Padron seemed amused, grudging his admiration but giving it nonetheless, that he had been able to kill the soldier. You don’t understand, Simon thought, something took me over, some devil, and I found it easy. Padron explained as if to an idiot that he would have to be flogged. Not me, Simon thought, it wasn’t me, really, Padron, it was that devil that took me over.
When they had all gone, leaving the soldier’s body to stink and stiffen among them and the other slaves to lie as far away from the mad little clerk as they could get, Snake whispered to him, ‘You upside-down, eh?’
‘No,’ Simon told him. ‘Not yet.’ Snake shrugged, took his stiff, swelling hand and wrapped it round the little secret knife hilt.
‘So hide it, not leave by the bench. Now.’
‘Where? He moved to put it in his mouth, despite it having been in the gulley, and Snake laughed … Pointed to Simon’s arse and made an obscene gesture.
Everything is about arses tonight, thought a quite insane part of Simon as he clinked over to the gulley again, squatted and strained and covertly put the thing in the place it was obviously designed for. Obviously. A few months ago he would have been disgusted and ashamed even to think of putting something there, now he just did it. He was too naïve to live. Really, imagine thinking it belonged in his mouth.
He lay down again, uncomfortable, uneasy. His arse was the only piece of territory he still owned, that and the increasingly disordered country inside his skull. Will I go mad? he wondered. Or will it all turn me into a brute like the soldier was?
Yes, he thought, yes it will, one or the other. He squinted at his hands in the dimness, scarred by the oar rail, the knuckles and palms swelling from blows he could not rightly remember giving, hands, his own, he had killed with them now. Becket had said that killing your first man was like your first woman, the sort of inane thing an old soldier would say. It wasn’t anything like that. Simon’s first woman had not made him long to weep or curl up into a ball and hide away from the world; his first woman had been Rebecca and he had been her first man. It had been a perfectly … well, adequate experience, on the whole. Aunt Leonora had seen to it that he was just drunk enough to be able to manage it but not so drunk he couldn’t, which was a mercy. He had been as gentle as he could for as long as he could and then … Rebecca had cried and bled, which proved her virginity. And he had stroked her hair, thanking her incoherently before he slept. Later they had learned each other, each Sabbath afternoon, they had studied each other’s bodies, to glorify the Almighty with their love-making. Only a fool of a Christian could compare the two things. Killing a man was nothing like that. And in the morning the Padron would (quite justly) beat him.
To take his mind off that irredeemable fact, he sought for things that were not Rebecca to think about. He had considered all ten sephiroth, he had prayed, he had done manipulations in his mind of the numbers that surrounded him, the number of planks, the size of oars, the angles with the water, all kinds of things to keep his mind from scurrying about his skull like a spit dog. At least he had a new thing to mull over: he tried to imagine what the Miracle of Beauty might be.
Originally it must have been Santa Cruz’s idea, the secret key that made the whole daft enterprise of the Armada feasible. The galleases were intended for it, of course, although they would be useful in any flat calm. Even so, they were terrible sailors and brutally hard to row; they were not good ships. He now knew far more about them than he had ever wanted to and although he had decided that the Almighty was playing with him to treat him so cruelly, still it gave his mind something to do.
Miracle of Beauty, Miracle of Beauty. What a foolish name. How could a warlike campaign, an invasion plan, be either miraculous or beautiful? It was stupid, ridiculous.
* * *
Simon slept, dreaming uneasily of statues that came to life, of the soldier shouting at him, of Rebecca, made tiny, but perfectly naked, peeking out of the little knife-hilt. Normally, now, he could sleep quite well on the deck, even when there had been no rowing to tire him out, but every time he turned over or rose out of a dream’s muddy waters, he heard the sniffles and groans of the man who had been flogged the day before, prophesying the night he would have tomorrow. It made him feel sick each time he thought of it.
And in the morning, Padron came to him, with the knotted scourge in his hand and grinned under his moustache. Dry-mouthed, Simon looked past him, face blank.
‘Now, clerk,’ Padron said jovially. ‘Must I tie you to the bench or will you stay still for me?’
