The Tenth Gift (13 page)

The turbaned pirate swept the mayor a mock-bow. “Thank you for your contribution, fat man. I take as first installment.”

“First installment?”

“Of your redemption, of course.”

“Redemption?”

The raider grinned. “There are birds at the sultan’s palace who have just such trick. I am told they are intelligent, but I think they repeat only sound without comprehending sense.” He paused to enjoy the mayor’s evident discomposure, then continued smoothly, “The redemption of your person: your ransom. For your wife.” He considered the large woman grasping her husband’s arm, her eyes as round as saucers. “She seems a well-built woman, which many men like. She should fetch good price. I suggest maybe four hundred pounds for pair of you.”

Curiously, it seemed it was the sum that outraged Maddern rather than the concept of ransom. “Four hundred pounds?” He could not help himself. “You must be mad. That’s a fortune!”

“Less first payment of”—the pirate scanned the coins in his hand, calculating—“two pounds and sixteen shillings. That will be three hundred and ninety-seven pounds and four shillings in the money of your country. Though I am happy to take Spanish reales and doubloons, too.” He paused cruelly. “Start thinking who pay and how, or you soon find the fat of your flesh wasting away on a galley slave’s bench!”

Mistress Maddern began to sob, and it looked as if her husband might do the same.

They were at the water’s edge now and still no one had appeared: If they had seen the raiders, they had shuttered up their windows and sat quiet as mice within. Or perhaps they were at prayer in the chapel of Raphael, or at All Saints’ at Market-Jew, oblivious to the disaster that was being played out so close at hand. They would be singing the closing psalm at Gulval now, Cat thought, Sir Arthur and his family, Rob and the rest of the household, unaware that in the bay below them lay at anchor three pirate vessels that had stolen into the haven of their wide harbor under the cover of a sea-fret and now waited to make off with sixty of their countryfolk.

Down at the harbor wall a host of small boats bobbed cheerfully up and down on the quiet sea, blue-painted wooden skiffs that looked little different from those used by the local fishermen, and now the raiders moved among the crowd, with harsh voices dividing them into bands that each boat might bear away to the distant ships. Maybe it was now that the grim reality of the situation struck home, the idea of this being their last touch of Cornish soil, and suddenly there was a great hubbub and Jack Kellynch and a couple of the lads were swinging away with their fists. One of the pirates jumped into the harbor with a splash, his curved sword arcing through the air with the light breaking off it so bright it hurt the eyes to watch it fall. The raiders laid about them mercilessly and this small insurrection was soon and savagely settled, leaving Thom Samuels lying groaning on the ground, his blood running crimson between the cobbles, the fingers of his severed right hand slowly unfolding from the fist he had made like a flower unfurling in the sun.

In no time they were in the skiffs and away, too cowed by this sudden burst of violence to offer any further resistance.

Cat allowed herself to be bundled aboard a little boat like the piece of rude merchandise she had now become. She crouched in the bow crushed up against two crying women whose names she did not know. None of her family were in the same boat, and she found she could not bring herself to look at the two men who rowed them away from the quay. Instead she stared out past them to the place she had so long and so fervently prayed to leave. She had never seen Penzance from the sea before; had never once set foot in a boat, for all that she was Cornish-born and surrounded by this gleaming, sleek ocean. It moved under the little boat like a live thing, disorienting her further. She shielded her eyes from the sun and gazed and gazed at the receding shore. Surely someone would come? Someone must at least see the great ships and wonder what they were doing here. They would have passed right by St. Michael’s Mount, right past its battery and its guards, and no one had so much as raised an alarm. Of course, they had slipped by in the fog, but now the ships lay in full daylight, bold
and massive and arrogant, pennants flying, men on their decks. Were the garrison also at prayer, or, with the governor away for the week’s end, were they more likely sleeping off a heavy head full of ale? If its lookouts and gunners were senseless and snoring, it mattered little how many guns Sir Arthur petitioned from the Crown, Cat thought, remembering that day barely a month ago when Cornwall’s great men had gathered at Kenegie.

Then the shadow of the tallest ship fell cold across her, and when she looked up it was to see two great flags flying high from its masts. The first was a graceful pennant bearing three crescent moons. The second was a huge dark green banner on which an arm wielded one of the long, curved swords, and beside it a skull resting on a pair of crossed bones grinned down at her.

