BUT I WAS not dead, though for many days and nights after I left Las Conchas I wished that I were.
The soldiers soon dispersed the crowd gathered outside the compound of Don Vicente Alonso Carbazón. Then the lieutenant yanked the end of the rope and hauled me out through the gate and off down the road. His soldiers came after, cuffing and kicking me all the way to the dockside until they found the ship on which they’d booked passage.
‘I’m minded not to have the bother of finding a galley boat to take him as their slave,’ the lieutenant commented when I tripped and fell as we mounted the gangplank. ‘I don’t want this piece of scum still with me when we join up with the armies of the king and queen.’
‘We can throw him overboard with the rubbish when we quit the harbour,’ one of his soldiers suggested.
The lieutenant grunted. ‘Mayhap his corpse would float ashore and reveal what I’d done. I’ll not risk the anger of that magistrate if he finds out I’ve killed the boy when he decided his life should be spared.’
The ship’s captain, who’d been listening to the discussion, said, ‘If we don’t meet a galley boat between now and next landfall we’ll tie him to the anchor as we drop it down.’ He winked. ‘We can say he got caught up in the rope and was dragged over the side.’
He grabbed me by the hair of my head, ran me across the deck and flung me into one of the open holds. I hurtled downwards, banging arms, legs and head against bales and boxes of cargo until I ended up on the solid wooden floor. I’d scarcely recovered my breath when the opening was battened down and the light extinguished. This was a new terror for me. I’d not experienced extreme darkness before; blood surged behind my eyes as I groped wildly with outstretched arms to find something to hold on to. The ship shuddered as the sailors made ready to leave. Suddenly the world moved under my feet and the whole universe slid away. My mind was seized by a fit, for I’d never been on a boat. The sails cracked out and we began to make headway from port. As the wind lifted, the swell took us, and the spine of the ship arched against the sea. Terrified by the primeval power of the elements, I lurched about, screaming in the blackness, while the ship rose and fell, borne up and brought down by the hand of an unknown gigantic creature. I vomited, heaving up again and again, until dry retching cramped my stomach with excruciating pain, and I fell down, exhausted, and lay there whimpering.
There was no way of knowing daylight from darkness. Deprived of sight, the noises I heard sounded loud in my head – the scuttling of rats and the groans and creaks of the wooden hull as it forced its way through the water. I thought the planks would split asunder and I would be cast into the Deep, so I cried out piteously for my mother and my dead father.
And within the ferment of my mind I saw them again: my mother left alone, sick and dying, and my father, his body swinging at the end of rope.
The weather worsened, the ship pitched and rolled, and the huge boxes and bales of the cargo began to shift. I feared I should be crushed. I crawled about until I found a space among the struts, where I wedged myself along the ribs of the ship. There I clung, while outside the waves battered and crashed, seeking a way in to overwhelm me. I remained without moving for what seemed like days, until I became so weak I could hardly lift my head.
It was the red-haired soldier, the one who’d shown my father mercy by pulling on his legs to cut short his last agony, who finally opened the hatch. A rope came tumbling in and he swung down to take a look at me. Then he bawled to whoever stood at the top waiting for his report, ‘He lives!’
He returned a few minutes later with a jug of water. ‘Twice now you have cheated Death,’ he said as he forced open my mouth and poured the water down my throat, ‘for, by rights, you should have expired here for lack of water.’ He went aloft again, coming back with a hunk of bread and a wineskin full of rough red wine. Breaking the bread into pieces, he moistened it with the wine and watched as I managed to swallow. He grunted as he helped me stand up. ‘Perhaps you were born under a special star.’
A small Spanish trading galley boat had been spotted on the horizon. The lieutenant didn’t care if I was alive or not: even if I had been only halfway dead he’d have dropped me over the side, but now he saw that he might trade me for some alcohol to drink.
