It was Nicholas Gay's last night at home. At dawn his father's best ship, the Sainte Spirite, would weigh anchor for the longest eastward voyage she had ever undertaken. His father's brother, Gervase Gaillard of Bordeaux, was going out in charge of the venture. Gilbert Gay, the London merchant, who had altered his name though not his long-sighted French mind in his twenty years of England, thought this an excellent time for his eighteen-year-old son to see the world.
Since Nicholas could remember, he had known the wharves of the Thames and the changeful drama of London Pool. He had been twice to Normandy, but to a lad French by birth, that was hardly a foreign land. Now he was to see countries neither English nor French—some of them not even Christian. Half Spain and all the north coast of Africa were Moslem. Sicily and Sardinia had Saracen traditions. This would be his first sight of the great sea-road from Gibraltar to Byzantium.
During the past three years Gilbert Gay had been often absent, and the boy had taken responsibility of the sort that makes a man. With the keen aquiline French profile he had a skin almost as fair as a girl's, and yellow-brown waving hair. The steady gray eyes and firm lips, however, had nothing girlish about them.
As luck had it these last hours were crowded with visitors. Robert Edrupt, the wool-merchant, and David Saumond, the mason, were taking passage in the Sainte Spirite. Guy Bouverel had a share in her cargo, and came for a word about that and to bid Nicholas good-by. Brother Ambrosius, a solemn-faced portly monk, had letters to send to Rome. Lady Adelicia Giffard came to ask that inquiry be made for her husband, who had gone on pilgrimage more than a year before, and had not been heard of for many months. The poor soul was as nearly distraught as a woman could be. She begged Gervase Gaillard to ask all the pilgrims and merchants he met whether in their travels they had seen or heard of Sir Stephen Giffard, and should any trace of him be found, to send a messenger to her without delay. She was wealthy, and promised liberal reward to any one who could help her in the search. It was her great fear that the knight had been taken prisoner by the Moslems.
“I think that you must have heard of it in that case,” said Gilbert Gay gently, “since these marauders ever demand ransom. I pray you remember, my lady, that there are a thousand chances whereby in these unsettled times a man may be delayed, or his letters fail to reach you. 'Tis not well to brood over vain rumors.”
“I know,” whimpered the poor lady, “but I cannot—I cannot bear that he should be a captive and suffering, and I with hoarded gold that I have no heart to look upon. 'Tis cruel.”
“Holy Church,” observed Brother Ambrosius, “hath always need of our hearts and of our gold, lady. Peace comes to the spirit that hath learned the sweet uses of submission. To dote on the things of the flesh is unpleasing to God.”
“When I was in Spain,” said Edrupt, “I heard a monk preaching a new religion. He urged his hearers to aid in rescuing the captives held in Moslem slavery. 'Tis said he has saved many.”
“Were it not well,” pursued Brother Ambrosius as if he had not heard, “to think upon the glorious opportunity of a captive to bear witness to his faith? We read how angels delivered the apostles from prison, and how Saint Paul in his bonds exhorted and rebuked his people, to the edification of many.”
“True,” commented Gilbert Gay rather dryly, “but we are not all Saint Pauls. And I have never known of God sending angels to do work that He might properly expect of men and women.”
This was a new idea to Brother Ambrosius. Not finding a place in his mind for one just then, he looked meek and said nothing, and presently took his leave.
“Saint Paul was a tentmaker, was he not?” queried Guy Bouverel when the door had closed upon the churchman. “Had he rowed in the galleys I doubt whether we should have had those Epistles.”
Nicholas recalled this conversation the next day, as the sturdy little ship of English oak filled her great sails and went blithely out upon the widening estuary of the Thames. The last of the dear London landmarks faded into the gray soft sky. Soon the sailors would begin to look for Sheerness and the Forelands, Dungeness, Beachy Head. Nicholas leaned on the rail above the dancing morning waters and remembered it all.
There was his mother's sweet pale face under the white coif, her busy fingers completing a last bit of stitchery for him. There was his father's fine, keen, kindly face bent over his account-books and coffers. There was pretty Genevieve, his sister, with her husband, Crispin Eyre. And there were the comrades of his boyhood, and the prating monk, and the unhappy lady with her white face framed in rich velvets and furs, and her piteous beseeching hands that were never still. Those faces, in the glow of the fire and the shine of tall candles in their silver sconces, were to be with him often in the months to come.
Edrupt came up just as a long Venetian galley went plowing out to sea, the great oars flashing in the sunlight, one rank above another. “They do not have to pray for a fair wind, those Venetians,” Nicholas commented idly.
