Cathedral of the Sea

by Ildefonso Falcones

  Now King Pedro was on the beach, taking command. He ordered the ten galleys to be made ready, and that the citizens of Barcelona and surrounding towns, who were beginning to arrive at the shore, should embark together with the small number of soldiers he had with him. Every vessel, big or small, was to head out to repel the Castillian fleet.

  “This is madness,” complained Guillem when he saw everyone scrambling on board the boats. “Any one of those galleys can ram our vessels and split them in two. Lots of people will be killed.”

  It would still take some time before the Castillian fleet reached the harbor.

  “They will show no mercy,” Arnau heard someone say. “They’ll massacre us.”

  Pedro the Cruel was not someone to show mercy. Everyone was aware of his fearsome reputation: he had executed his bastard brothers, Federico in Seville and Juan in Bilbao. A year later, after holding her prisoner all that time, he had beheaded his aunt Eleonor. What mercy could they expect from someone who did not shrink from killing his own family? The Catalan king had not put Jaime of Mallorca to death despite his constant betrayal and all the wars they had fought.

  “It would make more sense to try to defend ourselves on land,” Guillem shouted in Arnau’s ear. “We’ll never do it at sea. As soon as the Castillians get beyond the tasques, they will overrun us.”

  Arnau agreed. Why was the king so determined to defend the city at sea? Guillem was surely right; once the enemy had got beyond the tasques ...

  “The tasques!” Arnau shouted. “What boat do we have in the harbor?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The tasques, Guillem! Don’t you understand? What ship do we have?”

  “That carrack over there,” said Guillem, pointing to a huge, potbellied cargo boat.

  “Come on. We’ve no time to lose.”

  Arnau started running toward the sea, in among the crowd of other people doing the same. He looked behind to encourage Guillem to follow him.

  The shoreline was buzzing with soldiers and citizens of Barcelona, wading into the sea up to their waists. Some of them were trying to clamber on board the small fishing boats that were already heading out to sea; others were waiting for boatmen to come and pick them up and take them to one or other of the bigger men-o’-war or merchant vessels anchored farther out.

  Arnau saw a boat approaching the shore.

  “Come on!” he shouted to Guillem and plunged into the water, trying to make sure he reached the boat before all the others around them. By the time they got there, it was already full, but the boatman recognized Arnau and made room for him and Guillem.

  “Take me out to the carrack over there,” Arnau shouted when the man was about to set sail.

  “First to the galleys. That’s the king’s order ...”

  “Take me to my ship!” Arnau insisted. The boatman looked at him doubtfully, and the others in the boat started to protest. “Silence!” shouted Arnau. “You all know me. I have to reach my ship. Barcelona ... your family depends on it. All your families might depend on it.”

  The boatman gazed out at the big, lumbering ship. It was only a little out of his way. Why would Arnau Estanyol not be telling the truth?

  “Head for the carrack!” he ordered his two oarsmen.

  As soon as Arnau and Guillem had grasped the rope ladders thrown to them by the ship’s captain, the boatman headed off for the nearest galley.

  “Get all your men rowing!” Arnau ordered the captain before his feet had even touched deck.

  The captain gave the order to the oarsmen, who immediately took their places on the rowing benches.

  “Where are we headed?” he asked.

  “To the tasques,” Arnau told him.

  Guillem nodded. “May Allah, whose name be praised, grant you success.”

  But if Guillem understood what Arnau was trying to do, the same could not be said of the king’s army and the citizens of Barcelona. When they saw his ship begin to move off with no soldiers or weapons on board, one of them shouted: “He wants to save his ship!”

  “Jew!” another man cried.

  “Traitor!”

  Many others joined in the insults. Soon, the entire beach was filled with angry cries against Arnau. What was Arnau Estanyol up to? Bastaixos and boatmen wondered, as they watched the heavy ship slowly gather speed when a hundred pairs of oars dipped rhythmically into the water.

