Chapter 5 The Hounds of God by Rafael Sabatini
FLOTSAM
Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna, Count of Marcos and Grandee of Spain, opened his eyes and looked up through the pallid dawn at the grey cloud masses overhead. It was some little while before his senses understood what his eyes beheld. Then he grew conscious that as he lay there supine upon the shore, he was cold and stiff and sick. By this he knew that he was still alive; though how this happened, and where he might be, were matters yet to be investigated.
Painfully, upon joints that seemed almost to creak as they moved, he brought himself to a sitting posture, and gazed out across the heavy ground-swell of the opal-tinted sea into the spreading flush of the September dawn. His senses reeled under the effort, sky and sea and land all rocked about him, and he was seized with nausea. He ached from head to foot, ached as if he had been stretched upon the rack; his eyes smarted acutely; there was an unspeakably bitter, briny taste in his mouth, and his mind was in such troubled confusion that it could render him no proper account of himself. He was conscious that he lived and suffered. Beyond that it is to be doubted if he was so much as conscious of his own identity.
His nausea increased, and he became violently sick, whereafter, exhausted, Nature compelled him to lie down again. But as he lay now, the oppressing cloud began to lift from his brain, clearing the outlook for his consciousness. Soon memory resumed her sway. He sat up again, more alertly this time, and at least no longer nauseated. His eyes ranged once more over the sea, more purposefully now, seeking upon the waters some sign of that towering galleon which had suffered shipwreck in the night. The reef upon which she had gone to pieces showed boldly in silhouette against the quickening sky, a black line of jagged rocks upthrusting from a white foam of thundering breakers. But of the galleon not so much as a mast or spar was to be seen. And the storm, too, had passed, its fury spent, leaving no indication of its passage save that oily ground-swell. Overhead the cloud mass was being broken up, dissolving, and patches of blue sky increasingly revealed.
Don Pedro sat forward, his elbow on his knees, his head in his hands, his fine long fingers thrust into his damp clammy hair. He remembered now that dreadful swim of his, instinctive and without orientation in the blackness of the night. The unquenchable animal instinct of self-preservation it was that had compelled it. Reason had no part in the effort. For whilst he possessed the clear assurance that land could not be far, he had no means of telling in that impenetrable darkness the direction in which it lay. Therefore, with little hope of reaching it, he supposed himself to be swimming into eternity.
He remembered how when exhaustion began at last to cramp his limbs and paralyse further effort, he had commended his soul to his Maker, to that God who had proved so extraordinarily insensible of the fact that His were the battles which Don Pedro, and so many other tall Spaniards now stiff and cold had gone forth to fight. He remembered how in those last moments of consciousness, a wave had suddenly seemed to seize him in its coils, lift him high and bear him swiftly forward upon its crest, then loose its grip of him and leave him to crash down upon the beach with a force that had driven out what little breath yet lingered in his tortured lungs. He remembered his instant deep thankfulness, quenched the next moment in the realisation that he was being sucked back by the undertow.
The horror of it was upon him again. He shuddered now as he thought of the frenzy with which he had clawed that foreign shore, driving his fingers deep into the sand, to grip and save himself from the maw of hungry ocean before the strength to battle should be spent with consciousness. That was the last thing he remembered. Between that point and this there was a blank which his reason now set itself to bridge.
The tide was on the ebb when they had struck the reef. This had permitted his last effort to be availing. Thus had the retreating sea been foiled of her prey. But, in faith, that monster had been fed to a .surfeit as it was. The galleon was gone and with her some three hundred fine tall sons of Spain. Don Pedro checked the surge of thankfulness for his own almost miraculous preservation. Was he, after all, more fortunate than those who had perished? He had been dead, and he was alive again. It amounted scarcely to less. The dark dread portals had been crossed when consciousness was extinguished. For what had he been thrust back into the world of life? His respite in this barbarous heretic excommunicate land could be no more than temporary. Escape must be impossible. Upon discovery it would be demanded of him that he suffer death again, and suffer it probably with indignity and amid torments infinitely worse than those which last night he had undergone. Far indeed from returning thanks for his preservation, let him give rein to his envy of those compatriots of his who would wake no more.
Drearily he looked about him, surveying the rocky little cove of that nook-shotten isle on which the sea had spewed him up. The swiftly-growing light showed him a desolate deserted space, walled in by cliffs like some vast prison. No dwelling was visible here or anywhere on the heights above. All about him rose these sheer red cliffs fringed on their summit by the long grass that was waving in the freshening breeze.
