He woke to early morning sunshine streaming through the latticed wooden shutters and patterning the bed, and nothing but the lingering scent of her dark hair on the pillow beside him. He felt desolate and afraid. The old familiar cloud of danger rising up once more over him, his comrades and all those he loved.
He murmured the intelligence to Smith and Stanley as they walked down a corridor. They nodded and said nothing. It seemed to come as grim confirmation rather than startling revelation.
‘More later,’ muttered Stanley. ‘Not safe here. Walls have ears.’
‘Even the steaming teapots have listeners in ’em,’ added Smith bitterly.
There was a long, slow, elaborate breakfast that was agony. Nicholas wasn’t even hungry. No Sultan appeared, but still the meal lasted half the morning. Already Nicholas wondered if it was deliberate – to delay them. The atmosphere of this gilded, secretive court was fraying his nerves, no matter how lavish the ostentatious hospitality. There was no sign of Esperanza Malachi, vanished like a dream.
And then they were bid farewell and returned to the English House. They laded up the baggage and made straight for the quayside. Smith felt unwell. Stanley feared they may have been poisoned, or come close to it. They were in a hurry to be gone.
A Turkish galley was departing for the Greek coast. The captain espied them with their several barrows of baggage and crates, and immediately began haggling. A crowd appeared from nowhere and seemed to close in around them. It felt bad. At the back of the crowd, Nicholas saw a man in dark robes speaking with members of the crowd, low and confidential, and then stepping away again to watch. This was very bad. A babel of voices drowned out every other sound except the seabirds crying overhead, but some inner voice told him they were in immediate and extreme danger. And as ambassadors and merchants, they were unarmoured and unarmed but for the swords at their sides, which all gentlemen carried, and small daggers at their belts. A crate aboard carried their precious firearms, well nailed and secure.
Stanley had already come to an agreement with the captain. The captain smiled. He had no teeth at all. The crowd seemed to be pushing them aboard. Nicholas glanced round one last time, feeling he was missing something. And then up on a wall overlooking the quayside he saw a woman in a veil. On her own, must be a whore. Yet … Then she lifted her veil and it was her, Esperanza. She was looking for him. He dared not signal to her, it might be her death. He stared intently back. Then she saw him. He was being pushed and jostled but he kept his eyes on her. She made to raise her hand as if stroking back her hair, shielding her eyes from the brilliant Mediterranean sun, but it was as if she was indicating the galley by the quay before them. And then, very clearly and deliberately, he saw her shake her head.
He glanced round. Smith and Stanley were already aboard, and calling back to him with impatience. He looked around once more, and thought he glimpsed a figure step up beside her – a man in a dark robe. No. But he couldn’t be sure. And then she was gone.
Their baggage and the crates were stacked at the back of the galley, a fine boat of the grander sort, and they collapsed against them feeling strangely exhausted. Faces to the sun. The galley moved out across the water.
When no mariner was near, Nicholas murmured, ‘Stanley, I think we are in danger on this galley.’
‘We are in danger everywhere. Comes with the job.’
‘But – particular danger.’ And he told him of Esperanza Malachi on the quayside. Smith listened too.
Hodge said, ‘What? What? What is it now? Don’t tell me, it’s getting worse and all going proper dungheap. There was something wrong with that lamb last night, I tell you, and—’
‘This new … friend of yours has already put herself in great danger,’ said Smith. ‘So perhaps we can trust her word. She must be fond of you.’
‘She was only doing her mistress’s bidding. The Sultana does not like this planned campaign of the Tatars.’
‘We suspected it was coming. But it is useful to have it confirmed, and some numbers, daunting as they are. We thought it was just Devlet Giray and the Tatars of the Crimea, but if he has joined with the Nogai also, the Kuban and the Kalmyks from further East … But we will never get through now if other forces have their way.’