‘I’ll stay still,’ said Simon, skin prickling with the humiliation of it, determined not to show his fear to the other men on the bench, not even to the soldier who was still glaring sightlessly up at him because the blacksmith had not yet come to release him.
He tried to think of it as like a river to cross. Now he was on this side. Soon he would be on the other side. In between was unpleasantness. Obediently he gripped the other edge of the bench, hunched his shoulders over and ducked his head down as far as he could so nobody would see his face.
Padron stood on the bench and the scourge whistled, thumped. Once Simon caught a glimpse of the peasant grinning with satisfaction and rubbing himself. The newly discovered madman sitting gibbering quietly in the corner of Simon’s mind made a note to kill the peasant just as soon as he had killed the Padron. Even the sensible part of him seemed to be flaking apart, like a flint. Becket had given him good advice, once, in his cups. ‘Some of the whores say it’s better to scream and wriggle,’ he’d rumbled. ‘That way, the man doing it doesn’t lay on so hard because he thinks you’re already suffering. Some of them say it’s better not to say anything because then he doesn’t get any fun out of it even if he lays on harder to try and get something out of you. As for me, I spent my time cursing the bastard, which was some help.’
At the time Simon had thought he could not be so stoical, but now he found that a solid mass of rage born of shame kept him silent by blocking up his throat. It hurt more with each blow, a peculiar, unbearable, spreading itch under his ribs each time, getting worse each time as the blows started crossing and re-crossing previous welts, until the pain itself was breath-stopping. He gripped the bench tighter and tighter, tried to remember not to bite his tongue or his lip and tried not to move, not to give Padron any fun. He wasn’t sure whether he had succeeded because he kept his eyes tight shut, terrified he might cry.
At the end of it, Padron sluiced him down with seawater and jumped up from the bench to the walkway to talk to the blacksmith, who had also been watching with a lascivious grin on his face. The two of them moved the soldier’s corpse so the chain could be taken off, then out the oarport went the soldier and all his experience of Lepanto and the great three days looting of Antwerp and wherever else he had been, which changed each time he told stories.
Sick and shaking and cold from the water, which stung his back like fire, Simon sat under the bench, curled his back and tried to get his breath. He was panting as if he had been rowing. Snake inspected the damage for him.
‘He got worse than you,’ Snake pronounced eventually, nodding across at the one who had stolen the file who still moved like an old man. ‘It not bad.’
‘Not bad,’ Simon repeated dully, easing his shoulders and wishing he could swap bodies with someone else. I am now a member of the company of whores and peasants and soldiers, he thought, and also priests who must scourge themselves for the better worship of God. Those who have been flogged. Well, why not?
He thought of Rebecca and what she might say when she saw him. Almost certainly she would be furious with him for taking the risk of fighting the soldier only for words, only because he had called her a name, not even knowing what she was to him. Of course she would never get the chance because he would probably never tell her. Would he ever feel her next to him in bed again? Would he ever be able to lay his head on her shoulder and hold the small, pointed mound of her breast? No. Almost certainly not. He had seen her, that should b
e enough, but it wasn’t. Like the food they got at noon, half rations because of still being in port, it was enough only to whet hunger, not satisfy it.
He thought of her and then forced himself to stop thinking of her. He was not like the soldier or the peasant, to relieve his carnal desires right there, in the oardeck. It didn’t happen often anyway, he was too hungry and tired most of the time. By running through possible codes for the Miracle of Beauty, changing the letters to others by sequences of combinations and getting nothing but gibberish, he even managed to forget the fire in his back enough to doze off. The other men on the bench looked at him sidelong.
Every movement hurt, that morning, not only his back but as if his whole body had been beaten, he ached the way he had in the first few days of rowing. He said this to Snake who said that of course it wasn’t his back alone, what did he think? Which reminded Simon that Snake was an escaper and also a member of the fellowship of those who had been flogged. Snake said the same as Becket, which was that you had to move about, stretch your back muscles and so he conscientiously touched his toes every hour or so no matter what it felt like or how badly the scabs cracked and burned.
