Swords From the Sea (63 page)

"That, there, was Hugo," he said, "but what is this?" Upon his light steel cap was the mark of a massive hoof.

"Look at the weapon in your hand, Sir Bryn," she responded.

The head of it flared out, into the shape of an iron hoof, with even the marks of nails upon it. Bryn let it fall beside the body.

"Why did he do this?" Alaine whispered.

Sure, Bryn thought, the Genoese had robbed upon the highroad in the guise of a fiend, and sure he had slain here his own light o' love who had left him for De Ferrand. But what of tonight? Hugo had tricked him at the table into boasting about Malik-had not known that he, Bryn, would be here upon the road this night. Then why had the night rider come?

Suddenly Bryn laughed. Why, Hugo had sought the girl for himself, spying down from that ridge behind the trees. And he had seen her come to the road with another man ...

Bryn picked up his sword from the road and sheathed it. Then he bent down and lifted the girl in his arms. She lay quiet against his shoulder, and a slim arm encircled his neck. He pressed his cheek against the heavy mass of hair, and lifted his head to whistle to Malik.

"Faith, Alaine," he whispered, "ye have had wooers a-many, among lords and devils. But now, girl, ye'll have only one, a poor churl of a soldier without service who'll carry you to his own land."

After that day the tongues of the good people of the island wagged long and loud. For, they said, the captive crusader had vanished like mist from his cell, and the witch girl Alaine was no longer to be seen.

But two tongues said nothing. The seigneur, De Ferrand, brooding in his tower, looked at times down upon the gibbet where hung the long body of Hugo with the hammer-hoof tied to its neck, after a just trial that had proved the corpse guilty of theft and murder and black magic and treason to its merciful and noble liege lord, the Seigneur Renault de Ferrand.

Chapter One

When the small boat grated on the beach, he jumped over. In the wash he felt the sands of Africa under his feet. Forgetting that he should not do so, he ran the boat's bow up three paces to the edge of dry sand. There was almost no tide.

Then, remembering why he had come, he let go the boat and straightened his long body. Curiously he looked at the gray mainland, with its tufted greenery showing over garden walls. A flat country he thought it to be, and dismal enough-this shore of the enemy.

On his thin freckled face he felt the hot shore breeze. He was overlarge for his age-eighteen the first day of that month of March in the year 1805. Silently he took his jacket, book, and moleskin valise, handed out by the boatswain. "Thank you," he said, and handed back a shilling extracted awkwardly from his pocket.

Fingering the shilling, the seaman stared grudgingly at his solitary passenger-at this odd young Yankee, embarked at Syracuse on the Neapolitan packet, and the only one to go ashore at the port of Alexandria in Egypt. At a time, moreover, when the gentry were all for leaving Alexandria, bag and baggage. Not that the slow-spoken Yankee belonged to the proper gentry. "Lad," warned the English seaman, with a vague idea of repaying the shilling with advice, "look well about you for cutpurses; and cutthroats-among the pygan savages here, and pay no girl more'n twenty piastres, which is a shilling more'r less. And by the same-"

"I'll bear it in mind, bo'sun," acknowledged the Yank quickly.

"And by the same token, when and as in trouble, take yourself, young Yankee, to yon brig that flies your colors," added the Englishman, his heavy voice edged with faint contempt.

He pointed out at the black hull of an armed brig anchored in the road among the passing raking sails of feluccas. "Not as A-merican colors be safeguard along the Barbary way, where as I have'eard tell at the port Tripoli an A-merican fraygate was surrendered, full armed and manned-"

"At Tripoli, yes," agreed the young Yankee. He hoped the sailor would still his tongue. Instinctively he held out a hand calloused by the chafing of salt-encrusted rope.

"At Tripoli her captain 'auled down his colors. Captain Bainbridge he was."

The young Yankee folded his jacket over his arm, his somber eyes lowered to the prints of his feet in the sand. The contempt in the English seaman's voice was impersonal, stubborn-something that had to be said because it was true. "And not a man wounded among all of them. Nah, not a fight in the lot of them." He spat into the water. "Surrendered with whole skins to the pygan corsairs of Tripoli!"

Gripping his book, the lanky boy answered under his breath: "She grounded on an uncharted reef."

"Ah."

The Yankee lifted his eyes, tense with fear. "They went in and burned her afterward-the Americans did."

He prayed inwardly that the boatswain would cease his loud abuse of the Americans at Tripoli. Already people were glancing their way, and a young woman appeared at his elbow, a silk kerchief gripped over her head, her slippered feet sinking into the sand. She was asking questions in good French and labored English, of which the boatswain seemed to understand little. Eyeing her, the man said: "Nah, then."

"She is asking," said the Yankee, who caught the drift of her French speech, "the price of a passage to Syracuse on your packet vessel."

"Yes," assented the girl, "please. To Syracuse or anywhere."

She held her head turned from the Yankee, who saw the fall of dark hair against a young cheek, and the bright peacocks embroidered on the scarf.

"To Syracuse?" The boatswain pondered, trying to get a sight of the girl's slim breast in the V of the shawl. "Fifty-two sov'reigns, or Venay- tian sequins."

The girl let out her breath in a sigh. Her head turned slowly toward the quay jutting from the beach, where carriages waited among eddies of servants-where wealthy would-be passengers waited for a chance to board one of the few vessels leaving the port of Alexandria. Her dark eyes half closed, her small shoulders lifted defiantly, she began to walk toward the quay.

