The Long Sword(172)
‘His kind is not rare,’ Fra Jacob said. ‘Listen, I am a doctor, trained in Italy. I have been a brother of this Order since my wife died in the Black Death.’ He took a cold cloth and ran it over my Turk’s face. He met my eyes. His were mild; in the low orlop of a Hospitaller galley, his eyes seemed very dark. He smiled, apparently without malice. ‘My father is a nobleman and my birth perfectly decent. But I have never been allowed to dine with the knights, nor offered accommodation, despite the Order’s vows or my own skills.’ He shrugged. ‘I am less resentful than perhaps I sound, but your reputation is as a man of blood.’
It was my turn to shrug. ‘I serve the legate,’ I said.
He nodded and his brow wrinkled. ‘You may find that there are many in the Order who have little respect for your legate.’ He paused. ‘Or none. He was born a serf – a peasant.’
I laughed. ‘I am warned. But I grew to manhood being excluded by the English court – I won’t be broken by aristocratic airs.’
While I was speaking, he got a Greek lamp, lit with olive oil, which smelled so much better than the whale oil you find in the north. By its light I could see my man. ‘What is his name?’ I asked.
We went back and forth, and the best I could reckon, his name was something like Kili Salmud.
He tried to bow, lying in a hammock with his hands together. He flinched as the movement reached his stomach muscles.
‘Let’s get him baptised with a Christian name,’ I said.
Fra Jacob frowned. ‘You might feel differently, were your situations reversed,’ he said.
I think I grinned. ‘But they are not,’ I said, or something equally glib.
South of Chios, we spread our line wide, a dragnet fishing for Turkish vessels, and we snapped a dozen of them up – fishing smacks, a lateen-rigged merchant, a three-masted tub that proved to be a pirate-taken Genoese. We ran her down ourselves in light airs, with the whole crew rowing triple banked, and Fiore and I led the boarders – Nerio was down with the flux. The crew fought to the last; the last being a man that Fiore beheaded with his false edge strategy, the showy bastard. Their resistance was pointless, as my friends and I were in full harness despite the heat, and with the two Venetian men-at-arms, all the dying was done by the crew of the round ship. In the hold we found the rotting bodies of the Italian crew, and saw why the Turks – really, as it proved, the merest Levantine pirates of no race whatsoever – had fought to the end, as the cargo was worth a pile of gold, being all silk, and the crew had been ill-used to the point of horror: tortured and humiliated before being killed like sheep with their throats opened, youngest to oldest.
The old admiral, who had scarcely spoken a word to me since our argument on his quarterdeck, came below when summoned by his marines. He didn’t avert his eyes, but merely shook his head.
‘You killed the bastards too quickly,’ he said. But he flashed me a smile. ‘Pirates – animals. They prey on Christian and Moslem alike, and are the enemies of all men.’ He nodded at one young man. ‘That’s a bad way to die, eh?’
And later, he had malmsey served to all of us, and he said, ‘It is easy to prate of the foul religion of the infidel and all that, but when you look at what those pirates did – to Genoese, my natural enemies – you know that it is those bastards who are the enemy. And they live in the seams and fissures between the rivals and ply their horrid trade because the lawful powers are busy fighting.’ He looked at me. ‘I’m sure I’ll go to hell for saying it, Sir Knight, but I’d rather clear the fucking pirates off the sea than conquer Jerusalem. I can go to Jerusalem any time I want, just for paying a fee to the Sultan in Cairo, who is a lawful man with normal appetites. And when we take Tyre, or Jaffa, or whatever unlucky town we storm …’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve said too much.’