The Tenth Gift

by Jane Johnson

  A man laughed. “Pirates out of Sallee, and they’re taking us to the Devil.”

  At this there was a hubbub. Then, “Where is Sallee?” cried several voices at once.

  “Dick’ll tell thee—he’s been there afore. The man’s a regular Jonah on the ship of Tarshish, he is. He has no luck. Tell ’em thy tale, Dick Elwith.”

  In the aft of the hold a man coughed. A deep voice rumbled out into the darkness. “When I were a child my father told me that they that go down to the sea in ships shall see the Lord’s wonders, and so I purposed as soon as I was a man that I would give myself as a sailor on a London merchant vessel. And so I did. But my true motive was for material gain, and maybe that is why the Lord has cursed me, for I was driven by more than curiosity into the Lord’s creation and the wish to acknowledge His works and cry Him praise. I thought to amend my lot in life, and to rise by enterprise, but that was not to be my destiny.

  “It was 1618 I was first taken. Our ship was making her course for the Madeiras laden with salt and beef, but in the early morning about a hundred leagues off the Rock of Lisbon, we saw a sail to windward of us, who gave us chase. We made what sail we could from him but to no avail, for they gained upon us little by little no matter what course we took, or how hard we put her to it. At last, at the rising of the moon, he came close enough to hail us and inquired whence came our vessel. We answered, ‘London,’ and when we asked the same of him, he answered, ‘From Sallee,’ and laughed, and then we realized he was a Turkish pirate vessel and fired off a broadside upon him, but he sheered off. We tried sailing in all ways but found we could not wrong him no matter what we did. He kept astern of us all day and all night and in the morning put out Turkish colors, so we answered with English, and having no more powder in our store were forced to surrender, whereupon he grappled us close and set a hundred men upon our decks, who fell to cutting away the rigging till our ship was disabled and we were obliged to yield. They took us all off and scuttled our brave vessel and took us to Sallee, a Moorish port of northern Africa—”

  “Africa?” a woman wailed. “’Tis a continent of savages half a world away! Oh, shall I ever see my home again?”

  Many others cried out their anguish now at hearing this dire news. Cat sat dumbstruck, her mind a wilderness.

  “Let the man speak, for clearly he has survived his experiences, even if he has had the misfortune to be taken by the same color of pirate a second time.” Cat was sure this was the voice of the preacher, Walter Truran, for its resonance filled the wooden bowels of the boat just as it filled the wooden frame of the church, and she was soon to be proven right as he continued, “The Lord does not willingly afflict nor grieve His children, but we provoke Him to take His rod into His hand and lay it smartly upon our backs because that folly which is bound up in our hearts will not otherwise be lashed out of us. Thus He taught Judah, by the captivity of Babylon, to prize the freedom of Canaan.”

  “Amen!” cried a man, and “Amen,” other voices averred.

  “I haven’t earned His rod!” someone else complained. “I do not deserve to be taken by heathens—”

  “Shut up, the lot of ye canting souls. Speak on, Dick Elwith, and tell us what fate awaits us in this Moorish place.”

  “We were all taken into the marketplace there and stripped for all to see, and I had some knowledge of the sea and ships and thus was I sold to the master of a raiding vessel, and because I would not turn Turk, they put me to an oar. Three year I rowed, chained like a beast. I prayed to die, but the Lord had other plans for me. One day we were caught by a Dutchman, possessed of twenty guns and a determined skipper, and with his brave men he overhauled the pirate vessel, taking it back as a prize to his homeland, and from there I made my way home no richer but much wiser and swore never to put to sea again.”

  “What went wrong that thee find thyself in the same predicament once more?”