They looked casually around. Other forces. They would never know who. You never knew who was really on your side, who betrayed you, even why. But Stanley trusted Nicholas with his life, after all they had endured together; he trusted his judgement of this Jewish girl, despite her easy ways, and he trusted that Nicholas had correctly interpreted her signal from the quayside. This galley was a trap, and the moment they were out of sight of land, the captain and his crew would be on them to cut their throats. Probably they’d get to keep their victims’ baggage as their reward. But Stanley judged they were better off aboard than going back on land. They were in danger everywhere, but here they might have a chance.
The galley was now half a mile from shore. Casually he went aft and relieved himself off the stern, taking in everything. Strolled back, greeting the brawny boatswain himself in fluent Turkish that the man found oddly alarming. His steady drumbeat slowed momentarily.
‘Fine morning, old shipmate!’ cried Stanley. ‘Praise Allah and his Prophet, eh?’ The boatswain tried to smile. As if he had only just now noticed the size and swagger of this blond infidel they were supposed to deal with soon, and the evident quality of his fine sword. The boatswain’s fingers splayed and then gripped the whipstaff the tighter. He wished he’d sharpened his dagger this morning.
‘Fine morning!’ he replied with forced cheer.
‘A shallow sea, the Sea of Marmara?’
‘That it is, sire.’
‘Blows up quite a storm.’
‘Aye, sire.’
‘One must be ready for it.’
‘That’s so.’ The boatswain was moving from foot to foot uneasily, eyeing him, fixed smile. Guilty as hell.
‘But we Englishmen – we know how to handle storms.’ Stanley rested his hand on the pommel of his sword and smiled pleasantly. Returned to his companions by the baggage. ‘Keep ’em jumpy,’ he murmured, still grinning broadly. ‘Anxious. The warfare of the mind begins here.’
‘So few of them,’ said Smith. ‘Captain, boatswain, half a dozen mariners. We’ve no guns about us, but we can handle this much, surely.’
Stanley said, ‘Look down below. The slaves on the rear four benches are only pretending to wear their manacles. They’re unlocked.’
‘They’re soldiers?’
‘Could be the best Janizaries, for all I know.’
‘No Janizary would sit on a rowing bench, even in deceit.’ Then he touched his fist to his mouth. ‘Damn.’
They were in trouble.
‘Four benches. Some sixteen of ’em?’
‘Thereabouts. All ready to jump up and join in the scrap.’
Scrap, thought Nicholas. Our lives are hanging by a thread, and soon we’ll be no more than four corpses with gaping throats, sinking silently down through clouds of our own blood into the saltwater depths … And he talks of a scrap, as if it was a schoolboys’ fight in a field, instead of a ruthless, covert assassination of four suspected spies. They’d slice open their gizzards and dump them overboard. If the English court enquired of them a month or two hence, the Sublime Porte could send a letter from the Sultan himself, expressing the most flowery condolences and suggesting that they must have been lost at sea.
‘But only one way up from below,’ murmured Stanley. ‘A narrow stair. You can hold that pass, Leonidas.’
Smith growled. He couldn’t wait. Let them attack him, he’d skewer them as they came. Despite the heat, both he and Stanley drew their doublets on over their linen shirts.
‘And the rest of us, keep close and back to back. Use every rail and mast you can.’
A mariner, a young skinny lad who looked Greek himself, came by and offered them a scoop of water from a pail. They all said no. The lad looked oddly disappointed. Smith watched him go back aft. He set the pail back down and had a quiet word with the captain. The captain looked uneasy.
‘Drugged,’ muttered Smith. ‘Opium, valerian … Lazy beggars. They want to cut our throats as we doze.’
‘I’m parched though,’ said Nicholas.
‘Did you think our breakfast was heavily salted this morning?’ said Stanley.
Nicholas frowned. ‘A little.’
‘To keep us a-thirsting, so we’d not refuse water once aboard.’
‘You really think they’re that cunning?’
‘I know they are.’
