As you might imagine, only the chosen man leading the team and lighting the fire is authorized to cut the mooring lines. I promised to hang any man who cuts or casts off a mooring line and strands a fire lighter or any of our men on an enemy ship that has no slaves to row it to Malta. And I certainly will.
The second alternative is better than the first - board a ship with slaves chained to its rowing benches, kill the men defending it, and then cut it loose and stay aboard as a prize crew – and have the slaves row it to Malta as a prize instead of setting it on fire.
In the space of a few minutes that is exactly what happens. For the first minute or two there is no response from the city. The only opposition initially comes from the surprised and easily overwhelmed sailors our boarding parties find on the ships and galleys they board. But then the inevitable occurs - men who have seen the galleys being taken on the beach run to the city and sound the alarm.
Suddenly a few and then hundreds and then thousands of shouting men, mostly unarmed thank God, appear almost out of nowhere and come running out of the city towards the dock – and are met by a shower of arrows as I hoist the recall flag and our boarding parties rush back to my galley.
It’s a good thing we have the archers ready and the heathen go to their mosques without weapons; one of our boarding parties waited too long and had to fight its way back to rejoin us. That’s when one of our men was killed and several wounded.
The arrow storm continues until the last of our boarding parties climbs back on my galley and we begin moving through the smoke towards the ships and galleys anchored nearby in the harbor.
I don’t think we left anyone behind. I hope not; the heathens seemed quite upset as we pushed off and rowed away from the dock - lots of shouting and arm waving.
We reach the first of the ships anchored in the harbor soon after our other galleys get there from the galley beach. We all follow the same process. Grapple a ship, board it and kill everyone, and then either light it on fire or leave a few men on board as a prize crew. My galley burns a couple of cogs and sends a galley towards Malta.
Then we make a big mess of things when we board a big cog and try to tow it out of the harbor. The damn tow line comes loose and we waste precious minutes futilely trying to retie it. Finally I give up and we come back alongside, re-board our boarding party, and follow our other galleys and their prizes out of the harbor. The cog we leave, so far as I could see, is the only one in the harbor not burning or being towed out as a prize.
It is quite embarrassing actually, particularly since the galley we follow out of the harbor is towing the biggest three masted dhow I’ve ever seen.
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Four of our original galleys, including the one I’m on, spend the rest of the day waiting off Tunis as a blocking force to give our prizes and the galley towing the big dhow time to get further away from Tunis and reduce the possibility of them being retaken. To everyone’s surprise not a single Moorish galley comes out of Tunis to try to retake our prizes, at least we don’t see any.
Finally, as the sun is setting I hoist the “follow me” flag and we begin slowly making our way back to Malta; hopefully keeping our galleys between our prizes and any pissed off heathen that might come out to try to retake them. The weather is good and we stay together most of the way – and the only ships we see, and ignore, are a couple of Spanish cogs that appear to be bound for Malta.
Chapter Twenty Four
BOUND FOR ENGLAND
All of the men and slaves on our prizes are deathly afraid of being taken by the Tunisians, and rightly so. So it’s little wonder that they row for Malta like the devil himself is breathing down their backs. That’s why so many of our prizes are already tied up and taking on water and supplies when we row into the harbor. Most of the rest straggle in over the next twenty four hours. But not all of them.
After almost a week of waiting we’re still missing several prizes and their prize crews. No one has any idea what happened to our missing prize crews or why they did not make it back. Maybe they’ve lost their bearings and will show up later; maybe the Moors somehow got past our blocking force with their surviving galleys and retook them; maybe their crews decided to desert. The possibilities are endless and we’ll probably never find out.
We end up reaching Malta with seventeen new galleys, two cogs, and a very large ocean going Arab Dhow with three masts and lateen sails that none of our sailors know how to use. We lost three men killed, a dozen or so wounded, and twenty six missing.
We also came away with about eight hundred malnourished slaves whom we promptly free and put on double rations to strengthen them up for the hard days ahead of us as we row to England. About half of the slaves are black Africans and Arabs; the other half are mostly Christian and Jewish sailors including fifty or so ecstatically happy British and French, some of whom had been slaves of the Tunisians for many years.
In any event, well over four hundred of the slaves accept our offer to carry them to England via Lisbon and the coast of France. The rest apparently want to keep their feet on dry land for a while.
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Our plans have changed. We don’t have enough men to fully crew all the ships we have so we’re not going to visit Algiers and try to get even more. Indeed, our big problem at the moment is to decide which prizes to keep and what to do with those we don’t want because we don’t have enough men to crew them. We are taking all the recently freed slaves who want to come with us to help row. And we are also recruiting all the able bodied men we can find. Even so, it looks like we’ll be several hundred rowers short.
