Priest's Tale

by Turney, S. J. A.

  And yet his feet were pounding the road as if he were moving with a single-minded purpose, taking him ever further from his friends and their unpleasant fate. The alley.

  Perhaps he was right to run? Orsini had told him to go, after all.

  But while Skiouros was an expert with a lifetime's experience of fooling people, there was simply no way to fool himself in this regard. Not just selfishness, but even cowardice! With no sense of relief, just the dreadful knowledge that he had proved the old Romani beggar absolutely correct in every way, he rounded the corner…

  …and smashed into an outstretched arm.

  A big man in the white tunic of a local Hafsid guard, curved sword slung at his side, stood like a mountain of toughened meat, barring his route to safety. The Hafsids were no lovers of the Turk… but then he was an escaped slave.

  As Skiouros staggered to regain his footing, the big man shoved him, roughly, sending him tottering back out into the main street. Skiouros, now in a panic that almost overrode the shame pressing down on him, spun in a mad daze. The crowd were closing in on him, angry now. An entirely Muslim crowd. They might - surprisingly - have nothing against the Orthodox Church, as the other priest who had contacted them seemed to indicate, and they may dislike the Ottoman Empire, but they were in no mood to let trouble brew on account of an escaped slave. All exits were sealed off now.

  Skiouros turned to see Etci Hassan glaring that awful pale-grey glare at him, a guard by his side levelling his musket and aiming for the priest-slave's face, his slow-match glowing and giving off a trail of smoke as he prepared to squeeze the trigger and fire.

  The Greek closed his eyes for his death, too cowardly in the end even to face that like a man.

  After half a dozen heartbeats with no fatal bullet grinding is way through his skull and brains, he opened one eye. While the musket remained trained on him, two guards were approaching, weapons in hand.

  Another failure.

  Not one of them had made it to freedom.

  He could not even find the strength of character to resist or object as the two guards grabbed him, punched him a few times, kicked his knees from under him and then dragged him back to the slave train, his toes dragging in the dirt.

  He watched miserably as Hassan beckoned to a guard - the one who had padlocked them all together back in Carthage's ruined port - and quietly, in a voice like icy death and accompanied by the freezing white glare of his eerie eyes, told the guard that he was a worthless fool and an incompetent. The guard lowered his gaze to the ground, muttering desperate pleas to his commander, unable to meet that disconcerting glare.

  Skiouros noted with no surprise and no pleasure just how fast Hassan's sword arm was as it swept his blade from its sheath in a tight arc and down through the man's lowered neck, sending the penitent sailor's head bouncing across the road with unpleasant bony, meaty noises, where it rolled among the legs of the watching crowd.

  A jet of arterial crimson pumped from the severed stump and Hassan negligently stepped closer and pushed the still-standing sailor's corpse backwards to fall flat on the floor, the spray of gore now pumping onto Skiouros' own black vestments.

  He didn't care. He was beyond such cares now.

  Parmenio and Nicolo had received a couple of blows from their captors despite having never moved. Orsini was being held up by a guard, his own legs no longer able to support him. Hassan had been pushed to a dangerous point, where his anger was so hot and powerful that he had authorised punishment of the captives despite the fact that such damage could seriously reduce their value at auction.

  And it had been Skiouros' doing. He had exhorted them to escape. He had showed them the time and the method and had essentially given them up to a beating from their captors while he attempted to flee to safety.

  And yet, as Parmenio and Nicolo turned to look at him while another Turk retrieved the padlocks from the floor for refitting the chains, both regarded him with a strange respect for his attempt, tinged with pity that he had been recaptured. They held him in no way accountable.

  If only he could say the same for himself.

  His heart felt heavier than it had ever done.

  "Chain them properly, bind their hands and then we move on to the Suq-al-Birka immediately" Hassan snapped. "I want to be back at sea and making for the rendezvous as soon as possible. And any further stupidity will be met with the edge of my blade, be it stupidity on behalf of slave or crewmember."

