The Heretic Kings (8 page)

A flash, and a frenzied roar as it went off, flying back off its precarious perch. It fell over, crushing half a dozen of the enemy boarders. Abeleyn’s own men surged forward, cheering hoarsely. A hellish cacophony of shouts and screams came from over the ship’s side. Abeleyn struggled to the carrack’s larboard rail and looked down.

The galleass had been directly below and the heavy shot had struck home. The deck was closer to the water already, and men were diving off it into the foam-ripped sea. The vessel was finished; the cannonball must have blasted clear through her hull.

But the boarders from the second galleass were clambering into the waist in droves. Abeleyn’s defenders were outnumbered five to one. He seized a broken pike, raising it into the air.

“To the castles!” he shouted, waving his pike. “Fall back to the castles. Leave the waist!”

His men understood, and began to fight their way inch by murderous inch towards the high fore- and sterncastles of the carrack which dominated the waist like the towers of a fortress. A bloody rearguard action was fought on the ladders there as the corsairs sought to follow them, but they were held. Abeleyn found himself back on the quarterdeck. Dietl was standing there holding a rope tourniquet about one elbow. His hand had been lopped off at the wrist.

“Arquebusiers, form ranks!” Abeleyn screamed. He could see none of his officers present and shoved his men about as though he were the merest sergeant. “Come on, you God-damned whoresons! Present your pieces! You sailors—get a couple of those guns pointing down into the waist; load them with canister. Quickly now!”

The Hebrian soldiers formed up in two ragged ranks at the break of the quarterdeck and aimed their arquebuses into the raging press of men below.

“Give fire!”

A line of stabbing flames staggered the front ranks of the boarders down below. Men were flung back off the ladders, tumbling down on those behind them. The waist was a toiling mass of limbs and faces.

“Fire!” Dietl yelled, and the two canister-loaded sakers which his mariners had manhandled round erupted a few seconds later. Two groups of shrieking corsairs were levelled where they stood, and the bulwarks of the carrack were intagliated with gore and viscera as the thousands of balls in the canister shot tore through their bodies. On the forecastle, another rank of arquebusiers was firing, dropping more of the enemy, whilst the men in the tops were blasting almost vertically downwards with the little falconets. The corsairs who had boarded were thus surrounded on all sides by a murderous fire. Some of them ducked into the shattered hatches of the carrack, seeking shelter in the hold below, but most of them dived overboard. Scores of them left their bodies, or what was left of them, strewn across the reeking deck.

The gunfire petered out. Farther to the north they could hear broadsides booming as the
nefs
fought for their lives against the other squadron, but here the corsairs were drawing off. One galleass was already awash, the sea up to her scuppers and her bow half submerged. Another was drifting slowly away from the carrack, the men in the tops having cut her grappling lines. The third was circling just out of arquebus range like a wary hound padding round a cornered stag. The water about the four vessels was crammed with swimming men and limp bodies, pieces of wreckage and fragments of yards.

“They’ll ram us now, if they can,” Dietl panted, his face as white as paper under the blood and filth that streaked it. He was holding his stump upright with his good hand. Bone glinted there, and thin jets of blood spat from the severed arteries despite the tourniquet. “They’ll draw off to gain speed and pick up their men. We have to hit them while they’re at close range.”

“Stand by the starboard guns!” Abeleyn shouted. “Sergeant Orsini, take six men and secure any enemy still on board. Load the starboard culverins, lads, and we’ll give them something to remember us by!” He bent to speak through the connecting hatch to the tillermen below, who all this time had been at their station keeping the carrack on course through the storm of the fighting. “Bring us round to due south.”

“Aye, sir! I mean Majesty.”

Abeleyn laughed. He was strangely happy. Happy to be alive, to be in command of men, to hold his life in the palm of his own hand and tackle problems that were immediate, visible, final.

The gun crews had rushed back down into the waist and were loading the starboard batteries, unfired as yet. The enemy galleass was struggling to brace round the huge lateen yards; both vessels had the wind right aft now, but the square-rigged carrack was better built to take advantage of it than the fore-and-aft yards of the galleass. She was overtaking her foe.

