‘Yes, sir,’ Thomas replied flatly.
‘There are few enough of us left now. Some in Europe think that the Order is the vanguard of the Church’s struggle against the Turk. The truth is we are the rearguard. Never forget that. Every man we lose brings the enemy one step closer to victory.’ His eyes bored into Thomas’s. ‘In time, if you live long enough, you will command your own galley and be responsible for the lives of the men who serve under you. It is not a duty to be taken lighdy.’ Thomas nodded. ‘I understand, sir.’
‘See that you do.’ La Valette backed off a pace and looked over the men standing along the deck. ‘Sergeant Mendoza!’ he called.
A portly figure trotted up to him and saluted. ‘Sir?’
‘You and your men are staying aboard, under the command of Sir Thomas. The rest of you, back to the Swift Hind at once.’
The party following the captain made their way along the deck until they reached the place where the bows of their ship were bound to the corsair galley by the grappling hooks. They climbed up on to the bulwark and crossed back over to the other vessel. As soon as the last man had left the corsair, Thomas gave the order for the grappling-hook lines to be slackened off so that the iron points could be worked free and carefully tossed back to the deck of the Swift Hind. A gap opened between the two galleys as La Valette gave the order to unship the oars 'and back the vessel off far enough to allow them to turn the bow in the direction of the fleeing galleon. Then the oars, working in a steady rhythm, powered the sleek galley after their prey. Thomas watched for a moment and then turned his attention to his temporary command.
He and Mendoza made their way over to the grating above the entrance to the main hold. As Thomas approached he could hear muttering from below and a terrified keening that was hurriedly silenced. A bolt fastened the grating in place and Thomas knelt down to draw it back, noting the thoroughness of the corsairs, who chained their rowers to their benches and then locked them into the hold for good measure.
‘Help me with the grating.’
With the sergeant’s help they lifted the grating and slid it on to the deck beside the entrance to the hold. Thomas peered over the edge and winced at the warm blast of the foulest stench he had ever encountered. There was movement below and the clink of chains as limbs stirred. Then he saw faces turning towards the pallid light entering through the hatch. Wild locks of filthy hair and straggly beards hung over their emaciated features. Most were white, but there were darker hues of skin there as well, though it was hard to tell for the filth that covered them. A ladder descended on to the narrow walkway that stretched between the lines of benches running along each side of the galley. He climbed down and saw a figure holding a small whip standing towards the stem, beside the pace keeper still chained next to his drum. Thomas and his men had to bend their heads as they strode aft, under the gaze of glittering eyes on either side.
‘Praise the Lord . . .’ a voice croaked. ‘They’re Christians . . . Christians! Come to set us free!’
His words set off many of his comrades who raised their hands imploringly towards their rescuers. Some simply hunched over the oars and wept, their shoulders wracked by sobs.
The overseer dropped his whip as Thomas approached and clasped his hands together, begging in French, ‘Please, sir . . . Please.’
‘Where is the locking pin?’ Thomas demanded.
The overseer jabbed a finger towards a ring bolt on the deck just beyond the reach of the pace setter. ‘Th-there.’
Thomas brushed him aside. He fought back his nausea at the overpowering stink rising from the bilges. How could any man endure this? he wondered. He reached the ring bolt and saw that the locking pin was just beside it. He took out his dagger and began to work it free. A moment later it fell out of its sheath and then Thomas fed the chain back through the ring bolt and laid it at the foot of the nearest rowing bench. He stared at the faces of the men sitting there.
‘Who amongst you is Christian, if any?’
‘Me!’ The nearest man nodded emphatically. ‘Me, master. I’m from Toulon.’
‘Set him free,’ Thomas ordered.
‘And me!’ said the rower’s neighbour.
‘Liar!’ the first man snapped. ‘You are a Morisco. The corsairs took you from Valencia.’
‘Sergeant, free this Frenchman. The other man stays in chains.’ The Morisco, descended from the Arabs who had once ruled Spain, opened his mouth to protest but then, seeing the implacable expression on Thomas’s face, he closed it and bowed his head over his oar in resignation. Thomas looked round as more voices called out, proclaiming their faith. If all were telling the truth, only a third would be left at the oars, too few to work the passage to Malta. As the tumult of desperate cries rose, he drew a deep breath and bellowed down the length of the galley, ‘SILENCE!’
The rowers, long since cowed by the whip of the overseer, obediently stilled their tongues. Thomas turned to his sergeant. ‘Set the Christians free, and only the Christians. Any man who claims the faith and is found to be a liar will be put to death.’
