The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea (7 page)

‘Lemons,’ said Hodge, ‘or oranges. Bread. Shrimps, mussels, anchovies, sardines, olives. Those little sausages, how d’ye call ’em,
churiscos
—’

‘There’s bread and stew,’ said the girl. ‘So bread and stew you’ll get.’

She brought them a loaf and two platefuls of steaming stew, and two jugs and cups. They drank. Nicholas raised his cup to her.

‘Freedom. Sweet freedom.’

‘You are drunk already,’ she said.

‘Only drunk on the sweet wine of freedom, lady, and your unearthly beauty.’

She said, ‘You should know, if you vomit in my tavern I will beat you so hard you will crawl out of here on all fours.’

Nicholas laughed, and then stopped and regarded her. ‘Did you . . . did you used to serve wine in an open-sided shack on the quayside down that way?’

‘What of it? I work hard, I am thrifty, I save the money that is thrown my way by drunken fools like you.’

The tone of voice, the stance, hands on hips, the wonderful haughtiness, the arched brows – and her flashing dark eyes, along with her haughtiness, and her fine figure . . . ‘Hodge,’ murmured Nicholas, when he had drained another cup and the girl turned away. ‘Think back, six years ago – when we first came to Cadiz, whenever it was. You remember that quayside bodega that Smith and Stanley took us to?’

‘And started a fight, and then ran and left us to it. They said it was for our . . . martial education, or some such horse shite. And we got badly beaten about too. I remember.’

Nicholas nodded at the girl. ‘That’s her, isn’t it? Our ministering angel.’

Hodge remembered back to the fight, and the bruised aftermath, when a pretty bar-girl of sixteen or so, fierce of speech but gentle of hand, had tended their wounds. When Smith and Stanley had returned she gave them such a tongue-lashing for their conduct that the two knights had cowered visibly. Now Hodge stared at her where she stood in the shadows, filling another jug from a barrel. Her dress was modest, she was no whore. Yet still it showed the outline of her neat bosom, her hips. He swallowed. It had been a while. ‘I think you’re right. And better preserved than we are too, I’d say.’

‘Eh! Señorita!’ called Nicholas.

She came swiftly. ‘Señora.’

‘But you wear no wedding band?’

‘What business is that of yours?’ She was more cold than haughty now, verging on real anger.

‘I . . . I am sorry. It is none. Forgive me.’

Well, he had manners after all. And the carriage of a gentleman too, she had to admit, though he wore a patched old linen shirt and scuffed boots and had behaved like any other drunken churl in her tavern. And on his bare arms, she now saw, he had cuts, and scars, a great white cicatrice on his left elbow, and gunpowder burns as well. They may have been no more than tavern brawls, of course. Yet something told her – something in their eyes, these two with the strange accents, and blue eyes in sun-darkened faces – something told her that they were no ordinary tavern braggarts.

‘My husband was killed,’ she said. ‘Soldiering in the Alpujarras. The Moors killed him.’ She spat and twisted her foot in the dust. ‘And you? Where did you come by those burns? What is your accent?’

‘We.’ Nicholas hesitated. ‘We—’

‘We may need more wine before we divulge all that,’ said Hodge, tapping the side of his nose.

She softened a little more. They were no ruffians. ‘And more food too,’ she said. ‘Both of you together have hardly enough meat on you for one man.’

‘That’s life on the corsair galleys for you,’ said Nicholas.

‘The galleys!’ She tossed her head scornfully. Her hair was
midnight black and glossy. ‘Now you are a bag of wind.’ And she went for more bread and wine.

The wine worked quickly, and they ate ravenously in between swilling.

Hodge sat back and belched. ‘I’m going to be sick.’

‘Then get outside and hurry up about it,’ said Nicholas, tearing off more bread and dunking it in his wine. ‘Or there’ll be nothing left when you come back.’

He reached out and tried to take the girl’s arm. She slapped him.

‘Six years ago,’ he said, ‘we were in a fight in your quayside tavern. There was a blubbergut boastful Frenchman—’

‘What other –
hic
– kind is there?’ said Hodge.

‘And we beat him. We were with two Knights of St John of Malta.’

The girl frowned. A hazy memory did come back to her. ‘They were . . .’ She scrutinised Nicholas. ‘You are English?’

