Of Myths and Monsters Read online

  CHAPTER THE SECOND

  Worst of the many problems besetting the English king and his army was that as they were in the bad graces of the Church, they had no way of obtaining gunpowder in any quantities or even the refined niter necessary to fabricate really strong powder.

  Having for many years been a research chemist in the field of propellants in his own world, the professor, upon being apprised of the current local problem, had rigged a lab of sorts at Whyffler Hall, where he, Bass, and the others had been projected, and had there quickly produced a succession of formulae, each resulting in even stronger gunpowder than the product of Church powdermills. Making good use of the eighty-odd tons of nitrate fertilizer which had been the load of one of the trucks, the Whyffler Hall operation had produced enough top-quality gunpowder to carry the royal army until it had been able to defeat armies of invaders and capture full resupplies of gunpowder.

  In the England of this world, the twenty-first-century man who eventually became the Archbishop of York had, through a succession of events, been able to save the threatened life of the eldest son of King Henry VIII Tudor through dosing the boy with longevity booster capsules, the formulation of which included extremely strong antibiotics. Therefore, the boy had lived to succeed his father as King Arthur II Tudor, while his younger brother, Henry Tudor, had died in Angevin of plague while at war against the French king.

  Arthur II had reigned long and had been succeeded by his grandson, Richard IV Tudor, who was soon after his elevation wedded to a niece (which was a polite way of saying illegitimate issue) of the then Roman Pope. Not far into his reign, Richard had died, and, fearing instability, the great nobles had had his younger brother crowned as King Arthur III Tudor. Although, more than seven months after Richard's death, his wife, Angela, had given birth to a son, there was sufficient suspicion of her among the bulk of the English and Welsh lords that most of them held forth that the boy was not come of Tudor loins but was certainly a bastard begat on the adulteress by one of her multitudinous lovers. Since by this time her papal "uncle" was deceased, all in England thought that that would be the end of that and good riddance to bad, foreign rubbish.

  However, the new Pope Abdul had been an old friend of his predecessor and, like him, a Moor, and he would have not liked to see Angela rejected and ejected from her late husband's kingdom in any case. But also, he had looked forward to ruling England and Wales through her as a virtual satrapy, and so the crusade against the "English Usurper" had been pronounced.

  At the moment of the arrivals of Bass and the others, the Regent Angela's forces had held the City of London and its immediate environs, while her opponent, King Arthur, had more or less held all the rest of England and Wales. He and his forces had, however, been severely crippled by their lack of gunpowder; Angela had had all of the gunpowder she ever could need, shipload after shipload of all sorts of supplies coming upriver to her from Italy and other places, but she was woefully short of men to use it in the field, her best troops—led by one of her rumored lovers, a papal knight—having been almost wiped out in a recent battle with Arthur's army. And so she and her supporters stayed mostly behind the strong walls of London and awaited the huge, strong force of Crusaders said to be on the way by sea from the Mediterranean lands, led by a world-famous condottiere hired on by Rome.

  When the word had been bruited about that King Arthur had, by hook or by crook, secured quantities of gunpowder, his army had nearly doubled in size and, with them, he had marched out of his camp near York to defeat first a force of French and Flemish Crusaders on the banks of the Tees River, then marched clear across the country to shatter a force of Irish Crusaders near to the walled town of Manchester and hotly pursue them clear to the sea, the last, desperate actions being fought on the very sea sands between royal English and Welsh cavalry units and the bodyguards of Irish petty kings and high nobles that these might be taken off by waiting boats.

  At length, the great force assembled of Crusaders and mercenaries from Italy, southern France, Savoy, Spain, North Africa, Dalmatia, Hungary, and dozens of other, smaller principalities had been landed in the south of England and had been met and soundly defeated by King Arthur's army—now benefiting not only from the changes wrought by the professor and by Bass and Buddy Webster, but by Pete Fairley's innovations on cannon and harquebuses.

