Sea Warriors

by Martin Archer

  Of course, that’s what we did; our men hadn’t yet been told that we would be raiding on the way to England to deliver the relics or where, but they knew about the boarding ladders and such being loaded and it wouldn’t take too sharp of a spy to know a big raid was coming.

  ******

  As soon as the sun came up the next morning, I once again had one of Harold’s sailors wave the “all captains” flag from the mast. It was brisk and chilly as the sergeant captains once again assembled. They stamped their feet to stay warm and ate chunks of cheese and hot flat-bread while they waited for our meeting to begin. Harold’s cook had stayed up all night getting it ready.

  Once again I stood on the roof of the forward castle with my lieutenants and summarized what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. Then we again called on each captain to briefly tell us what his galley and its archers were to do and ask if he had any questions or suggestions. As you might expect, the answers and suggestions got better and better, and the questions fewer and fewer, as the sergeants listened to each other. There were many questions. They were asked and answered loudly so everyone could hear.

  Finally, many hours later, there was silence when I again asked “Any more questions and suggestions?”

  The sergeant captains were sent back to their galleys and cogs and about thirty minutes after that Harold hoisted the “follow me” flag and we led a long line of galleys and cogs out of the harbour.

  The cogs had to be towed out of the harbour because the wind coming off the island was not right. They’d wait offshore for a couple of days to insure our secret didn’t get out. Then they’d return to wait for the prisoners we hoped to bring them and for some orders they wouldn’t expect.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  We make a visit to Tunis.

  We sailed all that day and all the next two with Harold’s galley leading the way and the others close around it. The cogs left us at the end of the first day to sail back to Malta to await our return. We made no effort to hurry. To the contrary, the men were provided with all the food they could eat and rowing was kept to a minimum. This was done so every man’s arms and strength would be at their best when we hit Tunis. Each night our galleys showed candle lanterns on their masts and we stayed so close together that there were a number of very minor bumps and collisions. They were inevitable.

  Twice our lookouts saw sails in the distance and twice we ignored them. They were cogs whose captains wanted no part of a fleet of war galleys. We never did see a Moorish galley, let alone one that might have been able to get to Tunis to sound the alarm.

  Had we seen a galley we would have chased it down and taken it for sure. Harold kept two of our fastest galleys close to his for just such an eventuality. They would have quickly caught a slave-rowed Moor and put a permanent end to its crew of sailors and the untrained thieves and cutthroats of its boarding party.

  ******

  Harold’s galley led fifty-five of our fifty-six war galleys into Tunis’s great harbour as if we owned the place. Harold and I and many of our men had been here before and it hadn’t changed. We knew exactly where to send our galleys and what each should do. Harold’s was not the first of our galleys to enter the harbour however. One of our galleys was already here. It had rowed slowly into the harbour last night right after the sun finished passing overhead and quietly anchored just off the quay opposite the big gate through the city walls. Its deck was empty and it was dark. No one saw the more than two hundred archers jammed into its castles and rowing decks.

  The only men on the galley’s deck had been two Christian Arabs from Beirut, long-time members of our company and former galley slaves with an intense hatred for anything Islamic. They stayed on the galleys deck all night. Had anyone inquired of them, which no one did, they would have replied in fluent Moorish and attempted to gull them. In the darkness, no one even saw the steady stream of men who, one at a time, came out of the castles and off the rowing benches to piss and shite in the harbour.

  When the sun arrived the next day, the two Moorish-speaking men were joined in their early morning prayers by six men who went below when they finished praying. A few minutes later the galley slowly rowed towards the quay. No one paid a bit of attention to the galley, though, had they thought about it, they might have found it strange that someone was in the lookout’s nest when the galley was in the harbour. Perhaps he was fixing something.

  What wasn’t strange at all was that the two Arabic-speaking men climbed on to the quay, moored the galley, and began leisurely walking up the path towards the city gate. A moment or so later, two other men came out of the forward castle dressed as Moorish sailors and followed after them. No one said a word and no one hurried. Before they reached the gate, the four men turned off and went to the city wall forty or fifty paces from the gate. There they squatted down to wait. They were obviously waiting for someone.

  ******

  A quiet word and gesture came from the lookout as soon as he saw Harold’s galley enter the harbour and head straight for them. It was moving at top speed with its oars beating the sea around it to a froth.

  The handful of early morning Islamic workers and sailors still praying on the quay and on the decks of the nearby transports suddenly began to sit up and stare at the recently moored galley. They were dumbfounded as the quiet and virtually deserted-appearing galley suddenly erupted into frenzied activity.

  Several hundred men carrying long, bladed pikes and longbows suddenly began pouring off the newly moored galley and running as fast as they could down the quay and up the cart path towards the recently opened city gate. The running men never said a word, not one word, as they passed through the open gate and into the city. The only sound was their heavy breathing and the slap of their sandals on the cart path running from the quay to the gate.

