Blood Red Sea

8

Nicholas trembled in every muscle and nerve end with fatigue. There was Stanley beside him, cleaning his sword, head hung low. There was Smith, bloody bandage around his neck, and another about his forehead, half over one eye.

‘You are not blinded?’ said Stanley.

‘Time will tell.’

Nicholas stumbled down the narrow steps, black with blood, and there was Hodge, red to the elbows. The odour of blood in that confined space was sickening.

‘Is it a victory, would you say, Nick?’ said Hodge.

‘I would not call it that.’ He shook his head. ‘No, I would not call it that.’

‘Nor I.’ Hodge reached for a cloth and wiped down his arms. The man on the low table in front of him was dead. He covered his face with the bloody cloth, so he could sleep now. ‘But the Turks will surely not return again after this.’ They looked at each other and then, both shaking, they embraced.

Ali Pasha Muezzinzade was led out on to the deck of the captured Sultana and, on the order of Don John, allowed his final words.

He spoke with fine dignity. ‘I die as I have lived, obedient to Allah and in the service of my Sultan. A fighting man before fighting men. Give me an honourable death.’

Then he was cleanly beheaded, and both his head and the banner of the Holy League run up the mast of the Ottoman flagship.

Though desultory fighting still went on over the wide sea, little islands of warfare in a growing calm, the news spread fast. The Sultana was captured, the Pasha was dead. Allah had spoken, and the day was lost.

Don John allowed Ali Pasha’s head to be displayed for only ten minutes, and then it was lowered again, wrapped in a clean white cloth and cast into the sea. A sea so chocked with timbers and spars and corpses, masts and oars and bobbing casques, there was barely space for it to sink.

They rowed slowly over to the burning hull of the St John of Jerusalem in a captured Turkish longboat.

The timbers flaked black under their feet, the sweet smell of smouldering wood filling their nostrils as they came aboard.

In a cabin below, breathing his last, lay Pietro Giustiniani. Five arrowheads buried in him deep.

‘Care for my slave Ali,’ he whispered.

‘We will,’ said Stanley. ‘What of Romegas?’

‘He fought to the last,’ said Giustiniani. ‘And then he went over the side, two Turks in his grasp.’ He gasped and stretched in pain, and Stanley laid a giant hand on his arm.

Then he said, ‘Do not weep, Brother. I die happy.’

‘We know it,’ said Stanley. ‘I only weep to say farewell.’

‘The day is won, is it not?’

‘Aye. The day is won.’

Giustiniani’s breathing became a deep rattle in his throat, his face sank into the immobility of the dead, and then he breathed no more.

Out on deck, they found the body of Ali, Giustiniani’s faithful slave, his throat cut by Kara Hodja’s men. They wrapped him in a strip of sail and lowered him gently over the side.

Nicholas gently touched a body half burned, legs charred almost away, but head and face miraculously preserved, a handsome face, a fine scar over the forehead. A faint smile on his lips, he thought.

‘Luigi Mazzinghi,’ he whispered. ‘A year younger than I.’

‘A gallant death,’ said Smith. ‘A knight’s deepest wish. He would not have wanted to be old and grey and toothless, and turn ladies’ heads no more.’

‘No,’ said Nicholas, smiling through his tears. ‘No, he would not.’

‘They will be taken back to Malta,’ said Stanley. ‘Giustiniani and Mazzinghi, unique as heroes of both Cyprus and Lepanto. They will be buried in Valletta with the highest honours of the Order.’

It was a sea of fire, burning on into nightfall. The mariners cleared away the bodies and swabbed the decks. The extent of the destruction became clear as they passed down the shattered line, rowing carefully among the burnt-out hulls and half-sunk galleys.

Truly the death of Bragadino had been avenged, and the Vengeance of Venice had wrought an unimaginable destruction.

A single blank shot was fired from La Real, and the Christian galleys saw that she had hoisted the storm signal. And it looked likely. A sharp wind had whipped up suddenly across the Gulf, white horses were dancing.

They picked up the last survivors they could find, and then made for shelter at Porta Patala.

‘And move fast!’ cried the captains. ‘The storm comes on apace!’

Darkness had fallen long before they rounded Cape Scropha, clouds thickened and the stars were extinguished. Half-shattered lanterns swung violently from their posts, and the north-east wind whistled in the rigging as they finally struggled into harbour,

In the darkness, rolling at anchor, the soldiers diced and drank and roared their filthy songs as the rain hammered down on the battened-down canvas awnings or on their bare glistening heads.

Meanwhile those remaining Turkish galleys that could still move themselves were doomed to struggle back in the teeth of the wind for Lepanto harbour in a heavy and rising swell. Galleys so gilded and magnificent when this day had dawned, now ravaged and humbled before the majesty of nature, tossed about by the almighty storm wind that blew down from the cold mountains. They prayed to Allah the merciful, little creatures clinging to their little wooden toys, as the thunder rolled overhead like the horses of heaven.

Don John of Austria leaned back and closed his eyes. He dreamt he was playing Moros y Cristianos again in the dusty streets of Leganés, as he had when a little boy.

