‘Hold her shoulders to the deck,’ he ordered to Peralta and Olalde, ‘and you,’ he said to Capitán Manuel, ‘get her head between your knees and both hands upon her forehead. She is not to move!’
The officers quickly did as they were bid. All were now sober as they knelt about the woman who still threw her wracked body about. Then Marmolejo bent over her and a moment later, as she let out a scream of intense agony and passed out, lifted his hand with the long sliver of glass firmly grasped between the thumb and forefinger. Laying this on the deck, from where Calcagorta picked it up and tossed it overboard, Marmolejo turned aside to draw a pot of unguent from his bag. Then he smeared the salve over the bloody wreck of the eye and socket, placed a pledget over it and swiftly bound the wound up with a bandage round the woman’s head.
‘She will not be the beauty she was,’ he said, calling for a bucket of sea water in which to wash his hands, ‘nor will she see except with her other eye, but she will live.’
Marmolejo looked at Calcagorta’s cheek. ‘It is nothing,’ the gunner said waving Marmolejo’s hand away. ‘I have suffered worse.’
‘I am sure you have,’ Marmolejo responded drily. ‘But wash it in sea water.’
The unconscious woman was carried away and the gentry followed Guillestigui below. The captain-general was already asleep in a drunken torpor amid the squalor of his disrupted and once luxurious quarters, his mistress across his breast in a like condition.
And so the afternoon of what one minor lay brother praying amid the Holy Ones would euphemistically call a ‘public concubinage’ drew to an end. The sailors and their women went below as they awoke from their own stupefying excesses. The sun westered astern of them and began to sink towards the horizon, flooding the sky with a portentous and ochreous yellow flush, while the wind came again steadily out of the west and the Santa Margarita, her hull sinking lower in the water as her pumps lay idle, her proud rig broken and reduced to a bellying foresail and her rudder grinding at its stock with every movement of the helm, made her lumbering way eastwards.
The young sailor whose libidinous conduct had initiated the first breakdown in discipline aboard the Santa Margarita had obeyed primitive and irresistibly reactive impulses. Such conduct, unthinkable in commonplace circumstances, manifested itself in times of stress, notwithstanding all the restraint preached by the Church against such unlicensed and rampant behaviour, nor the sanctions God in his wisdom – at least insofar as this mystery was explained by his priests – had put in place to curb it. Men and women coupled in wanton abandon in times of epidemic disease and soldiers went mad with lust after storming a besieged and resistant city. The laws of war delivered such a place over to the brutal and licentious soldiery partly as an inducement to tempt them to try and carry a breach, but also to enable them to vent their pent-up fears and to render them after their spree of rape and pillage tractable to military discipline.
No one, not even the most spiritual of the Holy Ones, had been unaffected by the spontaneity and excess of the orgy. For many of the nuns, prayer and thanksgiving that they had escaped rape were sufficient to comfort their return to normality. Marmolejo, Hernando and Agustin felt the powerful desire to flagellate themselves and each other, to beat out of their etiolated bodies the slightest inclination to lust. The process went on far into the evening and produced, from the young sailors later returning to a kind of duty after sleeping off their physical and sexual exhaustion, a ridicule and contempt that separated them in their perverse but practical release from the deeply troubled friars. Likewise their trulls fell to sluicing themselves, practising a primitive douching, while the handful of respectable women who lived under the half-deck merely retired into whatever private fastnesses their menfolk could arrange for them. As for those husbands and fathers who blushed for their women and secretly buried their own salacious desires in loud declarations of affected outrage, they congregated amidships and opened bottles and skins of wine in which to drown the impurity of their thoughts. Somewhere in the great cabin below the poop, Guillestigui and his closest colleagues, Basques to a man, merely continued what, intermittently, they had been engaged in since the captain-general had dismissed Fray Ocampo from the ship, a round of eating and drinking, and of unbridled and orgiastic fucking on their own account.
