The Pirates of the Levant (15 page)

Alatriste heard voices shouting something in English. He could expect little mercy from them, and so he looked up at the grey sky, took a few deep breaths and gritted his teeth. 'Bloody galley,' he muttered, as he stood, sword in one hand and dagger in the other. Then, at the east end of the bay, the
Mulata
hove into view.

The galley was travelling swiftly through the calm waters of the bay towards the saetta. The galleymaster's whistle set the rhythm for the oarsmen who, chests gleaming with sweat, were putting their all into their work, giving heart and soul to their rowing, the tempo punctuated by the metallic clank of manacles and shackles and the lash of the whip, cracking through the air and making no distinction between the backs of Moors, Turks, heretics or Christians. Their gasps and moans produced a harsh noise like the stertorous breathing of a dying man. Meanwhile, sixty soldiers and fifty sailors, armed to the teeth and spoiling for a fight, were crowded together on the
arrumbadas —
the raised fighting platforms round the edge of the boat and at the prow — impatient to begin. For although they knew that the day would bring more honourthan profit, not even the most arrant idler wanted to be left behind. The four Knights from Malta who were travelling as passengers — one French, one Italian and two from Castile had also asked Captain Urdemalas' permission to join the troops, and there they were, like knights of old, in their elegant red surcoats bearing the white cross, which they wore to go into combat. They would merely have cut a ridiculous fine figure were they not known throughout Christendom as fearsome warriors.

'Row! Row! Row!' we shouted, along with the whistle and the lash. 'Board them! Board them!'

There were good reasons for this ardour of ours, given that our enemies were probably cruel and insolent Englishmen who, not content with plundering us in the Indies, were now trying to bully and threaten their way into making a space for themselves in our back yard. We could hear firing from the land and knew that any one of those shots might take the life of a comrade. That is why we were so loud in our encouragement of the rowers, and I myself — may God forgive' me, if he pays heed to such trifling matters — would have gladly picked up a whip myself and lashed the rowers' backs to make them row faster still.

'Board them! Board!'

From the moment we rounded the point, we headed straight for the saetta, with Captain Urdemalas screaming orders and curses into the ear of the helmsman. From the mouth of the bay, we saw that the saetta, because of the way it was anchored, was sideways on to the wind, while at its stern and some distance off, the felucca's prow pointed towards the beach. If the saetta had had cannon ready on the seaward side, she could — given angle of approach — have done us considerable damage However, in her current state — slightly listing and held

fast by anchors and cables — she was fortunately unable to make use of her artillery. We watched the defenceless vessel gradually grow in size before us through the thin smoke given off by the linstocks held in readiness by the master gunner and his assistants as they crouched behind the cannon and culverins on the prow. The sailors in charge of the
pedreros
had meanwhile taken up positions above the cordage room and along the sides of the galley.

There were barely any harquebusiers on board, for almost all were on land, but we nonetheless bristled with pistols, pikes, half-pikes and swords, and were more than ready to use them. I had got into the habit, like so many soldiers, of tying a kerchief about my head so that my hair didn't get in the way when I was fighting or so that I could pull on a helmet, and on this occasion I was also wearing a corslet attached at the sides with chains so that I could easily pull it off if I fell into the sea, as well as carrying a small wooden shield covered in leather. With my dagger tucked in my belt and my short, wide sword in its sheath, I needed nothing more. Squeezed among my fellows in the gangway on the starboard side near the prow — for no one crossed the ram until the cannon and the other weapons had been fired — I thought about Angelica de Alquezar as I always did before going into battle, and then I crossed myself as did nearly everyone else, in readiness to board the saetta.

'There they are, the dogs!'

Yes, a dozen or so men had appeared at the rail and, in a trice, had raked us with musket-fire. The bullets, fired in haste, whistled over our heads, into the sides of the galley or into the sea, but before our enemies could seek shelter to reload, our gunner and his assistants dealt them a direct blow with a shot from the cannon, loaded with a sack of nails, bits of old chain and bullets. The saetta's rail splintered and there

was a terrible sound of breaking shrouds and the creak  of broken wood.

