The Great Siege

13

They rounded Cape St Vincent, passed by a flat, marshy coast to the north, the sky filled with elegant white seabirds, and finally into a great harbour, backed by an ancient city, gleaming white and pleasantly crumbling.

‘You are now nearer the sun in his zenith than the north coast of Africa,’ said Stanley. Hodge looked very uncomfortable. ‘Mind your drink is clean and never go hatless, or your wits will fry in your skull. And this — ’ he held is arms wide — ‘is the most ancient sea city of Cadiz, founded by the Phoenicians, three thousand years ago.’

‘We’re in Spain?’ said Hodge disbelievingly, gazing round the harbour tight-packed with jostling boats and many coloured sails, a babel of barefoot seamen shouting, loading and unloading sardines and olives and wool. ‘Will they treat us well? Are we English not enemies?’

The mariners were already lugging the bales of broadcloth up from the hold onto deck.

‘Negotium omnia vincit,’ said Stanley dryly. ‘Trade conquers all.’

‘Two hours,’ said the master. ‘Enough for us to make our sale to the Jew dealers, and take on water. We sail again before sundown.’

A crowd of fellows were drinking watered Jerez wine in the shade of a thatched and open-fronted quayside bodega.

Smith glanced back at the two boys following them and murmured, ‘Practice is one thing. They need a real brawl, if they are not to shit and run at the first sight of the Turk.’

‘Here’s one,’ said Stanley, nodding his head in the direction of a talkative drinker seated on a stool surrounded by listeners. The knights called for four cups of sweet wine and hot water and sat on a bench just out of the sun.

The drinker and braggard was bedecked in outlandish attire, plumes and silver bracelets and a necklace of shark’s teeth along with his unbuttoned shirt and ridiculous wide galligaskins, to make it known he had travelled much in foreign parts. His listeners, hard sunburnt sailors all, listened to him nevertheless, some grinning, some agog.

Smith’s great fist tightened round his wooden wine cup. The fellow spoke Andaluz Spanish, but his accent was French.

‘What’s he say?’ asked Hodge, taking a sip of wine. Nicholas had already drained his and was calling for another. The pretty young barmaid was getting prettier with every cup. Her dark eyes flashed and glittered in the dark of the wineshop.

Stanley translated.

‘He commends Russian wine and Cretan bread above all others. He says English beef is nothing, you should taste the roasted snake they eat in China, where he says manners are so much finer too. The Emperor is a personal friend of his. He says the moon gives off a burning white heat near the tops of the mountains at the equator, and fills half the sky. He says in the far north, men live in houses of ice, share their wives freely with strangers, and coat themselves with bear-fat instead of clothes. He says he has met a great hairy man whose beard nested birds, and gathered hogsheads of orient pearls from shallow lagoons in the tropics, in water as warm as a bath. There, naked maidens disport themselves wearing nothing but garlands of flowers about their pretty tawny throats, begging passing sailors to dally with them.’

‘If there’s one thing I cannot abide,’ said Smith, looking meaningfully at Stanley, ‘it’s a fellow who brags about his foreign travels.’

The traveller tossed back another cup of wine in a single gulp. Nicholas did likewise. It was manly.

‘Señorita!’ he called.

She came over with a leather jug, her slim hips swaying. He held his cup out. She looked at him.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Por favor. ’

The girl arched her fine black eyebrows at Nicholas with just a hint of amusement, and then refilled his cup.

‘A borracho fino, primero agua y luego vino,’ she said as she turned away. For a fine drunkenness, first water and then wine.

‘What did she say?’ asked Nicholas.

‘A compliment,’ said Stanley. ‘A saucy compliment indeed.’

Nicholas grinned goofily.

The great French traveller was telling of the island of Madagastat off Africa, ruled by Mohammedans as black as devils. On another island, mermaids and tritons swum inland and slept in the treetops at night, and there were owls the size of horses, and dragons with feathers as long as a cannon royal, and mouths like a castle gateway. There he had raked up carbuncles beneath the palm trees, diamonds and amethysts, and carried them home in sacks to his beautiful wife, the daughter of a duke.

‘All this,’ said Smith, ‘from a fat braggard who never stirred beyond the stinking backstreets of Paris, except to cheat a few simple Spanish sailors for his dinner.’

‘And before you know it,’ said Stanley, ‘your hand has bunched itself into a fist and punched the windy fool off his stool, sprawling on the flagstones, with blood pouring from his nose now flatter than an Ethiop’s.’

‘At which he says,’ added Smith, his voice rising, ‘why, manners are far superior to this in China! Then everyone in the tavern joins in belabouring him and tossing him over the quayside into the brine, wishing him hearty Godspeed back to China, and give the Emperor there a kick in the Netherlands for us!’

Nicholas laughed and stood a little unsteadily. He had taken too little water, as the barmaid had observed, and the strong sweet Jerez wine had already warmed his empty stomach and young head.