He knew that he was somewhere upon the coast of Cornwall. This from what the navigator of the galleon had told him last night just before they were dashed upon the rocks by the fury of that infernal tempest which had swept them leagues out of their course; a tempest which had come down upon them just when they appeared to have weathered all their perils, to have conquered adversity, and to confront a clear run home to Spain. Never again would he behold the white walls of Vigo or Santander upon which two days ago he had so confidently been expecting soon to look.
In imagination a picture of them rose before him, all bathed in sunshine, the vines laden now with their ripe purple clusters among which the brown-skinned, dark-eyed Galician or Asturian peasants would be moving with their vintage baskets on their shoulders, to pile from these the grapes into the ponderous wooden bullock-carts identical in every detail with those which the Romans had brought into Iberia nearly two thousand years ago. He could hear them singing at their labours, the wistful heart-wringing songs of Spain, subtle compounds of joy and melancholy that quicken a man's blood. So confidently two days ago had he been anticipating the sight of all this to heal the wounds which body and soul had taken in this ill-starred adventure. From the white church on the summit there above Santander, the Angelus of dawn would even now be ringing. As if he heard it with the ears of his flesh, the home-sick, storm-battered Don Pedro disengaged his legs from a tangle of seaweed, struggled to his knees, crossed himself and recited the salutation to the Mother of God.
After that he sat down again dejectedly to consider anew his position.
Suddenly he laughed aloud, a laugh of deep and bitter irony. He laughed at the contrast which he discovered between the manner of his coming ashore in England and that which had so confidently been planned. He had shared the assurance of his master, King Philip, in a triumphal progress which no human power could withstand. He had looked upon England as already beneath the heel of Spain, its bastard and excommunicate Queen driven forth in ignominy, and this Augean stable of heresy cleansed and purified and restored to the True Faith.
What else was to have been expected? Spain had launched upon the seas an armament that was invincible by temporal forces, fortified by spiritual weapons which must render it invulnerable to the Powers of Hell, offering herself as an arm through which God should vindicate His cause. It was incomprehensible, incredible that from the outset the elements should appear to have stood in league with the heretics. He reviewed the whole adventure from the first issuing of the fleet from the Tagus, when at the very outset adverse winds had created confusion, losses and delays. In the Channel the wind had almost constantly favoured the lighter craft of the endemonized heretical dogs who had harried them. And even when all hope of effecting a landing in England had been abandoned, and the surviving ships of the Armada, driven to circumnavigate this barbarous island, asked no more of Heaven than that they should be permitted to reach home again, the elements had persisted in their incomprehensible hostility.
As far as the Orkneys they had hung together. There in a fog ten of the galleons had gone astray. Sixty ships, including the Concepcion, commanded by Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna, had clung to the San Martin, and with her had ventured farther North, running short of food, the water fouling in their casks and disease breaking out amongst their crews. Their pressing needs drove them to seek the coast of Ireland, where half of them were wrecked. In a gale off the Irish coast the Concepcion was separated from the remnant of the fleet at a time when her crew were by thirst and famine rendered too exhausted to handle her. By a miracle they made Killibeg, and here Don Pedro obtained fresh provisions and fresh water. Thus he had been able to revive his fainting seamen, preserving them only so that they might be drowned upon the coast of Cornwall, from which he had been again preserved to end perhaps yet more miserably. Was there a curse upon them that the gift of life at the hands of Heaven should be the gift to be most feared?
Of the fate of the other consorts of Medina-Sidonia's flagship Don Pedro had no knowledge. But judging their case by his own when he had parted from them, he had little cause to suppose that any of them would ever reach Spain again or if they reached it that they would bear anything but skeletons into Spanish harbours.
In his dejection at this final ruin so far as he himself was concerned, Don Pedro reflected that the ways of the Deity were altogether beyond understanding. One explanation, it was true, existed. The launching of the Armada might be regarded as an ordeal by battle in the old sense: an appeal to God to deliver his judgment between the old-established faith and the reformed religion; between the Pope and Luther, Calvin and the rest of the heresiarchs. Was it in answer to this that God had spoken thus through the winds and the waves which He controlled?
Don Pedro shuddered at the thought, which, as he himself perceived, went perilously near to heresy. He dismissed it, and from the past turned his attention more closely to the present and the future.
