These pirates (for so they were, whatever they pretended of Holy Crusade) had their womenfolk and families with them in the settlement; aye, and their priest and chapel too. I was overjoyed at first to see young maids, thinking in my innocence that such desperadoes as these must have little concern for female chastity. But I quickly discovered that they were far more stringent than even my father and his like. I was foolish enough to make an open approach to Black Jaraj’s daughter, Dusanka, one Sunday after mass, and he, discovering us pressed close against the chapel wall, would have strangled me had not Godislav intervened. I learned a lot about the complexity of ethics in my time with the Uskoks! For that black-bearded face (what I could see of it), so bright-flushed with moral indignation, when next I saw it so red was stained with the blood of a Turk’s heart, dug out of the living body and chewed upon in turn by these most grisly villains!
This turned my stomach almost as much as a rough sea did. Often by the time we reached our prey, I was unfit by reason of my stomach for even the small part in the attack that Godislav permitted me to play. The men laughed, Jaraj in particular, but Godislav, though he smiled also, was kinder.
‘You are no sailor,’ he said. ‘Yet may we make a soldier of you.’
For he had discovered in me an aptitude for arms and for horsemanship too. He loved riding and always kept a stable of two or three horses, though there was little use for them either in his profession or in this rough and rugged country-side. Yet each day when he was on land he would saddle one of his mounts and ride where he could, taking me with him when he realized I could sit astride without falling off. However, when I tried to use the old mare like a Turkish pony and brought her back after a gallop with her flanks agleam with sweat and her mouth sore from my demands for sudden violent changes of direction, he spoke to me most sternly. I answered him familiarly and next thing I was lying on the straw beneath the horse with my head reeling, while Godislav stood above me with his fist tight-clenched.
‘Boy,’ he said, ‘do not overvalue yourself. I have fifty men better than you, and any one of them would cut my throat if he thought to profit thereby. But I have only three horses, and each of them would die for me if I demanded it. So know your place.’
And he stood over me while sulkily I rubbed down the mare, groomed her and salved her mouth. When I finished I fed her an apple and she nuzzled my neck.
‘See,’ said Godislav. ‘Any man you had treated so would be plotting vengeance, seemed he never so friendly. But she has forgiven you and would gallop till her heart broke if you asked it now. Some day you may have to ask it. Then will you know sorrow.’
I had no idea what he meant. A growing youth carries his brains between his legs, and his soul too! Only other violent activities of the body can divert his lust for a while, and fortunately these I had in plenty.
Besides riding, Godislav also instructed me in arms. From him I learned to wield dagger and cutlass, spear and club, pistol and musket. He it was who taught me that the most subtle and the plainest of weapons alike have their mysteries, and if two men fight with lumps of rock as big as a man’s fist, he who best understands his lump will be the winner.
Why he should have taken such pains with me I did not bother to wonder at that time. But looking back I see now what a lonely existence his must have been and I believe he kept me by him because I was useful, not just as a servant but in a strange way as a companion. As he rode out sometimes, if the air was balmy and his mood high, he would burst into song in a language I did not recognize. But as I have said, I have always had a quick ear and found it easy to imitate even without understanding. One of his favourite songs went,
It was a lover and his lass
With a hey and a ho and hey nonny nonny no
Who through the green cornfields did pass….
and having reached this point one morning, his voice tailed off as he looked with something of sadness in his face over the rugged mountain landscape about us. The merry tune was running through my mind, however, and without thinking I carried on the words.
In spring time, in spring time,
The only pretty ring time
When birds do sing hey ding, a ding ding
Sweet lovers love the spring.
He turned on me then with a look of amazement and anger and roared something at me in the same strange language.
I answered in Croatian that I did not understand, whereon he seized my arm most painfully and did not release his grip till he was convinced I told him the truth.
But thereafter, having discovered my gift of tongues, he set out to teach me his native language which I now found to be English. I learned quickly and was soon an able if not always very interested auditor of long reminiscences of his former life. His real name was Godfrey Hatfield and his family had flourished during the long reign of the English Queen during the last century. But when she died and the Scot, James, came to the throne, things changed and, from being a court favourite, young Godfrey had become first undesirable and then potentially criminal in the eyes of the new ruler. There had been suspicions of plot, a purge was ordered, but before he could be officially named, Godfrey had left the country and gone roaming across Europe in search of his fate, till finally he joined a ship at Marseilles and sailed for Constantinople. The corsairs had taken them off Crete and, as I have told, he pulled on a galley oar till the Uskoks rescued him after a fierce battle off the coast of Montenegro.
I listened enthralled to his talk of battles and booty, and because I could speak his language, I became first a precious link with England and all it meant to him, and next with his distant family, particularly a dearly loved younger brother. Significant, now I see, was the moment when, after instructing me in the art of slitting a man’s throat from behind so that he died and fell without a sound, he regarded me sombrely for a while, then said, ‘You are set to make a fair assassin, Carlo. Let us see whether you take to a gentleman’s weapons as easily.’
So saying he produced a pair of rapiers, buttoned the points, and began my education in the laws of the duello.