“That galley's past praying for anything,” Edrupt said grimly. “You may be glad that your men fear neither wind nor seas—nor you. 'Tis an ill thing to sail the seas with those who serve only through fear.”
Nicholas had not thought of it in that way. He knew, of course, that the slaves who rowed the racing galleys were the offscouring of mankind, desperate men, drawn from all nations. It was as much as two men could do to handle one oar, and all must pull in unison as a huge machine. The Venetian dromond was to other merchant-ships as the dromedary to other camels. To make the speed required the rowers must put forth their whole strength, hour after hour, day after day.
Any work which makes men into parts of a machine is not likely to improve them as men. When they have no love for their work and no hope of reward, and do not even speak the same language, the one motive which can be depended upon to keep them going is fear. The whip of the overseer bred festering, burning hatred, but it kept the sweeps from breaking their monotonous unceasing motion. If the voyage were quick, the profits were the greater, and no one cared for anything else.
Thinking of the hard sea-bitten faces of the galley-slaves Nicholas rejoiced that rather than live so the crew of the Sainte Spirite would every man of them choose a clean death at sea.
Some days later it seemed as if they were fated to die so. A Biscay tempest caught them, and from dark to daylight they were buffeted by the giant battledores of wind and sea. Nicholas spent the sleepless hours in lending a hand and cheering the men as he could.
At last they sighted the great Rock of Gibraltar, fifteen hundred feet of it clear against the sky, like the gateway pillar of another world. Between Europe and Africa they passed into the blue Mediterranean,—blue with the salty sparkle beloved of all sea-lovers since Ulysses. Light warm winds, the scent of orange-groves and rose-gardens, a sky only less deep in its azure splendor than the sea itself—it seemed indeed another world.
But the Sainte Spirite had not come whole out of her struggle with the powers of the abyss. Timbers were sadly strained, a mast was gone, every man on board was weary and muscle-sore. And then a Levantine gale drove the crippled merchantman down on the Barbary coast.
The blackness of that storm ended, for Nicholas Gay, in a plunge into the black waters and a glimpse of the high lantern of his father's ship dancing above the tossing foam like a witch-fire, for an instant before she went down. When he came to himself he was lying on hot sand in the sunshine, and Edrupt and David Saumond were bending anxiously over him.
Half the seamen were gone; so was the captain; so was all of the cargo. Gervase Gaillard had been injured by a falling mast and was helpless. The coast was strange to them all, but the old merchant and Edrupt made a guess that it was a part of Morocco somewhere near the town of Fez. Food they had none; water they might find; and the merchants had not lost quite all they had in the wreck. Some gold and jewels they had saved, secured about their persons. These would pay the passage of the company to London—if they had luck.
They were considering what to do next when a body of some twoscore horsemen swept down upon them. The leader might have been either Turk or Frank. He was as dark as a Saracen and wore the chain-mail, scimitar and light helmet of the heathen, but he spoke Levantine rather too well for a Moor, and with a different intonation.
“Who are you?” he asked curtly. Nicholas Gay stood up, not yet quite steady on his feet.
“We are London merchant folk,” he said, “from the wrecked ship Sainte Spirite, whereof my father, Gilbert Gay, was owner. My uncle here is our chief man, but as you see, he is injured and cannot move. If we may get food and lodging until we are able to return to England, we will requite it freely.”
“London,” repeated the soldier. “A parcel of London traders, eh?” He spoke a few words to the Moor who rode next him, in another language. “This is the domain of Yusuf of the Almohades,” he went on, “and we make no terms with the enemies of God. Yet we condemn no man to starve. Ye shall have food and lodging so long as ye remain with us. Doubtless ye are honest and will pay, but in this barbarous land there are many thieves. Therefore we will take charge of such wealth as ye have. As for that old man, he cannot live to reach his home. Abu Hassan!”
A trooper spurred toward the old merchant and thrust him through with his lance. He half rose, groaned and fell back, dead. Others, dismounting, seized upon the astonished and indignant castaways, and took from them with the deftness of practiced hands whatever they had of value. This was too much for the Breton and English sailors. They would have fought it out then and there. But Nicholas spoke quickly so that only those nearest him heard.
“There is no gain in being killed here one by one. Wait and be silent. Pass the word to the rest.”
When the prisoners had been herded into a compact company in the center of the mounted troop, the leader chirruped to his horse. “It grows late,” he said. “Y'Allah!” And at the point of the lance the captives were driven forward.