  Dick Elwith gave a great sigh. “Me. I was what went wrong. Greed got the better of me, so it did. Having no money and no prospects on land is a hard thing, and wishing for a wife I could tup without putting a bag over her head, I decided to make enough that I could take my pick, so I took service once more on a ship that sailed only in home waters, and foolishly thought myself safe. We ran passage between Plymouth and France, but never further afield than that, and thought ourselves safe enough. We were in the British Sea two weeks back when three ships were sighted flying Dutch colors, and we thought little of it, for their merchantmen are often seen in our waters and no trouble comes of it. So we let them get a lot closer than we should, but before too long we saw the true stamp of their faces, and I cried to the captain, Mr. Goodridge, who sits here now beside me, ‘Make sail and flee, for I know the type of men who sail this ship, and they are no Dutchmen, but corsairs out of Sallee, and they mean to take us as slaves!’ And Mr. Goodridge exclaimed in some horror and ordered us to loof up with all our sail, but to no purpose, for before we could make port we were overtaken. And as soon as they had taken us aboard, they ran up their own colors, three crescent moons on a green ground and the pavilion of Sallee, which shows a scimitar raised in anger above a skull and crossed bones.”

  Cat closed her eyes, remembering the effect that the sight of those sigils had had upon her.

  Another voice—presumably the said unlucky Captain Good-ridge—now intervened, “’Twas the Devil’s own work, such trickery. How were we to know they were Turks?”

  “It would have done thee no good had thee known and made sharp speed away, for these Sallee Rovers are swift and ruthless sailors and they never give up the ghost,” intoned Dick Elwith.

  After this, the stories came thick and fast. There were prisoners in that hold who had been taken from a dozen different vessels and who spoke a dozen different tongues. There were Spaniards and Flemish-speakers, and Devon men; two Irishmen and a whaling man from Newfoundland who had returned to see his family at Hartland. Fishing boats had been taken as well as merchantmen, but the raid on Penzance had been the first time the pirates had taken captives from a town, and the Reverend Truran’s congregation was the only crew containing women and children.

  “I’m sorry for the stink and the filth,” one man said solemnly. “They treat us as they would a herd of pigs, for we eat and we shit and we sleep where we sit.”

  Several women cried out in horror at this, but Dick Elwith rumbled a laugh. “Nay, not pigs, man, for the Turk cannot stomach a pig and will have nothing to do with them, neither to rear nor to eat. We’d be better off as swine, for then they would have left us be.”

  “’The swine, though he divide the hoof and be cloven-footed, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you,’” quoted the preacher. “Leviticus: chapter eleven. If you wish yourself a lower beast, man, you shame the Lord’s creation and damn your very soul.”

  The ship lurched and heeled over to starboard and there was a great groan from the sailors who recognized the new rhythm and pitch of the ocean. “We’ll be in the sea lanes now, heading south, and they’ll not stop now till they hit land,” one said lugubriously. “All the way to Morocco.”

  “How long will that take?” someone asked.

  “A month, with fair winds and good weather.”

  “And if there’s a storm?”

  Dick Elwith laughed, but it was a sound with no mirth in it. “If the ship founders, we drown.” And he shook his chains as if to illustrate his point, at which there was much lamentation.

  Preacher Truran called for quiet. “Stay thy fears: Do not let our captors know they have cowed our spirits. Our strength lies in the Lord and He will comfort us and protect us from the devils who have taken us. Harken to the words of the Psalm and gird up your courage!

  “Hear the right, O Lord, attend unto my cry, give ear unto my prayer, that goeth not out of feigned lips. Let my sentence come forth from thy presence; let thine eyes behold the things that are equal. Thou has proved mine heart; thou hast visited me in the night; thou has tried me, and shalt
find nothing; I am purposed that my mouth shall not transgress. Concerning the works of men, by the word of thy lips I have kept me from the paths of the destroyer—”

  A hoarse laugh rudely punctuated here, but the preacher merely raised his voice and kept on.

  “Hold up my goings in thy paths, that my footsteps slip not. I have called upon thee, for thou wilt hear me, O God. Incline thine ear unto me, and hear my speech. Shew thy marvellous loving kindness, O thou that savest by thy right hand them which put their trust in thee from those that rise up against them—”

  The second interruption was less easy to ignore. Light and noise broke abruptly into the hold as the door was opened from above and four men bearing lanterns and swords descended into the gloom, yelling in their dreadful, guttural speech and lashing out at random with great knouts of knotted rope. The first of them reached Walter Truran.

  “Shut noise, infidel dog!” he cried in a rough approximation of English, and whipped the tarred rope viciously across the preacher’s face.

  Undeterred, the reverend squared his shoulders and roared on, “Keep me as the apple of thy eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings! From the wicked that oppress me, from my deadly enemies, who compass me about—”

  Now there was a shining blade pressed against his throat. The preacher swallowed and at last subsided into silence.

