William Napier: Blood Red Sea

Nicholas flexed his hands.

The oars were far too long and unwieldy to be drawn in and used for weapons. What else was there?

‘For St Nicholas and Mother Russia!’ cried a voice as deep and cavernous as a great bronze cannon. The huge Rus had hauled himself up on to the narrow gangway over the rowers’ heads, and was standing there facing the open-mouthed corsairs at the stern, huge and adamantine, his arms flung wide, his broken manacle still trailing from his ankle. He was virtually naked, though back and shoulders were matted with dark hair, and quite weaponless. Yet still it was a few shocked moments before the boatswain ran at him with drawn sword.

The Rus somehow evaded the sword-thrust altogether and took the boatswain in an embrace. He lifted him from the gangway and squeezed. The boatswain’s eyes bulged in their sockets and his scimitar clattered on the planks. The Rus grinned.

In a scrambling panic, a couple more corsairs fitted arrows to their curved bows and one of them shot. Just as the bowstring thrummed, the Rus turned a little, and the arrow thocked hard into the boatswain’s back. His breath sighed from his mouth and his head rolled free. The Rus thrust his arm between the dead man’s legs, twirled him above his head, and flung him like a straw doll at the onrushing corsairs.

Other corsairs ranged their broad blades over the rest of the rowers below, ready to strike their heads from their necks if any more should stir. Nicholas cursed as he felt a cold blade touch the back of his neck. They were trapped. But what the devil was the Rus thinking of?

The Rus had run to the prow and turned again, still grinning like a deranged bear just loosed from its chains. He leaned down to a wooden hatchway. An arrow thudded into his belly and he paused for a moment, and then continued.

It was the powder store.

The corsairs were screaming and running at him, but everything happened in no more than a few breaths. With his mighty strength, the muscles of his arms and shoulders bunched like knots of towing rope, the Rus wrenched the locked door of the hatchway free, flinging it upright to give himself momentary cover just as two more arrows thudded into its planks.

The narrow gangway between the rowing benches allowed only one corsair to attack him at a time, and the first came sweeping wide with a side-bladed glaive or half-pike. Again the Rus’s agility belied his size, not to mention the two arrows that now stuck in him, belly and thigh, narrow rivulets of blood trickling from each. He ducked the half-pike and then swiped his assailant backhanded as if he were no more than a troublesome fly. The corsair reeled, blood erupting from flattened nose and split lips, and dropped to the deck.

The Rus leaned down and dragged him to his feet and held him tight to his flank in another crushing one-armed bear-hug. He shuffled near to the open hatchway again, his constricted captive trying to suck in air, his mouth a horrified gaping O.

Another corsair darted forward with a wheel-lock pistol hurriedly primed, and the Rus grinned widely, savagely, as if this was all that he had hoped for. Not even looking, he put the heel of his hand under his captive’s chin and shoved his head back with terrifying force. Nicholas heard the neck vertebrae snap. Again he threw a corpse into the arms of his onrushing assailants, then in a blur of speed he seized the arm of the fellow with the squat wheel-lock, snapped his arm at the elbow, and caught the pistol in his own paw.

He turned and leapt into the hatchway.

The air was filled with screaming, from the corsair with the shattered arm, and behind, from the captain himself. A scream of genuine panic and terror.

Nicholas’s eyes too flared wide with terror. Now he understood that sound the Rus had made. The soft explosion. He would kill them all in his madness. They would all go down together, Mohammedan and Christian alike, equals at last in the drowning sea.

Corsairs came struggling over the bodies of their fallen comrades, but it was too late. The Rus had moved with astonishing swiftness, his movements planned weeks and months before in bitter dreams of vengeance.

He reappeared from out of the hatchway like a demon in a stage dumbshow rearing up out of hell, deranged, filthy, triumphant — and holding upon his left shoulder a barrel of gunpowder that it would take two normal men to lift. In his final triumph now he was actually singing, some old Russian hymn, in deep baritone. Blagoslovi, Dushe Moya . . He smashed the barrel down upon the rest of the store below, waved the wheel-lock tauntingly one last time at the captain as his desperate screams fell silent, his mouth still open, disbelieving. Finally the Rus crossed himself, dropped to his knees, gritting his teeth at the arrow’s agony in his belly, held the sparking mechanism of the pistol to the spill of serpentine black powder — a scrabbling corsair leapt on to his back with a knife raised high in his fist — and fired.

The massive explosion blew the bow clean off the galley. After that, events unfolded in a strange, dreamlike silence but for a faint distant ringing. For the explosion had deafened every man aboard.

The single centre-line gun pitched head first through the flaming timbers and sank directly down to the ocean floor, a few last air bubbles trailing from its black mouth. The rest of the slaver seemed to rear back for a few moments, as if in horror at its own mutilation. Spars and scraps of burning sailcloth turned and wheeled high in the blue sky, and among them, heads and limbs and limbless torsos of corsairs and slaves alike.

The decapitated galley crashed down again and immediately her hold was swamped by the inrushing sea. Rowers on the benches scrabbled desperately at their manacles, but it was useless. There were only seconds left. Groaning forward, the galley began to slide down below the surface. Bubbles and eddies came up from the drowned hold, a casket of oranges floated free, a severed arm revolved in a small whirlpool. The captain held his chest of treasures clutched under his arm, looking wildly around. The Sweet Rose of Algiers carried no longboat or dinghy, and few of the corsairs could swim. The galley had been their home, their mother, their country.

The water swirled in around the rowers, and the salt made them reel in agony as it coursed past blistered thighs and backsides, chafed by months on the accursed bench. But swallowing their pain and shock, Nicholas and Hodge managed to move. They levered their broken manacles from their legs, and Nicholas thought to snatch the loosely draped headcloth from his bare skull and tie it around his neck, shouting at Hodge to do the same. Another of the rowers held on to him in desperation, pulling him down beneath the swirling water, nearly drowning him, screaming to be set free. The galley gave another lurch and, gripped by a maddened, dying man, chained to a sinking ship, Nicholas was momentarily dragged beneath the water. He strained every sinew and came up above the surface sucking in air. Then all he could do, loathing himself, was ram his elbow into the fellow’s face, driving his nose-bone back into the brain so that his grip loosened and he fell silent. That was the only way he could set him free.

He saw Hodge take another cloth and wrap it round his waist, and Nicholas grabbed a floating corsair by his belt — what remained of him — and took his dagger. There were so many other things they might do, so many things they might try to salvage, in faint hope of rescue before the Sweet Rose of Algiers took everything with her to the unknown deep. But his head was screaming, the water was swirling ever more powerfully and carrying him away. He clambered and waded back to the stern, stuck his dagger in the captain’s chest as he stood there wild eyed, wiped it clean and wedged it between his teeth. The captain dropped his treasure chest and sat down in the water, holding on to the whipstaff of the rudder, his face ashen and dying. A whirlpool of water coursed around him and Nicholas. Even the chest, heavy with silver and gold and precious stones, lifted and turned. Somewhere in the distance, his ringing ears heard Hodge shouting. ‘Save yourself! Get away from the ship!’