Free The Last Crusaders: Ivan the Terrible by William Napier

galley to despatch a few enemies of the Sultan – mere lackeys and tittle-tattles, as they were told, mere vagabond spies – had been speaking out of his pampered court arse.
    He said gruffly, ‘You’re no ordinary spies.’
    Stanley nodded to him curtly. ‘Kneel.’
    ‘I suppose that was why we were sent to kill you.’
    Stanley laid a huge hand on the fellow’s shoulder, repeated ‘Kneel!’ and shoved him to his knees.
    There were four dead, along with the slain boatswain and the captain overboard – the worst deceiver, in the knights’ view. Soldiers were soldiers, born for war, but a captain who turns against his own passengers … There were several others wounded, some badly.
    ‘Are we hurt?’ he asked.
    Nicholas had an embarrassing sprain to his ankle and kept quiet. Maybe later. Hodge had been hit on the head, making his vision flutter disconcertingly awhile, but his skull was famously thick, as he liked to boast. Smith had a sword cut to his upper arm that bled a fair bit. Stanley eyed it. Nothing serious. He had seen his old comrade-in-arms bleed a deal more than that and fight on regardless. He must have left several firkins of blood on the rocks of Fort St Elmo at Malta.
    Stanley went below and looked over the terrified slaves. They had no idea what had happened, or whose hands they were in now. One thing they knew for certain: life for a galley slave rarely got any better. He merely passed from one savage slave-driver to another. One of the wretched oarsmen sat manacled at the ankle, unmoving, his shaven head bowed, with blood actually dripping through the planks from the deck above and spotting his helpless white pate.
    Stanley roared back up, ‘Smith! Have the prisoners swab the deck will you, and sharpish!’ Then he tore off a strip of linen from his ripped and frayed shirt and gave it to the poor fellow, who mopped himself silently.
    Stanley called out over the rest of them, these forty or so emaciated, despairing stinkards, now in their hands, ‘Christians?’ He walked forward along the gangway, bent almost double, sick with the stench. ‘ Christianoi ?’
    Some of them nodded, though all of them in this beshitten and sweating dungeon of creaking timber walls looked like the worst criminals of the Ottoman Empire: murderers and rapists of the foulest sort. Any that claimed to be Christian captives, he demanded of them the Lord’s Prayer. Our Father, who art in heaven – in Greek – was enough. He got Nicholas and Hodge unmanacling them with a crowbar. The eight freed Christians, starved as they were, embraced each other and gave three cheers and scrambled up the ladder into the sunlight as if escaping from Hades itself. The sun blinded them for several minutes.
    In their place, Smith herded the surviving captives down below and had them manacled.
    ‘How the wheel of fortune turns,’ said the black-bearded fellow equably.
    Stanley couldn’t help but like him, though he had been trying to kill him but ten minutes before. ‘Your name, philosopher?’
    ‘Ibrahim.’
    ‘Ibrahim. Get used to it now.’
    ‘Where are we headed? Italy?’
    Stanley shook his head. ‘North.’
    ‘North?’
    Stanley grinned. ‘East, then north. So spit on your palms, friend, and take up the oar. We have a way to go.’
    Still in sight of the minarets of Constantinople. Nicholas scanned the nearest boats of this busy waterway between east and west. Thank God no shots had been fired. But for some shouts, it had been a quiet if murderous fray. On one nearby dhow a moustachioed seaman looked curiously over to them, but Nicholas shouted back cheerfully, ‘All good here, brother! Just a couple of unruly slaves needing a good beating!’
    The seaman raised his hand in acknowledgement.
    They laid the corpses of the four dead alongside each other – like pickled herrings, as Hodge put it. They would roll them overboard after dark. The Dead Man’s Splash by moonlight. Some of the injured were in a bad way, one