Now the English may have been good tacticians and  even better artillerymen, but there was one thing they feared like the Devil, and that was what happened next, before they could recover from the shock: the Spanish infantry boarded the ship. For we Spaniards could fight the deck of a ship as fiercely as if we were on land. Once our galleymaster and our helmsman had manoeuvred the ram of the galley so delicately that it rested against the side of the saetta without damaging so much as a strake, we fell upon the enemy. Half of us, fifty or so men, just managed to hurry across the ram's two feet of narrow planks before the
Mulata
drew back a little and, goin round the stern of the saetta, passed between it and the felucca, so that the
pedreros
on our port side could rake that deck with stones, just in case. Then it turned adroitly as it approached the beach, enabling the
pedreros
on the other side to pelt the corsairs there, before landing the rest of our men, who waded through the waist-high water, yelling: 'Forward for Spain! Attack! Attack!' As the saying goes:

With sword or cutlass, dagger or knife,

I'll kill the first who threatens my life.

The truth is that I could not really pay much attention to that part of the manouevre, for by then I had jumped down from the ram on to the listing hull of the saetta. Slipping awkwardly on the grease and covering my clothes with pitch, I managed to get on to the deck. There, I took out my sword and, together with my comrades, fought as best I could. The enemy were, indeed, Englishmen, or so it seemed. We made short work of a few of the fair-haired fellows and finished off the occasional wounded sailor whose blood streamed towards the other side of the deck.

One group tried to take refuge behind the mizzen mast and the piles of canvas and rolls of cable there. They fired on us with their pistols, killing some of our men, but we hurled ourselves upon them, ignoring their shouts and boasting, for they wielded their weapons arrogantly, challenging us to come near. Oh, we came near, all right, enraged by their impudence, capturing their refuge and mercilessly putting them to the sword on the poop deck, from which some, seeing that no quarter would be given, threw themselves into the sea.

We were so athirst for blood that there was not enough meat to sink our teeth into, and so I did not fight with any man in particular, apart from a blue-eyed fellow with long sideburns, armed with a carpenter's axe, with which he cut through my shield as if it were wax, and, for good measure, left me with a dent in my corslet and a bruise on my ribs. I threw down my shield, recovered as best I could, and assumed a crouching position, intending to go for his guts, but it was difficult fighting on that tilted deck. Then one of the Knights of Malta happened by and sliced off the fellow's head just above the eyebrows, leaving me with no opponent and my opponent with his brains hanging out, his soul in hell and his body on its way to the sea.

I searched for someone else to stick my sword into, but there was no one. And so I went down with a few other men to take a look below decks, pilfering what we could while we hunted for anyone who might be hiding there.

I had the grim satisfaction of finding one such sea dog, a big freckled Englishman with a long nose, whom I discovered huddled behind some barrels of water. He crept out,ashen-faced, and fell to his knees, as if his legs would not support him, saying 'No, no' and crying 'Quarter, quarter'. Once deprived of the strength that sheer numbers give them and when they are not in that gregarious frame of mind bestowed by wine or beer, many inhabitants of that brave nation swallow their arrogance with true Franciscan humility as soon as things turn sour. By contrast, when a Spaniard finds himself alone, cornered and sober, he is at his most dangerous, for like a furious beast he will hit out madly blindly, with neither reason nor hope, with ne'er a though for St Anthony or the Holy Virgin. But to return to the Englishman in the hold, I was not, as you can imagine, in the sweetest of moods, and so I went over to stick my sword in his throat and finish him off. Indeed I was just raising
my
weapon, determined to send the rascal off to Satan along with the Anglosaxon whore who bore him, when I remembered something that Captain Alatriste had once said to me: 'Never plead for your life with the man who has vanquished you, and never deny life to someone who pleads for it.' And
so,
restraining myself like a good Christian, I simply kicked him in the face and broke his nose.
Croc,
it went. Then I bundled him upstairs onto the deck.

