Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [28]
‘They’ve run out the cannon,’ said Marthe. ‘He is turning to fight.’
Then, above the shouting on deck, they heard Lymond’s voice take over.
The commands were in the peculiar Levantine French used in the Mediterranean fleet. Philippa could make nothing of them, but Marthe, listening, said in the same cool, academic voice she had used all along, ‘Are you interested in technique? This is a classic defence being carried out, with one or two variations. If we lift the hatch-cover a little, I shall show you.’
It was against orders, but it was better than staying in gloom and ignorance below. Leaving Fogge sitting with her eyes shut on the mattress, Marthe climbed the ladder and in a moment had the cover expertly open no more than six inches, for Philippa to see. There was a moment’s silence. Then over her shoulder, she heard the other girl laugh, under her breath. ‘Now indeed, now indeed we shall see,’ said Marthe. ‘Whether our friend shines velut inter Stellas luna minores, or not.’
‘You don’t like him,’ said Philippa. It was a crazy conversation. The sky was dark orange to begin with: how could it be, in the middle of the day? Between the two masts hung the sun, like a strange, pale blue sequin: the sails were down, and the odd light ran like amber over jacks of mail and shields and vizorless helms, over wrought cannon and ranked arquebuses on their crutches; on pikes and swords and halberds, and sank dying into the wadded textures of piled fenders and cables and heaped mattresses and awnings which had been structured with lashed oars and canvas into protection for the oarsmen and entrenchments within the galley itself.
On the long passages, in the prow and the poop, and in front of her, by the sloop and the iron-bound box of the ovens, the ship’s seamen and officers and her own company were spaced: the Master, in a well-greased jack of mail, was standing just in front of her, Jerott beside him, watching the bos’n amidships, the silver pipe round his neck, accepting and transmitting a series of orders from Lymond, unseen on the tabernacle. As the mosaic above her shifted and changed and changed swiftly again, Philippa saw Onophrion, vast in a leather jack, standing in the fougon, a two-handed sword reversed in his fists, and Gaultier, a borrowed helmet framing his narrow, seamed face, kneeling beside another of the six hatches. The slave gang, no longer rowing à outrance, but holding the Dauphiné steadily, head into the wind, were unarmed. But each oarsman, Philippa observed, quite outside the usual custom, had been released from his fetters.
She saw all that, and then the deck above her cleared momentarily of men and she was able at last to catch a glimpse of the sea. Under the queer lurid sky, the water moved, heaving unbroken in a dark and metal-bloomed blue. And shearing through it towards them, sails full, oars flashing, were two attackers, not one: on the port side, a galley like their own, but with twice their cannon and three times their number of armed seamen. And from the starboard side a capital ship, Spanish-built, and armed on all sides with what looked like its full complement of four hundred soldiers. Watching them streaking towards her, Philippa glimpsed the slaves at the oar benches, their ranked faces dark olive and black. Unlike theirs, these galleys were being propelled by Moors, or Arabs or Turks. Small wonder Lymond had realized so quickly that the Dauphiné’s top speed was not nearly enough. There had been no choice but to surrender or fight. But how on earth could he fight?
‘… No,’ said Marthe, in her ear, startlingly continuing a forgotten conversation. ‘I have no great love for him. It is a consolation. Think, if he were able to deliver us from this engagement, how very trying