When I saw what was waiting for us at the dock I discovered myself equally short of ideas for what to say.
He had gilded his ship. This is another foolish thing very rich people do sometimes: they put gold on everything. Conspicuous wealth as a display of importance is something the western world picked up from the Romans. It was later perfected in both Constantinople and the Vatican, and is still really popular now. It’s also been stupid for nearly that long.
“Impressive is it not? Imagine how impressed the Hindus will be when they see this at port!”
“Very impressed, milord,” I said. “I only hope the merchants are willing to give you a fair price when seeing how much gold you have to spare.”
Juan Pedro laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. As always, the point I was trying to make had rushed past him unnoticed. “Indeed!”
We were soon aboard, and to his credit Juan Pedro had built for us an impressively comfortable cabin and had packed a formidable quantity of Spanish wine, which I began drinking immediately. This helped, but only in the sense that it made it harder for me to contemplate going anywhere, and as we sailed from the docks I gave up any thoughts of tossing myself overboard and swimming back to shore. India wasn’t really that bad, I decided, so why not take a trip there?
This wasn’t one of my better decisions.
* * *
It was two or three days before I made it out of the cabin for any reason other than to relieve myself or change out a chamber pot. I’d have gone out sooner but Juan Pedro had been wildly sick almost from the moment we took to sea, having made the unwelcome discovery that boats rock about a lot and seasickness is a real thing. I had the glorious job of making sure he didn’t choke on his own vomit, and also that when he did vomit it went into a receptacle and not onto one of the plush pillows lining the room.
When we weren’t discussing how miserable he was we talked about Greek philosophy. Juan Pedro wanted to be a great thinker, but he couldn’t get out of his own way.
“It seems to me if Plato didn’t know what a chair was, he should have asked around. I would have told him.”
“This is what you’ve concluded?” I had left him with questions to self-interrogate on the nature of forms and objects.
“I have. I thought of it just recently, between bits of sickness. I believe nausea to be a great clarifier.”
“The point isn’t whether or not Plato knew what a chair was, it was how we know what a chair is. You recall he made the same point regarding animals, and so on.”
“I would have explained it to him. It’s amazing to me that people have been talking about Plato all this time and the man didn’t know how to tell a dog from a cat from a chair. It seems to me the point of philosophy is to take something obvious and make it sound complicated.”
This was actually a decent insight. Plato was nearly as insufferable as Juan Pedro—for wildly different reasons—but he would have loved arguing this point. (Although Plato loved arguing any point.) And in a way I was just as surprised as my patron was that people were still talking about him.
Still, he was missing the central thesis of Plato’s higher forms, which was not a vast surprise.
“Plato is arraigning the notion that there is a deeper truth to basic reality,” I said. “It may be easier to imagine this as a conversation with the Aristotelian perspective—”
“Yes, yes. Aristotle. I remember him.”
“Yes.” He didn’t remember Aristotle, because we hadn’t actually talked about him yet. “Maybe it’s best if you just consider, for now, the possibility that there is more beneath the surface. Think of reality as this ocean. Below the waves are things we can’t see which affect the things we can.”
This wasn’t close to being a correct analogy, but I was working with what I had.
“All right. I will think on this. Thank you, Giovanni. And I may need a clean bucket.”
* * *
I was on the portside railing later, having replaced Juan Pedro’s bucket with a clean receptacle and left him to sleep and think about how stupid Plato must have been. I was drinking wine from a tin cup and staring at the land in the distance, trying to figure out what land I was staring at. The captain stepped up beside me.
“How goes the prince?” he greeted. The captain was an aged Italian named Grillo who confessed in the first conversation we had that he’d not been to sea for fifteen years. Juan Pedro insisted Grillo was the best captain alive, based on whatever sources he used when putting this adventure together. The same sources told him to buy the ship we were sailing, which was supposed to be the fastest Spain had to offer. I had doubts on the second point because surely the fastest ship in Spain wouldn’t be quite so easy to buy.
