The big flaxen-haired, ruddy-cheeked fellow in front of him grinned and nodded. ‘Aye, Your Highness. I’d know this reprobate anywhere.’
‘’Pon my word, Deza, you unconscionable booby,’ said Don John. ‘But you choose your victims carelessly. You are only torturing here two of the most gallant heroes of the entire Siege of Malta.’
Nicholas wept openly as the manacles were sprung and he and Edward Stanley embraced.
‘Aye,’ said Stanley, ‘relief can do that to a man. You came damn close to being broken for life. What a place.’ He looked over at Deza with disgust.
‘You are in my Chancellery still, Sir Knight,’ said Deza. ‘Have a care.’
Stanley turned from Nicholas, still shaking, and bore down on Pedro Deza, his broad sunburned brow furrowed with a ferocious glare. Six foot four of muscle and anger. His voice rose in volume, and the chamber echoed as with the bellowing of an enraged bull.
‘A Knight Commander of St John answers to none but his Grand Master, the Pope in Rome, and Almighty God! These two youths here that you have reduced to shivering wrecks with your vile contraptions fought at Malta as heroically as Jean de la Valette himself. While you were shuffling your papers and presiding over your interrogations, Don Pedro Deza. So vex me no more. Or I may lose my sweet temper altogether.’
Deza quailed visibly, but said, ‘It was important to discover more about the Morisco rebellion. We have heard rumours that the Mohammedan rebels are being armed from England. And here were two Englishmen, hiding in the house of a Moor—’
‘Then you are credulous fools!’ replied Stanley. ‘The knights have information – not rumour, information – that the Moriscos are being armed from Constantinople, not England.’
Pedro Deza said not another word.
Don John of Austria was pulling on his kidskin gloves again and smiling thinly.
Smith gave Hodge a drink from his flask. Stanley laid his hands on Nicholas’s shaking shoulders.
‘Easy, old friend, easy. None will hurt you now.’
Then he too gave him his flask to drink. Nicholas glugged and gasped and managed a tremulous smile.
Stanley cuffed him on the back. ‘Let’s get some air.’
They marched out of the chamber led by Don John of Austria himself. Rescued by a prince of the blood! Well, half of the blood.
Life was a dream.
Two of the torturers hovered a little too near as they departed. In the blink of an eye, and in utter silence, Smith embraced them in his mighty hands and clonked their heads together. They dropped like meal sacks.
‘I know a tavern on the quay,’ said Nicholas.
‘We don’t doubt it,’ drawled Don John of Austria, barely looking at him. ‘And a delightful stew it may be. But we have our ship out there in the harbour. Which one do you think it might be?’
Beyond the bobbing boats, fishing smacks and coastal barges, there towered a gilded and magnificent galley flying the flag of the two-headed Habsburg eagle of Spain.
‘That one, possibly,’ said Nicholas.
‘Your judgement is uncanny,’ said Don John. Then he looked him up and down. ‘We met at Messina, I recall. Then you and your manservant went on to fight at Malta with Sir John and Sir Edward here.’
‘We did.’
The young prince’s eyes flashed with jealousy. ‘And then you served on a corsair galley as your reward?’
‘We love rowing. Both day and night.’
Again Don John gave his thin smile. He liked this one, he recalled. Sharp tongue, fighting spirit, and he followed all his sarcasms point for point.
He looked out over the harbour, to the royal galley and beyond. ‘We are sailing first for Messina, there to await further orders from Spain and learn more news of the movements of the Turk. Will he fall upon Cyprus, upon Crete? The coast of Italy?’ The foppish young prince looked grave for once, his gaze upon the far horizon. ‘His fleet is vast, the threat to Christendom is as real as ever. There is a great sea battle coming, I am sure of it. You might as well join us again, since your native England is now under the rule of Elizabeth the flame-haired frigid heretic, who will burn you at the stake the moment you set foot on home soil.’
‘She is my Queen still,’ said Nicholas.
‘Your Holy Father in Rome has declared her no queen but a usurper.’
The English youth looked a picture of torment, his eyes pained and hunted. Don John relented a fraction. ‘Well, I do not envy you your position. But I do not think you can ever dream of England again. Come and die with us fighting the Turk, and have your troubled head blown off by an Ottoman cannon. You will sleep easier thereafter.
