Page:A C Doyle - The White Company.djvu/207

Rh flushed and his eyes shining, for the blood of a hundred fighting Saxon ancestors was beginning to stir in his veins.

'What was that?' he asked, as a hissing, sharp-drawn voice seemed to whisper in his ear. The steersman smiled, and pointed with his foot to where a short heavy cross-bow quarrel stuck quivering in the boards. At the same instant the man stumbled forward upon his knee, and lay lifeless upon the deck, a blood-stained feather jutting out from his back. As Alleyne stooped to raise him, the air seemed to be alive with the sharp zip-zip of the bolts, and he could hear them pattering on the deck like apples at a tree-shaking.

'Raise two more mantlets by the poop-lanthorn,' said Sir Nigel quietly.

'And another man to the tiller,' cried the master-shipman.

'Keep them in play, Aylward, with ten of your men,' the knight continued. 'And let ten of Sir Oliver's bowmen do as much for the Genoese. I have no mind as yet to show them how much they have to fear from us.'

Ten picked shots under Aylward stood in line across the broad deck, and it was a lesson to the young squires who had seen nothing of war to note how orderly and how cool were these old soldiers, how quick the command, and how prompt the carrying out, ten moving like one. Their comrades crouched beneath the bulwarks, with many a rough jest and many a scrap of criticism or advice. 'Higher, Wat, higher!' 'Put thy body into it, Will!' 'Forget not the wind, Hal!' So ran the muttered chorus, while high above it rose the sharp twanging of the strings, the hiss of the shafts, "and the short 'Draw your arrow! Nick your arrow! Shoot wholly together!' from the master-bowman.

And now both mangonels were at work from the galleys, but so covered and protected that, save at the moment of discharge, no glimpse could be caught of them. A huge brown rock from the Genoese sang over their heads, and plunged sullenly into the slope of a wave. Another from the Norman whizzed into the waist, broke the back of a horse, and crashed