The French Executioner (24 page)

‘And I by yours.’

As they gripped each other’s forearms, Haakon ran up.
‘Now then, my friends,’ he said, ‘you’ll have to leave your lovemaking till later. In case you hadn’t noticed, we’ve a fight
on our hands.’

The huge Norseman was shaking with the excitement. He threw the axe high up in the air, clapped them both hard on the back,
and caught the weapon as it fell.

‘Haakon,’ Jean spluttered, ‘we will in all likelihood be dead before this day is out.’

‘I know,’ yelled the Viking. ‘Isn’t it wonderful? If only Fenrir were here.’

Further comment was cut off by the cry ‘To oar! To oar!’ Placing their weapons beside them, the three seized the huge oaken
beam and, on command, began to row at triple time. Hated though Big Nose was, his earlier action had impressed them all. If
he could give them any temporary advantage in the forthcoming battle, they would take it happily.

He was preparing to do just that. The enemy were a bare three hundred paces astern now, preparing to pass him on either side
and trap him in the pincer between them. If they succeeded in that, the
Perseus,
and more importantly its captain, were doomed.

‘Now is the time, Corbeau,’ he called down.

‘Port! Reverse oars. Starboard, row!’

It was a manoeuvre known as the Drowning Stop, because it could turn the boat on its side if executed wrongly. And the
Perseus,
lurching to a halt that caused all its timbers to shriek under the strain, spun around from its middle and seemed for one
ghastly second to be about to roll all the port-side rowers, including Jean, Haakon and Januc, into the sea. The Norseman,
closest to the gunwales, even dipped his hand into the liquid and splashed his face before the ship righted itself, the port
side came up and they were facing the onrushing Arab galleys, the smaller of which seemed to be directly before them.

As Corbeau called again for triple time on both sides, Ganton needed no prompting from his captain. He yelled at
his gun crew, ‘Shift to port! Far enough, you dogs! Now back a foot! Enough!’ He wrenched at the adjusting gear, uttered a
swift prayer to the Virgin, and touched the taper to the hole.

Once more the
Perseus
bucked along its length from the recoil; once more the smoke rolled in a dense cloud across the deck. When it cleared, Jean
was one of many to give a cheer for the shot had taken out the main mast of the smaller galley, its black crescent banner,
rigging and spars even now falling on the oarsmen, causing the ship to slew to the side.

Above the cheering, all heard the renewed call to row. The Silver Serpent galley had straight away changed its course and
was sweeping down upon them. The black robed figure could be heard now, shouting commands at his men, above the shrill war
cries of North African trumpets. There were maybe two minutes before they would be joined.

‘Musicians!’ cried de la Vallerie, striding towards the foredeck. ‘Strike me up galliard!’

And when the music of that dance, banned by half the royal courts of Europe for its scandalous sensuality, blared out across
the deck of His Majesty’s good ship
Perseus,
its captain put one hand to an armoured hip and began to caper.

‘Oh, sweet Mother.’ Haakon shook his head. ‘He’s mad as well as ugly.’

‘But he can sail,’ said Jean, for even as Big Nose executed his nimble steps it was not the only dance he was involved in.
He was yelling commands at all around him, trying to take the enemy head-on, to hole the bigger galley at the waterline with
his iron ram. Hakim i Sabbah, wanting the prize of the
Perseus
as much as the victory, was trying to take him side-on for the grapple. Like two wrestlers they bore warily down upon each
other, trimming and shifting with oar and sail.

‘Listen,’ said Januc, turning urgently to his two companions as they rose and fell, ‘there are three things you will need
to know to have any chance of surviving a fight on a galley.’

Jean leant in. ‘And they are?’

‘One: as soon as we come alongside they will lay down a barrage of arrows on our decks. They are firing from above, but they
know that the soldiers’ armour will mostly protect them. As they will have seen us armed, they will be aiming for us. So until
they board us, stay under the benches. And keep your arses tucked in.’

Haakon looked sceptically at the small bench. He was a big man.

‘Two: wait till you hear our second volley before you come out. My guess is Big Nose will shoot half his soldiers on the grapple
and half when the enemy board. You don’t want to take an arquebus ball from your own side.’

‘Good,’ grunted Haakon. ‘And the third?’

