Yet he must come up, wounded as he was. He must try and take one of them with him at least, though it was not the end he had hoped for. With his very last strength he clawed his way through the dark water to the rear of the boat, some twenty feet in length, and with the last shred of his discipline, he rose to the bright surface as slowly as he could, to break through it in near silence. He lay back with his face just above the surface, exhaled and inhaled with agonising slowness, aware of nothing else, expecting to feel the searing stab of the forked spear at any moment. Nothing. He pulled upright and turned his eyes away from the sun and opened them.
He trod water behind the stern. In the boat above, none looked down upon him. They looked over the sides, the bow. The water cleared from his ears and the air was filled with noisy chatter, angry shouts. More angry calls over the water from Is-Salvatur, and always in the background, the grim, ceaseless music of the Elmo guns. Their noise had covered him.
He could turn and swim on unnoticed. He turned himself about very slowly, silently in the water. The shore was no more that fifty yards off. He might yet do it.
There was a sound above his head. He glanced back and up, and a naked corsair was standing in the stern, towering over him, face dark-shadowed but visibly grinning, and stabbing a long-handled, narrow-tined fishing spear down into his upturned face.
He thrashed violently and somehow the forks missed him. When the corsair pulled his spear back to stab again, he found he could not. The boy had seized hold of the shaft. The corsair gripped tight, and Nicholas, the pain in his elbow dulled and distant in his surge of fighting fury, curled himself up in the water and planted his bare feet against the flat stern-board and pulled himself up on the spear. He rolled in over the stern, crashing into the corsair’s legs, and they both sprawled to the floor of the boat.
The bright sun and the upper air were like the taste of resurrection to him, and that inner fury and that uncanny speed again possessed him. In the time the lean young corsair took to leap nimbly to his feet, the leaner boy had snatched up the spear and flipped it round and driven the twin nine-inch prongs deep into his chest and then kicked him overboard to die.
There were five other men in the galley, two still on the rowing bench, staring at him. He moved forward and drove the fishing fork in long clean strokes deep into their chests, one, two, pulled it out, stabbed them again in the neck, and then as they slumped down he jumped up onto their prostrate bodies, his feet bare on their flesh.
On Is-Salvatur, the marksmen sighted down the lengths of their barrels and saw the dancing figure against the darkening sky and waited for the order to fire anyway and finish this farce. A single raking volley would kill them all. Dragut ordered the culverin hurriedly reloaded.
Flailing and thrusting with the long forked fishing spear, Nicholas fell on the last three men who were still gaping in amazement at this creature in human form that swam beneath the water, and erupted from it like a flying fish. The men of Barbary knew every island and inlet of the Western Mediterranean, but like most fishermen of Malta, they did not swim. It was an unholy mystery to them.
They were only lightly armed with daggers, one fumbling with a pole, and with his quick dancing movements, his lightning thrusts, Nicholas had stabbed all three of them before they fled this crazed idolater come from the deep, and threw themselves into the water, there to thrash and scream and perhaps drown.
He had despatched six men in under a minute. From Is-Salvatur, Dragut stared out. What in hell was this thin white djinn?
Even as he was driving the last of the corsairs into the water, Nicholas heard a volley of musket fire and the bellow of culverin. It was not finished yet.
He heard a harsh voice — it was Dragut — ordering the culverin reloaded fast. One of the gunners said the barrel was heating up, but Dragut struck him a mighty blow across the face, and he got to reloading.
He might shelter behind the boat, but there he was trapped, and the culverin would soon blast it in pieces. He could not row it alone. There was nothing else. He must swim again. But it was with a savage elation that he flung the fishing spear high into the air towards Is-Salvatur, like a javelin, then ran the length of the galliot and hurled himself off the prowboard and cut into the water. He felt invincible as he ploughed on, the sheltering rocks below Elmo only forty strokes away now.
Then something hit his head. It was like he had been cuffed. He saw blackness, and then blackness starred with pinpricks. He slowed and stopped. There were cries about his ears. He wanted to shake his head but it hurt too much. He gasped and sputtered, limbs flailing without control, musket balls sizzling around him. The distant roar of the culverin, followed by a silence and then many anguished cries. He should duck down but he could no longer. His left arm felt useless again. He ducked his head underwater and there was a great cloud of blood. He tried to drag himself onwards with his right arm and kicked his exhausted legs. Face turned into the dying sun, not seeing, blind with salt and inside his head only black space. No longer knowing where he was or who, not even his name. Only the sun beat down, nothing else lived nor would outlive it, not he, not she, there was only death and the sea and the sun.
12
The overheated culverin had split at the last shot and the ball had erupted at a sharp angle out of the barrel. It sheared into the water not twenty paces off. But as it went, it chipped a sharp blade of stone off a boulder, and the stone flew through the air and struck one of the men at the base of his skull, just beneath the wrappings of his turban.
It was Dragut.
The great corsair commander was stretchered over to the Ottoman field hospital at the Marsa, men jabbering. They said that the gun had overheated, they had worked it too hard and had neither water to cool it nor time to piss on it. The medics said that a stone shard might not be too serious, but Dragut’s eyes were closed, his face sickly pale, and he was beyond speech, his breathing deep and stertorous. When they unwrapped the turban, they found to their horror that the skull had been severally shattered, and a dribble of grey brain was oozing through the fine silk. It was accursed luck that so small an accident should wreak such damage. But it was as Allah willed it.
Three hours later, as the secretary wrote in elaborate Turkish fashion, in the letter that would be hurried back to Suleiman with galley slaves lashed to ribbons all the way, ‘our noble Dragut drank the sweet nectar of martyrdom, and forgot this vain world.’
The nectar of martyrdom did not always look so sweet up close, thought the Ottoman medics, swabbing up his brains.
Nicholas lay on his back in a small room, his head heavily bandaged. He stayed still for a time, trying to gather his thoughts and senses. Then he tried to move his left arm. The elbow felt terribly bruised, but he could move it, and with gritted teeth, flex it a little. It too was bandaged. He moved his right arm, his legs. He breathed deeply.
He had survived. How, he didn’t know. He stared up at the roof of the cool and peaceful Sacred Infirmary. Fra Reynaud was somewhere near, that strong and comforting presence. He gave thanks.
Then the walls, his narrow bed shuddered with a monstrous explosion, and he knew he had been deceiving himself. He was not in the Sacred Infirmary. He was at Elmo. He was back in the hell of Elmo.
Stanley stood by him, bloody and cut about. His head too was bandaged, his left arm was in a sling, a different look in his eyes. There were no more bad jests. There was an edge of anger in his voice when he spoke.