  One of the other pirates brought out a key and unlocked the bar to which the Reverend Truran was shackled. He slid the bar free and gestured for the four men who had been attached to it to get up while the next pirate unlocked the bar to which Cat and three other women were shackled. “On your feet! Up, now, get up!”

  They did so unsteadily, for the ship was rolling, and in the semi-darkness it was hard to get one’s balance. One of the women— Cat had seen her in the market of a Tuesday but did not know her name—clutched at her sleeve, nearly pulling it off, and as she staggered to regain her footing, Cat felt the sole of her shoe sink into something soft and slimy. A foul smell permeated the already-foul air. All she could think, inconsequently, stupidly, was that her best stockings would be ruined, and her bewildered thoughts were still running in this foolish direction when she emerged at last upon the deck, whereupon a great blast of sharp salt air served to clear her head admirably.

  In the waist of the ship, the pirate chief sat on a carved wooden chair with his feet up on an ornamented box. On his left a man in a white robe and turban sat cross-legged with a board of smooth, pale wood in his lap and a writing implement in one hand. On the pirate chief’s other side a bulbous glass jar stood on the ground, half full of some clear liquid. The container tapered to a graceful point and was decorated at base and lid with perforated silver cuffs. A long tube wound around with purple silk and tassels snaked up from the halfway point of this remarkable container, terminating in an ornate silver beak, which he held to his lips. As the captives were whipped into view, the corsair took a long draw on the beak, making the liquid in the glass stir and bubble. Closing his eyes, he inhaled blissfully, then exhaled a great fragrant cloud. Truly, Cat thought, seeing him wreathed about by curls of smoke, he is the very Devil, with his fierce profile and his strange, dark skin, sitting there on his chair as if upon the throne of Hell in triumph over us poor sinners.

  He waved his hand at the pirates who had freed them from the hold, and they came forward, driving their captives before them. One of them prodded Cat painfully in the back, but when she turned to complain at such unmannerly treatment, she saw he was a man with blue eyes, carrot-colored hair, and a skin darkened only by a vast multiplicity of freckles, utterly unlike the outlandish-looking foreigners who made up the rest of the crew. Seeing her surprise, this man grinned at her and dropped a slow, insulting wink. “Not expectin’ an Englishman among this possel, eh, my bird?”

  Cat’s jaw dropped. “And not only an Englishman but a West Country man, from your accent,” she said, horrified. “For the love of God, can you not speak for us and save us from these savages?”

  The other laughed and spat. “I have no more love of your God than our fine raïs there: I turned Mahometan two year back. Gone is my birth name of Will Martin, and now they call me Ashab Ibrahim—Ginger Abraham—which suits me a darn sight better. In Plymouth I were a poor and despised man, a turner of staves and apprentice cooper, till I was pressed into what’s left of His Majesty’s navy, may God rot their souls. Then along came my saviors and sank our fine ship, took me and my fellows captive. So I turned renegadoe and went to sea with these fine picaroons. Now I have a house in Sallee, two wives priddier than all the women of Devonport put together, and more gold than I could have made in three lifetimes. Allah akbar. God is great! And do you know how I came by such a fortune?”

  She shook her head, though she already suspected the answer.

  He leaned in closer, conspiratorial. “For each slave we take and sell, I shall have a hundredth share for my part in the capture. If we get all of ‘ee to Sallee alive and kickin’ and in good enough fettle for the market, I’ll make a proper packet, and that’s for sure!” He winked again, lewdly. “Mebbe I’ll buy ’ee myself, me ’andsome. I bet that priddy hair could keep a man warm a’nights!”

  Cat stared at him, aghast. If even Christian men had turned against their fellows in such a cruel fashion, there was surely no justice in the world.

  “Ibrahim?” It was the seated man who had spoken.

  Will of Plymouth, now known as Ashab Ibrahim, snapped to attention. “Yes, Al-Andalusi?”

  “Silence! Only I speak now.”

  The renegade hung his head.

  “You there, man in black robe.” Al-Andalusi indicated the preacher with the beak of the strange device from which he had been smoking. “What your name?”

