The Great Siege

14

After the big swell of the Atlantic, they headed west and nor’west on an easy wind, into the more peaceful waters of the Inland Sea.

‘More peaceful?’ said Smith, squinting. They were skirting south of the Balearic Islands and Formentera. ‘Then what’s that ahead? Five, ten points to larboard.’

Stanley saw a long, dark line of rocks, an outlying needle of the island to their left. And almost hidden behind the rocks, he could just make out the low, lean shape of a black-painted hull, dismasted for concealment.

‘If that’s not a Barbary galley, awaiting us like a wolf,’ he whispered, ‘then I’m the Queen of Sheba.’

Smith looked him up and down.

‘It’s a Barbary galley.’

Stanley grinned. ‘Does this ship have any guns?’

‘One old petrier in the bow,’ said Smith.

‘A petrier.’ Stanley shook his head. A crude stone-thrower. ‘Noah had one of those on his Ark.’

They sailed closer to the concealed craft. Even now he could picture the rowing benches below, poorly covered in salt-cracked cowhide. Christian slaves chained and encrusted with sweat and excrement. The whip raised over their backs ready to fall, the drumstick hovering over the drum.

Stanley’s blue eyes fixed on the motionless shape ahead of them like a hawk fixed on some unwary pigeon. Then he said, ‘Time to charge our muskets, Fra John.’

Nicholas saw the two knights stride back from the prow and begin preparations with astonishing swiftness and dexterity.

‘What is it?’

They spoke not a word to him, to the master, to none. There was no time to explain.

Smith sent Hodge below for his baggages, and quickly unrolled one faded green canvas. He and Stanley turned their backs and strapped on each other’s mail jerkins, and buckled on their swords.

‘What? Where?’ said Nicholas, almost beside himself.

The master aft remained oblivious, even his sea-eyes seeing nothing yet. His crazed passengers were yet again at their games.

Another fine oilcoth with three neat ties was unbundled, and there lay six muskets. Four were plain enough arquebuses, one was a longer weapon, and the sixth a thing of rare beauty. Nicholas whistled.

‘That’s a fine musket. Can I have a shot?’

‘Afterwards, maybe.’

‘After what?’

Infuriatingly, Stanley just grinned, busily preparing the guns.

‘Not a musket,’ said Smith, his attention likewise all on the weapons. ‘A jezail. A Persian word, I believe.’

The jezail was richly inlaid with mother-of-pearl, its deep reddish-brown wood polished to a deep lustre, and with a patterned barrel so fine and long it would have to be rested on a bulwark or prop. It seemed almost too beautiful for use. Yet Smith treated it just the same, swiftly checking the barrel was clean with a prod, driving in a charge of carefully measured gunpowder in a twist of cartridge paper, and then tamping in a perfectly round, smooth sphere of a ball after it. It was a wheellock, not a matchlock. Nicholas had rarely seen one before.

‘For a sword,’ said Stanley, tapping a spit of serpentine black gunpowder into the pan of an arquebus, ‘Toledo steel from Old Spain. For armour, the armourers of Germany cannot be beat. For small daggers, poignards, pistols, along with poisons, assassinations and corruptions of every sort, then of course you will go to Italy. But for a musket of the finest — though it shames me to say it — go east. Beyond the Ottomans. To Persia, or India.’

Nicholas remembered Stanley’s account of his supposed travels. The Great Moghul, and a trumpeting Indian elephant, its mighty ivory tusks raised in battle fury. Is that where John Smith’s jezail came from?

Smith held up the long, elegant musket before him in both hands. ‘The four-foot barrel is as smooth as slate within. Forged of finest Indian wootz steel. There is no musket to compare with it in all of Europe. Better yet, load it with one of these’ — he held out in has hand a few curiously shaped musket balls — ‘and you can fire through any armour known to man.’

‘What are those?’

‘They are called stuardes, made by a knavish and counterfeit Scotsman called Robert Stuart, who claims kinship with the Scottish kings. He lies. But he does make these musket balls that pierce armour, which no other man in the world, I believe, has the secret of. If the Knights only knew …’

He pocketed the stuardes carefully, set down the jezail with the muzzle propped up a little, and tossed Nicholas and Hodge a couple of matchcords.

‘Get these lit. And guard them with your life. If they go out, you go over the side.’

Nicholas wound furiously at the tinder box.

‘Oi!’ yelled the master. ‘No fire on my ship, not so much as a hot fart!’