I
N LESS THAN AN HOUR, THEY HAD BEEN LOADED UP AND
stowed in the hold, their hands manacled in cold iron, and locked in groups of eight to a succession of long bars running across the width of the hold. There was barely room to sit, let alone to lie, and it stank to highest heaven.

The congregation of St. Mary’s Chapel of Penzance were not the first captives to be taken by the pirate gang, for another fifty or more poor souls watched them herded in to share their already foul conditions, men whose eyes showed fever-bright in the gloom, whose faces were gaunt and sunken. They watched in silence as the newcomers were shoved into their places and locked down, as blows and imprecations rained down, for they had long since learned it was wiser not to aggravate their captors.

When the doors to the hold banged shut above them and darkness descended, then the questions started.

“Which vessel have they taken you from?” This in a thick accent not that of Penwith. “Musta been a big one, with all these women and children.”

“Vessel? Nay, it was no vessel we was taken from. ’Twas ashore in Penzance,” supplied a man’s voice: Cat thought it might be Jack Kellynch.

“Ashore?”

“Aye, they stormed the church and took us while we were at prayer.”

There was much shock at this. “I never heard of such a thing. Never in my life.”

“It was an easy mark on a Sunday morning.”

The ship’s timbers groaned as the vessel got under way, and by the pitch and roll of it, they could tell they were away into the sea, and then many of them began to weep, the shock of their situation made worse by the realization that many others shared their fate—strong, able-bodied men from far and wide in the West Country, who had been able to do nothing to escape their captors, and of whom none had attempted rescue.

S
OME TIME LATER
a number of their captors entered the hold. For the most part, they were small, wiry men with gleaming black eyes and heads shaved to leave only black topknots. They spoke quickly to one another in the harsh, noisy language of their country. They wore the backs of their robes tucked up between their legs and fastened at the front through their belts, and they picked their way as fastidious as cats through the filth, distributing among the prisoners pans of water, dry rusks of dark bread, and a handful each of small black fruits. No one said anything to them. They took the food and water and waited till the men had gone again.

“Eat and drink everything they give you,” came a voice, “or you’ll not last the voyage.”

Cat sipped at the water. It was brackish and had a strange, acidic taste.

“Dip your bread or you’ll break your teeth,” another man called into the gloom. “Don’t mind the taste—’tis only vinegar, or so they tell us.”

Next she put one of the small dark fruits into her mouth and almost spat it out again at once, it being both bitter and salty and with a hard stone at its center. She had never tasted anything so horrible in her life. “Here,” she said to the woman next to her. “Take mine. I don’t want them.” She watched as the woman bit into the black fruit and chewed and chewed, the expression on her face never
appearing to change. “I’ve had worse,” she said. “Saltfish and soused herring; rotten cheese and seal-flipper. Whatever these little things are, they ain’t so bad. If thee don’t eat, birdie, thee’ll waste away, and thee’re only a tiny thing as ’tis.”

“Who are these monsters and what will they do with us?” a woman cried out plaintively. With a shock, Cat realized it was her mother, and turned to stare into the darkness, but it was hard to see anyone’s features in the gloom. She sounded unhurt, which was some small comfort.

A man laughed. “Pirates out of Sallee, and they’re taking us to the Devil.”

At this there was a hubbub. Then, “Where is Sallee?” cried several voices at once.

“Dick’ll tell thee—he’s been there afore. The man’s a regular Jonah on the ship of Tarshish, he is. He has no luck. Tell ’em thy tale, Dick Elwith.”

In the aft of the hold a man coughed. A deep voice rumbled out into the darkness. “When I were a child my father told me that they that go down to the sea in ships shall see the Lord’s wonders, and so I purposed as soon as I was a man that I would give myself as a sailor on a London merchant vessel. And so I did. But my true motive was for material gain, and maybe that is why the Lord has cursed me, for I was driven by more than curiosity into the Lord’s creation and the wish to acknowledge His works and cry Him praise. I thought to amend my lot in life, and to rise by enterprise, but that was not to be my destiny.

