Page:A C Doyle - The White Company.djvu/204

176 'But your pennons? They will see that we have two knights with us.'

'Yet it would not be to a knight's honour or good name to lower his pennon. Let them be, and they will think that we are a wine-ship for Gascony, or that we bear the wool-bales of some mercer of the Staple. Ma foi! but they are very swift! They swoop upon us like two goshawks on a heron. Is there not some symbol or device upon their sails?'

'That on the right,' said Edricson, 'appears to have the head of an Ethiop upon it.'

Tis the badge of Tête-noire, the Norman,' cried a seaman-mariner. 'I have seen it before when he harried us at Winchelsea. He is a wondrous large and strong man, with no ruth for man, woman, or beast. They say that he hath the strength of six; and, certes, he hath the crimes of six upon his soul. See, now, to the poor souls who swing at either end of his yard-arm!'

At each end of the yard there did indeed hang the dark figure of a man, jolting and lurching with hideous jerkings of its limbs at every plunge and swoop of the galley.

'By St. Paul!' said Sir Nigel, 'and by the help of St. George and Our Lady, it will be a very strange thing if our black-headed friend does not himself swing thence ere he be many hours older. But what is that upon the other galley?'

'It is the red cross of Genoa. This Spade-beard is a very noted captain, and it is his boast that there are no seamen and no archers in the world who can compare with those who serve the Doge Boccanegra.'

'That we shall prove,' said Goodwin Hawtayne; 'but it would be well, ere they close with us, to raise up the mantlets and pavises as a screen against their bolts.' He shouted a hoarse order, and his seamen worked swiftly and silently, heightening the bulwarks and strengthening them. The three ship's anchors were at Sir Nigel's command carried into the waist, and tied to the mast, with twenty feet of cable between, each under the care of four seamen. Eight