on. “In addition to perhaps half a hundred Irlandese noblemen, he has for long employed a band of some twoscore Rus-Goths who call themselves something on the order of ‘Ulfhednarren.’ Does your grace possibly know aught of this rare type, also?”
Timoteo shook his head. “I’ve never been as far east as Rus, your eminence, nor conversed with many as have. Sweda-Goths all consider Rus-Goths to be a strange, barbaric folk with ancient, near-pagan customs and practices; some are no longer even pure Gothic, having intermarried with Finns and Kalmyks and other, singular, pagan peoples, over the centuries. Someone of the Order of Teutonic Knights could probably tell you much more of the Rus-Goths, since they have been fighting them for many a year.”
D’Este nodded. “Well, then, your grace, how long will it require for your company to march to Palermo?”
Timoteo grinned. “They will be under the city walls by the end of this week, your eminence. They are on the march, even as we converse. When will the ships be here for them to board?”
D’Este answered the grin with a pleased smile. “It is most refreshing to deal again with a direct, honest man, your grace. As regards the ships: one is presently unloading here after a voyage from the Spanish Indies; after that, a few days should suffice for the crew to refit her to carry men rather than cargo. The second is due in port any day now from Joppa. As for the French warship, I should estimate a fortnight or something less.”
Timoteo gave a brusque nod of his head. “Very well, your eminence. That will give me the time to sail over to Naples, collect the last of the monies due me from his majesty, and notify him at the same time that I am signing a contract with the Holy See for service outside Italy or Sicily. This last should somewhat ease his mind, for one reason he has for so long retained me was his fear that one of his many enemies would hire me to fight against him; the service he has had me and mine doing for the last year or more could have been accomplished much more cheaply by a far less expensive company or even by the Neapolitan Guards.
“When 1 come back from Naples, I’ll expect the contracts to be ready for the signing and sealing. I’ll also expect to be paid the initial third of the agreed-upon sum, in new-minted gold, please—Spanish onzas would be fine and should be easy to come by in a mercantile city such as Palermo.”
“Your grace, then, distrusts the coinage of his prospective employer, the Holy See?” inquired old Cardinal Sicola, with an inscrutable demeanor.
“Your eminence,” replied di Bolgia, “a coin that contains less than nine of ten parts gold is not and should not be called a gold coin; and when put to the Archimedean water test, a
truly distressing number of Romish gold coins have proved to be as little as three-quarters gold, worth their stated value nowhere save in the states ruled directly from Rome … if there.”
The condottiere braced himself for some sort of indignant explosion, a burst of ecclesiastical wrath from old Sicola. But it failed to materialize. The old man seemed almost to be pleased by the blunt, if unpalatable, truth.
“Very well, your grace,” D’Este agreed, smiling, “the contracts will be drawn and ready for the signing, sealing, and witnessing immediately upon your return from Naples. Your gold will be here too, in Spanish onzas, as you request.”
Bass Foster had but just placed foot to bridging board when a culverin mounted immediately below that board in the Frenchman’s main starboard battery was loosed off, point-blank into the very bowels of her attacker. Bass felt the slippery, springy board rise and shift under his boot soles, then he was falling and, terrified, he tried to brace himself for impact with the cold water that he knew would so very shortly envelop him. He seemed to fall forever, thinking with one part of his mind that it would be suicidal, most likely, to come up between the two ships and be ground between the hulls; but with this much weight on, staying down until he had swum around to the stern or portside of Revenge should be no problem. The problem for him would be in swimming at all, and then in the right direction, while underwater.
The impact of his body slamming full-length on its back on the hard deck momentarily stunned him, sending a galaxy of multicolored stars and suns and planets spinning before his eyes. But then arms were under him and hands were pulling him erect, giving him support until his legs again became a true part of him and could assume their job.
“Luck mit you still iss, mein Heir von Norfolk,” the familiar voice of his ever-faithful bodyguard and servant, Nugai, spoke from close beside him. “One foot more on zee plank out had you been, between zee ships fallen you vould!”
Then, with Nugai’s aid, he was back upon the rail and out on a plank for seeming eons—a plank which bucked and pitched and seemed determined to dump him off to be drowned or crushed. But then, in an eyeblink, he was across, a strangely carven ship’s rail was underfoot, and a maelstrom of breast-to-breast combat lay just ahead and below him.
With other boarders pushing from behind, no more anxious than he had been to spend more time than absolutely necessary on that swaying, treacherous plank bridge, Bass eyed the seething boil of battle as well as he could through his somewhat restrictive visor, seeking a bare spot of decking on which he might light. The search seemed vain and he was deciding he would just have to jump onto one of the embattled men when a large number of the heavy belowdecks guns roared out almost simutaneously and the French galleon heeled over to port, tilting the entire ship enough to send a sizable proportion of the battlers slipping and sliding into a dense mass against the portside rails.
Making a four-point landing on hands and knees, Bass pushed himself almost up, then was smashed down flat as the Frenchman’s portside battery suddenly fired off a salvo and the earlier heel and subsequent tilt was repeated in reverse. Before he could even think of again arising, the mob of fighting men were tumbling and staggering back over to the starboard side of the deck, trampling him underfoot, those who chanced to not trip over or fall onto his recumbent armored body.
He levered himself back onto hands and knees just in time for someone to fall directly onto his back, shrieking dement-edly and finally sliding down to where Bass could see him—a stocky man with reddish-brown skin, still screaming, while making frantic efforts with blood-slimed hands to hold shut a gashed-open belly.
It was not until he had slid and rolled himself to the sheltering lee of the first level of the sterncastle that Bass was able to stand erect once more, look about, and try to sort out just what was going on in the battle royal that the Frenchman’s waist and forecastle were become. He decided that Walid Pasha must be right about this being a true ship-of-war, rather than simply a well-armed merchant vessel; nothing else could possibly account for the large numbers of fighters in his sight on the upper decks while there still were obviously enough left belowdecks to serve and fire the heavy guns. He gulped at realization of the distinct possibility that he and his flotilla had, this time around, bitten off a mite more than they could easily chew.