Pirates of the Levant

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  '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 a
vowals 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.

  Chapter 6. THE ISLAND OF THE KNIGHTS

  I was impressed by both the appearance and the recent history of Malta, the island of the corsair Knights of St John of Jerusalem. The fearsome galleys of the Religion, as we called them, were the scourge of the entire Levant, for they patrolled the seas, pursuing Turkish vessels and seizing valuable merchandise and slaves. Hated by all Muslims, the Knights of St John were the last of the great military orders of the Crusades, and their members owed obedience only to the Pope. After the fall of the Holy Land, they settled in Rhodes, but when they were expelled by the Turks, our Emperor Charles V gave them Malta in exchange for a symbolic annual payment of one Maltese falcon. That gift, the fact that we were the most powerful Catholic nation in the world and their proximity to the Viceroyalties of Naples and Sicily — the latter sent aid during the great siege of 1565 — forged strong bonds between the Order and Spain, and our galleys often sailed together. Besides, many of the Knights of Malta were Spanish.

  The Knights had taken a vow to fight Muslims wherever they might be. They were hard, spartan men who knew they would receive no mercy if taken prisoner and they so scorned their enemy that their galleys were under orders to attack even if they were one ship against four. Given these circumstances, it is easy to understand why the Order of Malta looked to Spain as its main defender and support, for we were the only power that gave no quarter to Turks and Berbers, whereas other Catholic nations made pacts with them or brazenly sought alliances. The most shameless of these were ever ambivalent Venice and, of course, France. Indeed, France, in her struggle with Spain, had gone so far as to allow her galleys to travel in convoy with the Turks and had permitted Barbarossa's corsair fleet to over-winter in French ports while it plundered the Spanish and Italian coasts, capturing thousands of Christians.

  You may consider my state of mind when, having passed the Dragut Point and the formidable fortress of St Elmo, the Mulata cast anchor in the great harbour, between Fort St Angelo and the Sanglea peninsula. From there we could view the site of the dreadful siege that had taken place sixty-two years before, an episode that made the name of the island as immortal as that of the six hundred Knights of various nations and the nine thousand Spanish and Italian soldiers and citizens of Malta who, for four years, fought off forty thousand Turks, of whom they killed thirty thousand; battling for every inch of land and losing fort after fort in bloody hand-to-hand combat, until all that remained were the redoubts of Birgu and Sanglea, where the last survivors fought to the end.

  As old soldiers, both Captain Alatriste and Sebastian Copons regarded these places with respect, for they could all too easily imagine the tragedy that had played out there. Perhaps that is why they were so silent, from the moment we got into a felucca to cross the large harbour to reach the Del Monte Gate until we passed under its two small towers and entered the new city of Valetta, named in memory of the Grand Master Jean Parisot de la Valette, who had led the defence of Malta during the siege. I remember walking through the city's dusty streets flanked by houses with shuttered balconies and roof gardens, with a Maltese boatman as our guide.

  We viewed everything with almost religious awe, first following the city wall straight to the cathedral, then turning to the right towards the sumptuous palace of the Grand

