Blood Red Sea

6

They awoke the next morning with burning heads, the daylight making them wince, their eyeballs aching. They lay on straw pallets in an upper room, in an insalubrious house at the end of the Street of the Christmas Flowers. Nicholas tried to speak but his throat was too dry. Water.

He lay naked on top of his own britches, and could feel the necklace still concealed within the belt. His fist clutched his purseful of ducats. He opened it and peered inside, and found the correct number remained. The girls last night — four of them, wasn’t it? Five? — from what he could remember, were hardly the finest Venetian courtesans in looks or in conduct. But they did what whores are paid to do cheerfully enough, and they were honest.

He and Hodge dragged on their clothes groggily and stared at each other. No man can feel proud of himself after a night in a whorehouse.

‘Water,’ they both croaked simultaneously.

‘And opium,’ said Nicholas.

Hodge looked at him.

‘For my head,’ he snapped.

There was no bright sun today, and they were grateful. Grey clouds rolled overhead, and a cold wind came down from the north, off the Sierras, where the high passes were still thick with winter snow. As they stepped outside, a chill drizzle began, and they pulled the hoods of their cloaks over their heads.

They found a drinking fountain at the end of the street and washed and doused their heads and drank like camels and felt a little more alive. Girlish voices called down the street from an upper storey, ‘Come back to us soon, English stallions!’

‘Stallions,’ muttered Hodge. ‘More like mules with the mad staggers, we were.’

An old woman behind them, veiled and clad in black from head to toe, clucked her tongue against her few remaining teeth and pushed in beside the fountain.

‘This water is for purity,’ she said. ‘Not for cleaning off the filth of the whorehouse.’

‘You speak right, señora,’ said Nicholas gently. ‘How I would love purity.’

She stared at him, unsure whether he was mocking her, and then shoved them both out of the way.

After some enquiries they found a jeweller’s shop in another side street, the air filled with the clink of little hammers from the coppersmiths’ workshops. Nicholas presented the aged jeweller with the diamond necklace he had saved from the corsair treasure chest. The jeweller stared at it, breathed on it and held it to the daylight. ‘Fake,’ he said. ‘But skilled work. You may have two ducats for it.’

‘Two ducats!’

‘Very well,’ said the jeweller. ‘Three.’

Nicholas shook his head and stowed the necklace away in his belt again. ‘I’ll keep it. Treasured memories.’

‘A fake,’ muttered Hodge as they walked away. ‘Emblem of our whole poxy lives.’

There was a hubbub in the square. A crowd of people was surging along as if being harried from behind. They carried their possessions in rolls of blankets, improvised sacks or wooden barrows, as if they had packed hurriedly. And their baggage had the strange and ungainly look of fugitives’ baggage: expensive silks were bound up with cheap twine, cooking pots blackened with smoke clanked alongside silver candlesticks and fine glass ornaments, a mule carried two cages full of songbirds, cheeping and bright eyed and bewildered.

Men, women and children, crying infants, old ones, huddled and frightened, looking around, keeping close to one another for comfort. The children shivered, ill dressed for such a cold day. One boy wore nothing but sandals, a pair of baggy britches and an embroidered satin cloth around his skinny shoulders: a fine piece of work, but no warmth in it. What he needed was wool. Without thinking Nicholas stepped forward to throw his cloak around the poor lad. He too had been a fugitive and a vagabond once, shivering in the woods and ditches of his native Shropshire. And you shall not oppress a stranger, for you too were strangers in a strange land. .

But even as he stepped towards the fugitives, a woman, perhaps the boy’s mother, looked up at him with an expression dark with fear and hatred. He began to speak, to draw his hood down, but she spat on the ground and then she and her shivering boy moved on. It was too late. Enmity ran too deep and was as old as the generations of men, and the time for peace and for gifts was long since gone.

The drizzle became weightier and fell as rain. Hodge and Nicholas stepped back and watched from the entrance to a side alley, their hoods shadowing their faces. The atmosphere was bitter and ugly. Instinctively Nicholas’s hand dropped to his left side to check his sword. He had none.

The crowd numbered some two or three hundred people, being driven down to the harbourside. The men were all bearded and wore skullcaps, and women wore headscarves, some of them half-face veils. The wind caught at their veils and they held them in place with slim brown hands decorated with henna tracery.

Behind them came a gang of thirty or forty well-armed ruffians and irregulars, the cruellest and most unpredictable kind. Not disciplined Spanish tercios but a motley militia, untrained, underpaid and vengeful. Ready looters and thieves from any weaker than themselves, and made bolder by the additional presence of a couple of squadrons of pikemen and musketeers.

A low murmur came from the shuffling, dispirited crowd. Some of them were reciting prayers in singsong voices, praising Allah for having liberated them from this land of tyranny and unbelief. Others muttered ‘Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, have mercy on us, Allah the Just, the Merciful. .’

‘So these are the Moriscos who have committed such atrocities,’ said Nicholas softly. ‘There seems an irony here to me.’

‘Civil war.’ Hodge shrugged. ‘The innocent get it in the neck along with the guilty.’

‘Get that filthy burqa off!’ screamed a fat woman, suddenly enraged. ‘You’re on Christian soil still, you dirty Mohammedan slut!’ And she clawed at a younger girl and snatched off her face veil. The girl cried out, but her father touched her on the arm and cautioned her. In deep shame, exposed in public before all men’s eyes, and infidel eyes too, the young Moorish girl followed after her father, her face suffused with scarlet. Rain and tears ran down. They were nearly at the harbourside now, and there were ships come to take them from unkind Spain to a new life in the Islamic Kingdom of Morocco. It was as Allah willed it.

