“How comes it that he has not allowed you to send word to your people? Most of these folk are greedy for ransom.”
“I think he keeps me here for his pleasure. At first he took the letters I wrote and pretended to have sent them, and gibed in his bitter fashion when no reply came. That is how I know that the letters were not sent at all. Had my lady heard so much as a word of my captivity she would have searched me out.”
The approach of some troopers broke off the conversation, and Nicholas went his way, marveling at the strange chances of life.
Some months passed, during which the English worked at varying tasks—brickmaking, the hauling of brick and cut stone, the building of walls. Then a merchant called Mustafa came seeking slaves for his galley. After much crafty bargaining he secured Nicholas and his companions for about two-thirds the original price asked. But the Khawadji refused to part with Stephen Giffard.
The galley was a rackety, noisome trading-ship that plied along the coast. On board were already some rowers of various races, accustomed to the work, but the bulk of the labor was to be done by the new men. It was killing toil. Fed on black beans and coarse bread and unclean water, they worked the ship from one filthy white-walled port to another, never seeing more than the dock where the galley anchored or some mean street where their barracks might be. There were times when Nicholas seemed to himself hardly more human than the rats that gnawed and scrabbled in the dark at night. He began to see how a galley-slave is made—molded and tainted through and through by that of which he is a part.
The clean comradeship of the little group of Northern exiles did not count for so much in this work. The pace of the ship was the average pace of the whole crew. They became too weary to think or feel, too ravenous to disdain the most unwholesome rations. Nicholas found himself mysteriously aware of the moods of those about him, as men are when herded together in silent multitudes. In the free world one feels this only now and then—in an army, a mob, a church. Among slaves the dog-like instinct is common. They know more of their masters than their masters can ever know of them.
Nicholas had been carefully trained by wise parents to the habit of self-control, but he found that he was moved nevertheless by the mad unreasoning impulses of the half-barbarous people about him, ridden fiercely by their black thoughts of hate and fear. That it was the same with his comrades he knew from little things they said—and even more from what they did not say. They grew dulled to beauty and suffering alike. There were glorious dawns, that flushed the white walls of a seaport rose-red, above waters of mingled ink and blood that changed as by magic to blue like lapis-lazuli. Then the sky turned saffron and the minarets were of a fleeting gold above the deep blue shadows of the streets. There were velvet nights when the stars blazed like a king's ransom, and white-robed desert men moved in the moist chill air like phantoms. But all this was as little to them as to the lizards that crept along the walls or the sweeps they handled with their hardening hands. Years after, Nicholas recalled those nights and those mornings and knew that something that sat within his deadened brain had been alive and had stored the memories for him. But he did not know it then.
Mustafa bragged among his friends, from Jebel el Tarik to Iskanderia, of his fine ship and his unparalleled crew. The listeners would smile and stroke their beards and exclaim at intervals, “Ma sh'Allah!”—believing perhaps one tenth of what they heard. Oftenest he boasted of the Feringhi rowers whom he had purchased from the sheikh's own steward in the slave-market of Lundra—a city of mist and wealth and pigs and fair maidens. Thus it came about that Ahmed ibn Said, the host, and Abu Selim, the letter-writer of the bazaar, devised a jest for a supper at the khan. They would send for one of these Frankish slaves and see what he would say. The flattered Mustafa agreed, and the messenger returned with Nicholas Gay, whose gray eyes and yellow hair caused a mild sensation.
The guests began to ask questions, first in Levantine, then in Arabic. Were there bazaars in Lundra? Did the people drink coffee? Had they camels? Did the muezzin call them to prayer? Did the women sleep upon the housetops? Was the city most like Aleppo the White, or Istamboul, or Damasc-ush-Shah? How many Muslimun were there? How many of the idolaters?
To these inquiries Nicholas replied, at first with faint amusement at the mingled shrewdness and ignorance of these men, then with a fierce pride in his city which made his words, as the letter-writer expressed it, shine like rubies and sing like a fountain. The merchants listened, and munched their sticky baclawi, ripe olives and dates and figs, and drank many tiny cups of coffee, more entertained than they had ever been by Mustafa. Finally the host sent for a basket of fruit—great pale Egyptian melons, pomegranates, oranges, figs—and graciously bestowed it upon the gifted galley-slave. He meant to come next day, he said, and with Mustafa's permission behold the prowess of the English in swimming.