Blood Red Sea

6

As soon as the Turkish galleys were behind the Christian line they turned again and bore into the hard-pressed centre, guns ready loaded, gunners exultant. Suddenly the galleys under the command of Don John of Austria, already outnumbered by an enemy that attacked them fore, found themselves fired upon from behind as well. The most unnerving experience for any fighting men, on land or at sea.

‘They have come through! We are surrounded!’

On the battered galley of Sebastiano Veniero, twice holed in her hull but still afloat and mobile, one Spanish pikeman, a lad of no more than eighteen, snatched off his helmet and began to unbuckle his breastplate, ready to throw himself over the side and swim for the Greek shore. This battle was as good as lost.

In a trice, the point of Veniero’s sword was at his throat. The lad felt its startling pressure just under his Adam’s apple. The old Venetian sea dog glowered at him from beneath snowy-white eyebrows.

‘Armour stays on, lad. You stay fighting. Or I will kill you where you stand.’

Grapeshot from a nearby fusta raked over the deck, men ducked, pellets clanged and ricocheted off steel helmets and brass fittings. But Veniero did not move. The whole volcanic force of his will was bent on this one trembling soldier, and this example before his men. The lad rebuckled his breastplate with clumsy fingers, set his helmet back on his head, and took up his pike.

Veniero turned and gave fresh orders to his captain. ‘Make for the centre, at all speed! Master gunner, clear our way! La Real needs us!’

In the reserve squadron, the Marqués de Santa Cruz kept an eagle eye on the progress of the battle at all points. He was aware of the Turkish breakthrough below Scropha Point even before the Bragadino brothers heard of it, and immediately sent six of his strongest galleys to face them. They raced across the rear of their own lines at exhausting ramming speed, the wretched oar slaves lashed by the boatswain and his hated wetted rope-end, yet soon past feeling any pain other than their own arms and hearts and lungs, burning fit to burst. Such a speed could not be maintained for more than three or four hundred yards. Yet they closed on the rogue Turkish galleys over five hundred yards, six hundred. . A slave collapsed over the oar, blood pouring from his nose and mouth. Mariners unshackled him and pulled him free, dropped him in the bilge, face up out of kindness. Others groaned and pulled onwards.

They hit the five Turkish galleys from behind, firing at close quarters and very low to ensure they hit only the enemy and not their own. Despite the exhaustion and sickness of the slaves, the marines and pikemen aboard were fresh for the fight, and amid the chaos, Santa Cruz’s six galleys made short work of the Turkish five, sinking all but one of them, raking the other clean of soldiers and gunners at close range and then firing her. They pulled back slowly enough for the Spanish pikemen to lean over the sides and skewer enemy soldiers and sailors where they swam, bewildered and bleeding, through the smoking wreckage of their own galleys.

The Bragadino brothers closed up hard against the rocky shore, even as one, two of their own galleys were grounded on submerged rocks. The Turks too suffered grounding, their galleys suddenly groaning and tilting, the sound of twisted and tormented timbers ripped asunder adding to the general din.

It was only aboard one single Ottoman galley that it happened, yet it was the catalyst for what came next: a galley called the Star of Antioch happened to have a complement of oar slaves made up entirely of Christian captives rather than Muslim criminals. Their boatswain was particularly cruel, even by usual galley standards, and had laughingly sodomized one of their number only two days before the battle, when he discovered he was a novice monk.

‘And so white of skin!’ he roared as he worked, to the cheers of his mariners.

One of the oar slaves, a blacksmith by trade, had managed to break free of his chains. Now in the deafening press of battle, the Star of Antioch closely engaged with a Christian galley and every mariner and fighting man up on deck, the blacksmith hurriedly broke off the shackles of his fellow slaves with a boathook, biceps bulging, veins like pulsating cords. Moments later, led by this redoubtable blacksmith armed with his boathook, the slaves swarmed up from the benches on to the fighting deck. The mariners and soldiers, already holding off an attempted boarding by Spanish pikemen, were aghast to find themselves attacked from behind by a filthy, howling horde of their own slaves, half starved, skeletal thin, infested with lice and covered in sores, yet suddenly given a terrifying new strength by that strongest of instincts in the human heart: revenge.

There was wild butchery for a few moments, and then the greater part of the Turkish soldiery threw down their weapons and hurled themselves into the sea. Some of the slaves were so maddened by bloodlust that they instantly leapt after them, to stab them or drown them in the foaming, reddening water.

A neighbouring Turkish galley heard the desperate cries, saw their comrades abandoning ship and swimming for the Greek shore — Turkish territory, after all, and safety — and in a mass panic that can so easily take hold among exhausted and frightened men, did likewise.

