He leaned over and retied the ribbons under her chin so they would be more comfortable. Then he knelt by his mother’s bed. ‘Mother, I have a very important matter to discuss with you. How are you feeling?’
She looked at him and firmed her lip, which was inclined to slacken. He wiped a little spit from it with a clean cloth. ‘Yesh,’ she said.
‘Mother, you have heard Father Juarez preach of the Holy Enterprise of England?’
‘Yesh,’ she said, frowning at the sound of her voice.
‘Mother, the Holy Office will be set up in London once Parma has taken the city. It will be a great and holy work to bring the heretics back to the arms of Holy Mother Church. All the best men will be needed.’
She said nothing, waited, staring at him like a little bird.
‘Mother,’ he faltered, knowing how hard was the thing that he was asking of her, ‘if I can find you a pleasant and kindly convent to enter, if I am found worthy of going with the Enterprise … m … may I … may I go?’
He was afraid she would rage at him, forbid him, as she had when he had wanted to go to Flanders five years before. He was her son and he knew he must obey her if she asked him to stay because she needed him.
The good hand, the one that always held the rosary, clutched convulsively and he held it.
‘Yesh,’ she said, quite clearly, hauling the waxy folds of her face into half of a smile. ‘God … with … you … Josef.’
His heart soared and he kissed her poor hand. She held tight.
‘Write … to…’ She frowned, struggled, breathing harshly, with the effort of remembering, ‘to … my cousin … Juan de Acuna Vela.’
Of course! Her aunt’s son, now the King’s Secretary for Ships’ Ordnance. Wonderful. Pasquale would write tomorrow; one of his assistants had already suggested a pleasant, respectable convent where the nuns would care for his mother well until he returned. He thought he was senior enough in the Holy Office that if he expressed a desire to go with the Enterprise, his cousin would find a way of allowing him. Certainly, if it was God’s will that he go, then there would be no lasting obstacle. The priest who gave fasting penances had been right.
He would be like those famous men of the Society of Jesus who had gone among the benighted heathen savages of the New World, and brought them, in their thousands, to be baptised. He could see himself, standing in the sun at St Paul’s, watching the Host in the reconsecration procession as it passed the cheering, genuflecting crowds of the newly freed English.
It was the mission he had been born to fulfil.
Suleiman
Lisbon, May 1588
Suleiman always looked forward to seeing the new men unwrapped, not only because he enjoyed the sight, but also because you could start to see what they were. Since they had all usually been in prison for a while before, it was less important how big their muscles were than how they stood, how they looked around, how they walked.
He was a voluntary, of course he was. As soon as he had heard that the fascinating galleases were recruiting, he had gone to volunteer, even though his true loves were the slim and deadly galleys, with their sharp beaks, their centre-line cannon, everything about them stripped to the essentials, graceful and beautiful as a cat. He liked cats. To row in a galley was not a sentence, not a servitude, but an honour, as he always told his bench. This was why he had made the galleys his life.
But it had been obvious after the English El Draco beat Santa Cruz’s very own galleys at Cadiz that they might have been Queens of the Mediterranean, but they could not cope with the Atlantic seas or the Atlantic ships. For this reason, Santa Cruz had ordered the building of the strange hybrids that were galleases. And as soon as he heard the first whisper about them in a wineshop, Suleiman had been on fire to see one, row in one.
He had come aboard the day before, newly shaved at the most expensive barber’s in town, blowing the last of his money on it, carrying only his dagger, his water bottle and his whip. The Señors had greeted him with open arms, delighted to have such an experienced man, who had rowed at Lepanto. They had given him charge of two sweeps, thirteen men, since they were so short of voluntaries for this Enterprise.
Suleiman wasn’t at all sure where this England was and didn’t particularly care why one brand of Christian wanted to conquer another. Once he had prayed to Mecca five times daily, now he felt proud of himself if he remembered once a day. Nobody troubled him to be baptised now; he thought he had been a couple of times, but couldn’t remember. Only on voyages was he truly alive. The times between tended to fade into the wine and aqua vitae he drank.
