The Capsina. An Historical Novel

"None."

"How are we to do it?" asked Mitsos. "The moment they see us they will send after their men."

"There is no time to lose," said the Capsina, quietly. "Hoist the Turkish flag," and she looked at Mitsos as if questioningly, and Mitsos met her gaze.

"Yes," he said, "it is one of the things I do not like, and I am unreasonable. There is no other way of getting in, and all things are right to save Vilia. I would turn Moslem if so I could kill more of them. Oh, Capsina, I quite agree with you. I will even hoist it myself. How comes it you have one?"

"Because I am one who looks beyond to-morrow," said she, much relieved. "I made it in Hydra myself."

The signal was made to Kanaris, and a few moments afterwards they saw the Turkish flag run up on the Sophia. The wind still held, and the Revenge took a reef in to let the Sophia join her, and by the time the hulls of the Turks had risen above the horizon line of water, the two were sailing close together.

They approached quickly, under a steady and singing west wind, and before two o'clock they could already see the thin line of cutting ripples breaking on the shingle, and yet from the Turkish ships came no sign. They lay at anchor some furlong from the shore, it would seem deserted.

The Capsina's orders were to be ready to fire on the word, but if possible to pass the Turkish ships without firing a shot and cast anchor between them and the shore. Her object was, if the men had landed to take Vilia, to cut them off from their ships, which, if possible, they would capture; but at present there was no means of telling in what state things were; only the deserted appearance of the Turkish ships argued the probability of the raid having set forth. The Capsina, if this probability should prove true, had given orders, signalling them to Kanaris, to leave one-third of the men on the ships and land with the rest in pursuit of the Turks, for if, as was now certain, since the brigs had been allowed to approach so close, they had no suspicion that armed ships of the Greeks were in the gulf, they would have attacked Vilia with all their available men, leaving a handful only on their ships.

As they came alongside, with sails already furled, moving only by their impetus and ready to swing round and cast anchor, a Turk strolled across the deck of the ship nearest to the Revenge, and, leaning carelessly on the bulwarks, shouted in Turkish, and for answer had only the hiss of the lapping water and the sight of Mitsos's unfezzed head, for the Capsina had told the rest to keep out of sight; and as the appearance of a woman on the bridge would have seemed odd to even those indolently minded folk, she had left Mitsos alone there, while she crouched in concealment behind the bulwarks. At that suspicion seemed to awake, and he popped his head down and was seen no more, and a moment afterwards, just as the anchor of the Revenge splashed plunging into the sea, two shots were fired in rapid succession from the Turk's bow gun, which was pointing out to sea and evidently aimed at neither the Sophia nor the Revenge.

At that the Capsina jumped up.

"That is a signal," she cried; "there is no time to lose! Down with the devil's flag and up with the cross!"

A great cheer went up from the men as the blue-and-white ensign was hauled up the mast, for, like Mitsos, they put the hoisting of the crescent among the things they "did not like," and in three minutes the first boatloads were on their way to the shore. Along the beach were drawn up the boats in which the Turks had landed, guarded only by a few men, who, as the Greeks drew near the shore, fled incontinently into the olive-groves that grew down to within fifty yards of the sea, and climbed to the foot of the pine-forests of the upper hills.

"Let them run," said Mitsos, "for I could ever run faster than a Turk," and he vaulted clean and lithe over the boat's side, and pulled her in through the shallow water to the shore. "Eh, Capsina," he added, "but it won't do to let those boats stop there, else the men will be embarking to their ships again when we chase them, and sail off with our prizes. Dimitri, see that as soon as we have gone all boats are taken away from the shore and tied up to the Revenge or the Sophia."

"So shall it be," said Dimitri. Then: "Oh, most beloved little Mitsos, cannot I come with you?" he asked; "for I should dearly like to hunt the turbaned pigs through the forest."

Mitsos shook his head.

"It is the Capsina's order," he said, "and we must not leave the ships without good garrison. But," and his eyes twinkled, "when I am after some fat brute, who trips in the brushwood, and calls on the prophet who shall be very slow to help, I will think of you, Dimitri. Meantime you have your hands full. Board the Turkish ships, one by one, with three-quarters of the men from the Sophia and Revenge together, for they have no boats, and cannot reach us, and make ready supper, for I doubt we shall get no dinner to-day, except only food for joy. They will not have left more than half a dozen men on each ship."

"And those half dozen?" asked Dimitri, completing the question with a look.

"Yes, it must be so," said Mitsos. "And now off with you!"