  A born tinkerer, sometime jack-of-all-trades, weapons buff, and shooter of reproduction antique arms in his own world, Pete had come up with a simple, effective way to give seven relatively quick shots to each harquebusier, and he also had developed lighter, more easily maneuverable field-gun carriages no less strong and durable than the old, heavier, clumsier ones. These new weapons arrangements had gone far in the thorough defeat of the Scots army, and they proved no less devastating against the largest contingent of Crusaders, ripping the madly charging heavy cavalry into bloody rags in a deadly cross fire of harquebus balls and grapeshot from the batteries of light field guns massed at the flanks of the English line.

  With the utter rout of this last and largest Crusader force, all of the diehard anti-Arthur folk fled to the "safety" of the walls of London-town, it having by then become virtually the only place in which persons of such sentiments could continue to live in safety in all of England and Wales. Hordes of gentry and minor nobility, some with their own warbands, began to appear at the royal camp, ready now to fight for King Arthur against the evil, foreign Regent Angela and her assuredly bastard pretender of a son. Southern priests either fled to London or, suddenly having been brought to a realization that it was by far preferable to be a live Englishman than a dead churchman, began to strenuously preach support for the chosen and crowned king of England and Wales, Arthur III Tudor.

  With the influx of priests and bishops who had heretofore been rabid supporters of the Regent, hoard after long-hidden hoard of "priests' powder"—refined niter—was brought to light and turned over to the royal powdermills in and around York, where men trained by Pete Fairley used otherworldly techniques to further refine, then mix and blend it with other ingredients to produce English gunpowder, which was slowly achieving widespread renown as a product far superior to the very best grades of hallowed gunpowder—far more stable and dependably more powerful, so that significantly less was required to equal propellants in use.

  With no more invading armies to fight, King Arthur and the bulk of his enlarged, much strengthened army had invested London and gone into permanent camps at various locations around it in preparation for the coming winter, dispersing the cavalry to their homes for the season of snow and cold, mostly as an economy measure. So Bass had spent that winter at Whyffler Hall, with his wife and new son, but with the spring he had ridden out with a force of his Borderer veterans to the preannounced site of the spring cavalry muster, at the location of the battle against the Irish Crusaders, near to Manchester.

  While still in the north, he had been offered and had eagerly accepted an aggregation of fierce, hard-riding, hard-fighting Scots border rievers led by a justly infamous noble raider, the Laird of Eliot, overriding the inborn prejudices of the rest of his followers and officers.

  He had arrived at the Manchester encampment to find most of the troops he had expected, but also a complete squadron of mercenaries, the Royal Tara Galloglaiches—mounted axemen from the northwestern isles of Scotland, officered by Irish knights, all well mounted, well supplied, armed to the teeth and beyond, and of such ferocious reputation, appearance, and behavior that they terrified even the ruffians led by Laird Eliot. Although he had grudgingly accepted these troops, doing so only because it was the expressed wish of King Arthur that he do so, he had never yet regretted taking them on.

  He had first been truly glad that he had them on the day when he, by then Lord Commander of the Royal English and Welsh Horse, had brought to battle a tardy, mounted force of Crusaders—Spanish, Catalonian, Aragonese, Leonese, Asturian, Galician, Andalusian, Moorish, and Portuguese, with a light sprinkling of other nationalities—that
had landed on the southern coast late in the winter and had been since playing hob in the most southerly counties. He had met them on certain croplands north of Lymeport, and the hard-fought encounter had thus become known as the Battle of Bloody Rye.

