“And you’ve prepared against this threat?”
“Our towns are fortified,” said the Afentiko. “The militia drills regularly. But none of them have ever fought a war, and we have no professional soldiers.”
“Would you accept Venetian soldiers in Rhodes?”
The Afentiko considered this. “Yes,” he said. “It would hearten the people.”
Foscari concealed the elation that burned in his veins.
“I will send a message to Venice,” he said, “and see what the Council and the President have to say.”
* * *
One of Foscari’s fast dispatch boats was sent to Venice. Proceeding under sail, with its sixteen oars providing power when the wind was not favorable, and swapping in a fresh set of oarsmen at each stop, Foscari reckoned the journey would take ten to fourteen days. Since he knew what the Council’s decision would be once the message arrived, he was reasonably easy about the outcome.
Venice would take any steps necessary to secure Rhodes and prevent Spiridon, or anyone else, from threatening Venetian hegemony. More ships, plus Croatian and Albanian mercenaries, would soon arrive to buttress the island’s defense.
Foscari settled into a routine of pleasant activity. He dined with the Archbishop, the President, the Prime Minister, prominent citizens, and the island’s small Venetian community. He toured the island, and inspected the local militia and the fortifications. He drilled his ships every other day, and integrated the Afentiko’s small fleet into his maneuvers. He played football with young Nikolaos in the courtyard of the Grand Master’s Palace, and told the boy of Unione Venezia’s great victories over the wretched, stumbling teams of the Umbrian League.
He didn’t take his ships to Episkopi to look into the port for Spiridon’s ships. The Afentiko had agreed to the arrival of Venetian soldiers, and Foscari wanted to be on hand to prevent Kanellis from changing his mind.
Two weeks after his arrival, Foscari invited the Afentiko to dine aboard his flagship. He spread Venetian and Rhodian banners and flags, and brought aboard cold mezedes, plus stews and ragouts that could be kept warm at the cook’s station till needed. Two-thirds of the rowers were given leave ashore, along with the marines, and once out of the harbor the Barbarigo traveled under sail alone while the oarsmen gathered forward, by the cook’s station, for their own meal.
Foscari saw the barometer was falling. This might be the last fine day for a while, his last opportunity to offer hospitality to the Afentiko.
Foscari shared a table with the Afentiko right aft, shaded by the poop awning. The table itself, and the pair of carved high-backed chairs, had been borrowed from a local Venetian merchant.
Long silver clouds scudded on the western horizon. The sea was so bright and alive with reflections that it looked as if the sun had scattered gold dust on the waters. Water splashed under the counter, and the lateen sails formed brilliant crescents overhead. The scent of the pure sea breeze made Foscari’s nerves tingle.
Foscari sipped wine from his Murano goblet, nibbled mezedes, talked with the Afentiko about their business: about the island’s preparedness, about where the Venetian soldiers would be garrisoned.
And he thought about poison.
It was unfortunate, he reflected, that Rhodes was simply too small to survive on its own. It had to be incorporated into something larger, either the Venetian empire or the kingdom of Spiridon.
Consider the choice: Spiridon in his purple robes, a crazy butcher, a genocide, and an unpredictable, vindictive, murderous master.
Or Venice, which wanted only money and power.
Given all that, Foscari knew how he would choose, were he the people of Rhodes.
Not that he was prepared to offer Rhodes the choice. The Council had provided Foscari with a poison, made from the castor bean, that would kill the victim in three to five days, and would appear at first to be a bad case of influenza, maybe one that degenerated into pneumonia. There was no way to diagnose the poison, no way to connect Foscari to the death, taking place as it would several days after the administration of the toxin.
After which Venice would act to protect the Afentiko’s Venetian wife and children.
Serafina might rule the island in place of her husband—with a staff of Venetian advisors, of course—or it might be necessary to take the whole family under Venetian protection, to be sent back to Venice for their own safety. Another husband might eventually be found for Serafina, but her children would be sent to convents, where they would remain for the rest of their days.
There could be no question of their being given a chance to have children of their own. The Republic would not countenance a Greek dynasty taking root in Rhodes. The Afentiko’s line would die with his children.
The main question was the matter of timing. It might be better for the Afentiko to die after the Venetian troops had already landed and were in a position to intervene. But then again, such a death might be seen as too convenient for the Venetians.
Whereas now the death would create confusion and fear, a situation that would be resolved by the arrival of Venetian reinforcements. And Foscari judged that his own sailors and marines could secure the city if necessary.
It was sad, of course, that the Afentiko had to die. Foscari liked him. He was a remarkable man, and he’d been a loyal ally of Venice during a period when the Republic was weak and needed a bulwark on its eastern flank. But now Venice was ready for another round of expansion, and a sovereign Rhodes would just get in the way.
The Venetian State, the same State that had decreed the Black Annunciation, required a death, and Giustinian Foscari was a servant of the State. The State had saved him, raised him, trained him, and given him purpose. He would put his personal feelings aside and act as the State required.
Foscari turned to the Afentiko. “Loukas,” he said. “I have a special bottle of wine I’ve been saving, a Bardolino blended with a very fine Rondinella. It would be splendid on such a lovely afternoon, don’t you think?”
The Afentiko smiled. “I will take the ammiraglio’s recommendation.”
Foscari went to his cabin for the bottle, returned, opened it, and poured equal measures into the Murano goblets from which they’d been drinking all afternoon. The poison fell easily into the Afentiko’s glass from the ring on Foscari’s second finger—poison rings carried with them an absurd air of melodrama, but they worked.
Foscari felt his heart beating fast as he raised his glass in a toast. But the Afentiko wasn’t returning his gaze, but instead was looking aft, over the taffrail.
“Is that my barge?” he asked.
