Padron seemed to take pleasure in men’s pain. He insisted that Simon put his raw hands in aqua vitae for no better reason. Simon stayed stoical and quiet while his hands burnt in invisible flames in the spirits and his body went hot and cold with the pain. He would never have thought he could do it, except he was so frightened of more hurt from the Padron.
Then Padron brought him food, told him jovially in his accented Spanish, that if the clerk did not eat, he, the Padron, would tie Simon to the bench and stuff the food down his throat. The threat brought more terror. Since that day when the Inquisition had … questioned him, he could not bear to have anyone put anything in his mouth, or touch his mouth. It took him will-power to put the neck of a bottle between his chipped teeth.
So he ate. It didn’t matter, he supposed, one more hour of rowing would kill him, for certain.
But it didn’t. To his astonishment and anger, it didn’t. There seemed no end to how much abuse his rickety frame could take. Every part of his body hurt, and his hands … He thought he knew how bad it had been for Becket, now, and sometimes he would remember with gut-churning pity and shame the times he had used thumbscrews to get a confession.
Exhausted as he was, he couldn’t sleep that night, because the boards were too hard and his hands hurt too much and the night was too cold and the black lying next to him snorted through the hours. In the morning, when they brought black bread, olives and watered wine, he was so dizzy with weariness he ate without even noticing.
And then with all his grazes and bruises stiff and aching, with his hands so stiff with clots he could hardly bend them round the rail, with his arms shrieking as soon as he took hold, he had to row again.
He didn’t know how long they rowed because he was only thinking about each individual movement, stand, sit, stand, sit. He heard somebody whimpering softly in the distance, wondered if it was the black and then realised the pathetic noises were coming from his own throat and he couldn’t stop them.
Why am I not dead? he wondered at the end of that day. How come I’m still alive? He ate and drank, but he didn’t know what, didn’t know when. Perhaps I’ll die in the night, he thought, and the blackness reached out so hungrily from the back of his skull that he fell unconscious, honestly convinced he was going to Sheol.
It was a terrible disappointment to him when he woke in the morning, to the groans and complaints of the other men on the bench, to the demands of his bladder and guts. Ashamed and disgusted he voided himself in the gulley and smelled his own stink all that day.
He wasn’t sure, but he thought that was the day when one of the men on the other bench caused the boy who did the same duties on the hull-end of the bench as Simon to squeal in the early morning. There was a flurry and a beating. Later, a concerned knot of officers. The Padron was furious, his eyes flashing, brushing that moustache of his with his whip handle. The man who had caused the trouble was lash-scarred, sullen, unrepentent. Of course he had tried to have the boy. Who wouldn’t? Such a pretty little arse.
The Padron called the blacksmith to free him, then winched him up by the feet and flogged him until the blood ran down and the man was a swollen, purple-faced lump of oozing flesh that moaned and wept and shuddered and finally was still, hanging limp and unbreathing, swaying with the ship’s motion, a puddle of blood and urine staining the boards under it.
It’s impossible, Simon thought, impossible. This is not happening to me, I did not see this. The smell of the butcher’s shop filled the oardeck, adding to and warring with the already ever-present animal stench of men and ordure. The Padron passed by him to wash the scourge and Simon stayed absolutely still, breathing no more than he had to, terrified of those fierce eyes landing on him, taking some kind of offence, beating him …
They rowed most of the afternoon, he didn’t know why or where or anything except the certain fact that every time he tried to let go and collapse, an insect bit him somewhere painful.
Cold blackness of the night, and in the morning the tall young man had died, was stiff and cold where he huddled by the walkway. Padron was not at all upset: he collected money and trinkets off the other Padrons who were ruefully admiring. The blacksmith came again, complaining at having to suffer the stink of the slaves, unbolted the ankle-rings, tipped the skinny corpse out through the nearest oarport. They rowed again.