  It was a big and heavy gate. The handful of city guards who had opened it an hour or so earlier when the sun arrived hadn’t seen the sudden activity on the galley moored to the quay. Even if they had seen it, they wouldn’t have had time to close the gate before the four men who had been lounging nearby cut them down. The four men checked the dead guards as they stripped off their Moorish sailor clothes—which had been covering the distinctive hooded Egyptian gowns of English archers with the stripes of their ranks sewed on to their fronts and backs.

  The huffing and puffing archers running up from the quay were alert and excited as Randolph and his three men greeted them and put them into their assigned positions. It was something they had practised together over and over again using one of the gates to our Cyprus fortress.

  This time it was for real and the four men’s initial assignment was simple—they were to do whatever was necessary to hold the city gate open until reinforcements could arrive from the galley to relieve them.

  ******

  Harold had his rowers rowing hard as we came charging through the entrance to the big harbour and headed straight for the quay in front of the city gate. More than forty galleys similarly packed with archers were right behind us. Others coming in behind us headed for the Moorish galleys pulled up on the beach off to the left of the quay, and five moved into position to block the harbour entrance so none of the Moorish shipping could escape. We had surprised the Moors just as they had surprised our galleys and cogs at Beirut and the other Holy Land ports.

  “Follow me,” I shouted as Andrew Priest and I vaulted over the galley railing and led more than a hundred archers from Harold’s galley on a run towards the city. All around us galleys were unloading archers and their sergeants were hurrying them to the city gate as fast as they could run.

  Almost every archer was also carrying a land-fighting shield and either extra quivers of arrows or a bladed pike. Many were sweating from their exertions as they reached the gate even though there was still a chill in the morning air. It was very exciting.

  Randolph and his reinforced company of archers were not waiting at the gate for me and the archers following me. He had al
ready rushed off with his apprentice sergeant and men to the city’s huge central market. It was his task to lead his men to the city’s market and capture it as soon as the city gate was secured.

  ******

  Our raid had taken the Moors of Tunis by surprise just as the Moors had surprised us at Beirut and elsewhere when they made their great raid a few months ago. Within minutes, we had over two thousand heavily armed archers inside the walls of Tunis. There had been no fighting of any significance. The only casualties were the three city gate guards Randolph and his men had cut down. They were off to the side of the gate and already covered by swarms of flies attracted to the pools of rapidly drying blood around them.

  Tunis was mostly silent except for barking dogs, and its winding and narrow shite-strewn streets were empty as I double-timed the archer company from Harold’s galley to join Randolph’s company in the market. The few people we saw in the streets took one look at us and either darted inside their shops and homes or hurried away down the narrow side lanes.

  We passed through the open gate and turned right to go to the city’s main market next to its great mosque. The sound of our running feet and heavy breathing was all that could be heard as we pounded down the narrow lane. No one said a word to us as we passed, but we could see and feel people watching us from the rooftops and the window openings in the sleeping rooms above the windowless rooms and courtyard walls at the street level.

  A few minutes after we passed through the city gate we reached the city’s central market. It was a huge area of merchant stalls and workshops next to the city’s main mosque. Randolph and the bulk of the men from his galley were in the open area between the stalls and the mosque arrayed in battle formation. A smaller force of his men was at the holding pens at the far end of the market where the slaves and live animals were sold.

  “Hoy, Lieutenant. What’s the word?” I asked with a gasp as I came to a stop and bent over to ease the pain in my side and catch my breath. I’m getting too old for this shite.

  “So far so good, Captain. The heathens’ morning prayers were over by the time we got here and we’ve seen no one carrying weapons, at least not yet. That’s going to change, of course, and this is where the fighting is likely to start. The merchants have disappeared from the market as you might expect.

  “The good news is that we found four of our men from one of the cogs we lost. Over there in the cages of the slave market they was; some of their passengers were with them.

  “Two of the archers we released,” Randolph said with a shrug, “promptly gutted one of the slavers we caught who’d been guarding them. They said he’d killed one of our men and they’d sworn to kill him if ever they ever had a chance.”

  “Good work. Keep to the plan, Lieutenant—don’t let any of the heathens get into the mosque for the priests to organise and don’t let your men start burning the city until we see what happens. Maybe, just maybe, the merchants will return to the market and we can work out something to get our captured men back peacefully whilst we finish destroying the city’s shipping—but I doubt it so don’t wait a heartbeat if you see people carrying weapons. Go for them instantly and kill them.

  “Alright then,” I concluded. “Lieutenant, I’m going to go on to the king’s palace to see how Edward the shepherd and his men are faring and then back to the quay to see how Harold and his men are doing in the harbour.”

  Randolph and I spoke loudly and formally so the archers around us could hear. It’s important for the men to know we were organised and following a plan; gives them confidence, doesn’t it?

  More and more archers continued to pour into the market as we spoke. Randolph was already assigning them to positions in his battle formation as I waved my arm in a circle above my head and then pointed in the next direction I intended to lead my galley company of archers. It was time to visit Edward Shepherd and his men at the castle inside the city’s walls where the King lives.