Like other men Iago had felt the sinister prickle of lust, but its reasons – which he so readily comprehended – recalled the effect of such behaviour upon Zierikzee. He had turned away, notwithstanding that he was powerfully and disturbingly troubled by the physical urge that ran through him like a spasm. He caught sight of Ximenez ogling the events taking place under the break of the forecastle. Partly in pursuit of the dwarf, partly in search of refuge away from the visual agent of a massive temptation and partly anxious for the safety of Ah Fong, he followed Ximenez, who seemed intent on some private course of action. Instinctively this certainty alarmed Iago. When he entered the gloom of their private quarters after the sunshine of the deck it took him a moment to see clearly. Ah Fong was pressed against the ship’s side, one hand flat across her mouth, the other between her legs, holding the crutch of her pantaloons against her body. Her eyes were wide as she stared at Ximenez, who knelt before her.
‘Missee, please . . . please, let me see . . . Just let me see you,’ the dwarf pleaded.
Almost paralysed for a second, Iago thought that Ah Fong was laughing, for although her pose was in part defensive, he knew her too well to be entirely convinced by that hand across her mouth. And then she looked up at him, and Iago knew he was right, for when she removed her hand her smile was irresistible.
‘So big!’ she exclaimed, her free hand pointing, as Ximenez reared round, his codpiece open, his enormous member rigid with excitement and his right hand working it and himself into a frenzy. With the ship disintegrating around them Ah Fong’s laughter and Ximenez’s abandon acted upon Iago like a wild catalyst. He stepped over the drooling and masturbating dwarf and stood before the slim Chinese girl.
‘Ah Fong . . .’ His voice was breathless, his own desire eloquent and infectious.
She called him by her pet name for him and willingly tore down her samfoo pyjamas as he reached for her. Standing and pressing her against the ship’s side, a bale half supporting his knees as he reached for her buttocks – once so familiar but in recent weeks until now a memory – he pulled himself free. Her own legs rose and he felt her heels rasp on the rear of his thighs. A moment later he had penetrated her with a sweet and terrible satisfaction as behind them Ximenez gave a low groan and fell to a steady whimpering.
Oblivious to all else the three of them climaxed and then sank slowly to the deck. About them the entire ship was falling silent but for the groans of her wounded fabric, the wail of the Holy Ones and the steady thwack of the flagellating friars. When Iago stirred he found Ah Fong staring at him, her dark, almond-shaped eyes still holding a reflection of her amusement. She stretched out a finger to gently scratch his cheek.
‘You still like tiger,’ she said, her voice husky, ‘even though he,’ she added giggling again, her head nodding at Ximenez lying behind Iago, ‘is brother to the elephant.’
Iago half rolled over to stare at the dwarf. He was on his back, fast asleep and snoring. His right hand still lingered beside his exposed penis which, even in its now relaxed and flaccid state, surprised Iago with its size and girth.
‘Don’t you ever think of . . .’ he began, turning back to Ah Fong.
Ah Fong giggled again and shook her head. ‘He would divide me . . .’ she said, putting her hand up to her mouth again and suppressing her indelicate desire to laugh, but finding it so difficult that she rolled away from Iago, drew her legs up and tried to suppress her mirth in convulsions.
Looking at her, Iago felt himself stir again. He touched her back and moved closer, beginning to gently make love to her. Becoming tumescent he started thrusting himself between the tops of her legs.
To the peering face that parted the curtain to t
heir privacy he seemed to be sodomizing his young male servant.
Nine
The Holy Ones
The assembly of the Holy Ones ended at sunset and although the most devoted of the Franciscan brothers continued to beat themselves as one of the lay brothers lit the glims that illuminated their quarters, it was with flagging ardour. In due course they subsided into silent prayer from which Hernando suddenly rose.
‘Brethren,’ he said, his voice ringing with a certainty that all thought derived from spiritual conviction, ‘we are lost entirely if we submit a moment longer to the unholy, impious and blasphemous authority of Don Juan de Guillestigui.’
‘Beware, Brother, that you do not court a charge of mutiny,’ warned the more cautious Agustin, dragging himself to his knees and then shakily squatting upon his haunches.
Hernando brushed the warning aside. ‘If we must die, ’tis better to do so proclaiming God than merely submitting to His overwhelming justice that cannot now be far from our captain-general’s proud head.’
‘Mutiny and treason will ensure a martyrdom, Fray Hernando, if that is what you seek,’ put in Marmolejo, also squatting. ‘Whether or not our captain-general enjoys the powers of knife and rope under the King’s mandate matters little. He is a man capable of seizing those powers if presented with what he conceives to be the necessity.’
‘Would he dare that?’
