The Iron Tempest (38 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

In which Rashid is nearly drowned, keeps a Promise to Bradamant and pledges his Hand in Marriage

Rashid returned to Arles only to discover that Agramant had already fled the city. Not only was the fleet gone, but every ship and boat for miles around had been commandeered. Rashid searched the coast for days, stopping at every fisherman’s hut, before he finally—a dozen miles beyond Perpignan—found a ship and a captain. The latter was not anxious to make the journey to Afric for the sake of a single passenger, but finally surrendered to the persuasive argument of gold and the even more persuasive argument put forward eloquently, if silently, by Balisard.

Under Rashid’s urging, the cables were slipped, the sails unfurled and, propelled by a brisk following wind, the little ship slid smoothly into the deep blue water of the Mare Internum. Rashid expressionlessly watched the shores of Frankland sink below the horizon, finally dissolving in a white haze.

For nearly a full day the ship sailed under a brilliant sky and a steady northwesterly wind and Rashid, refusing to leave his place at the bulwark, stared at the southern horizon, anxiously awaiting the first glimpse of the African shore.

It was not until twilight that the weather revealed its treachery. The wind—which until that moment had been steady, not veering five points to either side of northwest—suddenly swung to the east, so surprising the helmsman that the ship nearly capsized before he was able to respond and bring her head around. But even as he was doing that, the wind changed direction again, coming from the south, then the east again and then the west, spinning the ship like a cork.

The sky became ever more threatening, the atmosphere white and misty. On the horizon the fine streaks of cirrus were being replaced by ramparts of cumulonimbus. Low clouds swept past, seemingly only a few yards above the masthead. The birds that had been following the ship disappeared—except for the petrels, those friends of the storm.

Sheets of lightning formed a vivid background to the ragged fragments of dark clouds. The lightning was too high and distant to be accompanied by thunder, but the dry air quivered under an overcharge of electricity and the captain warned Rashid that a tempest would burst forth at any moment.

As the wind increased in velocity, so did the lightning in brilliancy, flashing in leaping arcs that spanned the sky from horizon to horizon, leaving the atmosphere pervaded by an incessant phosphorescent glow and the sharp smell of ozone.

Thunder was heard now and grew louder. The ship pitched as enormous swells passed beneath it, the sea swelling in huge billows—which the sailors recognized as rebounds from the approaching storm. At nine o’clock there was an isolated flash followed instantaneously by a crash of thunder that made the deck quiver beneath Rashid’s feet like a frightened dog.

“The tempest!” someone cried, and sailors rushed past the knight, hurrying to lower the sails.

The waves, as though previously crushed and flattened by the weight of the heavy atmosphere, rose furiously, angry at having been suppressed. The raging sea was swept by cloud-drifts that seemed to become saturated with the waves. Rashid could no longer see the small, intermediary waves that had been in the hollows of the larger crests. Nothing but long, murky undulations, each urging the other on, so compact that their crests wouldn’t break.

“Better lash yourself to something,” the captain shouted into Rashid’s ear, “before you’re washed overboard!”

Rashid ignored him.

The storm began to rage around him. There was no demarcation between sky and sea and both seemed to have caught fire. Lightning shot vertically from the crests of the waves, tangling like incandescent wires with those radiating from above. Each raindrop hit the deck with a burst of light. There was a strong odor of sulfur. The air itself was on fire; Rashid found the brightness intolerable; the noise was terrible, a complex sound that combined the howling of the crushed waves, the roaring wind and the incessant thunder.

The heavy waves, warmed to a strange heat by the incessant lightning, fell over the deck until Rashid was soaked to the skin. He saw a man sweep past him like a cork, but he still refused to abandon his place at the bulwark.

A torrent of rain fell and then a shower of flame succeeded the rain. The drops of water became sharp spikes of fire. Dense masses of lurid clouds rolled around the ship as the air crackled like a bonfire. Hailstones, as large as nuts, poured onto the deck, each one bursting like a shot.

Broken shrouds snapped around Rashid’s head like whips, but so far the mast remained unbroken, though it bent like a willow wand.

