Priest's Tale

by Turney, S. J. A.

  He glanced across at his purser.

  "You've been to Carthage itself if I remember rightly. Anything useful you can add? I've only seen it from the coast."

  Nicolo shrugged. "I just took an hour or two to look around. They say if you look carefully enough, treasures can be found lying on the ground. I only found dried shit and dead animals, myself. The whole place is one big shitty ruin. People still live there, but they're peasants in tents or badly-built huts. I think they're the Berber desert dweller types."

  Parmenio nodded. "I've heard tell that the poor and those of dubious professions live there, 'cause they don't have to pay taxes to the Emir the way they would in Tunis. Doubt we'll find any help there. We'd be more likely to be murdered as Christians than aided as enemies of the Turk."

  Skiouros, finally patting and smoothing down his outer cassock, jammed the hat on his head and allowed the veil to fall at his neck. Reaching up, he rubbed the burgeoning beard that now filled out his chin, two weeks' growth making him look ever more priestly. "In fairness, this Hassan is a piece of shit, but I would hardly call myself an 'enemy of the Turk'. In fact, Sultan Bayezid still has my allegiance. Better the Ottoman than the Mamluk, for certain!"

  "Can you hear what they're saying?" Parmenio asked, blithely ignoring Skiouros' comments and gesturing upwards with a pointed finger.

  Skiouros lifted the veil and cupped his ear. The murmur of Turkish was dampened by the deck that lay between, and he could almost make out the odd word, but not enough to make sense of it all.

  "Not really. Think I can hear the boats being lowered into the water though."

  Nicolo nodded. "Me too. I suspect we're about to go ashore."

  "What do we do with all these supplies?" the purser gestured to the crate, behind which the store of purloined goods lay hidden.

  "We'll have to leave them" Parmenio sighed. "It was a nice thought, but we'll never get them past the guards."

  Skiouros shook his head, a sly grin crossing his face.

  "If you'd ever had to live off your wits, you'd know there's always a way."

  Crossing the space, he edged aside the crate. His hand closed on the eight arrows and he withdrew four.

  "You'll never hide them" Nicolo frowned.

  Skiouros laughed and took the missiles by head and flight, one at a time, snapping them across his knee and discarding most of the shaft. As he finished and threw aside the broken remnants, he offered an arrow head with three inches of shaft jutting below to each man.

  "You can put these in boots or up your sleeves for when you need them. I'd advise against the codpiece as a hiding place unless you're happy with diminished chances of fatherhood."

  As the three men took the proffered arrow heads and peered at them before searching for a good place to secrete them, Skiouros turned to the next article, retrieving three of the four-foot lengths of rope they had cut from the stores.

  "These will go around your waist, hidden beneath your doublet. Just make sure you get them beneath your underclothes so that they're well padded, or the shape might stand out too much."

  Leaving his friends desperately trying to secrete the ropes as suggested, Skiouros hooked out a tool handle - an ash shaft some three feet long.

  "No way you can hide that" Parmenio shook his head.

  Skiouros simply raised an eyebrow and crouched, taking one of the spare lengths of rope. Lifting his cassocks, he tied the shaft to his thigh, such that only a foot of the wood jutted out below the knee on the outside of his leg. As soon as the cassock fell back and he stood once more, there was not a sign of the handle - not even a tell-tale shape in the material.

  "You're good at this" Cesare noted with a sly smile. "Someday I will draw from you the tale of your past, Master Skiouros, and you can enlighten me as to how an escaped slave of the Turk managed to learn the high guard, speak several languages, and has 'experience' with black powder."

  "Speaking of which" noted Skiouros, reaching into the space once more and withdrawing two of the small linen bundles, "there is always a chance we might find a use for these."

  The three men instinctively stepped a few paces away from Skiouros as he stuffed the small parcels of powder down beneath his robes, attaching the twine ties to his vest so that they hung to either side of his torso beneath the armpits.

  "Not entirely comfortable" Skiouros smiled, "but quite well hidden, wouldn't you say?"

