The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea (3 page)

The slaves could have waited longer. The precious iron bolt might have been passed on night after night, freeing more and more. But then they might have been discovered. And they could have better chosen their moment to rise in revolt too. A natural time would be when the corsair galley came in sight of its next prey, when they were attacking a Christian merchant ship, and battle was engaged. Then they might just be saved. But to rise up now, only three of them, was suicidal. Patience was as important as courage.

The Sardinian boy groaned, blood coursed from his head and face, and he began to shake and tremble violently all over, his eyes closed. He could no more pull an oar than he could fly. He would die soon, before their eyes. Then his emaciated body would be unlocked from the bench, hauled up and rolled over the low gunwales. He would make barely a splash, his soul already flown to other spheres.

The bearlike Rus turned his great head on his rounded shoulders and glowered at Nicholas from beneath dense black brows. Whether it was a smile was impossible to say. But he showed his teeth. And then he made a noise that Nicholas did not understand. Blowing softly through his lips, he made a sound like a great, distant explosion.

The boatswain gave up his beating and leaned over, unlocking the boy’s manacle. He angrily ordered two of his men to haul in and stow the oar, and drag the half-dead boy aft.

The corsair captain in the stern grinned, his teeth stained with qat. ‘Row on, my Christian gentlemen, row on! Do not be troubled by your dying comrade there. For there is gold still to be discovered, emeralds, amethysts, bars of silver – and of course your white-skinned maidens . . .’

The dying boy was dragged to the gunwales.

Nicholas flexed his hands.

The oars were far too long and unwieldy to be drawn in and used for weapons. What else was there?

‘For St Nicholas and Mother Russia!’ cried a voice as deep and
cavernous as a great bronze cannon. The huge Rus had hauled himself up on to the narrow gangway over the rowers’ heads, and was standing there facing the open-mouthed corsairs at the stern, huge and adamantine, his arms flung wide, his broken manacle still trailing from his ankle. He was virtually naked, though back and shoulders were matted with dark hair, and quite weaponless. Yet still it was a few shocked moments before the boatswain ran at him with drawn sword.

The Rus somehow evaded the sword-thrust altogether and took the boatswain in an embrace. He lifted him from the gangway and squeezed. The boatswain’s eyes bulged in their sockets and his scimitar clattered on the planks. The Rus grinned.

In a scrambling panic, a couple more corsairs fitted arrows to their curved bows and one of them shot. Just as the bowstring thrummed, the Rus turned a little, and the arrow thocked hard into the boatswain’s back. His breath sighed from his mouth and his head rolled free. The Rus thrust his arm between the dead man’s legs, twirled him above his head, and flung him like a straw doll at the onrushing corsairs.

Other corsairs ranged their broad blades over the rest of the rowers below, ready to strike their heads from their necks if any more should stir. Nicholas cursed as he felt a cold blade touch the back of his neck. They were trapped. But what the devil was the Rus thinking of?

The Rus had run to the prow and turned again, still grinning like a deranged bear just loosed from its chains. He leaned down to a wooden hatchway. An arrow thudded into his belly and he paused for a moment, and then continued.

It was the powder store.

The corsairs were screaming and running at him, but everything happened in no more than a few breaths. With his mighty strength, the muscles of his arms and shoulders bunched like knots of towing rope, the Rus wrenched the locked door of the hatchway free, flinging it upright to give himself momentary cover just as two more arrows thudded into its planks.

The narrow gangway between the rowing benches allowed only one corsair to attack him at a time, and the first came sweeping wide with a side-bladed glaive or half-pike. Again the Rus’s agility
belied his size, not to mention the two arrows that now stuck in him, belly and thigh, narrow rivulets of blood trickling from each. He ducked the half-pike and then swiped his assailant backhanded as if he were no more than a troublesome fly. The corsair reeled, blood erupting from flattened nose and split lips, and dropped to the deck.

The Rus leaned down and dragged him to his feet and held him tight to his flank in another crushing one-armed bear-hug. He shuffled near to the open hatchway again, his constricted captive trying to suck in air, his mouth a horrified gaping O.