In the end we decide to sail some of our galleys short-handed and take all of our prizes with us except the big Arab dhow; it takes too many skilled seamen to handle its sails. The only exception is the big galley carrying George and about half of our coins - it will sail with Harold as its captain and a full crew of our very best and strongest sailors and men at arms. The rest of the coins will be split up among the other ships. Thomas and I will sail with Harold and George.
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We wait for almost week for the last two stragglers and good weather. During that time we provision the ships and almost a hundred of the slaves who initially wanted to stay ashore change their minds and join us to get food and shelter and stay away from the local slave catchers.
It probably also helps that they inevitably talk to the men in our crews who we’d freed from slavery earlier and find out that they really will be fed and remain as free churls if they join us.
Nine days after the raid we sail for England after selling the dhow to a local merchant for a fraction of its value and making arrangements for the crews of stragglers to be cared for and sheltered if they arrive and are not in condition to follow us.
Twenty one galleys and two cogs leave bright and early on the Sunday morning nine days after we raided Tunis. Four days later we begin arriving in Palma on the island of Mallorca
Our fleet pretty much stays together as we hop past the Moorish ports along the Spanish coast. The good weather lasts until we pass through the narrows at Gibraltar and enter the Atlantic. Then the weather turns bad and separates us. Every ship is on its own as we turn north for the run past the Moors at Cadiz to Lisbon.
It is hot and sunny and we are running low on water when we finally row into the great harbor at Lisbon eight days later. Only three of our ships have arrived before us including, to everyone’s surprise, one of the cogs. It had somehow ridden the winds of the storm all the way from Gibraltar to Lisbon. Most of the rest straggle into the harbor in the days that follow.
Almost a week later the winds and the weather look good enough to leave. That’s when the “follow me” flag goes up and I lead the seventeen ships of our fleet out of the Lisbon harbor including both cogs. Bob and his galley stay behind to round up and organize the five stragglers if and when they arrive. He’ll wait another week.
Thirteen days after we leave Lisbon Thomas and George and I stand on the deck and l
ook at the coast of England looming as a low grey mass in the distance.
“There it is, George. That’s your home.”
- End of Book One -
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Books Two and Three of “The Archers” saga are also available in Kindle editions. Book Four will be released early in 2015. Readers may also enjoy the similarly action-packed novels of the author’s “The Soldier” saga.
All of Martin Archer’s novels are available as Kindle eBooks (Search Amazon.com for “Martin Archer.”) and will sooner or later be available in print.
Other exciting eBooks by Martin Archer
“Gone for a Soldier” (Fighting in Korea begins a soldier’s career)
“Peace and Conflict” (With the Legion and then the US in Vietnam)
“War Breaks Out” (The Soviet Union invades Germany and NATO fights)
“War in the East” (US soldiers and Marines are involved when China invades Russia)
“The Islamic–Israeli War” (An Islamic Coalition attacks Israel and forever changes the Middle East)
Sample Pages from Book Two
“THE ARCHER’S CASTLE”
People on the Falmouth dock and the ships tied along it are standing up and looking as more of our galleys come into Falmouth harbor. It’s no wonder they are – that’s Harold’s galley and he’s leading in a long string of galleys and our other cog under its captain sergeant, Martin, the archer from Yorkshire. If my older brother Thomas’s count is correct that’s almost all of our ships.
Of the twenty one galleys and two cogs that left Malta, all but one of our galleys are now in Falmouth Harbor. The missing galley is somehow gone just like our two prizes from Tunis that did not show up at the rendezvous. So today we have twenty galleys and two cargo cogs here in Falmouth harbor with eleven hundred and ninety two men including ten of the original one hundred and ninety two archers that set out from Windsor with King Richard seven years ago. That is, of course, if none of our men have run since we last counted before we left Malta.
One of the cogs has an interesting cargo that we don’t understand or know what to do with. The cog Albert and his crew cut out when we raided the harbor at Tunis is full of little wooden chests containing balls and bricks of smelly flower paste. My priestly brother Thomas thinks they are the same as what the poxed captain was being fed when we bought our first ships off him – the ships we bought to get home on with the coins we took from the Bishop of Damascus after Thomas killed the thieving sonofabitch.
He’s usually right, my brother Thomas is – he memorized some of the bible and read all nine books in the monastery before he left to rescue me and take me crusading with that untrustworthy bastard who thinks he’s our king.
