The Portuguese Affair (24 page)

We never discovered why we had been attacked by the isolated troop of Spanish soldiers during that particular night. Perhaps word had been carried by one of the peasants, betraying us. Or perhaps they had simply spotted our sprawling, disorganised army tramping along in the direction of Lisbon. They were indeed driven off, but we discovered with the coming of the daylight that – what with the dark and the surprise and our inexperienced soldiers’ lack of skill – a number of our men had been badly wounded and killed. It seemed that a few of the better men amongst the inexperienced recruits had tried to join the regulars, but they had been surrounded by some of the Spaniards and cut down. They lay where they had fallen just beyond the camp and we stumbled upon them in the dawn. Mile by mile, our army, instead of growing by the addition of Dom Antonio’s loyal subjects, was dwindling away.

I did what I could for the wounded, assisted by Dr Nuñez, but many were far gone with existing weakness and the long hours they had lain bleeding before we found them. Four died. The march was halted, except for
Essex’s squadron, which set off without us. The dead were buried and Dr Nuñez insisted that the wounded who could not walk should not be abandoned. Unlike so many of their fellows, they had shown courage and initiative. There were five of them. Carrying slings were contrived out of some of the remaining tents. A few of the stronger soldiers would be able to carry these, if they took it in short snatches of an hour or two. Some of the junior officers volunteered to walk part of the way, taking it turn about to ride and using a pair of their horses to carry one of the slings. At last, after some two hours’ delay, we set off in the wake of Essex. Norreys was clearly angry that the Earl had divided the army, exposing us to greater danger, should there be another attack. He sent off a messenger to ride on to Essex and order him to wait for the rest of the army to catch up with his men.

That day was the hottest we had endured. There had been no springs for many miles, and the cheap rough wine bought from the peasants with promises of later payment made the soldiers thirstier than ever. When we came upon a stinking, marshy pond, they rushed towards it in a mindless mob, pushing and elbowing their fellows out of the way.

‘Stop!’

I heard Dr Nuñez shouting and rode ahead to see what was happening. The men were crowding round the greenish stagnant pool, fighting each other to reach it.

‘Stop!’ I echoed the command and elbowed my way in amongst them, trying to pull them away. ‘This is filthy standing water,’ I cried. ‘You
must not
drink it, however thirsty you are. It isn’t safe. It will carry sickness.’

Even from a distance I caught the rank odour of it, rising out of the pond like the stinking breath of a diseased man. It was surrounded by bog plants, many of them unfamiliar to me, but others I recognised as noxious herbs. The surface was covered with a yellow-green scum, not healthy water-weed but a kind of aquatic mould. Here and there, patches of the surface were clear and it was these, catching the sun with the winking temptation of some witch’s fatal brew, which had drawn the men in, driven by their almost insupportable thirst.

I might as well not have wasted my breath. Maddened with their desperate need for water, they would not listen. They threw themselves on their stomachs, those who had managed to push their way to the front, and began to drink from it, scooping up handfuls of the tainted liquid, even thrusting their heads below the surface and emerging crowned with the olive-tinted slime. I noticed a group of soldiers I recognised – the man who had hustled me away from the fighting the previous night and two of the regular soldiers who had been wounded in the skirmish. They were arguing with some of the unskilled recruits, warning them against the water. One of these was the man who had been bitten by the snake. As I watched, I saw that they were successful in persuading a few of the men, more successful than I was. As experienced soldiers, they would know they must avoid polluted water, however thirsty they were, but most of the men ignored them, as they ignored Dr Nuñez and me. I knew very well what the consequences would be.