Yesterday he had persuaded one of the riggers to show him round his new ship, the San Lorenzo, flagship of the four galleases. It wasn’t much like a galley, in fact, being high in the water, with three decks and three masts. This was going to be very heavy to row. They were also carrying a complement of sailors for the sails and gunners for the guns – there were gunports all along the top deck – but not all the gunports had a gun. There was still a shortage of ordnance, although the galleases were getting the pick of them.
The rigger took him down to the oardeck. It was not open to the sky as a galley’s was, but closed in under the top deck, although pierced at intervals with gratings. Suleiman brushed his moustache with the back of his hand and frowned. Eighteen sweeps either side, grouped in two fives and two fours, with gunports between the groups. The sweeps must be immense because of the great angle needed to reach the water from so high above it, but they had not yet been rigged, so the oar holes with their leather padding and hanging iron rings were open. The lowest bench was a few feet from the oar hole, the second at an angle and so on built up to the central walkway. That steep angle would be a problem with a ship so heavy. Suleiman frowned again. Six men plus the Padron to each double bench, how would they do it? And water would be a problem too, once the oars were in, for the guns took up the space they usually used for water barrels. Santa Cruz may have been a great admiral but he had never rowed a galley.
‘How many are they giving us?’ he asked the rigger, kicking the ringbolts on the nearest bench to see if they were firm.
‘About two hundred and seventy,’ said the man, staring around him curiously. ‘Don’t the oars chafe in the holes?’
Suleiman put his hand on the nearest pivot chain with its great ring to take the oar. ‘Train the men right and the oars never need to touch the sides,’ he said and pulled on the ring to be sure it was firm. Well, at least that had been done properly. But two hundred and seventy men were not going to be enough because unless they could solve the water problem they would lose a lot to heat and thirst the first time they took them out. They would be sailing some time soon, after the slaves were in, when the winds were fair.
He climbed up from the bench pits to the wide walkway, walked along it. They hadn’t rigged the guardnets yet because the slaves hadn’t been installed. And it all smelled of new wood and sawing. The floor was unnaturally clean, the gutters and drains clear, the benches sharp-edged and unworn.
He was sure there would be problems in heavy seas because of the way the sweeps were angled and they would certainly need the sails to get them started. This was very different from a galley, not nearly so beautiful or so cleverly designed. A galley was such an ancient thing, although individually most of them were no more than twenty or thirty years old because of ship-worms. There was nothing in a galley that had not been tested over hundreds of years and kept only because it was efficient. Here the thing was new, there were many compromises and he had not yet even seen the sweeps. He would bet that the handrails on them would be angled wrong and probably not firm enough.
They needed three hundred men per ship to allow for injuries. He had told the Señor of the Benches so and the man had laughed at him.
Now, today, looking at the slaves as they cluttered up the quay in their chains, some scowling, some blank-faced, some clearly terrified, Suleiman’s heart sank. Gaston was cutting their clothes off an
d some showed marks of torture, some were deformed, some diseased. Allah, that one had leprosy!
Outraged, Suleiman went to argue with the Señor of the Benches, who took one look and blanched. At least the leper was taken out of the chains, sent back to prison to rot.
He passed along through the crowds of chained, frightened men, assessing, judging. He chose two gangs that seemed marginally less useless than the others, at least there were a couple of blacks in one gang and one in another. One in each gang was clearly the runt, there was always one: you needed a short man to go down next to the oarport, though it helped if he was strong to steady it, a miner or a blacksmith. Neither of these were. One was some kind of scrawny clerk with the unmistakeable red rash of a hairshirt all over him and … oh … Was he Musselman? Well, no matter, he’d probably die the first time they rowed for more than an hour. The other was an attractive boy, with curly hair and a peach of an arse.
Suleiman slipped the guard his very last coin for the two gangs, then led them all a little aside.
