Just bad luck. It was the man who’d gone to have the whore, and he remembered my red hair, even under a prayer cap.
He struck me several times with his fists, and his two friends held me. They opened my kaftan and searched me, and found nothing. Then an ulema came with John – a sort of holy lawyer, among the Turks. A man who knew the religious law. They are not like our judges; they hold the law in their heads, and they pronounce judgement on the spot.
John argued with the man. But John had brought him.
I had been hit again in the head, and on top of the earlier blow, my brains were rattled, but I acted worse than I was, to avoid talking – slurring my speech at every phrase. My accuser rattled off his accusation, which I didn’t understand a word of, aside from the word ‘thief ’, and John managed to slip in what the man was doing with his belt off, so that the ulema snapped something at the Turk and he turned bright red … and kicked me.
And then they took me under the arms and carried me away. I was tied to a heavy post, and John came.
‘I am sorry, Lord,’ he said quietly. ‘You are to be whipped. And made to work. But not killed.’
And so I was. They left me tied there all night. I know that Richard pleaded with John to cut me loose; it would have been easy. But it would have given everything away. John was a good captain, although my back is still sometimes sore when the weather changes.
And there was one tiny blessing. While I was tied to the post in the middle of the camp, occasionally taunted by small Greek boys but otherwise alone to meditate, pray, and be afraid, I saw Zeno led out of a well-lit tent. He did some exercises, not fifty feet from my post, and he stretched, and asked his guards in Turkish to let his hands free so that he could exercise his arms, but they only grinned.
‘Do you think we are fools?’ asked one.
Zeno walked past me when he was done jumping like an antic. He didn’t show any interest, but I managed a wink, and he returned it. He had to turn his head to hide a smile.
‘What has this man done?’ he asked.
‘A thief,’ the Turk said. ‘Or not. Perhaps he will be flayed alive, as an example.’ He looked at me.
I tried to breathe.
In the morning a dozen Turks came, led by the bastard who accused me of stealing his sword. The ulema asked me, very slowly, what I had done with the sword.
‘I do not have it,’ I said. ‘Never had it!’
Want to cost a man a night’s sleep?
Use the phrase ‘flayed alive’ in a sentence.
He shook his head. One man passed a rope between my tied hands, and pulled so hard I almost cracked my head on the post, and I gasped, and the first whip blow hit my back.
The man behind the whip knew his business. He struck fast, and high on my back. Fifteen blows, and after the fifth I could not stop myself crying out, the pain was so intense. And the wait between blows, even though it was no more than a heartbeat or two … Oh, how I think of the agony of Christ when I think of that moment. I took only fifteen blows, and I was almost entirely unmanned.
And then the man in front of me let go, and I fell. Almost the end of me, I admit it. But the ulema came and murmured something, and two men began to rub some salve into my back.
I screamed.
It was aloe.
It hurt like …
I have no description for what it hurt like. I hurt. I hurt. I curled up, and that hurt. Having your back flayed betrays you in many ways, and the worst of them is that curling up hurts, because it stretches your back muscles.
But the aloe had an almost instant effect.
They put oil on it, olive oil, and the ulema, who seemed a decent fellow, snapped his fingers and a slave handed me a plain, clean kaftan. They put a clean cotton bandage around my torso, and then they helped me into the kaftan, and then I was taken back to work.
Turkish women sometimes give birth and go back to work, tending flocks. I’ve known French peasants to take a beating and go back to the fields. They must be made of sterner stuff than me; I sat by a horse, very suddenly, and almost got kicked for my pains.
But the other three covered for me. They curried my horses and moved my picket lines and I just wandered, barely able to breathe and wanting only to lie down and sleep, except that was one thing our masters did not allow baggage people to do.
‘Can you ride?’ Richard asked me.
‘Yes,’ I said.
John came later. He gave me something to eat. It tasted like flowers. And the smell of jasmine mixed with something like old soap of Castile. Even that doesn’t really capture the scent. I ate it, and was instantly …
Away.
