Blood Red Sea

1

The sun burned white in a cloudless sky, and spangles of sunlight danced on the placid sea. Occasionally dolphins broke the surface, their oilskin flanks darkly gleaming, before curving back into the green silence below. Away to the south, on the distant horizon, the sky was a dusty ochre over the burning deserts of Africa.

Tiny fluttering shapes of flying fish skimmed over the small waves, disturbed by a long dark shadow cutting through the water behind them. And the clean sea air suddenly soured with the stench of a Barbary slaver.

It was a low-slung black galley with a single mast, little more than a brigantine. The wind was so light the sail was furled. Fast, light and nimble, made for lightning raids on sleepy villages and lumbering merchantmen. A hawk of the sea.

They said you could smell the stench of a slave galley a mile away, and a downwind gust from this one would surely make any man tighten stomach and craw as he fought the urge to vomit. It was the stench of fifty men chained and rowing under the lash, the bilge water around their rotting feet a stew of salt water, urine and faeces. For slaves like these lived on the rowing bench until they died. But it was also the stench of permanent exhaustion, and despair so deep that death was all they longed for.

The Barbary slaver was some sixty feet in length and carried a single centre-line gun at the bow. Her primary armaments were the crew of twenty or so corsairs who lounged at the stern under the sun-blanched canopy, naked to the waist, flashing teeth and eyes, hooped gold earrings and elaborate henna tattoos. And armed with every variety of knife and dagger, mace and club, scimitar and half-pike imaginable.

One or two scanned the horizon from east to west, keen eyed and hungry for carrion. The rest diced or dozed, chewed qat or smoked kif. Other than men, the slaver — her name was the Sweet Rose of Algiers, without apparent irony — carried nothing more but the ballast of pebbles below, and the captain’s chest, an iron-bound treasury of gold and silver coins of every nation: Spanish escudos, Venetian ducats, Ottoman akçes, as well as a pair of bejewelled crucifixes they had looted from a little chapel on the coast of Sardinia. There was also, in a small velvet pouch, the dainty curio of a sun-dried nose, sliced from the face of a Sicilian nun they had captured onshore a few weeks ago and taken with them for a while. Eventually they had tired of raping her and tumbled her over the side.

The dip of the oars was slow but steady. If any rower faltered, the bull-hide lash of the boatswain would cut his back open. A rower on a slave galley was unlikely to last a year, and was usually grateful if he died before.

Among the Sardinians and Neapolitans, the Sicilians and Spaniards, there were two blue-eyed Northerners. A thickset young fellow with an impassive expression, and another with burning gaze and a pale beard that showed he was fair haired. Thin but strong, his torso showed many scars. Each wore nothing but filthy loincloths and rags on their heads to protect them from the Mediterranean sun. Still the sun blistered ears and cheeks, shoulders and hands. Slave owners commonly tried to keep their slaves in good condition, as they would any other of their possessions, and shielded their rowers with crude canopies. But not these corsairs. They were the dregs even of their low profession.

They were also careless in other ways.

On a Barbary slaver it was usual to work your slaves to death, ditch their corpses and then capture more on a further raid. The supply was endless and free, and that was what the slave galleys did: they consumed men. They existed to enslave their rowers, who rowed that they might exist.

And the life itself — the lawless raiding and ravaging — was itself so dark and seductive a pleasure. Erupting out of the night upon some huddled fishing town, cutting a swathe of bloody terror through its wailing streets, destroying and looting as the fancy took you. A corsair was nothing but a penniless backstreet cut-throat in the shadowy alleyways of Tunis or Algiers or Tripoli, a poor fisherman’s son from some desolate dust-blown village of the Barbary Coast. But on a corsair slaver he was free to follow every desire, to heap up other men’s treasure as his own, to do what he wished with their wives and daughters. None ruled the sea but the gun and the sword alone. And a captain was the king of his ship. Even of so wretched a vessel as the Sweet Rose of Algiers.

Each rower pulled a single oar, but one had collapsed and moved no more. Immediately the rhythm was lost, other oars fore and aft clonking into his trailing blade.

The boatswain was upon him in an instant, beating him and howling curses, but he was too far gone. A fisherman’s son, taken from Sardinia only a few weeks ago. The light was gone from his eyes and his heart had already shrivelled and died within him.

