Spanish Serenade (17 page)

The impulse to lie down beside Pilar, to curl his length around her and wait for sleep or the morning, whichever came first, was like a grinding pain in the top of his head. She was so sweet and innocent and beautiful that it would only be natural.

She might, if he were patient, wake and turn to him. One touch and he would be lost. He would taste the rosy smoothness of her mouth, and learn the gentle curves of her body with delicate, wandering care. Blind and deaf, mute and without memory, he would seek in her his private salvation. With diligence and rigorously held desire, he would lead her in the dance of love until she felt the music, until she joined him in its passionate rhythm and the melting wonder of its finale.

It was impossible. Even if she would permit it, he was not innocent and certainly not sweet. He moved, in fact, in a fugue of sweat and secondhand perfume with a scent of decaying hyacinths, both manured with generous ladling of self-pity and regret. He could not afford, or abide, for Pilar to catch a whiff of any of it.

A saltwater bath at dawn would cleanse him of the smell of this night's work, and the self-pity would vanish with the early light, of this he had no doubt. For the regret, however, there was no remedy.

8

THE CORSAIR CARAVEL appeared at first light, lifting silently out of the night mist. It might have been a Portuguese ship from its lines, but was lanteen-rigged with a single square sail on the foremast in the style of the African Mediterranean. By the time the ship was sighted by the lookout of the
Celestina
, it was so close upon them it was possible to see the turbaned heads and dully winking weapons of the men who lined the rails, perched on the crosstrees, and swarmed upon the ratlines as thick as lice in a beggar's blanket. From the mainmast flew a green banner with a crescent, the symbol of the sons of Islam known as the Barbary pirates.

The overcast sky of the day before had become blue-black, and there was a sprinkling of cold rain in the rising wind. The Spanish captain was a cautious and somewhat indolent man; his ship was riding the waves with sails reefed for the coming storm, and had been for hours. Roused from his comfortable berth and apprised of the danger, he dithered and called on his saints, and stared over the quarterdeck rail at the other ship. He discussed the situation with his officers in high-pitched tones, but rejected all suggestion that he stand and fight. He could not quite decide if there was time to make an escape, however; Spanish ships were notorious for their sluggish maneuvering, though they rode well in heavy seas. In the meantime the eager, babbling cries of the pirates began to be heard across the water.

The captain, in a frenzy of fearful anger, called an order. A brass trumpet squawked and died away. There was a flurry of secondary commands, followed by shouts and curses and the thud of feet as men pounded up to the decks. Seamen ran here and there with pale faces and eyes bulging with excitement. They leaped into the rigging and sails flapped and boomed, blooming white against the sky. The ship floundered, wallowing as it came about under a confusion of contradictory commands. Then with ponderous deliberation it caught the rising wind. A salvo was ordered by the captain to slow the pirates. A single shot was all that could be got off. The report thundered. The smoke of it drifted in a pall over the ship while the ball skipped uselessly across the sea like a stone over a mill pond. Raising its figurehead above the waves, the Spanish ship began to surge forward in a desperate bid for escape.

It was too late. The pirate ship was closing. Nearer it came, and nearer still. Arrows whistled like an endless flight of thin and vicious birds. Booming fire from muskets spat down on the decks. There were yells and screams in a half-dozen languages. The blue-water gap between the two ships grew more narrow. Grappling hooks were brought out by the pirates and set whirling. They whined through the air, rattling and skidding as they fell to the
Celestina
's deck, biting into the wood with a screeching crackle.

The pirates hurled themselves upward and over the rails, tumbling onto the Spanish ship with knives and swords in their hands and blood lust in their eyes. In a moment the decks were clogged with the fight. Men struggled, grunting and cursing, heaving and slashing before sinking in gurgling death. Swords whipped the air to clang and scrape in engagement. Blood splattered, spread, gathered into trails that crept along the deck seams and seeped into the scuppers.

Pilar, on deck when the Barbary corsair was sighted, had been ordered below to her cabin. She had gone at first, but the confinement had been too close, the dread of being cornered there too great; she had stayed only a moment. She ventured first into the passageway, then to the salon. The young priest was there, kneeling beside a chair with head bent over his clasped hands and his low voice droning in fervent prayer. She thought he was alone, until she saw the merchant cowering under a table with his eyes squeezed shut and his hands over his ears. Pilar stood staring at them for a moment, then picked up an empty wine bottle by its neck and made for the hatch that led to the deck.

She had no idea what she meant to do with the bottle; it was just that she felt the need for a weapon of some kind and that was all that lay to hand. She had scant idea of being much help in the melee above, but could not bear to remain shivering below like a rabbit in a hole, or like the Havana merchant. The Barbary pirates sometimes took captured ships back to port, but more often they took passengers and crew captive then set fire to the vessels. She could not bear the thought of perhaps being trapped in the flames, and if she was going to become a slave in the house of some Muslim, it would at least not be without resistance.

As she emerged on deck, she heard the shouting that rose above the tumult, strong, exultant voices crying a name over and over like some benison of faith. “Gonzalvo! “ they cried. “Gonzalvo! Gonzalvo!”

It was a magnet, that sound. It drew her forward, though she kept in the lea of the poop deck with her back flattened against it. There on the larboard quarter where the grappling hooks were thickest and the pirates swarmed like flies on a carcass, she saw a phalanx of men, a fighting wedge with Charro and Baltasar and Enrique at its triangular core and Refugio at its head. Their calls had brought others running, strengthening the human plow they pushed forward. With savage tenacity and vicious force they were holding their place and slowly, irreversibly, pushing the turbaned pirates back. At the same time, Refugio's voice, incisive and carrying, rang out with an order that brought the ship's scattered contingent of musketeers clambering to the poop, where they formed ranks. A moment later there came the crash of a murderous volley, then another, and another.

