The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege (14 page)

‘Maid,’ he said, and knelt before her. ‘Forgive us.’

She eyed him coldly and turned away, wringing out a cloth and then sponging Nicholas’s skull again. The boy’s face was white.

‘On your feet, brother,’ said Smith. ‘You’ll get no forgiveness here today.’

Stanley rose and set upright a fallen table. One leg was loose. He opened his wallet and laid down a handsome gold ducat with a heavy clunk. The girl sneered. She bathed Nicholas’s wound one last time, and then pressed a clean linen bandage over it.

She said in Spanish, ‘Hold it there. It will heal. You have a noble heart, English soldier.’

Nicholas understood little, though the tone of her voice was sweet and soft.

‘Thank you that you came to my rescue then,’ she said. ‘The Frenchman swung his sword as elegantly as a peasant does his scythe.’

The knights, on the other hand, understood every word. They smiled faintly.

She gave them a withering look. The tone of her voice altered, her eyes burned, and a stream of furious, fearless Spanish flowed from her lovely lips.
Spanish pride
, thought Nicholas.

‘As for these two sons of cold-hearted whores, these white-livered slaves and windy pox-ridden shitsacks, they are not worthy to travel with you, nay, not to share a wine cup with you. That they die soon and rot like the offal they are, I spit on them.’

And to illustrate her words, she hawked and spat full in Stanley’s face. He wiped it away with his sleeve and bowed.

He looked at Nicholas. ‘I think she likes you.’

‘More than I like you.’

The boy stood again, still unsteady and white-faced, and not from the sherry wine.

‘To Sardinia with us?’

Hodge began to protest, but Nicholas spoke over him.

‘Against my better judgement. You villains.’

Hodge helped him limping back to the
Swan of Avon
.

As they drifted away from the quayside with just a foresail to bring them round, there was a girl there on the sea wall watching.

Nicholas held up his hand.

She shielded her eyes against the sun and then raised her other hand. ‘
Un corazón noble
,’ she whispered.

The water widened between them, and the mainsail batted and filled above Nicholas’s head. The ship gradually picked up speed. He hesitated too long. She would not hear him. At last he called out, ‘What is your name?’

She did not hear or understand.

‘
Cual es su nombre, señorita
?
’ murmured Stanley near him.

More loudly still he shouted, ‘
Cual es su nombre?
’

‘Maria de l’Adoración!’ she called back.

Maria of the Adoration.

‘Nicholas!’ he shouted back. ‘
Inglés!
’

She nodded, and he thought she was smiling. But it was hard to see over the sparkling water. Then he heard her voice one last time. ‘
Vaya con Dios, Inglés!
’

It wasn’t only his head that ached.

‘And he thinks to be a monk,’ muttered Smith.

After the big swell of the Atlantic, they headed west and nor’west on an easy wind, into the more peaceful waters of the Inland Sea.

‘More peaceful?’ said Smith, squinting. They were skirting south of the Balearic Islands and Formentera. ‘Then what’s that ahead? Five, ten points to larboard.’

Stanley saw a long, dark line of rocks, an outlying needle of the island to their left. And almost hidden behind the rocks, he could just make out the low, lean shape of a black-painted hull, dismasted for concealment.

‘If that’s not a Barbary galley, awaiting us like a wolf,’ he whispered, ‘then I’m the Queen of Sheba.’

Smith looked him up and down.

‘It’s a Barbary galley.’

Stanley grinned. ‘Does this ship have any guns?’

‘One old petrier in the bow,’ said Smith.

‘A petrier.’ Stanley shook his head. A crude stone-thrower. ‘Noah had one of those on his Ark.’

They sailed closer to the concealed craft. Even now he could picture the rowing benches below, poorly covered in salt-cracked cowhide. Christian slaves chained and encrusted with sweat and excrement. The whip raised over their backs ready to fall, the drumstick hovering over the drum.

Stanley’s blue eyes fixed on the motionless shape ahead of them like a hawk fixed on some unwary pigeon. Then he said, ‘Time to charge our muskets, Fra John.’

Nicholas saw the two knights stride back from the prow and
begin preparations with astonishing swiftness and dexterity.

‘What is it?’

They spoke not a word to him, to the master, to none. There was no time to explain.

Smith sent Hodge below for his baggages, and quickly unrolled one faded green canvas. He and Stanley turned their backs and strapped on each other’s mail jerkins, and buckled on their swords.

