Simon stood where he was placed, in front of the judge, his knees shaking just as they had on the ratlines, longing to scratch. It was unquestionably intimidating to be surrounded by men wearing so much in the way of doublets and hose and gowns and ruffs and tall velvet hats, while he was got up as a kind of religious clown. It occurred to him that Merula’s dignity was remarkable when she had been wearing only her long leather skirt and an ill-fitting shirt. He tried to stand up a bit straighter, firmly squashed the urge to scratch. There was no point in looking like an ape when you were going to be sentenced to death.
Most of the indictment had already been heard while he waited outside. He still wasn’t completely certain what they had accused and found him guilty of. They might not even ask him any questions and would certainly already have made up their minds.
There was no harm in a little courtesy. Simon bowed formally to the judge, who looked surprised and nodded his head in response.
‘Señor Pasquale?’ said the judge.
The inquisitor cleared his throat. ‘Your Excellency, he admits it without any sign of penitence.’
The judge sighed and stared at Simon for a long time. Simon stared back.
‘Anriques, you admit that you are a Jew?’ said the examining judge.
‘I have always been a Jew, yes,’ whispered Simon, his voice still unhealed. He was relieved and a little surprised they were letting him speak.
‘Will you at least convert to the True Religion?’
Simon’s eyes narrowed. ‘Since I already follow the true religion, it would be ridiculous to change,’ he snapped.
There was sucked-in breath all round, a cold glare from the judge. Simon was amazed nobody had hit him. There was no point in trying to placate them, they had already decided sentence.
‘He is, as you see, hard-hearted and unrepentant in his wicked error,’ droned Señor Pasquale.
The judge put his long white hands on the desk and steepled them. ‘Perhaps if we brought you a priest to dispute with you and lead you to a better understanding of—’
‘Your Excellency,’ said Simon, suddenly tired of the game, ‘you have the power to bring any number of priests to dispute with me, but you do not have the power to make me believe what they say. Only the Almighty has that power. Why not leave it in His capable hands?’
The judge did not react in the way Simon had anticipated. He smiled. ‘For entirely selfish reasons, I am afraid,’ he said. ‘For the safety of my own immortal soul, I must be entirely satisfied that every effort has been made to save you from damnation.’
‘Then release me and let me go back home,’ Simon reasoned. ‘That will convince me you have my interests at heart. Legally you should banish me in accordance with the edict of Ferdinand and Isabella, and I am more than willing to be banished.’
‘Legally, you should be executed for returning to this land as an obdurate Jew.’
‘But I did not return, Your Excellency. I was visiting in my ship. I would have been long gone by now if I had not been arrested.’
‘This is chopping logic,’ said Señor Pasquale. ‘The fact is, he is here and he is a Jew.’
‘In any case, I would not send a soul in such danger back to lands cankered with the heresy of Protestantism,’ said the judge. ‘It would be like trying to wash off mud with pitch.’ He paused, leafed through the pages in front of him. ‘Anriques, are you married?’
What kind of trick was this? Didn’t they know? Was it possible they did not in fact have Rebecca? The rush of hope in his heart made him feel faint.
‘Why do you ask, Your Excellency?’
Señor Pasquale could not bear this insolence. ‘The woman our informant told us you had with you. Where did she go?’
Hope was a heady wine when you had been steeling yourself against it. If Rebecca had escaped somehow, then anything was bearable. Simon had to pause for a moment because he was trembling, until he got control of himself, wishing his throat did not ache so much.
‘What woman?’ he asked.
The judge sighed again. ‘Is she, was she a Jewess?’
‘Naturally, I would not marry out of my religion. It is strictly forbidden us, according to the Book of Ezra, as you know,’ said Simon piously. ‘If I am married, it must be to a Jewess.’
‘And these things are permitted in the heretic lands?’
‘Yes, Your Excellency. The Queen’s Gracious Majesty has permitted it.’
‘We will need to establish a proper branch of the Holy Offce the minute we take London,’ said the judge, making a note to himself. ‘I will send His Grace a memorandum. In the meantime, I appeal to you again, Anriques: at least listen to the learned doctors of the church that I can send you. Hear what they say. I know that the Jews also wait for the Messiah. Can you not at least conceive the possibility that the Messiah was Christ Jesus?’
Simon was surprised to find himself responding honestly. ‘It has been said, I forget by whom,’ he said slowly, ‘that both the Christians and the Jews await the arrival of the Messiah. If when He comes, He says, my fellow Jews, you were wrong and stiff-necked again when I was here last, then we will all repent. Since the Most High is merciful, He will forgive us. If when He comes, He says, my fellow Jews, thank you for waiting so long … Then, no doubt, the Christians will try to kill him.’
There was a pool of shocked silence, which Simon rather enjoyed. Perhaps he should not have been so flippant, but … Why not? What could he lose? He was so happy that Rebecca had escaped, he could have danced.
‘You are indeed obdurate,’ said the judge.
‘Yes, Your Excellency. I am sorry for your immortal soul, but mine is safe. And since I am obdurate in my religion, you must sentence me and I make no doubt you have already decided what to say. Why waste more time? Sentence me and have an end to the farce.’