‘Abandon ship!’

The cry spread like a contagion in crowded streets, and soon the Turks were abandoning their galleys all along the line.

The guns on all sides were firing less now, some having cracked, some simply too hot to work, and the scene became clearer to the commanding Bragadino brothers.

‘To the longboats, all swordsmen, all pikemen!’ they ordered. ‘Press after them hard! Let not one escape!’

They went after them crying ‘For Famagusta!’ They rowed over them and drowned them, they trapped them in the shallows or on the very shoreline, trampled over them and butchered them where they lay.

‘There is not enough sea,’ said one pikeman, ‘to wash this much blood away.’

But in the centre, the crux of the battle, it was going much worse for the Holy League.

Every man capable of wielding a sword or a pike held the line around La Real. Don John had given orders for the oar slaves to quit their benches and find arms of any kind, and they fought with the crew and soldiers in gallant comradeship. But with three enemy galleys surrounding her, it was desperate.

Yet again, Nicholas knew what it was like to be under siege from vastly superior forces.

The roar of cannon, the crashing and sundering of ships, oars snapping like whipcracks, the hiss and thock of arrows, the ships’ sides bristling like a porcupine. Cries and shouts, grenades and splashes, bombs and fire pots, and everywhere the gritty black billowing smoke. You could drown in another man’s blood, and men’s eyes showed as no more than bloodshot balls in a mask of soot.

A Spanish arquebusier crawled up on to the roof of the stern cabin to try to give fire over the heads of his comrades, but was immediately struck down by flights of arrows from the Turkish rigging. La Real’s mast was cracked and fallen. From the stores were dragged up makeshift wooden pavisades, covered in fat and oil, and used to build up the sides of the ship.

Something detonated below. They could not even be sure in the chaos whether they were hit, whether it was a powder keg going up, or what. Perhaps La Real was sinking under their feet even as they fought to the death for her.

Nicholas felt another arrow sheer off the side of his breastplate, glanced down to check it hadn’t gone into his arm. Safe. A matchcord on the Sultana fizzed white and Smith bellowed,

‘Ball coming in!’

Men ducked, the arquebus banged. A man screamed. A Turkish scream. The arquebusier himself. The gun had exploded, the muzzle flayed out like a flower. He was blinded for life.

Down below, Hodge worked alongside the surgeon. Then a savage burst of chain-shot from one of the Turkish galleys ripped straight through the window that should have been boarded up earlier, a window of finest stained glass, depicting the Virgin and Child. Rainbows of glass filled the air. Hodge ducked instinctively and was unhurt. But the surgeon clutched his raked belly and collapsed across the legs of the dying man before him. Hodge seized him by the shoulders and pulled him up again. The surgeon gave a last cry to heaven, a glimpse of the stars, sick of the blood-dark timbers, falling, falling. . He thrust the hacksaw into Hodge’s chest and his head fell forward.

‘I cannot,’ cried Hodge, ‘I cannot!’

He laid the surgeon down, snatched up a wooden crate and wedged it in the shattered cabin window as best he could.

The whole ship lurched. Timbers groaned and split. The dying man on the table groaned in the semi-darkness. Sweat beaded his marble-white face.

‘Take it off, for God’s sake,’ he pleaded softly, waving towards the red pulp that had been his foot.

Hodge gripped the hacksaw. Oh for alcohol. But there was no more alcohol.

There were only a last few grenades. Stanley hauled himself as high up the mast as he could and hurled one at the very last moment into the air. It exploded too high, though the defenders aboard the second galley, the Trebizond, ducked down, and shrapnel clanged off a few helmets and shoulderplates.

‘Make it count, Brother!’ cried Smith.

Stanley grimaced, teeth and lips black with powder where he had torn open so many paper-and-ball cartridges. He ripped off his neckcloth, wrapped up his last grenade, lit it, and hurled the whole bundle like a sling direct at the stern cabin of the Trebizond. The grenade detonated just as it struck the wooden sides and blew out a plank quite cleanly. Moments later a Janizary officer reeled out, clutching his bloody head.

A corsair leapt across the narrow divide between La Real and the Sultana and clung to the pavisade like a monkey, dagger between his teeth. Nicholas leaned out to cut him away but he dropped back with lightning agility. Nicholas hung over the side, one arm gripping the ropes of the pavisade, and slashed again. Again the skinny corsair dodged him. Then he plucked the dagger from his teeth, held it by the point and threw it hard and fast. It flew past Nicholas’s ear and hit someone behind. A cry. Stanley.

Nicholas didn’t even look back. He did what the corsair least expected. He let go his hold on the pavisade and dropped straight down upon him, hurling them both into the channel of water below. An instant later, two arrows thocked into the pavisade where he had just hung.