‘I need to piss,’ he said. ‘All this traveller’s talk has gone to my bladder.’

He made his way carefully outside.

Stanley just managed to catch the braggard’s eye at that moment. He shook his head apologetically, murmured something, and gestured outside at Nicholas.

The braggard stopped talking and frowned. The crowd of drinkers about him fell abruptly silent and stared round. The braggard stood up. He was a good height and of useful build, full-bellied but broad-shouldered, his lantern jaw finished with a neatly pointed beard. He pushed one or two men aside, staring directly at Stanley. Then he came over, hand on his sword hilt.

‘Qu’est-ce qu’il a dit?’ snapped the great traveller.

Stanley replied in French, ‘You didn’t hear?’

The traveller shook his head impatiently.

‘Oh, it was nothing,’ said Stanley, looking beseechingly up at him. ‘Really, nothing. I mean, not so terrible as it sounds.’

‘Qu-est-ce qu’il a dit?’ demanded the braggard violently, slamming his hand down on the table. Smith and Stanley both quailed abjectly before him. Nothing like fear to encourage a bully.

‘He said,’ Stanley murmured sorrowfully. ‘My profoundest apologies for the discourtesy of my passing acquaintance out there, but … he is young, and a little drunk.’

Nicholas was weaving his way back from the quayside, grinning foolishly, thinking of the lovely young barmaid.

The Frenchman drew his sword a few inches from the scabbard.

‘He said, he said,’ babbled Stanley in a high-pitched, whimpering voice, he and Smith both rising from the bench. ‘He said, oh mon Dieu, he said … that your mother was a filthy French whore, and you yourself were nothing but a fart-filled son of Sodom.’

With a great roar the Frenchman seized the edge of the table and overturned it. Nicholas halted and stared. Hodge remained seated, looking bewildered, Stanley and Smith both vanished abruptly, and there was the great traveller panting and staring at him with a very angry look in his eye.

‘What?’ said Nicholas. ‘Wha-’

Racing up the cobbled side street, Stanley and Smith passed by three fellows talking French, and immediately accosted them.

‘Votre ami est là, dans la bodega là-bas?’

‘Matthieu, oui, qu’est-ce qu’il y a?’

‘Vite, vite! Une bagarre!’

‘Et un salaud Anglais!’

‘Ah, merde, allons-y!’ roared the Frenchmen, breaking into a run. ‘A bas les Anglais!’

‘Four against two,’ said Stanley thoughtfully, looking after them. ‘I think that’s fair.’

‘Very fair,’ said Smith. ‘Very fair indeed.’

‘Two minutes?’

‘Five minutes. Time for a drink.’

‘A celebratory potation. Excellent.’

Thumps, crashes and yells could be heard from the tavern below. Something burst suddenly through the thatch roof. A table leg, perhaps.

‘A shame to pick on the fellow, in some ways,’ said Stanley.

‘Well,’ said Smith. ‘He was French.’

Coming down to the cobbled quayside again, Smith nudged Stanley. He looked along towards the town. Walking away from them was a slow quartet, arm in arm. Two had rough bandages round their heads, another’s arm hung down motionless at his side, and a fourth was using a table leg for a crutch.

‘They’ll live,’ grunted Smith. ‘What of our comrades-in-arms?’

The tavern was deserted but for the pretty young barmaid and two forlorn figures, Hodge and Nicholas, sitting silently on a bench. The latter was being tended by the girl, no older than Nicholas himself. He had a badly bruised eye and a long cut across his skull. The girl scowled ferociously at the two troublemakers, and then Hodge was on his feet, shouting at them. He seemed to have suffered little damage.

‘How dare you come back here, you pigeon-livered villains! Knights of St John, my arse you are, you’re nothing but a couple of born cowards with no more fight in you than a peevish dove!’ He was red-faced and bellowing and magnficently unafraid. He stood blocking Smith’s way and shoved him angrily in the chest, shouting in his face. Smith stepped back and did not retaliate. This servant boy was a prince among scullions. He could have clapped him on the shoulder, but needed his fists free to block any incoming blows.

‘Now get out of this alehouse and back in the shitten gutter with you, you leprous scum-sucking churls, or I’ll kick your lubbardly arses from here to Bristol and beyond, so I will! I mean it, you shit-begotten worms! Step back now!’

Hodge’s fist flew out hard and straight, and it was only with his best-judged step that Smith evaded it. A moment later he and Stanley each had an unbreakable grip on Hodge’s arms, and pinned him up against the wall. The boy struggled so wildly that they thought he might dislocate his own shoulderbones. Damn it. He was in a devil of a temper. They might have to knock him cold after all, valiant though he was.

‘What did I say about never using your fists?’ said Smith.

Hodge cursed him obscenely.

Then a voice spoke quietly behind them.

‘Set him down.’

