Текст книги "Portuguese Affair"
Автор книги: Ann Swinfen
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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 18 страниц)
Chapter Fifteen
That was the first three days. With a well-trained army, accustomed to long marches, fit and healthy, properly provisioned, it should have been possible to cover the sixty-five mile distance from Peniche to Lisbon in about three days. We should have been there by now. With our poor shambling creatures, unfit from the start of the expedition and growing weaker by the day, with very little food and almost no clean water, it would take us at least two or three times as long. If, indeed, we ever reached Lisbon. Like many of the soldiers I had begun to feel that our slow crawl across the Portuguese countryside would never come to an end. Although I was one of the privileged few on horseback, I still suffered the same heat, thirst and hunger as the foot soldiers. The horses too were growing weak. We could usually find them some grazing, however poor, but they too were desperate for water. Because of their failing condition, they plodding along as if half dead, their heads hanging, yellowish drool hanging from their lips as they gasped for breath in the heat.
The Earl of Essex had chosen to accompany the army, no doubt hoping for military glory when we reached Lisbon, although his past record in battle was no very great recommendation. This time it might be different, if the people of Portugal did indeed rise in support of Dom Antonio. On our journey so far, there had been no sign whatsoever of any such support. Apart from a few men who joined us in Peniche, no one had come to swell the ranks of the army since we had landed. Whether people were frightened by the summary execution of the nobles like my grandfather, on the merest suspicion, or whether they had little faith in the Dom himself, I could not tell, but by now I had little hope that the expedition’s supposed main goal – to put the Dom on the throne – would ever be achieved. It might be, too, that the Catholic people of Portugal were reluctant to be rescued from Spain by an invading army of heretic Protestants from England. The looting of churches in and around Coruña would not have gone unnoticed. In fact, on first setting out from Peniche, the army had looted some Portuguese churches before Norreys put a stop to it.
As for what the Earl of Essex believed or expected, who could tell? I do not suppose he cared two groats for Dom Antonio, though I am sure he thirsted for glory. He was not, however, a leader to inspire the men of this army. We had seen little of him. His particular party, consisting of his own officers, servants and cronies, kept to themselves. Naturally, he insisted on leading the march, so he was away at the head of the column, while I generally rode somewhat close to the rear, keeping a watch on the laggards who trailed along in danger of being left behind. Unlike the rest of us, Essex came equipped with sumpter mules and considerable baggage, amongst which I suspected that he had ensured an adequate supply of food and wine. At any rate, on the few occasions when I caught sight of him or his men, they did not appear to be suffering like the rest of us.
On the evening of the fourth day I lay down as soon as it was dark, for I was bone weary. It had been a bad day. Several more men had died and two of the horses. The ranks of the army had also grown thinner through desertions. There were those who simply collapsed at the roadside and refused to move, however much the junior officers kicked and swore at them. Then there were others who slipped away when they thought no one was looking. Raised up on horseback, I would sometimes see a solitary man, or perhaps a group of two or three, hiding in a patch of scrub, waiting for us to pass. They must have hoped for help from the local cottagers, but we never knew what became of them. Perhaps they found a life there in Portugal, perhaps they died, starving and alone, perhaps the Spanish discovered them and either executed them as spies or handed them over to the Inquisition as heretics. The remaining soldiers in our army seemed not to care, seeing how our numbers were dwindling. The fewer mouths to feed, the larger share for each of those men who were left.
The death of the two horses had at least meant some food that day. The Englishmen soon overcame their squeamish resistance to eating horsemeat and grabbed their share almost before it was cooked, roasted on spits over the campfires. I had little inclination to eat, certainly not the half-raw horsemeat, for I had passed beyond normal hunger to a dazed and abstracted state, in which I seemed almost detached from my body. I feared I was becoming feverish, and privately treated myself with a febrifuge tincture. I was sparing of it, for I had not a great deal left and was uncertain how much Dr Nuñez and Dr Lopez might have with them. Many of our medical supplies had been left aboard the Victory and as a result had been carried away when the fleet sailed before the two older physicians could remove them. As a bird might fly, over to the west, to the ocean, the fleet was not indeed very many miles from us, but it might as well have been on the moon.
