Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [30]
It was this that Jerott watched, and the Master, and Lymond, he knew, from his higher viewpoint behind. The captain of the red galley saw it too, but could do nothing about it. With a whine the projectile arrived, bursting through the taut folds of the sail, and with a triple crack like a whip embraced the sixty-foot mainmast, snapped it, and plunging down with mast, sail and yardarm to the deck brought the mizzenmast crashing down likewise.
Through the choking grey smoke which enveloped him, Jerott saw chaos break out on the red galley. The guns, primed to fire, remained silent; the oars driving her on to ram the Dauphiné’s side remained stuck like toothpicks, askew from her flanks as the slaves struggled beneath the weight of fallen canvas and timber. Jerott looked quickly to starboard.
Nothing that their guns had been able to do had checked the capital galley. With her sides bruised and her bulwarks here and there splintered she came on instead twice as fast, the bos’n’s pipe shrilling, and the shouting of enraged men came from her decks. They looked into the black throats of her cannon and saw the luminous blue of her sails tower against the dark tawny sky, and Lymond, his voice cutting through the uproar of men and ships and the compressed and walloping seas, called, ‘La scie!’
Jerott saw the beak of the capital galley, rushing towards them, suddenly hesitate; saw the bombardiers pause, their orders unfinished, the touch-flame unused in their hands. Flattening back under a stutter of arquebus fire, he took time at last to look to port.
The dismasted galley, out of hand, was driving unchecked towards them, pushed by the wind and the running speed she already had gained. Not only was she directly in her own capitane’s line of fire, but in a moment she would collide at full tilt with the Daupine’s port flank, while the capital galley performed a more orthodox ramming attack on the right. By the attack on the right, the Dauphiné would be held for grappling and boarding. But the beak coming at them from the left, Jerott knew, would stave them right through.
If Lymond had not already given that order. The words ‘La scie!’ and the bos’n’s pipe rang through the galley. There was a jolt which nearly flung Jerott, prepared and braced as he was, off his feet; and then the Dauphiné began, in great leaping thrusts, to drive by the poop, backwards. Trained to a hairsbreadth, the three master slaves on every bench changed hands and feet, and faces turned to prow, sent the solid fifty-foot oars pitching reversed through the water; and their wake hissed unreeling before them.
In vain, the seamen in the black galley fled to the sheets. In vain the slaves, obeying the whistle, stopped rowing and began to backwater. The corsair capital galley, proceeding briskly against the flank of the Dauphiné, faced the red corsair galley, proceeding unmanned on the identical, opposite course, and as the Dauphiné absented herself swiftly backwards, collided the one with the other with a satisfying and ungodly bang.
‘Jesu!’ said Marthe, who five minutes previously, uncontrollably, had again lifted the hatch. On deck, the steady stream of orders continuing, the sail was being broken out, swiftly, and while the bow-oars knelt on the gangway, bearing the loom of the oar, the blade free of the water, the first and fifth men in each bench were running the benches to their back-rowing stations. The third man fixed the footrest. The