The commander of the fort, Captain Gascon, glanced at Luca, who was still silent, looking at the children. ‘You can go down slowly and unchain them,’ Gascon ordered, tightening his grip on the gun. ‘No tricks.’
Radu Bey nodded to the man with the drum who unsheathed a massive blade, and stepped down behind him, on guard. He barked an order in Arabic. Luca glanced at Ishraq who nodded and whispered, ‘He said: “Who is Italian?”’
Several men raised their heads and called out: ‘Eccomi!’
One man responded, a little after the others.
‘Dove sei nato, pretendente?’ snapped Radu Bey.
The rower stumbled to understand the simple Italian sentence. ‘Napoli,’ he stammered, naming an Italian town, but speaking unconvincingly late with a Spanish accent.
‘I don’t think so,’ Radu Bey said simply, and the man dropped his head to his oar and gave himself up to despair.
‘We have to release them all,’ Luca exclaimed, watching this doomed exchange. ‘All the slaves. We have to attack the galley and get them free.’
‘We can’t,’ the captain of the fort shook his head. ‘There are too many of them.’ He nodded to the ship; seated among the slaves were free men, the janissaries of the Ottoman army, ready to row or fight as the captain ordered. All down the centre of the ship were their comrades, armed with great scimitars and cutlasses, handguns stuck casually in their belts. ‘They’ll have cannon mounted in the prow,’ he said. ‘Rolled back out of sight for now, but it will be armed and ready to fire. They’ve lost a mast but they can still take this ship out to sea at fighting speed. I’ll be happy if he just keeps to his word and we get the Italians off without trouble.’
‘My father may be enslaved on one of these hellholes!’ Luca said, anguished.
‘Let’s do what we can here today,’ Freize advised quietly. ‘See if we can get some men freed, then think about the rest.’
Radu Bey had been moving steadily and quietly among the ranks of the oarsmen, turning one key and then another. The freed men rose carefully to their feet, wary of the armed men around them, and put their hands on their heads, turning around as they were bid and walking through their fellows without looking to either left or right. Seven men from the upper deck went unsteadily up a narrow gangplank to the quayside, and then three came up from the lower. As they touched the stone of the quayside some of them fell to their knees to thank God. One man’s legs buckled from being seated at his oar for so long that he sank to the ground, and he could not rise up again.
‘Get them away,’ the captain of the fort said to the men who had brought the sail. ‘Take them to the hovel where they put the lepers, and get them washed and fed and kept there.’
‘That’s my side of the bargain,’ Radu Bey said, indifferent both to the men crying with relief on the quay and those groaning in the galley. ‘Will you help fit the mast?’
‘We won’t set foot on your ship,’ Gascon replied. ‘We’ll leave the sail and the mast here and you can fit it yourself. If you’re not gone by sunset I will turn the cannon on you, as you wait here.’
‘We’ll be gone,’ Radu assured him. ‘And we won’t come back, as I promised. Will you sell us some food?’
‘I’ll send some down to you, and fresh water. Give water to these poor devils.’
‘I should like to go onto the ship,’ Brother Peter suddenly said, surprising everyone. ‘I should like to go among the rowers with the priest and hear confessions of the men, and bless them.’
Radu laughed abruptly. ‘What for? Do you think you will raise them from the dead? For these men think they are dead and gone to hell. Don’t come down, priest. We’ll eat you instead of bread.’
Brother Peter hesitated. ‘I should bless them,’ he insisted.
The commander of the galley did not even bother to reply. The fair man who was holding the rope on the shore laughed. ‘Half of them are converted to the Muslim faith anyway,’ he volunteered, speaking Italian with a strong English accent.
‘Are you English?’ Luca exclaimed.
‘Captain Marcus, English privateer, advising General Radu Bey.’
‘Are you enslaved?’
‘Oh no. I am paid. I am going to command my own galley next year. I am a free man, a commander, serving the Empire. I’m a volunteer, a mercenary.’
‘How can you do this to your fellow Christians?’ Brother Peter demanded, trembling.
