by Ann Swinfen
‘Cover your head against the sun,’ I would say to one man. ‘Not with your metal helmet. Carry that. Contrive something cool, with a handkerchief.’
However, there were few handkerchiefs amongst the men, who thought them an unnecessary item, fit only for women, when any fool could blow his nose between his finger and thumb, so I showed them how to fastened three or four palm leaves together to make a comical kind of hat, as we had done as children. There was a good deal of ribaldry at this, when they looked at one another, but they soon appreciated the protection from the sun.
To another man, I would say, ‘You are not on ship-board now, to go barefoot. All the way from here to Lisbon the ground will be stony. If you do not have shoes, bind your feet with cloth.’
This presented more of a problem, as did the continued lack of handkerchiefs. Palm leaves could not provide protection for the men’s feet. I wished I had some of that shirt cloth I had used in the citadel of Coruña. In the end, some of the barefoot men resorted to tearing the bottoms off their shirts and binding their feet with these, while others continued to go barefoot, as they had been accustomed to do at home in England. But this was not England.
Late in the afternoon of the first day, I heard a piercing shriek from amongst the plodding soldiers behind me, and looking over my shoulder I could see a knot of men milling about, and all the column of soldiers behind them halted.
‘Doctor!’ The cry was passed along the line. ‘Dr Alvarez, come quick!’
I wheeled my horse about and cantered back to where I could see a man writhing on the path, his face contorted with terror and pain. I slid to the ground, unbuckling my satchel.
‘What is it?’ I demanded. ‘What has happened?’
‘A snake.’ They were all talking at once. ‘A great long snake, six feet at least. He’s bitten on the leg.’
‘Describe the snake,’ I said, as I knelt in the dirt beside the man and turned back his ragged breeches. He was one of those who wore no shoes, and the puncture marks were easy to see, just above the ankle.
But no one had seen the snake clearly, or if they had, lacked the language to describe it. Not that it would have helped, for I knew little about the snakes of my native land, except that some could kill a man. I cupped my hand beneath the man’s heel and raised his filthy foot to my mouth. However disgusting it was, I must not waste any time. I pressed my mouth against his ankle and sucked. Something foul filled my mouth and I spat it into the withered weeds beside the path. Again I sucked and spat, until it seemed there was no more venom to be drawn out. My lips and tongue tingled, as if I had bitten on a wasp.
The other soldiers had fallen silent, watching me with mouths agape. I heard one man mutter a hasty prayer. Several crossed themselves, in the old way. They stared at me with something like awe. I lowered the foot to the ground and sat back on my heels, feeling dizzy. The man moaned.
‘There is no reason to be afraid,’ I said as briskly as I could manage. When a patient has received such a shock, his very terror may stop his heart. ‘I have removed all the poison.’ I hoped I spoke the truth.
I salved the bite with echium vulgare, borago officinalis, and eupatorium cannabium, and gave the soldier an infusion to drink, of avena sativa, which strengthens the heart, and achillea millefolium, which is antispasmodic. I drank some myself, in case I had inadvertently swallowed some of the poison. This treatment was usually efficacious in the case of a viper’s bite, but I was uncertain whether it would prove powerful enough to counter the poison of this Portuguese serpent. The other men watched me with increasing respect. The injured soldier left off his moaning and hysterical cries and I told two of his companions to get him to his feet and keep him walking between them. The leg was showing some signs of swelling, but he had no other pain, his heart had steadied, and he did not lose consciousness.
‘You saved my life, doctor,’ he said pathetically. He was not much older than I, and tears had made channels through the dirt on his cheeks. I patted him on the shoulder.
‘Keep moving, and look where you put your feet in future. I will keep a watch on you, to see that you take no harm.