  Parmenio opened his mouth to suggest that Skiouros not flap his arms so much unless he wanted to detonate them, but then closed it again, pointing down the hold towards the stern. Skiouros turned to look and saw the booted feet of the Turkish sailors descending the ladder to the hold. Stepping to the side, he pushed the evidence of their theft deeper into the darkness and shifted the crate back into position, hiding the remnants.

  "Alright," Skiouros said with a deep breath. "No one makes any move to escape until I give you the nod. It'll all have to be using hand signals or winks and the like - Hassan speaks Italian and Greek, and we can't be sure none of his men do the same. Just watch me as closely as you can. As soon as I see a chance open up, I'll let you know, but you'll need to be ready as we'll have to move straight away. I'll get us away from them if I can, and then Nicolo and Parmenio will have to take over guiding us. If anything goes wrong, we'll just have to improvise and fight our way out."

  "Or die doing so" Nicolo sighed. "Better dead than a life lived as a catamite to some toothless, horny old Berber bastard.

  "Just be ready" Skiouros repeated, his voice falling to a whisper as two sailors paused at the far end of the narrow passage along the hold and started shouting at them in Turkish, demanding they approach, and beckoning with the hands that didn't hold a curved blade.

  Skiouros stepped into the corridor first, aware that he would need to take the lead position if he were to spot any opportunity and be visible to the others.

  "Let's get this over with."

  Chapter Nine - Of freedom's call

  Skiouros felt the crunch of the gravel beneath his feet, hastily shod once more in his fine - if scuffed and dirty - boots before leaving the hold. It felt as though the world had reached out and grasped him once more, clutching him to her bosom. It was hard to countenance just how much of a relief it felt.

  A quick summary of Skiouros' seafaring life left him in no doubt as to how strongly he belonged on land: a voyage from Istanbul to Crete in the guise of a sick monk, spending his entire trip taking emetics and vomiting, and then a voyage from Crete to… well, from Crete… in which he had been captured and humiliated by a renegade Turk and was now to be sold into slavery. Two for two - hardly a good record. On the bright side, unless they managed to break out between here and Tunis, he would hardly have to worry about future sea voyages, since he would most likely end up in the deserts to the south playing pretty boy to a Berber chief, tending caravan animals or labouring on a farm scratching out agriculture on the edge of the desert.

  The crunch of gravel.

  Bliss, despite what it heralded.

  Parmenio and Nicolo looked less enamoured with their new situation, though Cesare Orsini seemed to be taking the whole thing remarkably stoically. Strangely, since they had first met on board the Isabella, Skiouros had only seen Orsini show a strong outburst of emotion once. Irrespective of slavery, pirates and fighting for their lives, the only thing that seemed to have raised a strong response from the nobleman was the mention of his own family and their links with the Pope and the King of Napoli. The man certainly was an enigma.

  Skiouros peered across at him as the Italian stretched and rubbed the small of his back, his eyes closed as he relaxed in the searing sunshine, almost as though rising from his morning's bed without a care in the world. The Greek shook his head.

  Parmenio and Nicolo, on the other hand, were glowering with deep-seated hatred at their captors as they took in the Turkish force surrounding them.

  It appeared that Hassan was taking no chances, not that Skiouros would have expected
him to - the 'butcher' was clearly not a man given to error. He had left at least two dozen men on board the Yarim Ay, including the homunculus Mehmi - enough armed men to be certain no trouble could arise from the chained galley slaves and sufficient men and officers to put the ship to sea and find a safe haven should the Emir's own galleys happen by and spot the Turks languishing on their coastline. This left two dozen more men under the command of Etci Hassan Reis himself, rowing ashore to escort the prisoners to the market in Tunis. As the armed and brutal sailors continued to arrive from the ship's boat and form up around the prisoners, Skiouros felt their chances of escape ebb with every fresh set of footsteps. Four men against almost thirty? It seemed unlikely, to say the least.