“The worst appears to be over,” I said. “And if not, I’ll have to continue to drink his wine for him.”
Captain Grillo laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. “You relax and drink, we will reach India in no time.”
Incidentally, in this era, no time meant several months.
Nodding at the land before me, I asked, “When do we head for deeper seas?”
“Oh we won’t go much deeper than this. I like to keep the shoreline in view. We’re on a dead run for the Cape of Good Hope. I’ve charted it out; we should hit the winds right on schedule.”
“Well that’s good. And if you should need to go deeper?”
“For a storm, we’d be better off seeking shelter close to shore rather than further at sea. That or battening down and riding it. Not to worry, I know how to navigate.”
“Good, then,” I said, forcing a smile. I was wondering if I was actually too far away to swim for the land I could barely see, then remembered all the giant things in the water beneath us and decided I didn’t like that option any more than I liked the idea of staying on board.
What Captain Grillo was doing made absolutely perfect sense. In the days before proper timepieces it was extraordinarily difficult to navigate East-West travel, which involved correctly calculating one’s longitude. This was important because while a map could tell you where a land mass—or a reef—was, it didn’t tell you when you were going to arrive at it. To do that you needed the sun or the stars, and you needed to know what time it was at a fixed location. (The standard now is Greenwich Mean Time.)
The easier solution was to just keep land in view the whole time. This was reasonable when traveling North-South from Europe to the horn of Africa, and in a perfect world it’s what I would have done too. It certainly satisfied my concerns about deep oceans and the things that live within them.
But other things lurked near the shore of the African coast.
“Fastest ship in Spain, you say?” I asked Grillo.
“Indeed!”
“I do hope you’re right.”
* * *
It was a few weeks of mostly peaceful, storm-free sailing before we saw the other vessel. It turned up behind us having, I assume, rounded North Africa from Algiers or thereabouts.
“It’s the Portuguese!” declared Juan Pedro with a laugh, the first time he saw them. “We’re already leagues ahead, by India this gap will surely be a month or more.”
“I’m afraid that’s not likely,” I said. The captain was shaking his head at me, just subtly enough to escape Juan Pedro’s attention. “I’ve been looking at the ship for days now, and it seems to me it has either kept pace or gotten larger each day.”
“Captain, is this true?”
“It appears to be so, yes,” he said mildly.
“Then go faster, why don’t you?”
“Yes, lord, of course. I’ll give the order straight away.”
Once Juan Pedro had disappeared back into his cabin, the captain turned on me. “Why did you do that? We could have easily kept him in his cups below deck until they passed.”
I laughed. “Passed? Captain, who do you think is behind us?”
“I don’t know. The have a shallow draft and a wide hull, and they are clearly carrying a lighte
r load, but I don’t recognize their colors. Perhaps it is the Portuguese. What does it matter?”
“It matters because that ship will not be passing us. Why do you suppose the Portuguese route turns wide from shore before here? Or why if they travel this route it’s only with escort vessels?”
“Pirates?” he gasped.
I had considered giving warning many times, but I couldn’t decide what was the greater risk: pirates, or Grillo’s navigational skills. My trepidation regarding open ocean travel was clearly a factor in my decision to keep quiet, but it’s also not always wise to challenge a captain on his own ship. And after a while I convinced myself that he was right, and a straight run for the horn was the most logical choice.
“If you sail the Barbary Coast you risk Barbary pirates,” I said.
“But I ran this route for years without issue.”
“Maybe you did. Maybe you did it in a faster ship, or in worse weather, and maybe nobody was foolish enough to nail gold plates to any of the boats you captained.”
“We have to go faster.”
“I would say so, yes.”