‘And you are,’ he said, delighted with himself for having dredged up the name from so wine-hazy a memory, ‘you are Maria de l’Adoracion!’

For the first time she smiled, showing perfect white teeth. Then it went again as she took a hold of herself. ‘Perhaps I am,’ she said.

Darkness was falling, and a small scruffy boy appeared in the doorway. ‘Where are the strangers?’ he said in a piping voice.

‘Out, out!’ she cried, waving her apron.

‘They came off the knights’ ship. They fought at Malta, someone said.’

Maria stared back at the two drunken Englishmen, and then waved the urchin away.

She came back and stood at their table. ‘You really fought at the Siege of Malta? That is where you got your scars?’

Nicholas looked at her dreamily. Women loved a hero. Maybe he was on to something now.

‘We did, señora. And after . . . Algiers, Tripoli, the Greek islands . . . the galleys.’

With her dark hair and dark flashing eyes, he knew he was confusing her with a girl he had known and loved on Malta. This
Maria was a bar-girl and a widow, though yet only twenty or so, and more radiantly beautiful with every cup of heady wine. Well, let him be confused. Let confusion reign, he thought.

He pulled her to him. ‘Sit on my lap.’

She slapped him again, a considerable blow. He laughed.

‘You think to come swaggering back into my tavern after ten years—’

‘Five years,’ he said. ‘Six at most. How my heart has yearned for you.’

‘—and expect me to fall into your arms? What kind of arrogant swine are you?’

‘Women always insult those they are drawn to.’ He beamed at her.

‘Doh, you are impossible.
Impossible
. Touch me once more and you will see my stiletto.’

She went to serve another customer, her cheeks flushed red.

‘As lovely as a rose in the gardens of the Alhambra,’ murmured Nicholas, leaning after her and nearly tumbling off the end of the bench.

Hodge poured them both large tumblers of plain water. ‘King Solomon didn’t sweet-talk his one thousand concubines in the Bible any more sweet than you do. ’Tis a
Song of Songs
to hear you woo her. Here, drink this.’

‘Water?’

‘Water. We need it.’

They drank, and almost immediately Nicholas felt his head become a little cooler and clearer. He sighed. God save us all from beautiful but virtuous widows, he thought.

They drank three more tumblers of water each.

‘Well, Hodge,’ Nicholas said, with a small watery belch. ‘I am not proud to say it, but there’s another appetite must be quelled before I sleep. And this tavern is too virtuous a place for it. But the whorehouses of Cadiz are highly reputed.’

‘Aye, Master Nicholas,’ said Hodge, an address used only sarcastically now. ‘I am equally filled with disgust at myself for saying but. But – my britches cannot lie. Lead on. To the whorehouses of the Street of the Christmas Flowers.’

They staggered out of the door arm in arm, singing ‘Farewell, O You Sweet Spanish Ladies’.

Maria de l’Adoracion watched them go.

Men
.

They awoke the next morning with burning heads, the daylight making them wince, their eyeballs aching. They lay on straw pallets in an upper room, in an insalubrious house at the end of the Street of the Christmas Flowers. Nicholas tried to speak but his throat was too dry.
Water
.

He lay naked on top of his own britches, and could feel the necklace still concealed within the belt. His fist clutched his purseful of ducats. He opened it and peered inside, and found the correct number remained. The girls last night – four of them, wasn’t it? Five? – from what he could remember, were hardly the finest Venetian courtesans in looks or in conduct. But they did what whores are paid to do cheerfully enough, and they were honest.

He and Hodge dragged on their clothes groggily and stared at each other. No man can feel proud of himself after a night in a whorehouse.

‘Water,’ they both croaked simultaneously.

‘And opium,’ said Nicholas.

Hodge looked at him.

‘For my head,’ he snapped.

There was no bright sun today, and they were grateful. Grey clouds rolled overhead, and a cold wind came down from the north, off the Sierras, where the high passes were still thick with winter snow. As they stepped outside, a chill drizzle began, and they pulled the hoods of their cloaks over their heads.

They found a drinking fountain at the end of the street and
washed and doused their heads and drank like camels and felt a little more alive. Girlish voices called down the street from an upper storey, ‘Come back to us soon, English stallions!’

‘
Stallions
,’ muttered Hodge. ‘More like mules with the mad staggers, we were.’

An old woman behind them, veiled and clad in black from head to toe, clucked her tongue against her few remaining teeth and pushed in beside the fountain.

