Blood Red Sea

5

Gunners readied their guns, palms sweating, arms shaking so badly they wondered how they’d ever manage to fire them. In only a minute or two, these wooden walls around them would be erupting in their faces. Some among them would never hear anything again, not the song of the birds nor the voices of their own wives and children. Strangely, dread steeled them. They’d better goddam win, if that was the price they’d pay.

Arquebusiers crouched with their wheel-locks or more primitive matchlocks, murmuring their rosaries and prayers to the saints. They thought of their women. Hearts raced, blood pulsed, expressions tensed white, ready for the approaching cannonade.

A seabird wheeled overhead and gave a cry.

And in the prow of La Real, their crazed commander, Don John of Austria, was seen in full suit of armour, dancing a galliard to the music of pipes and a viol. It was high noon, the zenith of the day’s golden glory, before the slaughter to come and the bloody fall of the sun.

On the Turkish left, Kara Hodja narrowed his sun-wizened eyes and thought he understood what those great, silent galliasses must mean. He gave the order for his huge force of some ninety galleys and galliots to pull to larboard, well wide of them and out into open sea.

‘Their left wing moving out, sire!’ called a lookout.

‘Flanking movement,’ said Giustiniani.

‘Make sure Doria moves out to meet them!’ called Don John.

Meanwhile a low, well-oared fusta was moving off from Kara Hodja’s squadron fast, with an urgent message for Muezzinzade’s central squadron. It was Stanley who spotted it and advised Don John to give the order to hit it.

‘That speck? Why?’

‘A hunch,’ said Stanley. ‘I think Kara Hodja has suspicions of our galliasses.’

‘Damn it, yes, you’re right!’ exclaimed Smith. ‘The Turks will hold back if they get wind of the plan.’

Don John gave the order, and sent the same to the galleys to left and right. The Merman, the Fortune, the Santa Ana, the Wheel and the Serpent.

‘Hit that fusta travelling from the Turkish left to the centre! Blow it out of the water!’

The sea erupted in white geysers around it; the low boat was soon swamped, yet still it struggled on. Then it was low-raked again, savagely splintered, dancing wildly in troubled sea. It took more than twenty cannon shots to finish it. It rose and came down again no more than a shattered skeleton of its former self, and quickly went under with all hands.

On the Sultana, this skirmish was briefly noticed then dismissed. The Christians were practising ranging fire.

Kara Hodja raged. He made a move to send a second fusta, a third. But already the Turkish centre was now approaching the silent galliasses. It was too late.

Francesco Duodo commanded the centre galliass, with Jacopo Guoro to his left.

The mighty Turkish centre split apart to move around them. They were obstacles, nuisances, but no more. A feeble ploy by the Christians to break up their line, but only for a few moments.

The Turkish line was now almost parallel with the galliasses.

Aboard the galleys of the Holy League, forty thousand men held their breath.

Duodo raised his arm.

All along their high sides, portholes fell open and black muzzles appeared.

Kara Hodja stared through his telescope, and his mouth fell open. Twenty, no, thirty guns a side. No wonder they could hardly be moved.

By the beard of the Prophet.

On the deck of the Turkish galleys passing nearest to these silent supply ships, men’s eyes flared wide. There was a gasp, a wail.

Duodo’s arm dropped, and matchcords were lowered to the touch-holes.

Each galliass fired a volley from its open side so massive that the entire ship rolled sidelong with the recoil. But this had all been reckoned for by master shipbuilder Franco Bressano back in Venice. The guns were safely roped on their carriages, allowed to run back on their wheels and the huge ships well able to roll with the blast.

The effect of the volleys left and right into the Turkish line, effectively an explosion of enfilading fire, was devastating. The galley nearest to Duodo’s ship was momentarily rolled clean out of the water, coming back down in pieces. The one beyond was blown into two halves when its powder stores were ignited. Other balls ripped onwards down the line, and five or six more galleys beyond were badly damaged.

‘Return fire!’ screamed the nearest Turkish captains. ‘Sink those monsters!’

Even as they moved to reply, their oar slaves pulled desperately to move beyond the dreaded ships. Duodo and Guoro then ordered a second volley, for only every alternate gun was fired each time, with an interval for cleaning and cooling. The two galliasses turned a few degrees into the passing fleet, the guns lowered as far as possible. Any height and they might begin hitting their own wings behind.

‘Fire!’ cried Duodo, and again the guns roared.

Hulls splintered open, sails tore from shattered masts, seawater poured in. Chained oar slaves panicked and began to turn their stricken vessels around wildly in the centre of the line, oblivious to the savage beatings from the mariners, and soon became entangled with the neighbouring galleys.