Marmolejo smiled. In the half-light, which revealed the friars’ bloodied torsos like a devotional painting, his gaunt features had the appearance of a saint long past martyrdom. ‘Do you doubt it? Why, he would as soon hang you to establish his authority over the others as wring a chicken’s neck for his table.’
‘I . . . I am ready,’ said Hernando, the timbre of piety in his voice as the sweat of it gleamed on his body.
‘If it is the will of God,’ said Agustin, seriously, ‘that you shall be martyred, Fray Hernando, I conceive it my duty to join you, but I beseech you consider the other souls aboard, the souls placed in our care by Fray Ocampo.’
‘Are they not beyond redemption?’ Hernando asked fiercely. ‘Have they not by their wild concupiscence placed themselves at the very gates of Hell?’
‘Perhaps,’ moderated Marmolejo, ‘but it is not for us to judge. Nor would an attempt by us to remove the captain-general . . . us, Brothers,’ he chuckled extending his hands as though awaiting the stigmata, ‘a handful of unarmed men of God.’
‘Fray Mateo is right, Brother,’ said Agustin. ‘They would cut us down with cold steel – and relish it, I dare say.’
They fell silent for a few moments, then Marmolejo said, ‘The captain-general and his fellow hidalgos are not men bred to the sea. Their authority will diminish in concert with the fate of this ship. The power of survival and, one may infer, the present salvation of our corporeal selves lies with the pilots, the mates and those very marineros who so recently mocked Almighty God!’
‘Don Iago Fernandez may be reckoned with those skilled in seamanship,’ Agustin added.
‘Indeed,’ said Marmolejo.
‘Joanes de Calcagorta says he is not to be trusted,’ offered Hernando.
‘Do you trust Joanes de Calcagorta?’ Marmolejo asked, adding, ‘Besides, danger and the prospect of death gives men a common cause.’
‘Do you suggest we might thereby save Guillestigui?’ Hernando asked in astonishment.
‘It is our bounden duty to save all those who repent, and who but God knows if even our captain-general might not repent himself of his blasphemy and all his other sins which, I hear, are legion.’ Marmolejo’s comment seemed to clinch the argument for a moment, though it left their predicament unresolved. Then the friar said, ‘Perhaps we might consult Don Iago. He is, I am persuaded, a man of honour and therefore to be trusted in most matters touching our expedition. Moreover he – unlike Lorenzo or Olivera – owes no allegiance to the captain-general.’
‘I agree,’ said Hernando after considering the matter for a moment, and Agustin nodded. Marmolejo looked round and caught the eye of one of the attending lay brothers.
‘Fray Sancho,’ he said, calling one over, ‘be so good as to wait upon Don Iago and ask if he can come hither.
‘Something needs must be done,’ Marmolejo said, rising with a grimace of pain and reaching for his habit, ‘for some discipline is necessary without further delay to resume the work of pumping the ship.’
His brothers agreed, the summons of Iago marking the end of their self-scourging. ‘The inactivity of the pilots amazes me,’ Marmolejo said, wincing as the coarse woollen fabric of his habit rasped his scourged skin. ‘I cannot believe that they too fell into that morass of foul indulgence.’
‘One never knows what wickedness dwells in the hearts of such men, my Brother,’ Agustin said, dragging his own heavy wool habit over his lacerated back, heightened by the stinging remonstrance it gave him.
‘Brothers!’ Sancho was suddenly among them again, his face whey-coloured with shock, his eyes wide. He gasped inarticulately with the horror of what he had witnessed.
‘What is it?’ Marmolejo asked sharply. ‘Come, pull yourself together, Brother . . . What is it?’
‘The . . . the man Iago . . . He is . . . he is . . .’
From the cowering reticence of the messenger Marmolejo half-guessed, half-feared what Sancho’s news might be. ‘He is what?’ Marmolejo asked, recalling Sancho to reality, disconnecting his troubled mind from the image of Iago and Ah Fong.
‘I knew Geronimo de Ocampo’s curse was taking effect,’ Sancho blurted out, ‘but this . . .’
‘What in Heaven’s name are you talking about?’ Agustin said, standing before the shuddering Sancho.