* * *
The ship couldn’t actually go any faster without dumping provisions overboard, and that was an option nobody was prepared to consider. Juan Pedro did his best to encourage us to sail more rapidly by banging the drum, which only proved he knew nothing about how boats worked. He had bought a ship that once had oarlocks, but they were sealed up and there were no oars on the vessel. The drum remained, but it served no purpose aside from calling everyone’s attention in the event of a speech. So his banging of the drum in a somewhat rhythmic fashion to get the sailors to address the wind more effectively—or whatever he was thinking—did no good other than to annoy everyone.
We decided—we being the captain, myself, his first mate, and definitely not Juan Pedro—to head for deeper seas. As the captain first noted, the pirate ship had a higher draft, which was partly the way their ship was built but also due to a difference in provisions. We were heavy-laden with enough goods to get us around the Cape of Good Hope and to the east coast of Africa before needing to resupply, but the pirates couldn’t go that long. It was thought that if we sailed away from the African coast—a coast where they could expect to stop for resupply—we might reach a point where the pirates would be forced to either turn around or face starvation.
This idea had a drawback to it, which was that if they reached that point and did not turn around, we would be the only source of food in their vicinity, and they would literally have no option but to run us down or starve. We might well outrace them to that point-of-no-return, but we couldn’t compel them to actually turn around.
If it worked, we could turn north and then back east and return to Spain with our ship and our lives and no spices.
Unsurprisingly, when I informed Juan Pedro he expressed active hatred for this plan. “I say we let them catch up to us!” he said. “Surely they will see that we pursue greater riches. They may even join!”
“Juan Pedro, do you trust my advice?” I asked him.
“Of course, Giovanni.”
“Trust your captain to make the best decision for his ship, and for you.”
“But I hired the captain!”
“You did, as you also hired me. And I am advising you not to try and counter his command. It will fail, and since we are looking to throw things overboard to lighten our load, the louder you protest the more you look like unnecessary ballast.”
We did throw a few things overboard, but thankfully not the wine. Any beverage that wasn’t salt water was welcome aboard a long sea voyage, and our survival of this long aquatic siege might hinge upon potable drink. I did, however, curtail my impulse to start drinking all of it.
It wasn’t actually all that long, as sieges go. It felt much longer, because we could see the pirates constantly, and if one stared at their ship for long enough it was easy to become fooled into thinking they had slowed, or stopped, or were turning. But we didn’t get close to that point where they would have been forced to turn around. They reached hailing distance on the third day after our decision to turn east. It happened when the ships were both slowed due to a failing wind, but unlike our vessel, the pirates had open oarlocks, and oars, and people to use them. So for the final few hours we got to hear their drum pounding louder and louder, until it was silenced.
“Hello, gold vessel,” shouted a man—in Spanish—from halfway up the rigging of the pirate ship. “You can stop running now.”
The man was squat and portly, brown-skinned, tattooed and scarred. When he spoke Spanish it was with a Moroccan accent.
“Let me talk to him,” Juan Pedro asked.
“Be quiet,” I said.
Captain Grillo faced the pirate ship and spoke to no one in particular. “This ship is the sovereign property of Spain! Keep your distance!”
The man on the rigging laughed heartily at this. None of the other men on his ship did, which either meant they were in a much more foul mood than their spokesperson’s demeanor suggested, or none of them spoke Spanish.
“Captain Grillo,” I said. “Do you speak Arabic?”
“No.”
“Then may I?”
He looked surprised, but acquiesced. I stepped up next to him.
“Allahu Akbar,” I greeted.
“Allahu Akbar!” the man answered. He continued in Arabic. “You are Muslim?”
“I am when it suits me.”
This elicited more laughter. “I thank you for your honesty, sir,” he said.
“Are you captain?”
“I am. Whose ship is this?”
“No man of great import.”
“What is he saying?” Grillo asked.
“He wants to know whose ship it is.”
Juan Pedro jumped up. “He wishes to speak to the lord of this vessel? I will talk with him!”
“Let me speak for you my lord,” I said. “This is why I’m here.”
“Is that he?” The pirate captain asked.
“It is. I fear he is an idiot.”
