The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege (17 page)

The deck of the galley sloped back steeply now. The captive stood on the steep planking with knees bent, his lips moving furiously in prayer. His eyes were fixed on the Christians above him. Prayers and verses from the Koran, or ancient curses.

The sea rose higher up the deck. There was a deep, ominous groan from under water. The sea rose and surged around the corsair’s bare shanks, over his knees, his thighs. He would not scream or cry out. Such men had hearts of stone for themselves as much as others. Let death come. Reach down from the golden walls of Paradise. Come, Lord Azrael, angel of death in thy midnight cloak …

The galley gave a last tortured creak, and then very quickly and quietly slipped beneath the waves. A few small bubbles rose, nothing more.

‘My Christ,’ gasped Nicholas, suddenly choked.

Stanley turned around just in time to see one of the captive corsairs, the skinny one last on, dropping like stone off the side of the ship into the water, a red tide round his throat.

The master swiftly wiped his dagger on his breeches and returned it to the sheath on his belt.

Stanley closed his eyes.

‘What did he do?’ asked Nicholas desperately.

‘Nothing,’ said Stanley. He shook his head. ‘He did nothing. That was a warning to the others, that’s all. Not to rebel. It is sometimes done.’

Nicholas was all confusion. He had killed his first man himself, and his second and more, but that was in battle. Stanley himself had drowned a captive, and now the master had cut another’s throat like he was a rat. Surely after the frenzied violence of the galley’s attack, now there should be peace? But the violence went on.

What kind of burning hell was this inland sea?

Stanley saw his confusion.

‘Bid welcome to the Mediterranean, the heart of the world between Christendom and Islam. Two worlds divided. The Mohammedans themselves divide the world into Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb: the House of Islam and the House of War. Though their faith is but devil-worship, and their Koran but the garbled, misshapen spawn of the Holy Scripture, yet they are right about this at least. The world
is
truly divided between Islam and War. Christendom will forever be the House of War to them, the house of opposition. That role is thrust upon us. What can we do but fight? This one sordid killing’ – he indicated where the wretched corsair had fallen – ‘is only a drop of blood in this sea.

‘And the Mediterranean is a saltwater battle-line. Across this battle-line go atrocity and hatred and treachery ceaselessly, like spies in the night. It has been this way for a thousand years. It will be this way a thousand more, till Christ come again. You are right to feel sorry for it, lad. It is only Christian to do so. But the Mohammedan does not feel sorry for it. It is not his way. This is as it was appointed to be in his bloody scriptures. Welcome to the House of War.’

The
Swan
turned and sailed slowly and carefully into a shallow bay on the leeward coast of Formentera. Her shifted ballast and cargo and the westerly wind in her mainsail kept her keeled hard over for the most part, the hole in her larboard hull just above the water line. It was cunning sailing.

‘We can make her fast enough here,’ said the master. ‘But then it’s back to Cadiz, pumping all the way.’

‘You have won yourself the value of those corsairs,’ snapped Smith. ‘That is more pay for our passage. Mend the hull, and then on to Sardinia and Sicily.’

‘No. She needs a refit. Even here it will take three or four days.’

‘We don’t have three or four days.’

‘Then take another ship.’

‘There are no other ships, and you’ve been paid to Sardinia.’

The master looked uncertain, caught between a pragmatic seaman’s wish to mend his ship well, and a grudging respect for these landsmen, who’d fought so hard and saved him and his mariners from the Mohammedan rowing bench.

‘Two days then.’

‘One day.’

‘It can’t be done in a day,’ said Jackson, the ship’s carpenter.

‘A day and a night,’ said Smith. ‘Work by moonlight and lantern light. And work fast.’

‘I say it can’t be done.’

‘There’s half the corsairs’ treasure in it for you.’

The master rubbed his stubbled chin.

‘So now can it be done?’

‘We’ll work at it.’

They went ashore meanwhile and buried the landsman with a cross of sticks at his head, and also the dead boy from the galley. They left his father weeping beside the shallow grave, knees in the dust.

Hodge and Nicholas shared a hunk of barley bread. The sun was beginning to sink and lose its heat. Hodge broke off the corner of the bread where Nicholas had been holding it, as if to throw it away. As if it was bloodstained. Nicholas saw him do it. Hodge slowly put it in his mouth and chewed.

