Crossed Bones (15 page)

Some 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 top-knots. They spoke quickly to each other in the harsh, noisy language of their country. They wore their robes tucked up at the back between their legs and fastened at the front through their belts, and they picked their way as fastidiously as cats through the filth, distributing pans of water, dry rusks of dark bread and a handful each of small black fruits among the prisoners. 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 centre. 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 commotion. 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 to 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 he 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 colours, 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 now cried out their anguish 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 colour 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 had 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 I 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 colours, 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, Mister 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 Mister Goodridge exclaimed in some horror and ordered us to luff 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 colours, 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 that of the unlucky said Captain Goodridge, 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.’

After this, the stories came thick and fast. In that hold was a collection of prisoners from a dozen vessels, with a dozen tongues between them. 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 only time women and children had been captured.

‘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 II. 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 has 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. Show 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 preacher 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 crosslegged 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, with purple silk and tassels wound around it, snaked up from the halfway point of this remarkable container, terminating in an ornate silver beak that 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.

He waved his hand at the pirates who had freed them from the hold, and they came forward, driving their captives before them. One of them prodded Cat painfully in the back, but when she turned to complain at such unmannerly treatment, she saw he was a man with blue eyes, carrot-coloured hair and a skin darkened only by a vast multiplication of freckles, utterly unlike the outlandish-looking foreigners who made up the rest of the crew. Seeing her surprise, this man grinned at her and dropped a slow, insulting wink. ‘Not expectin’ an Englishman among this possel, eh, my bird?’

Cat’s jaw dropped. ‘And not only an Englishman but a West Country man, from your accent,’ she said, horrified. ‘For the love of God, can you not speak for us and save us from these savages?’

The other laughed and spat. ‘I have no more love of your God than our fine
raïs
there: I turned Mahometan two year back. Gone is my birth name of Will Martin, and now they call me Ashab Ibrahim – Ginger Abraham – which suits me a darn sight better. In Plymouth I were a poor and despised man, a turner of staves and apprentice cooper, till I was pressed into what’s left of His Majesty’s navy, may God rot their souls; then along came my saviours and sank our fine ship, took me and my fellows captive. So I turned renegado and went to sea with these fine picaroons. Now I have a house in Sallee, two wives priddier than all the women of Devon-port put together and more gold than I could have made in three lifetimes.
Allah akbar
. God is great! And do you know how I came by such a fortune?’