Most of the straggling column had overtaken and passed us while I worked, so that we were now nearly at the rear of the army. I remounted my horse and stayed near the group. Although the man was pale with shock and stumbled as he walked, two of his companions helped him along. He seemed likely to take no permanent hurt. I could not be sure, of course. Sometimes a snake’s venom acts so quickly that there is no time to take any action to help a patient. Sometimes it is slow and insidious. A patient will appear to have taken no harm and then, little by little, his limbs are paralysed, and then his heart and lungs. His tongue may turn black and his eyes roll back in his head as the deadly poison seizes his whole body. I would need to keep an eye on the man, in case he suffered any of these slow-burning symptoms.
The only food the people of Peniche had been able to give us was bread and a small supply of salted fish, which was all consumed by the morning of the second day, and little wonder, for the men were sorely tried by the blazing sun and their heavy loads. The salted fish was almost worse than no food, for it increased the terrible thirst brought on by the sun and the weary marching. Those of us in the group of Portuguese gentlemen ate no better than the men did. I felt myself growing giddy in the saddle by mid-day. However, I observed that the group surrounding the Earl of Essex, who kept themselves apart from the rest of us, appeared to have a supply of both food and wine.
Sir John Norreys rode up to Dom Antonio and put to him a blunt choice.
‘You must provide food for the soldiers, or I will not be able to stop them looting. Men will not willingly starve when they can see farms around them in the countryside.’
Dom Antonio conferred with Dr Lopez. It seemed they had no funds left with which to buy provisions. They had expected by now that the nobles and peasants rushing to join our army would bring food with them. In the end they decided that the Dom would have to beg the peasants to provide us with food on credit. Once Lisbon was seized, he would pay them back, and generously too.
Our whole Portuguese party accompanied him as he rode up to the largest house in the next village we approached. We had just crossed an area of barren, tussocky ground and reached a small valley watered by a stream – nearly dried up now, in the heat. It was a farming village, with fields and olive orchards surrounding the clustered houses. We Portuguese went in a body to show that this was not a foreign invasion, but a mission to restore to Portugal her ancient freedoms.
‘So you understand, Senhor,’ the Dom said, in a somewhat patronising tone, ‘by supplying our army, you will be contributing to the success of our campaign to expel the hated Spanish from our land.’
He was addressing the man who seemed to be some kind of village leader, but most of the men of the village were grouped around him, listening intently. From their expressions I fancied that they were calculating, not how soon the Spanish would be driven out, but what profit they could make from selling food to the army. When it became clear that supplies would be bought not for cash but for promissory notes, they drew apart in whispering groups. In the end they agreed to supply what they could, though it was hardly an abundance. As I watched the promissory notes signed with a flourish by Dom Antonio, I wondered when these people would ever be able to convert them to coin.
This brought us a supply of the kind of food which forms the diet of peasants in the southern part of Portugal: salted fish, dried peppers and figs, strips of dried mutton, a kind of cold porridge made of rice, flat disks of unleavened rye bread, and wine so rough it stripped the lining from the roof of your mouth. I ate cautiously – some figs and dried mutton, but mostly bread, and clear spring water when I could find it. The men ate ravenously, complaining all the while and demanding hot beef and onions, pies and pottage.
Dysentery broke out.
I do not believe – as some of the soldiers believed – that the villagers had sold us ta
inted food. The outbreak of the bloody flux was due to a number of causes: an unfamiliar diet, polluted drinking water, unauthorised food stolen along the march, and the weakness of the untrained, ramshackle soldiers who had never been strengthened by regular army service. For on the whole it was the first-time recruits, not the regular soldiers who had served in the Low Countries, who gave way to illness and exhaustion.
All the way from Peniche, men fell by the roadside and died. Some had wounds from Coruña or from the landing at Peniche or from their own drunken brawls. With the heat and the lack of food, their wounds festered and carried them off. Some grew so weak with dysentery they could march no further. They sat down beside the road and refused to go any further. Some died. Others, I suspect, simply melted away into the countryside. Whether they were taken in by local people and survived, or died alone and unmourned, no one will ever know.