At one point, at the height of the tempest, the ship was suddenly raised on the crest of an enormous wave, standing almost vertically on its stern. For an instant, Rashid saw himself at an incomprehensible height above the raging breakers below. There were cries of terror from all around him, as men flew past like sacks of grain, dropping into the surging black gulf beneath. Everything loose on the deck followed: spars, water barrels and crates; chickens, pigs and the ship’s carpenter.

The ship dropped onto the other side of the wave with a shuddering crash that must have sprung every seam.

Rashid saw that the captain and what remained of his crew were abandoning the ship and had launched a dingy that had miraculously survived the battering. He rushed aft, hoping for a place, but the little vessel was already overcrowded and more men were still clambering into it. The overloaded boat had only inches of freeboard and as Rashid watched a wave washed over it, filling it instantly. It went to the bottom like a rock. For another moment he could hear the crying of the drowning men above the howl of the storm until their larynges were choked by the sea water.

A flash of lightning revealed, not a hundred yards away, the black rocks that had panicked the doomed crew. Without waiting another minute Rashid stripped himself of his armor and tunic and, naked, plunged over the side and into the surging black waves. Popping back to the surface, he immediately began swimming toward shore, confident that his strength and skill would save him where panic and weakness had doomed the captain and his crew. It did not take more than a few moments before he realized that he had perhaps been overconfident.

Though he battled the grim, menacing waves with boldness, he was not so successful conquering the tempest that raged in his conscience.
Is this,
he wondered
, the terrible baptism the Christian savior reserved for me for having so long denied a gentler one? Is the prophet Jesus baptizing me, not in the pure, clean water that saves—which I’ve been so slow to seek—but in this bitter flood?

All the promises he had made to Bradamant came back to him—and there was to his shame no lack of them. Ten, twenty, thirty times he swore that if God—either Jehovah or Allah—would overlook this catalog of sins, if he were allowed to set foot on land once again, he would become a Christian then and there, before he took another step, before he drew another breath.

Never again,
he promised
, will I raise lance or sword against a Christian, never again will I support the Moorish cause. I’ll take the quickest route back to Frankland and throw myself at the feet of Karl the Great. Never again will I lead my love in a dance of lies but will honor her as a husband should.

No sooner had he made this promise than he felt his strength redouble, his heart surge like a supercharged engine. His powerful arms struck the waves like a galley’s oars, driving him through the pitching sea like a torpedo. Did his strength come from an appeased god or a rationalized conscience? At the moment the point seemed moot.

Rashid at last found himself lying on a gravelly beach, alone, the only survivor of all the men who had been on the doomed ship. The breaking waves pounded his back like great fists. Although so tired he fell twice before regaining his feet, his lungs burning with every breath, every inch of his body abrased and bleeding, he stumbled up the steeply sloping shingle until he arrived at a point beyond the reach of the surf. He found himself at the foot of a low cliff—really a pile of shattered boulders, some as large as hogsheads, some as houses. Even though he was exhausted, battered and waterlogged, he could see no sense in remaining where he was. The sky had been gradually lightening as dawn approached and the ceiling of heavy clouds lifted. The wind still blew fearsomely, and the salt torn from the tumultuous waves stung like nettles. Rashid shivered, then began to climb the jagged rocks; a gingery task for a naked, barefoot man.

It took a painful half hour or so, and a dozen new abrasions and bruises, before Rashid reached the top of the cliff. The landscape that spread before him, as he turned his back to the sea, was no less prepossessing than the beach and cliff had been. As far as he could see was a wilderness of dunes, broken rocks, scrubby-looking plants and cactus. To his right, the cliff rose gradually toward a high bluff, like a considerable hill that had been sheared in half by some ancient cataclysm—which, of course, is exactly what it was. A relatively gentle slope on the landward side dropped as a precipitous cliff into the sea. He thought he saw a fleeting wisp of smoke from near the summit—though it might just as easily have been a fleeting rag-end of the fog, given the chilly dampness of the atmosphere. Still, there was an encouraging hint of greenness at the base of the bluff that was certainly more inviting than the dun dreariness of the rest of the miserable landscape.

