Blood Red Sea

4

Don John talked last tactics with his knights.

‘The Turks still use many archers,’ said Stanley, ‘and a good archer can shoot twenty or thirty arrows in the time an arquebusier fires once.’

‘To even it out,’ said Smith, ‘every shot must count. For the arquebusier, the report and the impact should be almost identical, i.e. point-blank range. A great commander I knew used to say you should only fire your arquebus so close to the enemy that their blood spurts in your face.’

‘An unpleasant image, but instructive,’ said Don John. ‘I will send word out. For our line, I propose to range our ships like Barbarossa at Preveza. Spread wide enough not to tangle, but not so wide as to allow a Turkish ship through our line. Oh, and,’ turning to a messenger, ‘send the order to all galleys to shear off their rams.’

‘Off, my lord? But-’

‘Do galleys ram each other any more these days?’

‘They come close, they clash, they-’

‘But they do not ram? Not as a key tactic? So I am told.’

‘No, but-’

‘Then have them sawn off. They are useless decoration.’

In the grey dawn light he had them move forward as slowly as possible out of the narrow channel into the open Gulf of Patras, towards the little island of Oxia. His hundred and fifty ships were divided into three great squadrons of roughly equal numbers.

They would form into line with Don John of Austria himself in command of the centre aboard La Real, with some of the biggest and heaviest Spanish galleys and those of the Papacy, Veniero and the Venetians in close support. On the right would be Doria, commanding Genoese, Milanese and Sicilians, and beyond him was the open sea. On the left, the Bragadino brothers aboard their black-painted ship, commanding the main Venetian contingent with some Spanish galleys and a strong force of Spanish infantrymen aboard. Immediately to their left began the rocks and the shoreline of Scropha Point and the Greek mainland. How they negotiated their enclosed position would be crucial.

In reserve position behind Don John’s centre squadron drew up the veteran Spanish commander Don Álvaro de Bazán, Marqués de Santa Cruz, ready to feed men and ships into any breaks or weakness in the line, and with him was a single, fast galley flying the much-feared Cross of Malta, and captained by one Chevalier Mathurin Romegas.

Out in front of the Christian line, six huge galliasses were towed forward to wait silent and impassive for the fray.

For so many ships to come to order after passing through the narrow channel of Oxia in file was a fantastically difficult and complex manoeuvre. But Don John was served by the finest naval commanders in Christendom, and it was vital they succeed. The moment a Turkish force got among them or behind them — a favoured trick of Kara Hodja’s — they were lost. But the wind and the sea had begun to calm as the sun rose, which was some help.

The near-silent glide of a forest of masts over the blue waters. The faintest creak of oars in the leather-collared rowlocks, the occasional shiver of the rigging. The wind gentler by the hour, as Don John had promised. The banner of the Holy League softly waving overhead, blue damask embroidered with an image of the King of Kings, Judge of All, and a golden chain linking four escutcheons: the lion shield of Venice, the red-and-silver-striped arms of the Papacy, the heraldic castles and lions of Spain, and Don John’s own arms. The warm autumn day, the gentle sea, the proud banners and the gorgeous colours — Nicholas stared around, dazed with the beauty of it, though his guts were tight with fear. How could war be so foul and yet so glorious?

Then he coped with his fear, Hodge and he both in silence, as they had always coped. By keeping busy. They buckled on each other’s breastplates and fitted their helmets, and then along with the mariners and the soldiers aboard, they laid out grappling irons, and greased pikestaffs so that boarders couldn’t grasp them and haul themselves up. In the rear of the ship, as far from the guns as possible, the ship’s surgeon laid out his bandages, his handsaw, his leather flask of alcohol. All glass would shatter.

Friars sprinkled holy water on ships’ prows, and gave absolution for sins. Priests prayed fervently to San Marco and San Stefano, San Giovanni, Santiago. The Christian archers, islanders from Sardinia and the Balearics acknowledged the finest among them, tensioned their bows and filed their arrowheads. Mariners smeared the planks with oil to slip up any boarders, and brought up barrels of sawdust, to strew on the decks as the battle progressed and soak up the blood.

Visibility improved, and the lookouts stared over the blue sea from the tops.

‘Can we see them?’

‘Aye,’ one called down evenly. ‘We can see them. Estimate eight miles off and closing on us steady.’

It was 7.30 in the morning.

‘Hold the line.’

Don John gave the order for the oar slaves to be unchained. Down below, Bernardino the bigamist, Ercole di Benedetto the sodomite and the blind Il Cazzogrosso rubbed their red raw ankles in disbelief.

‘They range out like the horns of a bull!’ called down a lookout. ‘And no reserve!’

‘No reserve? Are you certain?’

‘Quite certain, sire.’

‘They will try a breakthrough in our line,’ said Giustiniani, ‘feeding fresh troops in where needed with small, fast fustas and galliots.’

