Stormbringers Read online

  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.