Eyes still fixed on the guns before them, cleaning, priming and loading in a blur of speed, Stanley paused only to point an outstretched arm in the direction of the hidden galley. He added not a word of explanation.

The master stared north to the islands, and was heard to hiss, ‘Suffering Christ! Man the sails, every man to the ropes! Move, you sons of whores, or your arses will be on a Mohammedan rowing bench by sundown. Move your poxy carcases, God damn you black!’

‘If this ship is to be judged on its keeping of the third commandment,’ murmured Stanley, working away, ‘then we are surely doomed.’

Nicholas too saw the hull, and a moment later heard across the smooth waters the sound of a drum begin to beat out a dreadful, ominous rhythm, and a first muffled crack. The prow nudged forward, and then the black galley eased out from behind the rocks, as lean and lethal as a stiletto dagger. The prow was decorated with an evil eye talisman, and some Arabic lettering.

His blood felt thick and cold.

‘Turks!’

‘Not Turks, boy,’ said Smith. ‘Moors. Berbers. The coast of Algiers is but fifty miles south. But they are Mohammedans and unchristened infidels all.’

The sails slapped above them. There wasn’t enough wind for flight. The rowing galley, immune to such vagaries, was now turning on its shallow keel and heading straight for them. Half a mile, less. A minute or two and they would be …

‘Bring ’em in!’ Smith cried out to the master. ‘Our appetites are up!’

‘Bring ’em in!’ retorted the master angrily. ‘What do you mean bring ’em in, they’re coming in anyway! There’s twenty or thirty Mohammedan cuthroats on that damned galley!’

Smith said, ‘Look as if you’re fleeing-’

‘We are fleeing!’

‘-but keep your mariners on the end of the rope. The instant they close to, reef up for a fighting sail.’

The master looked as black as a strangled Moor. ‘I am the king of this ship, and you, Sir Knight, or the King of all the Russias, are nothing here but damned peasants! You understand?’

Smith only smiled, a somewhat dark and unnerving smile. ‘Do as I say. Those corsairs are ours, and their treasure may be yours.’

‘Report, boy,’ said Stanley. ‘How many men?’

Nicholas and Hodge both squinted. The sea sparkled in their eyes. There were many heads, many dark shapes. ‘Twenty? Thirty?’

No reply.

‘Do we put on our swords?’

‘How else were you planning to fight? By slapping them?’

Nicholas and Hodge buckled on their swords, trying to keep their hands from shaking. They had survived a couple of tavern brawls, it was true, the last one a true skirmish. But this was the real thing. Men would die.

‘Draw ’em tighter!’ cried the master, looking up at the listless sails in desperation. ‘Swing her in from the wind! We can get in behind them and make for the islands!’

‘No — we — can’t,’ murmured Stanley in a happy, sing-song voice, busily priming another arquebus.

Nicholas glanced down at him. He was loving this.

Then the two knights were on their feet, swords and daggers about their waists, and six muskets fully served and loaded, laid out on the oilcoth. There was also the biggest pistol Nicholas had ever seen. A petronel: a horse pistol, for putting old nags out of their misery. He wondered what on earth it would do to a man.

‘You need a certain strength in your arm to fire the creature,’ said Smith with a nod. ‘But if you do it right, the effect is considerable. Now: if they’ve got a cannon, we might get a splash as they close in. You will see that not a drop of water touches the guns. Understand?’

Nicholas nodded.

‘And if they fire up a cannon, and you see the sparks fly at the breech, then look where it’s pointing and make sure you’re not in the way. Remember you can move faster than a cannon on its carriage. But once the ball has left the cannon’s mouth, and is coming straight at you — well then, it is too late to move. You will never see it, nor anything else before you see the gates of heaven.’

‘But I can’t see any cannon.’

The knights scanned the fast-approaching galley. The sea was calm, the sky clear, the sun warm. Good conditions for a shot. And no: no cannon visible. The corsairs would expect to come swiftly alongside this full-bellied, lumbering merchantman, and simply clamber aboard, scimitars whirling. Their usual technique. Some of the Christian dogs would be killed, the rest enslaved, and the cargo of broadcloth their reward in the markets of Algiers.

The master was still swearing furiously at his mariners, urging them to draw on every inch of sail.

‘You cannot outrun, them, sir!’ called Smith. ‘There is not enough wind.’

‘We cannot fight the villains either! Have you seen their numbers?’

Smith shrugged. ‘We have no choice in the matter. Unless you wish to cry for mercy? I’d save your voice.’

‘A good thing it looks like we are struggling to flee,’ said Stanley softly. ‘They suspect nothing.’