Januc’s attention had been taken by something on the foredeck, clutched in the captain’s hand.

‘What?’ he said, half-mindedly.

‘Three. You said there were three things we would need to know.’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said the distracted janissary, ‘three.’

And quite suddenly he abandoned the oar, dodged the flailing whip of a cursing Corbeau and ran for the foredeck. Arrows were
already beginning to fly towards the
Perseus,
but the arquebusiers held their fire. Two rowers in front and one to the side of Jean leapt up, plucking at feathered shafts
jutting from their necks.

They were maybe two hundred paces from the enemy and closing fast when Januc gained the captain’s side. De la Vallerie had
ceased his dance.

‘Captain,’ Januc said, pointing at the Turkish bow, ‘let me try.’

De la Vallerie looked at the naked prisoner before him, at the tuft of jet-black hair on his scalp.

‘It’s mine, prisoner.’ The nasal voice was petulant. ‘Why should I give it to you?’

‘Because I can kill their gunner. Isn’t that what you are trying to do?’

It was. The bow of the janissary, however – animal sinew wound around a core of maple with a hand grip of bone – was not like
the light weapons de la Vallerie had hunted with back in Bordeaux. Despite all his practice, despite the desire, he’d never
mastered it. He’d already sent an arrow towards the rear of the galley where he saw the enemy gunner crouched over his basilisk,
a cannon filled with deadly packets of small sharp metal that could devastate his soldiers at close range, and he had already
witnessed their gunner’s accuracy. If this one could be killed, it would certainly increase the odds in his favour.

De la Vallerie didn’t like standing this close to prisoners and he raised the pomander to his face. Yet over it, something
in the grey eyes, some certainty therein, held his own. Experience taught him that battles were won or lost on instinctive
decisions. Instinct now made him hand over the bow. He then turned his attention back to the forthcoming collision.

They were a hundred and fifty paces away. At fifty, Januc would have to make his shot, and he would get just that one chance,
for the gunner, having made his final calculations, would only raise his head again to fire. Januc swiftly unstrung the bow,
re-tied the loop, placed it between his feet and pulled the shaft down to notch the string.
Much better,
he thought, testing the increased tension. They were maybe eighty yards apart when he selected the best of the arrows, with
the smaller flight required for shorter distances and a narrow tapered head of iron. One to punch through a deer’s head at
fifty paces, as he had done so many times after hours of stalking in the hills around Izmir.

The cry to ship oars came first from the Arab deck, swiftly echoed by Corbeau. Both sea birds were wingless now, propelled
by the last lung-busting pulls, hurtling towards each other. Hakim had won the battle of skills, for the collision was going
to happen amidships, not head-on, and Ganton’s crew had not managed to reload for a final shot in
time. The old gunner sprinted for his own basilisk, primed and loaded on the aftdeck.

Seventy yards, and John Hood, late of King Henry’s navy, latterly in the service of the Moor, came up from behind the gunwale
to sight along his weapon, Mad Meg, named after a harridan wife long since abandoned in Dover. Hakim knew the value of the
man, had stopped to collect him and his favourite gun from the crippled ship, and Hood knew why. He was responsible for snagging
their prize with that wonderful shot to their mast. Now, if he could just rake the foredeck, kill most of the soldiers and
especially that dancing fool of a captain … He raised the glowing taper above the hole.

Sixty paces, no more, and, ignoring the shower of arrows beginning to fall like hail onto the deck, shutting out the cries
of stricken men, Januc pulled the bow back to full stretch. He had not felt the latent power within one for two years, but
his muscles locked in the familiar way, his breathing slowed and he took his sighting. He saw the gunner’s hand make a final
adjustment, saw the head just up above the gun’s end, even saw the gleam in an eye that reflected a burning taper. He sighted
on that gleam, breathed out, leaving just a little air, and released the arrow.

John Hood was lowering the match when something punched him in the face. He had no time to wonder what as he was dead before
he reached the deck.

The arrows had become a dense cloud, and Januc ducked down behind the wooden palisade of the foredeck. Above him, projectiles
pinging off the angled plates of his armour, the captain raised his sword in a swift salute.

‘Keep it,’ he said when Januc offered up the bow, ‘but I’ll want it back later.’