  Between the galloglaiches and Eliot's Scots, the Southern Europeans had been almost exterminated on that day, hundreds having fallen on the main field of battle and hundreds more along the line of retreat. Having been borne along with his bodyguards and a large proportion of his staff officers on the crest of an intemperate, unordered charge of the Scots—frantic, lest the already committed galloglaiches kill all the invaders and thus reap all the glory before honest Scots got to swing their own steel in the melee—Bass had taken out his anger, frustration, and fear that the battle might go awry without his guidance on the enemy, fighting aggressively, ferociously, rather than merely defensively as was his usual wont in personal combat. In so doing, he had won the deathless respect of the galloglaiches and full many another of his officers and men, a respect tinged with awe by more than a few and, therefore, bordering upon out-and-out worship. The Irish nobleman who had led them having suffered permanent injury in the battle, the galloglaiches had unanimously chosen Bass to be their new "chief," declaring themselves ready and willing to follow his banner to the ends of the earth, did he so desire, and so they and their knighted Irish officers had been with him ever since, they being the basis of his condotta.

  Subsequent to this great victory and, immediately thereafter, his cavalry brigade's extremely freakish capture of three armed merchant ships sailed up from Bilbao to resupply and revictual the now mostly deceased Crusaders, Bass had been summoned to attend upon King Arthur, and, in the castle at Greenwich, he had reaped his royal reward, being named Duke of Norfolk, Earl of Rutland, Baron of Strathtyne, and Knight of the Garter.

  The bulk of the royal army had hunkered down in their camps and entrenchments around besieged London, sending the occasional iron cannonball or carcass over the walls, but mostly just waiting for time, starvation, and disease to bring the city to capitulation, as was the king's wish, since he did not desire to damage the city as a full-scale bombardment and assaults would certainly do. Most of the cavalry had been split into very small units and, scattered hither and yon all over both England and Wales, were riding about cleaning the countrysides of surviving foreign Crusaders, native traitors, and packs of bandits, preparing the lands for peace.

  There being no place and no need for a Lord Commander of the Royal Horse in such small-scale cavalry operations as now were the only ones in progress, Bass had taken up residence on his duchy and had had built a permanent camp for his galloglaiches near to his ducal seat at Norwich Castle.

  When word was brought from friendly sources in the Mediterranean area that a large resupply fleet was being collected for the relief of starving and almost powderless London to Sir Paul Bigod, admiral of King Arthur's small but very feisty royal fleet, Bass and Pete Fairley between them had seized upon another use for the condotta of galloglaiches, then sitting idle near Norwich, submitted their scheme to Sir Paul, and been accepted with enthusiasm.

  So some two dozen open galleys, rowed by brawny axemen—who all, in their homelands in the Scottish Western Isles, had grown up handling oars as often as axes—and each of the galleys mounting a platform and a rifled, breech-loading, Fairley-made cannon, had taken a significant part in the waterborne ambush which had ended in the sinking or capture of the entire papal fleet for the crown and the prizing of a large, fully armed galleon-of-war for Bass.

  With this ship, more ships had been taken on the open sea—outright piracy having long, Bass quickly discovered, been a completely honorable profession or avocation of noblemen. The end result had been that he not only possessed a sizable and powerful fleet, but was become wealthy beyond any thought of or need for avarice.

  Then, shortly after the beginning of the new year's war season, King Arthur had ordered Bass and his condotta, along with certain volunteer reinforcements, to cross the Irish Sea and enter into the temporary service of Arthur's cousin, King Brian VIII Ui Neill, who was striving to bring all of the petty, ever-warring kings of Ireland under his sway. Bass had obeyed his monarch's orders.

  He had succeeded in his first two missions for the charismatic Ard-Righ, bringing back into the itching hands of the acquisitive High King no less than three of the Seven Magical Jewels of Ireland—the tangible symbols of sovereignty of the seven original kingdoms on the island—and even bringing down from the north two of the petty kings to pledge their allegiance to the Ard-Righ in person.

  But then a new-crowned king of the northeastern-most realm, that one called Ulaid, had decided to find a way to secure himself and his new realm against Brian and had voyaged over to the Hebrides isle of Islay, there to give over Ulaid to the Regulus of the Isles, receiving it back from that fierce, powerful Scottish lord as a feoff, which maneuver meant that now any attack upon Ulaid by the power-mad, land-hungry Ard-Righ would perforce signify an attack upon a vassal of and lands belonging to the Regulus, who owned forces and resources on at least a par with Brian.

