Song of the Legions

by Michael Large

  Abruptly, the crew’s manner changed. They grew anxious, angry, and restive about something. I thought at first that we Poles, in our ignorance, had offended their customs or religion somehow. I racked my brains as the Turkish sailors ran about, yelping like mad angry dogs. Then the storm blew, and a curtain of darkness fell, with driving rain, like a wall of icy daggers. A white light lit up the sky, and there came a roll of thunder so loud that it was as if all the cannons in every battle we had ever fought had been discharged at one stupendous volley. On the coat-tails of the storm came her attendants, the wailing winds, and the driving rains.

  We gazed, transfixed, at the sky. Mother of God! Such rain! Such a deluge! Such waves! Such a sea! Oh, the weight of water! To draw a pitcher of it is hard enough, but to be on a boat, struck by hills, mountains of the stuff! The poor slim boat reeled and heeled, pitched and hawed. All manner of things were hurled overboard and lost – weapons, spars, ropes, hats, and several men. They flew through the air before my very eyes, like sparrows. Great strips of the sails were torn off, as a child tears the petals from a flower.

  “We are lost!” I heard a cry. “Save yourselves!” Fortunately, I had sent Tanski below decks, for he had been a liability, what with his groaning and his constant voiding of his bowels. The others cowered below decks, or clung as best they could to the deck, the masts, or the rigging, holding on with strength born of terror.

  “Sierawski!” I shouted. “Our Lord walked upon the waters, and so can we!” For I saw the root of the problem – these slim chebec ships were too unsteady for these waters. They carried too much weight, too high. It was those damned crabs. Sierawski was losing his footing, and struggling. I grabbed him by the heels as he flew past me, hauling him to his feet like a rag doll, for he is but a slight fellow.

  “What desertion is this?” I laughed, “come, Sierawski! To the crab nets! It’s them or us!”

  Drawing our daggers, we held them between our teeth. Grabbing a rope, we hauled ourselves bodily across the deck, like mountaineers. She rolled wildy, bucking like a crazy horse. One moment the deck was as flat as a field, the next it was as steep as a hillside. Somehow we made it to the heavy box nets full of crabs. Rain lashed our faces, endless droves of icy arrows. Now the very air had turned to water. As we stood on the deck, waves broke across our bodies, drenching us to the core.

  “Cut the ropes, damn you!” I roared, my voice lost in the storm. But Sierawski saw my frantic slashes at the ropes that lashed the boxes to the deck, and he understood. We cut one box free. The ship lurched and it was pitched over the side, snatched from our hands by the greedy ocean, and we very nearly went with it.

  “Now the other side!” I cried, for we had to keep her level. We repeated our awful journey to the other side. By now we were thoroughly drenched, our hands red raw. Our lungs heaved, our eyes streamed, our teeth chattered. The stentorian roar of the sea, the angry voice of Neptune, was louder than the sounds of any battle. One after another we cut the heavy cargo of crabs loose, throwing them over the side, first from the left side of the ship, then the right. Soon they were all gone. If the crabs were pleased at their liberation and reprieve, it showed not in their black, beady eyes, as we returned them to the deeps from which they had so recently been abducted.

  Thus lightened, the ship ran on a more even keel. It hurtled off, like a cork from a bottle, a flying bullet, or a loosed horse, out of the path of that diabolic storm. Later, we learned that several boats like ours had been lost, with all hands. Thankfully we knew it not then.

  “The rocks!” Sierawski wailed. We had been caught between Charybdis and Scylla, for the storm had driven us towards the shore.

  “At least we can be buried on land!” I laughed. Huge boulders loomed into view, like enormous teeth. The ship, by some miracle, swept by the rocks, missing them by a hair’s breadth. It hurtled towards a low yellow beach at an alarming rate. Still the ship lurched from side to side. The shipwreck, when it came, was like a bodyblow. Our poor boat, that had been travelling so fast, struck the sandy bank, slewed across it, and ground to a halt. Every timber of the ship rattled right down to its splinters. As if I had been fired from a cannon, I flew. I knew what it was to be a musket ball. When I landed, I was buried in soft yellow earth, praise God. I was utterly exhilarated and elated.