The second boatload and the third came racing to land, and using for greater expedition the deserted Turkish boat to disembark the men, in less than half an hour the whole contingent, some four hundred and fifty, were ranged ready to start. Mitsos had in vain endeavored to persuade the Capsina not to come with them; they would have a run fit to make a man burst, he said, up the hills, and at the end God knew what rough-and-tumble fighting. But the girl, breeched like a man, and carrying musket and pistol, scornfully refused to be left behind, and, indeed, she seemed fit for any work. Mitsos looked at her with candid admiration as she trotted briskly along up the slope from the beach by his side, and:

"It is like being with Yanni again," he said. "When the lad found his legs too short for the pace, why, he would lean on me, so," and he drew the Capsina's arm within his own, and bade her give him of her weight. And the Capsina, flushed and panting a little, did as he told her.

Mitsos had been intrusted with the ordering of this raid of the raiders, and he called a halt as they got to the edge of the pine-wood, and repeated his instructions. The men were to form a long open file on each side of the path leading up the hill, so that should the Turks have turned and scattered through the woods on the signal of recall they might not slip past them. Fifty men were to stop there on patrol at the edge of the wood so as to intercept any who might have passed the advanced body, who, if they marched through the pine-wood which extended to within a mile of Vilia without encountering the enemy, were to form again on the open ground.

"And this, too," said Mitsos, in conclusion, with a voice of most joyful conviction: "the Turks are certainly a work of the devil. Therefore, it is entirely our business to hate them and to kill them. This is the last raid of these men. God has willed it so, and has made them short of leg and the more easily overtaken, short of arm and the easier to deal with at close quarters. Therefore" – and he raised his voice – "open out right and left as I gave the order."

And the men, with mouths full of laughter at the little Mitsos's homily, opened out.

The pine-wood through which they hoped to hunt the "turbaned pigs" grew thick and tall above them, and the ground was muffled with the fallen needles. Here and there, in spaces where the pines grew thinner, sprouted a tangle of scrub and brushwood, but for the most part the ground was bare of undergrowth. The track, a cobbled Turkish road, wound round the contours of the hill, and thus those in the wood on each side had to march the more slowly, allowing for the deviousness of the path. The morning was as if borrowed from the days in the lap of spring; the mid-day sun shone with the cheerfulness of April, peeping like a galaxy of warm-rayed stars through the clusters of needles on the pines, and the west wind, fresh and vigorous from the sea, gave briskness to the going of the blood. Glimpses of the snows of Cithaeron far and high in front carried the foot on after the eye, and the steepness of the ascent melted fast under vigorous feet. As the line went forward up the mountain-side, the sea, like a friend, rose with it, as if to watch and guard its foster-children, till a ravine cut crossways through the mountain hid that cheerful presence from the eye though its crispness lingered in the limb. Here the trees grew somewhat thicker, a spring had flushed the hill-side with a more stubborn growth of low creeping things, and owing to the windings of the road those who marched on either side were hanging on their footstep to allow the followers of the path to keep up with them, when the Capsina beckoned to Mitsos, who was forcing his way through a belt of young poplar which grew in the open. He paused, and, seeing what she had seen, crawled into cover of the pines and passed the word down to halt, and that those on the path should leave it for shelter of the bushes.

The slope of the ravine opposite them was thickly covered with trees, but high upon it, three hundred feet above them, and a mile away, was a little group of glittering points, winking and flashing among the trees, like the dance of the sun on water, and moving down towards them. Now and then, as if the sun had disappeared behind a cloud, they would be hidden from sight by a thickness in the pines, to burst out again in a fleet of bright moving spots where the ground was clearer. The advancing line of the Greeks had halted, those on the path had made concealment of themselves under the trees; and but for the bright specks opposite the mountain-side seemed tenanted only by the whispering pines, and only watched by a few high-circling hawks.

The Capsina was standing by Mitsos, and the lad's eyes blazed with a light that was not the fury of hate which the burned ruins of Elatina had kindled, nor veiled by the softening of pity for a man hung at his own yard-arm, but the clear, sparkling madness of the joy of fighting – the hungry animal joy of scenting the desired prey.

"Oh," he whispered, and "oh," again, and with that he looked up and saw the circling hawks. "They will be nearer before night," he said, "and fat with pickings. It is all as clear as sea-water, Capsina, and easier than smoking. We wait here exactly where we are, but closing up a little, and very still, till the Turks strike the bottom of the ravine below us. Then a volley, perhaps two, and, for they will break and scatter, then every man to feed his own knife and pistol. If it please you, I will give the order."

"And think you Vilia is safe?" asked the Capsina.

"Oh, woman, how can I tell? But, safe or not, there is nothing to do but what we are doing. We only know that the devils are not in Vilia now and are coming to us. We deal with them first. Is it an order?"

"Surely."

Mitsos passed the word right and left and sat down, taking no notice of the girl, but drawing his finger along the edge of his long knife. Once or twice he drove the point tenderly and lovingly into the bark of a tree, but for the most part sat smiling to himself, purring, you would say, like some great cat. Suddenly he turned to the Capsina.

