Blood Red Sea

13

They found billets and, with the Ottoman army only a few hours off, managed to snatch a few hours of uneasy sleep. They awoke again as it was growing dark.

‘Like a ruddy bat,’ said Hodge. ‘My eyes will wither in me skull.’

Nicholas was staring at the whitewashed wall opposite. Now washed red in the setting sun. He felt sure one of them would die here.

They wandered through the streets, and a woman called down from a balcony. ‘Evening, my gallants!’

Nicholas glanced up. A woman old enough to be his mother, dark hair piled high, low-cut dress displaying ample bosom. He bowed politely to her and she laughed, a rich, throaty laugh.

They found their way to the armoury and Smith and Stanley were there already. They chose basic arquebuses and powder pouches and balls, and found breastplates and backplates and the small morion-style helmets which they liked best. Little more than steel caps, doing nothing to protect the face or neck, only the skull, but they left the vision free and weighed little. Ideal for those who moved fast.

Smith started to object, saying a flying splinter could take a jawbone off, but Stanley said, ‘They’re right. Their strength is their speed, remember.’

Stanley and Smith went heavy armoured, with a pair of poignards at their waists, mighty swords hanging from their left sides, a pair of pistols each.

‘But oh for my old jezail,’ murmured Smith. ‘I could take out Lala Mustafa from the walls with just one shot.’

‘That would change things,’ agreed Stanley. ‘It would mean the Ottomans mustafa new commander.’

‘Please,’ said Smith. ‘Not now.’

He hung as many as a dozen grenades from his belt.

‘Don’t stand too near me,’ said Stanley. ‘You’ll go up like a powder store.’

Smith’s teeth showed white. He was burning to begin.

Nicholas swished his own light sword. He knew how Smith felt. It was the only way to manage the tension and not run mad. The only way without women.

They stood on the walls and watched the vast Ottoman camp establish itself by torchlight. A magnificent sight, hundreds of camels and mules, companies of slaves, great squares of tents and broad avenues, just like at Nicosia.

‘They look like an army fresh from home still,’ muttered Smith.

And it was true. Many of them had barely fought yet, merely sacked, and were as keen as any for the battle to begin.

‘Bragadino said we have four thousand men,’ said Stanley. ‘Venetian and some Spanish. You sure that’s seventy thousand out there?’

‘Thereabouts,’ said Smith. ‘Why, do you want more to get your teeth into?’

Gangs of slaves began earthing up ramps for the cannon, and they saw one huge shadowy shape in the darkness, a gleaming bronze barrel like some monster from the ocean deep. Its team of twenty-four powerful draught oxen strained under the lash to drag it forward over the flat dusty earth.

‘The first bombardment will start tomorrow,’ said Smith. ‘Not full assault, just ranging shots, testing shots.’

‘Still,’ said Hodge, ‘best not try to stop the balls with your belly, eh?’

Stanley grinned. ‘That’s the spirit, Master Hodge. That’s the spirit.’

But the next night brought someone else into the siege. A legendary name. They were not alone.

Famagusta harbour was closed off by a giant chain, hanging from two stone windlasses the size of castle keeps. It rendered the harbour and the few galleys within both safe and useless. The Turkish fleet bobbed at anchor beyond it on the mild summer sea.

But at night a single galley came in among them as the sky clouded over and the stars were lost. It moved without a single torch or lantern, a black shadow on the dark sea.

Then its guns roared out at near-point-blank range into the hulls of the sleeping Turkish ships, and three of them were sunk within minutes.

The black galley came to the mole beside the great chain, where all but two of its passengers and crew crawled on to the harbour wall under the pikes of the guards. The last two aboard scuppered her immediately outside the chain and swam for it. The galley sank in the shallow water, forming yet another obstacle in the path of any enemy trying to break into the harbour.

A messenger came to Bragadino, dining late with the knights.

‘An arrival by sea, sire!’

‘By sea?’

All looked up. There in the doorway stood a man of some sixty-five years of age, perhaps seventy. It was hard to tell, for he still gave off the strength and energy of a much younger man. A long fine nose, straggly beard and deep-set eyes circled with dark rings.

The Chevalier Romegas, Knight Commander of St John. The most feared sea-wolf in the Mediterranean.

They embraced heartily.

‘Before God it does me good to see you here!’ said Giustiniani after Romegas had told his tale. ‘And leaving three Turkish galleys sunk in your wake! The Chevalier Romegas does not become any milder with the years.’

The old sailor’s eyes gleamed. ‘I’ll become milder when the Sword of Islam is beaten into a pruning hook.’