  “It was as if all creation turned upside down, on its head, and the world spun on its axis! Still, I have had worse in drink,” I said to Sierawski, elated. For Sierawski and I were lying in the sand, on the beach. All around us were broken barrels and shattered spars and wooden planks. We had been hurled bodily completely from the deck of the ship. It lay beside us on its side, like an exhausted lover.

  “Ha ha!” I laughed at Sierawski, “you still have your hat!” Even after all this, his sodden czapka, leaking water like a sieve, was still jammed onto his head.

  It carried on raining after we had run aground, which seemed like the act of a spiteful God. We huddled together under the sodden canvas, without even a fire for comfort. The men pined for the happy days when they were seasick! We would be back to eating horseflesh, for a sad number of the beasts had died when the ship capsized. It was a wonder that any survived at all, but the majority, including my dear indestructible Muszka, had made it. Now we had learned the hard way how unstable these slim chebec ships were on open waters. It was a bitter lesson, but we learned it well. A cold night we had of it, but in the morning the rain ceased, and we surveyed the damage, and the death toll.

  “How many dead?” Tanski asked. He was sitting in a chair on the beach, wrapped in a blanket like an old man.

  “A dozen overboard, and twenty dead horses,” I replied bitterly, frozen to the core. My soaking rags stuck to my bones, and seeped icy water. None of us had known cold like it – not in the steppes, not in the snows, nor even in the icy void. Not for nothing was it called the Black Sea. It was as black and cold as the Devil’s heart. We knew now something of how those Russian Cuirassiers had suffered, when they were swallowed by the whirlpool of the Dniester.

  “A dozen men and twenty horses! I lost less at Raclawice!” Tanski groaned, and struggled to his feet. He was clutching his stomach, for he was in agonies of cramp and sickness.

  “Drink this comrade, for God’s sake,” I said to him, “you look like hell.”

  He drank the water I offered him. “Still,” he said, rubbing his belly, “you did well, Blumer. But for you and the boy Sierawski, we’d all be dead.”

  Tanski turned aside and was sick, bringing up the water immediately. He wiped his face, grimaced, and turned back to us. “What about this damned ship?”

  “Well, it isn’t too badly damaged, considering,” Sierawski said, “all the masts are still there. The oars and all the boats though, have been smashed to matchwood.”

  “Not too bad?” Tanski said incredulously. “The bloody boat is upside down!”

  “Come now, Tanski,” I said scratching my aching head. “The boat is not upside down, she is merely lying on her side.”

  “Oh well, that’s nothing, then! Lying on her side with her damned skinny arse sticking out of the water! What say you now, you salty sea dogs? We are a bunch of Jonahs, only without the whale!” With that he sat back in his chair on the sand, and sulked, and clutched at his stomach.

  “He has a point,” I admitted to Sierawski, “but we have plenty of rope, still, and if we could but right the vessel, we could heave her back into the water.”

  “Enough rope!” Tanski gnashed his teeth, “I’ll give you enough rope to hang you both! That is, if I could find a tree strong enough to bear the weight of your fat Irish carcass! So we get the accursed floating coffin back in the water. Then what?” Tanski snapped. “How do we get back out to sea with no oars?”

  I shrugged. “I suppose we wait for a passing zephyr to waft us on a gentle breeze all the way to Constantinople. A mere triviality.”

  “Ha ha ha!” Tanski laughed, at last, and wept, although whether tears of laughter, or rea
l tears, I dared not ask. “All right then, Admiral Blumer, how do we right this bastard of a boat?”

  I had an idea. “Let’s ask an engineer!” I said and we both turned on Sierawski.

  “Easy,” said he, negligently, “we ask the crew for a windlass and ropes.”

