Song of the Legions (34 page)

“Ha ha!” I laughed at Sierawski, “you still have your hat!” Even after all this, his sodden czapka, leaking water like a sieve, was still jammed onto his head.

It carried on raining after we had run aground, which seemed like the act of a spiteful God. We huddled together under the sodden canvas, without even a fire for comfort. The men pined for the happy days when they were seasick! We would be back to eating horseflesh, for a sad number of the beasts had died when the ship capsized. It was a wonder that any survived at all, but the majority, including my dear indestructible Muszka, had made it. Now we had learned the hard way how unstable these slim chebec ships were on open waters. It was a bitter lesson, but we learned it well. A cold night we had of it, but in the morning the rain ceased, and we surveyed the damage, and the death toll.

“How many dead?” Tanski asked. He was sitting in a chair on the beach, wrapped in a blanket like an old man.

“A dozen overboard, and twenty dead horses,” I replied bitterly, frozen to the core. My soaking rags stuck to my bones, and seeped icy water. None of us had known cold like it – not in the steppes, not in the snows, nor even in the icy void. Not for nothing was it called the Black Sea. It was as black and cold as the Devil’s heart. We knew now something of how those Russian Cuirassiers had suffered, when they were swallowed by the whirlpool of the Dniester.

“A dozen men and twenty horses! I lost less at Raclawice!” Tanski groaned, and struggled to his feet. He was clutching his stomach, for he was in agonies of cramp and sickness.

“Drink this comrade, for God’s sake,” I said to him, “you look like hell.”

He drank the water I offered him. “Still,” he said, rubbing his belly, “you did well, Blumer. But for you and the boy Sierawski, we’d all be dead.”

Tanski turned aside and was sick, bringing up the water immediately. He wiped his face, grimaced, and turned back to us. “What about this damned ship?”

“Well, it isn’t too badly damaged, considering,” Sierawski said, “all the masts are still there. The oars and all the boats though, have been smashed to matchwood.”

“Not too bad?” Tanski said incredulously. “The bloody boat is upside down!”

“Come now, Tanski,” I said scratching my aching head. “The boat is not upside down, she is merely lying on her side.”

“Oh well, that’s nothing, then! Lying on her side with her damned skinny arse sticking out of the water! What say you now, you salty sea dogs? We are a bunch of Jonahs, only without the whale!” With that he sat back in his chair on the sand, and sulked, and clutched at his stomach.

“He has a point,” I admitted to Sierawski, “but we have plenty of rope, still, and if we could but right the vessel, we could heave her back into the water.”

“Enough rope!” Tanski gnashed his teeth, “I’ll give you enough rope to hang you both! That is, if I could find a tree strong enough to bear the weight of your fat Irish carcass! So we get the accursed floating coffin back in the water. Then what?” Tanski snapped. “How do we get back out to sea with no oars?”

I shrugged. “I suppose we wait for a passing zephyr to waft us on a gentle breeze all the way to Constantinople. A mere triviality.”

“Ha ha ha!” Tanski laughed, at last, and wept, although whether tears of laughter, or real tears, I dared not ask. “All right then, Admiral Blumer, how do we right this bastard of a boat?”

I had an idea. “Let’s ask an engineer!” I said and we both turned on Sierawski.

“Easy,” said he, negligently, “we ask the crew for a windlass and ropes.”

We found the surviving crew some way off. They had set their prayer mats on the sand, and, after orienting these towards their holy city, were praying. We had to wait until this was finished, and then we found the captain. He was a short fellow, with thin strong arms, like whipcords, his skin tanned like leather. We followed his barefoot steps back across the sand to the stricken ship.

“He says we have a windlass, Allah be praised,” Sierawski said, as we retrieved a bulky wood and metal contraption from the hold. It was a great winch that turned on a horizontal axis. Apparently this was a ‘windlass’. This, as you may imagine, was an awkward and hazardous business, but we had plenty of strong men, and carried it off without incident.

“What now?” I asked Sierawski, who was taking charge.