If he was going to be burned or hanged, let them get on with it. He wanted no more waiting in darkness.
‘For the sake of your immortal soul, which I believe even Jews have,’ said the judge sadly. ‘To rescue you from hell and an eternity of suffering.’
Simon shut his eyes. Why did he have to come upon a conscientious judge? ‘I think it is probably too late for me,’ he said kindly, ‘Why not get it over with?’
The judge looked down. ‘May God have mercy on your soul. I hereby sentence you in the name of his most Catholic Majesty of Spain, to hard labour in the galleys of this realm, the better to repent you of your evil. Perhaps honest work will help you to see the mercy of Jesus Christ Our Lord.’
Of all the horrors for which he had tried to prepare himself, this was the one he had never considered. Him? Simon Ames? In the galleys? Him?
The judge shook his head at the mad evil laughter of the Christ-Killer he was treating so gently.
* * *
At first, all that happened to Simon was that he was taken back to the prison and clapped in his cell again. The guards told him that they had been given orders to bring him a priest at any time of the day or night if he asked for one. Then they gave him a plate of bread and beans and a cup of well-watered vinegary wine, took his penitent’s coloured shirt and sandals away and left him in the dark again.
He was glad, not just because it was the best food he had had in a long time, but also because he needed time to think.
First, he gave thanks to the Almighty that Rebecca had somehow eluded the Inquisition. They had made no mention of her black slave – perhaps Merula had truly managed to do something? He would never know. Otherwise, he could not imagine how it had happened, unless his brother Francis had somehow had a hand in it. Please let her get home to England, let the Queen’s wrath be averted.
As for him, in the Spanish galleys. It was a terrifying thought. Was the judge blind? Simon had never been particularly strong and imprisonment had weakened him. You heard stories about the galleys …
Simon had been steeling himself for death and he thought this really made only a difference of time, perhaps a few mont
hs. But why him? Of all people you might set to an oar, he was the last. He said his evening prayers and tried not to scratch when he lay down on the bench to sleep. But he couldn’t sleep. He was frightened and miserable.
In the morning, the guards came in early and marched him blinking out of the cell. In a brightly lit courtyard waited a hulking ugly man carrying a razor. Seriously wondering if he was hallucinating in some fever, Simon sat docile on the stool while the barber shaved both his scalp and chin. Having his head shaved made less difference than it had done the last time, when he was sick of lungfever, since Simon was going bald in the most unattractive way possible, with two long inlets of baldness climbing up his head, joining behind a tuft at the front and then spreading its hair-desert backwards leaving the tuft to grow in isolated splendour like a palm-tree at an oasis. His beard had never been very strong either. So although the wind around the back of his head felt very odd, all things considered, he thought perhaps he even looked better for being shaved. The man didn’t give him a mirror though as a real barber would.
Next they made him walk through to a bigger yard, tripping on the leg chains as usual. There was a long line of hunched, battered men. They walked him up to the end of the line and locked manacles on his wrists with a chain that passed round the waist of the man in front. A few minutes later, a guard passed a chain round Simon’s waist as another prisoner was attached. And so it went on. All of them were newly-bald, some licked their lips nervously, some waited stolidly and blank-faced, four of them were black. It occurred to Simon that he was by several inches the smallest of them and certainly the weakest and then he thought that the judge probably didn’t care at all what kind of men he sent to row in the galleys, so long as he obeyed his royal instructions and sent enough.
Orders shouted out and they marched off through the town under guard. It must have been a common enough sight since none of the street-boys threw stones at the baldies passing by. Even at that time of the morning the sun was too bright for him and the cobbles hurt his bare feet as he hurried to keep up. He thought they were heading down to the docks. Yes, they passed the gate, even the quay where the ship had been moored and like a fool, he looked for it although it must have been long gone, impounded for use in the Enterprise. The docks were very interesting, after the boredom of his cell: the activity seemed frenetic, with ships being scoured and reballasted, work going on everywhere, all the huge wheels for the cranes manned with skilled walkers, who paced round like a dog in a spit-wheel. Some of them were bald like himself and Simon remembered that galley-slaves were used in the docks when there were no galleys to row. Perhaps they would use him that way …
They marched along the quay, down to one where four very strange-looking ships were tied up, being fitted out. What were they? Three masts, heavily built, wide oarports with benches visible through them … How fascinating. These must be the famous galleases from Naples, the very ships he had been trying to find out about when he was arrested. Was that the reason for it all? Was the Almighty using him for some great purpose?
Simon felt a thrill of irrational excitement and hope. Perhaps there really was a reason for what had happened to him. Perhaps the Almighty had not forgotten him. He looked more carefully at the strange ships, counting, observing.
There were other long chains of bald men standing about on the quay, some decorated with tattoos. Among them walked bald men who were not chained, many of them wearing magnificent moustaches. There was a gangplank to the nearest galleas and a row of six men were lined up next to it. The rigging was full of riggers, a crane on the quay lowered barrels and nets full of shot into the hold. All the time the guards watched them impassively, most with halberds, but some with calivers and cross-bows.