  Skiouros stood like a sheep, uncaring and unfeeling as the chain was replaced around his neck and the padlock fastened once more.

  It appeared they would be sold after all.

  Chapter Ten - Of human traffic

  The four prisoners were shoved roughly into a stone room of surprisingly large dimensions, given how jumbled and confused the Suq-al-Birka had appeared from the outside. Light was provided by a square opening in the roof at the huge chamber's centre and even that was secured with a grille of metal that destroyed all hope of escape. Two corners of the huge room - roughly a third of the total space - had been sealed off with cage-like bars, creating two animal pens - one for men and one for women - as was evident immediately, given the occupants. Skiouros briefly raised his forlorn gaze from the floor to take in the room, not with any hopeful view to escape, but with a miserable, self-interested depression.

  The men and women in the cages were mostly very dark, even ebony-skinned Africans, stripped naked and festering in their own filth. In the open space between the cages, a post stood - resembling a pel for sword practice - but the use of this post was no such happy exercise. The shackles attached to the top and the dried blood that coated the floor around it told unhappy tales of its usage across the months and years.

  Another corner held a large trough of water, fed by a pipe and trickling away down a drain, keeping the supply full. Three buckets stood next to it, one with a ladle.

  As soon as the captives and their Turkish guard appeared, the cages broke into an uproar of pleadings, screams and imprecations, and Skiouros dropped his gaze again. He could feel the disapproving looks of the other three. For the last ten minutes through the streets, his companions had kept themselves alert and hopeful, watching for any possibility of a further attempt. Skiouros, disgusted at what he had discovered in his own soul and having abandoned all hope, had merely shuffled along meekly, keeping his gaze down. His friends were silently urging him with their eyes towards further hope.

  But there was no hope.

  Not on the journey, and certainly not now they had arrived and were to become caged animals to be bought and sold at the whim of their captors.

  The room had two doors. The one through which they had entered passed through a well-guarded room. The other one was equally secured with locks, though where it led, who knew? Probably the sale place. It would have interested Skiouros, had he been of a more positive outlook, to note that Hassan deliberately stayed outside the door with a few of his men, sending only four sailors to push them inside, and then allowing the Hafsid guards to deal with them from that point. Clearly Hassan had no faith in the word of the locals and no intention of endangering himself and his crew by walking willingly into a slave chamber.

  The corsair captain began to speak with the commander of the Hafsid guards, rattling away in Arabic. Skiouros wished that he had ignored the Latin that the scribe had been pushing on him in Crete and devoted some time to the study of this eastern exotic tongue. But then how could he have known that he would wind up here in the slave market of Tunis, unable to comprehend his jailors.

  "What are they saying?" hissed Parmenio, shrinking away from one of the native guards who glared at him for opening his mouth unbidden.

  "No idea" sighed Skiouros. "It's Arabic, not Turkish."

  "They negotiate" croaked a voice from the male cage, the Italian words heavy with an Arabic accent.

  Skiouros, despite his misery, looked up and spotted the man sitting cross legged by the bars of his cage. The old fellow with the sh
aved head and the grey beard scratched his scalp.

  "You remain the property of the Turk until a sale is agreed, and then the degraded filth that is the Emir's men will take their cut and your friend will walk away with his fortune. They negotiate because the standard procedure is to strip you naked and sell or burn your possessions, then give you a good check over, perhaps abuse you a little depending on which guard it is and whether he's recently sated, and then you are washed and imprisoned until the event."

  "And the negotiation?" asked Parmenio, frowning.

  "Your Turk believes you will fetch a good price as you are, because the clothes identify you as worthy stock. Without them, you are just another group of Christians taken in a raid. He is probably right, but the guards still do not like this."

  Skiouros nodded sadly. It was hardly their concern any more. Degradation would be their lot now.