The master stared out over the water.

Now twenty or more corsairs could be clearly seen, eagerly lining the galley’s narrow central gangway above the heads of the oar-slaves. They were stripped to the waist, skins every shade from coffee to Ethiop black. Most went shaven-headed — always easier at sea — except for topknots on their crowns, for the angels to pull them up to Paradise on Judgement Day.

Gold torcs and earrings gleamed. So too did scimitars, cutlasses, daggers and pistols. Smith and Stanley had taken up their guns and were crouching down below the bulwarks of the Swan. The high-sided little ship with its sterncastle and forecastle was something of a floating fortress, and evened the odds. But damn it, they should have instructed the boys in how to reload an arquebus by now. They never expected to meet corsairs this far out. Hunting so confidently, so close to the coast of Spain, the most powerful of all the Christian kingdoms. A sign of the times.

‘When we pass you back our guns,’ said Smith, ‘you take them swiftly, lay them down there, and pass the next. With the muzzle pointing skywards.’

The boys nodded.

‘You keep your heads down, and you keep those slow-matches burning. If you catch one of the swine climbing aboard, prick him while he’s still coming up and over. Once he’s on deck and it comes to hand-to-hand fighting — then God be with you.’

Nicholas felt cold to the marrow.

In the prow of the corsair galley, arrogant as a young god, stood the captain. A handsome, shaven-headed and moustachioed Moor, with flashing eyes and a ready smile. He wore an incongruous mix of grubby loincloth and startling red satin doublet, unbuttoned, showing his lean chest and hard stomach, twice scarred with deep swordcuts. He’d taken the doublet from a Genoese ship not a week before, the Christian’s blood still staining the gold piping. A wealth of gold hung around his neck and arms and dangled from his ears. Corsairs tended not to trust their treasure to banks. Two fine ruby rings gleamed on his little fingers. He’d cut them from the delicate hand of a young Spanish bride, sailing off Valencia last summer. The rings were not all they had taken from her, he and his men. He grinned. Life was sweet.

Though the merchantman had shown no white flag, yet look how she wallowed and struggled on the windless sea. She was as good as finished, a goat in a net, with the lion approaching. He spat and then sucked in the clean sea air, his chest swelling, his heart pounding to the drum, his galley surging along through the small waves, face into the sun. Soon they would have the joy of killing again, the joy of victory, the joy of standing on their enemies’ necks. Then the cargo, the cheers of his men, the triumphant return to Algiers. The dirty little whores in the waterfront brothels, and the white clay opium pipe. O, life was sweet.

John Smith and Edward Stanley carefully laid the muzzles of their guns on the top of the bulwarks of the forecastle, moving very slowly so as not to catch a corsair’s eye. The galley was two hundred paces off now. One hundred and eighty. One hundred and sixty. Smith squinted down the barrel of his jezail, finger lightly on the trigger.

His target was clear. The corsair captain, standing plain at the prow. But not yet near enough.

The master and mariners had fallen still, waiting in terror. Some clutched boathooks or little-used blades, and Vizard and Legge both held useful-looking halberds. But they had no hope — unless these passengers of theirs proved of sturdier stuff than they seemed. Certainly they knelt now and cradled their fine guns with a steely determination. Yet the enemy were so many. Already they could feel the manacles round their ankles, the oar and the rowing bench grinding the flesh off their bones, and a slow death coming. Why in hell did they agree to sail beyond Cadiz, into these infested waters?

The corsair galley was a hundred paces off. Eighty. Sixty.

Nicholas’s heart hammered, and his palms were so sweaty, he wondered how he’d ever keep a grip on his sword. Let it not come to that, he prayed with shame. Not yet. Perhaps they will turn away.

Forty paces off. The mechanical movement of the oars at top speed now, and they could hear the swish of the galley’s bow wave from here, see every corsair aboard. The captain in his outlandish attire even grinned, raising his scimitar and waving it as if in greeting.

If only they’d had time to serve and load up the old petrier, that might have come in handy, despite its age. A ‘stone thrower’, blasting out a rough stone ball from a squat iron barrel, it hadn’t much range but at short distances it could do business. And if you struck lucky, and the stone ball hit a piece of metal aboard the enemy ship, an anchor or cleat or even a metal band around a mast, it could splinter into a lethal spray of shards, hurtling in every direction, killing two or three men in an instant, laying low half a dozen more. But there had been no time, and the petrier sat untouched.

