The Great Siege

12

Dawn, and the sun coming up to larboard.

‘Out of France,’ said Nicholas wonderingly.

‘Out of Spain,’ corrected Stanley. ‘We sail south and west now. Look hard and you’ll see the snow-capped mountains that stand sentinel behind the Spanish coast. The mountains of Cantabria.’

They were beautiful in the sun. And the very word, Cantabria …

‘From their oak forests are made the Spanish galleons at Bilbao, which sail all the way to the Indies and back. Noble mountains, are they not, Master Hodgkin? More wild and sublime than any of your Shropshire hills?’

Hodge grunted. ‘Fatter sheep on the green hills of home, I’ll wager.’

They were rounding Cape Finisterre. Stanley was indicating eastward where Santiago da Compostela lay, the great pilgrim city where St James was buried, when the master called out from the sterndeck, ‘Storm coming in from the west. Hoist in sails!’

Sure enough, on the western horizon there were growing towering clouds, a dark and ominous grey, swollen with rain. The first gusts flurried across the sea, flinging up spray and flattening out the little waves. But the waves would be growing soon.

‘Off the coast of Galicia too,’ muttered Smith, and a look of genuine anxiety crossed Stanley’s bearded face.

‘Is that bad?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Bad?’ growled Smith. ‘It’s worse than the coast of Cornwall.’

Only a few minutes later a wall of wind hit the little ship like a backhanded swipe from Neptune himself. Every timber creaked and the ship keeled hard to larboard in the blast. The sails cracked like musket shots and the blocks rattled in the rigging. Everything started to tremble, including Hodge and Nicholas.

‘Pull her to starboard, head her into the wind!’ roared the master to Pidhook at the whipstaff. ‘She’s a tilt to the north, bless the devil. We can bring her out from the coast, or at least keep her off it.’

In another instant the air was filled with icy rain driving into them almost horizontally, stinging their noses and cheeks and making them gasp. But it was fear, raw fear that overwhelmed them. Pain was nothing to that. The black, clawed coast looked horribly near through the murk. The boys hooded their faces with their cloaks, though not being able to see the heaving waters around them made them feel instantly sick.

‘Pages, to the pump!’ roared the master. ‘Vizard, check anchor! Legge, wad up the water jars and lock down the hatches! Down below first, landsmen, ye’re nothing but a danger up on deck! Down below now, and no spewing on our cargo either. If you see a sprung leak bigger than an infant’s piss, give us the yell.’

Clutching on tight to rail and rigging, Smith moved aft to where the master stood bow-legged, holding on tight himself as the ship began to rear and buck over the growing waves. He said something, lost in the teeth of the gale, and the master stared at him, rainwater streaming down his face, and then shrugged as if he was listening to a madman.

Smith clawed his way back and loosened a pile of ropes tied round a capstan. He threw one end to Nicholas.

‘Bind yourself tight, boy, round the chest, tight as if your life depended on it! Which it does!’

Shaking with fear, feeling himself white-faced and nauseous, his eyeballs aching, Nicholas tried not to see the size of the waves already running in from the west, like green glassy dunes. To the east, white water breaking on needles of black rock. The ship straining to sail outward, the deck already tipping steeply. He forced his cold, wet hands to tie the thick corded rope around his chest, just below his arms, in a double knot. It was momentarily a relief to have something else to think about. Then the knot was done, and the ship gave a terrific lurch, timbers audibly screeching above the gale. He pictured nails twisting, boards springing loose … Terror gripped him again. He thought his bowels might empty.

‘And you, Hodge, the other end!’

No less terrified than Nicholas, Hodge did as he was told.

‘Now, about the main mast, both of you, two circuits. It’ll not be used for sail for a while, not on this blast!’

Slipping on the drenched deck, the two boys clumsily circled each other until both were looped fast around the great spruce mainmast, slipping and sliding back and forth, scrabbling desperately with wet leather soles on the sea-darkened timbers of the deck. The ship rocked and reeled, briefly on an even keel and then over again with a sickening lurch, the larboard deck almost down to the water’s edge. Yet they kept their balance and their panic under control, knowing they were bound to the ship with rope thick enough to tow another.

‘Now!’ bellowed Smith, and thrust the staves into their numbed hands once more. ‘Fight! If you were Norsemen of old, you’d do this with daggers to the death!’

Smith and Stanley bound themselves to brass cleats on the deck, and took staves also. Suddenly Smith roared again, ‘Now! Fight us!’