"Get you back to the ships," he said. "This is no work for a woman that we have on hand. I would not have a woman see it."

The Capsina laughed softly.

"In truth, little Mitsos, you know not much about women. Who told you that women have soft hearts and fear blood? Some man, no doubt, for it is not so."

"It will not be fit for you," said Mitsos again. "Will you not go back?"

"Certainly I will not."

Mitsos sat still a moment frowning.

"It is true that I do not know much about you. But – "

"But then I am not like a woman, you think?" asked the girl, with a sudden anguish at her heart.

"Yet I would there were more women like you," said Mitsos. "So be it, then. Look, they are getting closer."

Meantime the Greek line had closed up, and Mitsos stole away in cover of the trees to give the orders. The signal for firing was to be one musket-shot from the Greek line, given by himself. If the Turks stood their ground, the firing was to continue; if they broke each man was to be his own general, and his business was to kill. Turks were good marksmen, but they were slow of foot; and the wood was thick, and knives were the gift of God. The Greeks would collect again (and Mitsos smiled like an angel militant), when the work was done, in the place they now occupied.

Then came the space of quivering delay, when men could have found it in their hearts to shriek aloud with the straining tension, pulling like pincers at their flesh, while they were compelled to stand still and watch in silence that little glittering patch dancing and shining down the mountain-side. Mitsos for his own part was conscious of no thought but an agonized desire for tobacco, and to Kanaris the fact that he had left three if not four piastres lying loose on his cabin table was the source of an immeasurable regret; a stray lock of the Capsina's hair, which had escaped from her cap, and blew now and again against her cheek, was an annoyance of nightmare intensity, but all watched the growing, glittering patch. In another ten minutes it was nearly opposite them on the hill-side in front, some quarter of a mile away, and they could see that the men were hurrying along, half running, half marching unencumbered by booty or captives; and at that Mitsos drew a sigh of relief, for he knew that they had not reached Vilia when the signal of recall turned them back. Then he took his musket up from the ground where he had laid it, and holding it ready, with finger on the trigger, looked round at the Capsina.

"It is nearly over," he whispered. "Indeed, I am in a hurry to-day," and she smiled in answer.

Slowly and now with perfect steadiness, though five minutes before his hand had been like some ague-stricken thing, he raised the musket to his shoulder, and picking out one of the foremost men who were coming down the path opposite, kept him balanced on the sight of the gun, for, with the thriftiness of his race, he saw no reason why his signal to the others should not be in itself of some little use, and as the man stepped on to the little arched bridge that crossed the stream below, fired. The man spun round and fell, and a volley from right and left indorsed his shot.

He shook some powder out of his flask into his hand.

"That is a good omen," he said. "Oh, Capsina, I am most exceedingly happy!"

The Turks had halted for a moment, and a few fired wildly into the trees. A bullet struck the ground at Mitsos's feet, burying itself in the pine-needles, and the lad ripped up the ground with his knife, and put the bullet he was going to ram home on the top of his charge into his wallet again.

"To be returned," he said, and fired, and there was joy in his heart.

A second rather straggling volley came from the almost invisible Greeks, and at that the Turks stood no longer, but broke in all directions, some following the stream in its course to the valley, some charging up the hill where the Greeks were posted in order to get back to the ships, some rushing up the hill-side again in the direction of Vilia.

"Shall we go, little Mitsos?" said the Capsina, as if she would ask him to take a turn about deck.

They were standing not far from the path, and Mitsos for answer pushed the Capsina behind a tree.

"Fire at those coming up the path," he said, "and for the sake of the Virgin remember that I am in the brushwood not far in front," and he jumped over a low-growing bush.

About fifty Turks had kept together, and were coming up the path towards them at a double. Some two dozen Greeks had already begun running down the path after the others, and there were a few moments' tussle and fighting, two or three falling on both sides, but the Turks struggled through them and hurried on. Mitsos, the Capsina, and a few others fired coolly and steadily at them from cover, but they soon passed them and were lost in the wood behind. Mitsos threw his musket down.

"The knife and pistol for me," he said. "Come. The patrol outside will talk to those."