  Edward’s a steady old archer who had run away as a lad from his father’s life as a shepherd serf. He wasn’t one of our original company but both Henry and Peter thought highly of him and had recommended him for a fifth stripe and a leadership role in our raids. Edward had, I hoped, led six galley companies of archers, about five hundred men, through the city gate and all the way to the royal castle on the little hill beyond the great mosque. At least, that’s where he was supposed to lead them.

  ******

  Edward saluted by knuckling his head and calling his men to attention when I puffed my way up to him with my bad leg beginning to hurt the way it does in England when the weather is cold and wet. I knuckled mine back and gave him a great friendly clap on his shoulders. His

  Our new senior sergeant’s men were in battle formation. I could see from the bodies on the ground that there had been fighting between Edward’s men and the Moorish king’s guards whose barracks were in a big square building next to the King’s castle.

  From where I was standing with Edward and his men, I could see what looked to be a galley’s company of archers in a smaller battle formation further on along the castle wall. I could also see a number of dead Moors on the ground in front of us between the King’s castle and the nearby barracks. A dozen or more archers were moving among them to pick up reusable arrows and strip the dead Moors of their weapons. We’d be taking them with us when we left, the weapons that is.

  Edward quickly filled me in as to what had taken place.

  “Them Moors out there on the ground are likely to have been castle guards who were away from their posts when we arrived. They came a charging out of that building over there in an effort to get into the castle and we cut’em down with our arrows. Unfortunately, the castle gate were closed when we got here; yes it was.”

  Many things soon became clear—that the surviving guards had retreated back into their rooms with their wounded, that Edward had both the castle and the rooms of its guards surrounded, that he was keeping his men back far enough from the castle’s walls and the guards’ rooms to be out of crossbow range, and that he didn’t have nearly enough men.

  Edward’s men were in positions that we want to hold, so I quickly sent Edward with a guard of several dozen archers double-timing back to take command of our reserves at the main gate—with orders to send six more galley companies here to the King’s castle immediately. I would take over the command of the men who were already here.

  ******

  I waited until the six heavily armed galley companies of archers arrived, all breathless and puffing, and were distributed in the open area around the walled palace and the barracks. Then I pulled back the men in front of the palace gate and sent one of our interpreters forward unarmed, shouting, and waving a piece of linen over his head. He knew to jabber Moorish because he was a long-time slave who had made his mark and joined us after we freed him; he volunteered to go forward alone and will put on a stripe for it.

  After a fairly long wait, a man wearing a very large turban came out of a small low door built into the gate. It was almost funny because he had trouble ducking his head down low enough to get out through the door.

  The two men talked for a while with many hand gestures. The turbaned man then went back through his little door and our interpreter returned to me.

  “He’s gone to get a higher ranking official. I did as you said and told him that we had taken the city and that one of our captains was here and wanted to talk—and that, if the talks were not successful, we would begin burning down the city in addition to destroying all the shipping in the harbour.”

  We waited.

  Suddenly, we all jumped and a shiver ran through our ranks as the big gate swung open for a few seconds and an ornately dressed man wearing an absolutely huge turban stepped out. A man with a much smaller turban accompanied him, obviously some kind of attendant or interpreter. The gate immediately closed behind them.

  It was a good thing Big Turban didn’t try to use the little door in the gate; he wouldn’t have gotten throu
gh it. I had to repress a smile at the thought.

  I put down my sword and shield and walked forward with my interpreter. Whilst we were walking towards the two men, I noticed Big Turban looking aghast at the bodies of the Moorish guards on the ground where they’d fallen. I didn’t say a word when I stopped about ten paces from the two Moors; I just waited.

  Big Turban finally spoke for quite some time. My interpreter listened carefully and then repeated it to me in English. “He says his master wants to know who you are and what you want.” He sure as hell said more than that.

  “Tell him we are from England. … Tell him we are here because Tunisian galleys attacked shipping and ports east of Malta. … Tell him we will stay here until we finish destroying Tunis’s shipping and Tunis frees every one of its Christian and Jewish slaves. … Tell him that if the Christian and Jewish slaves, every single one them, are not at the city gate by sundown we will sack the city and burn it to the ground.

  “Also, tell him if we ever again find one of Tunis’s galleys east of Malta, or hear of Christian or Jewish slaves being in Tunis or on its galleys, we will return and kill you and your king and destroy Tunis.”

  Finally, I told him exactly why we’d come.

  “I’m here today with my men because your galleys and those of your Moorish friends captured over one hundred English archers and sailors, and several hundred of their passengers, during your big raid on Beirut and elsewhere a few months ago.

  “All of them in Tunis must be returned today; and all those being held elsewhere must be immediately freed and sent to Ibiza. If you already sold them, you best hurry to get them back and free them. My men have been ordered to return and burn Tunis to the ground if we ever hear of so much as one Englishman or one of our passengers being held or sold as a slave.”

  Then I leaned forward, poked the poor sod in the chest with my finger, and made him a promise.

  “We want those people immediately freed. Failure to do so will result in me returning and personally cutting your king’s stomach open and pulling his guts out while he is still alive and pissing on them—while my men do the same to every one of his courtiers, including you.”