The distinction between a gentleman and the rest was a fine one, I soon perceived. Once when we closed with the rapiers I, knowing myself to be hard pressed, evened things up by kneeing him in the balls, a move he himself had taught me in his lessons on the cutlass.
‘God’s scrotum!’ he gasped. ‘That is not the way of it, Carlo. Not the gentleman’s way!’
Yet I noted that, whenever he could, in the forward thrusts with the rapier, he would bring his leading foot down hard on my toes. Plainly the art of being a gentleman lay in concealing your foul strokes!
So time passed; how much, I do not know. Months certainly, perhaps a year. Young and animal spirits measure by seasons not by days, and all I know is that the bora which had blown us into the Uskoks’ hands was howling again as I lay in wait one dark evening behind Lieutenant Jaraj’s wood-pile. Godislav had rescued me once from the lieutenant’s wrath and no man in his right senses would have risked it twice, but the flesh is no academician and to urge reason on a young man in love is like advising the heretic to piss on the bonfire that consumes him.
I say I was in love. What I mean is that of all the females in the settlement on whom my lustful eye had rested (that is to say, so desperate was I, all the females) Jaraj’s daughter Dusanka had given me the clearest indication that she was ready to admit my suit. She was no beauty, in fact she had a long stupid face like a mountain sheep’s, with a slight cast of the left eye, and perhaps this explains her own willingness to smile on such a poor catch as me. But she was built on a generous scale with breasts you could have loaded into a demicannon, or a culverin at the least. It was these I had been attempting to bear out of the arsenal of her blouse when Jaraj had first come upon me. And it was the memory of their ponderous softness which had brought me back despite the various dangers of the night.
Not least among these was the wind. The bora forced itself down the cleft in the mountains where
our settlement lay; and its fiercest blasts could pick a man off his feet and dash him most bloodily against a wall or a rock. Equally dangerous were the smaller objects – sticks, stones, slates, animals even – which continually filled the air. I have known a slate whistling sideways on the breath of the bora take a man’s head clean off something which I personally have only managed a couple of times and that with all the speed of a horse at full gallop to fortify the blow.
But the bora was also my friend, for I had seen how these Bosnians treat their women. In my district of Croatia, a woman knew her place and might be beaten if she stepped out of it. But these uncouth Bosnian peasants regularly whipped their wives and daughters just to remind them, though no offence had been given. So Jaraj, though not likely to venture himself forth on such a night, would have no compunction at all about sending Dusanka out to fetch more logs for his fire.
I had been lurking in the lee of the log-pile for nearly two hours before the door opened. A great curse from within told me Jaraj was complaining of the draught; then the flame-yellowed rectangle faded as the door was pulled to and a dark shape moved away from the house. I knew it was Dusanka before I saw her face. Who else could push through the blasts of the bora as though they were the gentlest zephyrs of spring?
Srupid that girl may have looked, but when I called to her and she saw who it was, she summed up the situation in a trice. Her great arms enfolded me and her lips crushed mine with a force that set my head reeling, my arteries racing, and my gums bleeding. I began to fumble with her clothes, but even here her intellect went before me. She pushed me away and began to deal with the familiar fastenings herself, roughly urging me, when she saw that I was merely looking on with incredulous awe, to take care of my own undressing.
I tore my clothes off with the frenzy of a man on fire. What cared I for the chill of the night air or the blasts of the bora? I had heat within me to thaw the wastes of Thule and an anchor beneath me to hold though Boreas himself came ripping through my sails.
She was soft yet solid to my eager touch. Her breasts spilled to right and left like the moles of Constantinople harbour. Yet were they no defence against the armada of my passion or the spring tide of my seed. But before I drove over the bar into her safe haven, I pushed myself up from her body to savour the glory of her nakedness and show her the grandeur of my own.
It was a sight worth seeing, I hope for both for us. Yet I paid dearly for my pride.
The bora sent down such a blast that it almost overthrew the massive rock-weighted log-pile. Me, kneeling naked like a Turkish wrestler astride his foe, it picked up as though I was an effigy of straw set in a vineyard to startle the birds. Backwards I was driven, arms outstretched towards my dwindling love, with all the desperate agony of Orpheus too early turned to view his lost Eurydice. Had I hit the stone wall of the house, I had surely died. But fate had too many other games still to play with me and instead I was hurled against the wooden door with such force that the catch snapped open and I sailed across the room on to the lap of Jaraj who sprawled in a drunken doze before his fire.
Even an Uskok used to the sudden starts and alarums of war needs a second or two to wake from dreams of God knows what foulness to the reality of a naked youth lying across his belly.
I leapt to my feet. He stared at me in amazement and terror as though I might be a demon sent from hell to summon his black soul. I saw his eyes fix with speculative trepidation on my naked lance, still couched for the attack. Then his gaze moved to the open door where stood Dusanka like a German Valkyrie come to seek her slain hero.
If I’d remained still, she wouldn’t have had to look far. Jaraj, with the sickening naivety of an uneducated mind, ignored all other possible explanations of our twin nakedness and picked the worst.
