Blood Red Sea

10

There came a loud thump from the passageway outside, and angry shouting. Then the unmistakable sound of tempered steel clashing with steel.

Pedro Deza glared around and touched his sword hilt. ‘Take up your pikes. You, flank the door. You — open it.’

The door was cautiously opened on to the darkened passageway, and there stood a figure dressed in an immaculate white velvet suit trimmed with ermine, pulling off his kidskin gloves and examining his fingernails for damage. He looked up, arched his eyebrows and then strolled into the chamber. He was followed by two more burly fellows. Hulking figures in dusty travelling cloaks, shaggy haired, bearded, long heavyweight swords slung at their sides. One of the torturers ill-advisedly made a movement with his pike, as if to block their entrance, and one of the two ruffians swiped him backhanded with a kind of absent-mindedness that was almost comical. Yet there was nothing comical about the effect. Such was the power behind that casual blow that the torturer reeled backwards and slammed against the wall behind him, upsetting the table of glass beakers, bringing them crashing down around him as he slithered senseless to the floor. The black-bearded ruffian strode on into the chamber, not turning a hair at the din, and stationed himself near the door.

Nicholas stared, his thoughts in a whirl. There was only one man he had ever known who could deliver a backhand blow like that. But it could not. .

The fellow in white velvet looked around. ‘Damn it, Deza, but this is a curious show you run here. One of your pikemen dared to stand in my path, so I had to run him through. Just in the arm. I expect he’ll live, in a vulgar sort of way. Oh, and the smell is quite execrable. Have you rosewater?’

‘I, I. .’

‘No rosewater? My man, do you want me to stink like a civet? And kneel when I address you! I may be the bastard son of a bosomy German whore, bless her venereal soul, but I am also half-brother of King Philip. Down on your knees to Don John of Austria!’

Deza knelt, chewing his lip furiously.

The young prince, perhaps twenty-four years of age or so, tall and willowy of build, strolled languidly around the chamber, examining the various machines. At last he said, ‘What a nasty set-up. Is it really all necessary?’

‘It is, Your Excellency.’

The prince pulled a face. Then he raised an eyebrow in the direction of his two ruffians, and pointed at Nicholas and Hodge.

‘Are these your comrades?’

The two strode over. Their physical power was palpable. Their commanding presence had the other torturers skittering back to stand against the walls like naughty schoolboys before an angry master. One of the ruffians stood before Hodge and the other in front of Nicholas. Nicholas stared back at him. He was dreaming. The torture had started, and he had gone into a madman’s dream, his only escape.

The big flaxen-haired, ruddy-cheeked fellow in front of him grinned and nodded. ‘Aye, Your Highness. I’d know this reprobate anywhere.’

‘’Pon my word, Deza, you unconscionable booby,’ said Don John. ‘But you choose your victims carelessly. You are only torturing here two of the most gallant heroes of the entire Siege of Malta.’

Nicholas wept openly as the manacles were sprung and he and Edward Stanley embraced.

‘Aye,’ said Stanley, ‘relief can do that to a man. You came damn close to being broken for life. What a place.’ He looked over at Deza with disgust.

‘You are in my Chancellery still, Sir Knight,’ said Deza. ‘Have a care.’

Stanley turned from Nicholas, still shaking, and bore down on Pedro Deza, his broad sunburned brow furrowed with a ferocious glare. Six foot four of muscle and anger. His voice rose in volume, and the chamber echoed as with the bellowing of an enraged bull.

‘A Knight Commander of St John answers to none but his Grand Master, the Pope in Rome, and Almighty God! These two youths here that you have reduced to shivering wrecks with your vile contraptions fought at Malta as heroically as Jean de la Valette himself. While you were shuffling your papers and presiding over your interrogations, Don Pedro Deza. So vex me no more. Or I may lose my sweet temper altogether.’

Deza quailed visibly, but said, ‘It was important to discover more about the Morisco rebellion. We have heard rumours that the Mohammedan rebels are being armed from England. And here were two Englishmen, hiding in the house of a Moor-’

‘Then you are credulous fools!’ replied Stanley. ‘The knights have information — not rumour, information — that the Moriscos are being armed from Constantinople, not England.’

Pedro Deza said not another word.

Don John of Austria was pulling on his kidskin gloves again and smiling thinly.

Smith gave Hodge a drink from his flask. Stanley laid his hands on Nicholas’s shaking shoulders.

‘Easy, old friend, easy. None will hurt you now.’

Then he too gave him his flask to drink. Nicholas glugged and gasped and managed a tremulous smile.

Stanley cuffed him on the back. ‘Let’s get some air.’

They marched out of the chamber led by Don John of Austria himself. Rescued by a prince of the blood! Well, half of the blood.

Life was a dream.

Two of the torturers hovered a little too near as they departed. In the blink of an eye, and in utter silence, Smith embraced them in his mighty hands and clonked their heads together. They dropped like meal sacks.

‘I know a tavern on the quay,’ said Nicholas.

‘We don’t doubt it,’ drawled Don John of Austria, barely looking at him. ‘And a delightful stew it may be. But we have our ship out there in the harbour. Which one do you think it might be?’

Beyond the bobbing boats, fishing smacks and coastal barges, there towered a gilded and magnificent galley flying the flag of the two-headed Habsburg eagle of Spain.

‘That one, possibly,’ said Nicholas.