‘It’s a hard world,’ the man said cheerfully. ‘I used to ship slaves from Ireland for the French. Then I was on an English privateer preying on the Spanish. I don’t mind the nationality, I do mind being on the winning side. Right now, I am on the winning side. The Ottoman Empire is unstoppable, take my word for it.’
‘I shall send my men on shore for the mast,’ Radu interrupted, snapping his fingers as half a dozen men came forwards and waited for their orders. ‘Can I come onshore to dine?’ Radu spoke directly to Luca. ‘Will you ask me to dinner?’
‘You are the enemy of my country, and my church, and my family,’ Luca replied.
‘So think of me as on parole,’ Radu Bey suggested. ‘Why not bring some food and set a table here, and we can dine and talk while they are repairing the ship.’
‘You’ll have to disarm,’ Luca said, looking at the wicked curved sword.
‘Of course. And you have to swear not to kidnap me. We have to dine as friends and then part as enemies.’
Luca hesitated.
‘I know Plato,’ Radu Bey said temptingly. ‘Pliny too. I have a manuscript with me that I take everywhere I go. It talks about this coast, it tells of a wave. The ancients knew about this. It’s in Arabic, but I’ll read it to you over dinner.’
‘It tells of a wave?’ Luca repeated.
And it has a map.’
‘I’ll get the table set,’ Luca ruled, tempted beyond bearing at the thought of the ancient learning.
‘Take care,’ Gascon whispered to him.
‘If they know how to tell that a wave is coming, we have to learn the secret.’
While the servants came out from the inn under Freize’s watchful supervision, and set up the trestles and board midway along the quayside, Ishraq went back and released Isolde from the hidden laundry room and told her that Luca was dining with an infidel.
‘How could he?’ Isolde demanded. She peered out of the doorway of the inn to where Luca was standing at the end of the quay, watching Radu strip himself of a small arsenal of weapons and lay them down on the cobble stones.
Ishraq hesitated. She could not describe the power and charm of Radu, glittering in his beautiful clothes on the boat that could move so swiftly and powerfully in the water, hold still like a bird of prey, hanging in the water like a peregrine falcon hangs in the air, or fold its oars like wings to come close to the harbour wall, docile as a collar dove.
‘Luca wants to talk to him,’ she said. ‘He wants to know all about Arab learning.’
‘He’s walking very close to sin,’ Brother Peter said, coming upon the girls. ‘And danger.’
They watched Radu unsheath the curved blade of his sword, and from his belt produce two daggers. From a pocket inside his surcoat came the assassin’s weapon, a stiletto, and from a holster tied inside his pantaloons a beautiful miniature hand gun. He laid it all on the cobbles at Luca’s feet with an air of quiet pride at the armoury he carried.
‘Will you dine with him?’ Isolde asked Peter.
‘Not I! My conscience would not allow it.’
‘Freize will serve,’ Ishraq reassured her. ‘And he is carrying a knife, and he will be watching all the time.’
‘Why would Luca not just send him away?’ Isolde fretted. ‘An infidel! A slaver!’
‘Because Radu said he had a manuscript,’ Ishraq answered. ‘He taunted Luca that he had not read the philosophers. Luca wants to know what caused the wave. Radu says that he knows.’
‘He’s prepared to risk his life for this knowledge?’ Isolde asked incredulously.
‘Oh yes,’ Ishraq said as if she too thought that knowledge was worth almost any risk.
Freize came quickly down the quayside and saw them at the door, peering out. ‘I was looking for you,’ he said to Brother Peter. ‘The little lord wants you to come and write down all that the infidel lord says. He wants a note of the manuscripts.’
Brother Peter hesitated. ‘I won’t break bread with such a man.’
‘Nobody is asking you to dine,’ Freize said, irritably. ‘He is asking you to be his clerk. To write things down. And since you came with us to be a clerk, since we were forced to travel with you and have you every step of the way because they told him he had to have a clerk, it seems only reasonable that you should be a clerk now. On account of the fact that I can serve dinner and save him from being beheaded by the foreign lord or poisoned by the foreign lord or dragged into that damn boat by the foreign lord; but I can’t write, so I can’t write down the endless lies that the foreign lord says. But you can. And so you should. And so you will.’