“You set a company of men to making oars,” said Sierawski, “for there is plenty of wood on the boat. But touch not those trees yonder, for I have need of them.”

Hard by the beach was a low copse of hanging trees, with vast round bellies thick as houses, and black as the ace of spades. They must have been a thousand years old when Christ was a boy.

“I doubt that I could cut those down with anything short of ten barrels of gunpowder,” I observed.

“Precisely,” Sierawski said, “they will be my anchors.”

It took all of the morning, but Sierawski’s men, under his direction, secured the windlass to the largest of the trees with a tangle of ropes. They ran the line around a second tree, to make a pulley, and secured the other end of the ropes to the hull of the ship, fore and aft, and to the tops of each mast.

“Like a spider, running the angle of a web,” I said, wonderingly. “With the right lever, a man can move the whole earth!”

It was a long, slow, process, and the sun was at its zenith by the time they were done, and the ship’s crew was back to noonday prayers. A pile of new, rough-hewn oars, made of broken spars and ship’s planks, was growing on the beach. Tanski stood apart, with the horses, for this seafaring business was not for him. His health was worsening again. His bowels and belly were voiding frightful amounts of soil and brackish water. To be in his element amongst the equines consoled his soul, and the company of the horses calmed him somewhat.

When the ropes were secure, Sierawski bid the men wind the handles of the windlass. The machine resembled a great mangle in a laundry, and the men laughed, and complained that they were not washerwomen.

“Silence!” Sierawski ordered, and I saw him now as he was at Wola, deadly serious and professional. “This is an important business, gentlemen, and dangerous. Fail now, and like as not we die here, on this beach.”

So they put their shoulders to the wheel. At first, the ropes were slack. The windlass turned easily, but to no apparent result. Gradually the screw tightened. The ropes tautened. The ship seemed to come to life, as the wood began to strain, and groan. Suddenly, it rolled in the sand, and began to rise.

“She’s moving!” cheered the men, and heaved on the ropes with renewed vigour. Sierawski had placed men on the seaward side, with props of wood, and they hammered these into the wet sand, to steady the vessel. With a great crack, like an enormous whip, one of the ropes snapped. It flashed across the sand like an angry serpent. We dived for cover. Sierawski stood quite still, and the end of the rope knocked his czapka from his head, and it rolled in the sand. By a miracle, the rope did not touch a hair of his head. The man did not even flinch.

“Steady there! Steady you bastards!” Sierawski roared. “Not too hard! Pull, don’t jerk! Ease her up! Imagine you’re stroking a woman, not plucking a chicken!”

Incredibly, awe-inspiringly, against all the laws of God and nature, the ship rose. Reborn, she turned on her axis, writhing like a living beast. As the sun set, the masts pointed up to the heavens, like church spires. Then we put our bare shoulders to that great rotten argosy. We fifty men heaved it, bodily, across ten feet of sand, into the sea. There it sat, in a couple of feet of water, flat bottom flush to the ocean floor. Now all we had to do was wait for the tide to turn, and with a kindly breeze, and another heave on the windlass, we would be off.

The men capered about the sand, dancing wild mad mazurkas. We had no more vodka to break out, but for once we cared not. We canonised Sierawski by dunking him in the sea, then lofted him on our shoulders. We scattered the seagulls with our cheers. Amid it all, the crew fell to their prayer mats again, thanking Allah for his timely intervention.

At midnight we loaded the surviving horses and the remaining gear back aboard Sierawski’s cathedral. When the tide came in, at around four in the morning, we set her afloat again. Exhausted as we were, still we did not wait for our kindly zephyr but put our shoulders, one and all, to the oars. Sierawski sat in state on the quarterdeck, our undisputed captain and saviour. Anointed and beatified, sanctified and lauded. Relegated to first mate, running back and forth across the deck, I contented myself with the actual running of the ship.

