By the time he had finished this he was close enough to Giles, Brian, Jim and Secoh to lower his voice. He and Dafydd came to a halt.
"Sir knight," he said softly, "will you get me killed? Aside from losing me my boat and whatever else may happen to me?"
"Oh," said Jim, lowering his own voice. "Sorry."
"I was born here of an English father and grew up in England. But I know this town as well as I know the Cinque Ports of our own land. I have always gone back and forth between them and Brest, and the local people here know me as one of them. It is a double identity that makes itself well worthwhile, on occasion. But do not raise your voice and call me Englishman, again, m'lord, if you value my life at any price at all. And if you want to get back to England, you'd best value my life. For you could not get there in my ship alone, I tell you this."
Jim had sense enough to accept this. However, Giles's quick temper was still not back at rest.
"And why not, master mariner?" snapped Giles.
"Even if you could get out past the underwater rocks of Brest safely, sir," said the man, "the Channel winds and waters would keep you from reaching the other side. You know nothing about ships, or about weather. You know not when to furl or let fly, when to turn and run before the wind or use it. That and more other things than you can count. But, let us not argue. I am with you because you are Englishmen; and because I'm told by this Welshman here that it is to England's great service that you be gotten back there as quickly as possible. My name, sirs, is Giles Haverford—"
"Hah!" interrupted Giles again, scowling fiercely. "Giles is my name!"
"I cannot help that, sir," said the shipman. "It is mine as well, as well as the name of many in England, and France as well. I am known in this port as Edouard Brion."
"Then I shall call you Edouard. Hah!" said Giles. He looked around at his Companions. "And my friends will also, possibly?"
"Be glad to," said Jim. "Anything to keep peace in the family."
Everyone but Dafydd, who was not ordinarily given to facial expressions that showed what he was feeling, blinked at Jim.
"Er—just a saying where I come from," said Jim, "it simply means I think it's a very good idea if we do all call the master, here, Edouard."
The others all made noises of agreement.
"Now, sirs," said Edouard somewhat rapidly, "if we were away it would be best to make it now, without further delay, on the outgoing tide which is now just past its full. Come with me as quickly as you can, then. We will board and up sail."
Secoh loaded himself with their baggage. Dafydd led the horses; and they followed Edouard. They were led nearly to the end of the wharves in the opposite direction from which Jim and Brian had gone. At last they stopped by a boat that was one of the slightly larger ones docked there; though it was built in the usual pattern, with an open deck, except for the forecastle cabin up in the bows. Its deck lay perhaps six inches below the level of the wharf.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Edouard Brion (or "Giles Haverford," when he was in England) turned away from the boat, looked up the slope at yet another line of what appeared to be drinking establishments; and stuck two fingers in his mouth.
He whistled shrilly. Then, without waiting for an answer, he turned again and jumped down onto the deck of his own ship.
"I'll throw a rope from the bow of the vessel," he called. "As you see, she's moored by her stern. One or two of you will have to catch it; and at least two of you will have to help pull her bow around to the deck. Meanwhile I'll be getting some planks to make a way to bring your horses down to the deck."
He did exactly what he said. Dafydd and Secoh caught the line and pulled the bow in; partly because neither Giles nor Brian made any move to do so and partly because the other two apparently took it for granted that they were supposed to do such things.
The bow came slowly around so that the port side of the boat bounced gently against the rough edges of the planking that made the surface of the wharf. Edouard arose from an open hatch midway in the boat, dragging two long, thick planks, each possibly a few inches more than a foot wide. He pulled these to the side of the boat and passed them up into the hands of Dafydd and Secoh; who by this time had, under Giles's direction, tied the rope from the bow about one of the blocks which for that purpose protruded upward from the face of the planks and were spaced regularly along the wharves.
