The Sea Beggars

by Holland, Cecelia;

  He looked up at the governor in his white plume and said, “For the tenth penny I won’t lift a finger.”

  The long Spanish face thinned even more at that, and the man leaned forward and said, “Are you a Catholic?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know the Church’s teaching concerning obedience to the temporal arm?”

  Michael pressed his lips shut. His hands slid down his arms and tucked inside his elbows, and he stared at the governor without speaking. Down the street, some of his neighbors had come out to stand in the sunlight and watch.

  “Your King commands you,” the governor said. “He has the right to raise such monies as are necessary for the defense of his realm, and you have the duty to work to maintain him.”

  Michael said, “Withdraw the tax of the tenth penny and I will bake bread again, but not before.”

  The governor sighed. He seemed more patient and bewildered than angry. He looked around him and back to Michael and said, “You are not a man in prime years yet—have you no parents?”

  “My father was killed in the image breaking,” Michael said.

  “Ah. Then you have no—”

  “My mother was hung up here from her own sign by the tax collectors for not paying the tenth penny.”

  At that the governor’s lips shut tight. He sat back in his saddle and lifted his reins. “Let’s go.” With a gesture to his men, he rode on down the street; Michael saw him ride to the next shop, the cobbler’s, and send his man to knock on that door, because the cobbler too was not working. Michael went back into the shop.

  Clement De Vere heard from some people about Michael’s angry talk to the Governor del Rio and went there in the evening, to the bakery, and knocked. No one answered. He knocked again and again and still no one answered. Finally he climbed over the wall beside the bakery and walked around the side, past the brick ovens cold behind their drifts of leaves, to the little door in the back of the shop.

  This door stood slightly ajar already. He pushed it wider and stood there looking at Michael, who was standing in the front of the little room, staring ahead into the front of the shop, toward the recent knocking. In his hand was a jug of beer.

  Clement swung the door open, so that it hit the wall with a crack, and Michael jumped. Spinning around, he dropped the jug of beer and it broke on the floor.

  “Good evening,” Clement said. “May I come in?”

  “Who are you?” Michael said, peering at him through the darkness.

  Clement went into the dimly lit room; he saw a rushlight on the only table, and taking out his tinderbox he bent over the clay lamp and worked with flint and steel until he had the wick burning. Then, with the hot glow of the lamp on his face, he put the table between him and Michael and said, “Now do you know me?”

  The young man’s face changed slightly. “Yes,” he said. “What do you want of me?”

  “Some talk. Sit down.”

  Michael sat, slack limbed; he looked drunk, but not stupefied. Clement pulled a chair up to the other side of the table and lowered himself onto it.

  “Have you seen Hanneke van Cleef?”

  Michael put his hand to his face and pulled on his nose and rubbed his mouth. His eyes slid away, searching for a dark corner to hide in. Finally he lowered his hand. “No. Not since—no.”

  “She’s gone, then. Alas for her: she has no Antwerp to flee to.”

  “Perhaps she’s dead.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  Michael shook his head. “But I don’t know why she would run away and not tell me.”

  “She was frightened.”

  “We were lovers. We were going to be married.”

  “Perhaps she was afraid of hurting you.”

  “She should have told me where she was going.”

  “Sometimes …” Clement picked at the wooden tabletop, peeling up a splinter from the surface. “I fled here from Dieppe, in sixty-two, with my wife and my son. My wife died on the way. I did not stay to bury her. Fear, and running away …” He put the splinter into the burning wick of the rushlight and watched the flame catch. “It’s impossible,” he said, and shook his head, “to run and stay calm.”

  “Why are you here? Just to look for Hanneke?”

  Clement shook his head. “No. No, I came here to find you. I heard you defied the governor. I have a job of work for you, if you are up to it.”

  “I will not work for the tenth penny.”

  “No, of course not. No one is asking you to. Many the people in Antwerp who are bolting their shops and refusing to work, many more every day. You’ve seen it.”

  Michael shook his head, surprised to hear this; a moment later he wondered why he was surprised, because he understood it very well. He grunted.

  “Good for them.”