For the first few minutes the odds were largely against the Greeks, for many of the Turks, despairing of escape, had hidden themselves in clumps of brushwood, which, as the Greeks came on, spurted and bristled with fire, and some number were wounded, but a few only killed. But when once they got the ambushed Turks out of the nearer hiding-places, and on the move again, the odds were vastly the other way. The trees were so thick that, as Mitsos had seen, muskets were of little use, and it was hand-to-hand fighting, or pistols at close quarters. Pistols, however, required reloading, and time was precious, for the main object was to prevent the Turks from reforming, or gaining open ground where they could make an organized resistance. But knives were always ready to the hand, and needed no charging but the arm-thrust, and in a little while only occasional shots were heard, and hurrying steps slipping on the muffled floor of pine-needles, or the short-drawn gasp of the striker or the groan of the struck. Now and then a couple of figures, with perhaps two more in pursuit, would hurry across a piece of open ground, and but for that a man on the slope opposite would have seen only the hill-side, green and peaceful, and heard the whispering of the trees above his head, or what he would take to be the sound of the wild boars routing and tramping in the undergrowth, and have suspected nothing of that dance of death raging under the aromatic pines. He would, perhaps, have noticed that the hawks were wheeling in large numbers, and very silently, without their usual shrill pipe, above the trees, and would have said truly to himself that there was carrion somewhere below them.

Mitsos and the Capsina had kept close together, but Kanaris, cool and business-like as ever, had lost them almost at once among the trees, for he had turned aside a moment to investigate a musket-barrel which pointed out of a clump of oleander by the stream, and had been rewarded for his curiosity by having his hair singed by the fire which passed close to his temple. Mitsos had paused a moment and laughed as he saw Kanaris draw back a step or two and jump with knife raised into the middle of the clump.

He shouted "Good-luck!" to him, and turned in time to see the Capsina fly, like some furious wild-cat, holding her pistol by the barrel in one hand and her long knife in the other, at a man who was crossing her between two trees just in front. He saw the Turk's lips curl in a sort of snarl, and he put his hand to his belt a moment too late, for the next the Capsina's knife had flickered down from arm's-length to his throat, and the butt of her pistol caught him on the temple. He fell sprawling at her feet, and she had to put one foot on his chest as purchase to pull the knife out again.

"Yet she is a woman," muttered Mitsos to himself, and, wheeling round, "Ah, would you?" he cried, and another Turk, rushing at the Capsina, who was still tugging at her knife, got Mitsos's weapon between his shoulder-blades.

The girl turned. "Thanks," she said. "I owe you one. Pull my knife out for me, little Mitsos – pull; oh, how slow you are!"

Even in so short a time the tide had completely turned, and the Turks were but as game driven from one cover to another. The Greeks who had gone off in pursuit of those who had fled down the bed of the stream were returning, for no more of them were left to be slain, and the fight was centring round a copse of low-growing trees more in the open and higher up the hill. The majority of those Turks who were not yet slain had taken refuge here, and already the place had proved expensive to the Greeks, for more than twenty lay dead round it. The brushwood was so thick that it was impossible to see more than a yard or two, and while a man was forcing his way in after some Turk in front of him, a shot would come from the right or left, or from closer at hand a knife would lick out like a snake's tongue, and while he turned to his new enemy, the pursued became the pursuer.

Such was the state of things when Mitsos and the Capsina came up. The latter had received a nasty cut across her left arm, and Mitsos had tied it up roughly for her, being unable to persuade her to stop quiet out of harm's way while the work was finished. But she refused, laughing wildly, for drunkenness of blood was on her, and the two went forward together.

She paused a moment some fifty yards from the edge of the copse. From the ground above it every now and then a Turk would make a dash for the cover, sometimes getting through the Greeks, who were fighting on the outskirts, sometimes knifing one on his way, or more often falling himself; and once from behind them a man ran swiftly by, cutting at Mitsos as he passed, and disappeared with a bound into the trees. The Capsina looked round at the dead who were lying about, and her face grew set and hard.

"What fool's work is this?" she cried. "We are in the open, they in shelter. Smoke them out."

She caught up a handful of dry fern, and firing a blank charge into it obtained a smouldering spark or two, which she blew into flames. Half a dozen others standing near did the same, and fixing the burning stuff on her knife she rushed forward to the very edge of the ambush, while from without half a dozen muskets cracked the twigs above her, and rammed it into the heart of the thick tangled growth. Other fires were lighted along the west side of the copse, the dried raffle of last year's leaves caught quickly, and the wind took the flame inward. The greener growth of spring cast out volumes of stinging smoke, and when the place was well alight she drew off the men, stationing them round the other three sides, advancing as the flame advanced, for escape through the choking smoke and fire was impossible. Then, at first by ones and twos, the Turks came out like rabbits from a burrow, some bursting wildly out and occasionally passing the line of Greeks, some standing as if bewildered and trying to steal away unobserved, others running a few steps out and then turning back again. An hour later the whole copse was charred ash and cinders.

It remained only to search for the dead and wounded of the Greeks. The dead, whom they accounted happy, they buried there on that smiling hill-side, so that the preying beasts of the mountain and the carrion-feeding birds might not touch them, but only next spring the grasses and flowers would grow the more vivid on their resting-places; the wounded they carried back tenderly to the ships. And how thick the Turks lay there the hawks and eagles know.