‘About to see what’s so bloody good about guns, you are, you ignorant bastard.’

They hear the first one go off as they breast the channel. Ahead of them are the docks and then the flint walls of the town. The gates are shut. Smoke rises from fires and all along the wall men are clustered at embrasures.

The first boulder thrums through the air and then falters and falls slushing into the turbid waters of the channel. There is a faint cheer from the first boat. The next gun fires. This time there are two separate noises that run into one: the report of the gun, then the longer sound of its boulder hitting the first tub amidships. The stone smashes through the wooden planks and tears into the men behind.

The boat staggers, loses way. Thomas hears bellows of rage and pain. Blood comes running down the boat’s side. Bodies soon follow, dead and wounded men pushed overboard as those left alive struggle to find space to loose their arrows. Then a third gun goes off.

‘See?’ Walter shouts above the noise. ‘See?’

Again the stone crashes into the tub, sending her shivering. There are more screams. Thomas hears men shouting at the defenders, men begging for mercy. Begging not to be fired on.

A fourth gun goes off. The archers in the first tub begin loosing their arrows at the men on the shore, aiming for the gunners, but they are too tightly packed and the gunners ashore are behind palisades and under tile roofs. Arrowheads spark on the cobbles. The defenders loose fire arrows, sooty trails arching in the sky, and soon the first sail is on fire, dropping in flaming black rags on to the heads of the men below.

Then a stone hits the carrack. It is a small one, about the size of a man’s head. It comes with a thrumming sound and an explosion of splinters from the top of the ship’s rail in the waist. It passes through the first man’s chest, throws the second man into the air and then shatters the third’s hips. Splinters of wood and man fly in every direction and others clap hands to their faces and suddenly blood is everywhere, a steady pink drizzle. It turns faces red. Gums eyes, lingers on lips, tastes distinct and coppery.

The Mary butts the first ship, now ablaze and listing against the quayside. Her deck is scattered with the corpses of the dead, and the wounded are scrabbling to get off before they are burned or drowned.

Thomas follows Walter across the gap, scrambling over the bloodied ship’s rails; he slips on the gore, picks himself up before he is trampled by those behind. Men around him are roaring, and he realises that he is too. A steady thunder of arrows keeps coming at them. Arrows pick men off, spin them around, hammer them to the deck.