‘For my part, I have missed every single encounter yet with the Mohammedans, being too occupied panting in the arms of my mistress – whichever trollop it was at the time – or prevented by my caring brother Philip. But for the coming sea battle, this watery Armageddon . . .’ He touched a kidskinned finger to his own chest. ‘. . . for once, this perfumed, velveted fop and whoremonger bastard will show his royal blood.’
Such a mix of pride and self-mockery, thought Nicholas. Such quicksilver intelligence and cutting humour. He gave a small bow.
‘You acknowledge me a fop and whoremonger?’ snapped Don John.
‘I, I . . .’ stammered Nicholas.
Stanley and Smith were both grinning.
‘Mercy, Your Excellency, you test him worse than Pedro Deza.’
‘Tch. Then off to your sordid peasant tavern with you.’ Don John turned on his heel and made for the quayside. A long rowing boat with a crimson awning and elaborately curved and gilded prow and stern, something like a Venetian gondola, was bumping against the harbour wall. He turned back.
‘But come to sea with us afterwards, English vagabonds! Perhaps you’ll prove too skeleton thin for a cannonball to hit you!’
Nicholas led them back to a certain tavern on the quay.
‘We heard you were to be racked and strappadoed,’ said Stanley as they walked. ‘Word came back from Gil de Andrada that you had been picked up. We heard more from . . . other sources useful to us. And when we heard that you were to be questioned by the great Pedro Deza, well, we had at least to visit you in prison. Before you got too lean and stringy. A few sessions on the rack and you would have looked like a two-yard earthworm.
‘Then Brother Smith here was going to sing soothing lullabies to you as you were stretched, in his unusual baritone, which would surely have taken your mind off your agonies. You should hear him singing “Greensleeves”. Ladies swoon at the very sound. Some actually burst into tears and run away, unable to bear such unearthly beauty.’
Smith growled, his voice more bearlike than ever with the passing years. ‘You see that Ned Stanley has lost none of his lacerating wit. Many’s the time I’ve burst my doublet laughing at his brilliant jests and sallies.’
Stanley roared with laughter. Smith glared from under his thick black brows. They had not changed.
Nicholas had almost forgotten why he loved their company so much. Not just their strength, their prowess at arms, their badinage, Smith’s grim sallies and Stanley’s smile. It was their nobility he loved. Their lives were a testament to lives nobly lived, strictly disciplined. Beneath those shabby cloaks, there were hearts and souls that served something higher than most men ever dreamed of. You have to serve some high ideal. Serve only yourself, and you soon shrink down to the small, petty size of yourself. Most men lived that way. But serve something high and noble, and in time you grow towards it, as an oak tree grows towards the sun. That was Smith and Stanley.
They came to the tavern, and there was no Maria. Instead, no sooner had they pulled up the benches and sat down than a tiny boy came running in, wide eyed, open mouthed and breathless, and stood by their table. He was barefoot, wore ragged breeches and shirt, and could not have been more than four or five.
‘You are the landlord here?’
The boy stared.
‘Well then,’ said Stanley
. ‘A jug of wine, bread, water, whatever there is.’
The boy nodded and sped off.
‘I’m sure they’re getting younger,’ said Smith.
The food and wine came, and Hodge raised his cup. ‘Wish it was good English ale to toast you with, but still. Here’s to you, Brothers Smith and Stanley. What a turnout. Who would have believed it?’
Nicholas said little and drank hard. Both knights noticed. After Malta, the galleys, and Algiers jail . . . the boy from Shropshire, son of a knight himself, was deeply wounded and scarred within. Their hearts ached for him. He would take more than a good meal to mend. And he hardly touched his plate of food as it was.
‘Eat,’ said Stanley. ‘You need it.’
‘I’d eat some opium if you had any,’ said Nicholas. ‘For my head.’
Not your head, your heart, thought Stanley. He could well foresee the thin English boy passing the last few months of his young life in a smoke dream, on a filthy divan in a den in Tangier, living for nothing but the pipe and an easy death.
It was not only from Pedro Deza they had saved him.