They were taken through the crowded narrow streets of a squalid town and left in a walled enclosure where two negroes brought them an earthen jar of water and some sort of cooked grain in a large bowl. The sun blazed down upon their shelterless heads and flies hummed about the filth in the unclean place. Nicholas, when their hunger had been partly satisfied and there was no more to eat or drink, addressed himself to the others in a cool and quiet voice.
“Friends, it is like we are to be sold into slavery among the infidels. If each man is left to shift for himself they may break us. If we stand by one another and keep our faith we may yet win home to England. They may not separate us at first, and I have been thinking that if they find out the value of a company of men freely choosing to work together in harmony, they will hardly separate us at all. But we must obey their will, we must keep order among ourselves, and above all, we must seem to have given up all hope of escape. What say you?”
Edrupt spoke first. “I'm with you, lad. 'Tis our one chance of seeing home again, I do think.”
David Saumond's shrewd eyes were scanning the faces of the sailors. “I'll no be the last to join ye,” he said. “But all must agree. One man out would make a hole i' the dyke.”
A big Breton sailor stepped forward. “Kadoc of Saint Malo sticks to his ship,” he growled, and drew with his forefinger a line in the dust. “Who's next?”
One after another, but with little hesitation, the men crossed the line. All had some idea of what awaited them in the Moorish provinces. It was no new thing for captives of European blood to be sold as slaves. Gangs of them toiled on canals, walls, fortresses, in grain-fields, on board galleys. Those leaders of Islam who urged a holy war sowed fortifications wherever they went. The need for slave labor for such work was greater than the supply. Much of the slave population was unfit for anything but the simplest and rudest tasks, and could be kept at work only by the constant use of the whip.
All the tales Nicholas had heard of slavery crowded into his mind in the first moments of captivity. Once a black-browed Sicilian had told of a night of blood and flame, when the slaves of a galley, mad with toil, privation and hatred, killed their masters and attempted to seize the ship,—and almost succeeded. “Slaves cannot unite,” the Sicilian ended contemptuously. “There is always a Judas.” But Gilbert Gay had chosen his men for this voyage with especial care. Every man of them, Nicholas believed, could be trusted.
They had never dreamed of anything like the next few days—the filth, the degradation, the cruelty. Nicholas was glad, when half-naked Moslem boys called them names from a safe distance, that the others could not understand. The insults of an Oriental are primitive and plain—and very old. Nicholas had a trick of absorbing languages, and already knew half a score of outlandish tongues and dialects.
Not only the townspeople but their Moslem fellow-slaves held the Kafirs in contempt. Their rations were sometimes food condemned by the Moslem faith. Edrupt's cool common sense and David's dry humor were of valiant service in those days. The Scot averred that better men than Mahomet had been bred on barley bannocks, and that the flat coarse cakes of the Berbers were as near them as a heathen could be expected to come. He also warned them that Moses knew what he was about when he forbade pork to his people, and that the pigs that ran in the streets of an African town were very different eating from the beech-fed hogs of Kent. From a Jewish physician for whom he had once built a secret treasure-vault he had picked up a rough-and-ready knowledge of medicine which was of very considerable value.
One morning they were all marched off, in charge of a greasy indifferent-looking Turk, to work on a canal embankment. The garden of an emir's favorite was to have a new bath-pavilion. Here the great strength of Kadoc, the hard clean muscle and ready resourcefulness of Edrupt, and the Scotch mason's experience in the ways of stones and waters, set the pace for the rest. The seamen studied how to use their strength to the best advantage as they had once studied the sky and the sea. They moved together to the tune of their own chanteys, and the Turk discovered that this one gang was worth any two others on the ground. When questioned, Nicholas replied briefly that it was the way of his people.
The foreign-looking officer smiled incredulously when this explanation was given, and watched them for some time with obvious suspicion. But the men seemed not to be plotting together, and to be thinking only of their work. If the English were fools enough to do more than they were made to do it was certainly no loss to their masters.
“I should like to know the name of that vinegar-faced captain,” said Edrupt one day. “I mistrust he wasn't born here.”
“No,” said Nicholas. “They call him the Khawadji, and they never use that name for one of themselves.”
“He's too free with his whip. Yon tall man that tends his horses could tell something of that, I make my guess.”
One night they came on the Khawadji's stable-man caring for a lame horse with such skill that Nicholas spoke of it. By some instinct he spoke in Norman-French. The other answered in the same tongue.
“Every knight should know his horse.”
“You are of gentle birth, my lord?”