It proved as I had expected, that we were right to fear the stagnant water, for by that evening, cholera had seized the army. It is a terrible disease at any time, but on the march under unrelenting sun in a waterless land, it can be as fatal as the plague itself. Its victims raved with fever. A form of violent flux seized them, so they vomited repeatedly and vented profuse watery diarrhoea studded with white matter like grains of rice and stinking of dead fish. There was no mistaking the signs. The loss of the body’s fluid leaves its vital elements desperately unbalanced so that the body craves water, but clean water was the one thing we did not have to give them. The victims’ very skin shrivelled, so that the hands of young men looked like those of aged crones. Those who had friends to help them along staggered onward with us, though they were so weak they must be half carried. Others collapsed in the ditches and did not move. They were simply left behind, for we had no carts to carry them, and even if we had, most would have died within a few hours, for the fever of cholera will burn a man up from inside, consumed by an inner fire. Fortunately the wounded men carried in the slings had been unable to reach the foetid water, for they would have been the first to succumb.

‘It was the honey,’ the whisper went round from mouth to mouth. ‘The honey that peasant gave us, the one who had an ear cut off and watched us with an evil look. The honey was poisoned.’

And any who had eaten the honey (which was pure and good, I had eaten it myself) began to fancy themselves poisoned. They would not listen when we told them that they had caught cholera from the dirty water. They had not been poisoned by someone else, they had poisoned themselves, but it is always easier to blame another man, rather than accept the blame oneself. The whole army, even the men from the
Low Countries, took hold of the idea that the Portuguese peasants were trying to poison them. It was perhaps fortunate that the local peasants had taken to hiding from the army, otherwise they might have suffered some undeserved vengeance. As it was, there was whispering amongst the men, and evil glances cast at Dom Antonio and the other senior men amongst the Portuguese.

For some reason, I escaped this mistrust, having become something of a mascot amongst the men, ever since they had seen me suck the snake’s venom out of the soldier’s ankle with my own mouth. Even so, I was aware that the mood was dangerous and could flare up into something more serious at any time.

On the second day after the cholera had begun its attack, our numbers had been reduced again by deaths, but some of those who had been infected, by some fluke of bodily strength, were gradually recovering. By now we knew that we were no more than perhaps a day’s march from Lisbon. It was with some difficulty that Norreys managed to restrain Essex from riding ahead again, in some madcap scheme of arrogant display.

That evening we set up our usual makeshift camp, though by now even the most inadequate of our soldiers understood the need for sentries to keep watch at night. There was, as usual, little to eat. The further we travelled on this seemingly endless journey, the less willing had the peasants become to sell us food in return for scraps of paper bearing the Dom’s scratched signature, so that by now we saw no sign of them. Either the people of this area were more suspicious or word had run ahead of us, so that the villagers had hidden their food supplies. Had we been able to find any of them, they could claim an inability to supply us with provisions.

We were sitting slack-jointed around the watch fires as it grew dark, when we became aware of a disturbance in one quarter of the camp. It first it was no more than a murmur of sound, like a distant thrumming of bees. Then it was punctuated by shouts and what sounded like a kind of laughter, not a cheerful sound but the kind of laughter that escapes from men who are afraid or ashamed, a sort of nervous burst of hysteria. I rose to my feet and peered toward that part of the camp, trying to make out what was amiss.

‘It is nothing but some horseplay amongst the men,’ said Ruy Lopez.

For once, perhaps, he had grown weary of constantly dancing attendance on Dom Antonio and had joined Dr Nuñez and me, sharing our lumps of rock-hard stale bread, which we could barely break with our teeth, and what promised to be the very last scraps of the mouldy cheese.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

‘Let it be, Kit,’ said Dr Nuñez. ‘You can care for their bodies. There is little else you can do for them.’

I sat down again, but kept my eye on a growing tumult in that quarter of the camp. Gradually it began to roll toward us, a cluster of men, shouting. At the front was a pale, gaunt figure, stark naked. I knew the man by sight, one of the recruits who had joined us at
Plymouth, but I had had no dealings with him. He was older than most of the men, probably in his middle forties, his dull brown hair touched with grey and his beard – as may sometimes happen – entirely grey, almost white. This beard had grown long and straggling since we had left England and hung now halfway down his chest, so that with his nakedness and his matted hair and long beard he seemed like some half-crazed prophet from the Old Testament. He was grown so thin that there seemed to be no flesh on his bones, only the knotted outline of wasted muscle and sinew. His joints at knee and ankle and elbow bulged grotesquely out of proportion to his limbs, and his feet were as prehensile as a monkey’s.