  Arnau and Guillem stood at the ship’s prow, staring at the Castillian fleet that was drawing dangerously close. As they passed the rest of the Catalan fleet, they had to protect themselves from a hail of arrows, but as soon as they were out of range they went to the prow once more.

  “This has to work,” Arnau told Guillem. “Barcelona must not fall into the hands of that traitor.”

  The tasques were a chain of sandbanks parallel to the coast. They were Barcelona’s only natural defense, although they also represented a danger for any boat wishing to enter the city harbor. There was only one channel that was deep enough to allow large ships in; anywhere else could mean they ran aground on the sands.

  Arnau and Guillem drew ever nearer to the tasques, no longer having to hear the obscene insults of thousands of voices on the beach. Their shouting had even managed to drown out the noise of the bells.

  “It will work,” Arnau repeated, this time under his breath. Then he told the captain to have the oarsmen stop rowing. As the hundred oars were raised out of the water and the ship started to glide toward the tasques, the shouts from the beach gradually died away until there was complete silence. The Castillian fleet was drawing closer. Above the sound of the distant bells, Arnau could hear the ship’s keel scraping over sand.

  “It has to work!” he muttered.

  Guillem seized him by the arm and squeezed it tightly. It was the first time he had ever reacted like this.

  The ship glided slowly on and on. Arnau glanced at the captain. “Are we in the channel?” he asked merely by raising his eyebrows. The captain nodded: ever since Arnau had told him to stop rowing, the captain had realized what he was trying to do.

  The whole of Barcelona realized.

  “Now!” shouted Arnau. “Turn the ship!”

  The captain gave the order. The oarsmen on the larboard side plunged their oars into the water, and the carrack began to swing round until prow and stern were stuck firmly in the two sides of the deep channel.

  The ship listed to one side.

  Guillem squeezed Arnau’s arm even harder. The two men looked at each other and Arnau drew the Moor close to embrace him, while the beach and the king’s galleys exploded with cries of congratulation.

  The entrance to the port of Barcelona had been sealed.

  In full battle armor on the beach, the king watched as Arnau deliberately ran his ship aground. The nobles and knights grouped around the king said nothing as he stared out to sea.

  “To the galleys!” he ordered.

  WITH ARNAU’S CARRACK blocking the harbor, Pedro the Cruel deployed his fleet in the open sea. King Pedro the Third did the same on the port side of the sandbanks, and so before nightfall the two fleets—one a proper armada, made up of forty armed and prepared warships, the other a picturesque motley of craft, with ten galleys and dozens of small merchant ships and fishing boats crammed with ordinary citizens—were drawn up facing one another in a line that ran from Santa Clara to Framenors. No one could either enter or leave the port of Barcelona.

  There was no battle that day. Five of Pedro the Third’s galleys took up position close to Arnau’s ship, and that night, by the light of a glorious moon, a company of royal soldiers came aboard.

  “It seems as though we’re at the center of the battle,” Guillem commented to Arnau as the two men sat on deck, close to the side in order to shelter themselves from any Castillian crossbowmen.

  “We’ve become the city wall, and all battles start with the walls.”

  At that moment, one of the king’s captains came up.

  “Arnau Estany
ol?” he asked. Arnau raised a hand. “The king authorizes you to leave the ship.”

  “What about my crew?”

  “The galley slaves?” Even in the darkness, Arnau and Guillem could see the look of surprise on the officer’s face. What did the king care about a hundred convicts? “We might need them here,” he said, to avoid the question.

  “In that case,” said Arnau, “I’m staying. This is my ship, and they are my crew.”

  At that the officer shrugged and went on deploying his men.

  “Do you want to leave?” Arnau asked Guillem.

  “Aren’t I part of your crew?”

  “No, as you know very well.” The two men fell silent, watching shadows passing by them as the soldiers ran to take up their positions in response to their officers’ half-whispered commands. “You know you haven’t been a slave for many years now,” added Arnau. “All you have to do is ask for your letter of emancipation and it’s yours.”

  Some of the soldiers came to take up position next to them.