And then, in a scream of twisting, snapping wood that seemed as human as any of the screams of the wounded and the dying on
both decks, the two ships smashed together.

Jean and Haakon had done as they were told and lay in the
muck and filth under the bench. The war cries, ululation of tongue and throat, did not draw them out, and they heard a dozen
arrows thump into the wood above them, one of them lodging itself an inch from Haakon’s nose on the deck. Then a volley of
bullets crashed above them as forty arquebusiers – half the
Perseus’s
complement of soldiers – fired at the first rank of turbaned, scimitar-waving pirates who came pouring over the side of the
bigger ship. Many were hit, bodies plunging down to land on bench and deck. Many were unharmed and naked feet pounded along
the benches above them.

When Haakon went for his axe, Jean yelled, ‘The second volley! Remember what Januc said!’

So they waited, and in an instant there came another crash of gunpowder, more cries of pain and terror, and a flailing body
fell beside the huddled Norwegian. His huge hands reached out to drown the struggling pirate in the mire.

‘Now!’ said Jean, and he and Haakon rolled out from beneath their bench to see the third wave of the enemy, unhampered by
the soldiers struggling to reload, sweep down upon the deck. There was no time to calculate odds, to fear or to take stock.
Now was the time for the battle mist to descend, as red as the blood that sprayed all around them.

A turbaned figure in white ran at him, shrieking, a spear held high, aimed at his chest. Jean side-stepped just in time, the
point buried itself in the gunwale behind him and, swinging the sword level with the spear shaft, he took the man’s head off,
seeing the startled look on the face as it bounced onto the deck. Jerking the spear out, spinning it up in the air to reverse
his grip on it, he hurled it a dozen paces to impale the man who had got behind and under Haakon’s whirling axe, whose scimitar
was poised for the death blow. Haakon noted the kindness with the eyes in the back of his head but had no time to acknowledge
it, for three more of the
enemy, one with a spear and two with swords, were upon him and Jean was unable to decrease those odds further, having three
screaming opponents of his own.

Jean leapt up onto the gangway. Driving forward, his blade circling, he feinted high, caught the man on the left under his
raised guard, slicing him across the chest, then took both the other blades in a square parry as they descended towards his
head and, flicking his wrists in a tight circle, sent the scimitars flying out of their hands. One man leapt in fear onto
the benches while the other reached for and whipped out another scimitar strapped to his back. Jean drove at him and he retreated,
skilfully parrying Jean’s assault, until he smashed up against the hanging body of Ake. The huge black man’s blood had made
that part of the deck slick, and when his opponent’s foot went from under him Jean lunged full length and hit the man in the
chest with the flat tip of his sword. It was the one disadvantage of the weapon, that it could not deliver a kill with its
point, but the blow was enough to knock the man on his back and Jean, bringing his rear leg up, sharply lunged again with
a downward cut, impaling his opponent on the deck.

His efforts had carried him to the steps of the aftdeck, and for a brief moment he found not an enemy before him. It was one
of those curiously calm moments that always occurred in battle, or at the exact moment in an execution when the sword struck.
The noise of it all faded, cries and deathblows were snatched away, the red mist pulled aside like a veil by some unseen hand.
Such moments of clarity had saved his life more than once and it was to save a life now, because within the calm he heard
a small voice beside him. He turned and looked at its source.

Not a hand’s breadth from his own face was another, a huge black one, covered in sweat, contorted by pain, upside down. Brown
eyes stared into his while a voice spoke words he could not understand, yet when accompanied by a look towards his sword told
their meaning perfectly.

Ake was beseeching him for a swift and merciful death.

In the silence that still held him, Jean seemed to move so very slowly up to the hanging man’s feet, as he slowly slashed
the cords there. Taking the weight, he lowered Ake gently down to the gangway, placing his back against the base of the aftdeck.
He then reached for the fallen enemy’s scimitar and laid it in Ake’s huge black hands, saying, ‘Later is always a better time
to die.’

The silence was suddenly swept away by a body knocking him backwards, covering him. He tasted blood, thought it unfamiliar,
and struggled up from under the dead limbs to see Haakon, stark naked, awash with gore, laughing like a maniac above him.