  Walter Truran threw back his shoulders and looked the pirate chief in the eye. “My name I shall keep between me and my God.”

  The raïs sighed. “How we ask family for ransom if you not give me your name?”

  The preacher looked even more outraged. “Ransom? Sir, my soul is my own. I shall not have my family blackmailed into buying it back from whatever godforsaken corner of the world you are taking us to!”

  “Sir—raïs—my name is John Polglaze, and I am alderman of the town of Penzance. Return me and my wife now to the bosom of our family and I promise you will be handsomely rewarded.”

  Al-Andalusi raised an eyebrow at this interruption. “Write it down, Amin. All information useful.” He turned his attention back to the alderman. “You not poor man, I can see by your girth. Empty your pockets and show me your hands.”

  John Polglaze frowned at him, not understanding the request.

  “Ibrahim!”

  The renegade caught hold of Polglaze and rummaged expertly through his clothing, coming away with a handful of coins and a pair of handsome rings. Then he took the alderman’s arm and turned the hand palm up for his captain’s inspection. The raïs grunted. “So white and soft, you no good in galleys or working in field, you last a week, no more! So how much they pay me for you?”

  Alderman Polglaze looked flummoxed. “I … I … ah … I don’t know, sir … er, raïs.”

  “Four hundred pounds?”

  The alderman went white. “Impossible! Never.”

  Al-Andalusi waved a hand. “Say four hundred pounds, Amin. One hundred fifty for John Poll Glez, and two hundred fifty for his wife. Is she comely? What her name?”

  “Elizabeth, sir, but—”

  “Ah, like old queen, excellent. She good friend to Morocco, bring us much trade, timber with which to build ships, many guns, enemy of bastard Spanish. Amin, write down two hundred twenty English pounds for wife Elizabeth Poll Glez—her name earn discount. Three hundred seventy pounds for pair.” This he repeated in his own language for the benefit of his scribe, then waved Polglaze away. “Next.”

  The next man was a fisherman in his thirties, spare and short in stature, his face almost as brown as the pirate’s, except where crow’s-feet had left white strea
ks around the eyes, but his muscles were like whipcord. His pockets contained no more than a pocketknife, which the raïs weighed in his hand, then tossed back to Ibrahim, a ragged kerchief, and two groats.

  “Henry Symons of Newlyn. My family are poor. Thee’ll get no money for me from them.”

  The raïs laughed. “Can you row?”

  Symons looked puzzled. “Aye, of course, and sail.”

  The pirate said something in his own language and the clerk wrote it down, smiling.

  The next man was older, and his seafaring days were long spent. Cat recognized him as old Thomas Ellys. Arthritis had swollen his joints and age had bent his back. His silver thruppenny bit was still in his pocket, ready for the collection, along with a yellowed bone comb. The raïs inspected his hand, which was callused and rough, confirming that he was a worker, and no rich man’s father. He turned to the clerk and they debated for a few moments; then the pirate called for one of his men, made a curt gesture, and indicated the old fisherman. Without a word, the crewman jostled Thom Ellys away to the ship’s side and without ceremony upended him over the gunwale. There was a pause, a splash, and then silence.

  “You barbarian!” the preacher started. He stared out at the rolling, empty sea. They were already far from land. Even a young, fit man had no chance of gaining the shore from here. “May the Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on his soul.”

  The raïs shrugged. “We short on provisions—cannot waste on useless old man who no one ransom and who fetch nothing in auction. If your Jesus care for his soul, he will arrange miracle.” He held the preacher’s furious regard coolly. “It was Romans first called my people ‘barbari,’ ‘the uncultured,’ but they ignorant and so are those who use same word after them. My people call ourselves the Imazighen, the free men: We are Berber and proud. At home in mountains I speak language of my own people, with business partners in the qasba I converse in Spanish, with fellow corsairs I speak Arabic and the lingua franca of ports; I speak also some English and a little Dutch. I have read every page of the Qu’ran and from curiosity some of your Bible. In my collection of books I have copies of Ibn Battuta’s Travels, poetry of Mawlana Rumi, Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, and Al-Hasan ibn Muhammed al-Wazzan’s Cosmographia Dell’ Africa; I have read them all. Now, tell me who the barbarian?”