Still untouched by a single shot, the two central galliasses began to wheel slowly though a complete half-circle, their minimal complement of oarsmen just enough to effect the manoeuvre. Then they could give fire from their other sides with guns still cool and ready.

In desperation a small, fast galliot full of corsairs came rowing at those evil ships, determined to scramble up the wooden walls somehow and cut the throat of every man aboard. Then the small band of marine arquebusiers stationed aboard came to the fore. They fired from the gun portholes into the close-packed galliot and soon every man aboard was either killed or wounded. The galliot floundered and came to a halt, the least scathed throwing themselves into the sea. The rest died where they sat.

The gun teams worked like demons, the two Venetian captains bellowing insult and encouragement at them in one breath. And the Turks saw to their dismay what would come next. Another ruinous broadside. Yet they must continue moving forward.

Ahead of them, the Christian line was fast approaching. One lookout cried that there was a man in a suit of armour dancing on the prow deck of the flagship. The captain ordered him down to be beaten. Evidently sunstruck, or hallucinating with fear, the fool.

Don John removed his helmet, slicked back his hair, and regarded the approaching line.

‘A fifth of them hit, I’d say,’ muttered Smith.

‘An excellent start.’

They ploughed through the water.

Smith knelt now and lined up his jezail.

Stanley gripped his sword.

La Real was heading straight for the Sultana. What else did they expect from Don John? Commander would clash directly with commander, and on the fate of that single encounter, much depended.

‘Give fire!’ cried Don John. ‘Let battle commence!’ And he waved his jewel-hilted Spanish rapier above his head.

The guns opened up all along the line as they raced towards each other.

The Turkish galleys came on with lateen sails raked back, guns blazing.

‘I thought we reckoned they were light gunned!’ bellowed Smith. He loosed a round from his jezail. ‘What would heavy gunned feel like?’

‘Keep firing, Brother!’ cried Stanley. ‘One day you might just hit something!’

‘Hodge,’ said Nicholas. ‘We will fight together, as always. Yes?’

‘As always. At least till I sicken of the blood and go to aid the surgeon below. If he is still living.’

Nicholas nodded. ‘As you will. And if you see me mortally injured, beyond help. .’

‘Aye. And you will do the same for me.’

‘I will. I swear it.’

The guns of La Real bellowed out again, and Nicholas could have sworn one of them struck the Sultana a second time, but it was hard to judge damage. Still the Ottoman flagship came on fast, oars churning the water, kettledrums thumping like the heartbeat of some great sea monster.

Then La Real shuddered. She was hit.

It was the wretched oar slaves in the bow who were killed or maimed. Their oars dragged loose in the sea and began to ruin the rhythm.

‘Get those men off the benches!’ cried the boatswain. ‘Pull those oars in! Give me the damage!’

The bow walls were holed but not shattered, and little sea came in. But five or six men had been dismembered or killed. The mariners moved to bundle them overboard.

‘To the surgeon with them, damn ye!’ bellowed the boatswain. ‘Captain’s orders!’

The mariners cursed, every curse under the sun. Risking their lives to save the dirty skins of bloody unbelievers. One of the slaves screamed, his sundered arm on the bench beside him, as a mariner pulled him up by his remaining good arm and heaved him over his shoulder.

‘Shut your wailing or I’ll split your belly, you son of a ’Gyptian whore.’

They lugged or hauled the maimed Mohammedan slaves back to be treated. Before going for’ard again ready to fight and kill more Mohammedans.

‘It’s a merry round dance, is it not!’ rasped one mariner to another.

‘Servants in a madhouse is all we are!’ roared the second.

La Real gave another lurch beneath their bare feet, and then the arrows started thocking into the deck around them.

The lines were barely a hundred yards apart.

‘Arquebusiers, hold! Any man fires, I’ll suck his eyes out!’ cried their sergeant.

La Real managed one last, ferocious blast of her five prow guns in close unison, the sheared-off ram enabling them to fire low and hit the oncoming galleys almost at the waterline, doing great damage. Yet the Turks seemed to be using guns more than expected, and galley after Christian galley was hit and began to sink. Nicholas actually felt the heat in his face as a galley a good hundred yards off, targeted and then struck by a brutally concerted bombardment from three Ottomans, simply blew up as it rowed forward, breaking into two in midair. Timbers and limbs came down in a mingled debris, oil and gore and intestines.

Then one hundred galleys or more drove into each other. A rolling, brutal clubbing sound of timber upon timber, wooden drums thumped by giants, a forest of masts dashed together by the angry hand of God.

