Free Corsair by Tim Severin

in the forest so it will be no trouble to make you one. For now you can borrow my straw mattress and sleep on the floor. I’ll fix things up with the dormitory kaporal later.’
    ‘I can’t thank you enough,’ said Hector. ‘Everything around here seems so strange and brutal.’
    Dan shrugged. ‘In my country we are taught to work together when life is hard, and to share what we have. I would offer you some food, but I have nothing left over, and the next rations will not be issued until tomorrow.’
    Hector realised that he had not eaten all day and was very hungry.
    ‘The bagnio ration is not much,’ Dan added. ‘Just a hunk of black bread, and often that is mouldy. You want to stick close to whoever is your gang leader. He’ll be given a bowl of vinegar with maybe a few drops of olive oil sprinkled in it. You can dip your bread into the bowl during the meal breaks.’
    ‘Will you be there too?’
    ‘No,’ said Dan. ‘I live in the bagnio because my master has not enough accommodation for his slaves. He pays a weekly fee to the guardian bashaw to house me. I work as a gardener. I look after my master’s masseries outside the city wall, weeding, cultivating, harvesting, all that sort of thing. I go there each morning after roll call. That’s where I’ll be able to steal the cord for your hammock, from one of his work sheds.’
    ‘So what will I be doing?’
    Dan glanced down at Hector’s ankle with its iron ring. ‘You are a public slave, so you’ll do whatever the scrivano assigns you to. It may be in the stone quarries or down at the harbour unloading boats. They’ll tell you in the morning.’
    ‘All these words you use, “scrivano”, “masserie”, and the others, they seem strange yet familiar. What do they mean?’
    ‘That’s our bagnio language. A scrivano is a scribe, and a masserie is a garden,’ said Dan. ‘You must learn the language fast if you are to get by in here. On the work gangs all the commands are given in that tongue – we call it lingua franca, though that seems odd because most of it is Spanish not French. Even the Turks use it when they are speaking with the Moors who don’t understand Turkish. There are so many different peoples held in the bagnio, all with their own languages, that we must have a way of understanding one another.’
    ‘My mother was from Spain,’ said Hector, ‘and she taught me and my sister to speak her language.’
    ‘Then you are fortunate,’ commented Dan. ‘Some prisoners seem never to learn to speak the lingua franca – the moskovits, for example, who come from the northern lands. They are always apart, and I feel doubly sorry for them because there is never any chance that they will be free. No one in their own country sends money to pay for their release. Some other countries send priests with chests of coin to purchase the liberty of their countrymen. The French do that, and the Spanish also. But their priests often quarrel.’
    ‘What about the English? Do they buy back their people?’
    ‘I don’t know for sure. There’s a rumour that this will happen soon, when the King in London has enough money to spend on his subjects. If that happens I will continue my journey and bring greetings to the King of England from the Miskito.’
    Hector could no longer hold back the question that had been tormenting him since he landed.
    ‘Dan, you said that there are only men in the bagnio. What happens to women who are captured by the corsairs? Where do they go?’
    The Miskito heard the anguish in Hector’s voice.
    ‘Why do you ask? Do you know a woman who was captured? Your wife, perhaps?’
    ‘My sister, Elizabeth. She was taken at the same time as myself, but placed on another ship, and she did not arrive here in Algiers.’
    ‘Is Elizabeth beautiful?’
    ‘My sister’s friends used to say that Elizabeth was bathed in May dew when she was a baby. Where I come from the young women go out at dawn on the first day of May to gather the