Another corsair darted forward with a wheel-lock pistol hurriedly primed, and the Rus grinned widely, savagely, as if this was all that he had hoped for. Not even looking, he put the heel of his hand under his captive’s chin and shoved his head back with terrifying force. Nicholas heard the neck vertebrae snap. Again he threw a corpse into the arms of his onrushing assailants, then in a blur of speed he seized the arm of the fellow with the squat wheel-lock, snapped his arm at the elbow, and caught the pistol in his own paw.

He turned and leapt into the hatchway.

The air was filled with screaming, from the corsair with the shattered arm, and behind, from the captain himself. A scream of genuine panic and terror.

Nicholas’s eyes too flared wide with terror. Now he understood that sound the Rus had made. The soft explosion. He would kill them all in his madness. They would all go down together, Mohammedan and Christian alike, equals at last in the drowning sea.

Corsairs came struggling over the bodies of their fallen comrades, but it was too late. The Rus had moved with astonishing swiftness, his movements planned weeks and months before in bitter dreams of vengeance.

He reappeared from out of the hatchway like a demon in a stage dumbshow rearing up out of hell, deranged, filthy, triumphant – and holding upon his left shoulder a barrel of gunpowder that it would take two normal men to lift. In his final triumph now he was actually singing, some old Russian hymn, in deep baritone.
Blagoslovi, Dushe Moya
. . . He smashed the barrel down upon the
rest of the store below, waved the wheel-lock tauntingly one last time at the captain as his desperate screams fell silent, his mouth still open, disbelieving. Finally the Rus crossed himself, dropped to his knees, gritting his teeth at the arrow’s agony in his belly, held the sparking mechanism of the pistol to the spill of serpentine black powder – a scrabbling corsair leapt on to his back with a knife raised high in his fist – and fired.

The massive explosion blew the bow clean off the galley. After that, events unfolded in a strange, dreamlike silence but for a faint distant ringing. For the explosion had deafened every man aboard.

The single centre-line gun pitched head first through the flaming timbers and sank directly down to the ocean floor, a few last air bubbles trailing from its black mouth. The rest of the slaver seemed to rear back for a few moments, as if in horror at its own mutilation. Spars and scraps of burning sailcloth turned and wheeled high in the blue sky, and among them, heads and limbs and limbless torsos of corsairs and slaves alike.

The decapitated galley crashed down again and immediately her hold was swamped by the inrushing sea. Rowers on the benches scrabbled desperately at their manacles, but it was useless. There were only seconds left. Groaning forward, the galley began to slide down below the surface. Bubbles and eddies came up from the drowned hold, a casket of oranges floated free, a severed arm revolved in a small whirlpool. The captain held his chest of treasures clutched under his arm, looking wildly around. The
Sweet Rose of Algiers
carried no longboat or dinghy, and few of the corsairs could swim. The galley had been their home, their mother, their country.

The water swirled in around the rowers, and the salt made them reel in agony as it coursed past blistered thighs and backsides, chafed by months on the accursed bench. But swallowing their pain and shock, Nicholas and Hodge managed to move. They levered their broken manacles from their legs, and Nicholas thought to snatch the loosely draped headcloth from his bare skull and tie it
around his neck, shouting at Hodge to do the same. Another of the rowers held on to him in desperation, pulling him down beneath the swirling water, nearly drowning him, screaming to be set free. The galley gave another lurch and, gripped by a maddened, dying man, chained to a sinking ship, Nicholas was momentarily dragged beneath the water. He strained every sinew and came up above the surface sucking in air. Then all he could do, loathing himself, was ram his elbow into the fellow’s face, driving his nose-bone back into the brain so that his grip loosened and he fell silent. That was the only way he could set him free.

He saw Hodge take another cloth and wrap it round his waist, and Nicholas grabbed a floating corsair by his belt – what remained of him – and took his dagger. There were so many other things they might do, so many things they might try to salvage, in faint hope of rescue before the
Sweet Rose of Algiers
took everything with her to the unknown deep. But his head was screaming, the water was swirling ever more powerfully and carrying him away. He clambered and waded back to the stern, stuck his dagger in the captain’s chest as he stood there wild eyed, wiped it clean and wedged it between his teeth. The captain dropped his treasure chest and sat down in the water, holding on to the whipstaff of the rudder, his face ashen and dying. A whirlpool of water coursed around him and Nicholas. Even the chest, heavy with silver and gold and precious stones, lifted and turned. Somewhere in the distance, his ringing ears heard Hodge shouting. ‘Save yourself! Get away from the ship!’