‘Yes, sir,’ the soldier replied tonelessly.
‘Carry on.’ Thomas could not bear the smell of these creatures and their surroundings any longer. ‘I’ll be on deck.’
‘What about him?’ Mendoza gestured at the overseer who was standing towards the stern, not daring to meet anyone’s gaze as he awaited his fate. Thomas stared at him briefly and noted the short length of whip still in his hand. ‘Him? Let the men you set free deal with him.’
Thomas turned away and strode quickly back down the narrow walkway towards the ladder, fighting the urge to run and escape from this hellish hole as quickly as possible. He climbed on to the deck and hurried across to the upwind bulwark and breathed as deeply as he could to expel every last tendril of the foul air in the hold. Although he had known what went on below the deck of a galley, he had only been below on a handful of occasions. What he had seen had disgusted him, but the men who crewed the Order’s galleys were criminals, pirates and followers of false faiths. As foul as the circumstances were on the Christian galleys, he had never before seen men as pitifully treated as here on the corsairs’ galley. He felt a deep rage as he thought of the enemy, a burning desire to wipe Islam from the face of God’s earth.
A splash close at hand made Thomas look round; some of his men were heaving the bodies of the dead over the side. The corpses had been stripped of their weapons and items of clothing that might fetch a decent price in the markets of Malta. Two more men guarded a handful of wounded prisoners sitting on the deck around the base of the aft mast. As he gazed at them, Thomas felt his heart harden like a cold stone in his breast. He turned away from the bulwark and strode towards them, gesturing to a handful of the other soldiers to follow him. As he reached the prisoners he stopped and stared at them with hatred. There were over twenty of them, most still wearing some armour, empty scabbards hanging from their belts and baldrics. Most had wounds which had hastily been dressed with tom strips of cloth. The wounds were superficial and they would recover, well enough at least to take their places on the galley’s rowing benches.
‘Leave the officers here. Take the rest down to the oars,’ he ordered in a flat tone. His men separated the prisoners, herding most towards the hatch while a handful remained sitting on the deck. Thomas stared at them for a moment before he spoke again. ‘Kill them. The bodies go over the side.’
One of the men who had been guarding the prisoners glanced at his companion before he cleared his throat and responded. ‘Sir? The officers are worth good money.’
Thomas felt a tremor in his hand and clenched it tightly. ‘I gave you an order. Kill them! Do it!’
Footsteps sounded behind him and then Stokely stepped between Thomas and the prisoners. ‘You can’t kill the officers. They are prisoners.’
Thomas swallowed and answered bitterly, ‘They are the enemy. They are Turks, infidels.’
‘They are still God’s creatures,’ Stokely answered, ‘even if they have not yet embraced the true faith. We accepted their surrender. We cannot slaughter them. It would offend any notion of chivalry.’
‘Chivalry?’ Thomas frowned and then smiled. ‘There is no place for it in the war against the Turk. Death is what they deserve.’
‘You can’t—’
Thomas raised a hand to silence him. ‘We’re wasting time. I want the galley under way as soon as possible. First, we get rid of these . . . vermin.’
He drew his sword and before anyone could intervene he ran the blade through the nearest of the corsairs, a youth in a finely embroidered jerkin, too young to grow a beard. The corsair gasped and slumped back on to the deck as a crimson stain quickly spread over the white cotton of his jerkin. He feebly clawed at the rent in the cloth and tried to press at the wound as if to staunch the flow of blood. Thomas stood over him, blinded by all but the desire to kill. He struck again, this time at the youth’s neck, cutting deep into the spine and almost severing the head. Thomas looked round at his men. ‘Now, carry out your orders! Kill them all. You first.’ He pointed at one of the men who had been guarding the prisoners. ‘Do it.’
The soldier lowered his pike and thrust it into the chest of the nearest corsair. The others began to cry out, begging for mercy in French and Spanish as well as their native tongues. Once the first two were dead, the rest of the soldiers standing around them joined in with the slaughter. Thomas stood apart, and Stokely looked on, his lips curled with disgust and horror.
‘This is. . . wrong.’ He shook his head. ‘Wrong.’
‘Then perhaps you had better reconsider your membership of the Order.’ Thomas shrugged and turned away as the last of the prisoners was killed. ‘See to it that the bodies are removed.’
