Swords From the Sea (90 page)

Fray Raymundo's thoughts flew to the native who had been insulted by the governor. He might well have come to the town to inform the Spaniards of the arrival of the English, being friendly to them before his encounter with the governor. After that, with a Peruvian's deep hatred of injury, he had lent his aid to El Andreque. If the priest had been able to make friends with the Indian in the tavern, different events might have followed. But God, he considered, had willed otherwise.

Meanwhile El Andreque had stepped to the side of Falconer, and drawn his sword to cut the cords which bound him, when two Spanish soldiers grasped him. At once he turned to the governor.

"Release me, senor," he cried, "and my companions, including the prisoners. God's truth, they are worthless mutineers, but they are Englishmen, and such shall not hang from a gibbet. Give us a guard of safe conduct down to the waterfront, with a pinnace to leave the shore, in order to reach our ship."

"Rather a safe conduct to the Devil and a pinnace to sail in purgatory, senor," retorted the governor. "I have no mind to release you here hence, save in that fashion."

"An' you do that," warned El Andreque, "all Lima will grieve, and your life as governor will have short shrift."

"How mean you?" questioned his Excellency, biting his beard, for he saw that there was something held back in the words of the Englishman. Yet he was surrounded by two thousand men with swords in their hands, and the corsair was distant from the town by the length of the harbor. Surely, there could be no danger from the English. The man's words were bred of madness.

El Andreque waved his hand good-naturedly. "An' you would know how matters stand," he said, "conceive that my ship has cut your craft from their moorings, and now sixteen sail are in our hands, drifted by the wind, out of the harbor. Not a vessel of size remains on the waterfront of Lima. An' you see not what this means, conceive that without ships you cannot reach another port, nor will other craft come to you, for we shall take and sink those that we meet up the coast. Lima will be barred from the rest of the world by the loss of sixteen sail, if we are not returned unharmed to my ship by dawn."

There was a stir at these words, and Fray Raymundo saw the governor's hands writhe together in anger.

"Dog!" shouted his Excellency. "Think you to deceive me with a threat? Your life will need a greater price than that. What if Lima is cut off from the outside for months? We can live. Better that than to surrender to you on such terms."

"A higher price?" smiled El Andreque. "Well, I will be generous, and give it you. The Santa Maria, with the king's treasure, is with the other ships in port, as I learned from the Indians. She is, in truth, in our hands. How like you the thought of losing the king's tax?"

The priest saw how heavy these tidings lay on his Excellency, for the Santa Maria was loaded with thousands of bars of silver. For a moment there was silence in the Audencia while the governor stared at the Enb lishman, and the hands of the Spanish captains itched to the swords they feared to use.

"The gun you heard," went on El Andreque, "was a signal to me that my ship had done what I planned. The guards of your vessels-too few, forsooth-were crowded into one galleon, and all the cables were cut. The forts on shore are helpless. They cannot see one ship from another in the darkness. In the hands of my men there is a ransom for a dozen dukes, the price of a kingdom."

His Excellency winced and shot a black look at the unfortunate customs guards.

"Our ransom, the sixteen ships, including the Santa Maria," resumed El Andreque carelessly, "will be paid, on my word, when we reach our ship. Otherwise, you will not see the ships again, and the Santa Maria will make the trip to England as a present to our sovereign lady, the queen. By my faith, King Philip will reward you well when he hears how his tax slipped through your fingers, senor."

There was a murmur of agreement from the crowd, who knew the value of the cargo of the galleon, but his Excellency bared his teeth in rage.

"Your word!" he snarled. "The word of a pirate and thief-how can I know it will be kept?"

"My faith," answered the Englishman, and Fray Raymundo marveled to see him smile, as at a good jest. "I have kept the vow I swore at Nombre de Dios, while yours has slight chance of honor. Am I not a man of my word?"

"Your life lies in my hand."

"Slight avail would it be to you, senor, if you lose all your shipping. Ships are uneasy to make from the trees on this coast, and none come from Spain."

"I could send a thousand men out in small boats to take your ship under cover of darkness. What is to prevent?"

"Naught save that there are no small boats. Pinnace and cockboat alike have been stove in by my men, save a half dozen that lay on the shore."

"The forts can fire on all the shipping in the harbor. Perchance-"

"The first ship to be sunk would be the Santa Maria, senor,"

And Fray Raymundo knew that the governor could do naught but yield his prisoners safe conduct. There were some words between the caballeros, who found the remedy not to their liking, but his Excellency waved them to silence and ordered the guards to take the English to the shore and put them in a small boat. When the tall Falconer bowed before his Excellency and said-

"I warrant your Excellency's beard is chaffed to a turn, and as for your jewels, you will know more presently."

Whereupon the English left the Audencia, making courteous farewells to the governor, and swaggering from the door. Fray Raymundo said a prayer of thanksgiving that no man had been hurt on either side, and blessed the happy chance that rid the shores of the English, and especially El Andreque.

Which ends his testimony, except for the remark that when the Santa Maria was returned to port with the other ships, when the English ship sailed the next morning, she floated strangely high in the water. Officials of his Excellency who boarded her found, pinned to the mast in the hold a receipt for two hundred and fifty thousand pounds in silver, paid by his Majesty, King Philip II of Spain, to Elizabeth, Queen of England.

