Warrior Tide: a novel of the battle of Lepanto by Fletcher Rhoden
excerpt from PROLOGUE -- CAPTURE The Mediterranean Sea: Sept. 26, 1572

“This one still lives, Capt. Mami.”
Captain Arnaut Mami looked down at Miguel, although his countenance was still a blurred shape surrounded by the sun’s white glare. Others also took in the sum of Miguel’s splayed form, awaiting their master’s command. The captain said nothing, his head leaning over shrugging shoulders as he walked on to survey the carnage. Miguel knew that no death sentence would be forthcoming.
Yet.
They dragged Miguel to his feet, which were soon shackled. They tore the pants and shirt from his body, clearing the pockets before tossing the rags overboard. The two Turks who striped Miguel paid no notice to the letters they pulled from his pants pocket, much less did they open and read them. They were stuffed into a wool sack and that was all Miguel saw before being shoved in the back by a wooden pole.
Like the other seventy-three survivors of Sol’s crew, Miguel was set to work and rot at the oarsman’s bench. His wounded hand and illustrious past would earn him no luxury on this voyage, Miguel knew, but what troubled him more was that his sight had not returned enough for him to relocate Rodrigo, should he have survived. And even the slightest whisper to one’s bench mate would bring a rain of the lash so severe that whatever one’s utterance it was likely his last, save his dying screams.
So Miguel sat in the near dark of the hull, the bench still crusted with the bloody shit of the man who’d occupied it last. Flies and gnats sailed into Miguel’s mouth and nose. Their larva twisted and fed on the blood on the bench and, soon enough, on the tender meat of Miguel’s exposed anus. The lice were already thick in his hair, dancing on his skin in an itch that would distract Satan himself. But to be caught scratching would only bring the lash. It was better to try and scratch the never-ending itch that infested his exposed groin; this was more satisfying and easier to disguise. And in one pull of the oar,. Miguel could get in a clean scratch and perhaps even remove some of the squirming, biting larva from his pubis.
His hands, the crippled and the merely injured, pulled the fifteen feet of exposed oar with three men at his right and one at his left. Miguel’s left hand could only pull with the inner wrist and the base of the thumb, each stroke sending bolts of searing pain up his arm to wrap around his throat.
Most of the other men at the oars had been completely shaved; slaves. Beyond the hull, thirty feet of oar raised and lowered with their effort; when the oar hit the water, their efforts tripled. Forward and back, they pitched and heaved, some falling upon their oars. The driver, one of several, would be quick to relieve their fatigue permanently, clearing another spot on the bench and ending the temporary respite of one of the captives in the hold. After the twentieth hour, the palm of Miguel’s right hand was a mash of pulpy red meat, as was the inner wrist and the base of the mangled thumb of his left.
The familiar Algerian captain and his master stopped at Miguel’s bench.
The master jutted his chin at them and said, “Cervantes, Miguel de Cervantes.” Miguel looked up, instantly aware not only that he may have put in head onto the block but that it was too late to retract it. In those resolute moments, Miguel’s hope and dread that they would have some word of Rodrigo usurped the fears for his own life. But Miguel fought the impulse to ask the captain, for to even raise his voice without it being in answer to a question was to volunteer for death by the lash. The uncertainty of his brother’s fate gnawed at Miguel’s heart and the hours of labor threatened a collapse of his system, but Miguel withstood these slower tortures and stood silent in the face of imminent mortality.
Arnaut Mami looked over Miguel’s soiled and bent body, naked but for the heavy layer of grime and dried sweat. He shook his head and muttered something to the master that Miguel could not understand, although he recognized the tongue as Arabic. The master nodded his understanding and grunted the order to the driver, who cracked his whip and yelled the order to continue rowing.
It was evening when the corsair galley pulled into the Algerian port of Oran. But Miguel was not to breathe the fresh air above deck until six hour more; six hours of the gnawing rats and moldy air and sweltering heat; six long hours of the tiny parasites and their unconquerable numbers digging into his ears and genitals and swarming in his lungs, drinking the very juices from the corners of his eyes.
Two more men expired before the corsairs opened the hold and led the slaves, blinded by the sudden glare of a white-hot sun, out of the galley and onto the docks.
After thirty minutes in that glaring sun, Miguel’s vision began to return.
He stood in a long line of chained Spanish prisoners, mixed with a few Venetians from what Miguel assumed was a previous raid. He scanned the faces of his fellow captives, but all eluded his focus and none called to him in that voice he’d known all his life and so longed to hear once more.