Brother Peter stared stubbornly into Freize’s angry face. ‘I shall not. I will not be dictated to by an infidel.’
‘You’re a clerk!’ Freize bellowed. ‘You are supposed to be dictated to.’
‘I will not sit at his table.’
‘Do it standing!’
‘I’ll go,’ Ishraq volunteered. ‘I can do it.’
She dived into the inn and came out with paper, a quill pen and an ink pot.
‘You can’t go,’ Isolde said at once.
‘I have to.’
‘It’s dangerous.’
‘Luca needs me.’
‘And what do I do?’ demanded Isolde, irritated beyond bearing. ‘What am I supposed to do, while you are there with Luca? Suddenly, you are the only one that can be of any use? When is he going to need me?’
‘Go to your bedroom window and keep watch for us,’ Freize advised. ‘Watch the sea in case another galley happens to come along. And if you see anything, scream like a banshee. I don’t trust them any more than you do.’
He turned to Brother Peter. ‘Does your precious conscience allow you to keep watch for us? While we are half a step from danger and you are safe away, yards away, down the quayside?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Then you stand half way between the inn and the fort, and if you hear her scream, raise the alarm and turn the men out of the fort to help us.’
Isolde hesitated, longing to be at the table with Ishraq.
‘Go on,’ Freize said. ‘Ishraq has to come because she speaks the language and she can write. But he’d want to keep you out of the way.’
‘Oh, I know she is quite indispensable,’ Isolde turned abruptly, without a word to Ishraq, and went up the stairs.
Freize and Ishraq followed the servants carrying baskets of bread and bottles of oil and wine and water. Luca glanced around and saw them coming, then turned his attention to the galley.
Radu, now completely unarmed, brought a box covered in oiled pony skin from his ship. He held it before him so that Luca could see there was no trick, and walked towards the table that the servants were setting up. ‘Two manuscripts,’ he said quietly. ‘Only two. I chose to bring these with me because they are about this coast. I have been sailing along it and comparing what I see to what they saw more than a thousand years ago. These are copies of ancient writings held in our libraries. We have the greatest libraries in the world, and translators and philosophers working all day, every day.’
Luca had a sudden pang of envy that he had no teacher and no books to guide him, and that the greatest library he had ever seen had been at his monastery where they had three manuscripts and a Bible chained to a desk. But first he had to ask Radu something else.
‘I want to find a man and a woman. I believe they were taken on a slaving raid.’
Radu started to unwrap the waterproof cover. ‘Really? Taken recently?’
Luca gulped. ‘Years ago, four years ago. My parents.’
‘Do you know what ship was raiding? The name of the commander?’
‘I don’t even know if he took them or killed them.’
‘It’s hard to trace people after a long time,’ Radu said indifferently. ‘But sometimes it can be done. There are thousands of slaves taken every year, but it can be done. You will want to ransom them, I suppose? You need to speak with Father Pietro, in Venice. He buys slaves from us when their families raise the money; he’s accustomed to finding people. Every year he buys a few thousand unnamed slaves with money given from your church and returns them to their homes.’
‘He does?’ Luca blinked. ‘I’ve never even heard of him.’
‘Of course. Someone has to trade between us. We are two mighty trading empires, and there are all sorts of people coming and going all the time. There are many middle agents, but he’s the best that I know. You are always kidnapping our people and we yours. He deals in the sales of holy relics too. We can’t make them fast enough for you. You have an unending appetite for human bones, it seems.’ He laughed. ‘We could almost think you gnaw on them like dogs. Fortunately, we have an unending supply from our endless victories. What name is it?’
‘Vero,’ Luca said. ‘My mother and father. Where would I find Father Pietro?’
Radu smiled. ‘On the Rialto of course. Slaves are a trade like any other. I should think you can buy anything there.’ He shouted towards his boat. ‘Anyone heard of a man named Vero?’
‘Guilliam Vero,’ Luca prompted.
‘Guilliam Vero. Taken about four years ago. Rowers, you can speak!’
One head went up. ‘On Bayeed’s ship,’ he said. ‘Two years ago.’
