“Pardon,” interjected the herald, his eyebrows raised quizzically, “how many principalities would you say were there represented in the preparation of that fleet? Which ones were they, do you recall?”
Ticking off his fingers, Walid answered slowly, jogging his memory. “Well, let’s see, Sir Ali. The Papal State, of course, and Genoa—Livorno’s owned by Genoa, though it’s been on long-term lease to the Roman See for as long as I can recall—both the North and the South Franks had ships there, as did the Spanish, the Aragonese, the Emirate of Granada, the Sultan of Morocco, the Hafsid caliph, the Grand Duchy of Sardinia, the King of Sicily, the Prince of Serbia, the Archcount of Corfu, and the King of Hungary. I was told, but did not myself see, that supplies had arrived from iskanderia; if true, they must have been private merchants, though, for I cannot imagine Sultan Mehemet getting any of his fleet involved in a clearly Roman dispute, not with the bulk of his army away down south fighting the Aethiops and their allies.”
“No Portugees?” probed the herald. “No Germans, Venetians, or Neapolitans? No Greeks or Levantines?”
“No!” Walid attested emphatically. “Not one Portugee there, nor when this fleet called at Lisboa on the voyage northward would the Portugee king contribute anything save a few score pipes of wine, rather a poor vintage, too, I was later told. While there were a few German ships in Livorno, they took pains to keep a distance from the Papal fleet and its suppliers. As for Greeks, Levantines, and Venetians, though there had been more than a few of them all in the harbor at Napoli, not a one was to be seen in the basin of Livorno.
“There was, however, a coaster flying the Neapolitan ensign. Fahrooq here was able to get to her captain and entrust to him a message to be delivered to Sultan Omar’s ambassador at the court of King Giovanni, at Napoli, telling of the virtual armed impressment of my ship and crew by the minions of Pope Abdul.”
“So, it was either sail in company with the fleet or die, eh?” asked Sir Ali, with a note of sympathy.
But Walid shook his head slowly. “Not exactly, my friend, not exactly. You think like the warrior you are, with all things in pure black or pure white, but statesmen and, especially, churchmen never deal in such purities, trafficking rather in innumerable shadings of gray. So did they deal with me.
“Upon arrival in Livorno, my vessel was anchored in the basin until a slip could be cleared in the navy yard, then we were warped in and moored fast. Immediately we were fast, an arrogant Roman officer and his well-armed escort boarded my ship and I was ordered to collect my ship’s papers and accompany him to his superiors. I did. I could just then do no other, like it or not. With my damages, the oldest and most ill-kept cog could have sailed rings around me, not to even think of what the full cannon mounted by that fortress at Livorno could have done to me.
“But we had not proceeded far through the navy yard when an older man, most distinguished of appearance, with the walk of a seaman and the honorable scars of a veteran warrior—neither of which had been evidenced by the supercilious, peacock-pretty, Roman puppy!—confronted us and announced that as senior captain of the navy yard, he had first claim on my person and time. The Roman first spluttered, then argued, then made to bluster, laying hand to hilt and calling up his pikemen. But when the older man whistled once and a double squad of matchlock-armed marines, the matches smoking-ready in the cocks, came trotting into view, the Roman backed off with the whinings of a kicked cur, whilst his own pikemen laughed behind their hands at his cowardice and discomfiture.
“And so it was that on that auspicious day, I made the acquaintance first of the renowned Conde Evaldo di Monteorso.”
CHAPTER
THE FIRST
With his crippled galleon under tow toward a destination known to none aboard save the herald, Sir Ali ibn Hussein, Walid Dahub Pasha stood his quarterdeck at the side of the enemy’s emissary. Walid still wore his best armor and bore cursive sword, big battle dagger, and slimmer boot dagger as well as several well-hidden edge weapons of varying sizes, shapes, and purposes.
Below, in the waist, Walid’s one-eyed boatswain, Turgut al-Ayn, and his mates closely supervised the repair and/or replacement of both classes of rigging, now and again lowering to the deck a shot-shredded remnant of canvas or a splintered spar.