The paste is very interesting. It takes the pain away from wounds. At least it did for poor Peter when he got his hand sliced and it rotted so bad that he died despite the barber bleeding him. Worth its weight in gold to soldiers isn’t it? I wonder where it comes from? Thomas thinks we should ask the Saracens where they are getting it the next time we catch one.
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Sample pages from Book One of “The Soldier” saga
Book One
SOLDIERS AND MARINES
Dust and gravel periodically spray out behind the Jeep as it slowly backs up towards the top of the low ridge. The early morning sun is bright and already hot, and the periodic sound of thunder in the background has been coming closer for two days.
Three men are in the slowly backing Jeep as it moves over the abandoned farm land and up towards the ridgeline. The passenger sits impassively almost as if he’s in a trance. The gunner on the mounted machine gun crouches and squints down the barrel into the sun as he constantly moves it to the left and right. He is chewing furiously on a mouthful of gum.
Everyone in the Jeep is trying to be as quiet as possible. But it’s not working because of the engine noise and the periodic burst of sound each time the Jeep runs over a patch of rocks or breaks a stick. Each of the men is terribly anxious without saying it out loud.
The occupants of the Jeep are nervous. And rightly so. It’s the morning of July 29th and thirty four days earlier the Soviet-trained North Korean army poured over the border into South Korea. It catches the poorly equipped and under trained garrison troops of the South Koreans and their allies by surprise - they are everywhere overrun and either killed or pushed back.
The sky is partially cloudy and the flat field of the upward sloping rocky farmland is empty of life and crops. There are great towering white clouds to the north, but at the moment the men are traveling in bright summer morning sunshine. It’s dusty and hot on the rough track across the abandoned farm. The mud ruts from a previous rain are baked hard and the men in the Jeep don’t know what they will find when they get to the top of the rise they are slowly approaching. But they are highly visible as they slowly bounce over the uneven ground and seriously worried about it.
“Careful, goddamn it, careful,” the passenger hisses in an unnecessarily low voice as they slowly approach the summit. He is twisted around and trying to see over the crouching gunner behind the gun mount. The driver is slowly backing the Jeep upwards towards the top of the rise.
Damn the passenger thought to himself as he tries to stand so he can see better, and just when I was about to rotate back home for a new assignment. He is about six feet tall with close cropped gray hair, about 190 pounds, and, although he never did really think about it, glad he only has daughters who won’t be called to serve.
He’d picked up the driver’s carbine ten minutes ago, checked its banana clip to make sure it is full, and clicked its fire selector from single shot to automatic. The carbine had ridden wedged between him and the driver until they reached the start of the gradually rising farm land a couple of miles back. Now, holding the carbine in his right hand like a pistol and trying to keep his balance by holding the edge of the lowered windshield with his left, he is standing as high as possible in the slowly bouncing and rocking Jeep in an effort to see around the gunner and over the top of the ridge.
The passenger is a fairly chunky man wearing the shoes and summer uniform of a garrison officer instead of boots and battledress. His pants are filthy and ripped, but that’s what he’d been wearing when the war started and he hadn’t taken them off yet. There is a colonel’s badge on the summer soft cap he’d grabbed off the bedroom table and jammed on his head when he’d gotten the 3am call about the invasion and rushed to headquarters.
Brown hair streaked with white pokes out from under the Colonel’s cap. It was cropped short and neat when the war started, but it hasn’t been cut or combed for weeks. He is forty two years old and desperately needs a shave and something to eat. He’d been the commander of a tank battalion in Germany during the big war and knows trouble when he sees it.
What happened? Why weren’t we ready? Even bouncing along in the Jeep he can’t get the disbelief out of his mind. Once again the US and the UK have been caught flat footed and ill-equipped.
The Jeep lurches to a stop at his whispered order. He hoists himself on the barrel of the carbine and slowly raises himself up as high as possible. Damn, still not far enough to see what’s on the other side. But he isn’t taking any chances. He’d quickly learned in Germany that it is really stupid to show yourself on a ridge line until you are damn sure you know what’s on the other side.
He hasn’t slept for days, his clothes are filthy, and he is totally exhausted. Being worried and backing slowly up a hill in a jeep brought back fleeting memories of the earlier war. He almost smiles at the memory. He’s a professional.
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(Search Amazon.com for “Martin Archer.” He would appreciate your suggestions and can be contacted at [email protected].)
istorical Fiction: exciting novel about Marines and Naval Warfare of medieval England set in feudal times with knights,Templars, and crusaders during Richard the lionhearted's reign
The Archer: Historical Fiction: exciting novel about Marines and Naval Warfare of medieval England set in feudal times with knights,Templars, and crusaders during Richard the lionhearted's reign Page 19