We carried some crude tents with us, but the nights were warm and most of us were too exhausted to erect them that night, so we slept in the open air. After my only meal of the day, some stale bread and a lump of cheese from which I had to scrape long whiskers of mould with my knife, I curled up under a withered bush, with my horse hobbled nearby and my satchel as a lumpy pillow. I never let it out of my sight, for I feared some of the soldiers might steal the poppy juice and other soporifics to send them into an everlasting oblivion. Apart from my medical supplies, all it contained were the carved seal made for me by Paolo and my two books, very battered now: the small New Testament given me by the rector of St Bartholomew’s church and Simon’s gift of Sidney’s poems. I had been too tired and too dispirited to open them for days now. The ground was baked hard and stony, the night troubled with the sounds of the army, but despite the discomfort a heavy sleep came over me quickly.
I woke suddenly with a pounding heart, unsure for a moment where I was or what had roused me. There was shouting and the clash of sword against sword, then heavy bodies colliding and crashing through the bushes near me. Men were yelling in English and Spanish. All this way from Peniche we had been untroubled by Spanish forces, but it seemed our luck had run out. Clouds which might have given us some protection from the unrelenting sun during the day had built up during the night and obscured all light from moon and stars. Apart from a watch fire some distance away, everything was as black as the inside of a chimney. I could see nothing at all.
I scrambled to my feet, caught up my satchel, and groped about in the dark for my horse. He whickered in alarm and I found him, first by the sound, then by the bulk of thicker darkness. The noises were coming nearer as I tried desperately to free the horse from his hobble. My saddle and bridle were somewhere on the ground, but there was no time to find them. I had ridden bareback often enough in my childhood.
Before I could scramble on to his back, one of our soldiers heaved up out of the darkness. Somewhere another fire or a flare had been lit and silhouetted against its distant glow I could just make out a big fellow I recognised, one of those who had helped the man with snake bite keep on the march, one of Norreys’s professional soldiers from the Low Countries. He peered at me, reaching out to grope for my arm.
‘Dr Alvarez? It is you! Get back here. That’s Spanish soldiers attacking. Our men will see them off, but you’re best out of the way.’
He tugged at my arm. He was breathing heavily. I could smell sweat and fear. His words were confident, but the hand on my arm was shaking.
‘Wait,’ I said, ‘I need my horse’s tack.’
‘This’ll be your b’yer lady saddle, then, that I nearly fell over.’ He gave a brief bark of nervous laughter.
He grabbed something from the ground, just as I caught my feet in the bridle and sprawled flat on my face. Between us we gathered up both saddle and bridle, and I wound my fingers in my horse’s mane to lead him with us. I had been sleeping a little distance away from the main body of our army, for I had an irrational fear that if I slept amongst the men, I might give myself away by talking in my sleep.
The soldier led the way in a long curve round the main part of the camp, where we could see more and more men staggering to their feet, drawing their swords and looking about them in confusion. It was still so dark it was impossible to understand quite what was happening. Torches were flaring here and there amongst the scattered English forces, but it was clear where the attack had been concentrated, on the side where, carelessly, no sentries seemed to have been posted.
My companion pointed this out with contempt.
‘If we had set up camp like this in the Low Countries,’ he said, ‘without proper sentries, I wouldn’t be here today, tramping and starving across this God-forsaken country. We’d all have had our throats cut long ago. Though the Don Juans aren’t making a very good job of it tonight themselves. They should have wiped out more of us by now.’
He spoke in a tone of professional criticism which would have made me laugh at another time.
I was having difficulty keeping up with him and persuading the horse along, for the shouting and the black shapes leaping in the firelight had frightened him. He kept trying to pull away from me.
‘Why had Sir John not seen to it that we were better guarded?’ I was incredulous.
‘Oh, he gave his orders, did the Old Man. But most of this scum pay no heed to orders, unless they have to fight to save their own skins. There aren’t enough of us real soldiers to hold this rabble together. Can’t call it an army. It’s no better than the sweepings off the streets of London.’
‘You speak the truth,’ I said, ‘but what’s to be done?’
I could sense him shrugging. The horse tried again to jerk away and I gripped his mane more firmly. ‘Come along, lad,’ I said soothingly.