11
‘So now,’ said Stanley, settling back and turning his cup of wine in his hand. ‘Let us understand this clearly, old comrade-in-arms. After the Siege you and Hodge spent four long happy years in the house of Franco Briffa. Then we bid sad farewells to you, and you sailed from Malta, bound for England. But you were taken by corsairs on the passage to Spain.’
They nodded.
‘You were galley slaves, you spent time in jail, you escaped, were recaptured . . . Finally you survived the destruction of the very galley you slaved on, and were picked up from the sea by Fra Gil de Andrada, our brother Knight. ’Tis not improbable. The western Mediterranean is still our sea as much as anyone’s. Then, for reasons unclear, you arrived upon the soil of Holy Catholic Spain – after two years of bitter tribulation at the hands of Moors and Barbary pirates – and promptly hurl yourself into a fight on behalf of the Moors? Against Catholic Spain?’
‘He always did have a noble heart,’ said Hodge, with what sounded much like sarcasm.
‘Nobility, bravery,’ said Stanley, ‘often look so like idiocy on a moonless night.’
Nicholas grinned. This from two warrior monks who, though they would hate to hear it said, had shown more crazed bravery at Malta in four months than were told in a library of Iliads.
Smith said, ‘What were you doing in the house of a Moor? I can see why Deza might have had his suspicions.’
Nicholas explained as best he could. Smith grunted. ‘Fool. Hiding in a chest indeed.’
‘A fool to his fingertips,’ said a woman’s voice behind. ‘A fool and addlepate beyond measuring.’
It was Maria, hands on her hips. The small boy came in and stood half hidden in her skirts. She tried to sound angry, but there was a light in her eyes.
‘So you were freed from the dungeons of Pedro Deza?’
Nicholas nodded, swallowed, wiped his lips. ‘Close-run thing.’
‘And now what will you do? Ride off to Madrid and insult King Philip to his face, perhaps? Go and seek the north-west passage to the Indies, a hundred years too late? Or sail off in a sieve to find the Golden Fleece?’
‘I think we might go to Cyprus.’
Hodge looked resigned. Maria cried, ‘Cyprus! It is full of Greeks.’
‘One or two, I believe.’
‘But then all Greeks are liars and fools. At least you will not be noticed there.’
Maria turned her attention to her little boy. He had a new graze on his knee.
‘She likes you,’ said Stanley.
‘Pour me more wine,’ said Nicholas.
‘In fact I’m sure I remember her. Wasn’t she the one who salved your bruised sconce all those years ago . . . ?’
‘A young widow, I surmise,’ said Smith. ‘And as pretty as ever.’
Nicholas grabbed the wine jug.
‘We have free passage to Messina if we want it,’ said Stanley. ‘With plain sailing we will be in Sicily in five days. You are sure you want to join us?’
Nicholas looked at Hodge. They had been together so long, through so many trials, they could read each other’s thoughts without speaking. England was closed to them for now. After all their sufferings, it was a terrible thing to learn.
Nicholas sighed. ‘Let us sail east after all. Into the cannon’s mouth, as ever. Let us go and fight the Turk all over again.’
‘Might as well,’ said Hodge.
On the quayside, porters were piling up cedarwood chests, five, six in number. An elderly Spanish gentleman was overseeing them.
‘What the devil are those?’ asked Smith. ‘They don’t look like armaments.’
‘His Excellency Don John has ordered more vestments for his wardrobe,’ said the elderly gentleman. ‘He felt he had insufficient for the voyage. Six more suits, two cloaks, linen and undergarments, hats in the latest styles, and six pairs of boots of finest Spanish calf leather.’
‘For a voyage of five days?’
‘Just so.’
The sun was going down as they moved off from the quay. It had been quite a day, beginning in terror in a torturer’s dungeon, ending now in magical reunion with old friends. Nicholas could have wept with exhaustion and elation.
When he looked back towards the quay, a young woman was standing there, a small boy close beside her. Nicholas raised his hand in farewell. She raised her hand likewise, and then turned swiftly away and was gone into the crowds.
‘This arrant new Florentine order,’ observed Stanley mockingly, ‘the Knights of St Stephen, our callow imitators. They are laymen, not monks, and allowed to marry.’
‘Really?’ said Nicholas, settling back and yawning and closing his eyes. ‘Fascinating.’