They drank to that.

‘I bring you all of six marines to fight,’ he said, ‘no galley, no supplies. But still more than Venice or any other power sends you, eh?’

‘Bitter truth.’

‘I also bring you fifty Muslim pilgrims, on the haj, whom we took captive coming here. They have been well treated. You may find them useful bargaining chips.’

Bragadino absorbed this surprising news. ‘What of the Holy League?’

Romegas’s dark-ringed eyes looked pained. His heart was sorrowful for this courageous governor.

Bragadino read him instantly. ‘None?’

Romegas shook his head. ‘In consistory they continue to argue. Don John presses very hard, but the Genoese are against any joint operation with the Venetians. The French are as elusive as ever, Philip urges caution-’

‘Their world is coming to an end!’ cried Smith. ‘Now is no time for caution! Why, I’d take Genoa and Venice by the scruff of their haughty necks and dash their heads together till they clanged like bells. Do they not understand what danger they are in? Do they not realise?’

There was a sombre silence.

Then Bragadino squared his shoulders. ‘It is as before. No help will come. We are alone.’

‘We should get more sleep while we can,’ said Hodge.

‘Sleep now?’ said Nicholas. ‘That’s a joke.’

The Ottoman miners would already be cutting into the ground with picks and shovels, behind their wooden and wickerwork screens. Among the tents, Janizaries would be sharpening their scimitars, combing and waxing their fine black moustaches, praying their last prayers to Mecca.

‘Well, I’m sleeping,’ said Hodge, and he vanished back to their billet. Nicholas followed a while later.

He came down an alleyway and there in a doorway was the woman he had glimpsed on the balcony. She must have been not far off forty, yet she was a handsome woman, tall for a Greek, her dark hair piled up and offset with a red ribbon. The black dress and lace mantilla of a widow in mourning went ill with her voluptuous figure and the wicked light in her bold dark eyes.

‘Ah, it’s my fair-haired gallant,’ she said when she saw him. ‘Give company to a poor widow, far from home?’

‘Me too,’ he said. ‘Farther than you. I am from England.’

She looked him up and down as if inspecting a ham in a butcher’s shop, almost smacking her lips. ‘A young Englishman? I am from Venice.’

‘That explains it,’ he said drily.

‘Explains what, Baby-face?’

‘The Greek women are more. . guarded. Whereas your Venetian women are well known to be more generous in every way.’

She scowled, hands on her hips. ‘Impertinent baby-faced whelp.’

He sighed. ‘How much?’

It was terrible how the imminent prospect of death caused such lust.

‘I was going to offer you a favour for nothing,’ she said, ‘seeing as the battle starts tomorrow and you’ll be stretched out dead by nightfall, while we women with more wit will live happily for many another day. Men, though, they go over the cliff like lemmings and call it heroism.’

He considered. Then he bowed and said, ‘Madam, please pardon my impertinent words.’ Half her age he might be, but she was alluring and life was short. Besides, he had never found the mock battle between men and women so hard to engage in. Indeed, the enemy, whether wives, widows or maids, had often enough taken him by the hand and drawn him into their bedchambers without even an assault on his part. He thought of the jailer’s daughter in Djerba. That had been risky indeed.

He smiled and took her hand now, the fingers brightly beringed, gazed into her eyes and murmured, ‘I was confused for a moment there by your unspeakable and heavenly beauty.’

She pulled her hand free, tossed her head, and said, ‘You lie like a Roman cardinal.’ Then she put her arms around his waist and pulled him to her.

Ah, the little feints, the charges and retreats. .

He could smell the perfume in her hair.

‘We poor widows,’ she said, ‘the downtrodden and oppressed, who are we to be proud? We need protection. Come inside, then, English soldier boy, though it feels wrong, you being about the age of my own son.’

They stepped inside the doorway and he kissed her full and generous mouth.

Didn’t they say a woman her age was most warm and passionate? ‘Like a fine wine,’ he murmured.

‘You,’ she said. ‘Never trust a man so smooth with words.’ And she nudged the door shut with her bare foot.

He had leapt from the bed and was standing naked in the chamber before he realised why.

In his last few seconds of sleep, he had heard the distant roar of a great gun, and then the thump of an iron ball against stone.

It was dawn. It had begun.

She sighed and stretched, hair tousled across the pillow. ‘Come back to bed.’

If he didn’t get his breeches on immediately, it would be too tempting.

‘Didn’t you hear that?’ he snapped.

She opened her eyes. ‘What?’

‘The Turkish guns. It’s started.’