  Then, to add insult to injury, the new vassal king of Ulaid had taken advantage of the curious murder of the petty king of Airgialla to his south and west, this kingdom having been a declared client state of the Ard-Righ, to declare the domain to now be his client, he to rule it as regent for the infant son of its last king. At the announced enfeoffment of Ulaid by the Regulus and the report that a unit of Bass' condotta had been courteously but very firmly turned back from approaching the capital City of Airgialla by King Roberto of Ulaid and his forces, Brian the Burly had given every indication of contemplation of an immediate, seaborne attack upon Islay and the Regulus.

  Only now did Bass realize that the sly, crafty Ard-Righ had used him and his well-known loyalties to abet his own schemes, having never entertained for even a moment any real intention of upsetting his plans in and for Ireland to go venturing off oversea in what would at best have been a very risky campaign, since he might well have ended having to fight not only the forces of the Regulus' erstwhile overlord, King James of Scotland, but those of his own cousin, King Arthur of England and Wales, King James's new ally, as well. Arrived back in his semi-permanent camp, finally, much of the dust and sweat of the day laved off, in comfortable clothing and with a full meal resting warmly in his stomach, Bass sat well into the night drinking and chatting with his officers, these men who had stood outside the palace complex at Tara, prepared to kill or to die for him, that day. He felt more than humble at such clear expressions of friendship and loyalty; he felt frustration, too, in that he did not know when or if or even how he could ever express his thanks and gratitude for such extremes of devotion.

  It was not until all goodnights had been uttered, and he had been disrobed by his squires and other servants, had bathed in his personal bathtub, had donned his silken nightclothes, and had lain upon his bed that other thoughts came to him.

  For the two twenty-first-century scientists and he and his group of twentieth-century people had not been the only ones snatched into this world from their own. Earlier this very year, in fact, thirteen men and women of his own world—most of them second-generation Armenian-Americans, plus a couple of Greek-Americans, a Lebanese immigrant, and a few of other ethnic backgrounds, the whole making up a Middle Eastern band and belly dancers who had been giving an outdoor performance when snatched away by another malfunction of the Whyffler Hall projector—had arrived during a solemn high mass in Yorkshire, appearing between the congregation and the celebrants with their stringed instruments still twanging, their clarinet still wailing, their fiddle still screeching, their rank of drums still booming, and the colorfully costumed dancers still whirling. Only the fact that the Archbishop of York had been on hand, had immediately realized what must have occurred, and had been able to hurriedly summon his foot guards to protect the confused and thoroughly shocked projectees had prevented the deeply superstitious and horrifie
d attendees of the ceremony from killing all of the supposed "imps of Satan."

  The Archbishop had lodged them all in a sizable and well-guarded suite in the huge, rambling hall on his country estate southwest of York. He had left most of them therein, ordering them a reasonable amount of freedom on the grounds of the estate, while he tried to decide the best disposition of them—best for them, best for him, best for England.

  In order to help him make a decision, he had taken to having lengthy conversations with the eldest of them, a man of fifty-odd years named Rupen Ademian, uncle to the bandleader and two of the others. In the course of these meetings, the two men had become fast friends, and, long before he had made any firm plans for the others, the Archbishop had taken Rupen into his personal service.

  Then, of a day, out of a guarded suite inside a well-guarded hall situated on a large estate far from any village or town, all save only Rupen Ademian and a belly dancer named Jenny Bostwick had mysteriously disappeared, just as if they might have been once more snatched up by the Whyffler Hall projector, although such could not have been the case, since the Archbishop had had that dangerous and unpredictable device removed from its centuries-old place and brought down to him at York, where he himself had taken it completely apart, using the otherworldly parts for various of his and Pete Fairley's projects and experiments.