‘What? Where?’ said Nicholas, almost beside himself.

The master aft remained oblivious, even his sea-eyes seeing nothing yet. His crazed passengers were yet again at their games.

Another fine oilcoth with three neat ties was unbundled, and there lay six muskets. Four were plain enough arquebuses, one was a longer weapon, and the sixth a thing of rare beauty. Nicholas whistled.

‘That’s a fine musket. Can I have a shot?’

‘Afterwards, maybe.’

‘After
what
?’

Infuriatingly, Stanley just grinned, busily preparing the guns.

‘Not a musket,’ said Smith, his attention likewise all on the weapons. ‘A
jezail
. A Persian word, I believe.’

The jezail was richly inlaid with mother-of-pearl, its deep reddish-brown wood polished to a deep lustre, and with a patterned barrel so fine and long it would have to be rested on a bulwark or prop. It seemed almost too beautiful for use. Yet Smith treated it just the same, swiftly checking the barrel was clean with a prod, driving in a charge of carefully measured gunpowder in a twist of cartridge paper, and then tamping in a perfectly round, smooth sphere of a ball after it. It was a wheellock, not a matchlock. Nicholas had rarely seen one before.

‘For a sword,’ said Stanley, tapping a spit of serpentine black gunpowder into the pan of an arquebus, ‘Toledo steel from Old Spain. For armour, the armourers of Germany cannot be beat. For small daggers, poignards, pistols, along with poisons, assassinations and corruptions of every sort, then of course you will go to Italy. But for a musket of the finest – though it shames me to say it – go east. Beyond the Ottomans. To Persia, or India.’

Nicholas remembered Stanley’s account of his supposed travels.
The Great Moghul, and a trumpeting Indian elephant, its mighty ivory tusks raised in battle fury. Is that where John Smith’s jezail came from?

Smith held up the long, elegant musket before him in both hands. ‘The four-foot barrel is as smooth as slate within. Forged of finest Indian wootz steel. There is no musket to compare with it in all of Europe. Better yet, load it with one of these’ – he held out in has hand a few curiously shaped musket balls – ‘and you can fire through any armour known to man.’

‘What are those?’

‘They are called
stuardes
, made by a knavish and counterfeit Scotsman called Robert Stuart, who claims kinship with the Scottish kings. He lies. But he does make these musket balls that pierce armour, which no other man in the world, I believe, has the secret of. If the Knights only knew …’

He pocketed the stuardes carefully, set down the jezail with the muzzle propped up a little, and tossed Nicholas and Hodge a couple of matchcords.

‘Get these lit. And guard them with your life. If they go out, you go over the side.’

Nicholas wound furiously at the tinder box.

‘Oi!’ yelled the master. ‘No fire on my ship, not so much as a hot fart!’

Eyes still fixed on the guns before them, cleaning, priming and loading in a blur of speed, Stanley paused only to point an outstretched arm in the direction of the hidden galley. He added not a word of explanation.

The master stared north to the islands, and was heard to hiss, ‘Suffering Christ! Man the sails, every man to the ropes! Move, you sons of whores, or your arses will be on a Mohammedan rowing bench by sundown. Move your poxy carcases, God damn you black!’

‘If this ship is to be judged on its keeping of the third commandment,’ murmured Stanley, working away, ‘then we are surely doomed.’

Nicholas too saw the hull, and a moment later heard across the smooth waters the sound of a drum begin to beat out a dreadful, ominous rhythm, and a first muffled crack. The prow nudged
forward, and then the black galley eased out from behind the rocks, as lean and lethal as a stiletto dagger. The prow was decorated with an evil eye talisman, and some Arabic lettering.

His blood felt thick and cold.

‘Turks!’

‘Not Turks, boy,’ said Smith. ‘Moors. Berbers. The coast of Algiers is but fifty miles south. But they are Mohammedans and unchristened infidels all.’

The sails slapped above them. There wasn’t enough wind for flight. The rowing galley, immune to such vagaries, was now turning on its shallow keel and heading straight for them. Half a mile, less. A minute or two and they would be …

‘Bring ’em in!’ Smith cried out to the master. ‘Our appetites are up!’

‘Bring ’em in!’ retorted the master angrily. ‘What do you mean bring ’em in, they’re coming in anyway! There’s twenty or thirty Mohammedan cuthroats on that damned galley!’

