The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea (4 page)

He hadn’t even looked at it. A rope of colourless stones that flashed every colour of the rainbow as he twisted his fist about.

‘Looks like it was diamonds you very nearly perished for,’ said Hodge.

Nicholas almost smiled. ‘So far,’ he said, ‘I’ve had a very lucky day.’

Hodge closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Nicholas had checked the links and then awkwardly managed to drape the necklace over his head.

‘As drowned men go,’ said Hodge, ‘you’ll make a very pretty one shortly.’

‘We’re not drowning,’ said Nicholas. ‘I’m not done with this world yet.’

It was very quiet but for odd splashes and groans. Nicholas looked around for the Sardinian boy, the only other slave unmanacled at the end who might have survived.

‘Save your breath,’ said Hodge. ‘You’ll need it.’

‘He might still live,’ said Nicholas.

‘He died,’ said Hodge. ‘Look around you.’

It was true. Among the gently rocking detritus, one or two terrified corsairs still clung to bits of wood. But no boy.

‘How long can wood float before it’s waterlogged?’ asked Hodge.

‘Weeks,’ said Nicholas.

‘How long can
we
float before we’re waterlogged?’

‘We shouldn’t speak. Breathe through your nose.’

Hodge fell silent. Then he fumbled underwater at the cloth tied round his waist, and produced . . . four oranges, salvaged from those that had floated up from the hold. He laid them carefully in a deep rut on the timber. But still seawater sluiced over them.

‘Eat them now. They may save us.’

Such paltry things a man’s life could depend on. Man whose mind ranged the whole universe – yet his life could depend on a single iron bolt, the thread of his life be cut for want of an orange.

They ate slowly and deliberately, knowing this could be the last thing they tasted before they died.

‘They were good,’ said Nicholas.

‘They were sweet.’

After a time Nicholas said, ‘We’ve got a day and a night. After that we will die of thirst. I remember Smith and Stanley telling me.’

‘Smith and Stanley,’ repeated Hodge. ‘We could do with their company now.’

Nicholas smiled faintly. What would they do now, if they were us?

It was a question they had asked themselves many times over the last few years. What would the mighty Smith and Stanley – old acquaintances from their past lives, adventurers, knights, warrior monks – what would they do? Nicholas and Hodge had whispered it to each other in filthy Tripoli dungeons, yelled it to each other as
they fled through almond orchards pursued by hunting dogs and a hundred maddened villagers, murmured it to each other drunkenly in many a dubious quayside tavern, surrounded by half a dozen cut-throats they had just insulted.
What would Smith and Stanley do now?

‘Smith,’ said Hodge, ‘would swim about with a knife in his hand, finishing off any corsairs he could find.’

‘Stanley would be making terrible puns. He’d say he’d be surprised if the
Sweet Rose of Algiers
ever
rose
again.’

‘Both of ’em,’ said Hodge sharply, ‘would have the wit to remember to cover their heads.’

Hurriedly they unknotted the cloths around their necks and tied them over their heads. At least they might delay the hour when the Mediterranean sun stewed their brains in their skulls. They also took off their loincloths and draped them round their reddened shoulders.

‘We’ve survived worse,’ said Nicholas, still ignoring his own rule about not speaking. The desolate silence sapped the spirit. ‘Remember when we stood at arms at Elmo. Our comrades, Lanfreducci, Luigi Broglia, the Chevalier Bridier de Gordcamp – those gallant souls. Remember the nights at Birgu, when the Turkish cannon roared. The basilisks spat flames that lit up the sky.’

‘Remember?’ said Hodge. ‘I will never forget.’

It was a comfort to talk, despite the thirst. Every little trick helped in survival. Nicholas looked around at the barren plain of the sea. There were no men coming to help, no comrades. It was a saltwater wilderness that cared nothing, for no one. Where was God?

Yet they prayed. Dying men always prayed.

‘What current are we in?’ said Hodge. ‘The Atlantic rushes in past Gibraltar and heads north, does it not?’

‘Aye. And we know we’re near the African shore. The yellow sky to the south tells us so. The current here heads back west. A great wheel. We live long enough, we may paddle into harbour at Cadiz or Tangier. Should only take some three months or so.’

‘I wonder about all the blood,’ said Hodge. ‘From the corpses. What fish and monsters it will bring.’