  “You should go down to the hold with the others,” one of the soldiers muttered as he pushed in beside them.

  “In this ship we go where we please,” Arnau replied.

  The soldier bent over the two men. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We are all grateful for what you’ve done.”

  Then he went off to search for another place by the gunwale.

  “When will you want to be free?” Arnau asked Guillem again.

  “I don’t think I would know how to be free.”

  At this, the two men fell silent. Once all the king’s soldiers had boarded the ship and taken up their positions, the night went slowly by. Arnau and Guillem slept fitfully while the others coughed or snored around them.

  At dawn, Pedro the Cruel ordered the attack. His fleet approached the sandbanks, and his men began to fire their crossbows and to shoot stones from catapults and bricolas. From the other side of the banks, the Catalan fleet did the same. There was fighting all the way down the coast, but especially around Arnau’s carrack. Pedro the Third could not allow the Castillians to board it, and stationed several galleys close by.

  Many men died from the crossbow bolts fired from both armies. Arnau remembered the whistle of the arrows as he had fired them from his crossbow, crouching behind the boulders outside Bellaguarda castle.

  The sound of raucous laughter brought him back to reality. Who on earth could be laughing in the midst of battle? Barcelona was in danger, and men were dying. What was there to laugh about? Arnau and Guillem stared at each other. Yes, it was laughter. Laughter that was growing louder and louder. The two men sought a sheltered spot where they could survey what was going on. They soon realized that it was the men aboard ships in the second or third line of the Catalan fleet, who were out of range of the Castillians and were making fun of their enemy, laughing and shouting insults at them.

  The Castillians continued firing their catapults at the Catalans, but their aim was so poor that time and again the stones fell harmlessly into the water. Some of them raised plumes of spray in the sea around Arnau’s ship. He and Guillem looked at each other again and smiled. The men on the other ships were still mocking the Castillians, and from the beach more hoots of derision could be heard.

  Throughout the day, the Catalans made fun of the Castillian artillery-men, who constantly failed in their attempts to strike home.

  “I wouldn’t like to be in Pedro the Cruel’s galley,” Guillem said to Arnau.

  “No,” Arnau replied, laughing those bunglers.”

  That night was very different from the previous one. Arnau and Guillem helped tend the many wounded men on the ship. They stanched their wounds and then helped lower them into the smaller boats to be taken back to land. A fresh detachment of soldiers boarded the ship, and it was only toward the end of the night that the two men could rest awhile and prepare themselves for the next day.

  At first light, the mocking shouts of the Catalans started again. The insults and laughter were taken up by the crowds still lining the shore.

  Arnau had run out of crossbow bolts, so he took cover beside Guillem and the two of them surveyed the battle.

  “Look,” his friend said, “they are coming much closer than they did yesterday.”

  It was true. The Castillian king had decided to put a stop to all the mockery as soon as possible, and was heading straight for Arnau’s ship.

  “Tell them to stop laughing,” said Guillem, staring at the oncoming armada.

  King Pedro the Third saw the danger. Determined to defend Arnau’s carrack, he brought his galleys as close to the sandbanks as he dared. This time, the battle was so near that Arnau and Guillem could almost touch the royal galley, and could clearly see the king and his knights on board.

  The two opposing galleys drew up side by side with the sandbanks in between them. The Castillians fired catapults they had mounted on the prow. Arnau and Guillem turned to look at the Catalan king’s vessel. It had not been touched. The king and his men were still on deck, and the ship did not seem to have suffered any damage.

  “Is that a bombard?” asked Arnau as he saw Pedro the Third striding toward a cannon on his own galley.

  “Yes,” said Guillem. He had seen them loading it on board when the king had been preparing his fleet for the defense of Mallorca against a Castillian attack.

  “A bombard on a ship?”

  “Yes,” Guillem said again.

  “This must be the first time that’s happened,” commented Arnau, still watching closely as the king gave orders to his gunners. “I’ve never seen...”

  “Nor have I ...”