The blue-eyed English youth with the fair beard was called Nicholas Ingoldsby. He glanced at his countryman, Hodge, across the narrow gangway. His eyes blazed. More than the single manacle that fixed a galley slave to the rowing bench in front, it was the manacles of the mind which held him enslaved. Few there dreamed of freedom, most dreamed of death. But in Nicholas Ingoldsby’s burning blue eyes there was no despair.

And the manacle round his ankle was loose.

Five days ago the galley had pulled into a narrow bay on a deserted island and the carpenter had gone ashore to find decent timber. The repair took some hours and the rowers rested, aching with longing to see land so close. But the corsairs’ scimitar points were always at their throats.

‘Slaves you are and slaves you will remain!’ bawled the boatswain. ‘Rebel and you will lose your ears, your noses, your eyes — a blind man can row as well as a sighted! I have seen rebellious slaves skinned alive. And then your throats will be cut and you will go down to feed the fish. No flowers on a sailor’s grave. None on a galley slave’s either. Your seed will die out and you will be forgotten for ever. Now do not stir while we work.’

They did not stir. Anger still burned like a red fire in Nicholas’s belly. As long as he still felt that, he might live. Others here would die. Most of them. But not I, he thought. Not I. Nor Hodge either. Soon our time will come.

They had been through worse than this before.

The corsair who doubled as ship’s carpenter replaced a spar, but in a moment of carelessness let a short iron bolt drop beneath the rowing benches, to subside in the foul water. In a trice Nicholas had clenched it between his toes and kept a hold on it, knowing a man’s life might depend on such a trivial thing. He clung to that iron bolt like a sinner to the Cross.

The boatswain raised his whip. The Sardinian fisher boy was about to be beaten to death before their eyes.

Nicholas bowed his head. He could never bear to watch this final scene, this epilogue to so wretched a life, though he had seen and endured many horrors himself in his twenty-two years. There were many scars on his arms, his lean torso, and a lumpy white cicatrice over his left elbow where a musket ball had once smashed into him as he swam desperately across a harbour. Long ago now. Upon the island of Malta. .

The boy groaned at his trailing oar but could not move himself. The whip cut and cut in pointless cruelty.

For five days now that iron bolt had been passed around, mostly at night, going from one rower to another. It was terrible work, and their punishment had they been caught would have been beyond imagining. Skinning alive would have been the least they suffered.

After five days of agonised filing and wrenching at their manacles, in the snatched seconds when the boatswain was not overseeing them, when they were on rest watch, in moments of darkness when clouds covered the face of the moon and dulled the brilliant Mediterranean stars, they had prayed to God to help them break their single cursed manacles.

And now for three of them, just three, their manacles were broken. Nicholas, Hodge, and the great bearlike Easterner whose language no one else spoke, but who said he came from ‘Rus, Rus’. It was scarcely believable. He meant the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, they thought, an almost unknown realm in the heart of snowbound Scythia. None knew how he had come here. But his expression was one that even the corsairs did not like to consider too long. As if the moment he had the chance, he would rise up and tear each of them limb from limb with his bare hands.

The slaves could have waited longer. The precious iron bolt might have been passed on night after night, freeing more and more. But then they might have been discovered. And they could have better chosen their moment to rise in revolt too. A natural time would be when the corsair galley came in sight of its next prey, when they were attacking a Christian merchant ship, and battle was engaged. Then they might just be saved. But to rise up now, only three of them, was suicidal. Patience was as important as courage.

The Sardinian boy groaned, blood coursed from his head and face, and he began to shake and tremble violently all over, his eyes closed. He could no more pull an oar than he could fly. He would die soon, before their eyes. Then his emaciated body would be unlocked from the bench, hauled up and rolled over the low gunwales. He would make barely a splash, his soul already flown to other spheres.

The bearlike Rus turned his great head on his rounded shoulders and glowered at Nicholas from beneath dense black brows. Whether it was a smile was impossible to say. But he showed his teeth. And then he made a noise that Nicholas did not understand. Blowing softly through his lips, he made a sound like a great, distant explosion.

The boatswain gave up his beating and leaned over, unlocking the boy’s manacle. He angrily ordered two of his men to haul in and stow the oar, and drag the half-dead boy aft.

The corsair captain in the stern grinned, his teeth stained with qat. ‘Row on, my Christian gentlemen, row on! Do not be troubled by your dying comrade there. For there is gold still to be discovered, emeralds, amethysts, bars of silver — and of course your white-skinned maidens. .’