‘Your judgement is uncanny,’ said Don John. Then he looked him up and down. ‘We met at Messina, I recall. Then you and your manservant went on to fight at Malta with Sir John and Sir Edward here.’

‘We did.’

The young prince’s eyes flashed with jealousy. ‘And then you served on a corsair galley as your reward?’

‘We love rowing. Both day and night.’

Again Don John gave his thin smile. He liked this one, he recalled. Sharp tongue, fighting spirit, and he followed all his sarcasms point for point.

He looked out over the harbour, to the royal galley and beyond. ‘We are sailing first for Messina, there to await further orders from Spain and learn more news of the movements of the Turk. Will he fall upon Cyprus, upon Crete? The coast of Italy?’ The foppish young prince looked grave for once, his gaze upon the far horizon. ‘His fleet is vast, the threat to Christendom is as real as ever. There is a great sea battle coming, I am sure of it. You might as well join us again, since your native England is now under the rule of Elizabeth the flame-haired frigid heretic, who will burn you at the stake the moment you set foot on home soil.’

‘She is my Queen still,’ said Nicholas.

‘Your Holy Father in Rome has declared her no queen but a usurper.’

The English youth looked a picture of torment, his eyes pained and hunted. Don John relented a fraction. ‘Well, I do not envy you your position. But I do not think you can ever dream of England again. Come and die with us fighting the Turk, and have your troubled head blown off by an Ottoman cannon. You will sleep easier thereafter.

‘For my part, I have missed every single encounter yet with the Mohammedans, being too occupied panting in the arms of my mistress — whichever trollop it was at the time — or prevented by my caring brother Philip. But for the coming sea battle, this watery Armageddon. .’ He touched a kidskinned finger to his own chest. ‘. . for once, this perfumed, velveted fop and whoremonger bastard will show his royal blood.’

Such a mix of pride and self-mockery, thought Nicholas. Such quicksilver intelligence and cutting humour. He gave a small bow.

‘You acknowledge me a fop and whoremonger?’ snapped Don John.

‘I, I. .’ stammered Nicholas.

Stanley and Smith were both grinning.

‘Mercy, Your Excellency, you test him worse than Pedro Deza.’

‘Tch. Then off to your sordid peasant tavern with you.’ Don John turned on his heel and made for the quayside. A long rowing boat with a crimson awning and elaborately curved and gilded prow and stern, something like a Venetian gondola, was bumping against the harbour wall. He turned back.

‘But come to sea with us afterwards, English vagabonds! Perhaps you’ll prove too skeleton thin for a cannonball to hit you!’

Nicholas led them back to a certain tavern on the quay.

‘We heard you were to be racked and strappadoed,’ said Stanley as they walked. ‘Word came back from Gil de Andrada that you had been picked up. We heard more from. . other sources useful to us. And when we heard that you were to be questioned by the great Pedro Deza, well, we had at least to visit you in prison. Before you got too lean and stringy. A few sessions on the rack and you would have looked like a two-yard earthworm.

‘Then Brother Smith here was going to sing soothing lullabies to you as you were stretched, in his unusual baritone, which would surely have taken your mind off your agonies. You should hear him singing “Greensleeves”. Ladies swoon at the very sound. Some actually burst into tears and run away, unable to bear such unearthly beauty.’

Smith growled, his voice more bearlike than ever with the passing years. ‘You see that Ned Stanley has lost none of his lacerating wit. Many’s the time I’ve burst my doublet laughing at his brilliant jests and sallies.’

Stanley roared with laughter. Smith glared from under his thick black brows. They had not changed.

Nicholas had almost forgotten why he loved their company so much. Not just their strength, their prowess at arms, their badinage, Smith’s grim sallies and Stanley’s smile. It was their nobility he loved. Their lives were a testament to lives nobly lived, strictly disciplined. Beneath those shabby cloaks, there were hearts and souls that served something higher than most men ever dreamed of. You have to serve some high ideal. Serve only yourself, and you soon shrink down to the small, petty size of yourself. Most men lived that way. But serve something high and noble, and in time you grow towards it, as an oak tree grows towards the sun. That was Smith and Stanley.

They came to the tavern, and there was no Maria. Instead, no sooner had they pulled up the benches and sat down than a tiny boy came running in, wide eyed, open mouthed and breathless, and stood by their table. He was barefoot, wore ragged breeches and shirt, and could not have been more than four or five.

‘You are the landlord here?’

The boy stared.

‘Well then,’ said Stanley. ‘A jug of wine, bread, water, whatever there is.’

The boy nodded and sped off.

‘I’m sure they’re getting younger,’ said Smith.

The food and wine came, and Hodge raised his cup. ‘Wish it was good English ale to toast you with, but still. Here’s to you, Brothers Smith and Stanley. What a turnout. Who would have believed it?’

Nicholas said little and drank hard. Both knights noticed. After Malta, the galleys, and Algiers jail. . the boy from Shropshire, son of a knight himself, was deeply wounded and scarred within. Their hearts ached for him. He would take more than a good meal to mend. And he hardly touched his plate of food as it was.

‘Eat,’ said Stanley. ‘You need it.’

‘I’d eat some opium if you had any,’ said Nicholas. ‘For my head.’

Not your head, your heart, thought Stanley. He could well foresee the thin English boy passing the last few months of his young life in a smoke dream, on a filthy divan in a den in Tangier, living for nothing but the pipe and an easy death.

It was not only from Pedro Deza they had saved him.