He fidgeted. His father’s old sword at his side. God knew if it would hold in a straight encounter with a new Ottoman blade. What had the soldiers down below hidden under their benches? A few good crossbows and all four of them were done for. They’d be stuck like pigs before they got close. He stood to his feet. ‘When are they going to set about us?’
The rest stood. It was too nerve-racking to stay seated. Stanley wondered if they should head straight overboard themselves and make for the shore and safety that way. Still only a mile off. At night they might have made it, but now under a full sun the galley would only come after them and stick them in the water. And he didn’t think they would make it to nightfall. It was coming soon. Their guardedness was obvious, they knew it was coming, and the captain knew they knew.
‘Only one thing for it,’ said Smith. ‘Old trick from Alexander onwards. We start this ourselves.’
Without another word Stanley went back and approached the captain.
‘I hope you kept your blades oiled, boys,’ said Smith softly. ‘Now loosen them in their sheaths.’
Even as Stanley came near, the captain, fear apparent in his eyes, started to back away from this approaching giant whilst raising his left hand. The boatswain immediately began a double-drumbeat. It was the signal. From below came a noise of unmanacled chains thrown off, Turks rising up from the rowing benches, heading for the stairs …
Stanley moved like a big cat, pure pace and concentration. The captain had already drawn his sword but the knight closed in on him and batted the flat of the blade aside with his doubleted arm. Like a panther irritably batting aside a pygmy’s spear. Then he seized the captain around the waist, tipped him aside as he might a large water vessel, slammed his head sharply down on the heavy wooden rail and rolled him senseless overboard. He still had not drawn his own blade.
The boatswain had abandoned his drum already and was coming at Stanley furiously, dagger flailing. Nicholas stepped out and ran him through, placed his boot against his belly and immediately pulled the long blade free again. The boatswain collapsed to the ground, knelt, whooping horribly, his grubby djellaba staining deep red. Nicholas had not even time to do the chivalrous thing and finish him. He turned and flanked Stanley, Hodge the other side. He had not killed a man since Lepanto, but he felt nothing except the burning blood inside him, and the furious animal desperation to stay alive, no matter what. Shame and disgust would follow after. That was when you drank to oblivion.
Smith made for the top of the short ladder coming up from below. A Turk was already halfway up. Smith booted him hard in the chest, tumbling him back, then swung his leg down and kicked the ladder aside. But the soldiers were lithe and well trained, and others were quick to scramble along the benches to the bulwarks of the galley and swing up over the boards and the awnings. They came running at the doomed quartet along the catwalk, daggers in their hands, or swinging poles, hooks on ropes, anything they could find. Like a slave revolt. But mercifully no pistols or crossbows that Nicholas could see, or they’d have been finished. Matchlocks took too long to prepare, and powder and bowstrings never liked sea air for long.
‘Back! Back!’ cried Stanley desperately. ‘Hold together! Hand to hand!’
Smith stepped in beside them and they backed up against the stern cabin, no more than a rough plank shack for shade from the midday sun. The only way, the last stand, as they were surrounded by a mob of mariners and soldiers, yelling for their blood.
‘Your captain’s drowned,’ roared Smith, thrusting forward long and low and slicing through a bare leg at the knee, a man falling screaming to the deck, ‘your boatswain’s dead,’ pulling back sharp, on guard, parry, parry, ‘and soon the rest of you villains will be fishfood! Come on, boys, step closer!’
The deck was slick with blood, the leather soles of Nicholas’s boots were slippery with it. The galley floundered and gently rolled as the furious skirmish was fought, the cries carrying over the Sea of Marmara not a mile off from the city shore. Other boats were starting to slow and their captains to look over. They must finish this fast.
There was a slim figure up on the roof of the shack behind them. Stanley glanced back. ‘Take him!’ Nicholas was up in a trice, knocking him down. He rose up again. Both staggered. It was the young mariner, the Greek water-boy, no more than fourteen. He reached for his dagger, shaking all over. ‘Kneel!’ said Nicholas, swordpoint already at the boy’s throat. ‘Do not draw. If you draw I will kill you.’ The shack shuddered beneath them as another body crashed into it. The boy knelt and bowed his head in utter misery. ‘Lie flat down,’ said Nicholas. ‘Do not stir until this is done.’