The dying boy was dragged to the gunwales.

Nicholas flexed his hands.

The oars were far too long and unwieldy to be drawn in and used for weapons. What else was there?

‘For St Nicholas and Mother Russia!’ cried a voice as deep and cavernous as a great bronze cannon. The huge Rus had hauled himself up on to the narrow gangway over the rowers’ heads, and was standing there facing the open-mouthed corsairs at the stern, huge and adamantine, his arms flung wide, his broken manacle still trailing from his ankle. He was virtually naked, though back and shoulders were matted with dark hair, and quite weaponless. Yet still it was a few shocked moments before the boatswain ran at him with drawn sword.

The Rus somehow evaded the sword-thrust altogether and took the boatswain in an embrace. He lifted him from the gangway and squeezed. The boatswain’s eyes bulged in their sockets and his scimitar clattered on the planks. The Rus grinned.

In a scrambling panic, a couple more corsairs fitted arrows to their curved bows and one of them shot. Just as the bowstring thrummed, the Rus turned a little, and the arrow thocked hard into the boatswain’s back. His breath sighed from his mouth and his head rolled free. The Rus thrust his arm between the dead man’s legs, twirled him above his head, and flung him like a straw doll at the onrushing corsairs.

Other corsairs ranged their broad blades over the rest of the rowers below, ready to strike their heads from their necks if any more should stir. Nicholas cursed as he felt a cold blade touch the back of his neck. They were trapped. But what the devil was the Rus thinking of?

The Rus had run to the prow and turned again, still grinning like a deranged bear just loosed from its chains. He leaned down to a wooden hatchway. An arrow thudded into his belly and he paused for a moment, and then continued.

It was the powder store.

The corsairs were screaming and running at him, but everything happened in no more than a few breaths. With his mighty strength, the muscles of his arms and shoulders bunched like knots of towing rope, the Rus wrenched the locked door of the hatchway free, flinging it upright to give himself momentary cover just as two more arrows thudded into its planks.

The narrow gangway between the rowing benches allowed only one corsair to attack him at a time, and the first came sweeping wide with a side-bladed glaive or half-pike. Again the Rus’s agility belied his size, not to mention the two arrows that now stuck in him, belly and thigh, narrow rivulets of blood trickling from each. He ducked the half-pike and then swiped his assailant backhanded as if he were no more than a troublesome fly. The corsair reeled, blood erupting from flattened nose and split lips, and dropped to the deck.

The Rus leaned down and dragged him to his feet and held him tight to his flank in another crushing one-armed bear-hug. He shuffled near to the open hatchway again, his constricted captive trying to suck in air, his mouth a horrified gaping O.

Another corsair darted forward with a wheel-lock pistol hurriedly primed, and the Rus grinned widely, savagely, as if this was all that he had hoped for. Not even looking, he put the heel of his hand under his captive’s chin and shoved his head back with terrifying force. Nicholas heard the neck vertebrae snap. Again he threw a corpse into the arms of his onrushing assailants, then in a blur of speed he seized the arm of the fellow with the squat wheel-lock, snapped his arm at the elbow, and caught the pistol in his own paw.

He turned and leapt into the hatchway.

The air was filled with screaming, from the corsair with the shattered arm, and behind, from the captain himself. A scream of genuine panic and terror.

Nicholas’s eyes too flared wide with terror. Now he understood that sound the Rus had made. The soft explosion. He would kill them all in his madness. They would all go down together, Mohammedan and Christian alike, equals at last in the drowning sea.

Corsairs came struggling over the bodies of their fallen comrades, but it was too late. The Rus had moved with astonishing swiftness, his movements planned weeks and months before in bitter dreams of vengeance.

He reappeared from out of the hatchway like a demon in a stage dumbshow rearing up out of hell, deranged, filthy, triumphant — and holding upon his left shoulder a barrel of gunpowder that it would take two normal men to lift. In his final triumph now he was actually singing, some old Russian hymn, in deep baritone. Blagoslovi, Dushe Moya. . He smashed the barrel down upon the rest of the store below, waved the wheel-lock tauntingly one last time at the captain as his desperate screams fell silent, his mouth still open, disbelieving. Finally the Rus crossed himself, dropped to his knees, gritting his teeth at the arrow’s agony in his belly, held the sparking mechanism of the pistol to the spill of serpentine black powder — a scrabbling corsair leapt on to his back with a knife raised high in his fist — and fired.