The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea (18 page)

‘See to your guns! Report from larboard!’

A moment later a gunner ran up to say, ‘Front
verso
got a faceful of salt,
Capitán
. No other.’

‘Then clean her down. I want every gun ready to fire in two minutes.’

They were cutting perilously close to Cape Matapan now, far nearer than the corsair squadron had dared to sail, even though these were Kara Hodja’s home waters. But Nicholas felt a growing trust in every single thing the extraordinary Romegas did. He could sail between Scylla and Charybdis blindfold, this wolf of the sea.

There was a spike of rock not ten yards off the starboard bow, and heaven knew what ragged monsters lurking immediately below the hull, down in the sunless gloom. The
St John
surged merrily over them all. The rocks of the cape itself were barely fifty yards off. They were sheering round, and any moment would emerge,
perhaps with an extra gust of wind as they moved offshore again, the rowers rested and ready for . . .

‘Battle speed!’ called Romegas.

And then they were surging out from the cape, the file of six corsair galleys spread away towards the Dalmatian coast and their lair. The rearmost of the six was merely ambling. Not a soul aboard had yet seen the
St John
’s red hull appear round Cape Matapan, coming to destroy them.

Nicholas had rarely seen such ferocious aggression, with never a moment of hesitancy or doubt.

Romegas signalled now, rather than shouted. The helmsman brought the prow around to just ahead of the hapless, unwitting rear galley, and the oarsmen left off battle speed for a slow stroke, just enough to keep her steady and moving forward.

Romegas raised his hand. The master gunner beside the centre-line gun held a smoking linstock. Nicholas felt what it was then to have absolute power. A wild, dark pleasure.

Later the lookout boy swore he saw one of the corsairs glance back at that moment, and his eyes flare wide with terror.

Then Romegas dropped his arm, and all five prow guns fizzed and roared in a rolling volley of less than a second.

‘All guns reload! Hold fire!’

From the crow’s nest the lookout boy saw men turn and stare aghast from several of the corsair galleys, and clapped his hands in delight.

Then two of the five cannonballs struck home.

The galley rolled helplessly under the iron hammer-blows, and both balls passed clean through her hull, erupting from her far side in a mighty explosion of splintered timbers and spars. A howling went up from her depths as the oar slaves panicked and ceased rowing, crying out for mercy, their drivers flailing their lashes but to no avail.

The five other galleys seemed to give a moment’s pause at the shocking fate of their companion – and then the order ran through the squadron to row ahead with all speed. They fled.

The crippled rear galley floundered and turned in a quarter-circle. Already her stern was beginning to sag in the water.

‘Fast ahead!’ roared Romegas.

There was many a Christian captive aboard her. And in but a minute or two they would be dragged down in their chains to the deep.

The corsair crew were standing fore with hands clasped on their shaven heads. Smith kept his jezail on them from the
St John
. They jabbered and rolled their eyes. The deck tilted.

A handful went aboard. Stanley whipped the key from the captain’s belt and tossed it to Nicholas.

‘Here, you can swim. Move fast.’

Nicholas clamped the dismayingly small, fiddly key between his teeth and waded down among the benches. In the stern the wretched slaves were already up to their waists in seawater. And the bilge that had lain around their feet, rotting the nails from their toes, was now afloat.

Nicholas crossed himself. A cholera sea, this was. Welcome, the bloody flux.

Back at the stern, the captain smiled a lazy smile. ‘That is not the key,’ he said.

Stanley thundered at him.

The captain shrugged, wasting time. ‘That is not the right key. That is the key to my treasure chest, such as it is.’

Stanley gripped him round his jaw. ‘Then give me the right key.’

He still smiled. ‘There is none. It is lost. The Christian slaves will drown. Because you have destroyed our ship.’

Nicholas had not heard. The manacles were on their ankles. They cried out to him. He knelt in the foul water as the galley juddered. A huge current came gushing in from somewhere below where the
St John
had holed her. Nicholas groped beneath the water. There was the lock. He plucked the key from his teeth and turned it underwater. It was damnably stiff. In God’s name let it not . . .

Three things happened in a single instant. Smith’s jezail sounded its whipcrack shot. The galley gave another terrible lurch and Nicholas was up to his neck. And the tiny key snapped off in the lock.