  After a few moments the guards grabbed Nicolo and pushed him against the wall. The purser bellowed out in anger and struggled futilely, given the number of guards that were now in the room. Skiouros could not quite see what was happening as three men surrounded the sailor, but a moment later there was a bark of triumph and the length of rope that had been around Nicolo's waist was cast into the open area of floor. A few seconds more, and the broken arrow followed. For another minute or so, Nicolo was searched roughly, though nothing else of interest appeared - only a few coins and personal objects being cast onto the pile. As soon as the search was complete, Nicolo was pushed aside and left to refasten his clothes while the guards moved on to Parmenio and repeated the sequence, finding the hidden tools and various other personal goods and throwing them on the growing pile. Having ascertained that no violence or other abuse was likely, since Nicolo had remained untouched, Parmenio simply surrendered himself to the search and was shoved aside when it was completed.

  Hassan watched from the doorway and then rattled off some more Arabic with the guard - a short exchange of some subject on which they finally apparently agreed, before the Turk disappeared out into the other room, taking his sailors with him.

  It appeared they had now been delivered into the hands of the Hafsids.

  "What did they say" asked Parmenio as he adjusted his shirt from the rummaging.

  "Your Turk just gave them a preferential cut in order to get you into this afternoon's sale. He seems to want to be away in a hurry. No surprise, being a Turk in Tunis."

  As the old man in the cage watched, Cesare was subjected to the same search, the rough handling causing sharp intakes of breath as they touched the bruises and damage of Hassan's beating.

  "Looks like our cache of tools will be of no aid" Parmenio grumbled, watching the pile of goods on the floor grow with the third rope and arrow head.

  "If I had a source of flame" Skiouros sighed miserably, "I could destroy the whole building in a heartbeat." To illustrate his meaning, he lifted his arms just a little. Parmenio and Nicolo backed away a few paces instinctively.

  "No matter, though."

  As Cesare was pushed to his friends, holding his side painfully, one of the white-clad Hafsid guards rattled something off at Skiouros in Arabic.

  "I don't speak your language" he said in Turkish, frowning. The guard glowered angrily.

  "He demands that you surrender all your goods, including the rope and arrow that he is certain you have."

  Skiouros nodded bleakly. "Tell him I will."

  "They won't search him?" Parmenio asked in surprise.

  "Christians are a people of the book. Our faith demands that we treat you with respect."

  "That I'd not heard before."

  The old man shrugged. "Theory and practice are different in every field. The guards will not go easy on you, for you may be Christians, yet you are also slaves, but they would rather not anger a holy man any more than they must, and they would certainly rather not force a search upon him. Deliver your goods to them and they will be satisfied."

  Skiouros began pulling out the arrow head and rope from his vestments.

  "They don't expect anything else" hissed Parmenio meaningfully.

  The 'priest' nodded. "But it will show good faith if I go beyond expectations." With a sigh, he bent and unfastened the tool handle from his leg, throwing it onto the pile. Turning to the guard, he gestured at the prayer rope at his waist. There was a brief discussion among the jailors - after all, it could be used in an emergency as a noose - but they finally reached a consensus and shook their heads, indicating that he could keep it.

  "I see your good faith only goes so far?" Cesare smiled, subtly indicating his own armpits gingerly. Skiouros gave a weak, hollow smile.

  "We may yet find an open flame and I would like to think it would be better to be engulfed in the flames of freedom than chained, whipped and abused for the rest of my short, painful life."

  "Never give up hope" smiled Orsini. "A man of God should have more faith than that."

  As two of the guard gathered up the pitiful pile of possessions and hauled them out into the other room, the rest opened the door of the cage, using their clubs to batter fingers away from the bars, two of them with swords drawn to ward against any trouble.

  As the door swung open, three of the more desperate, naked Africans inside made to run. Club blows rained upon them for half a dozen heartbeats and then their bruised, bloodied forms were roughly shoved back into the throng.

  The Hafsid guard spoke quickly to them, the old man in the cage translating.