‘Just try to survive until we reach Lisbon,’ the soldier said. ‘But what will happen then? Do you think they’ll surrender to us? I don’t. We can’t attack or carry out a siege. We’ve no artillery. We can’t starve them out. We’re more likely to starve ourselves first. They’ll have laid in provisions, and made sure there’s nothing in the country round about for us to eat. There’s more ways than one for a siege to fail.’
‘I don’t know what will happen,’ I said. ‘I really don’t know. But if Drake sails up the Tejo from Cascais, he has cannon on the ships–’ I let my voice trail away. Could we rely on Drake?
He gave a disbelieving snort. It was clear that his opinion of Drake was no better than mine. At home in England, Drake was fêted as a hero for his actions against the Spanish and for the treasures he carried home to the Queen and the others who financed his voyages, but those of us who served with him saw a different side to the man – the ruthless, self-serving pirate, whose first aim in life was to hurt the Spanish as much as he could, and whose second aim was to make himself the richest man in England. Or perhaps that was the first of his goals.
By the time we reached the campfires, the sounds of fighting had dwindled into the distance. Men were milling about in confusion, bumping into each other, tripping over bundles on the ground. I hardly knew whether to laugh or cry.
‘Thank you,’ I said awkwardly to the big soldier. ‘It was good of you to come for me. How did you know where I was?’
‘Saw you go off there. The lads, they’re grateful for what you done for ’em.’ He gave a wicked grin. ‘Wouldn’t rate to lose our doctor, would it? More important that Earls or Kings. That’s what the lads think, anyways.’
He went off, either to join in the fight against the attackers or to help restore some order amongst the disorderly mob. I hobbled my horse again and sat down cross-legged by one of the fires. There would be little more sleep for anyone that night and it was certain my medical skills would be needed. After some time, a jubilant group of soldiers returned, having driven off the attackers with little damage to themselves apart from a few slashes – or so we thought – which I attended to, while Norreys and his senior officers rounded up men to stand sentry, after a thorough tongue-lashing to the ill-disciplined crew who had failed to keep to their duty. In any normal army, those who had deserted their posts would have been executed on the spot, but this was no normal army and our numbers were dwindling dangerously. We could not spare even the men who disobeyed orders. It was a dangerous situation for any army. Once discipline breaks down, an army becomes a violent rabble which is as likely to turn against its officers or each other as readily as against the enemy. I saw that all the victorious men who had chased off the Spaniards came from the experienced Low Countries troop.
I sent for more flares to be set up near me, and by their light I unpacked my satchel and set about seeing to the wounded. There had been no arrows or crossbow bolts, no musket shot, presumably the Spaniards thought they were too risky to use in the dark. They must have feared they would shoot their own men. Some of the sword cuts were superficial, needing no more than salving, but two needed to be stitched, difficult to do by the poor flickering light of the flares. Dr Nuñez joined me, but I saw no sign of Ruy Lopez. Together with the Dom and Norreys he occupied one of the few tents which had been erected, but I could not believe he had slept through the disturbance. Either he was too cowardly to show his face or else he was soothing the nerves of his patron. There was no sign, either, of Essex’s party. I was surprised he had not seized the chance for some heroics, but perhaps he was a heavy sleeper.
As so often on this campaign, I lacked bandages, but I made do with strips torn from the shirts that the men themselves were wearing, in order to bind their own wounds. There was little spare clothing amongst us, for it had been discarded along the march.
We never discovered why we had been attacked by the isolated troop of Spanish soldiers during that particular night. Perhaps word had been carried by one of the peasants, betraying us. Or perhaps they had simply spotted our sprawling, disorganised army tramping along in the direction of Lisbon. They were indeed driven off, but we discovered with the coming of the daylight that – what with the dark and the surprise and our inexperienced soldiers’ lack of skill – a number of our men had been badly wounded and killed. It seemed that a few of the better men amongst the inexperienced recruits had tried to join the regulars, but they had been surrounded by some of the Spaniards and cut down. They lay where they had fallen just beyond the camp and we stumbled upon them in the dawn. Mile by mile, our army, instead of growing by the addition of Dom Antonio’s loyal subjects, was dwindling away.
