A volley of cannon, crossbows, and arquebuses was poured upon the great quarter and stern of the _Biornen_, while her people were slowly and laboriously re-charging their pieces. The bolts whistled from the crossbows, the bullets whizzed from the arquebuses _à croc_, and the cannon-shot boomed as they flew over the decks, or sank with a heavy crash into the echoing hulls of the adverse ships; while, ascending from the still bosom of that narrow inlet of the ocean, the reports were reverberated like thunder, as the echoes rolled from peak to peak along those high mountains that overlooked it.
From the poops and forecastles the arquebuses maintained an incessant roar, and their bullets, each containing three ounces of lead, did deadly execution, being fired point-blank, beating great pieces of buff and mail into the bodies of those they slew.
"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.