NINETEEN

The dispatch rider from Paris set out from Fort Saint-Jean early in the morning. Even in the chill air, the stench of the wintering galleys bobbing at anchor almost overpowered him as he rode the length of the Quai du Port to the Arsenal. The pride of the French fleet, the choice assignment for the sons of the highest aristocracy, the low, narrow ships looked nothing like their summer incarnations. The bands of musicians were dispersed, the silk pennants in storage. The gilt and crimson scrollwork was invisible beneath huge canvas tents that stretched from the bow to the stern over the rowers’ benches, giving the ships the air of monstrous cocoons. The rider could read the names on the bows: L’Audace, La Superbe, L’Heroïne…

As the icy pink dawn faded from the sky, the cocoons appeared to hatch hundreds of galley slaves who been released from the chains that held them to their benches all night. Now chained in pairs, surrounded by armed escorts of halberdiers, they were herded across the quay to various workplaces in the city of Marseilles, to earn their winter keep. The rider hardly noticed this everyday sight, and having made his first delivery at the Arsenal, he headed to the more fashionable section of Marseilles, where the Captain of the Superbe had his winter residence.

Breakfast had just been cleared when the lackey showed in the messenger, and the captain was still clad in his quilted silk dressing gown, his wigless head protected by a fur-lined, embroidered cap.

“Well, well,” he said, almost to himself as he read the letter from the Captain General of the Galleys, “it looks as if someone has a friend at court. Remind me, Vincent. Who is this Florent d’Urbec? Have I seen him?” Vincent, whose shaven head and eyebrows proclaimed him also to be a wintering galérien, thought a moment and answered.

“I think it’s that new one on number seven, the one who weeps.”

“Oh, yes, the fellow who mends clocks. I like to have skilled trades among my rowers; I’ve made a good deal of money from him this winter.” He squinted again at the dispatch. “Pah! These courtiers—they don’t understand necessity. Do they expect me just to throw away the men I need? I must have a full complement for the campaign this summer; I see no reason to let a perfectly good one go just now. Later is good enough to satisfy the captain general.” The captain refolded the offending paper and opened the seal on the next dispatch. He waved his hand to dismiss his lackey. “Go see his comite, Vincent, and tell him to inform this fellow that when he can provide me with the price of a Turkish slave to replace him, I will let him go.”

The Superbe spent the first weeks of spring in maneuvers designed to break the new men to the oar, then joined the fleet on campaign against North African corsairs for the remaining months of summer. Chained around the clock to the benches, the galériens sometimes rowed for ten to twelve hours at a stretch, the comites feeding them bread dipped in wine to keep them from dropping. Even so, by the summer’s end, thirty-six had died and were pitched overboard.

D’Urbec began by assuring himself that in defiance of the galley masters he would at least keep his mind as his own. But as the first week ran into the second and then the third, he realized that pain and hunger, systematically applied, had done their work. His brain could no longer hold more than a minute at a time in focus; his concerns had shrunk to the size of his bread ration. At night he shivered in the open air, sleepless from the rattle of chained men scratching their vermin. And when at last he saw that he had become little more than a beast with arms, no different than the thieves on either side of him, his heart broke. The fever that haunted the oarsmen’s benches took possession of him. He had decided to die.

Images moved through his brain randomly. Paris. His friends. A stable yard at home. He could hear voices talking about him.

“Another one with fever, Lieutenant…”

“…the hospital weakens them. Just move him to the end of the oar. He’ll harden up…”

The rattle of chains and someone saying “Move, you.” Other images. A sign over a door, “D’Urbec et fils, Horlogers.” His father waving good-bye as he left on the diligence for Paris, wearing a secondhand suit. A frail girl with gray eyes, clutching a Latin book. The frightened look on the maid’s face at the back door of the great house as she said, “Monsieur, she is dead.” “…but she was well when I saw her last…” “Monsieur, she drowned herself.” Let it all go, said his mind as it left him.

The captain increased rations to combat the fever and had meat issued to the rowers. D’Urbec, wasted, blistered by the sun, his eyes burned deep into their sockets, rowed on at the easier end of the oar, his shoulders and arms gradually acquiring the abnormal strength of the galérien.

“You speak well,” said the ship’s tavernier when he measured out d’Urbec’s watery wine ration. “What were you before?”

“A law student,” said d’Urbec, his eyes dull and desperate.

“Ah, just what I could use,” replied the tavernier, who was also a fence of stolen property when the ship docked for the winter at Marseilles. “I have a client who needs a marriage certificate for his daughter—dated last year, if you know what I mean. Could you draw one up, nice and legal, if I got the right parchment and seals for it?”

“It would not be hard.”

“What about wills, deeds? I know people who’ll pay well.”

“Of course,” answered the law student who had once wanted to reform the state.

It was not until the following spring that a filthy, hollow-eyed man in worn, badly fitting government-issue clothes left Marseilles on foot for Paris. A black, shapeless hat hid his shaven head, but nothing could conceal that his face was without eyebrows. A short jacket, sprung out at the seams, and a coarse, patched shirt concealed the G A L branded deep into his shoulder. He was filled with bitter knowledge: how much wine diluted with seawater could be drunk before illness set in, how to bribe a comite to spare the lash, how much more easily money could be made secretly forging legal documents than mending clocks, and the exact price of a Turk. Hidden inside his shirt was the document that gave him freedom and a much-refolded, grimy letter from his father that he had paid a considerable bribe to receive. One passage, puzzled over again and again, was burned into his mind: “…a generous and titled widow with great influence at court has helped me secure this miracle…” Who? Who? he mumbled silently to himself. Those who passed him on the road thought he was insane.