The water was narrow and choppy, the sides of the ships perilously close together. Any moment a lurch would knock them together again and Nicholas and his enemy would be crushed. Nicholas heaved himself up on the flailing corsair’s shoulders and pushed him down, expelling air from his own lungs as he did so by sheer will, against every instinct. They went under.

At any moment he expected to feel a stab in his side. Corsairs rarely carried just the one blade. But nothing. He held the corsair’s shaven head between his hands, trying to ram it against his knee. A cannonball came fizzing through the water near by and sank away into the darkness. His eyes wept, his lungs burned. The corsair bit his hand. He gouged and fought, and felt his thumbs sink unspeakably into the corsair’s tightened eye-sockets. The corsair thrashed and went limp.

Nicholas rubbed his thumbs clean in revulsion, swam for what he hoped was the stern of La Real. A rope splashed in the water near by; he clutched it with both hands, his bitten hand seeping blood where the villain had bitten him. A strong grasp pulled him up like a drowned puppy. He swiped the water from his salt-reddened eyes as he lay there gasping on deck behind the barricade. An arquebus ball slammed into the timber near by. He stared blearily.

‘Stanley, you still have a knife in your shoulder.’

The knight pulled it free and stowed it under his belt for later use.

‘Are you not wounded?’

Stanley slipped his hand under his breastplate and his fingers came out unbloodied. He patted his bulging torso. ‘Not all muscle, lad. Wadding too. All horsehair and bombast, I am. Now you need to bandage that hand, and get some brandy on it.’

Then the whole boat rocked and boomed, the Sultana alongside rocking even more violently, as Sebastiano Veniero’s heavyweight galley charged into her far side like a mad bull. A whole line of well-drilled arquebusiers stood swiftly and delivered a volley at point-blank range across the decks of the Sultana, laying low at least a dozen men.

Cheers went up, Don John swirled his rapier overhead and cried, ‘Veniero to our aid! Press on!’, and with that near-miraculous renewal of morale that comes to any group of fighting men, no matter how beleaguered and weary, when reinforcements arrive, the soldiers aboard La Real surged over the pavisades and threw themselves at the Sultana.

Nicholas glimpsed Veniero himself, the old sea dog, the old sea lion of Venice, standing at his fighting post, a bloody bandage round his thigh, one arm crooked round the mast, the other holding a stout crossbow it would have taken most men two hands to use. He raised it and fired from the hip, and a Janizary on the Sultana went down in a tumble of white silk.

‘Sire, you need to get below and have that leg freshly bound!’ cried a young musketeer.

‘Time enough when the Turks lie six fathoms down! Find me more bolts, damn you!’

A second later, a huge explosion sent the Trebizond rolling away on her side, and half her men slithering towards the far rails. Then she settled down at a steeper and steeper angle. She was sinking fast.

Someone had made it to her lower decks and sabotaged her with a well-placed keg of powder. . There was no sign of Smith.

‘Make sure they don’t grapple us as they sink and take us down!’ cried Stanley. ‘Cut all ropes!’

There followed vicious hand-to-hand fighting on all sides, as refugees from the sinking Trebizond tried to press aboard La Real in final desperation, and those aboard the Sultana, under assault from two sides themselves now, were steadily pressed back along their decks, flailing and tripping over their own wounded and dead.

At last, crowding back to the stern cabin, they threw up makeshift, unlikely-looking barriers.

Smith reappeared and stared blearily through the smoke, a wheel-lock pistol in each hand. One of his eyes was badly cut about. ‘Mattresses!’ he bellowed. ‘Goose-down mattresses! What do the devils think this is, the Sultan’s seraglio?’

Yet they would make bizarrely effective barriers to their capturing the stern cabin and Ali Pasha within.

And they needed to move fast, seize this momentary advantage. Nicholas yelled out and pointed. Across the water, not a quarter of a mile off, three or four fast galliots were ploughing towards their stricken flagship, densely manned with a fresh hundred or more best Janizaries.

‘Hit those galliots, prow gunners!’ cried Don John. ‘Don’t let them get close! And Smith, Stanley, get men on the roof! Tear the timbers off with your bare hands!’

Then a familiar voice bellowed out from beyond, ‘Get your heads down there!’

Veniero. And without a second warning, he put a matchstock to an ancient petrier he had mounted on his starboard side: a stone thrower.

An instant later the barrier of mattresses exploded in a storm of feathers, blood and bone. Smith and Stanley and Nicholas, with many a grim-faced Venetian pikeman, fought their way forward in an eerie snowfall of white goose-down, falling gently to the deck and turned red beneath their slithering boots.