William Napier - The Great Siege

She said in Spanish, ‘Hold it there. It will heal. You have a noble heart, English soldier.’

Nicholas understood little, though the tone of her voice was sweet and soft.

‘Thank you that you came to my rescue then,’ she said. ‘The Frenchman swung his sword as elegantly as a peasant does his scythe.’

The knights, on the other hand, understood every word. They smiled faintly.

She gave them a withering look. The tone of her voice altered, her eyes burned, and a stream of furious, fearless Spanish flowed from her lovely lips. Spanish pride , thought Nicholas.

‘As for these two sons of cold-hearted whores, these white-livered slaves and windy pox-ridden shitsacks, they are not worthy to travel with you, nay, not to share a wine cup with you. That they die soon and rot like the offal they are, I spit on them.’

And to illustrate her words, she hawked and spat full in Stanley’s face. He wiped it away with his sleeve and bowed.

He looked at Nicholas. ‘I think she likes you.’

‘More than I like you.’

The boy stood again, still unsteady and white-faced, and not from the sherry wine.

‘To Sardinia with us?’

Hodge began to protest, but Nicholas spoke over him.

‘Against my better judgement. You villains.’

Hodge helped him limping back to the Swan of Avon .

As they drifted away from the quayside with just a foresail to bring them round, there was a girl there on the sea wall watching.

Nicholas held up his hand.

She shielded her eyes against the sun and then raised her other hand. ‘ Un corazón noble ,’ she whispered.

The water widened between them, and the mainsail batted and filled above Nicholas’s head. The ship gradually picked up speed. He hesitated too long. She would not hear him. At last he called out, ‘What is your name?’

She did not hear or understand.

‘ Cual es su nombre, señorita ? ’ murmured Stanley near him.

More loudly still he shouted, ‘ Cual es su nombre? ’

‘Maria de l’Adoración!’ she called back.

Maria of the Adoration.

‘Nicholas!’ he shouted back. ‘ Inglés! ’

She nodded, and he thought she was smiling. But it was hard to see over the sparkling water. Then he heard her voice one last time. ‘ Vaya con Dios, Inglés! ’

It wasn’t only his head that ached.

‘And he thinks to be a monk,’ muttered Smith.

After the big swell of the Atlantic, they headed west and nor’west on an easy wind, into the more peaceful waters of the Inland Sea.

‘More peaceful?’ said Smith, squinting. They were skirting south of the Balearic Islands and Formentera. ‘Then what’s that ahead? Five, ten points to larboard.’

Stanley saw a long, dark line of rocks, an outlying needle of the island to their left. And almost hidden behind the rocks, he could just make out the low, lean shape of a black-painted hull, dismasted for concealment.

‘If that’s not a Barbary galley, awaiting us like a wolf,’ he whispered, ‘then I’m the Queen of Sheba.’

Smith looked him up and down.

‘It’s a Barbary galley.’

Stanley grinned. ‘Does this ship have any guns?’

‘One old petrier in the bow,’ said Smith.

‘A petrier.’ Stanley shook his head. A crude stone-thrower. ‘Noah had one of those on his Ark.’

They sailed closer to the concealed craft. Even now he could picture the rowing benches below, poorly covered in salt-cracked cowhide. Christian slaves chained and encrusted with sweat and excrement. The whip raised over their backs ready to fall, the drumstick hovering over the drum.

Stanley’s blue eyes fixed on the motionless shape ahead of them like a hawk fixed on some unwary pigeon. Then he said, ‘Time to charge our muskets, Fra John.’

Nicholas saw the two knights stride back from the prow and begin preparations with astonishing swiftness and dexterity.

‘What is it?’

They spoke not a word to him, to the master, to none. There was no time to explain.

Smith sent Hodge below for his baggages, and quickly unrolled one faded green canvas. He and Stanley turned their backs and strapped on each other’s mail jerkins, and buckled on their swords.

‘What? Where?’ said Nicholas, almost beside himself.

The master aft remained oblivious, even his sea-eyes seeing nothing yet. His crazed passengers were yet again at their games.

Another fine oilcoth with three neat ties was unbundled, and there lay six muskets. Four were plain enough arquebuses, one was a longer weapon, and the sixth a thing of rare beauty. Nicholas whistled.

‘That’s a fine musket. Can I have a shot?’

‘Afterwards, maybe.’

‘After what ?’

Infuriatingly, Stanley just grinned, busily preparing the guns.

‘Not a musket,’ said Smith, his attention likewise all on the weapons. ‘A jezail . A Persian word, I believe.’

The jezail was richly inlaid with mother-of-pearl, its deep reddish-brown wood polished to a deep lustre, and with a patterned barrel so fine and long it would have to be rested on a bulwark or prop. It seemed almost too beautiful for use. Yet Smith treated it just the same, swiftly checking the barrel was clean with a prod, driving in a charge of carefully measured gunpowder in a twist of cartridge paper, and then tamping in a perfectly round, smooth sphere of a ball after it. It was a wheellock, not a matchlock. Nicholas had rarely seen one before.

‘For a sword,’ said Stanley, tapping a spit of serpentine black gunpowder into the pan of an arquebus, ‘Toledo steel from Old Spain. For armour, the armourers of Germany cannot be beat. For small daggers, poignards, pistols, along with poisons, assassinations and corruptions of every sort, then of course you will go to Italy. But for a musket of the finest — though it shames me to say it — go east. Beyond the Ottomans. To Persia, or India.’

Nicholas remembered Stanley’s account of his supposed travels. The Great Moghul, and a trumpeting Indian elephant, its mighty ivory tusks raised in battle fury. Is that where John Smith’s jezail came from?

Smith held up the long, elegant musket before him in both hands. ‘The four-foot barrel is as smooth as slate within. Forged of finest Indian wootz steel. There is no musket to compare with it in all of Europe. Better yet, load it with one of these’ — he held out in has hand a few curiously shaped musket balls — ‘and you can fire through any armour known to man.’

‘What are those?’

‘They are called stuardes , made by a knavish and counterfeit Scotsman called Robert Stuart, who claims kinship with the Scottish kings. He lies. But he does make these musket balls that pierce armour, which no other man in the world, I believe, has the secret of. If the Knights only knew …’

He pocketed the stuardes carefully, set down the jezail with the muzzle propped up a little, and tossed Nicholas and Hodge a couple of matchcords.

‘Get these lit. And guard them with your life. If they go out, you go over the side.’

Nicholas wound furiously at the tinder box.

‘Oi!’ yelled the master. ‘No fire on my ship, not so much as a hot fart!’

Eyes still fixed on the guns before them, cleaning, priming and loading in a blur of speed, Stanley paused only to point an outstretched arm in the direction of the hidden galley. He added not a word of explanation.

The master stared north to the islands, and was heard to hiss, ‘Suffering Christ! Man the sails, every man to the ropes! Move, you sons of whores, or your arses will be on a Mohammedan rowing bench by sundown. Move your poxy carcases, God damn you black!’