The two loose planks were laid and the gear was carried aboard; while Edouard laid the steering oar in its chocks, ready to have its blade lowered into the water. Then the horses were both coaxed and pulled down the planks. The last aboard was Brian's magnificent war horse, Blanchard of Tours; to buy which he had spent all his inheritance, except the half-ruined Castle Smythe and the immediate ground around it, with a few poor farms and the serfs who worked them.
Blanchard had now been persuaded to get on the planks, but once on them, he had decided that he did not like them; and even less did he like the fact that they sloped downward ahead of him and felt slippery underhoof.
"Come on, Blanchard, damn you!" snapped Sir Brian, pulling hard on the horse's reins. But Blanchard, who was afraid of nothing in battle, had a horse's instinctive dislike for insecure footing. He neighed and refused to move.
"Look! Look!" cried Secoh, suddenly from the wharves to the vessel. "More georges, in their shells, coming out on the wharves on horses and getting down from them!"
Edouard swore.
"I'll have a fine time talking myself back into the good graces of the shipmen here in Brest after this!" he said. "However, in for a penny, in for a pound."
The men-at-arms were indeed coming in their direction.
"Blast and damn you to hell, Blanchard!" roared Brian. "You will come!"
Bending down swiftly, he pulled the golden knight's spur from his left heel and jabbed it into the nearest side of Blanchard's hindquarters.
"Charge, Blanchard!" he shouted.
Training broke through instinct, just long enough to get Blanchard moving. He half galloped, half slid down the planks and headed at speed up toward the front of the vessel. If it had not been for Brian and Giles both grabbing at his reins and stiffening their heels against the deck boards to hold him back, he would have tried to gallop down the steps of the forecastle, and undoubtedly broken both front legs.
He came to a trembling halt, panting and wild-eyed.
"Swef, swef, Blanchard," said Brian in a soothing voice, "now, now, calm, great horse…"
He patted and stroked the neck of the sweating and still terrified animal; and Blanchard began to calm.
"Will you leave the beast be, sir knight?" shouted Edouard, hauling with all his strength to get the planks back on board. "Better he go overboard than let those men-at-arms catch us and we all be put to death right here."
Jim was staring at the oncoming troop. The only thing he could imagine was that after counting themselves back to ordinary consciousness, Ecotti could have used some of his sorcerer's magic—not possibly to make himself remember what had happened while he was under hypnosis or the King to remember consciously—but to make the King tell him what he had told Jim.
If that had happened, Jim's questions and the King's answers would have been known. These men-at-arms would have been dispatched immediately. On horseback, the residence of King Jean was only minutes away. Now, what Edouard said was only too obvious. Either the boat got underway immediately; or the men-at-arms would overwhelm them. Forty or fifty enemies all at once were too many.
Though that number was already being reduced. Dafydd, with his usual coolness, had laid out his quiver of arrows where it was convenient to reach; and one by one he was knocking off their horses individuals among those who were charging at them.
The men-at-arms were identically dressed in chain mail; but all wore steel breastplates over this, with the royal French arms graven upon their surfaces, and now shining red in the light of the setting sun. Possibly that was why Dafydd's arrows were taking them in the
throat or some other less protected spot on their bodies. However, in any case, any of those he hit were out of the fight that was coming. But there were too many of them for the loss of these to make an important difference in the odds.
"Cut the bow and stern ropes!" Edouard was shouting.
But, while the men-at-arms were still some little distance up the wharf, approaching at the trot to which the weight of their arms and armor reduced them, three barefoot young men in ragged shirts and trousers had now appeared on the wharf above the boat. They had come at a run; and now they leaped down lithely to its deck. They went instantly to casting loose the ropes with which the boat was tied to the wharf fore and aft.
As the last rope came free, the boat began to drift away from the dock.
Unfortunately, at that moment, an errant wave obstinately chose to push them back against the dock again. Their return was just in time for the leading members among the men-at-arms to reach the wharf above the vessel and begin jumping aboard.
