Phelim O’LiamRoe, Prince of Barrow, son of Milesians, descendant of Carbery Cathead, of Art the Solitary, Tuathal the Legitimate and Fergus of the Black Teeth, cousin to Maccon whose two calves were as white as the snow of one night, was thin and middle-sized, with a soft egg-shaped face thatched and cupped with blond whiskers. And at this moment, Stewart saw, he was bent double in fruitless converse with a coal-black bow oar from Tunis; thereby closing the main thoroughfare of the galley to seamen, oarsmen, timoneers, soldiers, warders, ensigns, lieutenants and captain alike.
The sweating Moor, bearing down on fifty feet of solid beechwood, crashed back regularly and wordlessly on the five-man bench like a piston, rowing twenty-four strokes to a minute, while the voice of The O’LiamRoe, Chief of the Name, Prince of Barrow and feudal lord of the Slieve Bloom in the country of Ireland, warmly cordial, went on and on.
‘… And it would be queer if we didn’t agree, with leverage itself the great wonder of the world, as my own father knew, and my grandfather twenty-two stones and bedridden. When they came from sluicing him down at the pump they would lay the coffin lid over the turf stack next the bed and sit my grandfather at one end. They had a heifer trained to jump on the other. When the lid was nailed over him at the end my grannie was blithe, blithe at the wake; for she got a powerful lot of bruising when he landed.…’
Robin Stewart winced. He had had two weeks of it. At Dalkey, Ireland, he had had his first sight of the great man, as The O’LiamRoe had shinned ineptly and eagerly up the ladder, to stand revealed on the tabernacle of La Sauvée, a carefree, mild and hilarious savage in a saffron tunic and leggings. His entire train, for which Mr. Stewart had cleared a compartment, consisted of two: the small wild Firbolg called Dooly and the comatose Mr. Ballagh.
Robin Stewart had been mortified: not by O’LiamRoe’s looks, or his dress, or his simple enjoyment of useless knowledge, but because he not only invited questions, he answered them. As a student of human nature, Stewart enjoyed a long, difficult analysis; his onslaughts were memorable. A man talking amicably about the art of the longbow would find that, by means known only to Mr. Stewart, this led straight to God, his total income, and where his schooling had taken place, if any. In one day, the Archer knew that O’LiamRoe was thirty, unmarried, and resident in a large, coarse Irish castle. He knew that there was a widowed mother, a string of servants and five tuaths filled with clansmen and the minimum wherewithal to sustain life with no money to speak of. He knew that, in terms of followers, O’LiamRoe was one of the mightiest chieftains in English-occupied Ireland, except that it had never yet occurred to him to lead them anywhere.
Watching the lord of the Slieve Bloom straighten and move happily off, tripping over an old pennant with a salamander on it, the Scotsman was moved to an irritation almost maternal. ‘And anyway, what in God’s name’s a tuath?’
He had said it aloud. A voice replied in his ear. ‘Thirty ballys, my dear. And if you ask what in God’s name does a bally do, it holds four herds of cows without one cow, desperate lonely that they are, touching another.’ The fat Irishman in the next chair scratched his black poll and recrossed his hands over his comfortable little stomach ‘Surely The O’LiamRoe told you that? Bring in any little fact and O’LiamRoe will wet-nurse it for you.’
Mr. Ballagh, asleep or drunk, had so far escaped the Archer’s attentions. In the dark-skinned, slothful, unshaven face he thought he saw disillusionment, intelligence, the remains of high aspirations perhaps, all soaked and crumbled into servitude and cynicism. He said easily, ‘Ye’ll have been a long time with the Prince?’
Mr. Ballagh’s answer was succinct. ‘Three weeks.’
‘Three weeks too much, eh? You should have made enquiries about him beforehand.’
‘So I could, then; but who would answer me? The fellow lives in a bog and devil the person has laid eyes on him from one end of the country to the other. I heard from a friend of a cousin of a cousin,’ said Mr. Ballagh on a little wave of wine-coloured confidence, ‘that he was wild for a true-bred ollave who could talk in French for him, and here I am.’
The O’LiamRoe had no French. That he had English was a welcome surprise. France, from the lowest of motives, had entertained not a few of the powerful leaders of her downtrodden neighbour, and had sweated over their plots and counterplots in Gaelic and Latin. ‘What’s an ollave?’ asked Mr. Stewart.