‘Opium,’ John said with a soft smile. ‘Make all better. For a little while, eh? Come along, Lord.’
The shadows were getting long, and John had separated our horses, moving them to the end of the last picket line as if they were the last to be fed, watered, and perhaps cleaned that day. He had a small fire going, which was not uncommon. It was hot as Hell; my skin prickled, and there was something oozing through my bandages. The colours of the fire held me entranced, though, and my friends were there, and that was enough for me.
Then I watched some ants. They were fascinating, in the haze of pain and opium, and I wondered if they had souls. If they all existed in a web of friendships and obligations. If some were soldiers and some, priests.
I wondered if I had an analogue as an ant.
It was all very curious. Everything seemed to pass very slowly, and in fact, I began to wonder about time, something I’d never even considered before.
Richard appeared next to me.
‘William,’ he said. ‘Wake up.’
‘Not asleep,’ I said.
‘Zeno didn’t come out for exercise,’ Richard said.
I thought about that. I was still thinking about ants, and men, and the futility of endeavour, but at the same time, my mind seemed to be very fluid, very quick, and – you won’t credit this – I thought that I could see in the dark.
‘He is in a tent,’ I said.
John was on the other side of me, but I was curled around the anthill and didn’t see him.
‘Do you know what tent, Lord?‘ John asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘By the stake.’
In the end, they had to take me.
Perhaps it was the worst plan ever made. But I couldn’t explain, through the opium, where the tent was compared to the stake, and so they carried me, a wounded slave, through the enemy camp, to the very stake where I had been flogged.
I turned in a little circle. ‘That one,’ I said, pointing with my head at a red silk pavilion.
‘Can you fight?’ Richard asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
‘Me neither,’ John agreed.
‘We spend too much time fighting,’ I said, or words to that effect. ‘The world is too rich to waste it on fighting. We can be stepped on, like ants. And then what are we?’
‘Good point,’ John muttered. Look, I don’t actually remember any of this. But I’ve been told it quite a number of times. It won’t surprise any of you that my friends enjoy mocking me.
So I was handed over to Aldo, who hobbled along with me back to the horses. We walked past dozens of Turks, ghazis, and various akinjis and other soldiers, and no one troubled us at all. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that I got a kind look or two, perhaps from Turks who had been flogged themselves. And then, many of them were sick, too; some fever or grippe was passing through the camp.
We sat and sweated in the insect-filled dark. I played with colours in my head.
Richard ran out of the darkness with a turban on his head. ‘We have him,’ he said. ‘Mount!’
I don’t remember much after that. My horse was good enough – a big steppe horse, sort of like a very large, slightly vicious
hill pony. He was perhaps fifteen hands, if you were generous, and his square head would not have recommended him anywhere. Despite which, he ran and ran, out into the darkness beyond the horse lines.
I know we went north, because that’s what John and Richard told me later, but at the time, I was somewhere between abject misery and opium-induced euphoria, and my clearest memory is impossible – that of riding on a cloud, moonlit from below. I’ll assume that didn’t happen.
There’s a lesson there, though, because that moment, riding across the tendrils of cloud illuminated in an ivory gold, is my clearest memory of the whole escapade. And if that memory is false, than what is memory?
Bah.
There was pursuit. Once we halted in some scrubby trees, and I watched the moonlight play on the ground; moonlight so strong that there were crisp shadows across my hand. And the sound of men in armour trotting by, and Richard with his hand over my horse’s nose while I played like a child.
And later, we were high on a ridge watching three parties below us, all headed in the wrong direction. John said later that we threw them by going north, deeper into Ottomanid territory.
The day that followed was one of total misery – blazing hot, and I had a pounding head like a man who has drunk wine all night, and I began to vomit at midday and was too weak to move around much. John carried me to a small stream, which gurgled down the ridge – just a trickle where, in spring and autumn, it was no doubt a flood. I lay there, bitten by invisible insects, sweating profusely, and vomiting bile.