“We would have run you down sooner, sir, but for the sheer insanity of a gilded vessel on a pirated sea. My first still expects the navy to appear, as surely this must be a trap.”
“It is no trap,” I said. “Alas, I am beholden to a patron who thinks it wise to cover his ship in precious metals and hire the one captain in Spain who doesn’t anticipate pirates. My patron would make for an excellent ransom, and serves no other purpose in this world. The rest of the crew is likely worth nothing except as slaves.”
“What is he saying?” Juan Pedro asked.
“I’m negotiating your surrender.”
“My surrender? I will fight these dogs to the death!”
“I will let him know your feelings on this,” I told him. To the pirate captain I said, “forgive me, he appears to have already forgotten you speak Spanish.”
“He sounds stupid enough to be worth a great ransom indeed. A man such as yourself no doubt fetches a good coin as well.”
“This is unfortunately not the case, captain. I have no family with holdings, only what I myself possess. I have no real desire to be sold into slavery either, as I have been a slave in the past and do not relish the experience.”
He looked confused. “This is an odd negotiation, sir. Name your terms.”
“Terms? We have nothing to negotiate with. Drown them all if you like. If you drown him…” I pointed to Juan Pedro, who probably thought I was saying something flattering. “…you might even have a pleasant voyage back to Algiers, as he is completely insufferable. No, I speak to you now because I would rather be a pirate, thank you.”
About half of the pirate crew laughed aloud at this. Notably, the captain didn’t.
“Why would I trust such a man as you on my crew when you spare so little loyalty for your own?” he asked.
“Apologies, captain, but trustworthiness does not strike me as a highly valued attribute for a pirate. But very well. T
here is treasure hid aboard this ship that is worth as much as the ship itself. I know where to find it without first tearing it apart stem-to-stern.”
“Again, you have given me no reason to trust you.”
“You have naught to lose. Let me cross peaceably and I’ll tell you where it is, and then we can discuss whether to value me as more than a head to sell to a slaver.”
“Have your crew lash the boats, and you will be the first across. Then we will see.”
I turned to Captain Grillo. “The boat is going to be taken, but I am still negotiating. I may be able to spare you all, but you will have to do what I say. Assist them in lashing the boats together.”
“We can fight them off once they come close,” Grillo said. He looked much more eager to die in a battle than as a slave, and I didn’t much blame him.
“If it comes to that, yes.” In truth, I had no plan and nothing with which to negotiate for his or the crew’s lives. If they chose to perish fighting for their golden ship I was in no position to stop them. But my own position was marginally better.
“Juan Pedro, I need you to do something for me right now,” I said.
“What is it, Giovanni?”
“The wood bunk on which I sleep has a loose board. I need for you to pry open that board and place your purse beneath it. When you are done, repair the board as well and as fast as you can. Do you understand?”
“I’m afraid I do not.”
“They need to be sure that there’s more value in your ransom than in your death. If they find themselves sufficiently enriched by your purse and the gilding, you will not survive the afternoon, I promise.” It was a pretty good lie.
“Yes of course,” he said. “You feel I am to be ransomed?”
“It’s an honorable outcome for you, my lord. If you die today who will tell the world of your bravery? In ransom, you can tell them yourself.”
He clapped me on the shoulder. “You are a good advisor, Giovanni.”
“I thank you. Oh, and one more thing. I will need your sword.”
Even lashed together there was still a gap between the ships wide enough for a man to fall through, so a plank was laid for me. Happily nobody from either side took the opportunity afforded them by proximity to begin fighting with one another. I was counting on the pirates preferring diplomacy to bloodshed, with the risk of violence coming from the Spanish side. If this seems illogical, keep in mind the pirates make money off each man they sell into slavery, while many men would rather die than end up a slave. If I felt like negotiating a peaceful arrangement, the people in need of convincing were on the boat I was leaving, not the pirate ship.
Immortal At Sea (The Immortal Chronicles Book 1) Page 2