Still lower, out of Walid’s sight on the gundecks, Captain Fahrooq had seen the last of the broadside guns unloaded, powder and shot and wads stowed in their respective places. The gunpowder was stowed back into copper-hooped casks. The casks then were carefully laid back in the security of the thick-walled, felt-lined magazine; the wads were, one by one, washed, squeezed dry, then stacked back in the wad chests; shot went into ready racks affixed to the hull above each gunport.
While a carpenter and his single surviving mate went about the patching of battle damage on the main gundeck, Fahrooq ordered the gun captains to set their crews to cleaning and polishing the secured guns and the mounts and ancillary equipment before once more shrouding them from damp and dust.
His immediate orders fully discharged, the officer made his way abaft to the spot whereon the surgeon and his mates had established themselves and their apparatus at the commencement* of this most costly conflict. Despite the long hours which had passed since cessation of hostilities, the sweating, blood-soaked practitioners still were hard at work with knives, saws, pincers, probes, and needles upon the latest occupant of their makeshift table, which dripped clotting gore at ail four corners and all along each edge.
As he waited for the senior surgeon, Master Jibral, to finish his current undertaking, Fahrooq took down one of the lanterns and began to carefully pick his way among the recumbent forms lying close-packed on the blotched and shadowy deck. His bootsoles grated on the sand which had been liberally scattered over blood pools to provide secure footing to Master Jibral and the rest.
He found two of his soldiers almost at once. One lay dead, cold, beginning to stiffen already. The other lay equally still, but he still lived . . . most of him, at least. His left leg now ended just a bit below the knee, but the stump was neatly done up in almost-clean bandages. Although the man’s eyes were open, they did not focus; Fahrooq correctly surmised that the cripple had been well dosed with poppy, probably before they took off his foot and leg.
Further search revealed yet another wounded soldier, also poppy-drugged and bandaged, but no trace of the young officer he sought, his nephew, Suliman ibn Zemal.
While his assistants manhandled the last patient off the gory table to a place on the deck, Master Jibral wiped his red-dripping hands on his blood-soggy kaftan. Taking a waterskin down from a peg, he played the thin stream into his open mouth for a moment, swished the lukewarm liquid about tongue and teeth, then leaned and spat it into a half-barrel filled with severed limbs before again throwing back his head and swallowing a pint or so of the tepid water. When he had rehung the waterskin, he sighed once, then turned toward Fahrooq, smiling tiredly. The waiting captain shuddered involuntarily, for in the dim and flaring lantern light, in the close, noisome atmosphere of this place of stinks and blood and death, the surgeon’s face— with precious little skin visible under the layers of old and new blood, spade beard and mustaches stiff with cloned gore, the just-rinsed teeth shining startlingly white—bore an uncanny resemblance to how Fahrooq assumed a man-eating Mareed from out the very depths of Gehenna must look.
But Captain Fahrooq was basically a rational man, nor did he lack of courage, Firmly setting aside his fleeting, superstitious fancy, he spoke formally. “Good Master Jibral, I seek young Lieutenant Suliman. His sergeant informed me that he was brought to you, wounded, early on in the battle. Where will he be found?”
The surgeon raised one bushy, clot-matted eyebrow. “Lieutenant Suliman . . . ? Oh, that must’ve been the one in the fancy lamellar djawshan, heh? In that pile of corpses in the outer space, there, probably on the bottom of the pile, or near to it.”
Fahrooq sighed. “You . . . you did your best for him, Master?”
The surgeon shook his head. “I had another feed him poppy paste, Captain. Aside from that, there was naught any man could have done save to have given him a faster death, perhaps. When that ball hit this ship, it drove a sharp oaken splinter more than a cubit long and near a handsbreadth wide into the space between the lower edge of his djawshan and his private parts. Men with punctured bowels don’t live, Captain, no matter what is done to or for them. His bowels assuredly were punctured several times over, and I would have been remiss in my responsibility to other men whose wounds were less grave had I wasted time on a man who could not be saved in any case.