“It was 1618 I was first taken. Our ship was making her course for the Madeiras laden with salt and beef, but in the early morning about a hundred leagues off the Rock of Lisbon, we saw a sail to windward of us, who gave us chase. We made what sail we could from him but to no avail, for they gained upon us little by little no matter what course we took, or how hard we put her to it. At last, at the rising of the moon, he came close enough to hail us and inquired whence
came our vessel. We answered, ‘London,’ and when we asked the same of him, he answered, ‘From Sallee,’ and laughed, and then we realized he was a Turkish pirate vessel and fired off a broadside upon him, but he sheered off. We tried sailing in all ways but found we could not wrong him no matter what we did. He kept astern of us all day and all night and in the morning put out Turkish colors, so we answered with English, and having no more powder in our store were forced to surrender, whereupon he grappled us close and set a hundred men upon our decks, who fell to cutting away the rigging till our ship was disabled and we were obliged to yield. They took us all off and scuttled our brave vessel and took us to Sallee, a Moorish port of northern Africa—”

“Africa?” a woman wailed. “’Tis a continent of savages half a world away! Oh, shall I ever see my home again?”

Many others cried out their anguish now at hearing this dire news. Cat sat dumbstruck, her mind a wilderness.

“Let the man speak, for clearly he has survived his experiences, even if he has had the misfortune to be taken by the same color of pirate a second time.” Cat was sure this was the voice of the preacher, Walter Truran, for its resonance filled the wooden bowels of the boat just as it filled the wooden frame of the church, and she was soon to be proven right as he continued, “The Lord does not willingly afflict nor grieve His children, but we provoke Him to take His rod into His hand and lay it smartly upon our backs because that folly which is bound up in our hearts will not otherwise be lashed out of us. Thus He taught Judah, by the captivity of Babylon, to prize the freedom of Canaan.”

“Amen!” cried a man, and “Amen,” other voices averred.

“I haven’t earned His rod!” someone else complained. “I do not deserve to be taken by heathens—”

“Shut up, the lot of ye canting souls. Speak on, Dick Elwith, and tell us what fate awaits us in this Moorish place.”

“We were all taken into the marketplace there and stripped for all
to see, and I had some knowledge of the sea and ships and thus was I sold to the master of a raiding vessel, and because I would not turn Turk, they put me to an oar. Three year I rowed, chained like a beast. I prayed to die, but the Lord had other plans for me. One day we were caught by a Dutchman, possessed of twenty guns and a determined skipper, and with his brave men he overhauled the pirate vessel, taking it back as a prize to his homeland, and from there I made my way home no richer but much wiser and swore never to put to sea again.”

“What went wrong that thee find thyself in the same predicament once more?”

Dick Elwith gave a great sigh. “Me. I was what went wrong. Greed got the better of me, so it did. Having no money and no prospects on land is a hard thing, and wishing for a wife I could tup without putting a bag over her head, I decided to make enough that I could take my pick, so I took service once more on a ship that sailed only in home waters, and foolishly thought myself safe. We ran passage between Plymouth and France, but never further afield than that, and thought ourselves safe enough. We were in the British Sea two weeks back when three ships were sighted flying Dutch colors, and we thought little of it, for their merchantmen are often seen in our waters and no trouble comes of it. So we let them get a lot closer than we should, but before too long we saw the true stamp of their faces, and I cried to the captain, Mr. Goodridge, who sits here now beside me, ‘Make sail and flee, for I know the type of men who sail this ship, and they are no Dutchmen, but corsairs out of Sallee, and they mean to take us as slaves!’ And Mr. Goodridge exclaimed in some horror and ordered us to loof up with all our sail, but to no purpose, for before we could make port we were overtaken. And as soon as they had taken us aboard, they ran up their own colors, three crescent moons on a green ground and the pavilion of Sallee, which shows a scimitar raised in anger above a skull and crossed bones.”

Cat closed her eyes, remembering the effect that the sight of those sigils had had upon her.

Another voice—presumably the said unlucky Captain Good-ridge—now intervened, “’Twas the Devil’s own work, such trickery. How were we to know they were Turks?”

“It would have done thee no good had thee known and made sharp speed away, for these Sallee Rovers are swift and ruthless sailors and they never give up the ghost,” intoned Dick Elwith.

After this, the stories came thick and fast. There were prisoners in that hold who had been taken from a dozen different vessels and who spoke a dozen different tongues. There were Spaniards and Flemish-speakers, and Devon men; two Irishmen and a whaling man from Newfoundland who had returned to see his family at Hartland. Fishing boats had been taken as well as merchantmen, but the raid on Penzance had been the first time the pirates had taken captives from a town, and the Reverend Truran’s congregation was the only crew containing women and children.

“I’m sorry for the stink and the filth,” one man said solemnly. “They treat us as they would a herd of pigs, for we eat and we shit and we sleep where we sit.”