Pausing only to pluck his sword from the hearth, he came at me with a fury matched only by my fear. I pushed Dusanka aside (itself no mean feat) and fled into the night. Jaraj pursued. It was a desperate race and how it might have turned out, I do not know. But the same fate that had blown me into the house was still at its pastimes. The bora raged to a new crescendo, the log-pile finally gave way as though lifted by a shallow-laid petard, and Jaraj was enveloped in a tumble of flying wood.
I hoped he might be killed, but his moment was not yet come and I had scarcely time to reach Godislav’s house and clothe my nakedness before there was a thunderous knocking without.
It was Jaraj, bleeding and bruised, but with his wrath unabated. He had brought with him a few of his cronies, and as the bora, worn out perhaps by that final explosion, began to die away, others of the crew emerged and came to join the group.
Godislav, who had watched my precipitous entrance stark naked without any comment, now listened in equal silence to Jaraj’s speech. Concealed within the house, I listened also, and I soon realized that there was much more than just Dusanka’s threatened virtue at issue here. Jaraj, claiming to be speaking for the whole crew complained that we were spending too much time on shore, that the division of spoil was inequitable, that Godislav’s protection of noble Venetian prisoners was evidence that his heart was not in the Uskok cause, and that this suspicion was compounded by his protection of one who, from his origins, was very probably a Turkish or at least Venetian spy and who was certainly a despoiler of devout and virtuous maidens.
It took me some time to recognize myself in this last description and when I did, I felt indignant. But as others joined in the chorus of protest, I ceased to feel indignant and began to feel disturbed. The root cause of all the trouble was that Godislav was a foreigner and during the past year, perhaps because he had me for company, he had become more rather than less of a foreigner. Recently there had been talk in Senj of a full-scale campaign against the Turks, with a united Uskok force under Majmun. Such talk was not uncommon and normally everyone rattled their swords and behaved as if the uprising were imminent, though privately acknowledging the impracticability of the scheme. Godislav had been openly contemptuous, however, and his band had felt themselves demeaned before their fellows. This Jaraj now seized upon and while I would still have backed Godislav’s brains and reputation to preserve him in power, I began to have a sinking feeling that the only way he could do it was by sacrificing me and the Venetian prisoners to the mob.
Now Jaraj fell silent. Quickly I began to load a pair of pistols. At least I would not die alone. Outside the men grumbled and muttered among themselves, then all noise died away as Godislav began to talk.
He began seriously.
‘You are brave men. Aye, the bravest I have known. Always I have the example of your courage before me. If I am quick to the attack when galleys clash, it is because I know I must be fleet of foot to keep up with those around me. If I expose myself to cold steel and hot bullet, it is because I know that I am shielded by the press of those around me. If I take blows and feel wounds in silence, it is because I know my screams would shame and disgust the fortitude of those around me. Yet I confess these standards are hard for me to maintain. Jaraj is right. Sometimes I must fall short. Should any there be who would follow the brave example of Jaraj and go to Senj to join the force doubtless already gathering there for the assault on the heathen Turk, then let him go, freely and with our applause, and in the certainty that his wife and family will be safe and well cared for.’
Here he paused. I could imagine Jaraj looking round with dismay to deny that he was going to join any attack on anyone. Several voices cried out that they would remain with Godislav through thick and thin. Others joined in and the chorus might have become a thunder of acclamation had not someone shouted, ‘What of the Venetians?’
Godislav was unworried.
‘The Venetians? You see these papers I have in my hands? These are letters written by those selfsame Venetians to their families. They say they are well – for the moment – but will only remain so and be released if these rich families pay a good ransom.’
‘This we have heard before,’ shouted Jaraj. ‘Why have
we waited so long?’
‘We have waited till it was worth our while to risk a visit to Venice,’ answered Godislav. ‘There is no love for us there. Such a risk is scarcely worthwhile for the sake of a handful of ducats. But for ten thousand chiquines!’
‘Ten thousand!’ echoed the mob.
‘Aye, that is the total demanded in these letters!’ cried Godislav. ‘And this I promise, too, my friends. There shall be no talk here of unjust division. This money shall be divided equally between all members of my crew!’
The cheers were tremendous and there was some laughter also, produced I suspect by the realization that Jaraj, who had voiced the complaint, would be a large sufferer by this new democracy, for previously as lieutenant he had received a double share of all booty.
‘But who shall go to Venice and fetch this money?’ demanded someone.
‘It will need a brave man and someone expert in their language,’ said Godislav. ‘Someone also who is careless of his own life and not curious how he loses it, for their Council of Ten has, I believe, devised many subtle instruments for the entertainment of Uskoks.’
This was the first mention I ever heard of the Ten and even then, still in some trepidation for my own skin, I could detect the unease of the crew’s response.
Godislav let the hubbub of talk rumble on for a while.
‘Men,’ he then cried. ‘I have no more right than anyone else to undertake this task; nay, less than many if courage be the measure; but I would esteem it an honour undreamt of if those of you eagerly vying to be our chosen embassy would sacrifice their entitlement to my undesert. Say, will you let me go? When the vernal sun returns to warm your brave hearts, will you let me go?’
The Forging of Fantom Page 3