Nicholas staggered in the powerful surge, then set his foot on the captain’s throat, grabbed the rawhide thong around his neck and pulled. It came free, with the key attached. The captain’s head fell back and he went under water, his last words a curse in slurred Berber.

‘May it carry you down.’

The ship itself then gave a colossal gulp, like the last gasp of some dying leviathan, as its stern was finally sucked beneath the surface of the sea and it tilted and began its slow dive to the ocean floor, many dark fathoms down. Nicholas abandoned himself to the turbulence, eyes closed, mouth clamped shut, the dagger still between his teeth, his lungs filled with one final breath. You could not fight the sea. You had to wait until it let you go.

Seeing nothing, tumbled about, all sense of direction lost, he was aware only of an iron key in his right hand, and a heavy locked chest under his left arm, dragging him downward fast. So fast that even through tight-closed eyelids he was aware of the sunlight fading, the water around him darkening, deeper and deeper green, as he fell away from the sunlit upper world. In his blindness he groped with the key, tumbling over and over, and at last drove it into the lock of the chest.

The captain had kept it well oiled. He counted his loot nightly. With his last strength, his lungs feeling as if he’d inhaled a line of pure gunpowder, Nicholas turned the key and wrenched the lid open with main force. The weight of the sea at this depth was trying to keep it shut, as if Old Father Ocean had already stretched out long green fingers of weed, decreeing these treasures
Mine, mine, for all eternity
. . .

Let it be something decent, he thought. Even at that extremity the wry thought crossed his failing mind that, knowing his luck, he would probably come up with a fistful of English pennies. His fingers closed around something like a chain, and then he let the chest go and it dropped away into the depths. He kicked the opposite way from its descent, towards the light. He could barely kick more. But he must, or he would not rise fast enough to save his life. He must swim.

He began to see visions, colours. But he held himself in his right wits, eyes bunched tight, though longing to open them and look down, for one last glimpse of those corsair treasures sinking away into the midnight deep. But he denied himself. That second or two of delay alone might kill him. He kicked for the sunlight, eyes screwed so tight he saw stars, mouth leaking bubbles now, eardrums throbbing and hissing.

He imagined himself kicking upwards through glinting silver reales, cascades of pearls and glittering clouds of gold dust. Turning and falling, winking and revolving like some strange sea creature, at last losing even its light, an emerald necklace that once graced the alabaster neck of a queen.

He never remembered the last of his ascent but came to the surface and lay there with a roaring in his ears, a thunderous sound. After
a while he realized it was his own breathing, as his burning lungs sucked in air. He lay spreadeagled on his back in the water like a starfish, just floating, blinded by the sun. Still alive. A dagger blade still between his teeth.

Then a familiar voice called his name.

If the ship had sunk entire, they too would have been lost. But the Rus’s act of mayhem had blown timbers and spars widely over the sea, which offered the remote chance of reprieve, at least for a few hours. Straws to drowning men.

Hodge was draped over such a spar. Nicholas stuck the dagger in the knotted waist of his loincloth and swam slowly over to him.

After the months of enslaved horror, then the sudden violence and the gigantic explosion, there was an eerie calm. They bobbed in a flotsam of shattered timber and drowned men. Now the
Sweet Rose of Algiers
was gone, they looked out on nothing but boundless sea. They almost felt a longing for the filthy brigantine. Here, so far from land, so far from other living men, was the loneliness that drove men mad.

After a while they found the energy to exchange their single spar for a broader, more promising timber. A plain piece of pine from the mountains of Lycia, all that saved them from death. They draped their arms over it. Their blistered backsides and legs under water, their rotted feet, had gone strangely numb. Perhaps it was better that way.

‘What’s that you’ve got? Round your fist?’