We landed at a place called Czeligra, in Bulgaria, and then another fly-blown place called Warny. At each, we picked up supplies, and a few Polish stragglers and refugees, to replace the men we had lost. At each, Sierawski’s boasting, and his legend, grew. I held my tongue, said nothing, listened, and learned. Two days out of Warny, another black wall fell across the heavens. Rain fell hard. The horses grew restless, and panicked, their hooves thudding muffled against the lower decks. I smelled a fresh thunderstorm like sulphur in my nostrils.

“What now, Admiral?” I said to Sierawski, who was in his cups in the captain’s chair, with a tricorn hat on his head, holding forth to some of the men, and the ship’s crew, on the finer points of seamanship and navigation. Subjects on which he was entirely ignorant.

“That?” Sierawski said, “Tis naught but a shower, Blumer. Have the men collect rainwater,” he said airily. At that moment, a great finger of white fire struck a resounding blow on the topmast. We cleared our blinded eyes and looked up to see the mast and sail ablaze, lighting up the sea like a beacon. It must have been visible for twenty miles around, like a lighthouse.

“Aye aye Captain Sierawski,” I replied blandly, “and shall I collect the lightning, too, while I’m about it?”

By some miracle that rickety old crab-boat, bursting at the seams, finally rounded the Horns of the Bosphorous. We sailed into the greatest city in the history of the world, at last. We cheered and flung our czapkas in the air. The sight of the city took our breath away. It was bigger than Warsaw, Krakow, and Lwow rolled into one, and multiplied a hundred times.

This place, as you know, had once been Byzantium, the eastern capital of the Roman Empire. When Rome fell, the double-headed eagle flew here for another thousand years, and they still called themselves
Romanii
– Romans. Yet their degenerate empire had eventually crumbled, and three hundred years ago had been conquered by the Ottoman Turks, a race of virile warrior nomads.

The Russians had adopted the old redundant symbols of Byzantium for their own, for they had always coveted the City, even before the Turks took it. A dozen Tsars had sworn that one day they would lay their bones in the Hagia Sofia, having first restored it to the Orthodox Church and conquered the City. None had succeeded.

There we saw the great dome of the Hagia Sofia itself, surrounded by minarets. Once the greatest Church in Christendom, now the greatest Mosque of the Caliphate. ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend,’ as the Turks say, and thus it proved. We did not share their religion, but we shared their enemy, and thus they gave us refuge. True, our Polish King Sobieski had defeated the Turks way back in 1683, but times had changed.

One half of the city stood in Europe, and the other in Asia. Through the Dardanelles – the great channel of water that runs between the two – passes half of the world’s commerce. Among all this bustle our tiny crab-boat went unnoticed. We had never seen such a press of humanity, in all its infinite shapes and colours.

We landed with great jubilation and thanked God. We saw the vast land walls that ringed the city and the harbour. By the side of the harbour was an immense chain, curled up in a heap, with links as big as a man. We tethered our horses to this great metal leviathan and gaped at it. None of the locals paid it any heed.

“What the Devil is this?” Sierawski demanded, intrigued.

“The Romans strung this chain across the harbour,” I said, in amazement, “to keep out enemy ships. It must have lain here ever since! Think of it! Just three hundred years ago, Roman legionnaries walked those walls! A Roman Emperor still ruled in this place!”

“Such a strong position, a natural fortress – those walls, this harbour! If only we had such advantages in Poland!” Sierawski enthused.

“Didn’t do the Romans any good, though, did it? That chain, this harbour, those huge land walls?” Tanski sneered, weakly, from his seat, for he was riding in a wagon beside us. Although he had recovered somewhat, he could barely walk, let alone ride his horse. He was wrapped in a blanket, and taking badly to being an invalid. His mood was even more foul than usual.

“Where are the Romans now, eh?” Tanski castigated the dead Romans. “Stupid bastards! Gone! There are no Churches here. I see only mosques and minarets! Byzantium sank beneath an Ottoman tide, and was obliterated. Erased from history, like Troy and Carthage, and ...!”

