‘Not a horseshoe,’ Pegy growled at the grim assembly beside him. ‘A crab.’
He managed a mirthless smile at the anxious faces round him.
‘A wee jest on his name. Jack Crabbe was yin o’ Red Rover’s better captains afore the Rover embraced the Kingdom’s cause. Now Jack Crabbe’s ship, the Marrot, is a skulking moudiewart in the service of any who will pay — or more likely his own self.’
‘Hardly his own, I fancy,’ Rossal answered in steady, unaffected French. ‘He is not here by happenchance, flying a banner of the Order.’
He was not, Hal thought, and the thread of smoke nagged at him while the brothers, Angus and Donald, argued about who should shoot first.
‘The range is too great,’ Angus declared. ‘Give it to me — I have the muscle for the work.’
‘You? Ye couldna hit a bull’s erse if ye clung to its tail.’
‘In the name o’ Christ an’ all His bliddy saints — God forgive me — will yin o’ ye shoot.’
Pegy’s exasperated bellow made everyone wince, but Donald drew back until the bow creaked protest, then almost flung the arrow from him. It splashed a score of feet short.
‘Ye see? Ye bummlin fruster — wait until she closes.’
The brothers scowled at each other, but Hal had finally worked out what the smoke was and the chill of it tumbled the words from him like frost.
‘They will not close, nor have need to. They will fire off that engine they have up the sharp end and drop carcasses on us until we burn.’
‘Christ’s Blood.’
The words were out of Rossal’s mouth before he could stop them and he crossed himself at once and fervently offered penance for his sin at the first opportunity. Kirkpatrick grunted out a laugh at Hal’s elbow.
‘I hope you have the chance,’ he added and then glanced at the sail and the fog bank; he noted wryly that the more wind there was shoving the ship, the more the fog bank receded in front of them. It was a grim humour folk had come to expect from Kirkpatrick, but the rasp of it was a grate on the nerves for all that.
There was a dull thud of release, a deeper burst of smoke and a brief flowering of red. Then a tailed star shot up, trailing an arc across to them; it hit the water with a gout of sizzle and splash.
‘In the name of Christ,’ muttered Angus. ‘Yon’s a bad sight — but I am pleasured to see that they can shoot no better than you, brother.’
‘A warning,’ de Villers declared, adjusting the fold of his maille coif so that it covered all of the lower part of his face. ‘This Crabbe does not want us burned to the waterline. He knows what we carry.’
Yet again unspoken words hung above them like a corpse from a gibbet: they had a traitor.
Painfully, the pursuing ship overhauled them, for all Pegy’s bawling and the frantic bucket chain soaking the sail to garner more wind, for all Somhairl’s muscled skill at tillering the bulky cog to suck up the last puff.
Another star trailed smoke out and this time the gout of steam and the splash were far closer. Hal saw Sim climb to the forecastle, stick a foot in the stirrup of the arbalest and begin to wind it; he wanted to call out for the auld fool to watch his white pow, but smiled at himself, standing half-naked and ill-armed and almost as ancient.
‘They want us to heave to,’ Niall bawled from his mast-nest.
‘Signal them to eat shite,’ Pegy howled back and men laughed, though it was mirthless and tied with tension like a harsh twist of cord. Angus did his best to obey, baring his buttocks and pretending to eat the contents, so that the men laughed, harder and more shrill.
Hal could now see small figures on the other ship, using iron rods to carefully lift the burning ball of oil-soaked withies; it was so like the ribs of some beast that men called it a carcass. Drop it, he wished wildly; if you roll yon on your own deck there may be a chance for us this day.
He looked at the sail and then over his shoulder; the fog bank was a cable length away and he groaned — he knew that the pursuers could not risk them escaping in the haar and that this shot would be for a hit. They were close enough that they might actually manage it, too.
Rossal and the others knew it; knew also that the target would be the huddle of black-robed men on the sterncastle, so clearly the ones who mattered that they might as well have waved their own Beauseant banner.
‘Away,’ Rossal said gently. ‘If you value your lives.’
At the same time, Pegy hammered his feet on the deck in a mad dance to signal Somhairl, bellowing at him to heel over hard to farans, to put the enemy off their aim.
Somhairl was leaning hard on the tiller, obediently turning the heavy ship to starboard, when the world whirled from behind him and blasted him to blackness. Uncontrolled, the tiller waved and the cog floundered.
Pegy felt it, yelled out furiously and men turned from their tasks to see, amid the sudden flutter of men spilling from the sterncastle, the slumped form of the Red Shadow; at once Donald and Angus sprang to the tiller and strained, cursing.
‘Dunted,’ Kirkpatrick said, kneeling by the slumped form of the big Islesman. ‘There, ahint the ear. Bigod, it is as well his braid took the brunt, else he would be standing before his Maker.’
A blow, Hal thought, designed to kill, not just to lay the man out for a while. He and Kirkpatrick exchanged glances, each knowing the thoughts of the other at once, from long association; the traitor was here, on board. Hal’s eyes flitted from sailor to black-clad knight; de Villers met his stare and then turned away, while de Grafton laid his shoulder to the tiller and helped the straining brothers. It could have been anyone in the shadows under the sterncastle, Hal thought bitterly.
‘Brace,’ bawled Pegy and the threat of the carcass scorched back on them.
Up on the forecastle, Sim had loaded and rested the arbalest on the merlon, squinting at his target. Bigod, age is a terrible thing, he thought, for I can scarce see more than a blur.
But a blur was fine, provided he could tell man from mast. He shot and the deep whung of the release brought heads round.
Up on the forecastle of the Marrot, Jack Crabbe’s expensively hired ingéniateur studied the roll of the wave, waiting for the second just before it started on the rise. He was a Gascon expert, was Ferenc Lop, even if shooting a mangonel from a moving ship was a new experience and he had, he was pleased to see, mastered it as he had mastered everything else to do with engines.
His hand was up and men watched for the cutting swathe of it, the signal to release. The bird-wing whirr of the crossbow bolt took them by surprise and they recoiled from it, the one with the release rope among them. The latch clicked, the mangonel arm flung forward — just as Ferenc slammed back into it, pinned through the chest.
The power of the muscular mangonel ripped him forward and sent him over the side in a bloody whirl of arms and legs. The carcass, balked out of the spoon, shot sideways, ploughed a burning furrow through the nearest men, spun off the castle and hissed into the sail, where it clung for a moment, before dropping to the deck and rolling a trail of sputtering fire, ponderous as a blazing snail. Flames and smoke shot up, broiled with screams.
Over on the Bon Accord, men stared in awe as the Marrot veered, the smoke obscuring her and the flames clearly leaping up the sail. They turned to where Sim was winding the arbalest, elbows working like two mad fiddlers, and broke into howls of delight. Sim affected nonchalance, shot one more bolt into the smoke, and slithered down to the deck as the first witch-fingers of comforting haar enveloped him.
‘Christ betimes,’ Kirkpatrick declared, beaming, ‘as fine a shot as any by a man half your age.’
‘Aye, aye,’ Sim acknowledged easily, pulling out a rag to clean the steel-bowed arbalest as the crew crowded in to admire it and him. It was only later and only to Hal that he admitted he had been aiming at what he thought was Jack Crabbe — a span of hands to the left of the man he hit.