Nicholas walked out over the headland for some peace, and to daydream of a certain barmaid back in Cadiz. There was a goatherd boy sitting on a rock, wearing a goatskin and a felt cap, holding a crook. He must have been eleven or twelve. He stood and saluted Nicholas. He had seen the fight at sea.

The boy’s native tongue was Catalan, but they spoke in crude Spanish, the goat-boy understanding a few French words too. Nicholas tore off some barley bread for him. The boy ate ravenously.

‘Do you know Malta?’ Nicholas asked him. ‘War there? Guns?’

The boy shook his head. Then he said, ‘If I have money, I buy a corsair slave off you.’

Nicholas smiled. ‘Why need you a slave? To come and wash your feet, to watch your goats—’

‘No,’ said the boy. ‘I buy him, I chain him down outside my hut and watch him die in the sun.’

The late afternoon sky was deep blue, the breeze tranquil, the colour of the sea below them an astonishing limpid azure. Little birds flitted through the thorn brakes. At a glance you might think
it a peaceful and lovely island, sun-baked and thyme-scented, with its goatherds and goatbells and little rocky hills. But this goatherd boy was very thin, and in his great melancholy brown eyes there was an unspeakable loneliness. Nicholas could guess his story all too well, no need to ask. His family was gone, only he was left. One night, in one of those ceaseless slave-raids that Africa made upon Europe, his entire family had been stolen. They were gone to the Barbary Coast, to the rowing bench or the workbench, the kitchen or the quayside whorehouse. They would never be seen again. Now he lived alone in his hut, with only the murmurous bees in the thyme and the tinkling goatbells for company, in place of his sister’s laughter, his father’s call, his mother’s voice.

Nicholas gave him the rest of his bread.

‘We are sailing to Malta,’ said Nicholas. ‘We are going to fight the Mohammedan.’

The boy nodded, chewing hard. ‘Kill them,’ he said. ‘Kill them all.’

‘What a bloody baptism was there,’ murmured Smith.

‘He has no after-battle sadness at such slaughter?’

‘But little.’

‘He is a soldier to the bone. If not a soldier, he could have grown into a killer of the worst sort, this country boy.’

Smith said, ‘He’d have survived on the roads of England too. Till he came to the hangman’s noose and danced the Tyburn jig.’

They brooded a little on what was in part their creation.

‘And to think, Fra John, that we provoked a fight back there in Cadiz to give them martial experience.’

‘He fights like a devil. What do the infidel call it? A
fasset al-afrit
. A dust devil. One who moves like the wind.’

‘There’s no meat on his bones,’ agreed Stanley, ‘and the strength of his sword arm is no match for a knight’s. Or a Janizary’s. But his speed is astonishing. When he fights, he moves in a world where every other man in his eyes seems to move like an aged pensioner. He darts in and cuts ’em open before they even see him. I glimpsed him at work once or twice. An eerie sight.’

‘Tell him nothing of this.’

Stanley shook his head. ‘Didn’t they say old Friar Bacon invented a potion which made him invisible, so he could pass among men and not be seen by them? This boy moves so fast in a fight, it’s as if he has drunk this potion.’

They replenished their water jars from a source the goatboy showed them, and sailed again the following afternoon. They would have to sail and bail all the way. It would be three days to
Sardinia, three more to Sicily, and then a day south to Malta. Only a week more and it would begin.

Yet Lady Day was far gone now, it was well into April, and the Turk would be upon them soon. The knights had a dread of coming into Messina and hearing that the Turk was already on Malta, the island had fallen, and this time there had been no mercy for the Knights of St John. They pictured their severed heads already decorating the battlements of the poor fort of San Angelo, so meagre a successor to the great fortified city of their beloved Rhodes.

The six days to Sardinia and Sicily were uneventful, slow and tense. They called over to passing merchant ships in a macaronic mix of Latin tongues.

‘
Les Turcs a Malta?
’

Mariners called back, ‘
No, signores. No escucho no armas de fuoco, no cannones. Todo paz. Paz e benevolenza
.’

All is peace. Peace and goodwill.

They grimaced and hastened on to Messina.