His head dropped, and he wiped his eyes. We all fell silent. Would the same fate await Poland? Annihilation? Genocide? The Ottomans had usurped the Romans, driven them from Byzantium, and made it their own. We too had been driven from our homes by a tide of barbarians and savages. Would we ever return to our motherland?

A Polish courier, acting as our guide, collected us and led us off, in column. In the great chaotic swirl of the harbour, whole camel trains, thousands of people, and hundreds of beasts came and went. Like the great chain, no one paid us any heed whatsoever. Impassive Janissaries watched us go by.

Heathens or not, the Arabs treated us with great respect, and we spent one month enjoying the hospitality of the Sultan. We soon learned why – they meant to ensnare as many of us as they could for their army, which was sorely short of good officers. For they knew well that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Here there were sirens to trap the unwary. We needed to plug our ears with wax, blind our eyes, and tie ourselves to the ship’s mast, to resist the temptations of the City of the World’s Desire.

We were quartered in the old diplomatic mission buildings and embassy. These lay empty, as we had no ambassador, and no nation. So General Dabrowski’s chief spy, Rymkiewicz, his man in Constantinople, had taken them over, and now they swarmed with soldiers. Every day another company took ship for the Legions in Italy, but there were many men to carry, and we must wait our turn. We were told this by Rymkiewicz himself. It was this spy who had arranged our safe passage here with Hassan. He was a tall, handsome man, very able, and a great soldier. He was a close friend of Cyprian Godebski, but when I asked him for news, he shrugged, and said there was none. Cyprian’s fate was in God’s hands. This same spy Rymkiewicz was dumbfounded when, after three short weeks, we received an invitation to dine at Hassan’s palace. The wily old one-eyed Sheikh had not forgotten us, it seemed.

“Try not to get killed, and don’t convert to Islam, if you can possibly help it,” Rymkiewicz said drily. “But you cannot refuse the invitation – it would be a mortal insult, and there would be blood. Enjoy yourselves. That’s an order.”

In truth we had no intention of refusing. We were itching to explore this celebrated den of iniquity. For Constantinople was well known as the most depraved city in the world, as well as the richest, for the two things always go hand in hand. It was the Sodom and Gomorrah of the age. Decadent Paris was but a Sunday school by comparison. We had been provided with a small allowance – one hundred piastres each – and we meant to spend every last tynf of it on debauchery. Even Tanski had rallied, and dragged himself from his sickbed, proclaiming between coughs and constant trips to the latrines that he was completely recovered.

So off we went together, in a tiny boat, that drew us across the water to our destination. Hassan’s grand abode was the size of one of Warsaw’s city blocks. It stood hard by the water, and the dappled light shimmered on the sandstone walls. A small skiff with liveried servants bore us to the Palace’s private jetty. Armed guards patrolled the walls. We stepped ashore and were led by a perfumed eunuch through a vast iron-bound door, wide enough to admit an elephant. A huge iron portcullis studded with garnets hung overhead. Slaves fawned on us as if we were the sons of the crimson ones.

“In what manner of army,” I said to my comrades, “does a General have such a Palace as this?”

Hassan wore a curved dagger and curling slippers to match. The dagger had a huge jewel on the end the size of a hen’s egg, and was stuck in a belt that was also studded with huge jewels. His grey beard was dyed black, and was oiled and tied with ribbons. Although he had obviously bathed, still he smelled like a rutting ox, beneath the wafting clouds of perfume that he had been doused in. The Old Janissary greeted us all warmly, as if we were his lost sons – even Birnbaum. It turned out that this was how he viewed us all – as prospective sons. But he began with a lamentation.

“Every day the Sultan still asks where the Polish Ambassador is,” he said, “and every day the Vizier replies that the King of Poland regrets that he cannot pay his compliments. An empty echo in eternity!”

A water pipe was brought and set before us, with a great bubbling glass globe, and eight arms like an octopus. Hassan and we Poles smoked, and the tobacco smelt sweet as honey. It was the fruit of the lotus flower – hashish. After a few bubbling pulls on the pipe, the room was suffused with a warm happy glow.