  We found the surviving crew some way off. They had set their prayer mats on the sand, and, after orienting these towards their holy city, were praying. We had to wait until this was finished, and then we found the captain. He was a short fellow, with thin strong arms, like whipcords, his skin tanned like leather. We followed his barefoot steps back across the sand to the stricken ship.

  “He says we have a windlass, Allah be praised,” Sierawski said, as we retrieved a bulky wood and metal contraption from the hold. It was a great winch that turned on a horizontal axis. Apparently this was a ‘windlass’. This, as you may imagine, was an awkward and hazardous business, but we had plenty of strong men, and carried it off without incident.

  “What now?” I asked Sierawski, who was taking charge.

  “You set a company of men to making oars,” said Sierawski, “for there is plenty of wood on the boat. But touch not those trees yonder, for I have need of them.”

  Hard by the beach was a low copse of hanging trees, with vast round bellies thick as houses, and black as the ace of spades. They must have been a thousand years old when Christ was a boy.

  “I doubt that I could cut those down with anything short of ten barrels of gunpowder,” I observed.

  “Precisely,” Sierawski said, “they will be my anchors.”

  It took all of the morning, but Sierawski’s men, under his direction, secured the windlass to the largest of the trees with a tangle of ropes. They ran the line around a second tree, to make a pulley, and secured the other end of the ropes to the hull of the ship, fore and aft, and to the tops of each mast.

  “Like a spider, running the angle of a web,” I said, wonderingly. “With the right lever, a man can move the whole earth!”

  It was a long, slow, process, and the sun was at its zenith by the time they were done, and the ship’s crew was back to noonday prayers. A pile of new, rough-hewn oars, made of broken spars and ship’s planks, was growing on the beach. Tanski stood apart, with the horses, for this seafaring business was not for him. His health was worsening again. His bowels and belly were voiding frightful amounts of soil and brackish water. To be in his element amongst the equines consoled his soul, and the company of the horses calmed him somewhat.

  When the ropes were secure, Sierawski bid the men wind the handles of the windlass. The machine resembled a great mangle in a laundry, and the men laughed, and complained that they were not washerwomen.

  “Silence!” Sierawski ordered, and I saw him now as he was at Wola, deadly serious and professional. “This is an important business, gentlemen, and dangerous. Fail now, and like as not we die here, on this beach.”

  So they put their shoulders to the wheel. At first, the ropes were slack. The windlass turned easily, but to no apparent result. Gradually the screw tightened. The ropes tautened. The ship seemed to come to life, as the wood began to strain, and groan. Suddenly, it rolled in the sand, and began to rise.

  “She’s moving!” cheered the men, and heaved on the ropes with renewed vigour. Sierawski had placed men on the seaward side, with props of wood, and they hammered these into the wet sand, to steady the vessel. With a great crack, like an enormous whip, one of the ropes snapped. It flashed across the sand like an angry serpent. We dived for cover. Sierawski stood quite still, and the end of the rope knocked his czapka from his head, and it rolled in the sand. By a miracle, the rope did not touch a hair of his head. The man did not even flinch.

  “Steady there! Steady you bastards!” Sierawski roared. “Not too hard! Pull, don’t jerk! Ease her up! Imagine you’re stroking a woman, not plucking a chicken!”

  Incredibly, awe-inspiringly, against all the laws of God and nature, the ship rose. Reborn, she turned on her axis, writhing like a living beast. As the sun set, the masts pointed up to the heavens, like church spires. Then we put our bare shoulders to that great rotten argosy. We fifty men heaved it, bodily, across ten feet of sand, into the sea. There it sat, in a couple of feet of water, flat bottom flush to the ocean floor. Now all we had to do was wait for the tide to turn, and with a kindly breeze, and another heave on the windlass, we would be off.

  The men capered about the sand, dancing wild mad mazurkas. We had no more vodka to break out, but for once we cared not. We canonised Sierawski by dunking him in the sea, then lofted him on our shoulders. We scattered the seagulls with our cheers. Amid it all, the crew fell to their prayer mats again, thanking Allah for his timely intervention.