‘I am your Padron,’ he said to them, brushing his moustache with the end of his whip, enjoying the eyes on him, the licked lips. ‘My name is Suleiman. You are right to fear me because I am the hardest Padron there has ever been. But you will be the best oarsmen in the world, whether you want it or not, and thus we will help the ship to live. For you are the ship. If the ship dies, you die. You are her soul, her speed. To row in a galley is not slavery, but an honour.’
He paused impressively in case anyone wanted to laugh or argue and give him a chance to demonstrate the use of his whip. Nobody did.
‘Now this is all I require of you and then you will be fed and not beaten. You obey me. You do as I say no matter how foolish it may seem. If I say stand, then stand. If sit, sit. And you do not speak. Now sit.’
He said it quietly, to see who was listening. About half of them squatted, the experienced ones, the other half looked round puzzled or started for the ground or stared at him.
‘Once more. All stand.’
Now some were squatting, having caught up with his first order, some standing. He was patient until they were all up.
‘Sit,’ he told them gently.
About half of them squatted, including the scrawny clerk who had been staring like a halfwit. But of the men still standing, some were narrowing their eyes at this. They weren’t aboard yet, you could feel them thinking, why did they have to obey him now?
He went up to the biggest one, an ugly, scarred ex-soldier with heavy muscles. He had to look up at the man.
‘Do you have a problem with sitting?’ he asked softly. ‘Are you sick, have you the piles?’
‘I am not a dog,’ rumbled the man stupidly.
Suleiman reached down and grabbed the man’s privates, wrenched and twisted. The ex-soldier hooted, bent double, his eyes crossed.
‘You are less than a dog,’ said Suleiman, squeezing and pulling down. ‘Sit, doggy.’ The soldier squatted, making high, whining noises between his teeth. Suleiman let go with a final twist, stood and kicked the man in the face, knocking him backwards and breaking his nose with a satisfying crack.
He brushed his moustache, stared at the men. ‘Does anyone else have difficulty sitting?’
Nobody spoke. Excellent. The beautiful boy was crying as quietly as he could. Well, perhaps he would learn that Suleiman could be kind as well as harsh.
He moved them up to the gangplank when he calculated that the sweeps he wanted would be boarding. A couple of sailors threw buckets of water, handfuls of slaked lime to kill the vermin, making them choke and cough. They jingled aboard, the ex-soldier still nursing his nose and bleeding in drips onto the clean wood.
Installing new slaves on their benches was always a difficult business. Suleiman was pleased to see that their ankle chains were individually and separately passed through the ringbolts in the bench. It was the only way to do it: if you tried simply passing one chain through the rings and manacling the men to the chain, you might think you had saved time in fitting out, but then the first time a slave died and you had to release him, you had a mutiny on your hands and would end up having to flog an entire bench to death, which was both wasteful and tedious.
The noise of hammering and talking was loud in the space under the top deck. This was going to be a noisy ship and Suleiman hoped devoutly that nobody was a loud snorer. His two gangs waited, then shuffled carefully down the companion way to the oardeck, the little clerk tripping and nearly pitching on his head. There were guards on the oardeck of course, ready to kill anyone who thought he might have a chance of escape in the confusion of fitting out. Sometimes it worked; more usually, the enterprising ones died. Of course, it was the last possible chance of escape before you were chained in the place where you would eat, shit and work for the rest of your life, however short that turned out to be. You couldn’t blame them.
Suleiman tapped his whip on his legs and stood in the lefthand oarpit while his two gangs shuffled themselves alongside the new benches.
‘Sit. On the bench.’
All of them sat with alacrity. Good. They sat, staring at him, looking around them. The clerk peered out of the oarhole, and then up at the high roof above them; it was twice as high as a normal tween-decks space because the oardeck took the upper half of the hold as well. There was a reason for that, which the clerk would find out in good time.