At the three first deaths, the column of march halted, while the leaders consulted over what to do. We could not carry the dead with us. Nor could we leave them lying unburied on the barren ground, prey to scavenging animals and birds. So we halted in the unforgiving heat, while a resentful burial party was named and set to digging a grave to accommodate all three. At that point we still carried spades and mattocks, intended for simple mining under the walls of Lisbon, if the garrison should attempt to hold the city against us.
The men dug a pit of reasonable size and the men were laid to rest, with the burial service spoken reverently over them by one of the army’s padres, as we stood, sweating and bareheaded, at the side of the grave.
Later, attitudes hardened. A shallow groove would be scratched out, the body rolled into it, and a few handfuls of dirt scattered over, to the accompaniment of a few a hastily gabbled words. One of the padres had died by then. Finally no one even bothered to look round at the dying, for each man struggled to put one foot in front of the other and had nothing left to spare for the dead. As for those who simply sat or lay at the roadside, refusing to go further, I do not know what became of them.
Never had the land of my birth seemed so alien to me. As I rode on, light-headed under that merciless sun, I was haunted by thoughts of my sister, trapped, perhaps forever, in a cruel servitude of body and soul. Until now I had kept at bay the thought of my grandmother, dead in a prison of the Inquisition, and my grandfather, who would be alive today but for this ill-conceived and disastrous expedition.
In my state of dumb misery and feverish imagination, I found my mind dwelling on London. Despite the secrecy and danger of my life there, it seemed a cool green haven, compared with the hellish land over which we crawled, as insignificant as a column of ants, awaiting the annihilation of some gigantic boot. What would my father be doing now? Was he well enough to minister to his patients in the hospital? I wondered whether my dog Rikki still accompanied him there every morning, and whether Joan was yet reconciled to him. What would the players be performing now, in the summer season at the playhouses? Their light-hearted companionship seemed a world away from this dark company moving forward across a foreign land in shared misery. Would Simon come to visit my father in my absence? Did he ever think of me? Or would he be too preoccupied with some new drama in the playhouse and his friendship with his new companion Marlowe? I dashed stupid tears from my eyes, making a pretence of wiping the sweat from my forehead. It was useless to think of London, for I might never see it again. I might not even survive the march to Lisbon.
Chapter Fifteen
That was the first three days. With a well-trained army, accustomed to long marches, fit and healthy, properly provisioned, it should have been possible to cover the sixty-five mile distance from Peniche to Lisbon in about three days. We should have been there by now. With our poor shambling creatures, unfit from the start of the expedition and growing weaker by the day, with very little food and almost no clean water, it would take us at least two or three times as long. If, indeed, we ever reached Lisbon. Like many of the soldiers I had begun to feel that our slow crawl across the Portuguese countryside would never come to an end. Although I was one of the privileged few on horseback, I still suffered the same heat, thirst and hunger as the foot soldiers. The horses too were growing weak. We could usually find them some grazing, however poor, but they too were desperate for water. Because of their failing condition, they plodding along as if half dead, their heads hanging, yellowish drool hanging from their lips as they gasped for breath in the heat.
The Earl of Essex had chosen to accompany the army, no doubt hoping for military glory when we reached Lisbon, although his past record in battle was no very great recommendation. This time it might be different, if the people of Portugal did indeed rise in support of Dom Antonio. On our journey so far, there had been no sign whatsoever of any such support. Apart from a few men who joined us in Peniche, no one had come to swell the ranks of the army since we had landed. Whether people were frightened by the summary execution of the nobles like my grandfather, on the merest suspicion, or whether they had little faith in the Dom himself, I could not tell, but by now I had little hope that the expedition’s supposed main goal – to put the Dom on the throne – would ever be achieved. It might be, too, that the Catholic people of Portugal were reluctant to be rescued from Spain by an invading army of heretic Protestants from England. The looting of churches in and around Coruña would not have gone unnoticed. In fact, on first setting out from Peniche, the army had looted some Portuguese churches before Norreys put a stop to it.
