The Green Count

by Christian Cameron

  ‘Are they worth anything if we take them?’ I asked.

  Parmenio gave me a hard look. ‘I’ll be happy to save my cargo,’ he said.

  Bernard was by me, looking under his hand. ‘Not much armour,’ he said in French.

  Ser Jason had a heavy poleaxe in his fist. He was smiling.

  ‘Have you ever fought at sea?’ Parmenio asked.

  I nodded. ‘With Venetians,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes, I have fought the Venetians many times,’ Parmenio said.

  We all laughed. When you are going into action, everything and nothing is funny.

  ‘The archers can begin shooting as soon as they can reach the pirates,’ Parmenio said to Ewan.

  ‘On the contrary,’ I said. ‘They should get below the gunwales. We should not show them the glitter of harness, either.’

  I was looking at the low bows.

  ‘I have fought this ship for ten years,’ Parmenio said stiffly.

  ‘Then you should enjoy this,’ I said. ‘If we do it right, we should take both of them.’

  ‘They’ll be packed with men,’ Parmenio said, but he was looking at Fiore and Stapleton donning their harness. ‘It’s true, by the Saints, I’ve never had so many men-at-arms aboard in all my life.’

  ‘Will their rowers fight?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘I doubt it. The rowers are all the crews of the ships they’ve taken.’

  Fiore was serving out spears to men who only had swords. Pierre Lapot grinned at me.

  ‘Shares?’ he asked.

  I nodded. ‘Equal shares, men-at-arms and archers,’ I said.

  Parmenio looked at me.

  I shrugged. ‘Business,’ I said.

  Half an hour later, I lay at the edge of the deck, hard against the bulwark, in full harness, and my legs, out in the full Mediterranean sun, were bloody hot, I can tell you. I was looking out through a little hole in the bulwark that was really there for seawater and crap to run out in a storm. But I could see one of the pirate galleys framed perfectly in the little hole, and she was an elegant, predatory craft, all raked forward with a high ram spur like a fighting cock’s beak.

  The captain was Greek, in a long hauberk of maille; I could see him on his little command deck astern, and he was waving at something. Then his well-handled little ship shot alongside, and he called in Italian as the rowers pulled in their oars.

  He was demanding that Parmenio ransom his ship. He called it a ‘toll’.

  He asked for two hundred ducats of gold. I could see Parmenio in our stern, high above me, and I could see he was thinking about it. I understood his doubts; battle was never certain, and my wife was sitting in the captain’s cabin with my arming sword across her knees. The stakes are very high at sea – imprisonment, ransom, rape, life as a galley slave or worse for anyone, man or woman.

  And the decks of that pirate ship were packed. Every criminal and routier in Anatolia seemed to be standing on the gangway, perhaps sixty men packed onto the half deck of a ship smaller than our own, and of course, there was another the same.

  But in the end, they offered us no choice, and the first pair of pirates leaped onto the bows. They had no intention of letting us ransom ourselves, and they ran, as mad as ghazis, over the little foredeck, and a dozen grim bastards came after them.

  ‘Up!’ I roared, and we all got to our feet.

  The pirate captain was the very first man to die. He was still looking up, grinning like a madman, which perhaps he was, and John’s arrow went into his open mouth.

  In the bows, we had a low, very solid bulwark in front of us, and all of us had spears save Ser Jason, who had a poleaxe. It was surprisingly like fighting at barriers; I was covered waist high. The difference was that none of my adversaries had any harness to speak of, and I was surrounded by the best knights a man could want as companions.

  The sea rats rushed us in waves. Later, I heard from Ewan that they’d intended to board aft, into the stern windows, but a dozen expert bowmen had shot their boarding party to pieces before the first man could get across.

  The Genoese sailors began to work their way down the side of our ship, shooting into the rear of the men trying to get aboard us. Their captain was dead; there was no one to tell them to pole off. The pressure on us at the bulwark lessened and then fell away; there were perhaps half a dozen men, all wounded, standing on our bow, but they had no fight in them. When I climbed over our bulwark, one of them jumped into the sea and the others jumped back onto their own ship to avoid me.