‘Talking about? Why, we are forsaken! Lost! I knew it the moment I saw Antonio de Olivera draw his knife on Diego de Llerena . . . God has deserted us! Oh, Christ, have mercy upon us . . .’ Sancho fell to his knees, crossing himself with a fervour that seemed ridiculous as he then fell sideways as the Santa Margarita lurched sluggishly into a wave. He struggled upright, helped by Marmolejo, who seized his upper right arm.
‘What,’ the discalced friar asked with steadying deliberation, ‘is Don Iago doing that so disturbs you?’
‘He is buggering his Chinese boy!’
There was a moment’s silence and then Agustin broke it. ‘I said that creature was too handsome to be anything other than a catamite.’
‘Aye, Brother, and I mistrusted Fernandez from the start,’ added Hernando. ‘And never,’ he added turning to Marmolejo, ‘approved of your familiarity with him.’
The news was a greater shock for Marmolejo, whose intimacy with the enigmatic Iago troubled his colleagues. There had been tensions roused over such unnatural acts between young men in his days as a seminarian and he had encountered it occasionally between soldiers on campaign, but now – here – aboard the Santa Margarita, amid a dissolute ship’s company on the vertiginous threshold of Hell itself, it seemed a final betrayal. Don Iago he had marked as a man of parts, not a sodomitical and perverse wanton, but now he knew not what to think.
With a strangled howl Marmolejo shoved past Sancho and ran towards the screen surrounding Iago’s bed-place. He flung back the curtains and stared at the three supine bodies beyond the matting.
Blissfully unaware of Sancho’s intrusion, Iago withdrew from Ah Fong a few seconds before Marmolejo invaded their privacy. Lying back, eyes closed in ravished abandonment, he was roused by the sharp rustle of the withdrawn canvas. He met the stare of the prurient Marmolejo, whose eyes roved over first Iago, then the snoring dwarf and finally the shapely buttocks of Ah Fong.
‘What unholiness dost thou perpetrate?’ Marmolejo asked with Mosaic ferocity.
‘What is it to you?’ Iago responded with equal indignation, turning over and drawing a blanket over Ah Fong’s haunches just as she too roused from her satiation.
‘’Tis too late for that,’ remonstrated Marmolejo, ‘I have seen enough of your pederasty and the rearmost parts of you
r catamite . . .’
‘My catamite . . . ?’ a puzzled Iago queried. ‘What do you . . .’ Then, slowly, he realized Marmolejo’s erroneous conclusion.
‘What belong this?’ Ah Fong began but Iago was now roused to a fury, a fury that contained all his pent-up hatred of Marmolejo’s sacerdotal breed. His left hand cut through the air like a sword blade, silencing Ah Fong.
‘Perhaps,’ he snarled, ‘you have seen insufficient of my catamite, Fray Marmolejo.’ Turning to Ah Fong, Iago spoke to her quickly in the dialect he had learned in captivity: ‘I lose face in front of priest, my Honeyed One, he thinks I am a man of animal appetites and fuck you through your arse. Obey your master, rise now and show him you are a woman of exceptional beauty.’
Ah Fong in her lassitude was nothing loth. She rose in the semi-darkness, a pale, slender faery figure.
‘Do you not think she bears a resemblance to a daughter of Eve, Reverend Father?’ Iago said in a low and menacing voice, rising with a corner of the blanket in his hand, to stand beside, and then cover, the young woman. Ah Fong took the blanket from him and Iago stepped forward to confront the stupefied friar just as Ximenez woke and with a grunt stared about him in incomprehension. ‘I took you for a better man, Marmolejo,’ Iago went on, abandoning respect for the friar. ‘Not one so ready to falsely accuse me of . . . of what?’ he exclaimed. ‘Of sodomy?’
‘My son, I . . .’
‘Do not assume spiritual paternity until you have begged forgiveness!’
But Marmolejo, charged with the virtue of his flagellation, was not used to so vicious a challenge and proved equal to the changing situation. ‘Fornication, Don Iago, is a sin,’ he argued.
‘What! You would condemn a man for lying with his wife?’
‘Your wife?’
‘Do not measure all men by a common standard, Marmolejo, or you will be led into temptation and be guilty of spiritual pride.’
Marmolejo felt the words like a blow less pleasant than those he had administered upon himself. ‘You have no right to speak to me in that manner.’
The Disastrous Voyage of the Santa Margarita Page 16