Then he jumped back alongside and ran a soldier through from behind. Ducked under another flailing blow that cruelly caught the wounded soldier again and finished him, a home strike. Several bodies already lay stretched out about the deck and he saw Stanley with a long blade in each hand, one his own, one Turkish, thrust out laterally and cut two at once. Hodge had lost his blade altogether and taken up a polehook, bringing it down heavily on a soldier’s skull and then rapidly pulling it back and driving it forward again full into another’s face. A horrible soft, sinking feel to it. The Turk reeling and screaming in agony, covering his face with his hands, his eyes …
Suddenly it was over. Though determined fighters, the Turkish soldiers were no opium-crazed jihadis longing for martyrdom and the Mohammedan paradise, and this ferocious resistance was entirely unexpected. No one had said it would be like this … The last few threw down their weapons and knelt, but for one, a big, round-bellied, black-bearded fellow who remained standing, though weaponless, bloodied at the neck but quite calm. Hardly even out of breath. He was thinking bitterly, whoever had sent them out on this galley to despatch a few enemies of the Sultan – mere lackeys and tittle-tattles, as they were told, mere vagabond spies – had been speaking out of his pampered court arse.
He said gruffly, ‘You’re no ordinary spies.’
Stanley nodded to him curtly. ‘Kneel.’
‘I suppose that was why we were sent to kill you.’
Stanley laid a huge hand on the fellow’s shoulder, repeated ‘Kneel!’ and shoved him to his knees.
There were four dead, along with the slain boatswain and the captain overboard – the worst deceiver, in the knights’ view. Soldiers were soldiers, born for war, but a captain who turns against his own passengers … There were several others wounded, some badly.
‘Are we hurt?’ he asked.
Nicholas had an embarrassing sprain to his ankle and kept quiet. Maybe later. Hodge had been hit on the head, making his vision flutter disconcertingly awhile, but his skull was famously thick, as he liked to boast. Smith had a sword cut to his upper arm that bled a fair bit. Stanley eyed it. Nothing serious. He had seen his old comrade-in-arms bleed a deal more than that and fight on regardless. He must have left several firkins of blood on the rocks of Fort St Elmo at Malta.
Stanley went below and looked over the terrified slaves. They had no idea what had happened, or whose hands they were in now. One thing they knew for certain: life for a galley slave rarely got any better. He merely passed from one savage slave-driver to another. One of the wretched oarsmen sat manacled at the ankle, unmoving, his shaven head bowed, with blood actually dripping through the planks from the deck above and spotting his helpless white pate.
Stanley roared back up, ‘Smith! Have the prisoners swab the deck will you, and sharpish!’ Then he tore off a strip of linen from his ripped and frayed shirt and gave it to the poor fellow, who mopped himself silently.
Stanley called out over the rest of them, these forty or so emaciated, despairing stinkards, now in their hands, ‘Christians?’ He walked forward along the gangway, bent almost double, sick with the stench. ‘
Christianoi
?’
Some of them nodded, though all of them in this beshitten and sweating dungeon of creaking timber walls looked like the worst criminals of the Ottoman Empire: murderers and rapists of the foulest sort. Any that claimed to be Christian captives, he demanded of them the Lord’s Prayer. Our Father, who art in heaven – in Greek – was enough. He got Nicholas and Hodge unmanacling them with a crowbar. The eight freed Christians, starved as they were, embraced each other and gave three cheers and scrambled up the ladder into the sunlight as if escaping from Hades itself. The sun blinded them for several minutes.
In their place, Smith herded the surviving captives down below and had them manacled.
‘How the wheel of fortune turns,’ said the black-bearded fellow equably.