On the wildly tilting deck amid the teeth of the storm, faces dashed and eyes blinded with stinging salt spray, the two boys fought back desperately as the two knights belaboured them, delivering many a true hit to legs, arms and sides that would leave bruises for a week. Gradually the boys’ fear receded as outrage and then anger took its place, and they returned blow for blow with increasing fury. Even if the ship did founder on those jagged rocks, not half a mile off, they’d outlive it. They’d out-swim the bastard storm!

The knights laughed and mocked them, goading them on, roaring out in the wind.

‘Well named you are, Nancy and Matilda! You fight like maidens! Fight! Devil take you, fight!’

The rope clutching them securely round the chest, they spun and dodged and strained from the mainmast like bears tied in the pit and set on by dogs. Their blood was up, hair plastered to their skulls, soaked to the skin, yet they were wielding their staves and ducking and slithering and yelling too vigorously for the cold to touch them now. It was like galloping a horse through the rain, thought Nicholas. Your flesh was cold to the touch, yet your hot blood sang, your brain pulsed, your heart burned with an animal heat. He caught Smith hard across the hip with a side blow that had the knight bellow in his black beard and shake the water from his eyes.

‘Blasted puppy, have at you!’

A return blow was only just parried, leaving Nicholas’s fingers tingling with needles at the shock.

‘Yell, yell into the storm!’ roared Smith, coming at him again. ‘Shout out that you love the storm! Say it!’

‘I love the storm!’

‘Hah!’ Another painful blow across Nicholas’s back as he turned too much aside. ‘Again! Louder!’

‘I love the storm!’

He fought back. He yelled. He screamed. The storm screamed around him, and he was one with it now, riding it, riding the little ship beneath his feet like it was a wild horse and he the rider, in command now of this bucking wild thing. He further called to mind scenes of torment from the past weeks and months, and the shipwreck of his life. It steeled him, and terror fled away.

The mariners on the rear deck squatted low to keep their balance, watching this crazed performance in disbelief. These four voyagers belabouring each other with longstaffs in the teeth of the gale, staggering back and forth, only kept from sliding clean of the canted deck and certain drowning by being bound to the mast.

‘The storm has turned their wits!’

‘Perhaps it’s a cure for seasickness.’

A third simply spat downwind and growled, ‘Landlubbers.’

At last Smith and Stanley dropped back laughing, even their mighty frames exhausted from fighting in drenched clothes on such a shifting ground, eyes stung red by saltspray, beards streaming water.

‘Fight on! Fight on!’ they roared at the boys, goading them to further furies.

What good practice this was — for they would soon be fighting in the heart of another storm. When the ground beneath their feet would be slippery not with saltwater but with blood.

At last Smith and Stanley looked at each other and nodded. They had it. Both boys. The Ingoldsby boy for certain, and his Hodge too. Both of ’em. That furor martialis, that battle fury, without which no amount of fancy swordsmanship is worth a fig.

Between the two of them however, the knights held privately that once at Malta, the two boys would fall to and become useful porters of powder and musket balls, provisioners, perhaps builders and ditchers. They had survived homeless through an English winter well enough, they might endure through the coming inferno of Malta. But not as fighters. Though the gentleman boy, certainly, had that knot of anger in his belly that drives the best warrior. Anger against what? Against the world that hurt him.

Young Ingoldsby had damnably little left to him in England, it was true. But at Malta, all this swordsmanship flummery would suddenly seem as nothing under that burning, unforgiving sun. They would have their uses, these stout-hearted boys, but not as fighting men. A certain Grand Master would not allow it. But for now, let it keep them busy.

The storm endured from dawn till dusk, but the ship was kept off the toothed coast of Galicia well enough, and at last the wind began to ease. The waves heaved and dragged at them all night, but by sunrise the following day, the sky was a pale washed blue, and the roll at last abating. Hodge and Nicholas had slept down below, curled up among the bales of English broadcloth, and never felt a hint of sickness. Before he slept, as every night, Nicholas prayed for the souls of his father and mother, and for his sisters.

In the morning they groaned and stretched and every muscle ached. Their breakfast rations were nowhere near enough. They fantasised about roast pork, sizzling on the spit. They dreamt of boiled beef and pottage, plum tart, green garden peas, apple duff and cream, frumenty, woodcock, duck roast, sweet rice pudding. But stale bread, mouldering cheese and tart small beer would have to suffice.

Smith had them raise the sword that day.

Each raised it twenty-two times.

‘A fair promise of parry and thrust,’ said Smith, trying to hide his pleasure in his beard. ‘In truth, a good swordsman will only raise his sword three times before he kills. One parry — two parry — three thrust. The rhythm of meted death.’

Nicholas’s voice rose with indignation. ‘Then why-?’