Simon did his best not to be present. He couldn’t understand why the tall young man had been lucky enough to die and he had not, he was envious of the young man, and he longed to find the way to unlock the ugly, burning, miserable body chained to the deck, that kept him from escaping. But he couldn’t. He floated between the oar and the bench, he burned, he sweated, tried not to vomit when Padron forced water between his lips, and all the time he was waiting for his agonised carcass to break, to burst so he could fly free.
But he didn’t. He came to, finding the Padron kicking him.
‘Wait, I’m not dead yet,’ he said in English, and then again in Spanish and then regretted it because if they put him out the oarport the salt water would give him much better mercy than the oardeck.
He had some kind of conversation with the Padron and he rather thought he had told the Padron he would not win bets on him so easily. Perhaps he was trying to goad the Padron into killing him. He thought there was something wrong with the black next to him. Surely it wasn’t normal for a man to radiate so much heat, or squat to void his bowels in the stinking gulley so often. How often? He couldn’t rightly remember, before sleep hit him on the head and he hoped that it was death disguised.
He woke stickily out of headlong sleep, lying in a pool of water, in darkness almost as black as his dreams, the howling of wind, the ship flinging itself from side to side so that the only thing keeping him from being thrown across the deck was some kind of iron entanglement around his ankles. The ship tilted sideways, he slid and crashed against the hull, water spewed in through some hole … The ship was sinking, the slaves would be lost. Where was Rebecca? Where was the Master of the ship?
He struggled to his feet, groping for the hatch to close the hole. Somebody was roaring orders over by the flickering watchlight, he couldn’t work it out but he knew he had to shut the hatch where another great gout of water came in. As the ship heeled the other way, he braced his bare feet against the bench, fumbled for the hatch again, waited for the tilt, unhooked it and dropped it across, found the batten by touch and slotted it across, tried to go to the next hatch and nearly fell on his face when his ankle chains stopped him.
That was when he remembered where and what he was. Somebody got a lantern lit and the darkness was pushed back next to the Padron’s hawklike face.
‘Do as the clerk did,’ roared the Padron, and Simon found himself shivering and panting in the stares of those men who were not busy clawing at their feet. Another moved to shut the hatch, and another. The Padron ran lightly down his bench, helped them shut the ports on that side, another Padron did the same on the other.
Above their heads swung the oars, groaning and creaking, thirty-six blunt swords of Damocles. Simon blinked up at them, wondering if one would fall on his head and finish it. But the Padron gave the order to go down under the bench, and Simon cowered there while he watched the Padrons climb up among the oars, hauling on ropes, making fast, with their own Padron always in the middle of it all, at the highest most dangerous points, clinging on with one enormous fist to a rope while he slipped another rope around the end of an oar that was about to drop down, then letting himself down the ropes like a monkey.
Then Simon had to sweep, get the water down the gulleys and out of the scuppers, pushing it uphill against the heel of the ship in the howling gale above, sweeping over and over until the planks were only an inch deep and they could rest. He stowed the sweeper, flopped down.
Simon wrapped his arms around his knees as the rest of the seawater emptied out of the scuppers slowly, shivering with the cold, every one of the many raw places on him shrieking at the salt and the cracked
scabs on his hands bleeding again.
The black next to him was sitting likewise, with his head on his knees, teeth chattering, singing softly to himself. Was he insane? Well, why shouldn’t he be? A spot of insanity would be a blessed relief, not to know yourself, to believe that perhaps you were a prince or some kind of animal.
Simon got the strange feeling that the black was encouraging the water, singing the storm onwards. Nonsense. Just because Merula claimed to be able to make storms, didn’t mean that it was either true or common among the blacks. Simon had seen the black’s blood and it was the same colour as his own. To be sure he smelled different, but he had five fingers on each hand and his privates were no different from any Christian’s, even if they were bigger. The heat coming from the man was almost pleasant.
There was a whipping crack, more creaking, rumbling and a sudden screaming. Simon almost hit his head jumping up to see. A little way down the deck on the same side he saw a jumble of arms and legs and blood and in the middle of it, the fat shape of a gun. What was it doing there?
