The Priest's Tale by s.j.a. turney

Author:s.j.a. turney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Of the butcher’s rage

Mehmi lurked outside the gilt door of the audience chamber. His squat, brutal frame had never looked more out of place than here in this vestibule of gold, blue and white, with its banners bearing the sword of Islam, the blue lion of the Hafsid dynasty, the three crescents on blue of Emir Zakariya the Second, the white-on-red crescent of the Tunisian Emirate and countless other decorative designs of peacock feathers and gilded fretwork. The diminutive, slope-shouldered pirate with his curled beard, Ottoman turban, salt-stained rough sailor’s trousers and jacket and heavy boots shuffled uncomfortably from foot to foot.

Not only was he extremely unhappy at simply being in the court of the Hafsid Emir, who had every right and every reason to execute them on the spot for making landfall in his demesne, but two other things were preying on his mind almost as much as their potential predicament:

First was the fact that they would already have to sail as fast as the Yarim Ay could manage – a killing pace for the galley slaves – in order to reach their rendezvous with the great commander Kemal Reis in the straits, and the delay caused by the side trip to the market in Tunis had stretched their schedule to snapping point, but now to further delay over such a lost cause as the four slaves was making him twitchy. The whole of Hassan’s crew were loyal to the death to their captain, of course, but they also all knew that he rode a fine line of unpopularity in the fleet and that he could still theoretically be removed from command and sent home in disgrace by Kemal. Angering the fleet commander through further delay was ridiculous.

But the thing that was really making him twitch was the priest. Mehmi’s mother – may the blessed nineteen keepers of the fires of the abyss spend the rest of eternity torching the flesh from the old hag’s bones – had always impressed on her malformed child, in between beatings, that the Christian priests were not men of God. They were sorcerers and witches and purveyors of infidel, heretic, evil spells. Mehmi had never paid too much attention to the idea, despite his loathing of all Christians, but the journey from Greece had brought all those painful lessons flooding back.

Priests were magicians of the blackest kind, abhorred by the prophet – may Allah protect and keep him. God had turned his back on these wicked black-robed creatures in a way he had not for the other peoples of the Book. Hassan himself had cut the throat of the Zakynthian priest on his altar, watching the red stain blossom on the ivory-coloured altar cloth. But it had been Mehmi who had nailed the man’s wrists and ankles to the crossed benches while the sailors had systematically peeled away his flesh, leaving a twisted pink parody of the great Christian symbol.

Mehmi had thought at the time that this dishonouring of the prophet and

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