The sun was breaking through and quickening the dispersal from the heavens of the cloudy remnants of last night's tempest. Don Pedro rose painfully to his feet and wrung what he could of the sea water from his doublet. He was a tall gracefully-shaped man of scarcely more than thirty, and not even the sodden state of his garments could extinguish their elegance. His dress alone would have proclaimed his nationality. He was all in black, as became a noble of Spain and a lay tertiary of St. Dominic. His velvet doublet, peaked and tapering to an almost womanish waist was faintly wrought with golden arabesques. In its present wet state it had almost the appearance of a damascened cuirass. From a girdle of black leather embossed with gold, a heavy dagger hung upon his right hip above his ballooning trunks; his hose, a little rumpled now, was of black silk the canons of his boots, of fine Cordovan leather, had slipped clown, one to the level of his knee, the other to his very ankle. He sat down again to pull them off, first one and then the other, emptied out the water by which they were logged and drew them on again. He removed from his neck the handsome collar of Dutch point, which hung like a dishclout now that the sea had washed all the starch from it. He wrung it out, considered it a moment, then cast it from him in disgust.
Giving now in the full daylight a closer attention to his surroundings, he was startled to perceive the real nature of certain dark objects which dotted the little strip of beach. These, carelessly observed when he had first looked about him whilst the light was dim, he had assumed to be rocks or clumps of seaweed.
He made his way towards the nearest of them with dragging feet. He paused to bend over it, recognising it for the body of Hurtado, one of the officers of the ill-fated galleon, a gallant stout-hearted fellow who had laughed at perils and discomforts. Hurtado would laugh no more. Don Pedro fetched a sigh that was in itself a requiem, and passed on. A little farther he came upon a man still bestriding in death the spar upon which he had ridden ashore. Seven other bodies lay, some sprawled, some huddled, upon the sands where the sea had cast them up. These, some timbers, a chest and few odd furnishings represented all that was left above water of the splendid Concepcion.
Don Pedro considered his late comrades with that solemnity which the dead must ever command. He breathed a prayer for them even. But upon his finely-chiselled face—of the colour of ivory, its warm pallor stressed perhaps by the small black moustache and stiletto beard—there was no shade of regret for their fate. Don Pedro was equipped with a finely-balanced cold intelligence which could suppress emotion in the weighing of realities. These men were more fortunate than himself in that they had died but once, whereas he was destined, he supposed, to endure another and infinitely more cruel death in this hostile land.
It was a reasoned assumption, and by no means merely the apprehension of illogical panic. He was acquainted with the fierce hatred of Spain and Spaniards that was alive in England. He had seen flashes of it during his sojourn at Elizabeth's Court where he had spent two years in the train of his cousin, the Ambassador Mendoza—he who had been compelled to leave England when Throgmorton betrayed his complicity with the adherents of the Queen of Scots in a plot against the life of Elizabeth. If that hatred had been so lively then, what must it be to-day, after years of alarms culminating in the dread into which the coming of the Armada had flung this God-abandoned country? He knew his own feelings for a heretic; he knew how he would deal with one at home; how, indeed, he had dealt with some. Was he not a lay tertiary of St. Dominic? These feelings supplied him with a standard by which to measure the disposition of heretics towards himself, and the fate that must inevitably await him at the hands of heretics.
He paced back slowly to Hurtado's body. He remembered to have observed that there was a rapier girt to it, and Don Pedro coveted the weapon. This covetousness was entirely of instinct. Reason supervening as he stooped to unbuckle the belt, he paused.
His sombre eyes looked out over the heaving waters as if to question the infinite of which the ocean must ever seem the symbol. What use to him a sword?
Don Pedro was a cultured and learned gentleman who had studied at the University of St. James of Compostella, and afterwards applied his learning in the world and the courts he had frequented. Hence he had developed a habit of philosophic reflection. He had learnt that to strive against the ultimately inevitable is a puerile effort, unworthy of an intelligent mind. Where an evil is unavoidable, the wise man goes to meet it and so makes a speedy end. Let him abide, then, here in this deserted spot until he perished of hunger and of thirst; or, if he went forward, let him cover his face like a Roman and receive death from the first hand raised against him.
Thus philosophy. But Don Pedro was still young; the blood flowed strongly in his veins, and the love of life was quick within him. Philosophy, after all, is an arid business, concerned with speculations upon the why and wherefore of things, with theories upon past and future, upon origin and destination outside of absolute human ken. Life, on the other hand, as apprehended by the senses is concerned with the moment; it is not vague, but definite, real and self-assertive. Where life flows strongly, the reality of what is, must ever conquer speculations of what may be, and life will seize every chance, however slender, of preserving itself.
