The Silver Wolf

J. C. Harvey, Jacky Colliss Harvey

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781838953331
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838953300
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The extraordinarily rich, dark, panoramic tale of an orphaned boy's quest for truth and then for vengeance as war rages across 17th-century Europe. Amidst the chaos of the Thirty Years' War, Jack Fiskardo embarks upon a quest that will carry him inexorably from France to Amsterdam and then onto the battlefields of Germany. As he grows to manhood will he be able to unravel the mystery of his father's death? Or will his father's killers find him first? The Silver Wolf is a tale of secrets and treachery and the relentlessness of fate - but it is also a story of courage and compassion, of love and loyalty and ultimately of salvation too. Book One of Fiskardo's War marks the start of a series of unforgettable, epic historical fiction for readers of Ken Follett and Kate Mosse.

PART I

May 1619–December 1622

CHAPTER ONE

The Dock-Rat

‘The clouds gather thick in the German sky…’

Thomas Frankland, The Annals of King James and Charles I

MUNGO SANT, born Dundee, more years ago than he cares to remember, stands on the foredeck of the Guid Marie. A fine wind spanks her forward, her sails are full, and her bowsprit is aimed straight at the future like a lance. What times these are.

Beneath the bowsprit the Guid Marie herself (a hideous little totem, distorted as driftwood and black as a shrunken head) has what Sant would think of as a smile within the crack that serves her for a mouth, and the chisel marks that are her eyes, like her master’s, are fixed on the horizon, where a grey smudge has become visible, a thickening in the sea.

There comes a thump from underneath her decks, some twenty feet down from Sant’s right boot.

Sant hears the thump, assesses then dismisses it. He lets the lids of his eyes fall shut – closing mah ports – and relishes across them the strum of wind and warmth and sun. Gold. It is Sant’s favourite colour.

Sant calls himself a trader, but the names smuggler, pirate, sea-wolf (or perhaps in his case a sea-fox – wily, cunning, nose ever-lifted to the breeze) would do equally well. Dame Fortune may have been a little slow to smile on Sant, but she’s smiling now, oh yes. He can smell it. He can feel it in the lifting of the sea. And all because of one man: the Golden Jew.

My Golden Jew, thinks Sant, and smacks his lips. Simply saying the man’s name is like the opening of a treasure chest: Yosha Silbergeld, my Golden Jew. Now there’s a fox, if you like. It has taken Sant years to get within the business ambit of the Golden Jew, but he’s in there now, by God he is.

Another thump. Sant heaves a sigh. All those years of readiness and waiting, and what’s his cargo? A horse. One single horse. Even Noah was trusted with two.

Ah, but… that one single horse is the Buckingham mare. Bedded easy, so Sant hopes, remembering the thump, on three soft feet of golden hay, still fragrant from the Norfolk meadows. Two hundred guineas’ worth of equine perfection. Her tiny, shiny hooves. Her Arab face, dished and curvaceous as a viola. The rolling globes of her rump, gleaming like polished walnut. And somewhere outside Stockholm, in a pine-fringed field, a stallion stands waiting for her, a stallion with a two-foot prick curved like a stick of giant coral, and all across Europe the horse-riding nobility eagerly await the progeny resulting from their union.

And Sant is carrying the Buckingham mare into Amsterdam because Yosha Silbergeld is brokering the deal. There’s some God-damned uppity new powers come into being recently under the Northern Lights, flexing their Protestant muscles, and trade with them requires both subtlety and skill.

Sant opens his eyes. The smudge of grey has broken free of the horizon and is taking shape: masts and cranes and warehouse gabling. It’s a braw time to be a man o’business, thinks Sant: the line of ships waiting to get into Amsterdam must stretch back a mile into the sea.

Yosha Silbergeld’s factotum is waiting for them on the quayside. The usual bunch of urchins, urgent as gannets, surround the man, entreating Myn heer! Myn heer! The man claps a hand to his hat and locks an elbow over his purse; Sant, looking down from the foredeck, permits himself a smile. The man calls up:

‘You haf her?’

‘Aye, aye,’ Sant calls down. ‘Any news?’

‘Ah!’ says the man. ‘Bo-hem-yah has new king!’

‘Oh aye?’ Bohemia. The arse-end of Europe, and landlocked to boot. ‘Who’s that, say?’ Sant enquires, but only to be polite.

The answer is so unlikely that for a moment he doubts his hearing. ‘Freedreek ov Heidelberg!’ comes the cry.

‘Frederick of Heidelberg?’ Sant leans out over the rail. ‘What, he as wed Elizabeth Stuart? That Frederick?’

‘Ja, ja!’

‘And what’s the Emperor had to say to that?’ In the chequerboard of European faith, Bohemia’s neighbour, Imperial Austria, is more Catholic, some would argue, even than her cousin Habsburg Spain. ‘Frederick’s a Calvinist!’

Yosha Silbergeld’s factotum pulls himself up a little taller, on his own stiff, Dutch, Calvinist dignity. He steadies himself for a bellow.

‘BO-HEM-YAH HAS CHOSE!’ he declares proudly. ‘ISH WILL OF GOD!’

Predictably, one of the urchins takes this moment to pull at the man’s pocket. The man takes off his hat and uses it to beat the boy about the head. ‘Myn heer Sant, be so good,’ he calls up imploringly. ‘Ve unload our lady-horse, please.’

