Uru, uru achim

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!

Havah nagilah…

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach

Both of the galleys had moved half a length ahead of God’s Wounds now. Upon a signal from one of the aghas, both suddenly folded their oars and steered inwards, falling back and converging on God’s Wounds. The oar-slaves collapsed onto their benches, and the only thing that kept all of them from landing flat on their backs was that they were packed into the hull too tightly to lie down.

“You men are only seeing the turbans and jewels and polished weapons of the Janissaries!” Jack hollered. “I can see the slaves pulling the oars now-she’s a coffin packed with half-dead wretches. Did you hear those snapping noises before? ‘Twas not gunfire-’twas the long bullwhips of the slave-drivers! I see a hundred men with fresh stripes torn from their backs, slumped over their oars. We’ll all be slaves in half an hour’s time-unless we show the agha that we know how to fight, and deserve to be Janissaries instead!”

As Jack was delivering this oration, he was laying his rope-coil out on the planking of the fore-top, so it would unfurl cleanly. A grappling-hook flung from the rail of the port galley nearly struck him in the face. Jack ducked and shrugged. It bit into the planking at his feet, which popped and groaned as some Janissary put his weight on the attached line. Jack jerked his sword loose and chopped through it, sending a corsair down to be crushed between the converging hulls of the two ships.

The engagement, which had been miraculously quiet-almost serene-until now, became a cacophony of booms as the Barbary pirates fired all of their guns. Then it became silent again, as no one would have time to reload before it was all over. Jack’s view below was temporarily clouded by smoke. He was looking almost level across to the port galley’s tall mainmast, which had a narrow crow’s nest near the top. It was an obvious target for a grappling-hook and indeed Jack snagged it on the first throw-then, pulling the slack out of the line, was almost torn off the fore-top as the ships rocked in opposite directions and their masts suddenly spread apart. Jack decided to construe this as an opportunity, and quickly wrapped the rope round his left forearm several times. The next movement of the ships ripped him off the fore-top, putting a few thousand splinters into his abdomen, and sent him plunging into space. The rope broke his fall, by nearly pulling his arm off. He whizzed across the middle of the galley in an instant, seeing just a blur of crimson and saffron, and a moment later found himself hanging out over the blue ocean, ponderously changing direction. Looking back the way he’d just come, and was shortly to go again, he saw a few non-combatants staring back at him curiously-including one of those slave-drivers. When Jack’s next pendulum-swing took him back over the galley’s deck, he reached out with the sword and cut that man’s head in two. But the impact of sword on skull sent him spinning round, out of control. Flailing, he swung back over the deck of God’s Wounds and slammed into the base of the foremast hard enough to knock the wind out of his lungs and make him let go of the rope. He slid to the deck and looked around at a number of men’s legs-but not legs he recognized. The whole ship was covered with Janissaries, and Jack was the only one who’d done any fighting at all.

The one exception to that rule was Yevgeny, who had got the gist of Jack’s stirring first speech, but not understood the more pragmatic second one. Accordingly, he had harpooned the rais, or captain of the starboard galley, right through the throrax.

This and other statistics of the battle (such as it was) were conveyed to Jack by Mr. Foot later, after they had been stripped of all clothes and possessions and moved onto a galley, where a blacksmith was stoking up his forge and making ready to weld fetters around narrow parts of their bodies.

The corsairs rifled the holds of God’s Wounds in all of about fifteen minutes, and obviously lacked enthusiasm for the cowrie shells. The only captive who wasn’t transferred to a galley was Mr. Vliet, who had been ferreted out of the bilge, where he had concealed himself. The Dutchman was brought up abovedecks, stripped naked, and tied over a barrel. An African was roundly fucking him now.

“What was all that nonsense you were raving from the fore-top?” Mr. Foot asked. “No one could understand a word you were saying. We were all just looking at each other-” Mr. Foot pantomimed a bewildered shrug.

“That you’d all better show what magnificent fighters you were,” Jack summarized, “or else they’d have you chained up straight off.”

“Hmph,” Mr. Foot said, too diplomatic to point out that it hadn’t worked in Jack’s case. Though a few discreet winks from some of the bleeding sunburned wretches told Jack that his partial decapitation of that one slave-driver might make him as popular among galley-slaves as he’d formerly been among Vagabonds.

“Why should you care?” Mr. Foot asked a few minutes later, as the anal violation of his erstwhile business partner showed no sign of coming to a climax any time soon. The barrel supporting Mr. Vliet had slowly worked its way across the deck of God’s Wounds until it lodged against a rail, and was now booming like a drum. “You’re not long for this world anyway.”

“If you ever visit Paris, you can take this question up with St.-George, mort-aux-rats, ” Jack said. “He taught me a few things about correct form. I have a reputation, you know-”

“So they say.”

“I hoped that you, or one of the younger men, might show some valor, and become a Janissary, and one day make his way back to Christendom, and tell the tale of my deeds ‘gainst the Barbary Corsairs. So that all would know how my story came out, and that it came out well. That’s all.”

“Well, next time enunciate,” Mr. Foot said, “because we literally could not make out a word you were saying.”

“Yes, yes,” Jack snapped-hoping he would not be chained to the same oar as Mr. Foot, who was already becoming a bore. He sighed. “That is one prodigious butt-fucking!” he marveled. “Like something out of the Bible!”

“There’s no butt-fucking in the Good Book!” said the scandalized Mr. Foot.

“Well, how should I know?” Jack said. “Back off! Soon, I’ll be in a place where everyone reads the Bible all the time.”

“Heaven?”

“Does it sound like heaven to you?”

“Well, it appears they are leading me off to a different oar, Jack,” Mr. Foot said. Indeed, a dead man was being cut loose from an oar at the stern, and Mr. Foot was being signalled for. “So if we never speak again-as seems likely-Godspeed!”

“Godspeed? Godspeed! What kind of a thing is that to say to a fucking galley slave?” were Jack’s last words, or so he supposed, to Mr. Foot.

Mr. Vliet was being pushed overboard by a couple of Janissaries. Jack heard the splash just as he was sitting down on the shit-stained bench where he would row until he died.

In all times kings, and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns upon the frontiers of their kingdoms; and continual spies upon their neighbors; which is a posture of war.