The certainty of Rodrigo’s demise sank deeper in Miguel's soul, quelling the fire of hope that had kept his body alive since Sol’s capture days before. And for the first time since then, Miguel was free at least to draw a breast full of the crisp, clean sea breeze his lungs craved. He puked and wretched, the undigested grains tossing themselves past his trembling lips to join other puddles on the dock. Once his stomach was dry, each breath renewed him by tiny increments.
For the fist time since his capture, Miguel thought he might actually survive.
Then a man Miguel did not recognize, one who appreared a denizen of Algiers and not of the sea, led him and thirty of his fellow Spaniards in a single-file line, still chained at the ankles, away from the dock and deeper into the city by way of one of its may narrow, winding streets. Miguel could see nothing of the faces of these thirty men beside the sorrowful countenances of the ones on either side and perhaps those on their sides. But he told his heart what his mind had already come to realize.
Rodrigo was dead.
That little boy looked back at Miguel from the corner of his memory, the bright eyes and chubby cheeks, the innocent face that was so blithely ignorant of his horrible fate. Miguel’s lungs lurched, wanting to cry out a warning to that distant little boy, but he was powerless to save him.
The streets, heavy with mosques and luxurious public baths, were crowded with naked Christian slaves whose faces were so sunken and pale that it seemed death had already visited and then abandoned them as unworthy. Their stink was as if they perspired urine as they repaired many of Algiers’ twelve thousand houses. They walked stooped over with a broad beam across their backs, a bucked hanging from each end. Many carried water, but some buckets were filled with bread. So vile was the air around these slaves that anything which might later be ingested could not come in contact with them or even come too close. Others carried thick chords of firewood, cedar from the North African Atlas mountain system, in amounts so great that their bony shoulders were visibly becoming detached under their stretched skin. Countless masses walked single-file with manure caked nearly an inch thick up their knees, their necks pushed low from the heavy plows and hoes they were forced to carry.
On occasion, one would glance at Miguel has they passed, eyes warning of the unspoken and unspeakable horrors and the rape of liberty and the reduction of a man to a beast. They begged Miguel for food or water, for life or death, for anything but the unending toil of slow rot which had become the sum total of their existence.
But Miguel could offer them nothing, and something in the sorrow of their sunken eyes told him they knew that. They asked not because they had hope; they begged because they’d lost hope.
Others crouched in gutters and scrubbed the walls of the patios and vestibules, always keeping their heads down and faces hidden. Never outnumbered by more than two hands, the negro drivers hovered around their shackled charges with canes to snap against their backs at the slightest relaxation. The thuds of canes on flesh punctuated the rattle of their chains, perhaps thousands spread out in several blocks around Miguel; it gave a low hum to the clang and bustle of the Moors or Janissaries.
The hairs on Miguel’s neck sprang up at the first sight of one of these hated, dangerous men. They were a rare sight since that great occasion, when the Holy League had so successfully wiped out their gruesome number and turned back their bloodthirsty quest. Those garish red robes tore so easily under good Christian steel, the flamboyant quills that poured up and out and down from their headdresses only drew the bead of the Spaniard’s eye to his target.
But that day had passed, and now Miguel walked in chains, bowed and filthy. And where less than a year before Miguel had felled his own number of these violent and cantankerous foe, now the slightest miss-touch with the back of his hand would cost the hand; the insult of looking one in the eye would be dealt with similarly.
Miguel turned away from them, his mind wandering to the burn of the shackles as they dug deeper into the bones of his ankles; they had already long since worked their way through the meat.
A man’s scream turned Miguel’s head before he could initiate the move; if he could have chosen, he wouldn’t have looked at all. But now his eyes were fixed one of many vendors in a small bazaar across the street. He had offended the Janissaries, or must have, since they were already tearing the silks from his kiosk. One had drawn his sword. Before the man could plead his forgiveness, the steel sank deep into his chest. Blood leapt from his mouth in a thick, heavy sheet; the vendor’s body was quick to join his own blood on the cobblestones at the Janissaries’ feet. They laughed and walked on, the vendor and his discarded wares instantly covered with swarming thieves and pickpockets and even other vendors, picking through the bloodied goods.
A sharp explosion of pain on the right side of Miguel's face sent waves of shocked pain streaming down his limbs, knees nearly buckling and bile rising from his empty gut. But Miguel concentrated instead on the driver’s shrill hollering, spittle landing on Miguel's cheek. He did not know the words but he understood their meaning. Miguel would look ahead and keep walking or die; or perhaps all three.
