The Great Siege

15

The corsair captain and eleven of his men were dead. The captain’s brother still lived, his shoulder wound roughly staunched.

Of their own, Stanley and Smith had taken a good few cuts and bruises, none to kill them. Smith’s left ear was sliced so a portion hung down and flapped when he turned his head.

‘Like a spaniel,’ said Stanley.

Smith showed his teeth, rimmed with blood. ‘Get your needle and horsehair out, mother dear.’

Eight corsairs still lived, variously wounded, in an abject state. They stood huddled on the slathered, bullet-pocked deck of the listing Swan, chained hand and foot. The mariners treated them cruelly as they chained them, stripping them of what gold and silver they wore. The tables were turned, the sun was smiling, and these Mohammedan dogs were theirs now. They would fetch a fair price in the slave market back at Cadiz.

One of the dogs muttered a curse in guttural Arabic. Faster than the eye could see, Smith’s mighty fist shot out and hit the fellow’s face like a battering ram. His head jerked back, blood spraying out in a circle from his flattened nose, and he slumped to the deck unconscious. The other corsairs bunched closer together, like nervous cattle, eyeing this glowerng blackbeard of a Christian.

‘I thought you said never to use your fist,’ said Nicholas dryly.

Smith’s hammer-fist appeared unharmed. ‘Quite so. But there was no time for otherwise. Besides, you did not understand what this one said.’ He looked down at the battered fool. ‘He may insult me, but not my Saviour.’

‘You understand Arabic?’

‘And speaks it,’ said Stanley. ‘As fluent as the Prophet himself, no peace be upon him. There was plenty of time to learn on the galley.’

‘You were on a galley?’

Smith said nothing.

Stanley shook his head. ‘Ask no more, lad,’ he said softly. ‘Only a barrel of troubles that way lies. None but a madman would reminisce about his time as a galley slave.’

Hodge came back on deck, barely able to speak, and desperate for water. His head was thickly bandaged. Nicholas greeted him with a bear hug and then stood back a little embarrassed.

‘Well, Hodge?’

Hodge touched the side of his head gingerly. ‘Unwell, Master Ingoldsby. Very unwell, in truth.’

‘What is four times four?’ asked Stanley.

‘Sixteen.’

‘Her Majesty’s mother?’

‘The Boleyn hussy.’

‘What nickname did our Lord give to James and John?’

‘The Sons of Thunder,’ said Hodge.

‘James and John Boanerges,’ said Stanley, nodding. He clapped Nicholas and Hodge on their shoulders as they stood side by side. ‘The Sons of Thunder.’

Hodge looked awkward, Nicholas proud.

‘You fought valiant well, Master Hodgkin. You took a knock to the sconce, but I saw you deliver one heftier still that sent your fellow back into the brine like a dead duck.’

‘I only hit him so you’d not call me Matilda again.’

The fair haired knight grinned. ‘That I’ll not. Well, not often.’

Vizard’s arm was broken, but the flesh not cut nor ruptured. It should mend with a bit of splinting. The lookout landsman was dead, and a page had been beaten to death by three of the corsairs before being tipped over the side. His body was lost. The master himself had been shot in the hand, a minor wound, but pure agony. Smith went to him and did what he could with some oily stuff and some brandy. The master said, Couldn’t he bind up his own ear first? He was dripping on him, and the sight was making him nauseous, and both men managed a bitter laugh then.

‘I don’t know whether to curse you for driving us on east of Cadiz, and into all this mayhem,’ said the master, ‘or show gratitude that you saved us.’

‘You and your men stood by us,’ said Smith. ‘You did sufficient well, for mariners. Now here comes a measure of brandy. This’ll hurt.’

The corsair dead were stripped of their bracelets and armlets, earrings and torcs, and rolled over the side with a splash. Then Stanley had the captain’s brother lowered back onto the corsair galley and climbed down after him.

The smell that arose from the rowing benches was indescribable. The cramped wretches looked up from their filthy hold, many not with elation but with desolation and despair. Though they were about to be rescued, they showed nothing, no life at all. Some had been chained to the bench for so many days and nights, seen so many horrors, that to have freedom given them now was almost more than they could bear.

Stanley spoke to them one by one, hand laid on encrusted, sinewy shoulders. Some were naked but for a rag tied over their heads against the sun. The sores on their hands were abominable, the sores on their buttocks when they stood would be far worse. Some kept their heads bowed, not rejoicing, their faces lost in a mass of tangled hair and beard, eyes staring out like animals caught in a snare. Some greeted Stanley, some showed hope, but some had gone beyond that into madness. They had gone long ago into their own solitary worlds to survive, and now they could not re-emerge from that other world, nor ever again return to the everyday. They were galley-mad.

Behind the rearmost benches, almost hidden under the prow deck, were two emaciated boys of perhaps eight and ten. Too small to row, they had been simply chained there until the corsair galley should reach the next slave market. As Stanley squeezed his way in there, one of the rowers turned round and groaned.

One boy still sat, head bowed. The other lay on his side, so thin that his pelvic bone, his ribs and his arms showed like sticks of barkless ash.