Master Ballagh recited. ‘A hired ollave is a sweet-stringed timpan, and a sign, so they say, that the master of the house is a grand, wealthy fellow, and him for ever reading books. An ollave of the highest grade is professor, singer, poet, all in the one. His songs and tales are of battles and voyages, of tragedies and adventures, of cattle raids and preyings, of forays, hostings, courtships and elopements, hidings and destructions, sieges and feasts and slaughters; and you’d rather listen to a man killing a pig than hear half of them through. I,’ said Mr. Ballagh bitterly, ‘am an ollave of the highest grade.’
‘Well, you’re wasting your time here,’ Robin Stewart pointed out. ‘You should be getting grand money for all yon, surely. And what made you take up poetry anyway, for heaven’s sake?’
‘Grand money, is it; and everyone forced by legislation to speak the English?’ snarled Mr. Ballagh. He calmed down. ‘The O’Coffey, who ran the bardic school near my home, had a hurley team would make your mouth water and the blood come out at your ears. I was the fifteenth child, and the nippiest, so why should I object to what my father and The O’Coffey might arrange? The fifteenth. And the nippiest …’
Master Thady Boy Ballagh smoothed the doubtful black of his pourpoint, flicked the limp grey frills of his cuff, and wrapped the stained folds of his robe over his knees. ‘Hand me that bottle, will you?’
And by then it was too late. The squall was already coming, a streaming blemish over the water, and lying over before it the Gouden Roos, a three-masted galliasse caught with every rag on the yards. For a moment still, La Sauvée slid peacefully along. Claret flowed from the leather down Master Ballagh’s throat. Stewart, his arms folded, watched O’LiamRoe’s head bob and the fifty blades rise, catch the red sun and fall into glassy green shadow.
They rose again, but this time the shadow remained. The whole galley disappeared from the sun in the fair blue waters of the English Channel as a thousand tons of galliasse drove at them broadside on.
She was Flemish and foul-bottomed, her sheets paid out on a lee helm so that the westerly squall had caught her and was spinning her leeward on top of them, hurled on by wind pressure on sides, sails and gear. Then the wind caught La Sauvée too. Master Ballagh’s bottle fell from his hand; the chairs in the poop slid, and the galley heeled, her shrouds whining and the long lattice of her shells spiked and quilled along its 150 feet by the oars, clenched, thrashing or rattling loose. The shadow of the galliasse darkened and the captain jumped, shouting, on the gangway. The oarsmen on the starboard side were on their feet. Spray hissed and then clattered on the bared benches, and for a moment the stentorian voice of O’LiamRoe, sliding with twenty others in the mess of pennants and tenting around the open holds, was heard bellowing: ‘The key! The key for the leg irons, ye clod of a Derry-born bladder-worm!’
Stewart, out and gripping the handrail, heard that, and saw that the galliasse, white faces fringing the prow castle, was close-hauling at last, pulling the sheets hard in and bringing up the tiller to head her into the wind. She was a heavy ship, and badly handled. She turned beamside on to the galley and pointed into the wind, her sails shaking, but she was already moving too fast to leeward. The leaping water between the ships shrank and vanished; there was a moment’s shudder; and then wood met wood with a grinding scream of a crash. Twenty great oars to starboard stubbed to needles with the impact, and as the top side of La Sauvée’s low freeboard gave way, twenty shanks in vengeful hunger closed on blood and muscle within, pinning Christian thief and pagan pirate alike with polished beech and spliced lead. The world stopped as the boats locked; then the Gouden
Roos, obeying the helm, lurched off as the sea leaped into the hole in La Sauvée’s side.
Horror, panic and ignorance held Stewart fast to the ship’s side. He saw that the undrilled crew, leaderless, shocked and decimated, had no idea what to do. The bo’s’n had vanished. The captain, wet with spray, was clinging hard to the mainmast and mouthing at the heaving galliasse. There was no sign of the Irish party; then the Archer, taking a step on the jumping, slippery deck, saw O’LiamRoe disappearing down the poop ladder and two black-headed Celts capering down the main gangway closing hatchways and hurling the tangle of pulped bunting in the sea.