“Call me not lord,” the Norman said wearily. “I have seen too much to be any man's lord hereafter. Since my fever I am fit only for this, and none will know the grave of Stephen Giffard.”
Nicholas' heart leaped. “Sir,” he said quickly, “ere we left London the Lady Adelicia, your wife, came to my father's house to beseech him to aid her in searching for you. If any of us ever see home again I will take care that she is told of this.”
The knight looked ten years younger. “I thank you,” he answered gravely. “And if I should not live to see her again, I would have her know that my thoughts have been constantly of her.”
“Is not this Khawadji a caitiff knight of France? He does not seem like a Moor.”
The Norman nodded. “He is Garin de Biterres, a miscreant of Guienne. My brother balked him in some villainy years ago. He took me for Walter when he saw me, and let it out. Aquitaine being too hot to hold him, and the Normans in Ireland refusing to enlist him, he came through the Breach of Roland and took service under the Crescent. He was once a slave among the Moors of Andalusia, and owes his deformity to that. He cozened an old beggar into treating his leg with some ointment which would wither it up so that he could not work, and it never wholly recovered.”
“How comes it that he has not allowed you to send word to your people? Most of these folk are greedy for ransom.”
“I think he keeps me here for his pleasure. At first he took the letters I wrote and pretended to have sent them, and gibed in his bitter fashion when no reply came. That is how I know that the letters were not sent at all. Had my lady heard so much as a word of my captivity she would have searched me out.”
The approach of some troopers broke off the conversation, and Nicholas went his way, marveling at the strange chances of life.
Some months passed, during which the English worked at varying tasks—brickmaking, the hauling of brick and cut stone, the building of walls. Then a merchant called Mustafa came seeking slaves for his galley. After much crafty bargaining he secured Nicholas and his companions for about two-thirds the original price asked. But the Khawadji refused to part with Stephen Giffard.
The galley was a rackety, noisome trading-ship that plied along the coast. On board were already some rowers of various races, accustomed to the work, but the bulk of the labor was to be done by the new men. It was killing toil. Fed on black beans and coarse bread and unclean water, they worked the ship from one filthy white-walled port to another, never seeing more than the dock where the galley anchored or some mean street where their barracks might be. There were times when Nicholas seemed to himself hardly more human than the rats that gnawed and scrabbled in the dark at night. He began to see how a galley-slave is made—molded and tainted through and through by that of which he is a part.
The clean comradeship of the little group of Northern exiles did not count for so much in this work. The pace of the ship was the average pace of the whole crew. They became too weary to think or feel, too ravenous to disdain the most unwholesome rations. Nicholas found himself mysteriously aware of the moods of those about him, as men are when herded together in silent multitudes. In the free world one feels this only now and then—in an army, a mob, a church. Among slaves the dog-like instinct is common. They know more of their masters than their masters can ever know of them.
Nicholas had been carefully trained by wise parents to the habit of self-control, but he found that he was moved nevertheless by the mad unreasoning impulses of the half-barbarous people about him, ridden fiercely by their black thoughts of hate and fear. That it was the same with his comrades he knew from little things they said—and even more from what they did not say. They grew dulled to beauty and suffering alike. There were glorious dawns, that flushed the white walls of a seaport rose-red, above waters of mingled ink and blood that changed as by magic to blue like lapis-lazuli. Then the sky turned saffron and the minarets were of a fleeting gold above the deep blue shadows of the streets. There were velvet nights when the stars blazed like a king's ransom, and white-robed desert men moved in the moist chill air like phantoms. But all this was as little to them as to the lizards that crept along the walls or the sweeps they handled with their hardening hands. Years after, Nicholas recalled those nights and those mornings and knew that something that sat within his deadened brain had been alive and had stored the memories for him. But he did not know it then.
Mustafa bragged among his friends, from Jebel el Tarik to Iskanderia, of his fine ship and his unparalleled crew. The listeners would smile and stroke their beards and exclaim at intervals, “Ma sh'Allah!”—believing perhaps one tenth of what they heard. Oftenest he boasted of the Feringhi rowers whom he had purchased from the sheikh's own steward in the slave-market of Lundra—a city of mist and wealth and pigs and fair maidens. Thus it came about that Ahmed ibn Said, the host, and Abu Selim, the letter-writer of the bazaar, devised a jest for a supper at the khan. They would send for one of these Frankish slaves and see what he would say. The flattered Mustafa agreed, and the messenger returned with Nicholas Gay, whose gray eyes and yellow hair caused a mild sensation.
