"Yare, yare—my yeomen of the sheets and braces! Cheerily now—my timoneer!" bellowed the skipper of the Fleur-de-Lys, through his speaking trumpet, as he, by a rapidity of manoeuvre and superior seamanship, sheered his vessel upon the larboard side of the Biornen in the smoke, and poured another broadside upon the Norwegians, who did not expect it from that point, and the sudden crash and slaughter filled them with alarm and irresolution.
"By St. John of the Desart!" exclaimed Bothwell, in the excitement of the moment forgetting his assumed Protestantism, "ye do well my true cannoniers. Shoot—shoot, and spare not! or never again will ye see the woods of Clyde, and the blooming bank of Bothwell. To it, Bolton, with thy bowmen! Shoot me down those rascal archers on their tops; for by St. Peter, who smote off the lug of a loon, I have wellnigh lost mine by their hands. Shoot—shoot, and spare not!"
A loud cheer replied to the Earl, and his vassals bent to their toil with renewed ardour and alacrity.
The decks were rapidly becoming encumbered with the dead and wounded; for there were neither accommodation or due attendance for the latter, and so they were permitted to lie just where they fell, with their blood streaming away to leeward, and dripping from the scuppers into the ocean; while the shot ploughed and tore up the oak planking of the deck, beat down the bulwarks, rending mast and boom and spars to shreds and splinters; and each time the ponderous stone bullets of the great Danish carthouns thundered and crashed through the side of the Fleur-de-Lys, she staggered and trembled in every rib and plank.
"Sweep me the gunwall with your arquebuses!" cried the Earl, leaping upon the corpse-strewn forecastle, where Ormiston, like a swarthy Moor, was handling one of those ponderous fire-arms as easily as a bird caliver; "for one more salvoe from those accursed carthouns will hurl us from the ocean like a flash of lightning!"
"Cock and pie!" said Ormiston, as he levelled the long arquebuse in its iron sling; "we have been putting pelloks into their doublets ever since the tulzie began; and I doubt not have scored a hundred by the head, but the gloomy night is increasing so fast that we aim now at random."
The darkness, as he said, had increased very much. The clouds were gathering in heavy masses, and the red sheet lightning was gleaming behind the rocky peaks of those hills, where the northern lights had been flashing one hour before. Dark as ink grew the waters of the fiord, and the increasing wind that blew down it, between the high shores on either side, flecked its surface with foam, as it passed away into the turbulent waste of the Skager Rack. This change was unseen or unheeded by the combatants, who were now lying to with their foresails backed, and pouring their missiles upon each other with a deadly animosity, that increased as the slaughter and the darkness deepened around them together. Notwithstanding the superior size of the Norwegian ship, and the heavier metal of her cannon, the little Fleur-de-Lys stood to her bravely; for she was manned by bold and desperate hearts, whom outlawry and revenge had urged to the utmost pitch of rashness and valour.
Meanwhile, Konrad and Hans Knuber watched with beating hearts the varying ebb and flow of the tide of battle in which they had so suddenly been involved. They remained passive spectators, exposed to the fire of their friends and countrymen, by whose hands they expected every instant to be decimated or decapitated. Whenever a barbed crossbow-shot from the Biornen struck down a poor Scottish mariner to writhe in agony and welter in his blood, or when a shot tore up plank and beam almost beneath his feet, Hans growled a Norse malediction, and thought of the ruin these Scots had that day brought upon him. Suddenly he grasped Konrad by the hand, and pointed to a part of the water that appeared covered with white froth.
"Seest thou that, Master Konrad?—hah!" he exclaimed.
"The lesser moskenstrom—the eddy that swallowed up thy ship. God shield us!" said Konrad; "for we are just upon its verge."