  Clement’s head bobbed. The rushlight, touching only on the high planes of his face and shoulders, made him seem larger than he was. “Yet these folk must still be fed, and somehow we must feed them.”

  “Why us?”

  “All of us. We must feed ourselves, without the Spanish dipping their fingers in.”

  The splinter was consumed. He dropped the final flaming bit into the lamp, where it blazed up briefly on the oil and was gone.

  “The people need bread. You have the ovens and the skill. There is some danger involved—”

  Michael said, “You know I am Catholic. What makes you think I will not betray you?”

  Clement shook his head. “Because you are Dutch. Are you with me?” He put his hand out across the table.

  Michael gathered his breath; the thought of Hanneke was strong in his mind. He remembered his mother, hanging from the bakery sign. Reaching his arm across the table, he took Clement’s hand in a hard eager clasp.

  The rowlocks of all three boats were muffled with strips of cloth, but one had come loose, and in the dark the rhythmic rattle and creak of the oar sounded loud as church bells. Michael swore under his breath. Twisting his head, he cast a quick look on ahead of his boat to the frontmost boat, where Clement was, hoping for an order to fix the unmuffled rowlock. No one spoke; the three men in that boat bent to their rowing as hard as ever, leaning forward in unison, down the narrow gap between the sacks of flour piled high into all three boats, their oars rising in the dark, sweeping backward over the river, and falling again to the stroke. Michael turned forward again to row.

  They were working their way down the northern bank of the Schelde, where the river bar was shifting and treacherous and few sailors ventured. The three boats slipped in a close file through the still water, Clement leading them. He must have done this before; he knew exactly where to go, and they had not run aground yet. But Michael’s oar now and then grazed the bottom, or dug deep into the silt, and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end.

  He prayed as he rowed and sometimes cursed himself for doing this at all, when he could have been back in his shop asleep. He promised himself he would not do it again. It was too dangerous. Down this bank of the river there was nothing but the broad flats of silt and thickets of marsh brush, not a light the whole length of their trip, but on the far side was the city, with its wharves and anchorages, a thousand lanterns bobbing on the water, another ten thousand shining on the land, and the harbor watch. How were they to get through the harbor watch? He cursed Clement, too, for talking him into this.

  Now the groaning of the rowlock was driving him mad. With a mutter to the man behind him, he shipped his oars and shifted his weight forward, reaching in between the squat sacks of flour to find the lock and the padding of cloth that hung useless from it. Someone else murmured some encouragement. Unable to see much, going all by touch, he wrapped the cloth around and around the iron fork where the oar rode and knotted it fast.

  Now it would not move easily, and the rowing was harder, but the racket was stilled. He bent his back to the oars. He was raising a blister on his left hand, too, and he cursed that and forgot about praying.

  The man
behind him tapped him on the back. He straightened, lifting his oars up, and looked over his shoulder again.

  Now they were opposite the center of the city. The water lapped against the sides of the boats, and beyond them, in the marshes, a night bird lifted its voice in a mournful croak; there across the quiet water the lights of Antwerp blazed. Crooked trails of light stretched across the river like fingers pointing at the smugglers. On a ship lying out near the center of the channel a bell rang twice. Michael’s ears hurt from listening. He thought he could make out voices on the ships ahead of them. His stomach rolled over, sick with fear.

  Coward, he thought fiercely to himself. God, help me. God, give me courage. He thought of Hanneke: would she love him if she knew how he felt now? His mouth was dry. His fingers wrapped tight around the grips of his oars were cramping with fatigue, and his back ached.

  “We go straight across,” the man behind him whispered. “The canal is straight across from us. If we’re hailed, ignore it. If we’re challenged, then we’ll separate. This boat goes to the Duke’s Canal, downstream half a mile, and up to the first bend, where there’s a wharf, and there wait for orders. Got it?”

  The other man, in the stern of the boat, grunted some acknowledgment, but Michael said nothing.

  “Go.”