As he walked towards the bows, Thomas felt nothing for a moment. He had expected to feel a sense of release, the draining of the tension that had built up during the battle, and then in the hold. But there was just a chilling numbness. The blood on the deck around him and on discarded weapons was just a detail, and his recollections of the battle were fleeting images unfreighted by emotion, remorse or even the smallest ray of triumph. All he knew was that he still lived and his comrades had won a small victory. No more than a pinprick to the vast Leviathan of Turkish might that was steadily making this sea, and the lands that bounded it, the domain of Islam. Blood would continue to flow, men would continue to die by the sword or from starvation and exhaustion chained to the oars of the galleys that swept this troubled sea. Women and children would continue to be taken as slaves to become whores or be raised as Muslims to wage war on those they had once called family. In turn the knights of St John and those who shared their cause would fight for survival. And so it would go on. Sword and scimitar locked in an endless, bloody duel whose only prize was the misery upon misery heaped upon man.
Thomas went over to the small hatch over the forward hold where he had killed the man dressed in black. He sat down heavily and unbuckled his mantlets and pulled off his gloves before fumbling with the buckles of the chinstrap of his helmet. It took a few attempts before he pulled the helmet off and placed it beside him on the deck. Sweat plastered his hair to his scalp and the morning breeze felt cool on his exposed skin. He leaned back for a moment, resting against the bulwark, until a shadow fell across his face. He blinked his eyes open and saw Stokely standing before him.
‘I’ve carried out your orders. And the Christians have been freed.’ He gestured towards the rear of the deck where forty or so skeletal figures in rags were gathered around some baskets of bread, frantically scrabbling for a loaf, and ripping chunks off and chewing vigorously. Stokely watched them a moment. ‘They weren’t so hungry that they didn’t tear the overseer to pieces first. Still, he deserved his fate.’
‘If you say so.’
Stokely glanced at the hatch. ‘Have you searched down there yet?’
Thomas shook his head.
‘Might be some more food we could give that lot.’
Thomas waved a hand towards the narrow coaming. ‘Do as you wish.’
Stokely lowered himself down the ladder into the small storage hold. A moment later Thomas heard him swear in a surprised tone, before he called up.
‘Thomas!’
‘What is it?’
‘Come down here!’
The urgency in his tone caused Thomas to quickly shift himself over the edge of the hatch and drop down into the confined space. ‘What is it?’
He turned and looked forward to where Stokely was crouching down, not far from a bundle of rags. There was not enough room to stand and Thomas shuffled over to his side. The bundle stirred and in the shafts of light that penetrated the hold through a small grille Thomas saw that it was a woman. A thin strip of cloth covered her and as she began to turn towards them, it slipped and exposed the raw welts across her shoulders and back. Her hair was long and dark and one hand was chained to a bolt in the side of the hold. She looked at the two men, eyes narrow with suspicion. Her skin was pale and there was a bruise on her cheek. Her lips parted and her tongue briefly moistened the chapped skin before she whispered, ‘Who are you?’
‘Christians,’ Sir Oliver replied. ‘We’ve taken this galley.’
‘Christians,’ she repeated, looking them over searchingly.
There was a brief silence as the woman and the two knights stared at each other. As he looked at her, Thomas realised that she was beautiful, even here, beaten, bruised and chained in her own filth. Something stirred in the coldness of his hardened heart. He shuffled round so that he could reach the ring bolt and then pulled out his dagger. The woman flinched slightly at the sight of the blade and he motioned towards the pin fastening the chains to the bolt. ‘I’ll get you out of here.’
She nodded and Thomas inserted the point of the blade and began to work the pin free. He paused briefly and looked at her. ‘What is your name?’
She licked her lips again and replied hoarsely, ‘Maria de Venici.’ Thomas nodded and again he felt something stir in his heart as he regarded her.
‘Maria,’ he repeated slowly, savouring each syllable of the name. ‘Maria.’
But not now.
His heart was beating with impatience and anxiety as he stood in the shadow of the walls of Fort St Angelo, the home of the Order, built on the rocky tip of the Birgu peninsula. The fort guarded the entrance to the harbour and loomed over the small town whose red roof tiles appeared dull and grey in the moonlight. A small path ran along the base of the wall, leading down to the landing stage at the edge of the water, where Thomas stood waiting. He started nervously as the cathedral bell tolled the half-hour after midnight. Maria should have been here long ago. Edging away from the rocks beneath the wall, Thomas strained his eyes as he stared along the path, but nothing moved there. He felt a stab of fear at the thought that she might have changed her mind and decided not to take the risk of meeting him alone again.