I did what I could for the wounded, assisted by Dr Nuñez, but many were far gone with existing weakness and the long hours they had lain bleeding before we found them. Four died. The march was halted, except for Essex’s squadron, which set off without us. The dead were buried and Dr Nuñez insisted that the wounded who could not walk should not be abandoned. Unlike so many of their fellows, they had shown courage and initiative. There were five of them. Carrying slings were contrived out of some of the remaining tents. A few of the stronger soldiers would be able to carry these, if they took it in short snatches of an hour or two. Some of the junior officers volunteered to walk part of the way, taking it turn about to ride and using a pair of their horses to carry one of the slings. At last, after some two hours’ delay, we set off in the wake of Essex. Norreys was clearly angry that the Earl had divided the army, exposing us to greater danger, should there be another attack. He sent off a messenger to ride on to Essex and order him to wait for the rest of the army to catch up with his men.
That day was the hottest we had endured. There had been no springs for many miles, and the cheap rough wine bought from the peasants with promises of later payment made the soldiers thirstier than ever. When we came upon a stinking, marshy pond, they rushed towards it in a mindless mob, pushing and elbowing their fellows out of the way.
‘Stop!’
I heard Dr Nuñez shouting and rode ahead to see what was happening. The men were crowding round the greenish stagnant pool, fighting each other to reach it.
‘Stop!’ I echoed the command and elbowed my way in amongst them, trying to pull them away. ‘This is filthy standing water,’ I cried. ‘You must not drink it, however thirsty you are. It isn’t safe. It will carry sickness.’
Even from a distance I caught the rank odour of it, rising out of the pond like the stinking breath of a diseased man. It was surrounded by bog plants, many of them unfamiliar to me, but others I recognised as noxious herbs. The surface was covered with a yellow-green scum, not healthy water-weed but a kind of aquatic mould. Here and there, patches of the surface were clear and it was these, catching the sun with the winking temptation of some witch’s fatal brew, which had drawn the men in, driven by their almost insupportable thirst.
I might as well not have wasted my breath. Maddened with their desperate need for water, they would not listen. They threw themselves on their stomachs, those who had managed to push their way to the front, and began to drink from it, scooping up handfuls of the tainted liquid, even thrusting their heads below the surface and emerging crowned with the olive-tinted slime. I noticed a group of soldiers I recognised – the man who had hustled me away from the fighting the previous night and two of the regular soldiers who had been wounded in the skirmish. They were arguing with some of the unskilled recruits, warning them against the water. One of these was the man who had been bitten by the snake. As I watched, I saw that they were successful in persuading a few of the men, more successful than I was. As experienced soldiers, they would know they must avoid polluted water, however thirsty they were, but most of the men ignored them, as they ignored Dr Nuñez and me. I knew very well what the consequences would be.
It proved as I had expected, that we were right to fear the stagnant water, for by that evening, cholera had seized the army. It is a terrible disease at any time, but on the march under unrelenting sun in a waterless land, it can be as fatal as the plague itself. Its victims raved with fever. A form of violent flux seized them, so they vomited repeatedly and vented profuse watery diarrhoea studded with white matter like grains of rice and stinking of dead fish. There was no mistaking the signs. The loss of the body’s fluid leaves its vital elements desperately unbalanced so that the body craves water, but clean water was the one thing we did not have to give them. The victims’ very skin shrivelled, so that the hands of young men looked like those of aged crones. Those who had friends to help them along staggered onward with us, though they were so weak they must be half carried. Others collapsed in the ditches and did not move. They were simply left behind, for we had no carts to carry them, and even if we had, most would have died within a few hours, for the fever of cholera will burn a man up from inside, consumed by an inner fire. Fortunately the wounded men carried in the slings had been unable to reach the foetid water, for they would have been the first to succumb.
‘It was the honey,’ the whisper went round from mouth to mouth. ‘The honey that peasant gave us, the one who had an ear cut off and watched us with an evil look. The honey was poisoned.’