Several women cried out in horror at this, but Dick Elwith rumbled a laugh. “Nay, not pigs, man, for the Turk cannot stomach a pig and will have nothing to do with them, neither to rear nor to eat. We’d be better off as swine, for then they would have left us be.”

“’The swine, though he divide the hoof and be cloven-footed, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you,’” quoted the preacher. “Leviticus: chapter eleven. If you wish yourself a lower beast, man, you shame the Lord’s creation and damn your very soul.”

The ship lurched and heeled over to starboard and there was a great groan from the sailors who recognized the new rhythm and pitch of the ocean. “We’ll be in the sea lanes now, heading south, and they’ll not stop now till they hit land,” one said lugubriously. “All the way to Morocco.”

“How long will that take?” someone asked.

“A month, with fair winds and good weather.”

“And if there’s a storm?”

Dick Elwith laughed, but it was a sound with no mirth in it. “If the ship founders, we drown.” And he shook his chains as if to illustrate his point, at which there was much lamentation.

Preacher Truran called for quiet. “Stay thy fears: Do not let our captors know they have cowed our spirits. Our strength lies in the Lord and He will comfort us and protect us from the devils who have taken us. Harken to the words of the Psalm and gird up your courage!

“Hear the right, O Lord, attend unto my cry, give ear unto my prayer, that goeth not out of feigned lips. Let my sentence come forth from thy presence; let thine eyes behold the things that are equal. Thou has proved mine heart; thou hast visited me in the night; thou has tried me, and shalt find nothing; I am purposed that my mouth shall not transgress. Concerning the works of men, by the word of thy lips I have kept me from the paths of the destroyer—”

A hoarse laugh rudely punctuated here, but the preacher merely raised his voice and kept on.

“Hold up my goings in thy paths, that my footsteps slip not. I have called upon thee, for thou wilt hear me, O God. Incline thine ear unto me, and hear my speech. Shew thy marvellous loving kindness, O thou that savest by thy right hand them which put their trust in thee from those that rise up against them—”

The second interruption was less easy to ignore. Light and noise broke abruptly into the hold as the door was opened from above and four men bearing lanterns and swords descended into the gloom, yelling in their dreadful, guttural speech and lashing out at random with great knouts of knotted rope. The first of them reached Walter Truran.

“Shut noise, infidel dog!” he cried in a rough approximation of English, and whipped the tarred rope viciously across the preacher’s face.

Undeterred, the reverend squared his shoulders and roared on, “Keep me as the apple of thy eye, hide me under the shadow of thy
wings! From the wicked that oppress me, from my deadly enemies, who compass me about—”

Now there was a shining blade pressed against his throat. The preacher swallowed and at last subsided into silence.

One of the other pirates brought out a key and unlocked the bar to which the Reverend Truran was shackled. He slid the bar free and gestured for the four men who had been attached to it to get up while the next pirate unlocked the bar to which Cat and three other women were shackled. “On your feet! Up, now, get up!”

They did so unsteadily, for the ship was rolling, and in the semi-darkness it was hard to get one’s balance. One of the women— Cat had seen her in the market of a Tuesday but did not know her name—clutched at her sleeve, nearly pulling it off, and as she staggered to regain her footing, Cat felt the sole of her shoe sink into something soft and slimy. A foul smell permeated the already-foul air. All she could think, inconsequently, stupidly, was that her best stockings would be ruined, and her bewildered thoughts were still running in this foolish direction when she emerged at last upon the deck, whereupon a great blast of sharp salt air served to clear her head admirably.

In the waist of the ship, the pirate chief sat on a carved wooden chair with his feet up on an ornamented box. On his left a man in a white robe and turban sat cross-legged with a board of smooth, pale wood in his lap and a writing implement in one hand. On the pirate chief’s other side a bulbous glass jar stood on the ground, half full of some clear liquid. The container tapered to a graceful point and was decorated at base and lid with perforated silver cuffs. A long tube wound around with purple silk and tassels snaked up from the halfway point of this remarkable container, terminating in an ornate silver beak, which he held to his lips. As the captives were whipped into view, the corsair took a long draw on the beak, making the liquid in the glass stir and bubble. Closing his eyes, he inhaled blissfully, then exhaled a great fragrant cloud. Truly, Cat thought, seeing him wreathed about by curls of smoke, he is the very Devil, with his fierce
profile and his strange, dark skin, sitting there on his chair as if upon the throne of Hell in triumph over us poor sinners.