Cutthroats of the Coast

Chapter 25 - The Condemned

We transferred to de Croix's ship the following morning. Thirty denizens of the prison, including Jack, Ramsbottom, my friend Hassan, myself and our guards, were pulled across to La Ruse in a broad, flat bottomed barge, the gentle ripples of our bow wave catching the light from a blazing sun in a quite entrancing manner. Relief coursed through me like a refreshing draught of the finest Rhenish. We would be free of the sweltering confines of the prison, even if only to replace it with the similarly rude confinement of a galley. That galley, we realized as we approached it over the busy harbour, was the xebec that we had observed from our cell only the day before.

Our weeks of confinement had left us pale and gaunt, old before our time. Ramsbottom's hair, usually long and lank, had been coming out in clumps, leaving him with unsightly bare patches upon his scalp. Jack's tyranny over the boy had left him mute, shying from the slightest movement. He sat in the bilges of the barge, his head held in his hands, the bones of his wrists stark in the morning sun, water lapping around his feet and skinny arse. We were all yellow-eyed, our breath and bodies stinking, our clothes reeking and worn through, modesty only saved by Jack's ingenuity with knots.

The easy motion of the boatmen as they pulled their flashing oars lulled me, calming my soul in a way that I had not experienced in the long weeks of nervous tension during our detention. I watched the blades dip and sweep back in the calm waters, bubbles streaming to the surface from their passage. Dip and pull, dip and pull. I drifted into a reverie, my eyes wandering lazily across a harbour frontage cluttered with flat-roofed, whitewashed buildings, as we slowly drew away from the jetty. Where was Nathaniel now, I wondered? De Croix had taken him to Salé's citadel. To what end I do not know but I feared for his safety. Not that I was going to do anything about it, or wanted to. I was done with Nathaniel.

The journey in the creaking barge gave me an opportunity to size up our new vessel with my professional, seagoing eye. As we approached, it struck me that there was something about it that seemed not to be right. The word squat or dwarfish had sprung to mind as we ploughed our way across Salé's wide harbour,

"It appears that the ship is not ready for sea, Jack," I said. "The masts seem to be lacking their typical height. Would not topmasts be shipped before leaving port?"

"You are becoming quite the sailor. You'll be wanting a master's berth soon enough." Jack grinned at me in a way I had not seen since we had last been on The Resolve. Well, to be honest it might have been the morning after my night in Da Silva's cellar, after Jack had spent so much time with Maria. "It's not missing anything, Matthew, it's a xebec. It's meant to look like that." He pointed to a massive spar that hung from the top of a stunted foremast; one end pointed at the deck, the other at the sky, a sail bound tightly to the yard. "You rig a lateen from that. It's a big triangular sail. Xebec's are not like good protestant ships, they're too much like bloody galleys. Frogs and Dons and Moors sail 'em, slaves row 'em."

We reached the vessel and our boatmen hooked on. We could hear a great hubbub above but we could see little from our gently pitching position. No one came to the side to hail us and so our guards simply shoved us up the side. It should not have been an arduous climb since a xebec sits much lower in the water than a brig, but our weeks of poor rations and little exercise had left us as weak as kittens. With much cursing and swearing we eventually hauled ourselves out of the barge, much to the abids' disgust.

On reaching the roasting surface of the deck we stood in an ungainly mob, gawking about ourselves like a parcel of monks in a whorehouse. We were at a loss with what would happen to us. No-one seemed particularly concerned. Instead the crew seemed much more interested in catching a small dog that was yapping around in the fo'c'sle. Our guards, a different troop of abid than Mohammad's men, were similarly nonplussed and waited without any intelligence of what to do.