There was a stretch of breathless time when it seemed that nothing could end the fighting except death to all, that the ferocity and the prodigal spending of strength and will and blood would go on until none were left alive. Then came a sway in the line of turbaned attackers. A man fell back, then another. A bearded Levantine threw down his broken sword with a curse. He whirled and fled. A half-dozen more followed. The Spanish surged forward with redoubled effort.

Aboard the pirate ship the watching corsair captain, marked by the feather held in his turban by a winking jewel, cried out an order. Nubian giants stationed on the decks drew sword and began to slash the grappling lines free. Suddenly it was a rout of yelling, scrambling men. They leaped from the
Celestina
, swinging on cut sheets, springing from the railing, diving into waves so that great fountains of blue water spouted. Surfacing, they swam toward trailing ropes as the two ships drew apart.

Refugio and his followers harried the retreat, wading into the thickest of the stragglers. The firing began to die away. The acrid smoke of gunpowder swirled about the masts, obscuring the wounded and the dying and the figures that still struggled here and there along the deck. Refugio, with sweat streaming from his hair, and his chest heaving with effort, began to drop back, to turn as he swept the deck with a comprehensive and vigilant glance. His questing gaze stopped, became fixed. Stillness touched his features. His lips parted as if he would call out.

A last muffled shot exploded. Refugio flinched, staggering back as bone splintered and muscle ruptured in a bright red decoration on his chest. He lowered the tip of his sword to the deck with slow grace. In the midst of the fulsome shouts for the Spanish victory, his eyes closed. He sank boneless and heavy toward the deck.

It was Baltasar who caught him, who lowered him to the planking. Enrique and Charro, their faces white, closed in with swords in their fists, uselessly protective as they blocked his body from view. The shouting died away. For a brief instant there was stunned and weary silence.

Pilar dropped the wine bottle she held. It rolled across the slanting deck and plunged into the sea. Along the deck the injured groaned and cried out. Spanish seamen, savage in the release of fear, moved here and there, kicking the bodies of the pirates over the side, and also those not yet dead. No one moved to help the injured Spanish seamen or tend the dying. No one moved to help Refugio.

Pilar felt as if her heart had burst. The burning pain erupted inside her, taking her breath, dimming her sight. She could not move, could not think. Her voice was trapped, suffocatingly, in her throat. The morning receded, so that the cries and groans around her grew distant, without meaning.

Abruptly, she shuddered, drawing air deep in her lungs. Her head cleared so that everything she saw and heard was sharp-edged, crystalline and bell-like in its clarity. Without conscious thought, she moved toward Refugio, then she was running to where he lay.

Enrique, his hands red to the wrist, was bending over him with a wadded sash pressed to the wound. The brigand leader lay unmoving, with shadows forming like bruises under his eyes.

“Is he—” Pilar began.

Enrique spared her a glance. “Alive, barely.”

Warm energy pulsated along her veins. “Bring him below,” she said, her voice firm and clear.

The band hovering around their leader looked at her, then at each other. Baltasar nodded. As one they bent to Refugio and began to lift him.

“Take care!” Pilar said.

They looked at her again, but made no comment.

In that instant the priest, emerging from below, moved to join them. In quiet helpfulness he aligned himself beside the other three men. Sliding their hands under Refugio, they formed a support with their linked arms. Moving as carefully as a young mother with a new babe, they started toward the hatchway.

There was no physician aboard the ship. The ship's officers and seamen took their illnesses and injuries to one of their number who had some experience with such things, or else treated themselves. Passengers were expected to do the same.

At the convent Pilar had attended there had been a nun who, in an attempt to ensure that Pilar had some degree of usefulness, and perhaps out of an impulse of kindliness, had taught her to tend wounds, and also the recognition and cultivation of healing herbs. Pilar was by no means sure that her sketchy knowledge was adequate for the situation confronting her, but could not think it greatly inferior to what was otherwise available.

She directed that Refugio be placed on the berth in the cabin they shared. Enrique she sent in search of brandy or rum, while she set Charro to tearing the single linen sheet into strips. She herself made a pad of Enrique's sash, holding it firmly in place. She had turned to ask Baltasar to go for a basin of seawater when from the door there came a thin and despairing scream.

It was Isabel. Her eyes were desolate and her mouth a circle of woe as she stared at Refugio on the berth. Starting forward with a throat-wrenching sob, she flung herself at the red-stained and still form.

Baltasar caught her before she reached the berth, dragging her up short so that her hair swung in a wild tangle around her red-splotched face. He gave her a hard shake. “Stop it, stop that noise! He isn't dead yet!”

Isabel gulped and tears streamed from her eyes. “Oh,” she said, shivering. “Oh,” she whispered again, then threw herself upon Baltasar's chest, crying in noisy sobs. He held her, soothing her with awkward pats on the back. In his eyes was a look of baffled and angry anguish.

For an instant Pilar felt the rise of tears, but she forced them back. There was no time to cry, no time to inspect the distress that poured like an endless stream through the recesses of her mind. Refugio was bleeding, the red tide soaking into the cloth she held, wetting her fingers with its warm flow. Something had to be done. She would do it.