  That’s when a crossbow bolt hit me. Luck, or God’s hand, saved my life; the bolt hit my left pauldron, skipped across my aventail and slammed into my helmet with half its force spent, but I was knocked flat, and only a mailled hand saved me from going over the side.

  The second ship. It was coming, bow to bow, and their bow was packed with bowmen.

  On the other hand, our bowmen were higher, and the sailors dropped the mainsail so that the archers in the castle could drop arrows forward. And meanwhile I was on the wrong side of the bulwark, and the man who’d just pulled me to my feet was the Persian scholar, now in a coat of maille.

  But as our archers began to drop arrows into their archers, their bow slammed into us. I was driven to my knees, and a hundred men came for me, all screaming, or so it seemed.

  I owe my life to my friends. Nerio and Fiore and Jean-François came over the barrier; I got to my feet, and there we were, helmet to helmet on the bow of a sailing ship, with fifty fathoms of deep water ready to swallow anyone who went over the side in armour.

  We formed a sort of wedge; I was at the head of it because of where I’d fallen, and the Persian was on my left and Nerio on my right, with Jean-François almost against the bulwark to my left. Fiore in the same position to my right, and Jason towering behind him, his poleaxe up over his head.

  I only remember the end. I was fighting with my baselard. I had broken my spear, and I had no time to go for a sword, and men were trying to wrestle me over the side, and many of them had some armour, or shields, and they all had helmets. And Ser Jason killed them. Mostly the rest of us stayed alive, and used our armoured bodies as shields; we pushed, clawed with our gauntlets. It was close, as close as any fight I can remember, and they screamed.

  But between men in plate harness and men without armour on their hands and arms, in a close fight, breast to breast, there is no contest. I could rip a man’s face off with the flange on my elbow, and as he cringed away from the loss of an eye, kill him with a dagger and go for the next.

  It was like Poitiers, for a few dozen breaths.

  And then the archers flayed them.

  The men in front of us began to flinch away. Fiore did his volte stabile, throwing one man into two more, and all three went over the side. Ser Jason’s hammer hit another helmet so hard that a piece of bone, or perhaps a tooth, rang against my helmet. Nerio, who was using his long sword with one hand on the blade and one on the hilt like a long dagger, put his point into a distracted man’s eye; he did it with the care of a good workman, withdrew the killing point, and used his pommel to help the falling corpse over the side.

  The Genoese, above us, shot a volley of crossbow bolts down into the boarders, and they broke.

  I went to one knee to breathe.

  Something tapped me on the helmet. Hard.

  I turned my head, and Ser Jason leaned over. In his Norman French, he said, ‘Next time, stay on our side of the barriers.’

  They all laughed.

  And then we all got to our feet and went over into the second galley. The first had clawed off; some bright lad had the spark to get away, and he forced the rowers to pull away.

  Our more recent attacker simply made a poor decision – to stay and fight. It was a terrible decision; our archers had decisively outshot his, and we had fifteen men-at-arms who had not yet use
d their weapons, due to my foolishness.

  They did now. I’d like to tell you that I stormed the pirate galley alone, but honestly, I stood in the bows of the pirate while Pierre Lapot and Etienne l’Angars earned their shares, killing their way down the gangway with Fiore and Ser Bernard behind them with spears.

  As soon as we had a fair lodgment on their deck, their slaves rose against them. I’m told that this seldom happens, but it must have been plain to all which side was going to win, and suddenly the surviving pirates were being clubbed with broken oars, and stolen knives were thrust into bare feet.

  Two hundred paces to landward, the second galley paused to consider rowing in to rescue her consort, and our archers cleared their command deck. Again.

  That was the end of the fight. It should never have been a contest, except for my stupidity in leaving my barricade too early, for which I was rightly mocked. And the women in the closed quarters hugged most of us, and we started the systematic looting of the pirates.