The ship tilted again and the gun rumbled again, rumbled over the deck on its heavy wooden field carriage – not a ship’s gun either, but something taken from a fortress. It had broken free of its ropes, was loose on the oardeck. It was rolling inexorably over to the end man of the next bench who stood staring, tugging at his chains, wailing helplessly in its path as it bore down on him.
‘Get on the bench!’ shouted Simon, then realised he had shouted it in English.
The gun mowed the man down, rocked against the hull, started its rumbling journey back and its zigzag path would bring it right to their own bench.
‘Listen,’ said Simon in Spanish, ‘Listen to me. It’s coming this way. Get up on the bench. ON THE BENCH.’ To show them what he meant he jumped up himself and found, as he had suspected, that the chains were just long enough to let him do it. He grabbed the black’s shoulder and pulled him up likewise, said it again in Portuguese just in case.
Slowly, blinking, hearing Simon shouting over and over in the hoarse whisper that was all the inquisitor had left him, the other men got up on the bench and when the gun came rumbling towards them, none of them were in its path, they were all perched above it, clinging to each other for balance, the man next to the walkway grasping the netting to keep from pitching off.
The Padron was following the gun, face intent as he held a net in his hands. As the gun slammed into the hull he pounced, put the net over it, wrapped ropes around knightheads and others around posts to be held and so the gun was stopped. Other Padrons came and helped to lash it in place and then the Padron went and made sure of all the other guns.
Simon stayed perched on the bench until he was ordered down. The other men of his bench said things to him, he wasn’t sure what, they seemed grateful to him. He tried to smile because what he really wanted was to laugh and cry. Whyever had he tried to escape the gun? As he watched the Padron kill the men who had been crushed, he thought that would be a good way to go. After all, there was really no such thing as a good death, all kinds of death involved pain and sickness and debility unless you were lucky enough to be executed or to die in battle. To be stabbed under the ear by the Padron seemed a much better thing than to stay alive to wrestle with enormous pieces of timber.
Padron came to talk to him just when he thought that and he shivered and tried to answer sensibly. He tried to hide his terror, which was surely foolish, for the Padron was not a coward, not perhaps even a bad man.
It was no good. The Padron roughly felt the black’s forehead and scowled. ‘He took sick yesterday,’ Simon explained, feeling obscurely that it was his fault. The Padron told him to take care of the sick man and Simon was outraged, so angry he actually spoke back, risking the Almighty knew what vengeance.
But the Padron was not angry. ‘Do what you can,’ he said, quite gently, and then dared to praise Simon for his actions. He actually said that Simon had the heart of a Padron, Simon remembered it clearly, how it came as a compliment from the Padron’s mouth and turned into an insult in the air midway between them. He tried not to show his fury and he thought the Padron hadn’t noticed. Recklessly, he invited the Padron to kill the black, who seemed to want it, but the Padron spouted some kind of hypocritical nonsense about it being in the hands of Allah. He spoke quite gently to Simon while Simon blinked and clenched his teeth and tried to stop shivering.
As the ship scurried before the wind and the rain leaked in and the cold bit deeply into every part of Simon’s frame, and the black lay shaking, panting and twitching next to him, the night passed and melted into day, which, was just as dark, just as miserable, just as cold. At first Simon was relieved not to be rowing, then realised that for all its brutality, at least rowing kept you warm. He had never shivered so much in his life, he thought his teeth would jump out of his head with it. After a while, the black stopped moaning and shivering. He gasped a couple of times. Guiltily, Simon watched, but did nothing. Could not even bring himself to unclamp his arms and reach out to hold the man’s shoulder or hand so he would know he wasn’t dying alone. He was too cold, too exhausted. At last the black lay still and the heat in him cooled and cooled as he stiffened.
The blacksmith had come and the black had splashed out of the briefly opened oarport, bitter grey rain spattering in and the wind making no headway at all against the stink of death around Simon.