‘This water is for purity,’ she said. ‘Not for cleaning off the filth of the whorehouse.’

‘You speak right, señora,’ said Nicholas gently. ‘How I would love purity.’

She stared at him, unsure whether he was mocking her, and then shoved them both out of the way.

After some enquiries they found a jeweller’s shop in another side street, the air filled with the clink of little hammers from the coppersmiths’ workshops. Nicholas presented the aged jeweller with the diamond necklace he had saved from the corsair treasure chest. The jeweller stared at it, breathed on it and held it to the daylight. ‘Fake,’ he said. ‘But skilled work. You may have two ducats for it.’

‘Two ducats!’

‘Very well,’ said the jeweller. ‘Three.’

Nicholas shook his head and stowed the necklace away in his belt again. ‘I’ll keep it. Treasured memories.’

‘A fake,’ muttered Hodge as they walked away. ‘Emblem of our whole poxy lives.’

There was a hubbub in the square. A crowd of people was surging along as if being harried from behind. They carried their possessions in rolls of blankets, improvised sacks or wooden barrows, as if they had packed hurriedly. And their baggage had the strange and ungainly look of fugitives’ baggage: expensive silks were bound up with cheap twine, cooking pots blackened with smoke clanked alongside silver candlesticks and fine glass ornaments, a mule carried two cages full of songbirds, cheeping and bright eyed and bewildered.

Men, women and children, crying infants, old ones, huddled and frightened, looking around, keeping close to one another for comfort. The children shivered, ill dressed for such a cold day. One boy wore nothing but sandals, a pair of baggy britches and an embroidered satin cloth around his skinny shoulders: a fine piece of work, but no warmth in it. What he needed was wool. Without thinking Nicholas stepped forward to throw his cloak around the poor lad. He too had been a fugitive and a vagabond once, shivering in the woods and ditches of his native Shropshire.
And you shall not oppress a stranger, for you too were strangers in a strange land
. . .

But even as he stepped towards the fugitives, a woman, perhaps the boy’s mother, looked up at him with an expression dark with fear and hatred. He began to speak, to draw his hood down, but she spat on the ground and then she and her shivering boy moved on. It was too late. Enmity ran too deep and was as old as the generations of men, and the time for peace and for gifts was long since gone.

The drizzle became weightier and fell as rain. Hodge and Nicholas stepped back and watched from the entrance to a side alley, their hoods shadowing their faces. The atmosphere was bitter and ugly. Instinctively Nicholas’s hand dropped to his left side to check his sword. He had none.

The crowd numbered some two or three hundred people, being driven down to the harbourside. The men were all bearded and wore skullcaps, and women wore headscarves, some of them half-face veils. The wind caught at their veils and they held them in place with slim brown hands decorated with henna tracery.

Behind them came a gang of thirty or forty well-armed ruffians and irregulars, the cruellest and most unpredictable kind. Not disciplined Spanish
tercios
but a motley militia, untrained, underpaid and vengeful. Ready looters and thieves from any weaker than themselves, and made bolder by the additional presence of a couple of squadrons of pikemen and musketeers.

A low murmur came from the shuffling, dispirited crowd. Some of them were reciting prayers in singsong voices, praising Allah for having liberated them from this land of tyranny and unbelief. Others muttered ‘
Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, have mercy on us, Allah the Just, the Merciful
. . .’

‘So these are the Moriscos who have committed such atrocities,’ said Nicholas softly. ‘There seems an irony here to me.’

‘Civil war.’ Hodge shrugged. ‘The innocent get it in the neck along with the guilty.’

‘Get that filthy burqa off!’ screamed a fat woman, suddenly enraged. ‘You’re on Christian soil still, you dirty Mohammedan slut!’ And she clawed at a younger girl and snatched off her face veil. The girl cried out, but her father touched her on the arm and cautioned her. In deep shame, exposed in public before all men’s eyes, and infidel eyes too, the young Moorish girl followed after her father, her face suffused with scarlet. Rain and tears ran down. They were nearly at the harbourside now, and there were ships come to take them from unkind Spain to a new life in the Islamic Kingdom of Morocco. It was as Allah willed it.

‘Still,’ said Hodge, ‘hard to think they are of the same religion as the Turks, or those corsair savages.’

‘They are not of the same religion,’ said Nicholas.