“Tiller there!” Dietl shouted, somehow making his failing voice carry. “Wait for my word and then bring her round to sou’-west.”

“Aye, sir!”

Dietl was going to cut around the bow of the galleass and then rake her from stem to stern with his full broadside. Abeleyn spared a look for the other enemy vessels. One was visible only as a solitary mast sticking above the packed sea. The other was taking on survivors of the failed boarding action and reducing sail at the same time. The sea was still stubbled with the bobbing heads of men.

The carrack gained on her enemy, sliding ahead. The gun crews, or what was left of them, crouched like statues by their weapons, the slow-match smoke drifting from the hands of the gun captains as they awaited the order to fire.

“If we bow-rake her, can’t she ram us amidships?” Abeleyn asked Dietl.

“Aye, sire, but she hasn’t enough way on her yet to do us any real damage. Her oarbanks are shot to hell and she’s not too happy with this stern wind. We’ll rake her until she strikes.”

The galleass was on the starboard quarter now. A few arquebus shots came cracking overhead from her, but mostly she seemed intent on putting her oarsmen and her yards in order.

“Bring her round to sou’-west!” Dietl shouted down the tiller-hatch.

The carrack curved to starboard in a beautiful arc, turning so her starboard broadside faced the beakhead of the oncoming galleass. Abeleyn glimpsed the wicked-looking ram on the enemy vessel, only just awash, and then Dietl screamed “
Fire!”
with what seemed to be the last of his strength.

The air was shattered as the unholy noise began again and the culverins resumed their deadly dance. The crews had depressed the muzzles of the guns as much as they could to compensate for the larboard roll of the ship as she turned. At this range and angle the heavy balls would hit the bow and rip through the length of the enemy vessel. The carnage on her would be unbelievable. Abeleyn saw heavy timbers blasted from her hull and flung high in the air. The mainmast swayed as shot punched through its base, and then toppled into the sea, smashing a gap in the galleass’ side. The vessel lurched to larboard, but kept coming, her ram gleaming like a spearhead.

And struck. She collided amidships with the carrack and the concussion of the impact staggered Abeleyn and toppled Dietl off his feet. The gun crews of the carrack were still reloading and firing, pouring shot into the helpless hull of the galleass at point-blank range. The decks of the enemy vessel were running with blood and it poured from her scuppers in scarlet streams. Men were leaping overboard to escape the murderous barrage, and a desperate party of them came swarming up the carrack’s side but were beaten back and flung into the sea.

“Port your helm!” Abeleyn yelled to the tillermen. Dietl was unconscious in a pool of his own blood on the deck.

There was a grating noise, a deep, grinding shudder as the wind worked on the carrack and tore her free of the stricken galleass. She was sluggish, like a tired prizefighter who knows he has thrown his best punch, but finally she was free of the wrecked enemy vessel. There were half a dozen fires raging on board the corsairs’ craft and she was no longer under command. She drifted downwind, burning steadily as the carrack edged away.

The third galleass was already in flight, having picked up as many of the corsairs as she could. She spread her sails and set off to the south-east like a startled bird, leaving scores of helpless men struggling in the water behind her.

An explosion that sent timbers and yards a hundred feet into the air as the crippled galleass which remained burned unchecked. Abeleyn had to shout himself even hoarser as flaming wreckage fell among the carrack’s rigging and started minor fires. The exhausted crew climbed the shrouds and doused the flames. The carpenter, Burian, appeared on the quarterdeck looking like a dripping rat.

“Sire, where’s the master?”

“He’s indisposed,” Abeleyn told him in a croak. “Make your report to me.”

“We’ve six feet of water in the hold and it’s still gaining on us. She’ll settle in a watch or two; the breach the ram made is too big to plug.”

Abeleyn nodded. “Very well. Get back below and do what you can. I’ll set a course for the Hebrian coast. We might just make it.”

Suddenly Dietl was there, staggering like a drunk man but upright. Abeleyn helped him keep his feet.

“Set a course for the Habrir river. West-sou’-west. We’ll be there in half a watch. She’ll bring us to shore, by God. She’s not done yet, and neither am I.”