  Their conversation was interrupted by the roar from the cannon as it shot a huge stone. They quickly turned to survey the Castillian ship.

  “Bravo!” they shouted when they saw the cannonball smash the galley’s mast.

  A great cheer went up from all the Catalan fleet.

  The king ordered his men to reload the bombard. Taken by surprise and hampered by the fallen mast, the Castillians were unable to return fire. The next Catalan stone was a direct hit on the forecastle.

  The Castillians began to maneuver away from the sandbanks.

  Thanks to the constant mockery and to the ingenious bombard on the royal galley, the Castillian sovereign was forced to rethink. A few hours later, he ordered his fleet to lift the siege of Barcelona and head for Ibiza.

  STANDING ON DECK with several of the king’s officers, Arnau and Guillem watched the Castillian ships recede into the distance. The bells of Barcelona began to ring out once more.

  “Now we’ll have to get the ship off the sandbanks,” said Arnau.

  “We’ll take care of that,” he heard someone say behind him. He turned and came face-to-face with an officer who had just climbed aboard. “His Majesty is waiting for you on the royal galley.”

  King Pedro the Third had heard all about Arnau Estanyol during the two nights of battle. “He’s rich,” the city councillors had told him, “immensely rich, Your Majesty.” The king nodded unenthusiastically at everything they told him about Arnau: his years as a bastaix, his service as a soldier under Eiximèn d’Esparca, his devotion to Santa Maria. It was only when he heard that Arnau was a widower that his eyes opened wide. “Rich and a widower,” thought the king. “Perhaps we can get rid of that ...”

  “Arnau Estanyol,” one of his camerlingos announced. “Citizen of Barcelona.”

  The king sat on a throne on deck, flanked by a large group of nobles, knights, and leading figures of the city who had flocked on board the galley following the Castillian retreat. Guillem stood at the ship’s side, some way away from the group surrounding Arnau and the monarch.

  Arnau made to kneel before Pedro, but the king told him to rise.

  “We are very pleased with your action,” said the king. “Your intelligence and daring were vital in helping us win this victory.”

  The king fell silent. Arnau did not know quite what to do. Was he meant to speak? Eve
rybody was looking at him.

  “In recognition of your valiant action,” the monarch continued, “we wish to grant you a favor.”

  Was he meant to speak now? What favor could the king possibly grant him? He already had all he could wish for ...

  “We offer you the hand of our ward Eleonor in marriage. As her dowry, she will be baroness of Granollers, San Vicenc dels Horts, and Caldes de Montbui.”

  Everyone on board the galley murmured their approval; some applauded. Marriage! Had he said marriage? Arnau turned to find Guillem, but could not see him. All the nobles and knights were smiling at him. Had the king said marriage?

  “Are you not pleased, Lord Baron?” the king asked, seeing Arnau turn his head aside.

  Arnau looked back at him. Lord baron? Marriage? What did he want all that for? When he said nothing, the nobles and knights fell silent too. The king’s eyes pierced him. Had he said Eleonor? His ward? He could not... he must not offend the king!

  “No ... I mean yes, Your Majesty,” he stammered. “I thank you for your generosity.”

  “So be it then.”

  At that, Pedro the Third stood up, and his courtiers closed around him. As they passed by Arnau, some of them slapped him on the back, congratulating him with phrases he could not catch. He was soon left standing all on his own. He turned toward Guillem, who was still over by the ship’s side.

  Arnau spread his palms in bewilderment, but the Moor gestured toward the king and his retinue, and so he quickly dropped his arms to his side.

  ARNAU WAS GREETED back onshore with as much enthusiasm as was the king himself. It seemed as though the entire city wanted to congratulate him: hands stretched out to him; others patted him on the back. Everybody wanted to get near the city’s savior, but Arnau could not hear or recognize any of them. Just when everything was going well and he was happy, the king had decided to arrange a marriage for him. The crowd swarmed round and followed him all the way from the beach to his countinghouse. Even after he had disappeared inside, they stood in the street calling out his name and shouting their joy.