The two flagships smashed into each other with single-minded fury, trembling and juddering. Arrows hissed in the air, a mariner fell crying with a bolt in his shoulder. Turkish archers swarmed high above in the rigging, but hopelessly exposed against the blue October sky. La Real’s arquebusiers returned disciplined fire at close range, and archers fell from the rigging like leaves from a shaken tree.

Amid the chaos, Don John’s pet marmoset, from the Americas, scampered up and down the main mast, plucking out arrow shafts and snapping them between his teeth, then throwing them into the sea with a chatter.

Then Muezzinzade showed his veteran skill. He gave a rapid signal, and with astonishing deftness, two more galleys, one on either side, closed in on La Real and isolated her. She was suddenly an island surrounded by three Ottoman ships, each thickly clustered with fighting men, corsairs and Janizaries.

‘Signal for reinforcements!’ yelled Don John. ‘Someone to break through!’

But Muezzinzade, still with greatly superior numbers, had already given the order for any galley going to the aid of La Real to be intercepted and engaged immediately, at any cost.

He was determined to avenge the damage done by those accursed galliasses, and capture the Christian flagship as soon as possible.

A great roar went up from all three ships surrounding them. Hardened mariners trembled.

‘Ready yourselves, all aboard!’ bellowed Smith. ‘Here they come!’

The Turks had it their way. It had already come to hand-to-hand fighting on deck. Their preference every time.

Ropes whistled, grapples clanged. Plank bridges crashed down.

From three different sides the enemy swarmed across, swords gleaming, eyes bright with the joy of battle.

The gallant Merman struggled to come alongside and attack the Turkish galleys from beyond. In the rigging, a woman with long dark hair plastered across her cheeks yelled out wild curses, shrieking at the enemy like some crazed banshee. It was Maria la Bailadora, a squat pistol in her hand. But the next moment, two more Ottoman galleys came along either side of her and the Merman was overrun. Maria la Bailadora fired into the midst of them but she could not reload, and a corsair swarmed up the rigging, dagger at the ready. She screamed and flailed at him, and he managed only to cut her arm rather than her throat.

His comrades screamed up from below, ‘Skewer the bitch!’

It was eerie to see a woman aboard any fighting ship, and bad luck for all. She must be a witch.

The corsair grinned and slashed at the rigging around this wild woman. She lunged at him, unarmed, ready to tear his eyes out. But her arm was weakened by the wound, the rigging ripped, and she lost her hold. He gave her a final kick in the chest and she fell to the deck below, in the thick of the enemy.

‘La Bailadora!’ cried a Spanish soldier. ‘Break through!’

Then there was a ferocious onslaught, swords clashing, pistols and muskets fired into faces at point-blank range. Even half-pikes seemed too long and unwieldy in that bloody close-quarter mêlée. The Turks were finally driven back and there lay La Bailadora, cut with a thousand sword cuts.

The last of the enemy fled from the ship, some throwing themselves overboard. The Merman turned about, ready again to come to the aid of La Real, breathing vengeance. But in the chaos of the fighting, one of the Turks or corsairs had found his way to the powder store in the bows and lit a fuse. Even as she turned, the powder went up and the bow of the ship, where most of the fighting men crowded, went up in fifty-foot flames, a beacon of fire carrying nothing but bad news.

On the right, Andrea Doria and Kara Hodja were playing a desperate game of manoeuvres. The renegade Dominican priest was moving wide and south into open sea, aiming both to avoid the guns of the galliasses, and to outflank the Christian line altogether. Then he could reform, turn and drive into them from the south, prow guns blazing.

But Andrea Doria had the blood of generations of Genoese sea dogs in his veins. He moved out and matched Kara Hodja’s squadron stroke for stroke, though the corsair ships outnumbered his own two to one. It was a damnable frustration for Doria, still barely a gun fired, while to his left the battle was raging. But he knew it was the most important thing he could do: hold off Kara Hodja, and engage only when safe to do so.

On the Christian left, it was desperate. Here, the Turks under the command of Sulik Pasha had driven forward with the fiercest speed and greatest weight of numbers, determined to break through fast.

Among the Christian ships they saw one painted midnight black, as black as a raven in mourning.

‘What ship is that, do we know?’ demanded Sulik Pasha.

‘That is the ship commanded by the sons of Bragadino of Famagusta,’ said a lieutenant.

Sulik Pasha regarded the sinister black ship in silence. Then he simply raised his arm and ordered the whole line forward at battle speed.

Minutes later, all hell was unleashed.

The Christians were outnumbered on every blazing, blood-slathered deck, yet they fought like demons, and not one single Turkish galley could break through the line.

The decks of the Raven were awash with blood, the stern cabins were aflame, and yet even amid the sheets of flame and the coils of black smoke, men hurled fire pots and grenades, and arquebuses banged out of dense clouds where surely no man could see.