Delightful. I had no idea where my comrades might be; nor was my head working well enough to worry overmuch. I lay, and was miserable. I slept and dreamed dark dreams, woke, and vomited.
Eventually I slept, and then I was over the back of a horse, and a new kind of misery overtook me. We were moving fast, and I was bouncing like a sack of grain. Indeed, a sack of grain would have been more useful.
But we’d ridden over the high ground and we were coming down to the coast; I remember seeing the sea. Twice, they had to stop in the high country so that I could relieve myself. I won’t dwell on it, but John saw to my back, too, rubbing in some liniment or some salve that made the fire less.
I have since imagined that a high fever on a hot day in Asia, a flayed back, and some wicked disease of the camp, wringing out my intestines, was as close to a glimpse of Hell as ever I need have. Time seemed to cease; I couldn’t see that we moved, and I couldn’t ride.
No one ever suggested leaving me. And on the second day, when we were coming down out of the high country towards the Sea of Marmara (although I could not have said so at the time) Zeno began to be sick, and by the end of the day, everyone but John was down, and John did nothing but clean us and curry, water and watch the horses.
But in that night, I had a clear dream of Saint Michael and Saint George and Saint Mary Magdalene, praying for me, and I awoke from chills to find my head clear for the first time in four days. My back hurt, and hurt worse because I was lying on the red dirt with no bedding, but I could think.
I groaned for a while, I suspect, and then I got up, fetched myself water, and then began, without too many words, to help John. I did the best I could. Richard’s sickness was different from mine – he was freezing cold where I had been boiling hot – and I built up our small fire and did my best to make it burn hot and without smoke.
We couldn’t move. Aldo was so sick that cleaning him was a full-time job. Richard was sick enough, for all love, but he spewed more infrequently and he never completely succumbed to the fever. Zeno was the worst, though, and I thought at one point that he was dead.
Indeed, it was as bad as the Plague, in the filth and the bile, but not anywhere near as mortal. Still, we lost another day, and then John, who had been proof against the disease for so long, caught the fever.
By then I was in my right wits, and my back was healing. I got everyone mounted, and took us about a mile – mostly to get them all out of the rank odour of our own disease. John had found a tiny valley, a sort of rivulet with well-wooded sides, and I moved us there and built a new camp, and as Richard recovered, he helped me.
And I know that we lost a day there, somewhere. Because when we finally had John fit to travel, and we headed back down the ridge towards the sea, I would have had it Sunday, but it was more like Tuesday, as we found later.
Regardless, we found ourselves in a small Greek town on the Sea of Marmara, looking at a crop of little islands. It was a fishing village, and Zeno got them to send out the Orthodox priest, whom we kept a horse-length away because of the disease. In two hours we had ourselves a fishing boat – a big one, about twenty feet long or maybe a couple of feet longer, and painted a sky blue long before, so that it showed more weathered wood than paint. Still, she was all the boat we had, and after filling her full of water at the edge of the sea, Zeno pronounced her seaworthy, if foul – years of throwing dead fish and their guts into the bilge made the boat smell as if the five of us had all had our disease in the boat.
Still, she was a weatherly little boat, and after some practice in by the little beach, we gave the priest our horses with a suggestion that he not tell the Turks where they came from, piled our very few belongings into the little vessel, and raised the threadbare sail.
We sailed out into the Sea of Marmara and made the nearest island in one tack. It has a monastery on it; the monks didn’t trouble us, but sold us bread and salt fish, which we paid for with money John had stolen. I cooked, and Richard Musard gathered firewood and made our usual fire; that is, the fire the two of us had lived at for several years – a deep end full of coals for baking and boiling water, and a shallow end with a hot fire of small wood for cooking and drying clothes.
John was at the height of the disease, and I poured water down him, stripped him naked, washed his clothes in a tub loaned by the monks, and they gave me an herb which I put into his fish stew. He drank it greedily enough, and his fever broke, but whether that was from the goodness of the monks or because he was due to heal, I do not know.