Meanwhile, one among them had thrown a rope with a grapnel on the end and caught hold of the bow; and several of them together pulled the boat back alongside the wharf.
The rest of the men-at-arms swarmed aboard. The sheer weight of their numbers drove Giles, Jim and Brian back across the deck. None of the three had had time to put on more than their chain mail shirts. Jim had donned his before leaving the inn; and Brian and Giles had put theirs on the minute Jim had got them out of the dungeon.
They were otherwise without armor, and, except for Jim, without helmets. For weapons, they had only the swords and poignards hanging from their knight's belts, plus Dafydd's bow.
So weaponed, and lightly protected, the three of them met the rush of their heavily half-armored opponents; who by weight and numbers alone, threatened to overwhelm them.
There was no doubt that Brian and Giles, at least—and probably Dafydd, who had now laid aside his bow and was fighting alongside them with the long knife he always wore in a scabbard down along his leg—were man-for-man more than a match for any of their attackers. But faced with so many, it was only a matter of time before they were slain or captured.
Secoh clapped his hands.
The human clothes that Jim had caused to have bought for him flew apart in rags and tatters. He was once more a dragon.
With one powerful pump of his wings he rose above the heads of everybody there, to about a dozen feet of height; and kept himself there with an occasional downbeat, opening to the full his massively toothed jaws and spreading the scimitar-shaped claws that tipped his forelimbs. He roared.
The royal French men-at-arms were brave men. Probably, unusually brave men. Else they would not have been wearing the Leopards and Lilies, which were France's coat of arms, engraved on their breastplates.
In dragon terms Secoh was a shrimp. But, hovering now just a few feet above their heads, with more than twenty feet of leathery wing outstretched, the setting sun behind him casting his shadow for yards along and up the slope toward the drinking houses beyond the wharf, he was too much like some creature out of a nether world for them to stand and face.
He had, as far as they could tell, appeared from nowhere; and that he was hell-born was all too likely. The English, as everyone knew, would use any abomination (witness the fact that His Holiness, Pope Innocent the Second, at the Second Lateran Council in 1139, had banned bowmen, like the one here, as unfit for Christians to make use of—except, naturally, against infidels).
The men-at-arms could not get away from the boat and wharf fast enough.
One of the crew—those three who had leaped aboard just before the men-at-arms got there—cut the grapnel-ended rope. The other two had already been busy setting the sail; and Edouard was now putting the blade of the steering oar in the water. In a moment they were moving—slowly, it was true, but moving—away from the wharf, gaining speed as they went and heading toward a part of the bay where no land showed, the mouth of the Rade of Brest to the open sea. Secoh landed back on the deck, looking pleased with himself.
"Well done, Secoh," said Jim.
Secoh ducked his head bashfully. "It was nothing, m'Lord," he said.
Behind them, up on the hill, the drinking houses from which the pockmarked man's group of mariners had come were now fronted by a silent throng of human bodies, who stood and stared after them.
"I will have to think up a fine tale, indeed," said Edouard between his teeth, "before I risk myself in Brest again. I shall expect you to keep that in mind when you pay me, messires; aside from the lean price the Welshman drove with me. That price did not include cutting off access to the port that is my main source of income."
The words registered strongly on Jim. Whatever pockmarked and his friends might have believed about Jim's story before, the sight of King Jean's men-at-arms striving to take them would have pretty well given it the lie. He and the rest indeed owed Edouard more than had been bargained for originally.
"So far as it is in my power," said Jim to the shipmaster, "I'll see that you don't lose by this."
No sail tried to follow them; and it was not long before they had left the Rade of Brest behind them and were on the open sea.
The sunset still gave them light and the open sea, insofar as they were moving into it, was evidently in a good temper. There was no more than a usual chop; of the sort that the kind of ship Jim thought of as a ship, in contrast to this little boat, would hardly have felt.
