Blood Red Sea

16

There was sun on his face, and his nose was clotted. He was completely deaf. He choked on air. He was vomiting.

Someone slapped his back so hard he juddered. He vomited again. Was he being beaten?

The sun reeled overhead and he opened his eyes. He was alive.

He was hauled up the side of the St John like a kitten rescued from a tub. Flopped on to the deck.

When he came to his better senses again there was blinding sunlight, and a dark shadow standing over him. More shadows beyond. A gull in the sky. Someone playing a musical instrument, for the love of God.

Romegas’s shadow loomed across him.

‘You, lad, are almost as much a brainsick fool as I am. You drowned yourself to save two oar slaves, one of whom died anyway. It was I who killed the rest. Damn the day.’

He struggled upright. Someone helped him on to a bench. The sky and the sun still reeled around him.

‘Stanley,’ said Romegas. ‘Watch him. If he escapes the bloody flux from that vile dunking, he must have the luck of the devil.’

His clothes were dumped overboard. Smith said they’d poison all the fish between Cape Matapan and Crete. He was sluiced naked until he felt his skin half salted off, and given the freshest, purest water to drink, straight from a spring ashore. They made him drink until his belly was swollen like that of a mother with child. And for a day and a night they watched him like hawks, felt his brow, demanded to know of his stools. By the end of the next day, as he wearily reported on the state of his bowels, they shook their heads. Aye. He had escaped it. The Lord alone knew how.

‘Swallowed several firkins of galley slaves’ bilge,’ grumbled Smith, ‘and never a whit the worse for it.’ Smith grumbled with a kind of paternal pride, like a father grumbling about how much his son ate, how tall he was growing. ‘Lad, if every man had your stomach, then camp fever and bloody flux would be things of the past.’

Nicholas grimaced. He still didn’t much like to be reminded of it.

The two slaves whose manacles he had sprung had nearly drowned anyway, but one was finally hauled, choking but alive, aboard the St John’s longboat by Smith, clutching the wretch round his bare throat. The knight nearly gave him a hanging.

‘This is your saved man, the Christian you almost drowned for,’ said Smith, his voice sardonic. ‘He cut his wife’s throat.’

Stanley grinned broadly. ‘This day is full of little ironies, is it not?’

Nicholas refused to look shaken. ‘Who am I to judge his sins?’

He was an Italian, a fellow with a narrow face and dark, lank hair, called Aurelio Scetti, and a lute player, of all things.

‘You are now his rightful owner,’ said Stanley. ‘Not in bad shape, he might be worth thirty ducats in the market at Venice, if you get him there alive. Not bad work, Master Ingoldsby.’

Thirty ducats! Nicholas had hardly considered it. But he now had more wealth than he’d had since leaving England.

‘Perhaps it will be the beginning of a great Ingoldsby trading empire,’ continued Stanley mockingly. ‘You know your way around certain Mediterranean cities, you speak fair French, Spanish and Italian as well as your native tongue, and now you have your first assets. Become a slave trader, Ingoldsby! There’s no end of demand. You could take to gunrunning and arms dealing between Turk and Christian as well, and end up with a palazzo of your own overlooking the Grand Canal of Venice, with the prettiest wife and a couple of mistresses too.’

Nicholas looked at him sourly. ‘Don’t tempt me,’ he said. ‘The older I get, the more likely I’ll think in such ways. But it’s not why I came here.’

Why did he come here? Stanley watched him at the rail. He knew why.

Ingoldsby — still an orphan boy at heart, at twenty-two — Ingoldsby came here hoping that in the nobility of some last crusade he might redeem his life and his soul. A foolish hope? Vain, naive, impossible? Stanley was glad it was not for him to say.

Romegas was silent and stared his horizon stare for long hours from the captain’s post.

‘It was an evil day,’ said Stanley quietly. ‘That any captain, even the most villainous corsair out of the Barbary Coast, should lock his slaves to their benches and then lose the key. Knowing that in storm or shipwreck he could not release them. It was a villainous thing. But-’

Romegas shook his head. ‘I’ll not be comforted. It was I gave the order, I who sunk her. It is I must bear responsibility. And I heard talk among the mariners that this is an omen for Cyprus.’

‘Do you believe in omens?’

‘I do. But I also believe men always read ’em wrongly.’

Nicholas negotiated with the boatswain, and his new possession was allowed to sit on the rowing benches unmanacled, down beside Abdul of Tripoli, fed and watered but not rowing, to restore his strength. Aurelio Scetti said nothing. He was a man far gone inside himself and his own misery.

Nicholas gave Abdul a piece of bread.

The Moor said, ‘Your magnanimity drowns my very heart in tears of most humble gratitude. Surely your beneficence is like unto a beacon of golden light, shining out across the cruel darkness of-’

‘Cease,’ said Nicholas. ‘Have you ever rowed on a corsair galley?’

‘That I have. A misunderstanding between myself and a powerful imam concerning his daughter. I can say no more, decency forbids. But you think that corsairs only use Christians on their galleys?’ He shook his head. ‘They use any man with two arms and a heartbeat.’

At dawn they came in sight of an island and Smith and Stanley went ashore in the longboat. They came back to report a single spring, the water drinkable. Not a goat, not a rock dove, not a human soul. A few skittering lizards. The whole island but a thousand paces across.

They took barrels over and filled them with fresh water. Then they went back with the corsair captain and his crew and marooned them there without a blade or a gun between them, only the clothes they stood up in.