  They bent to the oars. The few moments of waiting had stiffened Michael’s back muscles and his arms, and the first strokes were an agony. Now they were rushing forward into the lights and bustle of the enemy city. In his panic he went too fast and lost the rhythm of the other oarsmen; they hissed at him and one splashed him expertly with a flat stroke of an oar. He tasted muddy water on his lips.

  God, help me, he thought, thoroughly frightened now. God, be with me. Miserably he longed to be home.

  A ship loomed over them; he could hear the river water sloshing against its hull. He smelled oakum and pitch. The sour odor of the wharves grew stronger. His shoulders hurt. He wanted to stop so badly he groaned, but if he did stop the others would turn on him and, worse, would know he was a coward. He wished he had never seen Clement. God, help me, he thought, and fell to prayer again, timing the words to the strokes of the oars.

  The night was growing lighter; he could see the ears and neck of the man ahead of him, rowing. The city was engulfing them with its bright bustle. Voices sounded ahead of them, and a church bell began to ring and others joined it, a growing chorus of brass tongues. They passed between two more big ships. Like cliffs the first black jetties lifted up around them; one of his oars scraped wood. Bits of debris floated by them in the water.

  “Hold! Who goes there?”

  He nearly screamed. He nearly dropped his oars. Ignore it, he remembered, and kept to his stroke. The boat shot forward through the water, a wharf on one side, on the other a broad stretch of choppy water where the canal opened up.

  “Hold—up oars, there in the boats, or I’ll shoot!”

  “Turn,” the man behind Michael shouted, and the boat lurched to one side. Michael had no notion which way to turn, or what he should do to help; he sat there paralyzed on the center thwart while his companions swung the heavy craft around to leeward. He raised his head and saw on the wharf that now stood up behind them a row of men with muskets in their hands.

  “Watch out!”

  The muskets rattled. Michael ducked, his hands rising instinctively to cover his head. A bullet hummed past him. Something struck the boat beside his foot. Behind him a man screamed. The water leapt with tiny fountains from the bullets. Michael sobbed for breath; he felt he could not get enough breath to live. The man in front of him whirled and struck at him.

  “Row! Row, you fool—we’re betrayed—they were looking for us—row!”

  The grips of his oars swung in jerks back and forth above his hands, the blades dipping down into the water. He caught the grips and bent his back to the oars. They were shooting again, up there on the wharf. He leaned into the stroke and raked his oars through the water, and the boat shot forward; that rain of bullets struck in their wake. Something thudded into a sack of flour to his left, and a little puff of white dust went up.

  That steadied him. The flour would shield him, somewhat, if he kept moving. The man in front of him was rowing so hard he gasped with each stroke. Swiftly they shot the boat across the open water, past the mouth of the canal where they had meant to go, and into the maze of wharves and jetties beyond.

  “The Duke’s Canal,” said the man in front of Michael, and gasped again. “Remember—in case I—”

  For the first time Michael realized the oarsman was shot. Stunned, the young man lost his stroke staring at the body ahead of him, bending to the oars, pulling feebly at the river.

  “Row, damn you!” the wounded man ordered.

  He rowed. Turning to look behind him, into the bow of the boat, he saw that thwart was empty. They had lost the bow man. His oars hung in the rowlocks, dragging at the water, and Michael leaned back and pulled the oars into the boat to keep them out of the way.

  They worked their way down through the dense wharves and jetties of the harbor, sometimes shipping their oars to pull the boat along by hand underneath the wharves, or from piling to piling. Behind them more muskets went off and there was shouting, but no one sounded the alarm near Michael’s boat. At the mouth of the Duke’s Canal they stopped, close by the bank, to rest.

  It was the last rest for the man in the stern thwart. He slumped down over his oars, coughing, and Michael climbed awkwardly up between the flour sacks to him and tried to help him sit.

  “I’m dead,” the man said. He was nameless to Michael, faceless, only a body. He leaned his head against the young man’s shoulder, his breath gurgling in his throat.

  “We’re safe now,” Michael said. “Aren’t we?”

  The head against his shoulder swayed from side to side. “Betrayed. Someone betrayed us.”