The ancient Sicilian harbour was a clamorous babel of voices, ships loading and unloading, gulls crying, crowds jostling. The master of the
Swan
got a good price for the Spanish merino wool that he had picked up in Cadiz. He would take nothing on to Malta but his troublesome, stout-hearted passengers. He would set them ashore in the Grand Harbour, and then hurry back west as fast as he could, leaving the mayhem of this holy war behind him. He and his mariners were already thinking longingly of the alehouses of Bristol.

Few other masters and shipmen around the harbour showed any interest.

‘Malta?’ they grunted. ‘No trade there.’ And no more.

No others were sailing south. Many quickly changed the subject, no keener to talk of the island than to bring a cat on board ship, set sail on a Sunday, or talk of a storm in fair weather. Malta had become a name accursed.

There was some small encouragement for them, regarding the one naval commander among all the Christians who was truly feared by the Turk.

‘Is Romegas still sailing?’ asked Smith.

A Sicilian gave a slow, guarded smile. ‘Ay. Night and day, the Chevalier Romegas is still sailing.’

They had a short time before departure, while the crew laded the
Swan
with water and provisions, so found a hostel close by. A dark panelled interior, pleasantly cool, and four cups of wine.

‘And none of your mindless belligerence this time,’ Smith said to Nicholas. ‘Nor making love-lorn eyes at any barmaid.’

Nicholas gave him a look.

At the rear of the hostel was a private room, though the door was ajar. A fruity, well-mannered voice was saying,

‘Slay me, but if I had not spent so much time a-dallying with the Lady Maria,
or
her equally delectable sister, the Lady Catherine, I should have been at Malta a month ago. It is the story of my life, Don Luis.’

Stanley and Smith exchanged glances.

‘That voice is familiar,’ murmured the latter.

‘I am ever torn between the burning of the flesh and the cool of the monastery,’ continued the fruity voice. ‘And then of course, the clarion call of war.’

‘That will be for your brother to decide,’ said the older voice of Don Luis.

‘My brother,’ repeated the fruity voice in a sarcastic tone. ‘One might as well await the conversion of the Jews. And Malta will soon be under violent siege.’

Chairs were pushed back, and then there appeared in the doorway the venerable figure of an old Spanish nobleman in a fine black surcoat, a heavy gold chain around his neck. Yet he stood back to let his superior pass through the doorway first. And into the room where they sat stepped a startling peacock of a man. Only some twenty years of age, immaculately bearded, with a pale face and high cheekbones, he was clad in a pure white velvet suit with a small jewelled belt and dagger at his waist, and soft white leather top boots reaching to just above his knee. If you hadn’t heard him talking of his mistresses, you would very much think that this was one of those gentlemen who preferred the company of other gentlemen.

He held his nose so high in the air that he would never have
noticed the four scruffy wine-bibbers at their table, had not Smith and Stanley, to Nicholas’s astonishment, stood up the instant this ridiculous coxcomb appeared, and bowed very low. Nicholas then saw, to his even greater astonishment, that the white-suited coxcomb was wearing a small silver Cross of St John around his neck.

He looked at the two bowed knights and arched one immaculate jet-black eyebrow.

‘We do not recognise the crowns of your heads, gentlemen. Show us your faces, if you please.’

Smith and Stanley stood once more, and the coxcomb winced exaggeratedly at their appearance.

‘Brother Knights, we see,’ he said, and gave a minuscule nod. ‘Greetings.’

‘Majesty,’ said the knights.

Majesty
. Nicholas swallowed. The fellow was a prince, of royal blood! He had never set eyes upon one of God’s appointed royalty before. Instinctively he and Hodge both bowed their heads, but they needn’t have troubled. The Prince did not even notice their existence.

‘You sail for Malta?’ said the Prince.

‘Yes, Majesty. Within the hour.’

‘Then we sail with you. Our passage here has been damnably difficult, waylaid with the most
tiresome
distractions.’ He drew off his white kid gloves once more and used them to fan his face. ‘Pray, finish your wine before we sail.’

The knights drank fast. Nicholas and Hodge gulped theirs even faster. In the very presence of
royalty
.

The Prince turned his head, and wrinkled his nose.

‘On reflection,’ he said, ‘we shall wait outside, in the purer air. Our noses will thank us for it.’ He smiled beneficently upon them as he left. ‘Pray do not hurry. Surely the Turk himself is coming but leisurely.’