Suleiman sat on the walkway, dangling his legs, watching them, waiting for the first man to talk. One of them did, he made a joke of some sort. Suleiman flicked his whip out lazily, caught the top of the joker’s ear.
‘Don’t talk,’ he said. ‘Now stand.’
All of them stood. Good.
The blacksmith arrived with his tools and began the process of taking the chains between the men’s feet off, leaving only the leg irons. Suleiman moved among them. The clerk was in the right place, down by the oarport. Next to him Suleiman placed one of the two blacks in that gang, then a well-built peasant, then the soldier, then the other black, then the tallest of them. He nodded at the blacksmith to continue. One at a time the blacksmith riveted a steel chain to the left ankle-ring, passed it through the ringbolt on the deck, attached it to the right ankle and riveted it on. He had a small anvil and a narrow ballpeen hammer and he was skilful enough, didn’t bruise too many of them. Most of the new slaves stared into space, pretending they didn’t care and perhaps some of them didn’t. The clerk watched the process intently, as if he wanted to learn something important. When he was finished with the leg-chains, the blacksmith took off each man’s manacles. Most of the men rubbed their wrists gratefully, some stretched their arms out. The clerk was staring out of the oarport thoughtfully. He looked down at the gutter between his feet.
‘Does anyone want to take a shit?’ Suleiman asked genially.
They all looked at him as if he was mad, annd then as the more intelligent of them began to think, they worked out what was the purpose of the gutter between the benches at right angles to the side of the ship, why they were naked, why galleys were notorious for their stench.
‘No one? Good. If you take my advice, you’ll shit in the morning or the evening, but not during the day because it makes the deck slippery.’
Some of them were open-mouthed with horror. Suleiman knew half his men would be constipated by the end of the week and he had even laid in a special store of figs to help them. His benches were always the healthiest because he cared for them as if they were his sons. He rarely lost a man, he never had a mutiny. They were the best because he was the best.
‘Stand,’ he said. Some stayed sitting, still staring at their legs, the boy was crying again. The soldier stood, the clerk stood. ‘Sit.’ He sighed. ‘These are not words. They are commands. There are not many but you must learn to obey them. Or you will die. There is “Take Hold!” When we have the sweeps rigged, we will practise that. There is “Down!” which means lie down under the bench and stay there. There is “Up!” – you must sit in your place on
your bench. And then there are “Stand!” and “Sit!” We will practise them now.’
They did. He had them standing and sitting and sitting and standing for an hour until he was satisfied they all knew what he was talking about, even the blacks who spoke no Christian languages. By that time, the noise of hammering had stopped because all the slaves were finally aboard and the oardeck was beginning to heat up with all the bodies in it. Suleiman had heard that the north was cold even in summer and he hoped it was true because otherwise they were going to lose an awful lot to overheating, what with being closed in and the water barrel problem.
He left them under the eye of the soldiers assigned to that bench and went to look for barrels of water and wine, and also for wrist-guards and handstraps. He was delighted to find some goatskins that nobody else had the imagination to want and grabbed six of them. He thought he would be able to hang them under the walkway where there was a space. But there were no handstraps available and only a few tattered wrist-guards. He had his own smart, carved, leather wrist-guards of course. He was one of the first to come looking for food and managed to talk a large piece of dried sausage out of the cook’s stores.
Back with his men he came between the benches, cutting off some sausage for each man.
‘Hold your hands out, cupped,’ he told the first one. ‘This is how I will give you your food. If I do not, it is because there is not enough or because I think you have not worked hard enough. Or perhaps because I feel like starving you a little. I will give you the best and the most food that I can. You will eat whatever I give you no matter what it looks like or how bad it smells.’
As he came to each one he asked what the man was before, did he have illnesses or injuries, had he ever been in battle. The soldier claimed to have fought in a tercio, claimed to have an old war wound, claimed to have been in battle. His eyes were blackening, and he could hardly speak because his nose was so swollen. Suleiman reached out, caught the nose and twisted the septum back into place before the man could do more than squawk.
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