As they drew near to La Real, Don John’s flagship, Nicholas marvelled at her beauty. He and Hodge had been on fat-bellied Genoa merchantmen, stinking corsair galleys, lean warships of the knights, that funny little bucket of a vessel that sailed them out of Bristol six long years gone – but never anything quite like this. A palace afloat on water.
She blazed in the setting sun. Her hull below the water was black but above, her waist was crimson, her gunwales deep yellow and her railings crimson and gold. Her poop-deck awning was of finest crimson satin, and above it hung the two-headed Habsburg eagle of the Holy Roman Empire, the quartered standard of Spain, and even the eight-pointed cross of the Knights of St John.
‘He is not, strictly speaking, permitted to fly that one,’ said Stanley quietly, ‘even though he’s a Knight Commander in the Order, and we are his acting aides-de-camp. But he may yet prove the Knights’ best ally. So we say nothing.’
At the prow of La Real shone the dimly gleaming barrels of her main guns, thrusting out from beneath her fighting deck. Sakers and culverins flanking, but the centre-line gun most definitely a full-size cannon, perhaps as much as an eighty-pounder. The whole ship would shudder when a linstock was put to her breech.
They climbed the ladder on her larboard – even that was elaborately carved and gilded – and were beckoned to sit on luxurious velvet-padded benches on the covered admiral’s deck. The small windows were of colourful stained glass, depicting the lives of the apostles and the saints.
‘Clear glass would be better,’ grunted Smith. ‘Get a view of the approaching Turk.’
The elderly gentleman from the quayside appeared again and ordered wine to be brought for them. He introduced himself with a little bow.
‘Don Luis de Requesens, tutor to His Excellency. Who is now at his evening toilet. He will join you presently.’
‘Has to pluck his eyebrows,’ said Smith when Don Luis was out of earshot.
Nicholas grinned and cradled his silver goblet of wine, cool to the touch and beaded with water droplets. The goblets had been chilled on beds of ice. In early summer. How on earth . . . ?
‘Brought down by muleteers from the Sierra Nevada,’ said Stanley. ‘Snow lies u
p there till June.’ He grinned ‘The things you can have if you’re a prince.’
‘Or sail with a prince,’ said Nicholas.
He took a gulp of wine, sweet and white and deliciously cool on a sultry Cadiz evening. Then he said, ‘So. Tell us about Cyprus.’ Stanley drew breath.
‘You remember I said to you once that Malta was but a minor skirmish in a much greater war?’
‘Minor skirmish!’ said Hodge bitterly.
Stanley nodded. ‘Not in heroism and endurance, of course. But the greatest battle is yet to come. Perhaps the final battle. And a sea battle, we believe. It will make or break us. If we win, it will mean the end of Ottoman dreams of conquering Europe. If we lose . . . well, there are already Ottoman forward bases in the Adriatic, Ottoman war galleys harrying Venetian shipping right to the mouth of the lagoon.’
‘Raids led by that devil-born traitor, Kara Hodja,’ growled Smith, his eyes burning like coals, ‘who was once a Dominican friar.’
‘We will meet with Kara Hodja one of these days,’ said Stanley, his voice soft but chilling. ‘The Black Priest will have his last rites soon.’
‘But,’ said Smith, ‘the raids of Kara Hodja will seem as nothing if the fleet now being assembled on the Bosphorus succeeds in destroying the Christian navies piecemeal, and comes to dominate the Mediterranean end to end. Then Europe will be theirs for the taking. St Peter’s Rome will be a mosque, as Constantinople’s St Sophia became a mosque a hundred years ago.’
‘A far more beautiful church than St Peter’s, incidentally,’ said Stanley.
‘You have seen it?’ asked Hodge, wide eyed.
The knight gave an enigmatic smile. Then he was serious again. ‘So you see, bit by bit, Christendom falls to the Armies of the Prophet, and still we are divided against each other. The Turk gobbles us up singly, like a fox among chickens. Long ago Jerusalem fell to Islam a second time. All the ancient heartlands of Christendom. Then in 1453, Constantinople herself. And since then, Trebizond, Rhodes, Belgrade have also fallen, with further attacks on Corfu, Venice, Vienna . . . The dark shadow of Islam creeps ever westwards.’
The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea Page 9