La Sauvée began to settle. On her port side she was dry and firm yet; on the roll to starboard she took in green sea with a slap and suck. The galliasse, her timbers buffed and splintered, pitched still at their side. The helmsman had brought the Gouden Roos up to the wind, but with the impact she had lost all her way. She lay clumsily in stays, helpless to sail out of the galley’s hapless path, and the September wind, pranking from side to side, gripped her broad upperworks and began grimly to drive her again, backwards and up to the flank of the stricken galley once more.
The O’LiamRoe, crowbar in hand, appeared for an instant under Stewart and vanished to starboard into the pit of overturned flesh. It seemed a futile errand of mercy. Ashamed of the thought, Stewart leaped down himself and was belaboured like a log in a millrace. The free men, silent with terror, were fighting towards the single spare boat, followed by the first of the unlocked slaves. As he was dragged, twisting with them, a sea broke and hissed on the rambade. They cowered, and then scattered screaming. For the last time the galliasse overshadowed the clotted and struggling ship.
It was then that the whistle blew. It blew twice, and the second time they heard the order, clear, succinct and calm. ‘On va faire voile. Casse trinquet! Timonier, orser!’
There were just enough sane men left to obey; and Robin Stewart was one of them. With violent purpose they leaped for the running tackle of the furled lateen sail, high above them. Willing hands un-clewed the rope; and in the very throat of all the malignant crab-gods of the ocean, they mustered in fright and foreboding the mighty snap of a tug needed to break the sail from its withies and gather the wind to their rescue. The hemp snaked and crashed as they pulled—and the sail stayed hard-tied to the yardarm.
Stewart, glaring swollen-eyed at the masthead, dragged with the others a second time and a third at the sheet. Nothing moved. The galliasse nudged nearer. To leeward the sea suddenly bobbed with a cluster of heads; then more. The skiff, freed on a starboard roll, fell badly and overturned. The slap and crash of the sea, louder than wind-voice and wood-groan and the air-swallowed scream from the injured, rose to a thunder as the ships neared. Stewart, the burrowed skin white and red off his palms, pulled again in heart-gouging unison in vain.
Round, compact and shining with salt, a scrubby figure whisked up the loose foremast rope, its wind-torn black flying, its unclean hands warping the wind-scoured skies to its chest. Master Thady Boy Ballagh, ollave, poet, professor, the fifteenth and the nippiest, climbed straight to the yardarm, made his way to the peak, and sixty feet up over a listing deck, knife in hand, probed the lashings. He used his blade sparingly and with care; then sliding quickly back to the masthead, gave a signal. They pulled.
With a slithering crack, 400 yards of canvas dropped from the arm, swelled, and went tight. La Sauvée shuddered, throwing every last man of her 400 flat. She shuddered; she steadied; then, leaning softly from the wind, the ship raised her broken side from the sea, gathered strength, and heeling round the gross stern of the galliasse, drew tranquilly off. Behind, the Gouden Roos began to pick up the swimmers.
Robin Stewart, feeling faint, and with his hands in his armpits, was counting heads. He had just found Piedar Dooly, chopping off leg irons, when a golden head rose from the benches and addressed the red evening sky.
‘Liam aboo!’ screeched Phelim O’LiamRoe, Prince of Barrow and lord of the Slieve Bloom, in princely paean to his fathers.
‘Liam aboo!’ returned his ollave concisely from the yardarm, and like a soiled raindrop, slid down to the deck.
II
Dieppe: The Pitfalls and the Deer
As to the pitfall of the unlawful hunter; the deer which he rouses and the deer which he does not rouse come equally to him.
DIEPPE, city of limes, was asleep. On the walls, at the bridge, on the broad city ports, the watch kept guard. The fishing boats had moved out. In the river, lanterns flickered where the galleys lay like whales, prow to quay, and the lighthouse shone over the bar. Inside, the streets smelt of herring and the new paint still fresh from the Scottish Queen’s visit; here and there an overlooked flag fluttered darkly, with the de Guise emblem on it.
All these dignitaries had now moved inland. Tomorrow the Irish guests of the King of France would follow them; but tonight the comfort of the Porc-épic’s mattresses claimed them after the rigours of the sea, and the windows were dark.
La Pensée, the beautiful house of Jean Ango, late Governor of the Castle, was not lit; but at least one man there was awake. Unmoving by the quiet fountains of the terrace, looking down on the moonlit river through Jean Ango’s bowers, glimmering with the marble bones of Attic deities, Tom Erskine waited without impatience for a visitor.