Miguel did look forward. Out of focus until he could fix his eyes properly upon it, was the huge, white building. The picture of Turkish clarity of expression, it was stark in its angles and lacking the finely carved stonework or other ornamental touches of so many of the Byzantine mosques and public baths throughout the city.
The royal bagnio.
It was seventy feet long and forty feet wide, five stories tall and built around a courtyard with a cistern of stagnant water. The darkness in the numerous dank rooms swallowed even the noonday light that squirmed in through the tiny rectangular windows. The rattle of chains was louder in the bagnio than in the streets, even if only five thousand or so stalked its catacombs compared to the twenty-five thousand spread throughout Algiers. But here the sound bounced from one greasy wall to another, the echoes bumping into each other even as the slaves did likewise, fumbling through their treks from the mills or their grinding bowls to the cistern and to whichever room they’d designated for relieving themselves. By the smell, that was every room.
Each square enclave was a cell, yet none had bars. Instead, the prisoners dragged chains from iron collars and cuffs, some bolted to the ground. Some prisoners seemed to have free reign of the prison, but their shackles hobbled them severely, making escape impossible. Some draped the linked lengths over their shoulders and some hung by them from the low ceilings, their bonds the very same instruments of their release. Two were already hanging when Miguel was ushered to his cell.
Miguel’s chain stretched fifteen feet from the wall. It was long enough to reach one corner, where he was expected to relieve himself, and to reach the other, where they would toss him his daily ration of two small loaves of bran or barely bread and a small flagon of water. When they brought him in, they removed the previous occupant of his chains, but they first had to unwrap them from around the man’s neck. Looking around, hearing the screams as they staggered through the halls, Miguel realized that whether murder or suicide, the man’s hanging was likely a welcome respite.
The corners that were not caked with hardening human feces were encrusted with rat shit, the little, black seeds of those hated vermin were scatted over every inch of the ground.
The rats were bigger here than on the galleys, and more aggressive. One sat in the corner of Miguel’s cell, watching him with red eyes that pierced his white fur. It watched for hours; at times Miguel wasn’t certain it was still alive until he would holler at it, causing the faintest twitch of its whiskers as it tasted the fear in the air.
The din became an invisible hum to Miguel’s aching ears. Hours passed and the rat scratched away into the crevices between wood and stone. Miguel dropped off for a few minutes of sleep, but when his eyes shot open again the rat had returned and was still staring, as if sizing him up, seeking his vulnerabilities. Miguel knew it wouldn’t be long before he awoke to the sound of the animal’s teeth digging into his left hand, pulling the putrifying meat from the bone with no fear of reprisal.
Only the shrieks that echoed in the furthest and sometimes the nearest chambers of the prison could transport Miguel from the dark confine of his cell. By the end of what Miguel believed was his second day, three different men had met gruesome trials that resulted in screaming so heinous and prolonged that Miguel’s meager provisions could not remain in his belly. When the guard saw this, he refused Miguel his second day’s ration. But eating his own regurgitated bread was still a small discomfort compared to what must have inspired those gut-wrenching howls in the neighboring cells.
After a particularly long and excruciated series of screams, underscored by the crackle of Turkish laughter, Miguel was put back on a ration of a single small loaf of bread. He caught it before it hit the mold on the floor of the cell and bit directly into it. He heard the guards set down the pitcher, but didn’t listen for the footsteps of their departure. They did not leave but Miguel did not really notice; he hadn’t done much more than inhale as the bread filled his mouth and throat.
Then something in his mouth, something cartilaginous, stopped his jaw and his tongue went suddenly, painfully dry. He identified is as a human ear before he pulled it all the way clear of his lips, its stiff frills tracing horror across the tip of Miguel's tongue. Miguel shuddered, throwing the ear, encrusted with bread crumbs mixed with his saliva. Miguel coughed up the rest of the loaf, the laughter of the corsairs exploding from the doorway of his cell.
The two guards each held a musket, but their murderous glee only bid Miguel to throw caution and his life to the wind and die trying to strangle at least one of them.
Only the sound of his own name stayed his suicidal charge. Miguel looked up at them but said nothing as one guard turned and said something to someone in the shadows behind him. The guards parted and, from between them, stepped a man whose very stride and presence sent shivers up Miguel’s arms.
He wore silk from head to toe, his rings announcing his office. Miguel know without introduction that he was about to meet his new master.
“You are Cervantes,” the man said in a voice not ready to be corrected.

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