‘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 petroneclass="underline" a horse pistol, for putting old nags out of their misery. He wondered what on earth it would do to a man.