And any who had eaten the honey (which was pure and good, I had eaten it myself) began to fancy themselves poisoned. They would not listen when we told them that they had caught cholera from the dirty water. They had not been poisoned by someone else, they had poisoned themselves, but it is always easier to blame another man, rather than accept the blame oneself. The whole army, even the men from the Low Countries, took hold of the idea that the Portuguese peasants were trying to poison them. It was perhaps fortunate that the local peasants had taken to hiding from the army, otherwise they might have suffered some undeserved vengeance. As it was, there was whispering amongst the men, and evil glances cast at Dom Antonio and the other senior men amongst the Portuguese.
For some reason, I escaped this mistrust, having become something of a mascot amongst the men, ever since they had seen me suck the snake’s venom out of the soldier’s ankle with my own mouth. Even so, I was aware that the mood was dangerous and could flare up into something more serious at any time.
On the second day after the cholera had begun its attack, our numbers had been reduced again by deaths, but some of those who had been infected, by some fluke of bodily strength, were gradually recovering. By now we knew that we were no more than perhaps a day’s march from Lisbon. It was with some difficulty that Norreys managed to restrain Essex from riding ahead again, in some madcap scheme of arrogant display.
That evening we set up our usual makeshift camp, though by now even the most inadequate of our soldiers understood the need for sentries to keep watch at night. There was, as usual, little to eat. The further we travelled on this seemingly endless journey, the less willing had the peasants become to sell us food in return for scraps of paper bearing the Dom’s scratched signature, so that by now we saw no sign of them. Either the people of this area were more suspicious or word had run ahead of us, so that the villagers had hidden their food supplies. Had we been able to find any of them, they could claim an inability to supply us with provisions.
We were sitting slack-jointed around the watch fires as it grew dark, when we became aware of a disturbance in one quarter of the camp. It first it was no more than a murmur of sound, like a distant thrumming of bees. Then it was punctuated by shouts and what sounded like a kind of laughter, not a cheerful sound but the kind of laughter that escapes from men who are afraid or ashamed, a sort of nervous burst of hysteria. I rose to my feet and peered toward that part of the camp, trying to make out what was amiss.
‘It is nothing but some horseplay amongst the men,’ said Ruy Lopez.
For once, perhaps, he had grown weary of constantly dancing attendance on Dom Antonio and had joined Dr Nuñez and me, sharing our lumps of rock-hard stale bread, which we could barely break with our teeth, and what promised to be the very last scraps of the mouldy cheese.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said.
‘Let it be, Kit,’ said Dr Nuñez. ‘You can care for their bodies. There is little else you can do for them.’
I sat down again, but kept my eye on a growing tumult in that quarter of the camp. Gradually it began to roll toward us, a cluster of men, shouting. At the front was a pale, gaunt figure, stark naked. I knew the man by sight, one of the recruits who had joined us at Plymouth, but I had had no dealings with him. He was older than most of the men, probably in his middle forties, his dull brown hair touched with grey and his beard – as may sometimes happen – entirely grey, almost white. This beard had grown long and straggling since we had left England and hung now halfway down his chest, so that with his nakedness and his matted hair and long beard he seemed like some half-crazed prophet from the Old Testament. He was grown so thin that there seemed to be no flesh on his bones, only the knotted outline of wasted muscle and sinew. His joints at knee and ankle and elbow bulged grotesquely out of proportion to his limbs, and his feet were as prehensile as a monkey’s.
In my profession I am familiar with men’s bodies, but I had never seen one so wasted as this, not even amongst the London poor or the starved survivors of the siege of Sluys. It came to me that, under the rags that were all that remained of their clothes, the other men must look the same. My own body would be wasted. I had already noticed how thin my arms had become, the skin faintly traced with a quilting of fine lines where the layer of flesh beneath the surface had shrunk away.
The naked man stumbled in our direction, pursued by the crowd, who had begun to bay like a pack of hounds, shouting and jeering and giving way to that unnatural laughter I had heard before. The man’s eyes were wild as a hunted animal’s, and there were flecks of foam on the parched skin about his mouth. It crossed my mind that it was strange he should have even that much of the element of water in him, for we were all become as dry as the sands of the desert.
‘The Day of Judgement is come!’
He raised a withered arm and pointed at Dom Antonio’s tent.