“Take him below,” Abeleyn said to the carpenter as the master’s eyes rolled back in his head. Burian threw Dietl over his shoulder as though he were a sack, and disappeared down the companionway to his task of keeping the ship afloat.

“Sire,” a voice said. Sergeant Orsini, looking like some bloody harbinger of war.

“Yes, Sergeant?”

“The
nefs
, sire—the bloody bastards sank them both.”

“
What?”
Abeleyn ran to the starboard rail. Up to the north he made out the smoke and cloud of the other action. He could see two galleasses and two burning hulks, one unrecognizable, the other definitely one of the wide-bellied
nefs
of his retinue. As he watched, a globe of flame rose from it and seconds later the boom of the explosion drifted down the wind.

“They’re lost then,” he said. The weariness and grief were slipping into place now. The battle joy had faded. Three hundred of his best men gone. Even if the carrack had been undamaged, they would take hours to beat up to windwards and look for survivors, and the two galleasses that remained would find her easy prey. It was time for flight. The monarch in Abeleyn accepted that, but the soldier loathed it.

“Someone will pay for this,” he said, his voice low and calm. But the tone of it set the hair crawling on Orsini’s head. Then the King turned back to the task in hand.

“Come,” he said in a more human voice. “We have a ship to get to shore.”

FIVE

B ROTHER Columbar coughed again and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his habit. “Saint’s blood, Albrec, to think you’ve been thirteen years down in these warrens. How can you bear it?”

Albrec ignored him and raised the dip higher so that it illuminated the rough stone of the wall. Columbar was an Antillian like himself, clad in brown. His usual station was with Brother Philip in the herb gardens, but a cold had laid him low this past week and he was on lighter duties in the scriptorium. He had come down here two days ago, hunting old manuscript or parchment that might serve as blotting for the scribes above. And had found the precious document which had been consuming most of Albrec’s time ever since.

“There have been shelves here at one time,” Albrec said, running his fingers across the deep grooves in the wall. “And the stonework is rough, as though built in haste or without regard for appearances.”

“Who’s going to see it down here?” Columbar asked. He had a pendulous nose that was red and dripping and his tonsure had left him with black feathers of hair about his ears and little else. He was a man of the soil, he was proud of saying, a farmer’s son from the little duchy of Touron. He could grow anything given the right plot, and thus had ended up in Charibon producing thyme and mint and parsley for the table of the Vicar-General and the poultices of the infirmary. Albrec had a suspicion that he was unable to read anything beyond a few well-worn phrases of the Clerical Catechism and his own name, but that was not uncommon among the lesser orders of the Church.

“And where’s the gap where you found it?” Albrec asked.

“Here—no, over here, with the mortar crumbling. A wonder the library hasn’t tumbled to the ground if the foundations are in this state.”

“We’re far below the library’s foundations,” Albrec said absently, poking into the crevice like a rabbit enlarging a burrow. “These chambers have been hewn from solid rock; those buttresses were left standing while the rest was cleared away. The place is all of a piece. So why do we have mortared blocks here?”

“It was the Fimbrians built Charibon, like they built everything else,” Columbar said, as if to prove that he was not entirely ignorant.

“Yes. And it was a secular fortress at first. These catacombs were most probably used for the stores of the garrison.”

“I wish you would not call them catacombs, Albrec. They’re grim enough as it is.” Columbar’s breath was a pale fog about his face as he spoke.

Albrec straightened. “What was that?”

“What? I heard nothing.”

They paused to listen in the little sanctuary of light maintained by the dip.

To call the chambers they were in catacombs was not such a bad description. The place was low, the roof uneven, the floor, walls and roof sculpted out of raw granite by some unimaginable labour of the long-ago empire. One stairway led down here from the lower levels of the library above, also hewn out of the living gutrock. Charibon had been built on the bones of the mountains, it was said.

These subterranean chambers seemed to have been used to house the accumulated junk of several centuries. Old furniture, mouldering drapes and tapestries, even the rusted remains of weapons and armour, quietly decayed in the dark peace. Few of the inhabitants of the monastery-city came down here; there were two levels of rooms above them and then the stolid magnificence of the Library of St. Garaso. The bottom levels of the monastery had not been fully explored since the days of the emperors; there might even be levels below the one on which the two men now stood.