At noon they got more food than they bargained for. Not only black bread and olives and cheese and sausage, but also, each of them, an orange. A whole orange, each one a warm sun of scent and sweetness in the dim oardeck, like a promise from another world. Everyone on the oardeck was muttering and suspicious at such largesse, which was right because Padron stood on the walkway with his whip and told them that the oranges were a gift from Don Hugo de Moncada, a great and generous gift, because soon they would be leaving Corunna and heading north to fight the English.
Simon held his orange in his cupped hand, nearly laughing at the brightness, the outrageous vividness of the colour, admiring it as if it were a jewel. The peasant looked greedily at him. The last time they had something special to eat, a piece of chicken each, the soldier had reached over and stolen his, and Simon had done nothing. This time Simon met the peasant’s eyes and grinned. The man looked away. Shall I take his orange from him? Simon thought with a festive flare, and then was ashamed of himself.
He ate the orange slowly, every bit of it except the pips – skin and pith and meat and all, dribbling at the powerful tastes, the sourness, the bitterness. It was a Seville orange. He had heard from Dr Nunez of rare oranges from China that needed no sugar, but this was fine, this was good, as if taking a small sun into his body warmed him up.
And then, in the afternoon, they rowed again, out of Corunna harbour, out into the Atlantic, where the sailors could set the sails and catch the perfect south-westerly wind that would take them north-east to England. In the distance, he could hear sacred music, he supposed there was flag-flying and religious pageantry for the occasion. The Spaniards loved a procession almost as much as the English.
It was hard to row again, but not so hard as the first days. Simon suspected that nothing in his life would ever be as hard as that and found a kind of wonder in himself that he had in fact lived through it. He looked at the other men on the bench and wondered if they thought the same, or if they thought at all. He didn’t feel any fellowship with them, really, except when they were all heaving on the huge oar and they had to move together. Then the peasant would often give a rhythm for them, a worksong from when peasants were breaking rocks on the road. Snake listened with interest to it and then set up a song of his own, one with a strange beat to it that somehow caught them up and swung them along, and nonsensical foreign words that meant nothing to them, which they sang by rote. Some Padrons did not allow singing but their Padron was neutral about it. he allowed them to sing so long as they never missed the beat with the other oars and when he realised that the other benches caught the rhythm of Snake’s song as well, he even joined in with obscene Spanish.
Even so, after the long rest in Corunna, they were all more easily tired. When at last they could stop heaving, and catch their breath, and feel the heel and lift of the ship as the wind took her, Padron came along with the barrels of grease for the oars as they drew them up. Snake put grease on Simon’s back to make it more supple; that had burned him when they worked, his sweat had stung and all the bruises ached.
While he was trying to sleep that night, Padron came and talked to him, quite friendly, really, advising him to forget his wife. Simon answered cautiously and neutrally, only telling Padron about the terrible ache of boredom in his gut, which Padron seemed to find witty.
All Simon wanted was for the Padron was to go away, so he could try to sleep a little, but the man seemed to enjoy talking to him. He spoke of spectacles, of Simon keeping a look out through the oarport for him, of Simon earning the gift of sight.
The friendly squeeze of Simon’s shoulder by the Padron’s wide horny hand told him exactly how he could earn the spectacles, exactly how he could negotiate one of the last territories he owned, where he kept the little knife Rebecca had sent him, and it made him feel sick and sweaty. The Padron grinned down at him, completely sure of his power, of his right to get what he wanted from His Majesty’s property.