Smith smiled, with little mirth. ‘You will have more than one man apiece to fight, I fear. And you may just meet as good a swordsman as yourself. Then endurance is all. In Malta, if you remain steadfast to fight-’

‘I do.’

‘Then you will meet swordsmen of the very finest in the world. You will meet the Janizaries.’

There was one weighty bundle that Smith had not loosened yet. At sunset that day, he laid it on the deck and untied it and there were a dozen or more gleaming swords in their scabbards, sword-belts and whetstones with them.

Nicholas and Hodge stared. Though no soldiers, they knew what such a number of swords would cost. This one bundle was worth more than a ploughman or shepherd might earn in a whole lifetime. Now they knew what the two knights’ nocturnal business in Bristol must have been.

There was a great hand-and-a-half sword, venerable but not so wieldy. And Smith said they would be fighting tight-packed, have no doubt. There were two most beautiful blades, both with richly patterned and gilded bronze hilts.

‘Ours,’ said Smith.

Finally he drew out a pair of Italian short swords, cinquedeas, with plain leathern grips about the hilt.

‘These will serve you well enough. The Roman conquered his Empire with swords much like these. You will need to close up on your man to use it, and a shield is essential for that. But a stout thrust at the belly will finish any man.’

The boys took their cinquedeas with reverence, and Nicholas immediately began to buckle his about the waist.

‘Not now,’ said Smith. ‘Store it down below, out of the salt. Time enough to flaunt it later.’

Stanley and Smith also had the boys hearing and learning their foreign languages. They would hear half a dozen at Malta. Hodge learnt grumblingly, but well enough when Smith threatened to withhold his rations. Nicholas’s French and Latin were already good, and he knew a little Italian. He learnt more now, a few phrases of the difficult Malti tongue, and picked up Spanish too, an easy language and very mellifluous to his ears.

‘Estã bien?’ asked Stanley.

‘Sí, es — es una lengua hermosa.’

‘Es soberbia la hermosura. Beauty is pride. Or pride is beauty. There is the Spanish soul in essence. Sometimes to your laughing, mocking, red-faced Englishman, Spanish pride will seem like nothing but unbearable arrogance. But it is more to do with honour than self-love. Remember that Spain is a hard country, far harder than gentle green England. Spain was born under a hard sun, out of seven hundred years of war against the Mohammedan, and every inch of sun-baked Spanish earth was bought with Spanish blood — and Spanish pride.’

For five days they sailed calmly south down the thickly wooded coast of Portugal, though moving too slowly for Smith and Stanley’s liking. Nicholas felt a growing excitement. Who would have believed, when he lay shackled as a vagrant in that stinking pound only a few weeks before, or slept shivering in freezing barns with his orphan sisters, that he would soon be sailing south to war with two Knights of St John?

As for Hodge, he seemed to look out impervious on every coast they passed, and Nicholas knew he was already homesick.

‘Don’t be downcast, Hodge. You will look on the green hills of Shropshire again, I promise. I dream of it too — and my family. What remains of it.’

Hodge remained gloomy. ‘Foreign parts don’t suit all of us.’

‘And imagine the tales you will have to tell over your ale down at the Woolpack.’

‘Ale,’ whispered Hodge longingly. ‘Shropshire ale.’

Smith too stared out gloomily from the bow at the calm seas, the gentle wind only just filling the sails. The shadow of the mast on the sea like a mocking sundial, ever moving. His brothers at Malta, steadfastly waiting. The numberless Turk coming on.

Stanley nodded over at him. ‘My brother knight is of a tragic disposition,’ he said jovially.

He spoke loudly enough for Smith to hear. The gloomy knight’s back stiffened.

‘But then he has much to feel melancholy about,’ Stanley went on. ‘His unfortunate visage, for instance. And he was once disappointed in love, when the jade ran off with another. Very fair she was too. Rather long in the face, perhaps — but lovely long legs, a rich auburn mane, huge brown eyes like honey. Altogether the prettiest horse you ever saw.’

Smith turned and snarled over his shoulder.

‘And you, Master Hodgkin. Do you pine for your native land because you left a sweetheart behind?’

‘No,’ said Hodge shortly. ‘I’d just rather bide there, is all.’

‘Ah, but the world has grown vastly of late.’ Stanley looked out over the western sea with that faraway expression of his, eyes half closed. ‘And whole new continents yet to be found, some say. The fabled antipodes, islands in the Pacific Ocean. Such travellers’ tales.’

‘Have you travelled much, then?’ asked Nicholas.