  "You are expected to make no trouble. It would be unfortunate for your owner if the guards had to 'damage' you. You will be kept in the cage for only one hour, until the afternoon sale, when you will be taken out and added to today's stock. He also says that you all smell like a camel's rectum and that you should be washed."

  Nicolo glared at the guard. "No man gets to soap me down without buying me dinner first!"

  "Do not worry unduly. If they decide to wash you it is a short and painless process."

  "Not for them" grunted Nicolo meaningfully.

  "Come on" Skiouros sighed, walking into the cage. The others followed quickly and as soon as the door was shut and locked and the guards made their way out of the chamber, Parmenio approached the old man.

  "I'm surprised to find an Arab who knows Italian?"

  "Not all of us are thugs and killers."

  "What's your story?"

  The old man simply shrugged. "I mean no offence, friend" he said to the captain, "but we are slaves to be sold and abused, and I will languish here a week or more yet, while you will go to the block and have a new master in an hour. I have no desire to make new friends only to lose them moments later."

  Parmenio stared at the man, but the Arab simply climbed to his feet and shuffled off among the other captives. A few were looking hungrily at the four new arrivals, probably deciding whether an attempt to take their clothes would be too costly in blood and pain. A few others were looking at them with clearly very different - and highly disturbing - ideas.

  The four prisoners drew slightly closer together in the cage's corner close to the door.

  "What now?" Nicolo asked quietly.

  "Now," Parmenio sighed "we try and think of a way out of here."

  "Now," Skiouros corrected "we stay here and try not to get raped or attacked long enough to be sold into slavery and die a slow, long death in captivity."

  Orsini turned to Skiouros, his eyes narrowed.

  "This defeatism does not become you, Master Skiouros of Constantinople."

  "Leave me alone."

  "Hardly. You are our best hope for freedom, and you still carry the only tool to that end which we possess." The young nobleman pursed his lips and cast a quick glance at the two sailors beside them before leaning close to Skiouros and hissing with clear irritation. "I care not whether you are wallowing in self-pity because you ran from us or because you got caught again, but know this: you went with our blessing and returned with our pity. We have no time for you to explore the depth of your s
oul and just because you wear the robes of a priest does not make you any the less the man who drove a sword through a Turk to save my life. Send this self-pitying heap of blubber back to where he came from and sit up and think."

  Skiouros stared at Orsini. This was only the second emotional outburst he had ever heard from the nobleman and the strength in the words jerked him some way out of the fug of misery that had settled upon him.

  "Good" the Italian said quietly, looking deep into his eyes. "Shame at your flight, then. Stop wallowing and turn your anger away from yourself and to our captors, for they are the ones who deserve it. Now what can we do?"

  Skiouros shook his head.

  "Nothing."

  "There is always something. And you are resourceful."

  Skiouros stared helplessly at his friend and realised now that Parmenio and Nicolo were both peering intently at him too.

  "Honestly. There's nothing. This cage has locks that I may be able to pick given the time and the tools, but I have neither. And if we did get out, we're then sealed into the room. Through the door from which we entered is a room full of men who would love nothing more than to cut us down. The other door likely leads to the sale area, and if the auction is in less than an hour, they will be out there too, preparing. There's no escape."

  Orsini nodded sharply.

  "Alright. So what about when we get out there?"

  "I have no idea. I've never seen a slave auction."

  "I have" Parmenio said quietly. "In Cairo. Not pretty. It'll be busy as all hell, swarming with buyers round the edge. We'll be dragged up to the block one at a time, which is the only place where there's any space. We'll be manacled, of course. And then we'll be auctioned, and bought. If they're anything like the bastard sons-of-whores Mamluks in Cairo, we'll probably be branded then for our new owners."

  "Security?" Orsini prompted.

  "Tight. All exits will be heavily guarded and there'll be plenty of guards around the sale block. As soon as the money's exchanged hands it's the responsibility of the buyer, but most of those will bring their own thugs with them and will take an even more proprietorial approach to us."