‘We have hardship enough already, friend Hodge. Don’t add sea monsters to it.’

For the rest of that day, they watched men flounder and die. Some simply fell silent on their timbers, their faces dropping into the water. The sea gradually pulled the other survivors farther apart and cast them wide over the ocean. Towards dusk one still living came kicking past them very slowly. He wore a white turban.

‘Salaam,’ he croaked. He tried to smile but his cracked lips made it impossible.

‘Die, you maggot,’ said Nicholas, his voice a hoarse rasp. His throat was so parched, his lips so burned, he hallucinated wildly that his words were being spoken by a ghost. He had a mouthful of cobwebs. The sun made a malevolent humming noise in the sky as it went down in the west. ‘Die, or I will kill you.’

The corsair rested, exhausted, his head on his arm. His voice too was like the wind through dry grass, only just audible. ‘We are equal now. No longer slave and master . . . equal before the gates of death.’

‘Die,’ whispered Nicholas.

Then night came on, and the corsair died. The loneliness began to unhinge their minds. There was nothing but silence under the starlight, an empty world, the lapping of small waves at their timber of pine. Exhaustion and fragmentary dreams. Nicholas saw a Maltese girl called Maddalena. Hodge saw the woods and green fields of Shropshire. The constellations wheeled overhead, the moon came up and blinded them. Each of them had a horror he would close his eyes, and open them again to find the other one dead. They talked in slurred words with swollen tongues, hallucinating, lips splitting and bleeding, dreading the rising sun. For tomorrow would kill them.

Nicholas tilted his head back to the sky because it was raining. But no, it was not raining. He was dreaming. He wondered whether there was dewfall at night on the sea. He opened his red mouth wider, wider. The moon burned his black tongue.

Then he looked round and Hodge had gone. Slipped below without a word. His childhood friend, his manservant, his
comrade-in-arms through the atrocity of Malta. Hodge was gone below and he was alone. Now he would surely die.

‘Hodge!’ he tried to cry out across the starlit sea. ‘Hodge!’

But no sound came from his throat. Not even a whisper.

Some time later Hodge reappeared, but Nicholas knew he was just seeing visions. It was the Devil’s torment of a dying Christian. Hodge, he thought, came back very slowly through the sea, dragging a set of three timbers tied together. He pulled them up against their own, and tied them loosely to it with his waistcloth. It made a very crude, narrow, unstable kind of raft.

‘And look,’ said Hodge, producing something else. ‘Two more oranges were still afloat. Breakfast.’

He hauled himself on to the four lashed timbers, which sank a little but held. Nicholas stared up at him.

‘By day we stay under water or we’ll cook,’ said Hodge. ‘But by night we can crawl out like turtles and lie on deck. Aboard the
Fair Maid of Shrewsbury
, as she’s called.’

Nicholas smiled. It was a comical vision. There was the Devil for you. Gentleman, liar, joker.

He was cold in the night and towards dawn he stirred. Water lapped shallowly round his chest and legs where he lay. But he lay flat across four timbers. A light wind blew.

‘Master?’ came a strained whisper. ‘I thought you’d never come round.’

Nicholas raised his head. His neck ached abominably, his head throbbed with merciless pain, and the thirst was agony. But then Hodge waved an orange before his nose and he could smell it.

‘Hodge?’ he whispered. ‘I thought you were dead.’

‘Not yet. Eat.’

Hodge helped him roll on to his side. Everything was hurting – his joints, his legs, his feet, his hammering skull, his pulsing, bloodshot eyeballs. Every bare inch of his flesh felt as if it had been rubbed raw with sharkskin.

He sucked on the orange, and after a few minutes he felt a small trickle of strength in him. Enough to say, ‘This is our last day isn’t it?’

Hodge lay beside him, his eyes closed. Both of them were half in the water. ‘I think it will prove so, master. Aye. And soon the sun will be up and we must drop back in the sea.’

‘I cannot, Hodge. I cannot.’

Hodge turned his face towards him. ‘Master. To get this paltry raft, knotted with old clouts, I had to drown two Moors.’

Nicholas heaved himself round. ‘I have a dagger.’

Hodge look at him. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Hold out a little longer.’

‘For what?’

‘For a last hope.’

