Masters of the Guild Part 18

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 pa.s.sage of the company to London- -if they had luck.

They were considering what to do next when a body of some twoscore hors.e.m.e.n 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 G.o.d. 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 Ha.s.san!"

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.

Pa.s.s 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 d.y.k.e."

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 ca.n.a.ls, 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 coa.r.s.e 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 ca.n.a.l 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 pa.s.sed, 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 coa.r.s.e 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 anch.o.r.ed 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 mult.i.tudes. 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 insh.o.r.e, 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.