  At midnight we loaded the surviving horses and the remaining gear back aboard Sierawski’s cathedral. When the tide came in, at around four in the morning, we set her afloat again. Exhausted as we were, still we did not wait for our kindly zephyr but put our shoulders, one and all, to the oars. Sierawski sat in state on the quarterdeck, our undisputed captain and saviour. Anointed and beatified, sanctified and lauded. Relegated to first mate, running back and forth across the deck, I contented myself with the actual running of the ship.

  We landed at a place called Czeligra, in Bulgaria, and then another fly-blown place called Warny. At each, we picked up supplies, and a few Polish stragglers and refugees, to replace the men we had lost. At each, Sierawski’s boasting, and his legend, grew. I held my tongue, said nothing, listened, and learned. Two days out of Warny, another black wall fell across the heavens. Rain fell hard. The horses grew restless, and panicked, their hooves thudding muffled against the lower decks. I smelled a fresh thunderstorm like sulphur in my nostrils.

  “What now, Admiral?” I said to Sierawski, who was in his cups in the captain’s chair, with a tricorn hat on his head, holding forth to some of the men, and the ship’s crew, on the finer points of seamanship and navigation. Subjects on which he was entirely ignorant.

  “That?” Sierawski said, “Tis naught but a shower, Blumer. Have the men collect rainwater,” he said airily. At that moment, a great finger of white fire struck a resounding blow on the topmast. We cleared our blinded eyes and looked up to see the mast and sail ablaze, lighting up the sea like a beacon. It must have been visible for twenty miles around, like a lighthouse.

  “Aye aye Captain Sierawski,” I replied blandly, “and shall I collect the lightning, too, while I’m about it?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CITY OF THE WORLD’S DESIRE, CONSTANTINOPLE, OCTOBER 1797

  By some miracle that rickety old crab-boat, bursting at the seams, finally rounded the Horns of the Bosphorous. We sailed into the greatest city in the history of the world, at last. We cheered and flung our czapkas in the air. The sight of the city took our breath away. It was bigger than Warsaw, Krakow, and Lwow rolled into one, and multiplied a hundred times.

  This place, as you know, had once been Byzantium, the eastern capital of the Roman Empire. When Rome fell, the double-headed eagle flew here for another thousand years, and they still called themselves Romanii – Romans. Yet their degenerate empire had eventually crumbled, and three hundred years ago had been conquered by the Ottoman Turks, a race of virile warrior nomads.

  The Russians had adopted the old redundant symbols of Byzantium for their own, for they had always coveted the City, even before the Turks took it. A dozen Tsars had sworn that one day they would lay their bones in the Hagia Sofia, having first restored it to the Orthodox Church and conquered the City. None had succeeded.

  There we saw the great dome of the Hagia Sofia itself, surrounded by minarets. Once the greatest Church in Christendom, now the greatest Mosque of the Caliphate. ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend,’ as the Turks say, and thus it proved. We did not share their religion, but we shared their enemy, and thus they gave us refuge. True, our Polish King Sobieski had defeated the Turks way back in 1683, but times had changed.

  One half of the
city stood in Europe, and the other in Asia. Through the Dardanelles – the great channel of water that runs between the two – passes half of the world’s commerce. Among all this bustle our tiny crab-boat went unnoticed. We had never seen such a press of humanity, in all its infinite shapes and colours.

  We landed with great jubilation and thanked God. We saw the vast land walls that ringed the city and the harbour. By the side of the harbour was an immense chain, curled up in a heap, with links as big as a man. We tethered our horses to this great metal leviathan and gaped at it. None of the locals paid it any heed.

  “What the Devil is this?” Sierawski demanded, intrigued.

  “The Romans strung this chain across the harbour,” I said, in amazement, “to keep out enemy ships. It must have lain here ever since! Think of it! Just three hundred years ago, Roman legionnaries walked those walls! A Roman Emperor still ruled in this place!”