Ambrosio Bragadino reeled backwards as a soldier fell into him, head half blown away. He pushed the corpse aside.

‘Guns overheating, sire!’ called the master gunner.

‘Keep firing on them!’ Bragadino bellowed back. ‘Fire till they crack!’

And so the relentless rhythm went on: guns primed, priming iron driven down the touch-hole to clear it, shake of powder from the horn, gunner’s mate near by with the slow-match in the fork of his linstock, sputter and sparkle, and then boom, the gun reeling back on its carriage, and woe betide any novice standing behind.

Turks crowded up a ladder hooked over the prow of the Raven, yelling for the Prophet, but then they were burned away like leaves in a forest fire. Bragadino had set up a brazen trump for such an assault, and now it roared like a furnace as huge gouts and sheets of superheated flame blazed from its trumpet mouth, a blaze of fire cleansing the sides of the galley as enemy troops poured over. It burned deep into the wooden walls of his own galley too, but he seemed not to care. Let the Raven go down, if she took a thousand Turks with her.

His brother fought ferociously at the stern as more Turkish soldiers swarmed aboard. He was bleeding copiously from a neck wound, face white with blood loss, but quite oblivious.

Some soldiers donned rope-soled shoes so as not to slip in the blood.

‘Sand here!’ cried a voice. ‘More sawdust and sand, for God’s sake!’

The afternoon was now as dark as dusk with cannon fire and powder smoke. Like an untimely nightfall, thick with ashen clouds and streaked with burning meteors, red-hot lava. Nuggets of Greek fire burning even underwater, dancing tongues of flame devouring sails and rigging above. An infernal scene.

‘Fall back, sir!’ cried a Spanish captain. ‘You’ll be hit!’

‘Better hit than not heard!’ returned Bragadino. ‘Press on ’em, men!’

Any signalling between ships was all but impossible, few there could either hear or see beyond their own little world of ship-bound slaughter. Yet through the dense smoke, even as he fought with a sword chipped along its edge like a woodman’s saw, Antonio Bragadino glimpsed the rocky shore of Scropha Point, barely a hundred yards off to larboard. He shouted desperately to his brother. And Ambrosio, knowing the power of the unexpected, sent word as best he could to all captains and rowers to press north towards the shore.

‘We’ll be ripped open, sire!’ cried the captain.

‘So too the Turk,’ said Bragadino.

The chaos on the left was now indescribable, yet it was chaos in part deliberately created by the brothers Bragadino.

‘The devil love chaos,’ muttered one boatswain, peering into the smoke, trying to see any rocks around them, before taking an arquebus ball straight through his forehead.

And then Ambrosio Bragadino at the prow saw a Turkish standard ahead, arising out of the smoke like a castle turret out of an early morning mist, and he knew that below, in that dense smoke, was the command ship of Sulik Pasha.

‘Straight ahead!’ he cried, even thumping his foot on the boards as if the oar slaves below would hear him.

The Raven drove blindly into the smoke, and moments later struck Sulik’s galley astern and carried its rudder clean off. In the choking smoke, every man there was half blinded as well as gasping for clean air, red of eye like rabid dogs. Yet Bragadino still urged them forward into another fight, vaulting across on to the Ottoman galley. Hanging from the stern, he flailed his battered blade at the great silver lantern there and dashed it into the sea. He would slaughter everything he found on that ship. Commander, mariners, soldiers and slaves.

Fighting almost alone at times, cut with a dozen wounds, Bragadino found in a lower cabin four fine hunting falcons and a single shivering greyhound, Sulik’s personal menagerie.

He slaughtered them all.

Sulik Pasha was captured, bound and made to kneel on the ruined deck of the Raven. Somewhere behind in the smoke, Turkish galleys were foundering on the rocks of the Greek shore. So too were Christian galleys. It was madness.

Sulik Pasha began to ask what ransom the Christians might demand for him.

Ambrosio Bragadino kicked him in the mouth. ‘You know whose ship you are now aboard?’

Sulik spat blood, shook his head to clear it, determined to show no fear. ‘I know it. Your father was Bragadino, Governor of Famagusta.’

‘Well then.’ Bragadino raised his sword.

‘It was no doing of mine. You should understand, you should-’

The words were choked off as Bragadino’s sword drove down into the back of his neck and out of his throat.

‘Sire!’ came a cry. ‘Turkish galleys have broken through! They are behind our lines!’

Lighter in the water and shallow draughted as they were, four or five Turkish galleys had slipped through between the Christian line and Scropha Point.

‘Kill them!’ cried Ambrosio Bragadino. ‘Kill them all!’