  The second pirate galley lay just to landward of us.

  ‘We can take him,’ I said to Parmenio.

  He didn’t look at me. It was only later that Emile said I looked like a monster.

  But he gave the orders and we dropped down on the unmoving galley.

  It was a charnel house. Aboard the second galley, the slaves had risen, and they had not won or lost. They had fought what was left of the crew to exhaustion; I went over the bow and five surviving pirates all jumped into the sea.

  We stripped every shirt of maille, every decent weapon, but it was like stripping scarecrow routiers in Auvergne. These men were poor.

  And dead. I think there were a hundred dead men in the first galley and as many again in the second and on our deck; two hundred men dead in less than an hour.

  Sea fights are incredibly bloody. There’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

  We pushed their bodies into the water, took the two galleys in tow, put half a dozen men-at-arms in each one, and Parmenio raised the sails for Adalia.

  In Adalia we discovered that we’d just killed the notorious corsair ‘Tête de Mal’, who was reputed to be French or perhaps Algerian; that should give you an idea of the international nature of piracy. The Genoese handed over the wounded pirates to the justice of the Karamanids, and the governor ordered them killed.

  They were killed on the spot. The ghulami killed them efficiently, without fuss; some of the pirates begged for mercy or for a priest, and others simply sat and waited for the spear or sword blow.

  It rather put a pall on our feelings of victory. And in truth, there’s no reason; I’d killed a number of them in the fight, and never given it a thought. But I didn’t like that slaughter on the docks, and I still don’t, although I cannot see a cure for it; they were bad men, and they were unlikely to come suddenly to righteousness. On the other hand, I know what Father Pierre Thomas would have said – that God was the judge of that, and not man; that in the eyes of Jesus, all our sins were about the same.

  Any road, we landed, and were taken to a caravanserai for foreigners, which served wine; quite good wine. Most of the population was Greek, and the rest were Turks. Turkish women do not wear veils; they ride horses astride, and hit men who annoy them with riding whips – I saw this the first day.

  And John found some of his own tribe, or nation, serving the emir as ghulami. So he went off with them, taking Jesus-Maria along, and leaving us with no interpreter, because Sabraham was in the other ship with our Greeks.

  But among the Greeks, many merchants spoke Italian, and at our inn, most of the staff spoke Italian and some spoke French, so we could get wine and food well enough. Maestro Parmenio said that we’d be some days in port, as he had business up country, or he hoped that he did; he was trying to buy silk, and it sounded as if we were too early. And there was war up country, although none of us could make head nor tail of who was making war on whom. It sounded as if one of the Turkish beys, Orhan, or perhaps Urthan, was making war on the Karamanid bey on the high plains. Different from my Uthman, obviously. The Turks were all Uthman, really, or Suleiman. Or Ortan or Orthan.

  I had a good look at two galliots building on the beach. There were six shipyards, all Greek, but it was clear that they were building a navy for the bey.

  The second day, when Emile and I had walked out in the town – and tried, and failed, to meet any Turks – we were sitting out the heat of the afternoon in the cool of the inn’s hall. Helen was fanning us, and herself, while playing at flirting with Marc-Antonio, who was sewing up a long rent in his arming coat.

  There was a fuss in the courtyard, and Marc-Antonio, with every sign of a young man’s impatience with doing work, rose and went out to see what was happening, and he came back.

  ‘Some Moslem beggar asking to see the Christian lord,’ he said. ‘The inn’s people say he’s not a beggar,’ he added.

  ‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Which is it?’

  Marc-Antonio looked a little ashamed, and the innkeeper’s wife, a fat Greek woman, bobbed a sketchy bow. ‘So, Despotes, he is a good man. A … cobbler.’

  She had trouble with the word, so that I still wasn’t sure of the man’s status. But one of the inn’s boys brought him in by the hand, as the Arabs and Turks do with a person of consequence, and in truth, I’ve seen as much in Italy; if someone takes you by the hand, it is a sign of gratitude or close friendship, and if someone leads you by the hand, it is a sign that you have nothing to fear, and that you are greatly prized.