The Yankee's gaze followed the bright blue of the peacock scarf, and it seemed to him strange that this young woman should be alone and afoot on the beach. The thought only touched his mind, while he repeated silently the words he should not have spoken: They went in and burned her afterward ... He remembered how the fire had sprung from the sacks piled against the polished oak of the wardroom, crackling and burning amethyst color from the tar and charcoal in the sacks-whirling up the masts and the tarred shrouds in a hot dry night wind, mirrored in the still water, until the heat began to explode the charges in the shotted guns, and they fired their requiem for the doomed frigate, the Philadelphia ...

Clamping shut his lips, he walked away from the landing boat, not toward the crowd on the quay but toward the nearest alley of the town.

He walked, the boatswain noticed, planting his feet wide like a man who had been long at sea. Not like a proper gentleman! Such a traveling gentleman, in the boatswain's opinion, would have fondled the neck of the trim wench who had come by to catch his eye. Aye, a proper gentleman would have hallo'ed for a chaise to convey him into town, instead of trudging off carrying his own bag.

"Nah," said the seaman, pocketing his shilling. He was certain only that this young Yankee was like others of his kind, a man with an eye for trade who would pay down good money to escape a fight.

The Yankee walked hastily into the shade of the first alley and looked around him there, hoping that he was not followed from the beach. Beside him veiled women dozed in the shadow of a half-ruined kiosk. Bells jangled past him as dusty donkeys trotted by, their loads bumping against him. The dust hung in the air, and the stench of the ground choked him.

Against the wall a long human body smelled sickly sweet. Peering down at it, the Yankee made out a ragged dolman over shoulders where the flies had not clustered. The unburied body, then, must have been a French soldier, a relic of the French army of occupation, abandoned in Egypt like the charred skeletons of Napoleon's fleet off one of the mouths of the Nile ...

Wings flapped over his head. A tawny-white buzzard came to rest on the clay wall above the body.

The Yankee thought it a pity that no one troubled to give the body, even though it was a foreigner's, a grave. Frowning, he reminded himself of his two mistakes at the beach. First, he had lent a hand in beaching the boat; second, he had shown temper at the taunt of the English seaman, who was probably no more than a deserter, keeping his hide whole and his purse full under the Neapolitan flag.

Carefully the youth repeated the identification he had made up for himself: "My name is Paul Davies. I am a graduate of the King's College in the city of New York, now seeking lucrative employment as teacher of the French language-or ciphering-in some Christian family. My purpose in venturing to Egypt is to improve my mind by sight of the temples and pyramids of the ancient world."

The only book he had was the one he carried so ostentatiously, being The Pilgrim's Progress by a certain John Bunyan-an account of a journey which Paul had found only mildly interesting.

And his education, he knew, hardly qualified him to teach anyone, because it was that of a midshipman, recently promoted to lieutenant in the United States Navy.

Down the center of the alley limped a tall man leaning on a long staff, crying out "Ya hu-ya hak!" His shaggy head bent back, he would have blundered into Paul, if the Yankee had not stepped aside quickly. The crier, a blind beggar, was followed by two armed men, who stopped Paul, asking questions he could not understand.

By their tufted red skullcaps, he knew they were police.

"Giauringlisi!" exclaimed one impatiently, and jerked open Paul's valise, pulling out the few linen shirts and the pair of slippers it held. An English foreigner, they thought him to be.

He had no weapon. He could not resist. The one thing he should not do under any circumstances was to start a fight. So he smiled helplessly while the police ransacked his small bag, finding little.

Then they looked attentively at his narrow civilian trousers and white shirt, and the bigger of the two thrust his hand against the bulge in the shirt over the belt, where Paul's wallet lay.

Before they could extract the wallet, they heard the heavy tread of feet approaching, swiftly in quickstep. Around the corner behind them swung a platoon of stocky figures clad in uniforms green with age. The figures carried muskets brightly polished, and their sun-darkened heads turned quickly and silently toward the pair of police. At once the police stepped back to the wall, gripping their long staves warily, leaving the narrow street clear for the marchers.

Greeks, thought Paul, noticing their baggy pantaloons cut off above the knees. Barely he had time to scoop his belonging back into his valise and step aside. The Greeks swung by like a pack of mastiffs passing stray wolves. The Turkish police hugged their wall. And the Yankee seized this chance to stride off into the dust after the marching detachment.

He kept close to it, observing how the throngs in the alley scattered at the sight of their muskets.

In this spring of 1805 the flotsam and jetsam of the wars jammed the port of Alexandria. After the remnant of Menou's French army had surrendered, the redcoats had come and gone in their quest after Napoleon. On the heels of the departing English the letting of blood went on with bands of the Egyptian Mamelukes raiding the garrisons of the Turkish sultan-nominal ruler of the land-while deserters herded together to pillage and Bedouin tribes swarmed in to raid impartially, the flames of burning villages made beacons at night from Grand Cairo to the sea.

In the kaleidoscope of lawlessness, Paul Davies had been assured that the only safeguards were a British passport or a strong armed escort. Having neither of these, he was well content to follow after the marching Greeks, who might guide him to some place safe for Christians. When the sergeants at the rear of the small column began to stare back at him curiously, he slowed his pace to drop farther behind.

Somewhere on this African shore he had to find a man. The person he sought might be in the streets of Alexandria or up the Nile at Grand Cairo, or out in the desert. If Paul could cross his track, he should not be hard to find. But Paul could not let it be known that he was seeking for him. Nor could he waste time in his search. He had to ransack the town for a trace of his quarry, and having found the trace, to follow it to his man. And to contrive a meeting as if by happenchance. So much he had reasoned out in his slow fashion while still at sea on the deck of the Neapolitan packet.