As with all Harold Lamb story collections published by Bison Books, this volume concludes with a selection of essays originally published in a letter column titled "The Camp-Fire" in Adventure magazine. As I have said before, Harold Lamb and other contributors frequently wrote lengthy letters that further explained some of the historical details that appeared in their stories. The relevant letters for this volume follow.

As usual, the prefatory comments of Adventure editor Arthur Sullivan Hoffman are also printed here, although they are slight. Prior to these letters, however, is an essay written by Hoffman himself about one of his very favorite authors, Harold Lamb. Scholar Brian Taves located this during his own researches and sent it my way some years ago. It provides us with a behind-the-scenes look at Lamb's writing process, and some of the issues he faced in selling his stories. Hoffman is often praised as an editor, and in this essay we get a glimpse of how influential he was upon Lamb's fiction.

Harold Lamb and Historical Romance*

The Career of the Author of "The Crusades" as Seen by His Discoverer

Though of course he didn't in the least realize it himself, Harold Lamb began writing The Crusades: Iron Men and Saints nearly fourteen years ago. Ancient Asia had cast its spell upon him and there were already a dozen years of work and study behind him when we discussed the question of making the Crusades the subject of the book to follow Tamerlane.

One of his ancestors had been of the Washington Irving literary circle and others had been naval men. Heredity was so strong in him that at the age of six he definitely decided to write naval stories, and when the eyesight test at Annapolis barred the Navy at first hand his resolution became the stronger. But there were Asian germs at work in him.

Back in 1917, when he was but two years out of college, there came to me, following a sea story (historical, by the way), a fiction tale about Khlit, an old Cossack of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and I published it in Adventure. That magazine during my years as editor ran strongly to reliable historical settings for its fiction; the readers followed it with interest and they at once took Khlit to their bosoms.

For nearly eleven years there was a steady flow of stories, novelettes, and serials-fifty-two of them-all dealing with Asia of the past. There were only four laid elsewhere, and none after 1920. Asia had him. There was a dearth of sources to draw on in the English language; in addition to several European languages, he learned to read Arabic, Chinese, and a third that I've forgotten, besides something of various other Asiatic tongues, for European sources, too, were scarce and secondhand and he wanted the ultimate facts.

Khlit wandered far and wide over Asia. Later there appeared Abdul Dost, one of the Moghuls (Mongols) who conquered India, and Khlit joined him in his adventures. Genghis Khan and Tamerlane themselves stalked, living, through the pages of his stories. Later there came a Cossack, Ayub, under Boris Godunov, with his grandfather Khlit riding sturdily alongside. John Paul Jones leaped into the procession-did you, good American, know that he died serving Catherine the Great as admiral on the Black Sea against the Turks? Harold Lamb was the first to bring this episode into English fiction. Prester John and Stenka Razin, Persian, Arab, Rajput, Lap, Buriat, Tibetan, Armenian, Georgian, Mongol, and scores of others from all parts and many centuries of Asia brought each his share of Asia's history into Mr. Lamb's stories.

In 1926 he took the rather inchoate mass of the Babar Nameh (The Book of the Tiger), and condensed its 16o,ooo words into a smooth-flowing narrative of 22,000. It is the actual autobiography of Babar, Moghul (Turco-Mongol) conqueror of India, a great-great-grandson of Tamerlane, acknowledged by European scholars as deserving a place beside the confessions of Rousseau and Cellini, yet practically unknown in this country. Mr. Lamb was the first to make it available as a continuous, unified narrative.

For eleven years before he wrote Genghis Khan he lived with these peo ple, saturated himself with their histories and civilizations, the homely details of their daily lives. Always he was the scholar first, the good fictionist second. Rarely did a story appear without his historian's letter of comment for the magazine's department in which the authors chatted with the readers-letters meticulous as to every least variation from established historical fact, carefully balanced, ripe, fairly bursting with intimate knowledge of the broad and only partially explored field that had become his specialty. And very human letters-it was not dry bones and dusty records that interested him; he wanted to find out what kind of men these had been and what manner of life they led. In the beginning he couldn't. Nobody else had; there was no one to whom he could turn. He must pioneer. So he pioneered. And when Harold Lamb sets himself to a task it gets done. Concentration? Thoroughness? Gentle persistence? Irresistible driving power? Harold Lamb. The task, while a stupendous labor, was in this case only a joyful obsession. He writes me from Rome, busily at work on the second volume of The Crusades:

The work here is devilish-the Crusades loom up like a sea that drowns a chap-the mass of evidence buried in hundreds of old Latin records is appalling, and the controversies are frightful. I'm having a bully time.

But during the eleven years of the fifty-two pieces of fiction he was accomplishing much more than the building of broad, strong foundations as a historian. He was learning, through fiction, to make the ancient peoples as living, breathing, and human to readers as they were to him.

The road was not easy going. Aside from the one magazine there was no market for these stories-one of those curious editorial stone walls standing across his path. "Mongols and such? Nobody writes about them; therefore nobody wants to read about them. Historical stuff, anyhow, and costume fiction is out of fashion now." The dictum was the harder to bear because he knew that people did like to read about "Mongols and such" if they were the right kind of Mongols and such. The popularity of his stories with the magazine's readers had been proving that to him for years and, later, the longer ones of these same stories, like White Falcon and The House of the Falcon, were to prove it still further in book form-not to mention the three books that have swept him into his place as a historian who is an acknowledged authority on both sides of the Atlantic and who can make his history as interesting as the most colorful fiction.