‘Still,’ said Hodge, ‘hard to think they are of the same religion as the Turks, or those corsair savages.’

‘They are not of the same religion,’ said Nicholas.

‘They are all Mohammedans.’

‘Every man has his own religion. You think those thugs who drive these people out of Spain are the finest Christians?’

Hodge said nothing.

Down the alley behind them came more Moriscos, driven loosely along like cattle.

‘Allah ma’ak,’ muttered Nicholas as they passed by. God go with you.

The father of the family stared at him, this Christian who spoke the forbidden language of Arabic. In his eyes was nothing but suspicion, as if the blessing itself were a trap. He looked him up and down, as if trying to identify who he was, where he came from. Then he raised his arm and pointed at him very deliberately, looking hard towards an upper window above. Nicholas glanced up too, puzzled, and thought he glimpsed a figure move behind the wooden grille. When he looked back the father had moved on.

They ventured out into the square.

A wealthy Morisco merchant carried a fine bundle of silks on his shoulder, moving forward plump bellied but dignified, refusing to be hurried. A militiaman with a pike shouted out, ‘Hold!’

The Morisco merchant stopped.

‘Hand me those,’ the militiaman demanded.

‘They are not mine to give you,’ said the merchant. ‘They are promised in payment for our passage to Morocco.’

‘Hand ’em over, you snake-tongued devil worshipper, or I’ll open your belly!’ He lowered the wicked-looking pike. The merchant’s daughter, a girl of fourteen or so, cried out, ‘Abu! Abu!’ and clutched him.

The militiaman sneered at her and then viciously jabbed the butt of his pike down on her foot, encased in a fine silver-filigree slipper. Nicholas stared in horror as the girl fell to the ground howling, clutching her foot. Her father instantly dropped his bundle of silks and knelt at her side. The militiaman triumphantly seized the bundle and threw it over to his comrade.

‘Your purse too!’ he shouted through the rain and the girl’s agonized screams. ‘A rich man like you, it must weigh heavy!’

Hodge was already gripping Nicholas’s arm, holding him back, knowing his master of old. ‘We’re not even armed,’ he muttered, ‘don’t be a damn fool.’

But Nicholas twisted and was gone. He seized the militiaman’s pikestaff in both hands and shoved it back hard into the fellow’s startled face, knocking his helmet back off his forehead. He shoved it back a second time, a short swift jab. The heavy wooden staff clonked audibly against his skull, and blood spurted from his nose. He reeled. Nicholas whipped the pike clean from his grasp and spun around.

Immediately he was surrounded by a semicircle of half a dozen unwavering pikes, lowered to belly height. Heroes of Malta they might be, but this was suicidal. Hodge raised his face to the rain in despair. Barely a week free men, and they were going to go to jail again. At the very least.

There were a few moments of angry shouting, the pikemen looking ready to run this miscreant through on the spot. A Mussulman sympathizer, friend of the Moors, perhaps he’d like to take ship for Morocco too?

‘Have your cock chopped like a filthy Jew!’ bellowed the sergeant. ‘Maybe we should circumcize you in advance!’ He jabbed towards his groin, then looked around. Some hubbub was spreading through the square.

A rumour had run through the nervous crowd that a general massacre had begun. The Spaniards were intent on slaughtering them all before they even got to the harbourside, taking their last possessions, their daughters for prostitutes and bedroom slaves. Finally, to add to the pandemonium, someone had untethered some horses in a nearby street and tied lighted torches to their tails. Now the poor, terrified beasts came careering into the square with hindquarters smouldering and smoking in the downpour, lips back and teeth bared, rearing and trampling, the air filled with their screams and the evil stench of burnt horsehair. The crowd began to stampede and the pikemen turned away from Nicholas, starting to panic themselves.

Then urgent hands grasped Nicholas and Hodge and pulled them away down a narrow alleyway. Too startled to resist, Nicholas dropped the pike and allowed himself to be led. Moments later they found themselves crossing a tiny, rain-soaked inner courtyard, and bundled through a wooden doorway. They passed down a pitch-dark passageway, those that drew them on knowing the way, then through an archway so low they had to duck, and into a dimly candlelit chamber. They were pushed through heavy curtains at the back, into another still-smaller chamber, also candlelit. It was bare but for a single divan, and the air was full of the sweet smell of sandalwood.

‘Wait here,’ hissed a voice.

And then they were alone.

‘What the bloody hell now?’ said Hodge. ‘Once again you have landed us in the middle of a cowpat the size of Shropshire.’

‘That I have,’ said Nicholas, shaking the beads of rain from his cloak, drawing his hood off and sitting down on the edge of the divan with infuriating equanimity. ‘That I have.’

In the candlelight, Hodge actually saw the damn fool smile. The smile vanished again. ‘But I could not watch what they were doing.’

‘They were all Moors. The atrocities they have done, the terror they have spread-’

‘Hodge,’ said Nicholas quietly. ‘You know that is not true. Not those merchants and their families. Not that girl, her foot now broken by a Spanish pike.’

‘I bet they supported the uprising anyhow.’

‘Are you surprised?’

Hodge held his gaze and then his eyes dropped. ‘Damn it all,’ he said, ‘but the world’s a mess and a half.’