He had gone no more than perhaps half the distance when he saw what he first thought was the body of one of the unfortunate sailors, or perhaps only a tangled mass of sailcloth, seaweed and suchlike jetsam. That it was neither was proved by the strange words that seemed to croak from somewhere within its midst.

“‘Saul, Saul,” the voice barked, “why do you persecute my faith?’ That is, of course, what our Lord said to Saint Paul at the time He gave him the redeeming blow. Tell me, stranger, have you been thinking that you could cross the sea without paying a toll, thereby defrauding another of His fair wages? Don’t you see that God’s long arm still reaches you, even when you think you’re farthest away?”

Rashid was dumbfounded at receiving this remarkable speech from what could easily have been a heap of boiled spinach or old laundry.

“Is someone in there?” he ventured.

The shapeless pile shook itself then shook itself again even more violently, and with every vibration seemed to reform, reshape, grow a little taller and more compact until Rashid was astonished to see that what he had believed to be something awful the storm had washed up was in fact a very little old man who had, for some reason, been curled upon the ground on his hands and knees. He was the most withered, wizened and elderly human being Rashid had ever seen alive—barring his pseudofather, Atalante. The face was as pink and wrinkled as a baby’s fist.

“I knew you were coming,” the old man said. “I know everything about you.”

“So you say,” replied Rashid. “And who are you, then?”

“Ah. A hermit, my son, who needs no name. A hermit in this barren, lifeless corner of the universe who hasn’t seen a living representative of his fellow creatures in nearly two-score years. Come along with me. I’m sure you’d not refuse some food and wine and I’m certain we can do something about your Adamic costume.”

With those words and without waiting for an answer from Rashid, the old man turned and began to scramble over the rocks at a surprising speed, like a shaggy pica. Rashid, being left little choice, followed.

As he climbed the rocky slope, Rashid noticed there was a kind of rustic chapel or altar on the crest of the bluff directly above the hermit’s den—which latter appeared to be little more than a slightly improved natural hole. Evidently a great deal more labor and interest had gone into the chapel than into the living quarters—but then, that was the sort of thing that hermits did.

As Rashid neared the cave, he saw the slope of the bluff that ran away from the sea disappearing into lush groves of junipers, laurels and myrtles from which heavy date palms protruded. As he got closer to the hermit’s burrow, he saw a spring of clear water gushing from between the rocks immediately below the entrance. It tumbled down the slope in a series of splashing cascades and was evidently the inspiration for the oasis below.

“Come on, come on!” urged the old man, who, springing nimbly from rock to rock, had already reached his shelter.

Two-thirds of the way up the bluff was a hollow that could hardly be called a cave. It was little more than a cell carved out of the living rock, its opening protected from the weather by a few rough-hewn boards. And there was little enough inside to protect: a pallet stuffed with dried moss, a rough-hewn table and chair, both made of insubstantial-looking sticks artlessly tied together, a bronze crucifix attached to the rocky wall with a string and except for a few miscellaneous books, pots and bundles, that was all.

When Rashid entered, the hermit was already spreading bowls and baskets of fruit over the little table. “Here,” he was invited, “eat something. The water’s the purest on earth. This is all I’ve eaten for forty years and look at me now!”

Rashid was too hungry and too grateful for the hermit’s hospitality to be so ungracious as to point out that the old man’s appearance was not the compelling argument in favor of his diet that he evidently thought it was. The hermit had to have been all of eighty years old and every single minute was visibly engraved on his face, like the daily tally a prisoner carves in the wall of his cell.

“I know all about you,” the old man chortled while his guest ate and drank. “I know who you are, where you’ve come from and where you’re going.”

“You do, eh? So who am I, old man? Where’ve I come from and where am I going?”

“You’re the great Saracen knight, Rashid, of course, who sits at the right hand of the pagan king, Agramant.”

“Well,” admitted Rashid, “I can’t deny that, but it’s common knowledge, after all. You’ll forgive the conceit, I hope, but I don’t believe that my face is entirely unknown.”