“We will restore our land, and our eagle,” I said quietly to Hassan, “our Poland will rise again, like Our Christ.”

“As God wills it,” Hassan said. Steaming food was brought on silver platters. Hassan scooped up a great handful of curried lamb in his massive paw. We did likewise. The dinner was delicious, and strongly spiced, but it burned like hell on the way in – and indeed on the way out.

“Flags and names matter not. You are Poles, I am a Cossack. So what? Everybody must serve somebody. I have fought eighty-five battles, and given my eye to the Sultan. I serve the Janissaries, and it serves me well! What does it matter who you serve? It matters not! What matters is the reward for service!” he laughed, pointing at the opulence that surrounded him. Then he thumped his barrel chest, rattling his gaudy gold finery.

“I am well rewarded! I, Hassan! A humble Cossack, born in a tent on the steppes, born the son of a whore, no less! I had no fame, no name, why, not even a father! Yet here I sit, a Sheikh and a General. I have one palace, three wives, four daughters, and a harem of concubines,” he bragged.

“Where are your dear lady wives?” Tanski asked, interested. Indeed, there were a dozen glum-faced Turkish lads in attendance, flunkies, bodyguards, servants and soldiers, all wearing Hassan’s livery, but not a single female.

“I see a great deal of swords here, but not many spear-carriers, Excellency,” I said, for I too was curious, and I craved women’s company. “In Poland, a man has but one wife, but she and his daughters may sit at table, and speak their minds, and sing to his companions. Why,” I said sadly, “we even have women warriors in Poland,” and I thought of Madame, the courageous Castellan, lioness of Poland.

Hassan grinned. “Blumer, you have much to learn of our ways! Decent women do not consort with men outside their family. Decent women go veiled out of doors, if they leave the house at all. My daughters stay confined in their seraglio. Until it is time for them to marry, that is.” He said this last very meaningfully, and we all sat uneasily on the floor. Particularly Tanski, who dreaded matrimony more than death, for he lived only to kill men and chase women.

“Are all the women in the City decent?” I asked Hassan, with a grin.

“No! They are not, Allah be praised!” Hassan replied, and clapped his hands. With that, we heard silken rustling, jangling bells, giggling, and footfalls. This was the garden of earthly delights indeed. These were the famed houris of the east, belly-dancers, courtesans, slave girls. A whirlwind of beauty!

In swept a pair of willowy Circassian girls, to dazzle and entice Tanski and Sierawski. A dusky, busty girl flung herself on Birnbaum’s lap. All of the girls writhed as supple as snakes, undulating their bellies, wiggling their backsides, tossing their long shiny hair with their slender fingers. All of them were naked save for jewels and wisps of silk to save what little remained of their modesty, and barely covering their womanly charms.

Before me, like a dream of beauty, were a raven and a redhead, no older than seventeen years apiece. They were as supple as acrobats, stretching up their long slim legs, to make their silver anklets touch to their golden earrings. It was said that Bullock used to buy girls from Constantinople’s slave markets, and these were slave girls. Here we were, wallowing in the same filth as our traitor king.

And yet, and yet – the gleam of their skin, the warmth of their flesh. A man is only blood, and blood runs hot. We had spent so long without the company of women. Still the girls writhed, their breath hot on my neck. Still I did not resist.

“What rank are you in your Legion, Blumer?” Hassan said to me slyly, “a captain?”

“A warrant officer. Not even a lieutenant, Hassan,” I replied, tearing my eyes from the intoxicating beauty of the two girls, and back to his ugly old face.

“What?” he spat on the priceless Persian carpet. “Infamy! I will make you a Colonel of Janissaries this very day if you swear yourself to me. A regiment of five hundred Cossack cavalry at your command. I shall give you my eldest daughter, too, Blumer, a thousand ducats for her dowry, and these two girls for your harem. What say, you, lad? Is it a bargain?”

He spat in his palm, and held out his hand. “Here you may have your heart’s desire, Blumer,” he said.