Another man with a moustache walked along the row of men, using a knife. Simon squinted his eyes, trying to make out what was happening: was he marking them? No, he was cutting their rags off so they were naked. Those who had shoes or clogs were told to take them off. Buckets of water were thrown at them, then handfuls of white powder. At last, the men were marched aboard, naked as the day the midwife saw them.
Almighty help me, Simon thought, and shivered. Some of the other men he was chained to were staring with just as much horror, others just watched impassively.
It took all morning to board the galley-slaves because the blacksmiths bolting them to their benches could only work so fast.
* * *
In fact, watching the blacksmith hammering the rivets on his leg chain was the last thing Simon consciously remembered for a long time. It seemed insane that he should sit quietly and watch while someone used a metal chain to turn him into part of a ship, and yet he did. He also paid attention to the men with calivers and crossbows and halberds standing around ready to kill anyone desperate enough to try an escape, as he sat, cupping his hands over his privates like all the other new slaves. He even felt pleased when his manacles finally came off and his arms felt wonderfully light. But really he was not present at all. He was hiding away, deep inside himself, like an animal in a burrow, as far as he could get from his body, which was now, it seemed, the property of His Most Catholic Majesty. When the Padron came and had them do things, he obeyed. The rest of the time he was curled with his naked back against the bench, staring around him and not seeing anything.
The black man next to him seemed in a similar state. There was scarring round his neck from the time when he had been captured and subdued with a forked treetrunk around his neck. Simon blinked at him, said nothing, the man he had once been who had traded in slaves, as distant from him as the inquisitor. He appreciated the irony, even considered that the Almighty must have a very sharp sense of humour, but all of this was simply a ruffle on the surface of a mind that was not truly there at all.
The Padron terrified him more than he could say. His heart pounded with fright like an animal’s every time the Padron looked at him. A Turk of ordinary height, with a dark skin and a jutting nose over his flourishing moustache, he carried his whip like a sceptre, flicked it out lazily to take small bits of skin off whoever annoyed him.
Unwillingly, hating himself for his own slavishness, Simon tried to please him, to do as he was ordered promptly. He was terrified of the whip, terrified to white-minded sickness of being beaten. He tried to hide this, ashamed of it, strove to answer coolly and steadily when the Padron insisted on talking to him.
Early on the Padron had told him that he himself was a Mussulman, said something about their being surrounded by heathen. Apart from the blacks, the other men on the bench had seen he was a Jew and simply called him marrano. Padron called him ‘clerk’, which was marginally better. Nobody told names, or exchanged names, it was all nicknames or trades or what have you. So they had the soldier and the plowman and the tall willowy unfortunate who died so quickly that no one ever found out even his nickname.
They had been ignored, climbed over, shoved, kicked while the riggers brought in the oars. Occasionally one of them would be told to hold a rope or duck as something complex happened above. When the business was over and the work moved further up the ship, Simon had stared up at the oar hanging in its sling in the dimness, it seemed more enormous than he could believe. He was frightened of the oar as well, afraid every time they hauled on the ropes to bring it in and then let it out again, frightened he would accidentally clamp a thumb in the ring, afraid it would hit him on the head as it was pulled in and slipped out.
And then came the first time he fulfilled his function as muscular propulsion for the King of Spain’s galleas. Padron had read them some kind of lecture about not letting go until they were told. The huge oar was in front of his nose, there was a kind of handrail clamped to it. Clearly no human hand could take hold on the oar, so they took hold on the rail and began to sit and stand in unison, to move it back and forth in the water.
It was very difficult. They had to move together, and there was no room for error. The first time Padron flicked him with the whip, Simon thought he had b
een stung by a wasp.
For the first hour or so until he began to feel the blisters on his hands and the bruises on his arse, he thought perhaps he would be able to do this, wrapped up inside himself as he was, hidden away from the Padron, from the oar, from this terrifying, impossible world.
As he sweated his way through the second hour, he began to realise why the King of Spain needed slaves for this work. Not only was it brutally hard, it was, beyond anything, dull. Over and over again, sit and stand, sit and stand, over and over again, always the same, push and pull, heave and pull …
It was mind-bending. For a while, Simon tried to keep his attention away from what was happening to his body, as his chest crowed for air and his bruised throat filled with phlegm and his arms and legs shook and burned and his hands …
His hands were the worst. They locked with cramp because he was frightened of being bitten by the Padron’s insect whip – not because it hurt that badly but because it was negligent, immediate, humiliating. Because the Padron seemed to enjoy it? When the order came to let go, he couldn’t manage it, his hands wouldn’t obey him and the Padron came up behind him suddenly, making him quiver with fright, poured water, rubbed his forearms roughly with leathery palms, peeled back his fingers.
At the end of the hideous, unbelievable day, Simon lay on the boards and promised himself he would never move again. He was not hungry because his stomach was full of terror, he would tell his arms or legs to move and nothing would happen. In any case, his stomach still ached from what the inquisitor had done to him, and it was easy to refuse food. No doubt the black sitting next to him or the soldier whose nose the Padron had broken would have what he didn’t eat. Then he might die quicker.
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