William Napier - The Great Siege

Smith clawed his way back and loosened a pile of ropes tied round a capstan. He threw one end to Nicholas.

‘Bind yourself tight, boy, round the chest, tight as if your life depended on it! Which it does!’

Shaking with fear, feeling himself white-faced and nauseous, his eyeballs aching, Nicholas tried not to see the size of the waves already running in from the west, like green glassy dunes. To the east, white water breaking on needles of black rock. The ship straining to sail outward, the deck already tipping steeply. He forced his cold, wet hands to tie the thick corded rope around his chest, just below his arms, in a double knot. It was momentarily a relief to have something else to think about. Then the knot was done, and the ship gave a terrific lurch, timbers audibly screeching above the gale. He pictured nails twisting, boards springing loose … Terror gripped him again. He thought his bowels might empty.

‘And you, Hodge, the other end!’

No less terrified than Nicholas, Hodge did as he was told.

‘Now, about the main mast, both of you, two circuits. It’ll not be used for sail for a while, not on this blast!’

Slipping on the drenched deck, the two boys clumsily circled each other until both were looped fast around the great spruce mainmast, slipping and sliding back and forth, scrabbling desperately with wet leather soles on the sea-darkened timbers of the deck. The ship rocked and reeled, briefly on an even keel and then over again with a sickening lurch, the larboard deck almost down to the water’s edge. Yet they kept their balance and their panic under control, knowing they were bound to the ship with rope thick enough to tow another.

‘Now!’ bellowed Smith, and thrust the staves into their numbed hands once more. ‘Fight! If you were Norsemen of old, you’d do this with daggers to the death!’

Smith and Stanley bound themselves to brass cleats on the deck, and took staves also. Suddenly Smith roared again, ‘Now! Fight us!’

On the wildly tilting deck amid the teeth of the storm, faces dashed and eyes blinded with stinging salt spray, the two boys fought back desperately as the two knights belaboured them, delivering many a true hit to legs, arms and sides that would leave bruises for a week. Gradually the boys’ fear receded as outrage and then anger took its place, and they returned blow for blow with increasing fury. Even if the ship did founder on those jagged rocks, not half a mile off, they’d outlive it. They’d out-swim the bastard storm!

The knights laughed and mocked them, goading them on, roaring out in the wind.

‘Well named you are, Nancy and Matilda! You fight like maidens! Fight! Devil take you, fight! ’

The rope clutching them securely round the chest, they spun and dodged and strained from the mainmast like bears tied in the pit and set on by dogs. Their blood was up, hair plastered to their skulls, soaked to the skin, yet they were wielding their staves and ducking and slithering and yelling too vigorously for the cold to touch them now. It was like galloping a horse through the rain, thought Nicholas. Your flesh was cold to the touch, yet your hot blood sang, your brain pulsed, your heart burned with an animal heat. He caught Smith hard across the hip with a side blow that had the knight bellow in his black beard and shake the water from his eyes.

‘Blasted puppy, have at you!’

A return blow was only just parried, leaving Nicholas’s fingers tingling with needles at the shock.

‘Yell, yell into the storm!’ roared Smith, coming at him again. ‘Shout out that you love the storm! Say it!’

‘I love the storm!’

‘Hah!’ Another painful blow across Nicholas’s back as he turned too much aside. ‘Again! Louder!’

‘I love the storm!’

He fought back. He yelled. He screamed. The storm screamed around him, and he was one with it now, riding it, riding the little ship beneath his feet like it was a wild horse and he the rider, in command now of this bucking wild thing. He further called to mind scenes of torment from the past weeks and months, and the shipwreck of his life. It steeled him, and terror fled away.

The mariners on the rear deck squatted low to keep their balance, watching this crazed performance in disbelief. These four voyagers belabouring each other with longstaffs in the teeth of the gale, staggering back and forth, only kept from sliding clean of the canted deck and certain drowning by being bound to the mast.

‘The storm has turned their wits!’

‘Perhaps it’s a cure for seasickness.’

A third simply spat downwind and growled, ‘Landlubbers.’

At last Smith and Stanley dropped back laughing, even their mighty frames exhausted from fighting in drenched clothes on such a shifting ground, eyes stung red by saltspray, beards streaming water.

‘Fight on! Fight on!’ they roared at the boys, goading them to further furies.

What good practice this was — for they would soon be fighting in the heart of another storm. When the ground beneath their feet would be slippery not with saltwater but with blood.

At last Smith and Stanley looked at each other and nodded. They had it. Both boys. The Ingoldsby boy for certain, and his Hodge too. Both of ’em. That furor martialis , that battle fury, without which no amount of fancy swordsmanship is worth a fig.

Between the two of them however, the knights held privately that once at Malta, the two boys would fall to and become useful porters of powder and musket balls, provisioners, perhaps builders and ditchers. They had survived homeless through an English winter well enough, they might endure through the coming inferno of Malta. But not as fighters. Though the gentleman boy, certainly, had that knot of anger in his belly that drives the best warrior. Anger against what? Against the world that hurt him.

Young Ingoldsby had damnably little left to him in England, it was true. But at Malta, all this swordsmanship flummery would suddenly seem as nothing under that burning, unforgiving sun. They would have their uses, these stout-hearted boys, but not as fighting men. A certain Grand Master would not allow it. But for now, let it keep them busy.

The storm endured from dawn till dusk, but the ship was kept off the toothed coast of Galicia well enough, and at last the wind began to ease. The waves heaved and dragged at them all night, but by sunrise the following day, the sky was a pale washed blue, and the roll at last abating. Hodge and Nicholas had slept down below, curled up among the bales of English broadcloth, and never felt a hint of sickness. Before he slept, as every night, Nicholas prayed for the souls of his father and mother, and for his sisters.

In the morning they groaned and stretched and every muscle ached. Their breakfast rations were nowhere near enough. They fantasised about roast pork, sizzling on the spit. They dreamt of boiled beef and pottage, plum tart, green garden peas, apple duff and cream, frumenty, woodcock, duck roast, sweet rice pudding. But stale bread, mouldering cheese and tart small beer would have to suffice.

Smith had them raise the sword that day.

Each raised it twenty-two times.

‘A fair promise of parry and thrust,’ said Smith, trying to hide his pleasure in his beard. ‘In truth, a good swordsman will only raise his sword three times before he kills. One parry — two parry — three thrust. The rhythm of meted death.’

Nicholas’s voice rose with indignation. ‘Then why-?’

Smith smiled, with little mirth. ‘You will have more than one man apiece to fight, I fear. And you may just meet as good a swordsman as yourself. Then endurance is all. In Malta, if you remain steadfast to fight-’

‘I do.’

‘Then you will meet swordsmen of the very finest in the world. You will meet the Janizaries.’