Simon stared into the night, at the seaming on Snake’s back, trying to think about it. Trying not to think about it. Yes, he thought, perhaps he could resist, for a time anyway. But Padron could make sure that his life was hell, could stop his food, beat him, even stop his water. He lived with only a thin border of resource between him and death, he knew that. At the moment the Padron seemed to like him and the soldier had been right, the Padron wanted him. And he had no power at all to say no and make it stick. One day, sooner or later, when he was nearer to death perhaps, but one day, Padron would … The thought of the sin sickened him, tightened up his gut like a tangled string. His back burned, his muscles ached and Snake snored softly and he couldn’t sleep because he wanted to weep. Once he dozed off and found himself sitting up, tearing at the rings round his ankles, where they had made bruises and sore places. What could he do? Nothing. He couldn’t escape, he couldn’t die quick enough unless he used Rebecca’s little knife to slit his own throat. Of course, he could do that, said the quiet little madman sitting in the corner of his skull, the devil who had taken him over when he killed the soldier. It would mean never seeing Rebecca again, of making Sheol for himself. It might be worth doing though, rather than lose sovereignty over his last bit of territory. If he stabbed himself hard under the ear, where Padron had killed the men who were crushed, it wouldn’t take long to die or hurt that badly. Of course, he could stab the Padron when he came to take him, and then they would beat him to death.
It was a tempting thought.
He couldn’t sleep in the dimness of the oardeck, the heel and lift of the swell under the ship, all the great Holy Enterprise, which he couldn’t see, which he probably would never see, hove to with their lanterns burning, so they could keep contact in the wastes of the ocean, sacrificing speed for cohesion as they had been ordered by the King. Everybody else was asleep, snoring, grunting. One man moaning. Oh him.
Simon sat cross-legged to examine the chain that made him a part of the ship. There were ankle chains that could be locked and unlocked, but these were the kind that had a rivet hammered into place. To get them off you had to hammer the rivet out again. Which could be done if you wanted the slaves to work in the docks while the galleys were laid up for the winter, but not without a hammer and anvil. The chain between his ankles was made of good steel links about an inch across, and it passed through the ringbolt in the deck. Out of sheer animal frustration, he pissed on the ringbolt, and watched as the piss drained out through the hole in the deck that the ring was bolted into. Blinking, not quite sure if he was seeing right, or if what he was seeing actually meant anything good, Simon jiggled the bolt. There was movement, give. Something had damaged the timbers … Perhaps the iron wheels of the gun truck as it went past, something like that. Or perhaps the timbers were a bit young, unseasoned and were already starting to rot.
Simon looked round, partic
ularly for Padron. He was curled up against the junior Padron, cuddling the young man as if they were husband and wife, a disgusting sight. Everybody was asleep. Very quietly, Simon reached behind and retrieved the little knife, screwed it together, tried the saw blade.
The timbers splintered and gave to his tenative sawing, he rubbed away sawdust with his finger. He could enlarge the hole the ringbolt was in and when it was big enough he would be able to pull it out. He would still have chains on his ankles but he would not be bolted to the deck. It was something.
He thought of Snake. What had Padron said? If one escaped, his benchmates died too because they must have known, you couldn’t keep secrets. Very well. He would make sure Snake was freed too: he could reach Snake’s bolt. Not the peasant’s nor anyone else’s, because they were further up the bench and too high. He was the last man, on the end, right by the hull. Quite lucky.
Simon worked away carefully on the wood around the ringbolt, then formed the sawdust into a kind of cement with more piss to hide what he’d done, put his little knife away. He was terrified it might break or wear down, but so far so good.
He slept badly, afraid of so many things, jumped when the Padron spoke to him in the morning, asking how his back was. He eased his shoulders to hide his instant cringe as his skin remembered pain. He said it was recovering, Padron. They sang as they rowed north that day, so that Hugo de Moncada came to listen at the hatch and commend the Captain of the Oardeck on the high morale of his slaves. Perhaps the slaves could sing some sacred hymns, Salve Regina, perhaps? No, the Captain thought they were too ignorant for that. Never mind, said Don Hugo, it was good to listen to and they were making excellent progress. Simon squinted up at the man standing like a giant by the hatch, catching the grave bony face, the immense dignity and the ease with which he stood on the deck, and thought, after the Padron, after the peasant, you, Don Hugo. Or not him, the devil. The little devil that had entered his skull with his killing of the soldier, or just before perhaps. He was quite grateful to it because it had revealed to him how easy it was to kill someone. Not easy physically, true, he had been lucky he had been able to crack the soldier’s gullet on the bench, but easy mentally. He saw that now. Killing was only what you did when someone was in your way or disrespected you or threatened you. The soldier and the devil together had taught him that.
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