And I would like to say that Richard and I fell into each other’s arms. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was as if we’d passed straight through reconciliation without having to reconcile; disease and danger made us comrades, and that night on the island, as we ate together from one borrowed pot, he was by my side as he had been across most of France.
That night, instead of discussing our lives, or our friendship, or Janet, we talked instead about our mission. Richard and I were allies; we were the only two who believed that we had to actually touch the walls of Gallipoli to do our work.
Zeno cursed. ‘You two are incorrigible!’ he said. ‘It is only by the grace of Our Lady that I am a free man. Paolo Dormi must be tearing what little hair he has out of his scalp,’ he said with relish.
‘He certainly hates you,’ I said.
‘He will have reason, the black-hearted traitor. Ah, I wish Dante’s Hell were real, that I might put him there.’ Zeno shook his head.
‘Traitor?’ I asked.
‘He who says “Genoese” says “Traitor”,’ Zeno said.
Richard bridled. ‘There are many good men among the Genoese,’ he said. ‘Good and gentle men.’
Zeno laughed. ‘So people assure me,’ he said. ‘And yet I have never met a one.’
Aldo, a mere oarsman, laughed. ‘Il Capitano spent a few years rowing for the Genoese and it has poisoned his views of their hospitality,’ he said.
‘True for you, Aldo,’ Zeno said. ‘By Satan’s prick, Ser Guillaume, you make a fine fish stew, and if you were not so interested in war, I would suggest that you open a little place in Venice. I could supply the wine.’
‘And we could kill people for spare cash?’ I asked.
‘He’s always been a fine cook,’ Richard said with amusement.
John ate more stew, hunched over the iron pot as if we might
take it from him.
‘So, you two insist we visit this infernal town, yes?’ Zeno asked.
‘In a word, yes,’ I said.
Zeno sighed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose we can assay it again. With the current in our favour, I imagine we’ll have more luck – best of all, we can touch in the darkness. But I know of no landing on the European side – they may be there, but I’ve never used one. If I say I cannot land, will you allow us to sail on?’
Richard was stubborn. ‘I saw beaches,’ he said.
‘That may be, Ser Knight. But all beaches are not alike, and there are currents, and you are no sailor – not even as much as Ser Guillaume here, who has at least had a little instruction. I will make every effort, but you must accept my word as final.’ He looked at me for support.
‘I accept,’ I said. ‘We will need a full day.’
Richard looked at me across the fire.
‘Very well,’ Zeno said. ‘I’ll put you ashore at midnight and return for you at the same time. If we can put you ashore at all.’
‘We can swim,’ I said.
Richard looked at me as if I’d grown an extra head. ‘You can’t swim?’ I asked.
‘How long have you known me, William Gold?’ he asked.
We spent the whole next day on the island, cooking, eating, and restoring our strength. My back was surprisingly good; John was recovered, or nearly so. And Zeno went to the point and threw chips of wood in to measure the current, or so he said. I don’t think he learned anything very important.
Just before nightfall, we returned the cook pot and washtub to the monks, donned clean clothes, and boarded our boat. Considering I’d only been on the little island two days, I found that it was like leaving home – so quickly had I fallen into the comfortable routines of work, washing, cooking, making fires.
We sailed south and west, and the sun set magnificently in the west. Constantinople, the greatest city in the world, was that way, but we could not see her.
We rowed a while, and my back hurt all over again; sweat is no comforter of scars. After rowing, when it was fully dark, we raised the sail. I had quite a frisson of fear, out there on the great waters, alone in the dark in a small boat, but Zeno was elated, and sang Italian songs as he played with the sail until he liked the speed of the boat. We had a nice little wind – too much wind for my comfort – and when I was at the tiller I found it a little too thrilling. Zeno questioned me about my sea-knowledge, and I told him what I felt I had learned from Contarini and then again from Brother Robert.
The Green Count Page 34