  The first boat had brought the captain ashore with seven of his men. Four of those had armed themselves with matchlock muskets, slow-matches sizzling away, which had stayed unerringly trained on the prisoners as they were loaded onto the second boat and then ferried across. Skiouros had made no suggestion of an escape attempt as they first landed, aware - from the fact that the barrels of their guns barely wavered and remained locked on the targets' breastbones wherever they moved - that these men were good shots. To attempt to run at that point would have been plain suicide.

  And then the rest had arrived and Skiouros had begun to wonder whether he'd have been better running and taking his chance with a musket ball.

  All moot now, of course.

  A quick glance around at the ruins among which they stood revealed that it had once been a large structure, perhaps even large enough to accommodate a war galley like the Yarim Ay. Now the walls were little more that knee- or waist-high remnants and rubble had piled up next to them like the snowdrifts that plagued Istanbul in the harsher winters. There were signs that this particular ruin had been used as accommodation fairly recently, piton holes in the stone where a tent roof had been stretched across, using poles to create the pitch for height. The remnants of bedding, tattered rugs and the bones of past meals lay scattered, and along with them numerous pieces of debris from shattered jugs to leather fragments to snapped spoons.

  Skiouros paused and noted the position of some of the more interesting debris.

  Now two dozen men surrounded them, and one of those was approaching with a solid-looking iron chain hanging between his hands. The sailor glanced between the four prisoners and, seeing Skiouros watching him intently, strode across, a comrade at his shoulder. Gesturing to his friend, the man found the end of the chain and looped a few feet of it. The second guard stepped behind Skiouros and grasped both his hands, yanking them around behind him painfully and holding them in a vice-like grip. As Skiouros winced at the pain, the first sailor dropped the loop of chain around the prisoner's neck and slid it so that the thing was tighter than any collar, biting into the skin whenever Skiouros swallowed or moved his head even fractionally. Satisfied that it was tight enough and would never stretch to go over the priest's head, the sailor produced a small padlock from a pouch at his side and slipped the lock's shackle through the chain before snapping it shut with a gentle click that might as well be the doom-laden boom of a tomb door slamming shut as far as the captives were concerned.

  Secured, the two men let go of Skiouros and he stretched his arms and rubbed his painful hands, swallowing painfully within the choking loop of chain. At least they'd put him first in the line, Skiouros thought as he saw a guard escorting Orsini over, while the other looped a few more feet of chain a mere two yards down the line from the first padlock.

  Skiouros shuffled himself so that he could just see the padlock's edge out of the corner of his eye if he strained to look down, though most of it remained hidden by his chin and burgeoning beard.

  He smiled.

  The Turks were master engineers and great inventors and innovators - the ease with which the once-great Byzantine Empire had fallen to Mehmet the Great stood simple testament to that. But a padlock was a simple thing and not much improved on since the days of the great founder of Constantinople. And a padlock hardly presented a difficulty to a man who'd spent a decade in the world's greatest city, living by theft and subterfuge. It would be a lot easier, of course, if he had the tools, but these things could not be helped.

  His eyes dropped to the debris he had been investigating earlier and it took him only a moment to re-locate what he was looking for: a broken eating utensil, cast aside among the wreckage before the shabby, impoverished inhabitants moved on.

  Just right. That sharpened metal spike which was all that remained of the spoon would be ideal for tripping the pins in the lock at his throat. Trying to look casual, he turned to Cesare, who was now fastened in the same manner a couple of yards away while the guards went to work on Nicolo, third in the line. With a jerk of the head, Skiouros beckoned Orsini towards him and, as soon as the man took a step, easing the tension on the chain, Skiouros dipped and scooped up the broken spoon, using a finger to push it up the sleeve of his cassock. As he came upright, the metal spike disappearing into his cuff, Skiouros made sure to stagger the other way also and then clutch at his head as though he'd been caught momentarily off balance.

  "A picklock?" Orsini whispered. "You are a constant surprise, Master Skiouros."

  "I don't know about that, but I'll surprise myself if I can work out a way to get all four locks open without being noticed. Mine I can do in moments without drawing attention, but the other three…"

  Orsini pursed his lips.