Smith said, ‘Look as if you’re fleeing—’

‘We
are
fleeing!’

‘—but keep your mariners on the end of the rope. The instant they close to, reef up for a fighting sail.’

The master looked as black as a strangled Moor. ‘I am the king of this ship, and you, Sir Knight, or the King of all the Russias, are nothing here but damned peasants! You understand?’

Smith only smiled, a somewhat dark and unnerving smile. ‘Do as I say. Those corsairs are ours, and their treasure may be yours.’

‘Report, boy,’ said Stanley. ‘How many men?’

Nicholas and Hodge both squinted. The sea sparkled in their eyes. There were many heads, many dark shapes. ‘Twenty? Thirty?’

No reply.

‘Do we put on our swords?’

‘How else were you planning to fight? By slapping them?’

Nicholas and Hodge buckled on their swords, trying to keep their hands from shaking. They had survived a couple of tavern brawls, it was true, the last one a true skirmish. But this was the real thing. Men would die.

‘Draw ’em tighter!’ cried the master, looking up at the listless
sails in desperation. ‘Swing her in from the wind! We can get in behind them and make for the islands!’

‘No – we – can’t,’ murmured Stanley in a happy, sing-song voice, busily priming another arquebus.

Nicholas glanced down at him. He was loving this.

Then the two knights were on their feet, swords and daggers about their waists, and six muskets fully served and loaded, laid out on the oilcoth. There was also the biggest pistol Nicholas had ever seen. A petronel: a horse pistol, for putting old nags out of their misery. He wondered what on earth it would do to a man.

‘You need a certain strength in your arm to fire the creature,’ said Smith with a nod. ‘But if you do it right, the effect is considerable. Now: if they’ve got a cannon, we might get a splash as they close in. You will see that not a drop of water touches the guns. Understand?’

Nicholas nodded.

‘And if they fire up a cannon, and you see the sparks fly at the breech, then look where it’s pointing and make sure you’re not in the way. Remember you can move faster than a cannon on its carriage. But once the ball has left the cannon’s mouth, and is coming straight at you – well then, it is too late to move. You will never see it, nor anything else before you see the gates of heaven.’

‘But I can’t see any cannon.’

The knights scanned the fast-approaching galley. The sea was calm, the sky clear, the sun warm. Good conditions for a shot. And no: no cannon visible. The corsairs would expect to come swiftly alongside this full-bellied, lumbering merchantman, and simply clamber aboard, scimitars whirling. Their usual technique. Some of the Christian dogs would be killed, the rest enslaved, and the cargo of broadcloth their reward in the markets of Algiers.

The master was still swearing furiously at his mariners, urging them to draw on every inch of sail.

‘You cannot outrun, them, sir!’ called Smith. ‘There is not enough wind.’

‘We cannot fight the villains either! Have you seen their numbers?’

Smith shrugged. ‘We have no choice in the matter. Unless you wish to cry for mercy? I’d save your voice.’

‘A good thing it looks like we are struggling to flee,’ said Stanley softly. ‘They suspect nothing.’

The master stared out over the water.

Now twenty or more corsairs could be clearly seen, eagerly lining the galley’s narrow central gangway above the heads of the oar-slaves. They were stripped to the waist, skins every shade from coffee to Ethiop black. Most went shaven-headed – always easier at sea – except for topknots on their crowns, for the angels to pull them up to Paradise on Judgement Day.

Gold torcs and earrings gleamed. So too did scimitars, cutlasses, daggers and pistols. Smith and Stanley had taken up their guns and were crouching down below the bulwarks of the
Swan
. The high-sided little ship with its sterncastle and forecastle was something of a floating fortress, and evened the odds. But damn it, they should have instructed the boys in how to reload an arquebus by now. They never expected to meet corsairs this far out. Hunting so confidently, so close to the coast of Spain, the most powerful of all the Christian kingdoms. A sign of the times.

‘When we pass you back our guns,’ said Smith, ‘you take them swiftly, lay them down there, and pass the next. With the muzzle pointing skywards.’

The boys nodded.

‘You keep your heads down, and you keep those slow-matches burning. If you catch one of the swine climbing aboard, prick him while he’s still coming up and over. Once he’s on deck and it comes to hand-to-hand fighting – then God be with you.’