Then Stanley understood that the younger one was dead. The older boy had sat chained to his dead brother for who knew how long.

He had the captive corsair unchain them all at swordpoint, rowers and boys, and then the boys’ father, the rower who had groaned, crawled back and lifted up his dead son. The smell of decomposition was impossible to tell apart from the stench of the rowing deck.

‘My daughter also,’ wept the man as he looked down at his dead son, ‘my daughter. What they did to her. She was but a year older …’

Stanley laid his hand on the older boy’s head and said gently, ‘Your son.’

Under the rear deck was the captain’s chest. Its contents were meagre, but included a silver crucifix. Stanley raised it to his lips and kissed it, as if to cleanse it of the filth around him, and of the unchristened hands that had stolen it from some sad isolated church or chapel. Some poor fishing village on the coast of Calabria or Sardinia, this silver crucifix all the wealth of a village now burned to the ground, its priest lying slaughtered on the church doorstep.

The rowing slaves were filed out, the sores on their backsides horrendous, the size of saucers, limping and bent double. But their hated oars, thirty foot long, were useless as crutches. They were carefully helped across and painfully raised up onto the deck of the Swan, along with the dead boy. Nicholas thought one or two might die at any moment. He grasped one rake-thin rower and the sun-dried skin slid loosely over the bones of his arms like an old woman’s. Nicholas had a dread that if he pulled too hard, the arm might come off. These were the walking dead.

Then the captain’s chest.

‘This goes with us to Malta!’ Stanley called up. ‘Your reward is the infidels!’

The master nodded down.

Lastly he took a short manacle and snapped it closed on the wrists of the dead captain’s brother. The man stared wide-eyed. He was tied to the mast housing with a rope rowlock, thick as his arm. He began to plead, but Stanley silenced him.

‘You stay here. With your beloved galley.’

Then he called up to the Swan again, and soon they tossed him down a hatchet.

The captive began his prayers to Allah.

On the deck of the Swan, one of the rowers, not so near death’s door as he seemed, suddenly swung his oar end at one of the chained corsairs. The man’s head shot forward and blood spurted from his skull. Smith restrained the jabbering rower. He was half insane, eyes rolling, chewing his lip. The corsair had slumped down, dark red seeping over the deck, legs twitching. His fellows regarded him in silence. No point in pleading for mercy they had never shown.

Stanley knelt in the stern of the empty galley and dug out a strip of caulking rope from the hull timbers. The captive corsair twisted round to watch him work. Then he drove the hatchet into the seasoned hardwood with all his strength. After a dozen blows the wood was well split, and then a ragged medallion came loose. He tore it away. The wood below was thin now, dark with seawater. He aimed and delivered another blow with the neat blade, and a trickle of water seeped in. He struck once, twice more, and the trickle became a surge. He stayed kneeling, hacking and hacking. The noise of the water grew.

He stood and watched.

Someone called his name. ‘Get off the boat, man!’

The water flowed strongly around his ankles. From his manacled captive came Berber and Arabic cries. The sea was rushing in now, pushing aside the nailed timbers of the creaking, weakened hull, collapsing like an arched bridge that had lost its coping stone. The sea was reclaiming its own.

There were more cries from above, but Stanley stayed watching the dark waters around his thighs a while longer, aboard the dying galley. How sweet it would be to die and go to bliss.

Finally he shook himself back to life, and bounded onto the prow deck, seizing the rope, planting the soles of his boots on the side of the Swan and walking up. He glanced back once at the manacled corsair.

‘Allah al-Qady,’ he said. Allah will be the judge.

The weight of the water in the stern of the galley raised up the prow, as Stanley had intended, and below, the mariners were able to push the evil brass beak of the ram free of the Swan’s hull at last, hurriedly wadding up the gash as best they could with swags of oiled wool and some hurriedly nailed planking. But they could not pump or bail her as fast as she was taking on water. They began to move the ballast and cargo to the starboard side. But they would have to limp in to an island bay for repairs.

The deck of the galley sloped back steeply now. The captive stood on the steep planking with knees bent, his lips moving furiously in prayer. His eyes were fixed on the Christians above him. Prayers and verses from the Koran, or ancient curses.

The sea rose higher up the deck. There was a deep, ominous groan from under water. The sea rose and surged around the corsair’s bare shanks, over his knees, his thighs. He would not scream or cry out. Such men had hearts of stone for themselves as much as others. Let death come. Reach down from the golden walls of Paradise. Come, Lord Azrael, angel of death in thy midnight cloak …

The galley gave a last tortured creak, and then very quickly and quietly slipped beneath the waves. A few small bubbles rose, nothing more.

‘My Christ,’ gasped Nicholas, suddenly choked.

Stanley turned around just in time to see one of the captive corsairs, the skinny one last on, dropping like stone off the side of the ship into the water, a red tide round his throat.

The master swiftly wiped his dagger on his breeches and returned it to the sheath on his belt.

Stanley closed his eyes.

‘What did he do?’ asked Nicholas desperately.