  "Can it be taught in minutes? I am a fast learner."

  Skiouros frowned. Under normal circumstances he would have said no, plainly. But there was just the faintest possibility that a man with Cesare's sharp wits might be able to pick it up almost instinctively.

  "No better time to test that" Skiouros muttered, turning so that the guards who could see them were busily involved in a discussion and comparing their weapons, not paying a great deal of attention to the prisoners.

  "Try to look like you’re attempting to loosen the chain for breath" Skiouros advised quietly, and Cesare obliged readily.

  "Right" Skiouros muttered. "I'm going to do mine and talk you through it, just once, and quite fast, else we'll be noticed. Ready?"

  Orsini nodded, still pulling at his neck chain.

  "Here goes" Skiouros whispered, grabbing at the padlock, allowing the pick to slide out of his sleeve and into his grip. "Thumbnail in the keyhole, jerk the cylinder as far to the left as you can, so that it's very slightly misaligned."

  Cesare nodded, peering intently while maintaining the fiction of struggling with his own chains. His view was partially obscured by Skiouros' flapping black veil, which aided him in keeping the activity so well hidden from the Turks.

  "In goes the pick, making sure that you don't knock the cylinder back into line. Push the spike in to the full extent and then angle it to feel upwards. You'll find a sort of springy pressure. Push up until you hear a faint click. We're lucky as these are really simple locks with only three pins. Pull the pick slightly out until you feel the second pin and repeat the procedure. Then same again with the outer pin and then…"

  Skiouros' padlock snapped open with a click, though he kept it in place and pushed it so that it was almost closed again, sliding it around so that it sat beneath the back veil of his skouphos hat.

  "Astounding" Orsini smiled. "And why do the pins not drop back into place as you leave them? Because of the cylinder's angle?"

  Skiouros nodded. "It's a simple failing of all padlocks. Unless the cylinder cannot be misaligned, it is only a matter of patience and practice."

  Orsini grinned and Skiouros whispered "here", palming the broken spoon to the Italian. The nobleman almost dropped it as the chain jerked and the pair turned to see that all four of them were now fastened together, the far end looped around the wrist of a very burly guard. The captives were each separated by two yards of chain.

  Already the guards were starting to move, and Skiouros found that the organisation of the prisoners had placed him at the b
ack of the slave line, and not the front as he'd expected. Another setback.

  How could he possibly get signals to the others from behind?

  It would have to be done through whispered commands, passed down along the line. That would seriously slow any attempt to flee.

  Skiouros ground his teeth. Every moment was bringing another setback.

  "Memorise what I said. You need to have the padlock open long before the time comes to break." He turned from scanning the ruins to see Cesare smiling at him and settling his padlock so that it appeared still closed. Once more Skiouros was forced to reassess this man. He was a natural. What they could do together! A month of practice and they could own the world.

  Hassan bellowed the order to move and the guard at the fore jerked the chain, almost pulling Parmenio from his feet and starting the slave column moving. Skiouros shuffled slightly forwards and whispered "I doubt Nicolo and the captain will find the lock as easy. As we move, whisper the explanation to Nicolo and pass him the tool and we'll just have to hope he's more nimble than he looks. We may have to find a way to help them, though I have no idea how. We're going to have to play it all by ear. You're the one who's closer to them and can see what's going on, so if they can't do it, you may have to be the one to let me know when we can help them."

  Orsini simply nodded and moved forward, head down as though dejected and accepting his lot - in truth trying to further conceal the fact that his padlock was not properly fastened.

  The two dozen men with them were taking as few chances as Hassan himself, making sure they kept on all sides of the column at all times, providing no easy escape route. What did they expect a bunch of chained prisoners to do?

  The column moved out of the ruins and Skiouros peered to left and right. Another set of low, ramshackle broken walls betrayed the presence of a once thriving street - an arcade of shops perhaps - through which they passed. Ahead, a low colonnade indicated that the huge, square shape had once been something of import - perhaps a market or a temple, or a forum such as those that could still be found in Istanbul if one explored a little.