‘There you are,’ Radu said indifferently. ‘Father Pietro may be able to trace him for you, if he’s not dead already.’
‘Who is Bayeed?’ Luca asked urgently. ‘Where is his ship?’
Radu shrugged. ‘I don’t know Bayeed. He’ll be a slave raider, and where his ship is right now, no one knows – could be anywhere, working the Italian coast, perhaps Spain, or France. They raid and then take their stock back home for sale. You’ll have to ask Father Pietro.’
‘Is the man sure? The slave who knows my father. Can I ask him?’
‘He’s sure. No one speaks to me unless they are sure. You can’t ask him.’
Luca exclaimed with frustration but Radu Bey was untroubled. He pulled out a chair from the table and sat himself down, looking around him as if he was pleased with this unexpected dinner on land.
The soldiers were coming off the galley now, one by one up the gangplank to take the measurement of the rough-cut mast. They brought with them woodworking tools. They would pare down the mast to fit it exactly to the place on the deck. Below them on the ship, other men were cutting away the broken spars and throwing them into the water.
‘Alive,’ Luca said. He was shaking with emotion. ‘My father is alive.’
Radu looked at him without sympathy. ‘I suppose it’s hard to lose a parent if you love him,’ he said indifferently. ‘My father gave me as a hostage, to Sultan Murad. I never saw him nor my mother again. I’ve never been home. My father traded me and my brother for his throne. I don’t forgive him for that. I might have done the same in his position; but I’ll never forgive him for giving the two of us away. His own sons.’
‘I’ve spent years praying that my parents were still alive and that I might see them again.’
‘Yes, I suppose you will have done,’ Radu said without concern.
‘My father!’ Luca was choked with emotion. He shaded his eyes with his hand. ‘Excuse me, I had thought that I would never see him again. You have given me hope.’
The servants from the inn put food on the table, some meats, some bread, cheeses, smoked fish, fresh stewed fish, a bottle of wine. Radu held out his hands and one of the servants poured water into his palms for him to wash, and gave him a towel of linen to dry them. He served himself liberally and then passed his plate to Luca. ‘Forgive me.
I will eat with a better appetite, if you would taste everything they have brought for me. I don’t wish to be an impolite guest but equally, I want to survive this dinner.’
‘Very well,’ Luca said.
Radu waited patiently while Luca took a spoonful of everything.
‘The wine, if you will forgive my suspicious nature,’ Radu gestured to the bottle. Ishraq stepped forward and poured a small amount into a glass and handed it to Luca.
He took a sip. ‘Don’t you refuse wine? I thought you could not drink alcohol?’
‘Not when I am at sea, or on campaign.’ Radu watched Luca for signs of poison, but all he could see was a young man struggling to take in extraordinary news.
‘If I could get him back, if I could find her, then I would be an orphan no longer.’
‘Stranger things have happened,’ Radu said cheerfully, and seeing that Luca showed no signs of illness, he started to eat with relish, watching the work on his ship and now and then glancing back at the quayside to see that he was safe from a landside attack. Ishraq stood behind Freize and watched the Ottoman with a steady, unwavering gaze.
‘I am sorry. You have quite unmanned me,’ Luca said recovering himself. ‘I can hardly believe that my father lives. My father, that I thought was lost to me, still lives. Praise be to God.’
Radu, chewing on a chicken leg, nodded. ‘You understand that life on the galleys is hard? Few men live beyond a few years. He might have died since this man saw him, he might be dead now, might die before you get him ransomed.’
Luca nodded. ‘But I have been without hope, and you have given me hope.’
Radu laughed shortly at the thought of being the bearer of good tidings to a sentimental Christian, and reached for some stewed fish. ‘I am glad to be – what do you call it? – a herald angel. And your mother?’
‘Will I be able to find her?’
‘Perhaps more easily than him. If she is working for a master he will know her name, he might even have taken pity on her and offered her to be ransomed back. Unless she is in a harem and her master has taken a fancy to her. Was she pretty? Fertile? You might have half a dozen brown-skinned brothers and sisters.’
Stormbringers Page 19