Stormbringers (Order of Darkness) (24 page)

Jealously, Isolde saw that he turned to Ishraq, trusting her to cope in this new emergency. ‘Take a weapon in with you, in case they come,’ he said to her quietly. ‘Knives from the kitchen, an axe from the yard. And don’t open the door till you know it’s safe.’

‘Of course,’ she said quickly, and led the way upstairs.

‘Go,’ he said quietly to Isolde. ‘I can do nothing, unless I know you are safe.’

‘And Ishraq,’ she said, testing him. ‘You trust her to defend us.’

‘Of course,’ he said, and was then puzzled when she turned on her heel, without another word to him, and ran upstairs without even wishing him good luck.

Luca, Freize and Brother Peter followed the innkeeper down to the harbour.

‘We too should get into safety,’ Brother Peter said anxiously. ‘We’re not equipped to fight.’

‘I’d use my bare hands against them,’ swore Luca. ‘I’d go after them with a hammer.’

Freize exchanged one fearful look with Brother Peter and hurried after his master.

The innkeeper had paused on the quayside and was shading his eyes, looking out to sea. Men pushed past him, hurrying to the little round fort that guarded the entrance to the harbour, where they were handing out pikes. Half a dozen men were heaving on a wooden capstan. With a great groaning creak it yielded and slowly hauled a sunken chain out of the water to stretch across the harbour mouth, and bar the entrance.

‘It’s not like a raiding ship,’ the innkeeper said, puzzled. ‘I’ve never seen them approach so slowly before. And it’s coming in under a white flag. Perhaps they were damaged out at sea. It’s coming in too slowly and there are no cannon on deck, and there’s a white flag at the spur. It’s not an attack.’

‘Could be a trick,’ Luca said suspiciously, squinting to see the distant outline of the ship that was coming slowly, cautiously, closer. ‘They would stoop to anything.’

They hurried on to the little fort. An older man was there, shouting orders. ‘Is it a raid?’ the innkeeper asked him. ‘Captain Gascon, is it a raid?’

‘I’m ready for one,’ was all he grimly replied. ‘Tell me what they’re doing.’

Luca stepped to the edge of the quay, and got his first clear sight of the ship that had sailed through his nightmares ever since he had learned that his mother and his father had been captured. It was a narrow ship, lying very low in the water with oars stretching out either side, scores of them, in two banks, one above the other, rowing slowly now, but moving absolutely as one. Over the noise of men running to get weapons and taking their places in the tower behind him he could hear the steady beat-beat-beat of the drum keeping the rowers to a slow tempo. A wicked spike extended from the prow as if it would gouge the very land itself, a white scarf billowing from the killer blade in a temporary gesture of peace.

The first sail was down, tightly lashed, but he could see at once that the second sail, in the middle of the ship, had been torn down and had brought the mast down with it. They had cut it away, but the ropes were still trailing over the side; and the broken stem of the mast was jagged and raw. At the stern of the ship, on a raised platform, the master of the galley himself held out a broad white sheet in his upraised arm, so that the signal for parley flickered like a flag at front and back. They came slowly towards the chain, as if they feared nothing, and then, as the rhythm of the drum changed they did an extraordinary manoeuvre, feathering the oars all together, so that the ship moved neither forwards nor back, despite the swift inward current, but stayed, rocking in the churned water of the harbour, waiting before the chain, as if they could dream that any town in Christendom would ever willingly admit them.

‘What are they doing?’ shouted the captain, frantically loading the only weapon they had – an old culverin – inside the fort.

‘Holding still before the chain,’ Luca replied. ‘As if they think that we would ever lift it to them.’ He felt his heart thudding fast at the sight of the ship that was such a terror to every port and riverside village in Europe.

Every year the Ottoman slave galleys or the Barbary corsairs took thousands of people into captivity; whole towns had been abandoned because of the raids, villages destroyed. The slaving raids were a curse and blight on every coast in Europe. They raided from Africa to Iceland, creeping up quiet rivers and inlets at night, falling on isolated farmhouses and stealing people away. Now and then they would sail into a town, steal all the treasures and burn all the wooden houses to the ground. Families, like Luca’s own, had been torn apart by the brutal kidnaps. For Luca, safe in the monastery, the news that his father and his mother had gone missing was worse than if he had been told that they had died. For the rest of his life he feared that perhaps his mother was working as a house slave in a Muslim household, perhaps – or far worse – slaving to death in the fields, or brutalised by her owner. His father was probably serving in a galley like this one, chained to the oars and rowing every day all day, never raising up from his seat but sitting in his own dirt with the heat of the sun on his back, trained like an obedient mule to pull and pull when commanded, till his strong heart gave out under the strain and he died still rowing, and they unchained him and threw his wasted body over the side.

‘Luca,’ Brother Peter said shaking his shoulder. ‘Luca!’

Luca realised he had been staring blindly, filled with hatred, at the galley. ‘It’s just that – for all I know – my father is slaving on one of these,’ he said. ‘I’m going to get a pike.’

The captain came out from the fort, the ancient culverin in his hand, a slow burning fuse in another. ‘Hold this,’ he said, thrusting the handgun into Brother Peter’s unwilling hands.

‘I really can’t . . .’

‘What do you want?’ the captain shouted over the water, cupping his hands around his mouth. ‘What do you want? I have cannon trained on your ship.’