  Michael said nothing. He wondered if that were true, or if they had only run into the watch. The next time they would have to be more careful. Not use the main canal, for one thing. Slowly he realized that the man leaning against his shoulder had stopped breathing.

  He sat there awhile, tired, wondering what to do. There was nothing he could do for this fallen man, except offer a prayer for him—who could have been Catholic or Calvinist or even Anabaptist, for all Michael knew. His chest felt heavy and clogged. He thought of the man’s home, his wife and children, waiting for him. I’ll kill a Spaniard for you, he vowed, and a moment later was horrified at his own thought.

  This nameless man had saved him. Michael remembered the paralyzing fear that had gripped him and how this man had rowed and forced him to row away from the enemy fire. Dying, yet he had struggled on to his last measure of strength and saved Michael.

  The body in his arms was heavy, but he was reluctant to lay it down. He owed this man a debt beyond paying, the price of his life. Too late now. The boat rocked gently in a little series of waves. The night crowded around him, ghost ridden: all those who had died were watching him. Waiting to see what he did.

  His fear was gone. He knew now what he must do. Only one way to pay back what he owed. He would fight on, as this nameless hero had, until he died, or until the Low Countries were free again.

  Finally he laid the man down in the bottom of the boat, between the rows of flour sacks, and took his oars and brought the boat around to the Duke’s Canal. There was a lock here, a wooden water gate that stretched across the whole width of the canal, and he took the boat to one side and found the way through it. In the dark he fumbled with the stiff weed-grown ropes and the drop gate, and pulling the boat through the narrow opening he hit something that broke with a crunch of rotten wood. In the slack water beyond, he bent to the oars again.

  “Hold! Hold, there in the boat—”

  The shout went through him like a lightning bolt. Here was his first test. He lunged into the next stroke of the oars. The canal ran by the backs of factories and warehouses; wooden wharves stretched out into
the middle of the stream, and he steered toward the nearest of these shelters. A musket went off, behind him.

  “Over here,” someone was shouting, on the far side of the canal. “Over here!”

  Someone else answered, in Spanish.

  Michael whispered an oath. He pulled the boat in under the wharf, in among the black pilings like the wet trunks of trees, and drawing the oars into the boat he climbed over the side and sank down into the cold water. The bottom was only four feet under the surface. His feet sank a little into the muck but it was firm enough to walk on. Groping along the side of the boat, he found the painter in the bow and towed the boat on through the dark under the wharf, close by the bank, where the shadow was deepest.

  He could smell the blood of the dead man, in the bottom of the boat, the warm sickly sickening smell of the body. The water made him shiver. When he stopped, to listen and to rest, the cold drove him on again almost at once.

  While he stood listening, he saw the watch moving up and down the far bank, looking for him, their lanterns swaying out over the canal, throwing gleaming patches of yellow light onto the flat water. They called back and forth, and sometimes men answered on the bank over his head, so that he knew where they were and could hide from them. His feet were numb from cold. He hated the men up there so much he caught himself snarling silently in the darkness whenever their voices rang out. The rope over his shoulder was wearing a rut into his flesh.

  Once, someone saw him, or perhaps it was a lucky guess; a musket went off on the far side of the canal, and the bullet plowed into the bank a foot from Michael’s face. His stomach heaved. He could be that dead man in there; he could be yielding up that ripe aroma of blood and cooling flesh.

  He was that man, he told himself. That man, and every other victim of the Duke of Alva. For a long while he did not move, although the chill crept into his bones and turned his feet and legs to unfeeling lumps; he knew now what a burden he bore.

  At last they were gone. He heard them moving away down the canal, calling to one another, and he dragged the boat on to the next turning, out of sight of the enemy. There under the dangling branches of a tree, he pulled himself up into the boat and took the oars once more. Only when he was half a mile on, rowing toward his bakery, did he remember that he had been supposed to wait at that turn for the others. He shrugged. That did not matter. If there were any others left, they were busy enough with their own safety, and he had the bakery, the ovens, the skill to make use of the flour. He could not worry about those other people now, anyway; worrying about them divided his mind and soul; and now he had to be strong. He rowed on, into the fine dawn light, into the warmth of the morning.