Rapscallion. James McGee
Читать онлайн книгу.
with the bitten fingernails. “And do something about those. They’re making the place look untidy.”
The lieutenant scowled at a pair of prisoners whose legs had given way. Hawkwood assumed they were the two who had been helped up the stairs by their fellow detainees. He wondered what had become of the men who’d been left in the longboat, and whether anyone had bothered to retrieve them. No one in authority on Rapacious seemed interested in taking a look. It was more than likely the boat was still drifting at the end of the line.
“Aye, sir.” The sergeant of the guard saluted lazily and turned to the prisoners. He nodded towards the stairway. “Right, you buggers, let’s be having you. Simmons, use your bayonet! Give that one at the back there a poke. Get the bastards moving! We ain’t got all bleedin’ day! Allez!”
Lasseur caught Hawkwood’s eye. The Frenchman’s smile had slipped from his face. It was as if the reality of the situation had finally sunk in. Hawkwood shouldered his bedding, remembering Lasseur’s earlier whispered comment. As he descended the stairs to the well deck it didn’t take him long to see that Lasseur had been mistaken. Hell would have been an improvement.
Hawkwood was no stranger to deprivation. It was all around him on London’s cramped and filthy streets. In the rookeries, like those of St Giles and Field Lane, poverty was a way of life. It could be seen in the way people dressed, in the looks on their faces and by the way they carried themselves. Hawkwood had also seen it in the eyes of soldiers, most notably in the aftermath of a defeat, and he was seeing the same despair and desperation now, carved into the faces of the men gathered on the deck of the prison hulk. It was the grey, lifeless expression of men who had lost all hope.
They ranged in age from calloused veterans to callow-eyed adolescents and they looked, with few exceptions Hawkwood thought, like the ranks of the walking dead. Most wore the yellow uniform, or what was left of it, for in many cases the prison garb looked to be as ragged as the clothing that had been stripped from the backs of the new arrivals. Many of the older men had the weathered look of seamen, though without the ruddy complexion. Instead, their faces were pallid, almost drained of colour.
Some prisoners huddled in small groups, others stood alone, if such a feat was possible given the number of wasted bodies that seemed to cover every available inch of space. Some of the men were stretched out on the deck, but whether they were sleeping or suffering from some malady, it was impossible to tell. The ones that remained upright gazed dully at the new arrivals being directed towards the hatch and the stairs leading into the bowels of the ship. Some of the men looked as though they hadn’t eaten for days.
“My God,” Lasseur gagged. “The smell.”
“Wait till you get below.”
The voice came from behind them. Hawkwood looked back over his shoulder and found himself eye to eye with the dark-haired interpreter from the weather-deck.
“Don’t worry; in a couple of days, you won’t notice. In a week, you’ll start to smell the same. The name’s Murat, by the way. And we call this area the Park. It’s our little joke.” The interpreter nodded towards the open hatch and the top of the ladder leading down. “You’d best get a move on. Squeeze through, find yourselves a space.”
“Murat?” Lasseur looked intrigued. “Any relation?”
The interpreter shrugged and gave a self-deprecatory grin. “A distant cousin on my mother’s side. I regret our closest association is in having once enjoyed the services of the same tailor. I –”
“How much do you want for your boots?”
Hawkwood felt a tug at his sleeve. One of the yellow-uniformed prisoners had taken hold of his arm. Hawkwood recoiled from the man’s rancid odour. “They’re not for sale.”
There were ragged holes in the elbows of the prisoner’s jacket and the knees of his trousers shone as if they had been newly waxed. His feet were stuffed into a pair of canvas slippers, though they were obviously too small for him as his heels overlapped the soles by at least an inch. Several boils had erupted across the back of his neck. His shirt collar was the colour of dried mud.
“Ten francs.” The grip on Hawkwood’s arm tightened.
Hawkwood looked down at the man’s fingers. “Let go or you’ll lose the arm.”
“Twenty.”
“Leave him be, Chavasse! He told you they’re not for sale.” Murat raised his hand. “In any case, they’re worth ten times that. Go and pester someone else.”
Hawkwood pulled his arm free. The prisoner backed away.
The interpreter turned to Hawkwood. “Keep hold of your belongings until you know your way around, otherwise you might not see them again. Come on, I’ll show you where to go.”
Murat pushed his way ahead of them and started down the almost vertical stairway. Hawkwood and Lasseur followed him. It was like descending into a poorly lit mineshaft. Three-quarters of the way down Hawkwood found he had to lean backwards to avoid cracking his skull on the overhead beam. He felt his spine groan as he did so. He heard Lasseur chuckle. The sound seemed ludicrously out of place.
“You’ll get used to that, too,” Murat said drily.
Hawkwood couldn’t see a thing. The sudden shift from daylight to near Stygian darkness was abrupt and alarming. If Murat hadn’t been wearing his yellow jacket, it would have been almost impossible to follow him in the dark. It was as if the sun had been snuffed out. Hawkwood paused and waited for his eyes to adjust.
“Keep moving!” The order came from behind.
“That way,” Murat said, and pointed. “And watch your head.”
The warning was unnecessary. Hawkwood’s neck was already cricked. The height from the deck to the underside of the main beams couldn’t have been much more than five and a half feet.
Murat said, “It’s easy to tell you’re a soldier not a seaman, Captain. You don’t have the gait, but, like I said, you’ll get used to it.”
Ahead of him, Hawkwood could see vague, hump-backed shapes moving. They looked more troglodyte than human. And the smell was far worse down below; a mixture of sweat and piss. Hawkwood tried breathing through his mouth but discovered it didn’t make a great deal of difference. He moved forward cautiously. Gradually, the ill-defined creatures began to take on form. He could pick out squares of light on either side, too, and recognized it as daylight filtering in through the grilles in the open ports.
“This is it,” Murat said. “The gun deck.”
God in heaven, Hawkwood thought.
He could tell by the grey, watery light the deck was about forty feet in width. As to the length, he could only hazard a guess, for he could barely make out the ends. Both fore and aft, they simply disappeared into the blackness. It was more like being in a cellar than a ship’s hull. The area in which they were standing was too far from the grilles for the sunlight to penetrate fully but he could just see that benches ran down the middle as well as along the sides. All of them looked to be occupied. Most of the floor was taken up by bodies as well. Despite the lack of illumination, several of the men were engaged in labour. Some were knitting, others were fashioning hats out of what looked like lengths of straw. A number were carving shanks of bone into small figurines that Hawkwood guessed were probably chess pieces. He wondered how anyone could see what they were doing. The sense of claustrophobia was almost overpowering.
He saw there were lanterns strung on hooks along the bulkhead, but they were unlit.
“We try and conserve the candles,” Murat explained. “Besides, they don’t burn too well down here; too many bodies, not enough air.”
For a moment, Hawkwood thought the interpreter was joking, but then he saw that Murat was serious.
There was just sufficient light for Hawkwood to locate the hooks and cleats in the beams from which to hang the hammocks. Many of the hooks had