The deck of the galley sloped back steeply now. The captive stood on the steep planking with knees bent, his lips moving furiously in prayer. His eyes were fixed on the Christians above him. Prayers and verses from the Koran, or ancient curses.
The sea rose higher up the deck. There was a deep, ominous groan from under water. The sea rose and surged around the corsair’s bare shanks, over his knees, his thighs. He would not scream or cry out. Such men had hearts of stone for themselves as much as others. Let death come. Reach down from the golden walls of Paradise. Come, Lord Azrael, angel of death in thy midnight cloak …
The galley gave a last tortured creak, and then very quickly and quietly slipped beneath the waves. A few small bubbles rose, nothing more.
‘My Christ,’ gasped Nicholas, suddenly choked.
Stanley turned around just in time to see one of the captive corsairs, the skinny one last on, dropping like stone off the side of the ship into the water, a red tide round his throat.
The master swiftly wiped his dagger on his breeches and returned it to the sheath on his belt.
Stanley closed his eyes.
‘What did he do?’ asked Nicholas desperately.
‘Nothing,’ said Stanley. He shook his head. ‘He did nothing. That was a warning to the others, that’s all. Not to rebel. It is sometimes done.’
Nicholas was all confusion. He had killed his first man himself, and his second and more, but that was in battle. Stanley himself had drowned a captive, and now the master had cut another’s throat like he was a rat. Surely after the frenzied violence of the galley’s attack, now there should be peace? But the violence went on.
What kind of burning hell was this inland sea?
Stanley saw his confusion.
‘Bid welcome to the Mediterranean, the heart of the world between Christendom and Islam. Two worlds divided. The Mohammedans themselves divide the world into Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb: the House of Islam and the House of War. Though their faith is but devil-worship, and their Koran but the garbled, misshapen spawn of the Holy Scripture, yet they are right about this at least. The world is truly divided between Islam and War. Christendom will forever be the House of War to them, the house of opposition. That role is thrust upon us. What can we do but fight? This one sordid killing’ — he indicated where the wretched corsair had fallen — ‘is only a drop of blood in this sea.
‘And the Mediterranean is a saltwater battle-line. Across this battle-line go atrocity and hatred and treachery ceaselessly, like spies in the night. It has been this way for a thousand years. It will be this way a thousand more, till Christ come again. You are right to feel sorry for it, lad. It is only Christian to do so. But the Mohammedan does not feel sorry for it. It is not his way. This is as it was appointed to be in his bloody scriptures. Welcome to the House of War.’
The Swan turned and sailed slowly and carefully into a shallow bay on the leeward coast of Formentera. Her shifted ballast and cargo and the westerly wind in her mainsail kept her keeled hard over for the most part, the hole in her larboard hull just above the water line. It was cunning sailing.
‘We can make her fast enough here,’ said the master. ‘But then it’s back to Cadiz, pumping all the way.’
‘You have won yourself the value of those corsairs,’ snapped Smith. ‘That is more pay for our passage. Mend the hull, and then on to Sardinia and Sicily.’
‘No. She needs a refit. Even here it will take three or four days.’
‘We don’t have three or four days.’
‘Then take another ship.’
‘There are no other ships, and you’ve been paid to Sardinia.’
The master looked uncertain, caught between a pragmatic seaman’s wish to mend his ship well, and a grudging respect for these landsmen, who’d fought so hard and saved him and his mariners from the Mohammedan rowing bench.
‘Two days then.’
‘One day.’
‘It can’t be done in a day,’ said Jackson, the ship’s carpenter.
‘A day and a night,’ said Smith. ‘Work by moonlight and lantern light. And work fast.’
‘I say it can’t be done.’
‘There’s half the corsairs’ treasure in it for you.’
The master rubbed his stubbled chin.
‘So now can it be done?’
‘We’ll work at it.’
They went ashore meanwhile and buried the landsman with a cross of sticks at his head, and also the dead boy from the galley. They left his father weeping beside the shallow grave, knees in the dust.
Hodge and Nicholas shared a hunk of barley bread. The sun was beginning to sink and lose its heat. Hodge broke off the corner of the bread where Nicholas had been holding it, as if to throw it away. As if it was bloodstained. Nicholas saw him do it. Hodge slowly put it in his mouth and chewed.
Nicholas walked out over the headland for some peace, and to daydream of a certain barmaid back in Cadiz. There was a goatherd boy sitting on a rock, wearing a goatskin and a felt cap, holding a crook. He must have been eleven or twelve. He stood and saluted Nicholas. He had seen the fight at sea.
The boy’s native tongue was Catalan, but they spoke in crude Spanish, the goat-boy understanding a few French words too. Nicholas tore off some barley bread for him. The boy ate ravenously.
‘Do you know Malta?’ Nicholas asked him. ‘War there? Guns?’
The boy shook his head. Then he said, ‘If I have money, I buy a corsair slave off you.’
Nicholas smiled. ‘Why need you a slave? To come and wash your feet, to watch your goats-’
‘No,’ said the boy. ‘I buy him, I chain him down outside my hut and watch him die in the sun.’
The late afternoon sky was deep blue, the breeze tranquil, the colour of the sea below them an astonishing limpid azure. Little birds flitted through the thorn brakes. At a glance you might think it a peaceful and lovely island, sun-baked and thyme-scented, with its goatherds and goatbells and little rocky hills. But this goatherd boy was very thin, and in his great melancholy brown eyes there was an unspeakable loneliness. Nicholas could guess his story all too well, no need to ask. His family was gone, only he was left. One night, in one of those ceaseless slave-raids that Africa made upon Europe, his entire family had been stolen. They were gone to the Barbary Coast, to the rowing bench or the workbench, the kitchen or the quayside whorehouse. They would never be seen again. Now he lived alone in his hut, with only the murmurous bees in the thyme and the tinkling goatbells for company, in place of his sister’s laughter, his father’s call, his mother’s voice.
Nicholas gave him the rest of his bread.
‘We are sailing to Malta,’ said Nicholas. ‘We are going to fight the Mohammedan.’
The boy nodded, chewing hard. ‘Kill them,’ he said. ‘Kill them all.’
16
‘What a bloody baptism was there,’ murmured Smith.
‘He has no after-battle sadness at such slaughter?’
‘But little.’
‘He is a soldier to the bone. If not a soldier, he could have grown into a killer of the worst sort, this country boy.’
Smith said, ‘He’d have survived on the roads of England too. Till he came to the hangman’s noose and danced the Tyburn jig.’
They brooded a little on what was in part their creation.
‘And to think, Fra John, that we provoked a fight back there in Cadiz to give them martial experience.’
‘He fights like a devil. What do the infidel call it? A fasset al-afrit. A dust devil. One who moves like the wind.’
‘There’s no meat on his bones,’ agreed Stanley, ‘and the strength of his sword arm is no match for a knight’s. Or a Janizary’s. But his speed is astonishing. When he fights, he moves in a world where every other man in his eyes seems to move like an aged pensioner. He darts in and cuts ’em open before they even see him. I glimpsed him at work once or twice. An eerie sight.’