‘Well, sire,’ said a voice. He opened his eyes. It was the big Knight Hospitaller, Eduardo Stanley. ‘You did it.’

‘Aye.’ He closed his eyes again. ‘Aye, I suppose I did.’

The rain came down harder than ever, cold but clean, and washed the blood away. Men went out on deck, shivering but exhilarated, and raised their faces to the black wind-torn sky. The wind roared and bellowed all along the Greek coast. They held their arms wide, some danced on the deck. Out to sea, the wind lashed the waves wildly, scattering and sinking the last remnants of the ruined Ottoman fleet.

At dawn, Don John held a review.

There had been so many deaths. Both the Bragadino brothers had died of their innumerable wounds in the night, received in the desperate fighting along the shore. A lineage was extinct. Pietro Giustiniani of the knights was dead, and that gallant young knight so full of dreams of martial glory and fair ladies, Mazzinghi the Florentine. The great Chevalier Romegas was also dead.

Sebastiano Veniero was badly wounded, though he hid it, and Don John himself had been stabbed in the thigh. He said it would mend. And that mad, rake-thin poet of the Spanish ships, that Miguel de Cervantes, had been hit in the chest twice by bullets and his left hand was also maimed. He was intensely proud of his wounds.

‘Wounds are like stars in the sky, to guide others along the great highway to honour!’ he cried. Even now, he seemed determined to believe that he lived in an age of high chivalry rather than brute gun power. ‘Besides, I can still write my great epic with my other hand.’

‘What sort of epic?’ they asked him. ‘Of this great battle?’

He looked thoughtful. ‘I shall have to think about it,’ he said.

On the Turkish side, both Sulik Pasha and Muezzinzade had been captured and executed aboard ship. Kara Hodja had made good his escape. Deserters and captives gave Don John a fuller picture of the Turkish losses, and he looked grave as befits a military commander after battle.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Our losses were not small. Both our left and centre were badly mauled. But the squadrons of Andrea Doria on the right, and Santa Cruz’s reserve, escaped better, though both played a brave and vital role.

‘Furthermore, it seems the opening salvos from our Venetian galliasses did more damage than we thought. Perhaps a quarter of the Turkish fleet was damaged right at the start. In all, we estimate some fifteen thousand Christian dead, and at least thirty thousand Turk. Perhaps as many as forty thousand, with significant additional losses in the storm, which was hard against them, by the grace of God. Of our one hundred and fifty galleys, we lost some fifty. Of the Turks’ three hundred galleys, as best we can judge, they lost at least one hundred and fifty. Perhaps two hundred.’

There was relief but no cheering. You could not cheer the death of fifteen thousand Christians, nor that of some fifty thousand men. In a single day. Had there ever been such a rate of slaughter in the history of the world?

Don John finished a glass of wine that evening, set it down and then said, ‘I think this great battle of the galleys may be the last in this ancient red sea for a long time. Already, I begin to wonder if it was not a greater battle than even we realised. We have so decimated the Turk that Islam’s age-old dream of conquering Europe is surely finished. I say Christendom will turn its back now on the ancient Levant. We must look out instead across the wide Atlantic. The future is sailing west.’

All pondered and said nothing. But they all felt they had indeed witnessed something terrible, yet something of destiny.

Then Don John smiled to see them all so exhausted and solemn, and said, ‘My dagger wound shows how close I was in the fight, does it not, Sir Eduardo Stanley?’

‘Indeed it does, sire.’

‘Close enough to smell a Turk’s breath, I was. Worse than an onion-eating whore. And a mercy it was not four inches higher, or my amorous exploits would have been severely curtailed.’

‘You will be the hero of all Europe,’ Stanley assured him.

‘A passing worship,’ said Don John drily. ‘And a dangerous position. My brother Philip will be so delighted. And those hailing me today will be demanding my head on a plate tomorrow. That is how it is with men. Hosanna one day, crucify the next. Why this change, men themselves hardly know.’

He stretched back his hands, his fingers. They still ached from where he had gripped his sword hilt, hour after desperate hour. Then he clenched his teeth as the wound in his thigh suddenly made itself known again, but he made not a sound. His courtly code forbade it, and he quickly regained his expression of calm composure, even as his eyes were still watering.

‘A hero for a day, then, and still no crown.’

‘The cowl does not make a monk, nor the crown a king,’ said Smith.

‘I would have made a great king, and proved most royal, would I not? See how I commanded and inspired! A great lord of men, wise and well beloved. I would have chosen a queen of both beauty and virtue — a rare combination in women, I admit — had fine sons, ruled a happy and peaceful kingdom. But my father Charles tupped a German whore and there I was, a squawling base-born brat, and that is all my story. My single life upon this earth. I will never sit on a throne.’

The ironic lilt was gone from his voice.

‘Yet for a day, 7th October, 1571, I ruled over my watery kingdom well, and guided my men wisely. Was I not king for a day?’

‘You were, my lord,’ said Stanley. ‘You were.’