‘The Lord God of Israel has brought down his curse upon you, yea, and all you sinners who are gathered here! He has laid upon you the plague of starvation, yea, and the plague of thirst such as those who dwell in the wilderness! Ye shall perish of fevers and your guts shall burn within you until ye be consumed utterly in the fire!’
His eyes glowed with madness as he staggered toward the tent which flew, even at the end of this exhausted day, the royal standard of the house of Aviz. From within the tent there came nothing but a listening silence. Reaching the tent, he tried to drag down the standard, but it was too high for him to reach.
‘See where the standard of the bastard king is ringed with blood!’ he cried. His voice croaked like the cry of a raven. ‘So it shall be. Ye shall all perish, drowned in your own life’s blood and the vengeance of the Lord shall be wreaked upon you!’
There was more foam at his mouth now, but the strength of madness which had filled his voice faltered as he fell to his knees.
‘Ye shall all perish.’
It was no more than a whisper. Then he rolled over on the unforgiving ground and lay still.
Dr Nuñez reached him before I did. There was still a faint irregular pulse from a heart which could not beat much longer. A thin watery trickle of blood ran from his nose and the corner of his mouth. Dr Nuñez looked at me and shook his head. The men who had pursued the madman had stopped in their tracks. Looking anywhere but at their prey, they shuffled their feet and began to sneak away. The group of officers and gentlemen adventurers beside the fire had been shocked into silence. There was neither movement nor sound from within the royal tent.
Less than an hour later, the man died.
We hollowed out a shallow grave for him at the edge of the camp, some of those who had been in the baying crowd being the most anxious to help. Then we withdrew our several ways for what little rest we could find, exhausted in body and troubled in mind.
In this desperate state we came, the next day, over a last rise in the ground and there, about three miles away, we could see the mighty walls of Lisbon, and beyond them its clustered roofs and towers. This was where we were meant to have sailed weeks ago directly from Plymouth, without our diversions at Coruña and Peniche. Had we done so, we would still have had an army, of sorts. Though lacking in provisions, we would not have been in a state of starvation, as we were now. And here, if we had come directly, we might have found the gates opened to us by the considerable body of nobles who supported Dom Antonio. My grandfather would still be alive and could have helped me to rescue Isabel. Now he and the other nobles were dead and the gates stayed firmly barred. And I would find no help for Isabel.
The gallant Essex emerged at last from his private convoy. While the rest of the army was barefoot, dressed in rags, and as emaciated as prisoners emerging from the custody of the Inquisition, Essex still carried amongst his luggage his finest armour. He had donned a gleaming breastplate, inlaid with ornamentation in gold and polished by some page. He was fully equipped with coat of mail under his breastplate, with greaves and cuisses protecting his legs, rerebraces and vambraces enclosing his arms. His helmet, burnished to reflect the sun and blind any opponent, was topped with three magnificent plumes plucked from some exotic African bird. A sword with a jewel-encrusted hilt hung at his side and in his left hand he carried upright a spear, from which fluttered a banner bearing his motto embroidered in thread of gold: Virtutis comes invidia.
He was a truly magnificent sight, like some Arthurian knight from an illuminated book of romances, if, that is, one could have banished from one’s mind – as I could not – the image of this gallant warrior emerging from the surf at Peniche, his head wreathed in seaweed and water streaming from every joint of his armour, while around and behind him, unheeded, men drowned. Accompanied by a bodyguard of his followers, and watched, dull-eyed, by the rest of us, Essex rode up to the nearest gate of the city and banged on it defiantly with the butt of his spear.
‘Ho, within there! I challenge you to come forth and surrender the town or else be prepared to meet your end on the bloody field of battle.’
No one responded.
Unsuccessful in provoking the garrison of Lisbon, Essex nevertheless rode back to the rest of the army with a complacent smirk displayed within his open visor. Had he no understanding that this was a real war, not some heroic and fanciful tale drawn from the pages of a book of romances, written for courtiers and ladies?
I slid from my horse and found my legs would not hold me. Sinking down on a tussock of dried and dusty grass, I put my head between my knees. I had been in the saddle for two weeks, first to seek Isabel and then on the terrible journey to come here, to look upon our capital city. My mind was almost numb. My only clear thought was that if we could take Lisbon and drive out the Spaniards, I might still be able to return and rescue my sister.