Smith breathed slow and steady and pulled the trigger. The steel wheel whirred and sparks flew, there was the powerful report, the smell of burnt gunpowder, a brief puff of dark smoke.

After having knelt so unearthly still, the instant the shot was fired Smith was all activity. Never taking his eyes from the corsair galley ahead of him, he dipped his gun, cleaned it with ramrod, cartridge of powder, ramrod, ball, ramrod, a modicum more powder into the pan, all with perfect smoothness and without once needing to check his actions. He was kneeling up to the bulwark and taking aim again within half a minute.

The galley had slowed and stopped, the oars were still. They could hear the small waves slapping against the sides. It was like a venomous snake that had suddenly had its head lopped off. For Smith’s shot had sent the ball clean through the forehead of the corsair captain, and he was dead before he slumped to the deck.

‘In truth,’ said Smith, sighting down the barrel with a squint, ‘I fire a ball like that only one shot in ten.’

‘Twenty,’ muttered Stanley, also sighting.

Smith grinned. A rarity. ‘The curve of the ball from the barrel, even a barrel so beautifully smooth as this. The wind, the fall … But it looks mighty impressive when it works, does it not?’

Beside them, Nicholas felt his throat too dry to speak.

Another corsair, a tall lean fellow, ran forward and fell on the captain’s body with a cry.

‘Akhee!’ he cried. ‘Akhee!’

Stanley raised his head again from sighting.

‘What does he say?’ asked Hodge.

‘He says, “My brother.”’

‘As in my brother corsair, my brother Mohammedan … or my blood brother?’ murmured Smith. ‘If the latter — then we may indeed be in for a fight.’

‘From his grief,’ said Stanley, ‘I surmise the latter.’

‘What does that mean?’ stammered Nicholas.

‘It means this is now a blood matter. It means they’re not after our cargo. They’re after our lives.’

Smith grunted. ‘Take him.’

The lean corsair was just looking up again and across the water to the Christian swine, when Stanley pulled the trigger and the matchcord dropped and set the powder sizzling in the pan, and his arquebus erupted with a deafening bang, far louder than Smith’s jezail.

The corsair’s bare bronzed shoulder seemed to erupt in a spray of blood and he fell back with a cry. Then he stood again with his hand clutched over his wound, blood seeping through his fingers, and screamed back at them, unafraid.

‘Kul khara, kuffaar! Ayeri fi widj imaak!’

‘What does he say?’ asked Nicholas, whispering for some reason.

‘Discourtesies about your mother,’ said Stanley. ‘You don’t want to know. Next gun, lad, and quick about it.’

Smith was just sighting on the corsair to finish him when the rhythm of the drum changed, the oars moved swiftly in opposing directions and with astonishing litheness, the galley spun side-on. The corsairs dropped down below the gangway, out of sight, amid the fetid crush of the rowing benches. The oars moved back again in unison and the galley closed in below the sterncastle at full speed. The galley slaves were being lashed bloody over the last few dozen paces, the prow visibly rearing over the water.

‘They’re going to ram us!’

‘The devil!’

‘They’ve done this before.’

‘Then we’ll both go down together.’

‘Fire!’

There came a terrible crash from below and a groan of timbers, as the bronze-headed ram of the galley tore into the side of the Swan. Then the air was filled with warlike screams and cries of Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!

All hell broke loose. Shots erupted from the lean galley below, a mariner howled in pain. It was Vizard, dropping his halberd to the deck and crouching, cradling his wound. The master was shouting out, a pair of landsmen were still reefing up the mainsail as arrows struck the mast. Then at least half a dozen guns from the corsair crew fired in unison, balls tearing in through the bulkheads, holing sails, clanging off a brass stanchion on the deck, followed by a whistling ricochet. Nicholas risked a look, ducked down again. That volley was to clear them back so the corsairs could launch their grappling irons and shin up. The sides of the Swan were already swarming. He passed Smith his last loaded gun, Hodge served Stanley, and then they crawled back amidships. They huddled by the foremast, panting as if they’d already fought for an hour, and drew their short cinquedeas.

‘For England and St George, eh, Hodge?’ said Nicholas, his voice shaking.

‘I can’t bloody believe this,’ said Hodge. ‘We were better off in the pound with the lice.’

Smith stood exposed over the bulwarks and fired a sidelong shot, keeping his arquebus straight enough not to roll the ball out of the barrel, and blew a head clean off. But the corsairs had two grappling irons over the waist already. This was going to go hand-to-hand, and vicious. He took up the petronel and raced aft, swinging down the ladder to the waist of the ship without using the rungs, yelling to the terrified mariners to fight, damn them, fight!