In this small ship, however—and Jim made a mental note to remember to call it a ship, since the shipmaster and his crew clearly thought of it in those terms—the motion was definitely noticeable. However, Jim had always been fairly immune to ocean sickness; and his friends also seemed equally free of any problem that way, while Edouard and his crew were quite at home upon the waters.
"A fine day to be returning to England!" said Brian, voicing what Jim thought must be the thoughts of all of them.
But Edouard frowned.
"I would rather be in darkness, or rain," he said. "Our sail can still be seen from a large distance."
"That's not good?" asked Jim.
"We might find an enemy upon the waters who considers us fruit ripe for plucking," said Edouard. "We'll shortly be on the high seas; and prey to any other ship which can take us. Ah, well, we can do nothing but wait for trouble and meet it as it comes."
He turned back to his duties. Jim was becoming confirmed in an earlier opinion that shipmasters were all born pessimists.
They sailed northwest toward England. Night descended and dawn came. From time to time in the moonlight, they had glimpsed other sails at a distance. But none came close, and it was not long before they saw a dark line on the watery horizon ahead. They had seen similar lines on their right most of the trip so far, evidence of the western seashore of France. These ships, Jim reminded himself, liked to stay in touch with the land in their sailing, since they were restricted to navigating by sun and stars once out of sight of any shore.
Abruptly, Secoh spoke.
"M'Lord! M'Lord!" he cried. "There is a dragon up there, staying with us."
He pointed up and seaward, and Jim looked. In his human body he did not have Secoh's dragon-sight. But there was a flier up there, and he was soaring very like a dragon.
"Shall I fly up and challenge him?" asked Secoh eagerly.
"Maybe you'd better," answered Jim slowly. "Don't get into a fight if you can help it."
"I won't!" said Secoh, and took off, with an explosion of wings.
Jim watched. The other dragon let Secoh approach, and for a while they flew so close together they seemed to touch. Secoh left the other, who turned away. In moments, Secoh had thumped back down on the deck making an awkward, one-foot landing. With the other foot he clutched something half-hidden under his body.
"M'Lord!" he cried. Jim hurried to him and felt a heavy bag thrust into his hands. "It was Iren—one of those French dragons. They'll join us against the serpents! Here's their surety."
Jim
barely opened the bag and looked inside. He saw gems—many more of them than had ever been in any dragon passport he had carried. The bag held more than an Emperor's ransom—its worth would have made ransom for a dozen Emperors. Hastily, he passed it back to Secoh.
"You keep it, and guard it," he said in a near whisper.
"Yes, m'Lord," said Secoh softly, but with pride. He took the bag.
Jim turned away with what he hoped was an indifferent expression. He would tell Brian and the others later.
But now there was no doubt that the line ahead of them was the southern-facing shore of England. They were at first too far away to see anything but that streak of low-lying darkness. But with remarkable quickness, it began to grow and resolve itself into the hills and low points of a shoreline, although it was still too soon to make out harbors or towns.
However, there was another sign that they were getting close to whatever harbor had been picked as their goal; for the number of sails to be seen on the waters about them as the day brightened had increased.
The eyes of the crew, and of the shipmaster himself, were now directed at these other sails; apparently to find which, if any, were headed in their own direction.
Edouard himself stood in the prow of the vessel, where its deck raised to become the roof of the forecastle underfoot.
The three other members of the crew stood on the ship's railing, holding to vertical ropes, shading their eyes against the sun and peering both right and left.
The dark line of land ahead was now taking on some shape. Without warning, one of the crew swung himself outside the rope he held to and began to swarm up it. Reaching the top of the mast, he held on to it with one hand, leaning out to gaze under his palm at a ship in the near distance.
The other crew members were now watching him. For a moment there was silence. Then his voice rang out.
"Master! It's Bloody Boots!" he cried. "Fine on the larboard bow, sailing to meet with us!"
Edouard himself, now balanced up on the prow railing itself, where the two sides of the boat converged, held to one of the lines of the mast and peered in the direction indicated.