There were four other slaves to take the places of the ones that had died. Two of them were black. Padron brought them along to where Simon sat and when Simon had climbed to his feet, wishing he could rest from the incessant shivering, he saw that one of them … one of the blacks … He had a snake climbing his arm, scarred there just like Merula’s but with another kind of decorative pattern incised in it. The scar was magnificent and looked extremely painful to acquire.
No doubt it was another one of Merula’s tribesmen, no doubt at all. Padron was giving him the choice of who should sit next to him and so he chose that young man, who looked the same to him as the black who had died, but who wore Merula’s snake. It was something.
Idly he pointed at the snake when the blacksmith had gone away again. ‘Is that the world-snake who climbed the tree and ate a bird and laid an egg?’
The black man stared at him, then nodded slowly. ‘How you know?’ he asked in stiff Spanish.
Simon stammered to tell him of Merula, the woman who had just such a snake on her left arm, who called herself upside-down, who summoned the storm, who was searching for her son, a prince who had been sold …
The black man gave a short cry and suddenly Simon found himself embraced, peering over the lash-scarred shoulders of an escaper, trying to blink back sudden inexplicable tears. It was ridiculous. Stupid. Though a prince who was the son of such as Merula would be more than likely to try to escape and find himself sentenced to the galleys as a nuisance … But still. Still.
Once Simon had believed quite firmly that he was held in the cupped hand of the Almighty. He had felt guarded and safe and confident that the Almighty would take care of him and his family. No longer. How could he believe such a thing, where he was? But here, this kind of thing … What could he make of it? The Almighty must have a hand in it, but with what bitter cruelty, what ugly practical jokery to give him Merula’s son for his companion when he could do nothing whatever about it.
Eagerly, Merula’s son told him his name, but try as he would, Simon could not say it. So they agreed that Snake would be perfectly adequate, and indeed an honour.
They huddled together for warmth, Simon wondering at himself that he felt no revulsion to do it, that for all its darkness, Snake’s skin made goosepimples like his own. They fitted together well and with Snake there was at least one side of his body that wasn’t freezing cold.
When at last they brought down braziers, that was almost worse, because Simon was furthest away from where they were set and felt the warmth coming from them far more feebly than the dank cold from the hull. He shivered
and shook in rhythm with Snake’s shaking and listened to the sound of coughing from some of his other fellow slaves. Surely lungfever would take hold.
A little while later some small, smelly barrels were lowered down to the walkway and the Padrons came and told them to lower the oarblades in the slings and grease the blades with pigfat. Padron told them to smear the fat on themselves – not for impurity, he said, laughing, to keep warm. Simon had to hold his breath at the smell, which had a flat sticky roundness of putrescence to it. He was not at all tempted to eat the stuff, even if the Padron had not advised against it. To his amazement, after he was as plastered in fat as a bird for spit-roasting, he did feel warmer and the water less chilling. Something about heathens from Padron – it was worrying. Padron seemed to like him.
Padron came along again and shouted at them until they got up, stiff and creaking and aching all over, exhausted from the effort of shivering. They were to lean on the benches and push themselves up by their arms. Over and over again. Padron would not listen to appeals for mercy, there had been no food and their guts were all rumbling, but for some ugliness inside him, the Padron wanted them to waste energy on pointless lifting themselves up and down.
Snake grinned sideways at him. ‘This better,’ he said haltingly, ‘if … a woman, yes?’
Simon smiled back. ‘A woman?’ he said, puzzled.
‘Here.’ Snake held himself up on one arm, gestured in an expressively undulating line over the deck, and mimed mating with her until Simon had to choke down a laugh.
When they finished the push-ups, they were all breathless and a little warmed. The Padron had them jumping on and off the benches over and over.
At the end of it, the oardeck was no less dark and dank, but it was a little less cold. Padron stood on the walkway and said he had heard the Señors talking and they were making for Corunna now. Nobody cared, they just wanted their food. Simon and Snake sat back to back, chewing black bread, drinking the sour water. They were given permission to talk.
Gloriana's Torch Page 38