‘Do you?’ asked Freize, surprised.

‘No,’ the captain said. ‘A town like this can’t afford a cannon. But I’m hoping he doesn’t know that.’

‘Anyway, they can sail after they have been holed,’ Luca said bitterly. ‘You could have a cannon and fire it and hit him and still he would come on. They can stay afloat when they are filled with water. They are all but unsinkable.’

‘Can I give this back to you?’ Brother Peter asked faintly, proferring the weapon and the smoking fuse. ‘Really, I have no skills . . .’

Silently Freize took the weapon from the clerk.

‘I need a mast and a new sail,’ the shout came back across the water in perfect Italian. ‘I will pay a fair price for it.’

The captain looked at Luca. ‘You can see they need a mast.’

‘Could still be a trick,’ Luca said. ‘Don’t let them in.’

‘How did your mast break?’ the captain bellowed.

There was a little silence. ‘A terrible wave,’ came the reply. ‘You will have had it here,
Inshallah
. We have seen its path all along this coast. You and I, we are all equally powerless against the greatness of the sea. We are all sailors. We all need help sometimes. Let us in to your harbour to repair our ship. And I will remember that you have been a brother of the sea to me.’

Brother Peter crossed himself at the name of the Muslim god.

‘Did you see any children in the water? Any children swimming?’ shouted Captain Gascon, the commander of the fort.

‘Allah – praise be His holy name – help them, yes, we saw them; but we were running before the wind and our sail came down. We could reach only two of them. We pulled them on board and have them safe. You can have them if you will give us a mast and a sail.’

‘Show them,’ prompted Luca.

‘Show them to us,’ the captain of the fort shouted.

The master of the ship bent down and spoke to someone in the waist of the ship. He lifted and half pushed two children to stand in the prow. They clung to each other and turned white, frightened faces towards the shore.

The captain exchanged one look with Luca.

‘We’ve got to get the children back,’ Luca said.

‘Why should we help you?’ Captain Gascon shouted. ‘You are our enemy.’

The master of the ship made a little gesture with his hands, commanding the slaves to keep feathering the oars, holding the galley just clear of the chain, as the drum beat still thudded. ‘Because we are all men who have to face the sea,’ he said simply. ‘Because we wish to put our enmity aside, since the greater enmity of the sea has been shown to us. If you sell us a mast and a sail we will pay you well for them. And we will return these children for free.’

‘Would you agree to never come here in war again?’ the captain asked. ‘No raids.’

The man shrugged his shoulders. ‘You are not to know, but I’m not a slave taker. I am on a journey, not raiding. I don’t raid anyway.’

‘Can you command that the slaving galleys don’t raid our village?’

‘I can request it of them.’

‘Then swear to me that you will urge the slaving galleys never to come here again.’

‘Not for a year,’ the man bargained.

‘Ten years,’ the captain of the fort demanded.

‘Two.’

‘Five.’

‘
Heras.
All right,’ he said in agreement. ‘Five.’

‘And instead of payment for the mast, make him release all the slaves from the galley,’ Luca suggested.

The captain hesitated.

‘You don’t need money,’ Luca said. ‘We don’t need paying for a mast and a sail. This is a great opportunity. Let some of those poor devils get home to their families.’

‘Do you have any Christians at the oars?’ The captain yelled.

‘Of course.’

‘Any Italian men?’

A brief shout for help came clearly across the water and then they could hear the sound of a quick blow.

‘We may have some,’ the man at the stern of the galley said cautiously. ‘Why?’

‘You must release them all to us, and we will give you mast and sails for free.’

‘I cannot release them all, or we cannot row home,’ he said reasonably.

‘You can sail!’ Luca shouted, interrupting the negotiations as his anger overcame him. ‘You can sail with the mast and sails that we will give you! Those men must be freed.’ He found he was shaking with rage and that he had stepped out of the shelter of the fort. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the captain, stepping back. ‘I should not have interrupted.’

Luca rejoined Freize. ‘I can’t bear it,’ he said in an undertone. ‘My own father might be on that damned ship. That might have been his voice that called out that he was Italian. That might have been him who was struck.’

‘God help him,’ Freize said quietly. To the captain he said, ‘Probably best to make them wait outside the harbour and we bring the mast and sails down the spit, so they don’t come inside the chain. Probably safer not to let them in too close to the town. They may carry the plague, as well as being a people who are not well known for their reliability, in the friendship line of things. Not that I wish to be unpleasant.’

‘You will row back down there,’ the captain ordered gesturing to the seaward side of the fort. ‘You can tie alongside at the very end there. You must stay where we can see you and all your men must stay on board the ship. We will bring you the mast and sail and you will release all the Italians you have on board. Agreed?’

There was a low groan from the captives of other kingdoms.

‘Listen to them!’ Luca said fiercely. ‘Hear them!’

‘I will release ten Italian men,’ the master of the galley said. Still the drum sounded, regular as a heartbeat. The sea raised the galley up and down and the master of the ship swayed easily standing on the prow deck, as graceful as a dancer as the rowers kept the ship exactly where he had commanded it to be: still on a moving sea.

‘No, all of them,’ the captain said steadily. ‘You stole these men from us, now you need our help. You must restore all the Italians to us.’