Stormbringers (Order of Darkness) (26 page)

‘But I stayed in the Empire and I am as great a commander as my brother. I eat better than him, I am certain that I am better dressed, and I am on the winning side. The Ottoman Empire is over-running the world, our frontiers expand every year. Now you two can choose. By luck – by the breaking of a mast and the loss of a sail you are free to choose. Not many boys get such a choice. It is a moment of destiny – fate – funny that it should come to two such little boys as you.’

‘We’ll go with you,’ the eldest boy said. He looked up at the handsome face. ‘You promise that we can stay together and that we will not be made slaves?’

‘You will live with a family of Turks in the country, and they will feed you and educate you. You will have to work hard but you will be trained as soldiers. You will be forbidden to marry or take up any trade but soldiering. When you are big and strong enough, you will join the army and serve the Sultan Mehmet II, as I do. His command runs from Wallachia to Armenia and there’s no doubt that you will march into Christendom, to the very gates of Vienna and beyond, to Paris, to Rome, to Madrid, to London. Every year we advance. Every year the Christians are defeated and fall back before us. You will be on the winning side under my command. The Christians say themselves that the end of days is coming for them. They predict that the world will end: we know that it will be us who ends it for them.’

‘We will never be defeated,’ Luca said fiercely. ‘You lie to the boys. We will never be defeated and you will never ride into Vienna, for we are under the hand of God.’

‘
Inshallah
, we are all under the hand of God,’ the Muslim said quietly. ‘But clearly, even you must see, that us both believing this makes no difference to who wins the battles. At the moment, as you must see, we are winning.’

‘We will never renounce our faith!’

‘We don’t ask you to. You can believe what you like. You can even pray as you like. But we will rule all of Christendom.’

‘Come home!’ Luca exclaimed, holding out both hands to the boys as if he would have them jump on shore.

The eldest boy shook his head. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said with careful politeness, ‘but this man saved us from the flood and will teach us to be soldiers like him. We’ll stay with him.’

‘Don’t you want to see your home again? Your mother and your father?’

‘Not at all,’ the boy said clearly. ‘They treated us worse than their hounds. We will make a new home.’

Luca stepped back, looked at Brother Peter. ‘I have no words,’ he said wretchedly. ‘I have failed these children twice over. Once when I could not foresee the wave, and now I cannot stop them selling their souls to the devil.’

Radu smiled. ‘Cheer up, Inquirer! The galley slaves won’t choose to stay with me. They are all yours, poor wretches. Now, I’ll have to unchain them. I will have to take my men and go down among them.’

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.’