‘You, man, cut that rope! And you, take up that halberd. Prick ’em in the throat! You, Vizard, with the bloody arm, get it bound below and then back to the fray with you. The walking wounded fight well enough. You, boy, keep watch to starboard in case any rats swim round that way. There, man! Take him!’

Stanley also let loose his final arquebus, moving along the deck and leaning, firing — there came a scream and splash from below — then moving on again instantly, so there was no chance for enemy fire to be accurately returned. An arrow lodged in the rail near him. He drew his sword and hacked it off with a grand flourish.

A curved grapnel. Stanley seized it from the air in a huge hand and hacked until the leader frayed and split, the fellow below knocked back under a coiling cascade of rope. Stanley leaned down and caught another villain across the side of the head with the iron, then finished him with a short jab to the throat. An arrow glanced off his mailcoat and he dropped back behind the bulwark, taking in a sharp breath and resettling his helmet. That was close.

Nicholas had gone to help Vizard with his one serviceable arm to slither down the ladder to below decks. At the hatchway he felt a sudden dread and heard the weakened mariner gasp. He turned and there close behind him was a corsair, a black fellow twice his weight, scimitar gripped in a bulging fist, its blade already bloodied. His breeches dripped saltwater. Vizard gave a low groan and pulled free from the boy, kneeling exhausted in the hatchway.

‘Run for your life, lad. Over the side.’

The corsair’s teeth were white with a smile.

Every other man aboard was in caught in the mêlée, and Nicholas was alone. Over by the starboard rail lay the young landsman who’d been keeping starboard lookout, his head half cut from his neck.

Nicholas was pinned up against the sterncastle, hatch behind him, a wounded man at his feet. If he moved away, the corsair would finish Vizard. If he stayed, he would be trapped.

He gripped his cinquedea, stepped from one foot to the other. The corsair had killed over a hundred men, this was nothing to him. He waited. The fight raged behind him. Then he swung his scimitar swift and low to open up the boy’s guts, giving him no room. But the boy dropped right down on his belly like a snake, fast like the young can, and was up again. The scimitar came back in a trice, lower this time, and Nicholas clutched at a brace and vaulted over it. Then he stepped away. The corsair turned with him, dark eyes fixed. This Christian was as hard to catch as an eel. He’d have to chop the wounded one after.

He made two cuts, one feint and one real. The boy moved wrongly, the second cut would have finished him, but an oar jammed down on the deck and blocked him. His blade stuck fast in it. He cursed. It was the wounded mariner, fighting one-armed with a short oar seized from the ship’s longboat. He kicked out at the oar and freed his blade and cut down hard on the mariner’s head, but the white-faced kufr backed up enough to miss it. Now the corsair was angry. They were humiliating him.

He sped up, moving much faster on the eel-boy. The boy tripped backwards and sprawled on the deck and he had him. No fancy wide sweeps now. He jabbed down hard with his scimitar’s broad point to end it. It struck only wooden deck and the boy was rolling onto his feet again. Shaitan and Baalbub, these two would suffer for this.

Nicholas snatched off Vizard’s felt cap, and the corsair hesitated for the blink of a bird’s eye. What the devil? Then the cap flew and hit him in the face, he closed his eyes and turned his face instinctively, though it was but a bit of felt, and when he had mastered himself again, the boy’s blade was deep in his side. He roared and twisted, but the boy managed to keep a hold of his blade, stuck between his ribs though it was, and pulled it free. Blood gushed down his side. From the corner of his eye he saw the wounded sailor with the oar moving behind him. So he would be killed by a beardless eel-boy and a half-finished mariner, filthy infidels both, porkmeat still stuck between their teeth. He swung again wildly, roaring, blood on his lips.

Nicholas snatched the oar from the tottering Vizard and jabbed it hard in the corsair’s chest. He staggered backwards and suddenly knelt. That wound in his side was telling, his strength was gone. Nicholas stepped close, eye on the scimitar all the time, but it lay loose in the giant blackamoor’s hand, and thrust his cinquedea straight into the fellow’s muscular throat. He pulled it out, hot blood flooding over his hand, and the giant fell forward, his forehead thumping down on the deck with a bony clunk.