  So the boy led this man, and he was fairly ragged, but in the manner of a working man and not a beggar. He was a Turk or an Arab; he wore slippers and an apron over a robe.

  He bowed.

  I rose and bowed.

  ‘You are the Christian lord?’ he asked. His Italian was excellent.

  ‘I am a Christian. This lady is a noblewoman.’ I shrugged. ‘I am not.’

  ‘Ahh!’ he said and I thought he said it in consternation. ‘She is the emira, and you are her ghulam?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, smiling at Emile.

  He bowed again. ‘This I understand. I am one of … some men. We … serve. Food.’ He shook his head. ‘I have been chosen because I can speak in the tongue of the Franks.’

  The innkeeper’s wife, Anne, put a cup of cold water by the young man and smiled at us. ‘They are a society for … hmm. Entertaining travellers. It is part of their religion.’

  The young man beamed his thanks at Despoina Anne.

  ‘I am not sure we have served a woman before,’ he said with another bow. He drank some water. ‘But I come to invite you and your companions to our … place.’

  That night they came to the inn. There were sixty or seventy young men, all dressed in long robes with outlandish hats on their heads – tall hats of white felt with plumes. Some wore workmen’s clothes underneath, and others had fine silk kaftans. And we went down to meet them: Emile wore a silk kirtle with a stiff overgown, and three veils, so that the Despoina Anne said no Moslem man could take exception; Helen dressed in the same manner, and Sister Marie wore her habit; all the knights and men-at-arms wore their best, which in most cases was a good wool doublet without bloodstains, but Bernard had a fine pourpointe covered in silk. And the archers were quite creditable in good cotes; Ned might have been mistaken for a gentleman until he spoke.

  But the same might have been said of me.

  We went unarmed, except wearing daggers or eating knives. It was an adventure, if you like, but we’d taken the feared pirates, we had seen the emir, and we didn’t think we had anything to fear.

  Nor did we. The men were all young, as I have said, and their association is called a Fityan. Hafiz-i Abun, dressed very soberly, was delighted.

  ‘This is as good as home!’ he said. ‘In Persia, every town has two or three of these. Sometimes they are rivals, and they fight for the honour of receivin
g an important guest.’

  And indeed, although they paid Emile every courtesy, they were most attentive to Hafiz-i Abun. He sat at the head of the table, and his opinion was asked on almost every matter. And he told stories, the way I’m telling you now, and they were delightful, and I wish I could remember one; there was a nightingale in one, and another was about a clever dancing girl winning her freedom, and another about a man who farted and farted; excellent stuff, and Emile was trying not to roll off her pillow, she was laughing so hard under her veils.

  I was close to Hafiz-i Abun, and he smiled at Emile and nodded to me. In Italian, he said, ‘We are lucky. These are fine young men, and also Ismailis. Almost heretics, really, but the tribal Turks believe many odd things. However, their sects do not distance women from men. There are places, even in my own country, where men would not sit with women to eat.’

  So I explained that there were people of similar belief in France and Spain, but that in England and Italy we rather preferred to have women at our dinner tables.

  Then he turned and spoke to the two Turks closest to him, at length, about a point of the Koran, which is their Bible. And I was surprised at how much I understood, with a little help from Sister Marie, who was a quicker study.

  And then one of the young men danced, with a sword – stirring stuff – and then they asked Sister Marie to explain the Trinity.

  Well, she knew her theology well enough, but thanks to Sabraham we also knew that this is, to most Moslems, the sticking point of Christianity. To them, ‘There is no other God but God.’ This simple statement cannot be glossed. There is one god.

  And for us, we have the three who are one. The mere mention of three makes some Moslems say you are a heathen, an idolater, a pagan, and others hold us strangely deluded. They, of course, deny Christ’s divinity. Nor, to be fair, any divinity for Mohamed, their favourite prophet, or Elijah. Instead, they believe that only God is divine.