He stooped again, and completing this time his task without further hesitation, buckled the dead man's sword to his own loins. Nor was this the end of the fortification he craved against the immediate future. His men had all received their pay before the fleet sailed from the Tagus, and there had been, alas, no chance of spending any of it. The last precaution of each had been to strap his bag of ducats to his waist. Don Pedro loathed the task, but went about it at the dictates of common sense, and in the end stuffed a heavy purse into his sodden doublet.
By now the sun was already well above the horizon, and the last of the storm-clouds was dissolving in the blue. The sunshine and some exertion which it had been necessary to employ had partly restored Don Pedro's circulation, had at least delivered him from the earlier ague in which he had shivered. He became conscious that he was hungry and thirsty and that his mouth was bitter as a brine-pan.
He stood looking out to sea again, considering. Over the sunlit waters a flock of gulls wheeled and circled ever nearer to the shore, screaming shrilly. Whither should he direct his steps? Was it possible that in this desolate land of England there might be folk so charitable as to take pity on a fallen enemy in extremes? He doubted it. But unless he went to ascertain, the few pains he had already taken to provide for emergencies would be utterly wasted and a certain and painfully slow death would await him here. After all, that was the worst that could await him elsewhere, and it was not quite certain. A chance undoubtedly existed. Thus, you perceive, how the instinct of life had come already to effect a change in his outlook, and to irradiate it with a slight measure of hope.
He moved along that strip of Cornish beach, looking for some break in the wall of cliff, for some path that should lead up to those green heights on the level of which no doubt there would be men and dwellings. He climbed a shallow wall of black and jagged rocks which springing from the cliff, ran athwart the sands to bury themselves in the water and no doubt continue under it, just such a treacherous reef as that upon which the Concepcion had gone to pieces. In the tiny cove beyond, he espied quite suddenly the debouching of a dingle adown which a little brook came hurrying turbulently seaward. The sight of it was blessed in his eyes, the voice of it sang a song of salvation in his ears.
He reached the edge of it above the shore, flung himself prone upon the sparse wet grass where the soil was still sandy, and gratefully lowered his head to drink as drinks the animal. No Andalusian wine, no muscadine, had ever tasted one half so sweet to him as this long draught from that sparkling Cornish brook. He drank avidly to quench his burning thirst and cleanse his mouth of that bitter briny flavour. Then he washed the salt from his eyes and beard and from the undulating black hair that grew to a peak in the middle of his fine brow.
Refreshed, his spirits rose, and the reaction from the pessimism of his awakening was complete. He was alive, and he was in the full glory of his youth and strength. I le had been wrong—impious and insensible to God's grace—to envy his poor dead comrades. Contritely lie fell now upon his knees, and did what it would have become a pious gentleman of Spain to have done earlier: returned thanks to Heaven for his miraculous preservation.
His orisons ended, he turned his back upon the sea and began the ascent of the gently rising ground. The dingle was densely wooded, but a beaten track where the way had been cleared ran along the brook with its little cascades and deep pools, where here and there he beheld the flash of the golden flank of a trout which his shadow startled. Tall blackberry bushes tore at him as he advanced and thereby drew his attention to their fruit. He was thankful for the discovery of this manna, and proceeded to break his fast. It was very jejune fare; the berries were small, none too ripe and their pulp was scanty. But Don Pedro was not fastidious that morning. Misfortune schools us in the appreciation of small gifts. He ate with relish until a crackling sound in the undergrowth across the stream disturbed him He stood as still as the trees that sheltered him, lest any movement on his part should betray his presence. His ears were strained to listen and identify the sounds.
Someone was moving yonder. He was not at all alarmed. It was not easy to alarm Don Pedro. But he was alert and watchful, since whoever came must of necessity be an enemy.
Quite suddenly this enemy was revealed, and not quite the enemy that Don Pedro had looked for. Through the alders beyond the stream crashed a great liver-coloured hound, snarling and growling as it came. It stood poised a moment on the farther bank, now barking furiously at this black intruder whom it had sighted. Then with short yelps it ran hither and thither seeking a passage, and at last heaved itself across in a terrific leap.
Don Pedro leaped at the same moment. Nimbly he sprang upon an opportune rock, and out flashed Hurtado's rapier. This infernal dog should receive a cold sharp welcome.
But even as the hound bounded forward to the assault, a clear imperious voice detained it.
"Down Brutus! Down! Hither to me! Hither at once!"
The dog checked, hesitating between indulgence and obedience. Then as the command was repeated, and the mistress who uttered it appeared between the trees, it turned, and with a final yelp, perhaps of disappointed anger, went bounding back across the brook.