*

Below the deck, the Buckingham mare gives a gentle whicker to herself. Odours fill her nostrils, flood her brain: mud, coal smoke, people. But the Buckingham mare is plucky. She has stood the voyage; now she stands the strange sounds from above her head and the appearance before her of the Guid Marie’s first mate. She lets herself be led forward under deck, tolerates the explosion of blue sky as the hatch is levered up, even the constriction of the canvas cradle round her belly. She watches with keen interest as the square of hatch rotates beneath her swinging legs and is replaced with wooden deck. When the first mate reappears beside her and tugs on her rope she understands, and trots obediently forward. Now she is on the gangplank. Her velvet nostrils gape.

And then – what was it? Did a circling gull scream too loud? Did a sail flap, just too close? The Buckingham mare throws up her head, the rope flies out of the first mate’s grasp, there is a scrabble and a scrape and the Buckingham mare, in reverse, collides with the Guid Marie and comes to a stop with her rump wedged up against the creaking rail; three legs on the gangplank, rigid with panic, and one, hind right, hanging in thin air.

Two hundred golden guineas, poised to slip into the mud of the Zuyder Zee and so be lost for good. ‘You mosh DO something!’ the factotum booms.

‘You bloody do something!’ counters Sant. ‘Yon’s your bloody horse!’

The Buckingham mare dips her head to her knees. On deck and off, Sant’s crew surround the gangplank and consult.

‘Pull ’er ’ed.’

‘You pull ’er ’ed, she’ll pull you over with her!’

‘Smack ’er arse.’

‘Smack ’er arse? You mad? Look at her – one wrong step, and she’s gone.’

The first mate moves a hand toward the rope. The Buckingham mare rolls up her lip at him and he retreats. What the bloody hell was it, wonders Sant (whit the bluidy hail), that set her off?

There’s quite a crowd now, on the docks. And out of the crowd there comes a boy: hair like pulled taffy, like frayed rope, scabbed and ragged as a beggar; and he squints up at Sant and announces, ‘I’ll get her.’

And he speaks English. That in itself would make him stand out. And maybe a bit of Gallic in there too, some tell-tale cadence in the boy’s speech, and maybe that’s no more than Sant’s imagination. Sant surveys this little dockyard offering. ‘You’ll get her?’

‘Two gulden,’ the taffy-headed one replies. ‘You gimme two gulden and I’ll bring her down safe.’

Two gulden. It’s a ridiculous amount. But make a bollocks of this, thinks Sant, and that’ll be that for any further dealings with his Golden Jew. ‘Two shilling,’ he says. ‘You bring her safe down here, I’ll give you two shilling.’ If anyone is going into the drink with half a ton of horse on top of them, better this little dock-rat than one of his crew.

‘Done,’ says the boy. He walks slowly up the gangplank, rubbing his hands together. The tide is rising still, the angle now a good twenty degrees. Sant hears his first mate query, ‘Where’d he come from, then?’

The Buckingham mare watches the boy; three legs on the gangplank, one held quivering in space. The boy clucks his tongue, and her ears swivel to the front. He rubs his hands together one last time, holds them out to her, and she licks and nibbles over his palms. (‘What’s that about?’ asks Sant’s first mate.)

Cautiously, the boy picks up the dangling rope, puts it between his teeth, and, with the nose of the Buckingham mare buried in his palms as in a cup, leads her down the gangplank, docile as a lamb.

‘I’ll be buggered,’ says Sant’s first mate.

Sant and the boy conclude their business at the quayside while Yosha’s factotum checks over the Buckingham mare. ‘A shilling,’ says Sant.

‘Two,’ says the boy, in the weary tone of one who had expected this.

‘One and sixpence,’ counters Sant.

‘English or Scots?’ the boy says, holding out his hand.

English coin is worth twelve times as much as the Scots variety. ‘English, you little punk,’ snarls Sant, digging out his purse. Damn it, even the blasted dock-rats have become a walking Bourse.

The boy bites each coin to be sure they’re true silver before buttoning them into the little bag hid under his shirt. ‘What set her off?’ Sant asks, as he makes to walk away.

‘Sunlight,’ the boy calls back. He has a wary eye on the small posse of his kind lurking at the back of the crowd. ‘It’s the sun on the water. They don’t understand it. Don’t know what it is.’

A shilling and a sixpence for a bloody sunbeam. Sant watches the boy, hightailing it down the quay, posse in pursuit. Long may you live to enjoy it, he thinks, viciously.

MUNGO SANT STANDS in the first-floor chamber of the house of the Golden Jew, on boards not one whit less sturdy, wide or scrubbed than the deck of the Guid Marie (and considerably better polished – the floor is like black ice), and waits for the tiny creature bunched up on the far side of the table to cease shuffling through the many papers piled before it and acknowledge his existence.

‘A good crossing?’ Yosha Silbergeld has half-a-dozen languages at his disposal, depending on his listeners and his mood: English for Sant; Dutch for his neighbours; French when he is feeling louche; Russian if lugubrious; Latin, which never fails to impress, if he finds himself in a tight spot; and if angry or upset, nuggets of Yiddish surface in his conversation like fruit in a batter.

‘Easy,’ says Sant, proud. ‘Four days, there and back.’

A squeaking noise. Yosha gets from one end of his office to the other by pulling himself about in a burgermeister’s chair. Think first a laundry basket, only made of oak, most vigorously carved and comfortably upholstered, and cut away at the front. Then put it on eight curved wooden legs, each with an ebony caster. There. A burgermeister’s chair.

Yosha’s own legs dangle out the chair’s cut-away front, shapeless and jointless as those of a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Map of Europe
• Cast of Characters
• Prologue: June 1630
• Part I: May 1619–December 1622
• Part II: August 1610–October 1617
• Part III: July 1623–July 1630
• Acknowledgements