I found Captain Alatriste on the beach, along with the
other
-
survivors of the attack, Copons among them. They
were
dirty, exhausted and battered, but alive. And that was some achievement, for as well as Ensign Muelas and the four
other
men who had been killed, there had been seven wounded two of whom died later, on board the galley — proof of
just how fierce the fighting had been on land. In addition to
those losses there were three dead and four wounded during
the
boarding, including our master gunner, who died when
a
harquebus blew away half his jaw, and Sergeant Albaladejo, who was blinded when a musket was fired at him at point- blank range. It was no small price to pay for a saetta that was worth at most three thousand
escudos
, but this was tempered by the thought that we had slit the throats of twenty-eight pirates — almost all of them Englishmen, along with a few Turks and some Moors from Tunis — and had taken nineteen prisoners. We had also seized the felucca, and, according to the royal ordinances, we soldiers and sailors would receive a third of the value of its cargo.

The felucca was a Sicilian ship that the English had captured four days earlier. We freed eight crew members from the hold and were able to reconstruct events from what they told us. The captain of the saetta, a certain Robert Scruton, had sailed through the strait of Gibraltar in a square- rigged ship and with an English crew, resolved to make his fortune by smuggling and pirating out of the ports of Saleh, Tunis and Algiers. But their ship had proved too heavy for the light Mediterranean winds, and so they had captured a large saetta, which was faster and more suited to the job, and with that they had spent eight weeks scouring the seas, although they had not succeeded in seizing any vessel that brought them the wealth they coveted. The felucca, which was taking wheat from Marsala to Malta, had realised that the saetta was a pirate ship, but, unable to escape it, had been forced to shorten sail. The pirates, however, had drawn alongside so clumsily — a combination of heavy swell and poor helmsmanship — that the saetta itself came off worst and its starboard side was holed. That is why, being so close to the island, the English had decided to carry out repairs. Indeed, they had already completed them when we attacked, and were considering setting sail again that very day to sell the eight Sicilians, the felucca and its cargo in Tunis.

Having heard the witnesses and verified the information, the trial was deemed to be over. The sentence was clear. The saetta had not been issued with a corsairs' patent, or with any other document recognised among honest nations. For example, the Dutch, although they were our enemies because of the war in Flanders, were treated by us as prisoners of war when we captured them in the Indies or in the Mediterranean, and our policy was to allow those who surrendered to return home, to relegate to the galley those who fought on once they had struck their flag, and to hang any captains who attempted to blow up their own ship rather than hand it over. These were the polite customs practised by civilised nations, which even the Turks were happy to follow. However, at the time, we were not at war with England — the felucca was from Syracuse in Sicily, which was as much ours as Naples and Milan were — and so these sailors had no right to proclaim themselves corsairs and to plunder the subjects of the King of Spain: they were mere pirates. Captain Scruton's avowals that he had been issued patents in Algiers and had signed agreements authorising him to sail these waters made no impression whatsoever on the stern tribunal watching him, mentally measuring up his neck, while our galleymaster — bearing in mind that this Englishman came from, of all places, Plymouth — prepared his very finest noose. And when the felucca and the saetta — the latter crewed by some of our men — set sail the following morning thanks to a north-west wind that threatened rain, Captain Robert Scruton, a subject of His Royal Highness the King of England, was left hanging by a rope from the watchtower of Lampedusa, a notice at his feet — written in Castilian and in Turkish — which read:
An Englishman, a thief and a pirate.

The other captives — eleven Englishmen, five Moors and two Turks — were put to the oars and there they stayed, rowing their hearts out for the King of Spain, until the vicissitudes of both sea and war put paid to them. As far as I know, a few were alive when, eleven years later, the
Mulata
sank during the naval battle of Genoa against the French, with the galley-slaves still chained to their benches, because no one had bothered to free them. By then, none of us remained on board, not even the Moor Gurriato who now, with the new influx of rowers from the saetta, had more time on his hands, thus providing me with more opportunities to talk to him, as I will recount in the following chapter.