Stanley twisted back suddenly, half hanging from a rope, eyes dancing. ‘Have we? My brother knight and I, have we not sailed the known world in our time? Were we there when the Great Mughal rode into the battle on a mighty elephant dressed in scarlet silk? Have we seen the caravans pass in the shade of the palms of Mysore? Have we ascended the High Kashmirs? Have we wandered the bazaars of Bengal, seen Circassian slave girls as white as ermine pelts? Have we seen fiery macaws in the Island of Serendip, and the wooden houses of Yeddo among the Japanese lakes? Smoked Chinese opium in gold and jade pipes?’

Nicholas’s eyes roved over Stanley’s travel-stained clothes, his battered boots, his distant gaze formed by far horizons. He shivered. What kind of Knight of St John was he?

‘Have we not raided the shallow inlets of the desert Libyan coast, and spun yarns of it for our supper in the city squares of Bohemia, people throwing silver pieces into our begging bowls? Have we not crossed over the high pine-clad mountains in the depths of a snowbound December, to fight in the hard-pressed marches of Hungary? And have we not seen the very flower of Hungarian chivalry fall beneath the curved blade of the Ottoman? Seen Christian skulls whitening on the great Hungarian plain? For Suleiman was there too. And will come again.

‘Have we not gazed upon the ruins of Antioch, of Heliopolis, and the wondrous pagan temples of Isfahan? Slipped unseen through the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, beneath the bright Arabian moon? Breathed in the sweet odours of the frankincense trees of the Yemen? Walked in thick furs along the banks of the frozen Moskva, set eyes on the Czar of all the Russias himself, whom they call Ivan the Terrible? Perhaps we have even sailed the Atlantic, and seen the wild jungles of the Americas — they are only a month’s sailing away! Hummingbirds and volcanoes, conquistadors in the deep green forest, the snowcapped mountains of the Andes. Did we fight alongside Pizarro and that terrible General Carbajal, still fighting in the saddle at eighty? When they finally hanged him, he went to his death with all his satanic pride and ferocity intact, disdaining to ask for pardon. They can but kill me, he sneered.’

Stanley shook his head softly. ‘They can but kill me. Now there’s a motto for a man.’ He fixed his wide-eyed gaze on the two boys. ‘A grave maxim. And one to remember when we come into Malta.’

The boys pondered.

Then Stanley grinned his teasing grin once more. ‘Were we sent by our Grand Master, La Valette, to league with the wild tribesmen of Daghestan against the Ottoman columns? Did they nickname us Blackbeard and Inglitz? Did we escape through the midnight streets of Trebizond from an evil Turkish jail, the manacles still on our wrists? Were we were there at the siege of Nakhichevan, when the monstrous Ottoman basilisks roared against the armies of the Qizilbashi in their red hats? Did we sail through the Straits of Hormuz, were we there at the siege of Surat on the spice-laden Malabar coast?

‘The wind is blowing in the sails, boys. The horses’ hooves are stamping, and a myriad new worlds wait to be discovered. The green hills of Shropshire are as lovely as May, and a man should know and love his native ground. But beyond the far horizon … aah …’

‘What tripe he talks,’ said Smith, stumping past to relieve himself over the stern. Yet as he passed by, he shot his comrade-in-arms what looked like a warning glance. As if to say, Hold your tongue, brother knight. You talk too much.

Then Stanley fell silent.

The master of the Swan was still adamant that he’d not go east beyond Cadiz.

‘Malta I know not,’ he said stubbornly.

‘Sardinia, then. You know Sardinia. You might pick up a fine cargo of sweet wine there, much cheaper than in Spain, and yet sell it back in Bristol for Spanish prices nonetheless.’

The master pondered Stanley’s business advice. At last he said, ‘Cadiz for fresh water and the best price for our cloth. Then Sardinia, for four hundred florins more, or a hundred ducats.’

‘A hundred ducats!’ Stanley laughed. ‘Twenty.’

‘Eighty.’

‘Ten.’

The master scowled. ‘You mock me. That’s no bargaining.’

Stanley hadn’t time to bargain. He stood. ‘Listen to me, man. We sail to Malta to fight a Christian crusade against an invader who will devastate all of Europe if he triumphs. One day he will come to Bristol too. This gold coin in my wallet is to buy men and weapons to fight him, not to pay you for your services. You take us to Sardinia, and you will earn yourself twenty gold ducats, no more, and the knowledge that you have done God’s will.’

At last, the captain sullenly held out his hand. Stanley counted out the heavy Spanish ducats.

It was common knowledge that you could not argue with a master on his ship, Emperor of his little wooden domain amid the sea’s boundlessness. Evidently, it was common knowledge that Stanley did not have.