He dragged himself to his feet, yelling out, ‘Another key!’

Stanley was shouting back to him. One of the corsairs was lying
across the deck, shot through the head. He had tried to pull a dagger and stab Stanley in the back, but Smith had shot him instantly. The rest cowered and cursed him for a fool. You do not take on the knights, nor any galley that flies the white cross on red. Fools die.

Nicholas was wading back through the sluicing bilge. ‘Another key, for God’s sake!’

In the sinking stern the first and second benches were now under water. Men were drowning, crying out for help. Some voices were very young, those of beardless boys.

Stanley crossed himself, De Andrada muttered a prayer to Christ Jesus.

The captain smiled.

‘For God’s sake!’ cried Nicholas again, dripping and filthy.

Stanley shook his head. ‘There is no key. An evil day.’

‘To the longboat!’ cried Giustiniani.

Nicholas was seized then by . . . he knew not what. That blind fury that came upon him at times, ever since Malta. A red blind fury. A mariner near by was holding a boathook as a weapon, loosely pointed towards the crew of corsairs. He snatched it from his grasp and made to attack the murderers, to smash the iron hook into the sides of skulls. But a huge bear-hug seized him from behind and flung him away. Stanley. The galley was all but below the water now. Any moment she would be sucked down to the deep. All was chaos. The longboat was filling up, only Stanley and Giustiniani remained. Then Giustiniani leaped into the sea. He would find the longboat after.

Nicholas floundered, his head alternately above and below water. The current among the benches was like a huge snake coiling around his legs. There at the rear benches were two slaves, one of them screaming.

He jammed the boathook down again and again until he felt it hit metal and then twisted it violently. It was lodged. Another current, the ship rolled and seemed like to capsize, then settled again at a crazy angle. Somewhere beyond the screams and the ringing in his head, there was Stanley shouting. He gripped the far end of the boathook, half expecting it merely to snap, and fell on it with all his weight. Something sprung loose and he was thrown. He floundered in reeking salt water. A huge bubble came up from
the hold, perhaps all that had been floating her, and the ship was going now. Two men, still chained to each other, were clinging to him, drowning him. He struggled against them in the water, kicking furiously, windmilling his arms, the foul sea lashed white. All coherence gone. Then there was a powerful, unmistakable sucking force upon everything and he was being pulled down. Down in a dark silent vortex of rushing emerald sea.

There was sun on his face, and his nose was clotted. He was completely deaf. He choked on air. He was vomiting.

Someone slapped his back so hard he juddered. He vomited again. Was he being beaten?

The sun reeled overhead and he opened his eyes. He was alive.

He was hauled up the side of the
St John
like a kitten rescued from a tub. Flopped on to the deck.

When he came to his better senses again there was blinding sunlight, and a dark shadow standing over him. More shadows beyond. A gull in the sky. Someone playing a musical instrument, for the love of God.

Romegas’s shadow loomed across him.

‘You, lad, are almost as much a brainsick fool as I am. You drowned yourself to save two oar slaves, one of whom died anyway. It was I who killed the rest. Damn the day.’

He struggled upright. Someone helped him on to a bench. The sky and the sun still reeled around him.

‘Stanley,’ said Romegas. ‘Watch him. If he escapes the bloody flux from that vile dunking, he must have the luck of the devil.’

His clothes were dumped overboard. Smith said they’d poison all the fish between Cape Matapan and Crete. He was sluiced naked until he felt his skin half salted off, and given the freshest, purest water to drink, straight from a spring ashore. They made him drink until his belly was swollen like that of a mother with child. And for a day and a night they watched him like hawks, felt his brow,
demanded to know of his stools. By the end of the next day, as he wearily reported on the state of his bowels, they shook their heads. Aye. He had escaped it. The Lord alone knew how.

‘Swallowed several firkins of galley slaves’ bilge,’ grumbled Smith, ‘and never a whit the worse for it.’ Smith grumbled with a kind of paternal pride, like a father grumbling about how much his son ate, how tall he was growing. ‘Lad, if every man had your stomach, then camp fever and bloody flux would be things of the past.’

Nicholas grimaced. He still didn’t much like to be reminded of it.

The two slaves whose manacles he had sprung had nearly drowned anyway, but one was finally hauled, choking but alive, aboard the
St John
’s longboat by Smith, clutching the wretch round his bare throat. The knight nearly gave him a hanging.