Curses followed them across the water as they rowed back to the St John of Jerusalem.

‘May Allah bring you and all your children to hell!’

And, ‘We will kill you! We will kill you all!’

Three days later the lookout boy said he thought he could see mountains on the horizon. Romegas examined a chart and ordered the rowers to slacken off. They drifted until dusk and then moved on under darkness.

It was the Troödos Range. They were nearing Cyprus.

The dark bulk of the mountains loomed up beneath the moon, beyond a broad coastal plain. Between them and the coast, laced white with small waves in the moonlight, there was the lantern of a single small fishing boat at sea. The St John herself moved forward in complete darkness, her stern lanterns unlit, orders passed for’ard in whispers, the rowers commanded to move their oars as silently as possible.

Romegas eyed the little swinging lantern of the fishing boat a mile off. ‘Now begins the business of distinguishing friend from foe. This will be the story of your Cyprus campaign.’

Romegas said his farewells to them and embraced his brother knights heartily, the tears in his eyes betraying his fear that he would ever see them alive again. Gil de Andrada too would stay aboard, far more value as a naval captain than a land soldier. They would return to Malta.

‘God give you the victory,’ said Romegas, clasping Stanley about his broad chest. ‘I wish to God that I was with you, but I am a seaman, and it is at sea I do my best work.’

‘We know it,’ said Stanley, ‘and the Turk knows it too.’

‘Sail away fast with our blessing,’ said Smith. ‘Cyprus is a lone Christian outpost in a Turkish sea, surrounded by the enemy. Flying the cross of St John of Malta, this galley is like a straw man on an archery green.’

‘The St John is no straw man,’ said Romegas.

‘And you’ll prove it yet, I have no doubt.’

‘Fortune go with you, Brother,’ said Giustiniani gravely. The two old veterans had fought side by side for forty years or more. ‘And may you hear good news of Don John and the Holy League. We need it.’

‘There is no Holy League,’ said Romegas with sudden bitterness. ‘It is a figment of the Pope’s.’

‘A noble lie,’ said Giustiniani. ‘A noble dream. Wait and pray.’

Smith, Stanley and Luigi Mazzinghi went out in the longboat with barely a sound, and moved towards the fishing boat, their swords under their cloaks so as not to catch the moonlight. But the sharp-eyed fisherman had already seen them and the lantern went out. Yet his boat did not move. They rowed towards him.

Finally they pulled back on the oars only a few yards short. They could see the shadowy outline of a man, sturdy looking, holding his boathook like a pike.

‘Ho there,’ whispered Stanley. ‘Your name.’

‘What do you want with me?’

‘Nothing of you, friend, but your name.’

After a long pause, the fisherman said, ‘My name is Nikos. The Turks are on the coast all around. And your galley there is nicely lit up by the moon.’

‘We thought to have sailed round to Famagusta. But we cannot.’

Nikos shook his head. ‘The Turks already have Lemessos and Larnaca. The seas all around Cyprus belong to them now. You would not get round in your galley unseen, they would destroy you in the water, and it is too far in that longboat.’

‘Then will you guide us ashore here?’

‘How much?’

‘We come to fight for your island, man.’

‘How much?’ said Nikos stubbornly.

Stanley sighed. ‘A ducat.’

‘Done.’

They moved as fast as they could in silence. Mazzinghi, Smith and Stanley remained in the longboat while swords and muskets were lowered down in wrapped blankets, and Giustiniani climbed down to join them. Then two Sicilian mariners, who would row the longboat back to the St John. Then Smith stood up again, setting the longboat rocking dangerously. Stanley told him to sit, for the love of God, but Smith ignored him and climbed back up the ladder. At the rail he spoke quickly to Romegas, who then lowered one of the small standards of the Maltese Cross from outside the stern cabin and handed it to the Englishman. Smith sat back in the longboat and rolled up the standard on his knee.

‘An excellent idea, Fra John,’ said Stanley. ‘Ensuring that if we are captured by the Turks, as is more than likely, they will search your knapsack and discover that we are Knights of St John, going in disguise in Turkish territory. And what do you think they will do to us then? More than tickle us in the ribs, I imagine.’

Smith ignored him, carefully stowed the tightly rolled standard at the bottom of his sack, and then sat back looking almost pleased.

Stanley sighed. ‘It’s like trying to reason with a small child.’

Mazzinghi grinned in the darkness, as nervous and excited as any of them.

Finally Nicholas and Hodge came down the ladder, and one other with them.

‘Why is he coming?’ hissed Stanley.

‘Just a hunch,’ said Smith. ‘Don’t you have hunches?’

‘Yes. And they’re usually wrong. A Moor. Brilliant. Seven of us going to liberate Cyprus from the Mohammedans, and one of us is a Moor.’

‘Seven against Thebes,’ said Nicholas. ‘The Seven Sages.’

Stanley laughed sardonically.

‘What happened to the Scetti fellow?’ asked Smith.

‘I sold him back to Romegas,’ said Nicholas. ‘Twenty ducats.’

‘A poor price,’ said Abdul.

‘You keep silent,’ said Smith. ‘You may be a free man, God help us, but no Moor speaks aboard my boat.’

‘Enough talk,’ said Giustiniani, and flung his arm out.

‘Off we go,’ said Stanley, slowly moving his oar. ‘Why, I can feel that army of a hundred thousand Turks trembling at our very approach.’