The guests began to ask questions, first in Levantine, then in Arabic. Were there bazaars in Lundra? Did the people drink coffee? Had they camels? Did the muezzin call them to prayer? Did the women sleep upon the housetops? Was the city most like Aleppo the White, or Istamboul, or Damasc-ush-Shah? How many Muslimun were there? How many of the idolaters?
To these inquiries Nicholas replied, at first with faint amusement at the mingled shrewdness and ignorance of these men, then with a fierce pride in his city which made his words, as the letter-writer expressed it, shine like rubies and sing like a fountain. The merchants listened, and munched their sticky baclawi, ripe olives and dates and figs, and drank many tiny cups of coffee, more entertained than they had ever been by Mustafa. Finally the host sent for a basket of fruit—great pale Egyptian melons, pomegranates, oranges, figs—and graciously bestowed it upon the gifted galley-slave. He meant to come next day, he said, and with Mustafa's permission behold the prowess of the English in swimming.
To every one's surprise, Ahmed really came. Those who could swim were had out of their stifling quarters and allowed to do so. Nicholas could swim like an eel, and all were amazed when, after swimming farther out than any of the others, he flung up his arms, uttered a loud cry, and vanished. They watched and searched, but nothing more was seen of him, and there was mourning among the English.
But there was a Genoese galley in the harbor, and Nicholas had seen it. He had dived, swum under water as far as he could inshore, and come up with his head inside the scooped-out rind of a large melon. During the search the seeming melon quietly bobbed away toward a reedy shallow, and the swimmer hid among the reeds until dark, and then swam across to the Genoese ship. The captain knew Gilbert Gay and listened with interest to the youth's story.
The Genoese captain did not care to interfere with' Mustafa in a town full of his Moslem countrymen. He waited until the crazy trading-galley was well out to sea and rammed her with the beak of his own ship. Crossbowmen lined the rail, grappling irons were thrown out, and the captain, with Nicholas and some soldiers, went and unearthed Mustafa among bales of striped cotton. When he understood that they merely wanted all of his Feringhi slaves, he thankfully surrendered them.
“Shall we put this fellow to death?” inquired the captain. Mustafa understood the tone and gesture though not the words, and turned a dirty yellow-gray. “No,” said Nicholas Gay. “He was a good master—for an Arab.”
Mustafa took heart. He would never reach port, he complained, being so short-handed.
“You can work your ship under sail for that distance,” said the Genoese, twisting his mustachios, “if you dare loose your other slaves.” At that Mustafa had an ague. When they saw the last of him he was making slow and crooked progress.
“And after all,” said Edrupt one day, as they sighted the cliffs of Dover, “you bore witness among the heathen, as the fat old monk directed.”
“Stupid pig!” David grumbled. “I'd like fine to have him bearing witness in a Barbary brick-yard, sweating and whaizling over his tale o' brick. He'd throw his six hundred a day or I'd have his hide.”
“All the same,” said Edrupt thoughtfully, “a Londoner beats a Turk even for a galley-slave—eh, Nicholas?”
“We were never slaves,” said Nicholas. “We were free men doing the work of slaves for a time. We had memory and hope left us. There is nothing to be learned at such work. Stick together and give them the slip if you can—that's all the wisdom of the galleys.”
HARBOUR SONG
Sails in the mist-gray morning, wide wings alert for flight,
Outward you fare with the sea-wind, seeking your ancient right
To range with your foster-brethren, the sleepless waves of the sea,
And come at the end of your wandering home again to me.
By the bright Antares, the Shield of Sobieski,
By the Southern Cross ablaze above the hot black sea,
You shall seek the Pole-Star below the far horizon,—
Steer by Arthur's Wain, lads, and home again to me!
Caravel, sloop and galleon follow the salt sea gale
That whispers ever of treasure, the ancient maddening tale,—
Round the world he leads ye, the sorcerer of the sea,
Battered and patched and bleeding ye come again to me.
By the spice and sendal, beads and trumpery trinkets,
By the weight of ingots that cost a thousand dead,
You shall seek your fortune under hawthorn hedges,—
Come to know your birthright in the land you fled.
Sails of my sons and my lovers, I watch for ye through the night,
My lamps are trimmed and burning, my hearth is clear and bright.
With every sough of the trade-wind that blows across the sea
I wake and wait and listen for the call of your hearts to me.
By Saint Malo's lanterns, by Medusa-fires
Rolling round your plunging prows in midnight tropic sea,
All sail set, lads, and home again to me!
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