And Smith and Stanley each felt a hard jab over their kidneys. They glanced down. The Ingoldsby lad had come behind them and filched both their daggers from their belts simultaneously.

The daggers remained as steady as the voice. ‘Do not doubt I mean it. Set him down now.’

They set him down.

‘Step past ’em, Hodge.’

Hodge came round and stood alongside Nicholas.

Stanley began to turn, but the dagger point thrust so hard into him that he gasped. The lad might even have punctured his flesh through his doublet, damn him and praise him.

‘I said do not move,’ said Nicholas. ‘Talk.’

‘If you give us space.’

‘I’m not moving, nor are these daggers, till you talk.’

The boy had them pressed so hard against the wooden walls of the tavern that they truly could not move, slide nor turn on him no matter how fast they tried. Their own daggers had them pinned, and the boy’s voice was filled with that cold determination which told them not to attempt it. Once before they had got themselves trapped like this, pressed to a wineshop wall by half a dozen daggers, in an old town in Germany. On that memorable occasion, feeling the thin wall sway distinctly, they had both pushed with all their might and collapsed the planks forwards before them, rolling back on their feet in a trice to face their foe, with satisfactory consequences. But that was another time.

Stanley said, ‘We caused you to be caught in a fight, it is true. That you might profit by it. We did not believe you would come to serious harm. We did not flee to save our skins, we stayed near. When we come to Malta, you will face far worse skirmishes than this, with a far deadlier foe. Then you will find the lessons of today useful.’

It was a long time before they felt the daggers’ points soften.

They turned at last and leaned back against the wall. Stanley was not ashamed to feel his heart beating hard. The boy had truly meant business. He slipped his hand under his doublet and withdrew it. A small spot of blood.

The boy contemptuously dropped the two daggers on the earth floor at their feet and turned his back on them.

Now the knights could see better in the gloom of the tavern. Hodge was dusty and doubtless well-bruised beneath his clothes, but otherwise seemed hale. Nicholas’s eye was already bulging like a Cyclops’s, and would boast many colours before long. That must have hurt. The cut across his skull looked worse, still leaking blood down over his pale forehead and puffed eye. He also stood unevenly. It had been a serious thing, this brawl. To his dismay, Stanley also saw that the young girl had a short, deep cut on her chin.

‘Maid,’ he said, and knelt before her. ‘Forgive us.’

She eyed him coldly and turned away, wringing out a cloth and then sponging Nicholas’s skull again. The boy’s face was white.

‘On your feet, brother,’ said Smith. ‘You’ll get no forgiveness here today.’

Stanley rose and set upright a fallen table. One leg was loose. He opened his wallet and laid down a handsome gold ducat with a heavy clunk. The girl sneered. She bathed Nicholas’s wound one last time, and then pressed a clean linen bandage over it.

She said in Spanish, ‘Hold it there. It will heal. You have a noble heart, English soldier.’

Nicholas understood little, though the tone of her voice was sweet and soft.

‘Thank you that you came to my rescue then,’ she said. ‘The Frenchman swung his sword as elegantly as a peasant does his scythe.’

The knights, on the other hand, understood every word. They smiled faintly.

She gave them a withering look. The tone of her voice altered, her eyes burned, and a stream of furious, fearless Spanish flowed from her lovely lips. Spanish pride, thought Nicholas.

‘As for these two sons of cold-hearted whores, these white-livered slaves and windy pox-ridden shitsacks, they are not worthy to travel with you, nay, not to share a wine cup with you. That they die soon and rot like the offal they are, I spit on them.’

And to illustrate her words, she hawked and spat full in Stanley’s face. He wiped it away with his sleeve and bowed.

He looked at Nicholas. ‘I think she likes you.’

‘More than I like you.’

The boy stood again, still unsteady and white-faced, and not from the sherry wine.

‘To Sardinia with us?’

Hodge began to protest, but Nicholas spoke over him.

‘Against my better judgement. You villains.’

Hodge helped him limping back to the Swan of Avon.

As they drifted away from the quayside with just a foresail to bring them round, there was a girl there on the sea wall watching.

Nicholas held up his hand.

She shielded her eyes against the sun and then raised her other hand. ‘Un corazón noble,’ she whispered.

The water widened between them, and the mainsail batted and filled above Nicholas’s head. The ship gradually picked up speed. He hesitated too long. She would not hear him. At last he called out, ‘What is your name?’

She did not hear or understand.

‘Cual es su nombre, señorita? ’ murmured Stanley near him.

More loudly still he shouted, ‘Cual es su nombre?’

‘Maria de l’Adoración!’ she called back.

Maria of the Adoration.

‘Nicholas!’ he shouted back. ‘Inglés!’

She nodded, and he thought she was smiling. But it was hard to see over the sparkling water. Then he heard her voice one last time. ‘Vaya con Dios, Inglés!’

It wasn’t only his head that ached.

‘And he thinks to be a monk,’ muttered Smith.