‘How very confident of them. Overconfident, perhaps. Good for us.’ Don John mused. ‘From overhead, their line would look to a passing bird like a huge crescent. While ours, a straight line, with Santa Cruz behind, and our galliasses out front — like a huge cross, perhaps?’ He smiled. ‘Everything men think real is a symbol. Only the symbols are real.’

It felt real enough for now, thought Nicholas, knuckles white on the rail.

The two vast fleets approached each other, five miles apart, then three, then two. They slowed and waited, the oar slaves skulling back and forth, holding formation.

It was a battle-front some four or five miles wide. So many hundreds of ships, so many tens of thousands of men. There had been no clash of galleys like this since the days of the ancient world. Since Augustus fought Mark Antony for the Empire of Rome, in these very same waters. Then as now, the whole of history would turn on a single day.

Nicholas leaned from the rail, teeth clenched to stop them chattering. The enemy seemed numberless. And it was only a fraction of the fleet that he could see. Was the Holy League really supposed to destroy it, send it all to the bottom, make Christendom safe again for a generation? It was a madman’s dream.

And this was the powerful Ottoman fleet that had defeated the Christians in sixteen sea battles in succession now. He narrowed his eyes against the sun and made out poop decks adorned with silken awnings, exotic oriental hues of indigo, gold and green, and huge stern lanterns topped with silver crescents, glittering and swaying gently in the sun. Across the calm waters he could hear the sound of trumpets, drums and cymbals, the reedy piping of zornas. There the Turks and the Egyptians, the Arabs and Moors, would be listening to a last recital of the Koran, kneeling and kissing the decks beneath their green banners embroidered with the ten thousand names of Allah. As ready as any to die for their God.

‘The beauty of it,’ whispered Miguel de Cervantes. ‘Oh, the beauty of it.’

On the red-hulled flagship of the Ottoman commander, the Sultana, Ali Muezzinzade and his captains were full of high confidence, both wind and sun at their back. Yet as they surveyed the line ahead of them, they felt a slight puzzlement.

Why had the Christians been so careless as to let those great lumbering supply ships of theirs drift out in front of their line?

Idiots. Their commander, this base-born boy of twenty-four years, Don John, was evidently even more of a fool than they had heard.

Yet deep down, Muezzinzade felt some foreboding he could not explain.

‘Give them a blank shot!’ he ordered. ‘By way of invitation.’

The Sultana’s centre-line gun gave a crack, a giant’s handclap, and black smoke drifted over the sea.

‘Return fire!’ cried Don John. ‘Live firing!’

‘At this range, sire? It must be. . twelve hundred yards.’

‘Crank up the barrel or whatever you do. Hit something. ’Tis not far off, and God knows there’s enough targets to choose from. Hit them, that’s an order!’

Utmost aggression with supreme confidence. It had always been the way of the knights. And Don John himself was, among other things, a Knight of St John.

On the deck of La Real, every man’s gaze was upon her centre-line gun, now raised at an angle of forty degrees or more, and that first cannonball. Every other ship round about watched for the response. It was ridiculous — yet on that first ball, they felt, depended the mood of the Holy League itself, and the fate of this battle. And on this battle depended the fate of Christendom.

So may it please God, prayed the roughest mariners, chapped and salt-dried lips moving in prayer. Blessed Virgin, let it do its work, and let every ship in the fleet behold it clear.

Never such concentration.

The master gunner stooped and sighted one last time, felt the gentle tip and tilt of the deck under his bare feet, judged the precise timing of the burn. He glanced out at the masts of the enemy fleet, and then put the matchcord to the touch-hole, stood back and blocked his ears. The powder fizzed and spat sparks from the touch-hole, the muzzle lowered and then rose again in the swell, and there was a thunderous detonation and a whine. A perfect trajectory, the powder generous but not so much as to damage the barrel, the ball arcing high as a rainbow.

The destructive force of an iron ball was reckoned as its weight multiplied by its speed of travel. Like those terrible rocks from heaven that astronomers called meteors, falling so fast through the sky that they burned up, or made giant craters in the earth. This ball came down faster than any swift or falcon in its dive.

Chroniclers afterwards were often disbelieved, but in a wild stroke of luck, that first ball fired from the Christian flagship hit the flagship of the Turks at its stern lantern. The Sultana seemed to shiver and roll, followed a moment later by the sound of the impact travelling over the water to La Real. They saw the wooden gunwales of her stern explode in a halo of splinters and could even hear screaming. It was a devastating hit.

The effect on morale was tremendous.

Amid the cheering, Don John’s high, carrying voice was heard. ‘God is with us! Attack, all speed ahead!’

Ali Pasha, the muezzin’s son, face bright with anger, had evidently given the same order. The great kettledrums boomed out from the slave decks of three or four hundred galleys, and the two mighty fleets surged towards each other over the mild blue sea.