  Master of the Order and the lovely square in front of it, with its fountain and column. Then we reached the moat surrounding Fort St Elmo whose impressive star-shaped bulk loomed above. Next to the drawbridge, where the red flag bearing the eight-pointed cross of the Order was flying, our guide told us in a mixture of Italian, Spanish and lingua franca how his father, who had fought in the siege, had, helped sailors from Birgu to take volunteer Knights — Spanish, French, Italian and German — from St Angelo to the besieged St Elmo; how every night they broke the Turkish blockade — by boat or swimming — to replace the terrible losses of the day, although the Knights knew full well that this was a one-way journey and that they were going to certain death. He also described how on the last night, they had been unable to cross the Turkish lines, and the volunteers had had to turn back, and how, at dawn, those who were besieged with Grand Master La Valette watched from the forts of Sanglea and St Michael, as a tide of five thousand Turks overwhelmed St Elmo in a final assault on the two hundred knights and soldiers, almost all of them Spaniards and Italians. Worn down, beaten and wounded after five weeks of fighting day and night, battered by cannon shot, the Knights continued to resist among the rubble. He concluded his tale by describing how, injured and unable to go on, the last of the Knights had withdrawn, without once turning their backs on the enemy, to the final redoubt of the church, killing and dying like cornered lions. However, when the remaining Knights saw that the Turks, enraged by the price they had been forced to pay for victory, were showing no mercy to the wounded they came upon, they strode out into the square again, prepared to die like the men they were. So it was that six of them — one Aragonese, one Catalan, one Castilian and three Italians — fought their way through the enemy to the sea, where they hoped to be able to swim to Birgu. Alas, they were taken prisoner in the water. And so angry was Mustafa Pacha — he had, after all, lost six thousand men in St Elmo alone, including the famous corsair Dragut — that he ordered the Knights' corpses to be crucified and personally cut a cross on each chest with his scimitar. Then he set the bodies on the water and let the current carry them across to the other side of the harbour, where Sanglea and St Michael continued to resist. Finally, he brought out all the other captives, stood them on the city walls and ordered their throats to be cut. The Grand Master responded to this barbarous act by killing all his Turkish prisoners and firing their decapitated heads into the enemy camp.

  When our guide had finished his story, we stood for a moment in silence, thinking about what we had just heard. Then Sebastian Copons, who was leaning on the sandstone balustrade and frowning down into the moat surrounding the fort, suddenly said to Captain Alatriste, 'We'll probably end up the same way one day, Diego ... Crucified.'

  'Possibly, but we won't be taken alive.'

  'Not a chance.'

  These words shocked me, but not because the idea, however unpleasant, frightened me exactly. I understood what Copons and the Captain were saying, for I had good reason to know by then that almost all men are capable of both the very best and the very worst. The truth is that on the blurred frontier of those Levantine waters, human cruelty — and nothing is more human than cruelty — opened up so many disquieting possibilities, and not only on the part of the Turks. There were nebulous resentments buried deep in the memory: old hatreds and family feuds, which the Mediterranean light, its sun and blue waters kept alive. For Spa
niards — born of ancient races, with a centuries-long history of killing Moors or killing each other — slitting the throats of Englishmen was not the same as dealing with Turks, Berbers or the other people who lived on the shores of that sea. Captain Robert Scruton and his crew were mere intruders, and killing them in Lampedusa had been a formality, an act of family cleansing, a delousing before getting back to our proper business: Turks, Spaniards, Berbers, Frenchmen, Moriscos, Jews, Moors, Venetians, Genoans, Florentines, Greeks, Dalmatians, Albanians, renegades and corsairs. We were all neighbours, living round the same courtyard; we were people of the same caste. There was no reason why we shouldn't share a glass of wine, a laugh, a colourful insult, a macabre joke, before — viciously and imaginatively — crucifying each other or exchanging heads instead of cannonballs, with good old-fashioned Mediterranean loathing. For one always slits a person's throat better and with more pleasure when one knows the person in question.

  We returned to Birgu that evening, as the dusty air and the last rays of sun tinged the walls of Fort St Angelo with red, malting them look as if they were made of molten iron. Before returning to the ship, we had walked for a long time through the steep, narrow streets of the new city, visiting the harbour of Marsamucetto on the west side of the island, and the famous auberges or barracks of Aragon and Castile, the latter with its beautiful staircase. There is an auberge for each of the seven languages, as the Knights of the Order called them: the auberges of Aragon and Castile mentioned above — which, of course, belonged to the Spanish nation — those of Auvergne, Provence and France — belonging to the French nation — and those of Italy and Germany. On our way back, we ended up next to the moat of Birgu in the old part of the city, where the taverns for soldiers and sailors were to be found. And since there was still more than half an hour before the Angelus, when we would have to return to the galley, we decided to forgo yet another bowl of ship's gruel and instead wet our whistles at our own expense, eating a meal fit for Christians.