The sunrise was beautiful and terrible, a few trails of cloud in the east scattering the burnished light. God’s blessed daylight come to kill them. Every minute that the sun climbed to the zenith brought their death closer. They rolled back off the raft into the water with barely the strength in their arms to hold on to the spars. Their feet were bloated and white, legs blistered and weeping. Little fish came and nibbled at their sores but they could do nothing. They rested their throbbing heads on their forearms and made their last confused peace with God.

Nicholas thought he heard a splash near by and raised his head again. Twenty yards off there was a corsair corpse lashed to a spar, half submerged. His face was turned upwards, and the sun had burned his eyes dry in their sockets. But he seemed to move strangely, to twitch and bob. Like a dead dancer.

Then he understood. Something was tugging on the corpse from below, making it jerk spasmodically. Teeth were taking chunks out of his stomach.

To the dumb animals, flesh was flesh, alive or dead. Sailors’ tales told of rats biting into sleeping men’s faces. Meat was meat. He did not even know whether he would feel it when they in turn began to be eaten. His head drummed in hot agony, but the rest of his body below felt bloated and numb.

He could not speak but touched Hodge on the shoulder.

They watched a dark triangular fin passing back and forth through the water near the corpse. No, two fins. Three. Another splash. It was the fish fighting over the meat.

Hodge spread his hand wide, very calm. The old signal from their boyhood deer hunts. Keep still. Make no noise.

One of the dark fins, driven from the corpse by the others, was coming towards them.

‘On to the raft,’ whispered Hodge. He tried to pull himself up, but had no strength left.

Nicholas reached out across the raft to the next spar and strained with all his might. His skinny forearms nothing but bone and sinew. Feebly his legs kicked in the water. The dark fin veered a little and made towards the movement. He pulled and pulled, desperate to drag his emaciated body from the sea to safety. But he might as well have tried to lift a hundredweight sack of grain.

Hodge said, ‘There’s a ship’s mast. I saw one.’

He was hallucinating.

Then the dark fin cut through the water right beside them, and Nicholas saw the horrible grey shape of a huge fish, longer than he was, with small eyes in a massive head, and a wide mouth that seemed to be smiling. He fought with every inch of his will not to move, not to kick out, and the fin turned suddenly, whipping away through the water. It moved off some thirty yards, and then he saw it turn. It was coming back again.

‘Both of us,’ said Hodge. He felt like his throat was bleeding from the effort of speech. ‘Same side of raft. Weight down.’

Nicholas did as he said, and the raft dipped down into the water at an angle. Nicholas rolled on to the submerged edge. Hodge swam slowly round to the other side and hung on. The raft flattened out and Nicholas was just out of the water. Hodge was not.

‘Keep still,’ whispered Nicholas. ‘Do nothing.’

The fin came closer.

Nicholas pulled the small dagger from his waist. As well fight a lion with a twig.

The fin passed by again and he swiped clumsily at it with the blade, nowhere near, almost rolling from the raft into the sea.

Hodge shook his head.

Nicholas knelt up precariously on the four lashed timbers. One of them was coming loose.

Hodge shook his head again more strongly.

Nicholas’s swollen fingers struggled with the knot where it was tied with a piece of cloth, but it was impossible. Tight with salt water. He crouched over the knot, swaying like a drunken man, and began to saw at it with his dagger. It came free. He clamped the dagger back between his teeth and, with his very last strength, hauled the spar from the sea. It was the broken shaft of an oar, splintered in two by the explosion, and the far end was jagged.

The shark was gaining speed, making straight for where Hodge hung now, its fin cutting a tiny trickling bow wave. That was how they attacked.

Nicholas tried to roar out, to steel himself, but only a croak came. He lifted the splintered oar in both hands and squinted, and there was a great grey flickering form in the water. He lunged down. The jagged end struck something very hard and dense, like a side of beef, and Hodge was suddenly barged aside, losing his hold on the raft. Nicholas dropped the oar crosswise and seized hold of him.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the dark fin curve away and round – and then come again.

Hodge’s eyes were closed, his head lolled. How could Nicholas drag him on to the raft? Yet he must. He hauled the semi-conscious body to his side. Looking up, he saw three fins around the raft now, circling wide. Four fins. Five. And he saw a dolphin leap.

A dolphin. Several of them.

And as if by magic – or a miracle – those dark circling fins vanished.