There was no one else now, there was just Nicholas and his short sword and the oar useful in his left hand, more corsairs coming at him. Vizard scuttling back to the hatchway, leaning to one side like a hunchback, and more killing to be done. He felt very cold and clear and moved very fast, never stopping. There was another corsair, dripping with the sea, and his scimitar seemed to move like a falcon’s wing. The boy blocked it with the oar but the corsair moved just as fast. The instant his blow was blocked he switched his blade back and spun fancy on his heel in a wide swipe at the boy’s other flank. Not fast enough. Nicholas stepped back and clouted him with the oar, not very hard. The corsair grunted.

In that fleeting moment — the moment that always comes if you wait for it, when your enemy can do nothing but struggle for breath and a clear head, and is exposed — in that one precious speck of time, you must kill them. The bloody cinquedea drove forward hard into the corsair’s guts and he gave a horrible gurgling scream. His body fell far forward and Nicholas lost his grip on his buried sword. The dead man fell on top of it.

He stepped back, his arm coated with gore to the elbow.

He moved mechanically now, in a dream without emotion. Others moved around him watchfully, but they seemed to him to move quite slowly. At one point, beyond them, he saw Stanley surrounded by Moors, looking over in his direction, blue eyes wide.

Two more corsairs came. Never taking his eyes off them, he rolled the dead man off his blade with his foot and scooped it up and flicked the blood off it at his attackers. It flecked their faces, they spat. One cursed. What the devil was that?

Nicholas grinned. He felt the evil of it, the wide grin, the blood coating him. The corsairs circled, hesitant. A blood-fevered grinning madman here.

They caught him between them and a scimitar swept across his back and cut him open. It was nothing. He brought up his sword short in a fierce lightning jab when he should have been trying to save himself from the cut, and the unexpected strike went straight through the fellow’s forearm, between one bone and the other. The corsair bellowed and snatched back his arm, and Nicholas held onto his sword tight this time. He was learning. He flailed the oar, the two gave him space, the first fellow’s arm coursed with blood.

His ears were full of noise, of screams and explosions, yet they were very distant. In the foreground of his hearing was nothing but cold, murderous silence and slow time. He caught the second corsair an unexpected blow on the back of his head with the short end of the oar swiftly wielded, the fellow lurched forward, and ruthlessly Nicholas hit him again, and again, until his skull opened, bones splintering under the oar’s weight. The corsair’s eyes rolled up to the whites but he still stood, so Nicholas slipped near and then past him in a single move as smooth as a dancer, drawing his sword hard across the fellow’s throat as he went. His throat gaped open like an obscene mouth and he slumped down.

The second corsair began to back away jabbering, glancing over his shoulder, then turned and dashed for the ladder up to the sterncastle. A third was behind him.

Almost without noticing him, certainly not thinking now, Nicholas spun and sent him reeling with the long end of his oar, the short end jammed tight under his arm. The fellow slipped and sprawled. Nicholas turned back and tripped the fleeing corsair at the foot of the short ladder, turned back on the first one and struck him once as he knelt up again, clean through his right arm. The fellow remained kneeling before him as if in prayer, or like a heifer about to be poleaxed, and with a third blow he struck into his neck. The fellow’s head hung forward and he toppled sideways. Then he was standing over the corsair who had tripped, driving his sword hard down into his back, feeling the blade grating against his spine. The corsair spasmed crazily, arms out wide, slapping the deck, then Nicholas finished him with another stab in the back of the neck.

He stepped back. There was blood in his eyes, he didn’t know whose. He wiped it away with his left sleeve as best he could. His right sleeve was drenched and sticky.

The gunfire dropped off, the fighting was done.

Stanley and Smith were staring over at him, panting, swords drooping.

Nicholas was breathing hard but felt calm.

Vizard too had appeared in the hatchway, arm in a rough sling, and was staring at him, with a look in his eyes almost like fear.

Stanley came slowly over.

‘You killed five men,’ he said quietly, his voice a strained mix of disbelief and admiration.

Nicholas could think of nothing to say. Then he said, ‘They were trying to kill me.’ He looked about. ‘Where’s Hodge?’

‘How much blood is yours?’

‘Just my back, I think. Where’s Hodge?’

‘Down below. He took a blow to the skull, but it’s a thick Shropshire skull. He’ll live. Though he’ll probably wake thinking he’s a Frenchman.’

‘I doubt it.’

Stanley raised Nicholas’s shirt with the point of his sword and clucked. ‘A scratch. That constable’s whip back in England made a deeper impression.’ He dropped his shirt again. ‘Truly your only injury?’

Nicholas frowned and felt about. ‘Truly, yes.’

Again a look in the knight’s eyes. Then he said, ‘Find a clean shirt. We all need a cleansing today.’