In my profession I am familiar with men’s bodies, but I had never seen one so wasted as this, not even amongst the
London poor or the starved survivors of the siege of Sluys. It came to me that, under the rags that were all that remained of their clothes, the other men must look the same. My own body would be wasted. I had already noticed how thin my arms had become, the skin faintly traced with a quilting of fine lines where the layer of flesh beneath the surface had shrunk away.

The naked man stumbled in our direction, pursued by the crowd, who had begun to bay like a pack of hounds, shouting and jeering and giving way to that unnatural laughter I had heard before. The man’s eyes were wild as a hunted animal’s, and there were flecks of foam on the parched skin about his mouth. It crossed my mind that it was strange he should have even that much of the element of water in him, for we were all become as dry as the sands of the desert.

‘The Day of Judgement is come!’

He raised a withered arm and pointed at Dom Antonio’s tent.

‘The Lord God of Israel has brought down his curse upon you, yea, and all you sinners who are gathered here! He has laid upon you the plague of starvation, yea, and the plague of thirst such as those who dwell in the wilderness! Ye shall perish of fevers and your guts shall burn within you until ye be consumed utterly in the fire!’

His eyes glowed with madness as he staggered toward the tent which flew, even at the end of this exhausted day, the royal standard of the house of Aviz. From within the tent there came nothing but a listening silence. Reaching the tent, he tried to drag down the standard, but it was too high for him to reach.

‘See where the standard of the bastard king is ringed with blood!’ he cried. His voice croaked like the cry of a raven. ‘So it shall be. Ye shall all perish, drowned in your own life’s blood and the vengeance of the Lord shall be wreaked upon you!’

There was more foam at his mouth now, but the strength of madness which had filled his voice faltered as he fell to his knees.

‘Ye shall all perish.’

It was no more than a whisper. Then he rolled over on the unforgiving ground and lay still.

Dr Nuñez reached him before I did. There was still a faint irregular pulse from a heart which could not beat much longer. A thin watery trickle of blood ran from his nose and the corner of his mouth. Dr Nuñez looked at me and shook his head. The men who had pursued the madman had stopped in their tracks. Looking anywhere but at their prey, they shuffled their feet and began to sneak away. The group of officers and gentlemen adventurers beside the fire had been shocked into silence. There was neither movement nor sound from within the royal tent.

Less than an hour later, the man died.

We hollowed out a shallow grave for him at the edge of the camp, some of those who had been in the baying crowd being the most anxious to help. Then we withdrew our several ways for what little rest we could find, exhausted in body and troubled in mind.

In this desperate state we came, the next day, over a last rise in the ground and there, about three miles away, we could see the mighty walls of Lisbon, and beyond them its clustered roofs and towers. This was where we were meant to have sailed weeks ago directly from Plymouth, without our diversions at Coruña and Peniche. Had we done so, we would still have had an army, of sorts. Though lacking in provisions, we would not have been in a state of starvation, as we were now. And here, if we had come directly, we might have found the gates opened to us by the considerable body of nobles who supported Dom Antonio. My grandfather would still be alive and could have helped me to rescue Isabel. Now he and the other nobles were dead and the gates stayed firmly barred. And I would find no help for Isabel.

The gallant
Essex emerged at last from his private convoy. While the rest of the army was barefoot, dressed in rags, and as emaciated as prisoners emerging from the custody of the Inquisition, Essex still carried amongst his luggage his finest armour. He had donned a gleaming breastplate, inlaid with ornamentation in gold and polished by some page. He was fully equipped with coat of mail under his breastplate, with greaves and cuisses protecting his legs, rerebraces and vambraces enclosing his arms. His helmet, burnished to reflect the sun and blind any opponent, was topped with three magnificent plumes plucked from some exotic African bird. A sword with a jewel-encrusted hilt hung at his side and in his left hand he carried upright a spear, from which fluttered a banner bearing his motto embroidered in thread of gold:
Virtutis comes invidia.