‘Nothing,’ said Stanley. He shook his head. ‘He did nothing. That was a warning to the others, that’s all. Not to rebel. It is sometimes done.’

Nicholas was all confusion. He had killed his first man himself, and his second and more, but that was in battle. Stanley himself had drowned a captive, and now the master had cut another’s throat like he was a rat. Surely after the frenzied violence of the galley’s attack, now there should be peace? But the violence went on.

What kind of burning hell was this inland sea?

Stanley saw his confusion.

‘Bid welcome to the Mediterranean, the heart of the world between Christendom and Islam. Two worlds divided. The Mohammedans themselves divide the world into Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb: the House of Islam and the House of War. Though their faith is but devil-worship, and their Koran but the garbled, misshapen spawn of the Holy Scripture, yet they are right about this at least. The world is truly divided between Islam and War. Christendom will forever be the House of War to them, the house of opposition. That role is thrust upon us. What can we do but fight? This one sordid killing’ — he indicated where the wretched corsair had fallen — ‘is only a drop of blood in this sea.

‘And the Mediterranean is a saltwater battle-line. Across this battle-line go atrocity and hatred and treachery ceaselessly, like spies in the night. It has been this way for a thousand years. It will be this way a thousand more, till Christ come again. You are right to feel sorry for it, lad. It is only Christian to do so. But the Mohammedan does not feel sorry for it. It is not his way. This is as it was appointed to be in his bloody scriptures. Welcome to the House of War.’

The Swan turned and sailed slowly and carefully into a shallow bay on the leeward coast of Formentera. Her shifted ballast and cargo and the westerly wind in her mainsail kept her keeled hard over for the most part, the hole in her larboard hull just above the water line. It was cunning sailing.

‘We can make her fast enough here,’ said the master. ‘But then it’s back to Cadiz, pumping all the way.’

‘You have won yourself the value of those corsairs,’ snapped Smith. ‘That is more pay for our passage. Mend the hull, and then on to Sardinia and Sicily.’

‘No. She needs a refit. Even here it will take three or four days.’

‘We don’t have three or four days.’

‘Then take another ship.’

‘There are no other ships, and you’ve been paid to Sardinia.’

The master looked uncertain, caught between a pragmatic seaman’s wish to mend his ship well, and a grudging respect for these landsmen, who’d fought so hard and saved him and his mariners from the Mohammedan rowing bench.

‘Two days then.’

‘One day.’

‘It can’t be done in a day,’ said Jackson, the ship’s carpenter.

‘A day and a night,’ said Smith. ‘Work by moonlight and lantern light. And work fast.’

‘I say it can’t be done.’

‘There’s half the corsairs’ treasure in it for you.’

The master rubbed his stubbled chin.

‘So now can it be done?’

‘We’ll work at it.’

They went ashore meanwhile and buried the landsman with a cross of sticks at his head, and also the dead boy from the galley. They left his father weeping beside the shallow grave, knees in the dust.

Hodge and Nicholas shared a hunk of barley bread. The sun was beginning to sink and lose its heat. Hodge broke off the corner of the bread where Nicholas had been holding it, as if to throw it away. As if it was bloodstained. Nicholas saw him do it. Hodge slowly put it in his mouth and chewed.

Nicholas walked out over the headland for some peace, and to daydream of a certain barmaid back in Cadiz. There was a goatherd boy sitting on a rock, wearing a goatskin and a felt cap, holding a crook. He must have been eleven or twelve. He stood and saluted Nicholas. He had seen the fight at sea.

The boy’s native tongue was Catalan, but they spoke in crude Spanish, the goat-boy understanding a few French words too. Nicholas tore off some barley bread for him. The boy ate ravenously.

‘Do you know Malta?’ Nicholas asked him. ‘War there? Guns?’

The boy shook his head. Then he said, ‘If I have money, I buy a corsair slave off you.’

Nicholas smiled. ‘Why need you a slave? To come and wash your feet, to watch your goats-’

‘No,’ said the boy. ‘I buy him, I chain him down outside my hut and watch him die in the sun.’

The late afternoon sky was deep blue, the breeze tranquil, the colour of the sea below them an astonishing limpid azure. Little birds flitted through the thorn brakes. At a glance you might think it a peaceful and lovely island, sun-baked and thyme-scented, with its goatherds and goatbells and little rocky hills. But this goatherd boy was very thin, and in his great melancholy brown eyes there was an unspeakable loneliness. Nicholas could guess his story all too well, no need to ask. His family was gone, only he was left. One night, in one of those ceaseless slave-raids that Africa made upon Europe, his entire family had been stolen. They were gone to the Barbary Coast, to the rowing bench or the workbench, the kitchen or the quayside whorehouse. They would never be seen again. Now he lived alone in his hut, with only the murmurous bees in the thyme and the tinkling goatbells for company, in place of his sister’s laughter, his father’s call, his mother’s voice.

Nicholas gave him the rest of his bread.

‘We are sailing to Malta,’ said Nicholas. ‘We are going to fight the Mohammedan.’

The boy nodded, chewing hard. ‘Kill them,’ he said. ‘Kill them all.’