One barrel of cheap wine was all I was worth. And even that was grudged. It was more in a spirit of appeasement that the captain of the galley boat agreed to the exchange, for the soldiers had their weapons trained on the smaller boat. Sitting low in the water with no covered quarters for the occupants, the galley boat was only partially decked, with rough sailcloth rigged as an awning at the stern and down each side to protect the rowers from the elements. It had one light cannon mounted up front, and although the few crewmen carried long knives in their belts, they’d be easily overcome by a larger ship equipped with guns and armed men.
The deal was done in minutes, and Fate decreed that I became a galley rat.
The red-haired soldier came to bring me up to the deck. The hatch opened again and sun dazzled in my face. I squinted up as the rope came down.
‘If you cannot climb the rope by yourself, then hold the end and I’ll haul you up,’ he said, not in an unkind way.
I stumbled forward to grasp the swinging end of the rope.
Something glinted in the light.
Caught between the bindings of a cargo bale was a knife. It was long and thin-bladed: the kind a woman would have for paring vegetables. I found out later that it was of the type used by government officers to cut the twine as they affixed the customs seal on taxable goods. It must have become entangled as the cargo was inspected before loading the ship. I reached for it, and in a moment I had it in my hand. But where to hide it? Bending over to block the view of anyone watching from above, I slit the inside waistband of my trouser and slipped the knife inside.
They strung a line from the military ship to the galley boat to transfer the wine barrel. One end of a rope was tied around my waist and the other end to this line. Then I was tossed overboard. The galley crewmen hauled me across the gap, but I was too weak to climb the rope up to their boat. The ship cast off and I would have been caught in the undertow – except I heard a voice from the galley boat shout out, ‘Pull him in! Pull him in!’
Spluttering and coughing, I landed on the wide platform at the galley stern.
The man who had given the order approached me. He was a strange sight, dressed in black shirt, breeches and hose, topped with a three-quarter-length fitted jacket of peacock blue, thickly embroidered with silver thread. He wore a fanciful hat, the like of which I’d never seen before – black with a purple feather and more elaborate than those worn by mummers and performers who play out pageants in town squares at Christmas and Eastertide. Buckles glinted on his shoes while flurries of lace frothed at wrist and neck. A golden hoop dangled from one ear, and on his tanned face he’d grown a moustache and a tiny goatee beard. By his dress and manner I knew he was the captain. He bent over me and stroked my hair.
I snapped my head to the side and sank my teeth into his hand – whereupon he struck out at me with the bamboo cane he carried. I backed into the corner like a wild animal. The galley captain sucked on the bite I’d given him but, far from being angry at my attack on him, he nodded in approval.
‘I like a lad with spirit,’ he said. ‘It means you’ll be good in battle and able to fend off any trouble from our own oarsmen. Too scrawny to take an oar now, but you’ll grow into it if we feed you.’
I stayed where I was for the remainder of the day, cowering in the corner. That evening we anchored in shallow water off an island so that the oarsmen could rest and eat. The captain gave me a piece of the goat that was roasting on a brazier set up on the deck inside an iron firebox to cook food. I ate greedily. It had been weeks, months perhaps, since I had tasted meat.
The captain chuckled as he watched me gobble the food. ‘Go easy, boy. You don’t look as though you’ve had a decent meal all your life. Stuffing yourself like that so quickly will only bring on bellyache.’
He was right. Within an hour I was doubled up with colic as the unaccustomed food worked its way through my gut. To my surprise, some of the rowers came to look at me. I had imagined that every oarsman would be chained to their benches, but in fact only a small number, eight in total, were slaves or criminals imprisoned in this way. The rest, more than twenty free men, had elected to do this work. I was to discover that men from various countries became galley rowers by choice. It was considered a skilled, if arduous, job, but the pay and the pickings could be very rewarding: in addition to basic wages the oarsmen received a percentage of the cargo profit and any other booty that might fall their way. On this particular galley, under the command of Captain Cosimo Gastone, the food was nourishing: meat, fish or fowl, with plenty of bread, strong cheeses, and fruit and honey washed down with wine. The oarsmen were exceptionally well-fed as the captain believed they should be in peak condition.
I was to find out in the most brutal way that our very lives depended on the fitness of the rowers.