The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege (16 page)

He stepped back, his arm coated with gore to the elbow.

He moved mechanically now, in a dream without emotion. Others moved around him watchfully, but they seemed to him to move quite slowly. At one point, beyond them, he saw Stanley surrounded by Moors, looking over in his direction, blue eyes wide.

Two more corsairs came. Never taking his eyes off them, he rolled the dead man off his blade with his foot and scooped it up and flicked the blood off it at his attackers. It flecked their faces, they spat. One cursed. What the devil was that?

Nicholas grinned. He felt the evil of it, the wide grin, the blood coating him. The corsairs circled, hesitant. A blood-fevered grinning madman here.

They caught him between them and a scimitar swept across his back and cut him open. It was nothing. He brought up his sword short in a fierce lightning jab when he should have been trying to save himself from the cut, and the unexpected strike went straight through the fellow’s forearm, between one bone and the other. The corsair bellowed and snatched back his arm, and Nicholas held onto his sword tight this time. He was learning. He flailed the oar, the two gave him space, the first fellow’s arm coursed with blood.

His ears were full of noise, of screams and explosions, yet they were very distant. In the foreground of his hearing was nothing but cold, murderous silence and slow time. He caught the second corsair an unexpected blow on the back of his head with the short end of the oar swiftly wielded, the fellow lurched forward, and ruthlessly Nicholas hit him again, and again, until his skull opened, bones splintering under the oar’s weight. The corsair’s eyes rolled up to the whites but he still stood, so Nicholas slipped near and then past him in a single move as smooth as a dancer, drawing his
sword hard across the fellow’s throat as he went. His throat gaped open like an obscene mouth and he slumped down.

The second corsair began to back away jabbering, glancing over his shoulder, then turned and dashed for the ladder up to the sterncastle. A third was behind him.

Almost without noticing him, certainly not thinking now, Nicholas spun and sent him reeling with the long end of his oar, the short end jammed tight under his arm. The fellow slipped and sprawled. Nicholas turned back and tripped the fleeing corsair at the foot of the short ladder, turned back on the first one and struck him once as he knelt up again, clean through his right arm. The fellow remained kneeling before him as if in prayer, or like a heifer about to be poleaxed, and with a third blow he struck into his neck. The fellow’s head hung forward and he toppled sideways. Then he was standing over the corsair who had tripped, driving his sword hard down into his back, feeling the blade grating against his spine. The corsair spasmed crazily, arms out wide, slapping the deck, then Nicholas finished him with another stab in the back of the neck.

He stepped back. There was blood in his eyes, he didn’t know whose. He wiped it away with his left sleeve as best he could. His right sleeve was drenched and sticky.

The gunfire dropped off, the fighting was done.

Stanley and Smith were staring over at him, panting, swords drooping.

Nicholas was breathing hard but felt calm.

Vizard too had appeared in the hatchway, arm in a rough sling, and was staring at him, with a look in his eyes almost like fear.

Stanley came slowly over.

‘You killed five men,’ he said quietly, his voice a strained mix of disbelief and admiration.

Nicholas could think of nothing to say. Then he said, ‘They were trying to kill me.’ He looked about. ‘Where’s Hodge?’

‘How much blood is yours?’

‘Just my back, I think. Where’s Hodge?’

‘Down below. He took a blow to the skull, but it’s a thick Shropshire skull. He’ll live. Though he’ll probably wake thinking he’s a Frenchman.’

‘I doubt it.’

Stanley raised Nicholas’s shirt with the point of his sword and clucked. ‘A scratch. That constable’s whip back in England made a deeper impression.’ He dropped his shirt again. ‘Truly your only injury?’

Nicholas frowned and felt about. ‘Truly, yes.’

Again a look in the knight’s eyes. Then he said, ‘Find a clean shirt. We all need a cleansing today.’

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.