As for what the Earl of Essex believed or expected, who could tell? I do not suppose he cared two groats for Dom Antonio, though I am sure he thirsted for glory. He was not, however, a leader to inspire the men of this army. We had seen little of him. His particular party, consisting of his own officers, servants and cronies, kept to themselves. Naturally, he insisted on leading the march, so he was away at the head of the column, while I generally rode somewhat close to the rear, keeping a watch on the laggards who trailed along in danger of being left behind. Unlike the rest of us, Essex came equipped with sumpter mules and considerable baggage, amongst which I suspected that he had ensured an adequate supply of food and wine. At any rate, on the few occasions when I caught sight of him or his men, they did not appear to be suffering like the rest of us.
On the evening of the fourth day I lay down as soon as it was dark, for I was bone weary. It had been a bad day. Several more men had died and two of the horses. The ranks of the army had also grown thinner through desertions. There were those who simply collapsed at the roadside and refused to move, however much the junior officers kicked and swore at them. Then there were others who slipped away when they thought no one was looking. Raised up on horseback, I would sometimes see a solitary man, or perhaps a group of two or three, hiding in a patch of scrub, waiting for us to pass. They must have hoped for help from the local cottagers, but we never knew what became of them. Perhaps they found a life there in Portugal, perhaps they died, starving and alone, perhaps the Spanish discovered them and either executed them as spies or handed them over to the Inquisition as heretics. The remaining soldiers in our army seemed not to care, seeing how our numbers were dwindling. The fewer mouths to feed, the larger share for each of those men who were left.
The death of the two horses had at least meant some food that day. The Englishmen soon overcame their squeamish resistance to eating horsemeat and grabbed their share almost before it was cooked, roasted on spits over the campfires. I had little inclination to eat, certainly not the half-raw horsemeat, for I had passed beyond normal hunger to a dazed and abstracted state, in which I seemed almost detached from my body. I feared I was becoming feverish, and privately treated myself with a febrifuge tincture. I was sparing of it, for I had not a great deal left and was uncertain how much Dr Nuñez and Dr Lopez might have with them. Many of our medical supplies had been left aboard the Victory and as a result had been carried away when the fleet sailed before the two older physicians could remove them. As a bird might fly, over to the west
, to the ocean, the fleet was not indeed very many miles from us, but it might as well have been on the moon.
We carried some crude tents with us, but the nights were warm and most of us were too exhausted to erect them that night, so we slept in the open air. After my only meal of the day, some stale bread and a lump of cheese from which I had to scrape long whiskers of mould with my knife, I curled up under a withered bush, with my horse hobbled nearby and my satchel as a lumpy pillow. I never let it out of my sight, for I feared some of the soldiers might steal the poppy juice and other soporifics to send them into an everlasting oblivion. Apart from my medical supplies, all it contained were the carved seal made for me by Paolo and my two books, very battered now: the small New Testament given me by the rector of St Bartholomew’s church and Simon’s gift of Sidney’s poems. I had been too tired and too dispirited to open them for days now. The ground was baked hard and stony, the night troubled with the sounds of the army, but despite the discomfort a heavy sleep came over me quickly.
I woke suddenly with a pounding heart, unsure for a moment where I was or what had roused me. There was shouting and the clash of sword against sword, then heavy bodies colliding and crashing through the bushes near me. Men were yelling in English and Spanish. All this way from Peniche we had been untroubled by Spanish forces, but it seemed our luck had run out. Clouds which might have given us some protection from the unrelenting sun during the day had built up during the night and obscured all light from moon and stars. Apart from a watch fire some distance away, everything was as black as the inside of a chimney. I could see nothing at all.
I scrambled to my feet, caught up my satchel, and groped about in the dark for my horse. He whickered in alarm and I found him, first by the sound, then by the bulk of thicker darkness. The noises were coming nearer as I tried desperately to free the horse from his hobble. My saddle and bridle were somewhere on the ground, but there was no time to find them. I had ridden bareback often enough in my childhood.