Stanley couldn’t help but like him, though he had been trying to kill him but ten minutes before. ‘Your name, philosopher?’
‘Ibrahim.’
‘Ibrahim. Get used to it now.’
‘Where are we headed? Italy?’
Stanley shook his head. ‘North.’
‘North?’
Stanley grinned. ‘East, then north. So spit on your palms, friend, and take up the oar. We have a way to go.’
Still in sight of the minarets of Constantinople. Nicholas scanned the nearest boats of this busy waterway between east and west. Thank God no shots had been fired. But for some shouts, it had been a quiet if murderous fray. On one nearby dhow a moustachioed seaman looked curiously over to them, but Nicholas shouted back cheerfully, ‘All good here, brother! Just a couple of unruly slaves needing a good beating!’
The seaman raised his hand in acknowledgement.
They laid the corpses of the four dead alongside each other – like pickled herrings, as Hodge put it. They would roll them overboard after dark. The Dead Man’s Splash by moonlight. Some of the injured were in a bad way, one barely breathing, the one with a caved-in skull jabbering ceaselessly in Arabic … In desperate straits they might have pushed them into the longboat and let them fend for themselves, but now was the time for forgiveness.
They hove to until dusk and then brought the galley in as close as they dared to the southern shore on the Chalcedon side. Smith himself rowed them in. They left them stumbling through the shallows in single file, arms on each other’s shoulders. All men, Smith reflected, the fire of battle now gone from even his bellicose heart – all men when walking wounded, limping, heads bandaged and bowed, looked much the same.
They rowed after dark. Hodge took up the drumstick, an old mutton bone. ‘Always wanted to do this,’ he said.
Smith squatted down at the hatch as the drumbeat began and said to the wretched below, ‘We are Christians and soldiers, not ambassadors, and damn finer soldiers than you’ll ever be. The rest of you are not even soldiers but the scum of the criminal earth. We are your deadliest enemies. My brothers have been fighting both Arab and Turk for five long centuries now. Twenty generations. Nevertheless, you may find we are not the harshest of slavers. Row well, do not stint, and you will see no sign of the whip.’
And with that supreme insouciance which often comes good, they rowed back east under an Orient moon, its cold light silvering the small waves of the Bosphorus. They passed beneath the very nose of Seraglio Point and through the twenty miles or so of the narrow straits, and after they had disposed of the corpses and
sluiced the decks once more, Nicholas and Hodge fell asleep. They dreamt disturbed and violent dreams.
They awoke at dawn to the sun coming up over the vastness of a sun-beaten inland sea. The Euxine, the Black Sea, Kara Deniz.
‘Next stop,’ said Stanley, ‘the mouth of a mighty river called the Dnieper, and a coast the ancient Greeks called the Chersonese.’
To a land called Russia, and a king who called himself Czar.
‘So remind me,’ said Hodge, rubbing his head. ‘What was our Royal Command in Constantinople? To look after this English alliance with the Turks, tread delicately and find out what more we could. Yes?’
Nicholas looked at him sourly.
‘Well,’ he sniffed. ‘We fairly buggered that one up.’
It was true. Though they’d discovered important intelligence in the city, and escaped with their lives, it was not a glorious success. They’d better charm Muscovy or they’d have hell to pay back home.
The Black Sea was flooding north through summer meadows. Nicholas closed his eyes again to the early morning sun, and saw the Tatar Horde riding, almost hidden in the long steppe grass, the whispering feathergrass that could hide a whole army. Ancient nomad horsemen with their bows and blades, broad Asiatic faces painted for war, riding in revenge, revenge for Kazan and Astrakhan, so recently fallen to the armies of Ivan the Terrible. Passing along the old black roads of the steppe, resting overnight in shallow valleys studded with their campfires or in the thin birch forests, passing over river fords they knew of old, the wide ford of the Oka river, slipping through Muscovy’s poor defensive line, approaching the wooden city itself while the city still dreamed its restless dreams …