‘This is your saved man, the Christian you almost drowned for,’ said Smith, his voice sardonic. ‘He cut his wife’s throat.’

Stanley grinned broadly. ‘This day is full of little ironies, is it not?’

Nicholas refused to look shaken. ‘Who am I to judge his sins?’

He was an Italian, a fellow with a narrow face and dark, lank hair, called Aurelio Scetti, and a lute player, of all things.

‘You are now his rightful owner,’ said Stanley. ‘Not in bad shape, he might be worth thirty ducats in the market at Venice, if you get him there alive. Not bad work, Master Ingoldsby.’

Thirty ducats! Nicholas had hardly considered it. But he now had more wealth than he’d had since leaving England.

‘Perhaps it will be the beginning of a great Ingoldsby trading empire,’ continued Stanley mockingly. ‘You know your way around certain Mediterranean cities, you speak fair French, Spanish and Italian as well as your native tongue, and now you have your first assets. Become a slave trader, Ingoldsby! There’s no end of demand. You could take to gunrunning and arms dealing between Turk and Christian as well, and end up with a palazzo of your own overlooking the Grand Canal of Venice, with the prettiest wife
and
a couple of mistresses too.’

Nicholas looked at him sourly. ‘Don’t tempt me,’ he said. ‘The
older I get, the more likely I’ll think in such ways. But it’s not why I came here.’

Why did he come here? Stanley watched him at the rail. He knew why.

Ingoldsby – still an orphan boy at heart, at twenty-two – Ingoldsby came here hoping that in the nobility of some last crusade he might redeem his life and his soul. A foolish hope? Vain, naive, impossible? Stanley was glad it was not for him to say.

Romegas was silent and stared his horizon stare for long hours from the captain’s post.

‘It was an evil day,’ said Stanley quietly. ‘That any captain, even the most villainous corsair out of the Barbary Coast, should lock his slaves to their benches and then lose the key. Knowing that in storm or shipwreck he could not release them. It was a villainous thing. But—’

Romegas shook his head. ‘I’ll not be comforted. It was I gave the order, I who sunk her. It is I must bear responsibility. And I heard talk among the mariners that this is an omen for Cyprus.’

‘Do you believe in omens?’

‘I do. But I also believe men always read ’em wrongly.’

Nicholas negotiated with the boatswain, and his new possession was allowed to sit on the rowing benches unmanacled, down beside Abdul of Tripoli, fed and watered but not rowing, to restore his strength. Aurelio Scetti said nothing. He was a man far gone inside himself and his own misery.

Nicholas gave Abdul a piece of bread.

The Moor said, ‘Your magnanimity drowns my very heart in tears of most humble gratitude. Surely your beneficence is like unto a beacon of golden light, shining out across the cruel darkness of—’

‘Cease,’ said Nicholas. ‘Have you ever rowed on a corsair galley?’

‘That I have. A misunderstanding between myself and a powerful imam concerning his daughter. I can say no more, decency forbids. But you think that corsairs only use Christians on their galleys?’ He shook his head. ‘They use any man with two arms and a heartbeat.’

At dawn they came in sight of an island and Smith and Stanley went ashore in the longboat. They came back to report a single spring, the water drinkable. Not a goat, not a rock dove, not a human soul. A few skittering lizards. The whole island but a thousand paces across.

They took barrels over and filled them with fresh water. Then they went back with the corsair captain and his crew and marooned them there without a blade or a gun between them, only the clothes they stood up in.

Curses followed them across the water as they rowed back to the
St John of Jerusalem
.

‘May Allah bring you and all your children to hell!’

And, ‘We will kill you! We will kill you all!’

Three days later the lookout boy said he thought he could see mountains on the horizon. Romegas examined a chart and ordered the rowers to slacken off. They drifted until dusk and then moved on under darkness.

It was the Troödos Range. They were nearing Cyprus.

The dark bulk of the mountains loomed up beneath the moon, beyond a broad coastal plain. Between them and the coast, laced white with small waves in the moonlight, there was the lantern of a single small fishing boat at sea. The
St John
herself moved forward in complete darkness, her stern lanterns unlit, orders passed for’ard in whispers, the rowers commanded to move their oars as silently as possible.