The uneasy peace lately fallen on Europe had meant hard travelling and harder talking for Scottish statesmen. Erskine was here now on his way to Flanders because he was his nation’s chief Privy Councillor, and because his common sense was the needle and the battering ram which Mary of Guise could trust him to use.
Common sense had not brought him out here on the terrace, but curiosity to discover what path his visitor would take. He lingered in the mild September night, square, good-tempered, reliable; but like the artist of quiet movement that he was, the other man arrived without sign or sound. There was somewhere a breath of laughter and a stirring of cooler air, and a pleasant, familiar voice spoke from the shadows. ‘How delicate, love! Shall we dally?’
‘Are you there?’ Tom Erskine turned quickly, searching the darkness. ‘Where are you?’
‘Sitting, as it happens, on Clotho’s distaff and keeping an eye out for the scissors. One of the rarer benefits of a classical education.’ And indeed, on one of the nearer pieces of statuary a dark shadow moved, swung, and dropped lightly to the ground. A cool hand took his arm.
‘Enter the wily fox, the widow’s enemy. Let’s go indoors,’ said Crawford of Lymond.
Lymond was masked. Slender in black silk, the bright hair hidden by cap and caul, he suited the room like a piece of Ango’s Florentine silver. He pulled off the mask, and Erskine was caught in the heavy blue gaze; saw again the ruthless mouth; the thinly textured fair skin neatly tailored over its bones.
Not for a moment, carrying the Queen Mother’s request, had he thought that Lymond would agree. Not for a moment, bringing back Lymond’s ultimatum, had he expected the Queen Mother to accept. And yet the absurd relationship, neither of employer and employee nor of allies nor of partners, had been born. Here, reporting his presence as a free agent, was Crawford of Lymond, who would remain in France for the winter of the Queen’s visit, and who would tell her as much or as little as he chose of the world of plots, of secrets and of intriguing he had undertaken to enter. On the other hand, the Queen Dowager owed him nothing, and least of all protection if he were caught. It was an arrangement, it appeared, which pleased them both.
Lymond and Tom Erskine had little in common, and their personal exchanges took no longer than the pouring of two cups of the King of France’s wine. As they sat, Tom raised his in elaborate salute. ‘Welcome to France.’
‘Thank you. I gather our excellent Queen Mother arrived safely.’
‘Last week. The French King is outside Rouen, waiting to make one of those damned ceremonial entries. She’s off to join him, and they’ll install her in Rouen for the festivities. Then the whole Court goes south for the winter.’
‘While you go to Brussels: there’s no justice.’ There was a little silence, occasioned by the Special Ambassador wondering, rather despairingly as usual, how much Lymond knew. He was on his way to Brussels and Augsburg to conclude a peace treaty with the Emperor Charles, or with the Queen of Hungary on her absent brother’s behalf. It was a treaty not much wanted in Scotland, whose abler mariners liked to be able to raid Flemish galliasses in peace. But under French pressure, the Scottish Governor had agreed; and for that agreement, no doubt, the Queen Dowager of Scotland would receive due reward in due time from France.
It was a peace of which the Emperor himself, at Augsburg, was also wary, and of which he would be warier still if he knew that Tom Erskine was coming to him fresh from London, where he had just opened negotiations for a treaty with England, the Emperor’s current enemy. No peace treaty had yet been signed between Scotland and her neighbour, only a truce. Erskine could say, hand on heart, at Brussels, that there was no trade or contact between England and Scotland without safe conducts; that the Queen Dowager’s visit to France meant nothing more than a mother’s natural anxiety to see her daughter the Queen; that his own visits to France now and after this embassy were merely to satisfy himself for the Government as to the welfare of Mary of Scotland.
He hoped to God that Lymond believed so too; from the malice hardly concealed in his face he doubted it. But Lymond himself merely said, ‘And Mary Queen of Scots, our illustrious princess?’
‘With her mother.’ Erskine hesitated to go on, distrusting the other man’s tone. In the stiff ceremonies at Dieppe it had been one of the picturesque moments of the Queen Dowager’s arrival: the meeting with her child Mary, now seven, cheerful and self-willed after two years in France. Queen and Queen Mother had been in tears; the Dowager’s visit was limited, after all, and when she left Mary would still be in France, and in six or seven years would marry the King’s heir. She was the reigning Queen of Scotland, and had forgotten most of her Scots.