Foscari spun and pulled the old Fujinon 10x50 binoculars from their waterproof case.
Yes, the Afentiko’s barge was flying toward them, its lugsail set and its oars thrashing the water white.
A few strides brought Foscari to the break of the poop, where he began shouting orders to the crew. Oarsmen ran to their stations. The helm went up, the lateen sails rolled around their masts as the galley wore around, and the Barbarigo pitched as the bow bit into the waves from a new angle. The oilskin seals were removed from the row ports and the sweeps deployed.
Once the sweeps bit the water, Barbarigo was within hailing distance of the barge within minutes.
“War!” came the cry. “Spiridon’s landed at Lindos!”
Foscari clenched his teeth and turned to see the Afentiko looming over the stern rail, a fierce look on his bearded face. He held the Murano glass in his big, clenched fist.
Alarm clattered in Foscari at the sight. He took a step toward Kanellis, snatched the glass from him, and hurled it along with his own glass into the sea.
“This isn’t the time for wine!” he shouted. “This is the time for fighting!”
The Afentiko looked at him in surprise, and then amusement crossed his face.
“You Latins!” he said in his
broken English. “You’re such drama queens!”
* * *
It was too late in the afternoon to send the fleet south to Lindos, a port town about sixty kilometers south of Rhodes City. The town itself was assumed to be holding out: there would have been plenty of warning as the Cypriot fleet rolled over the horizon, and the town featured a massive thick-walled acropolis built, like the Grand Master’s Palace, by the Knights of St. John. Foscari had inspected the fortifications only the previous week, and the militia and the stored provisions seemed perfectly adequate to hold such a strong place.
Foscari sent his fast dispatch boat west at nightfall, with instructions to head straight for the Corinth Canal to warn the Venetian relief force. Plans were made to row to the aid of the town next morning. The allied galleys were made ready, their masts and sails taken down and stowed ashore, and a full complement of catapults and other large weapons set up on board.
The Venetian galleys also set up galleries amidships, a kind of raised bridge running athwart the vessel at its midpoint. These were stations for the marines, who could fire crossbows and ballistas down into enemy ships.
But there was one Rhodian ship still under repair. “I’ve accelerated the work on the Leo Gabalas,” the Afentiko told Foscari. “But the earliest the ship can touch water is two days from now.”
“We’ll fight without it,” Foscari shrugged. He had confidence in his squadron, in his men.
If he could defeat the enemy ships, he thought, he’d strand a large part of Spiridon’s army onshore where they could be trapped and killed, and probably capture a large number of his transports as well.
But as it turned out the allies were unable to go to the relief of Lindos the next day. As the barometer had predicted, the weather turned: a storm blew up overnight, a northerly gale battering the mole and sending spurts of white water shooting over the jetty and up the walls of Fort St. Nicholas.
Because they were designed to be propelled by human muscle, and to be wrestled by their crew onto a beach at night, galleys were light, fragile craft, and did not fare well in storms. Foscari would not risk the island’s defense by defying the weather, and he worried that his small dispatch vessel, set out into the teeth of the gale, would be overwhelmed.
Over the next three days the wind shifted easterly, then south. Rain darkened the walls of the city. Foscari could only hope the Cypriot fleet was being hammered on an iron shore.
No such luck: on the fourth morning, the rising sun broke through storm clouds to spread a bloodred stain on the water and to illuminate enemy ships approaching. King Spiridon’s navy came on in a long line: sixteen galleys, two more than the Afentiko’s information had suggested.
Foscari, using his binoculars from the battlements of Fort St. Nicholas, saw that they were a heterogeneous group, built—like the Afentiko’s fleet—from a variety of designs. Some had a single bank of oars, some double, some triple. Some, like the Venetian ships, carried their rowers inboard the hull; others, like the ships of ancient Athens, had a very narrow hull with outriggers staged out from the bulwarks to house the oarsmen. Some, like the Venetians, carried a spur jutting out from the prow, just at the right height to smash through the bulwarks and tear a red swath through enemy rowers. Others, judging from the curl of white water at the bow, deployed an underwater ram.
Whatever their design, the ships were extravagantly painted: greens, blues, crimson, and gold leaf. It was as if the circus had come to town. The dyes alone must have cost a fortune, let alone the gold.
Platforms had been built above the bow of all the Cypriot ships, and Foscari could see smoke drifting downwind from each enemy forecastle.
That meant each of Spiridon’s ships carried Greek fire, jellied gasoline from the fuel tanks of cars and boats stranded by the Change. Jellied gasoline worked well enough in firebombs lobbed by catapults or hurled like grenades, but if you were going to squirt the stuff from a siphon, you had to warm it up first and turn it liquid, and so each gasoline tank rested over a carefully controlled fire.
“Are they themselves attacking?” Foscari turned at the sound of Serafina’s voice—she’d dashed down from the citadel on word of the enemy approach.
“I myself don’t think so,” Foscari replied in Venexiàn. “They themselves can’t get in, and I’m not myself going out.”
“They’d pick off your ships as they cleared the breakwater.”
“If they themselves had any sense,” Foscari said, “that’s what they’d do. But I myself don’t know how sensible their admiral is, since he blew himself all the way up here in a gale, half his men at least are going to be seasick, and he’s going to have a hell of a time getting home rowing straight into the wind.”
Serafina raised binoculars to her eyes. “They themselves are keeping formation well enough.”
“Well enough,” Foscari admitted. “Can you yourself tell if they’re roped together?”
She seemed surprised. “They themselves are too far apart, aren’t they?”
“They could themselves use long hawsers.”
Serafina peered through his glasses. “But why?”
“To keep us from getting in between them.”
It’s what he would have done if he were the Cypriot admiral, lashed every vessel together and turned any action into a land battle, where superiority of numbers would give him an advantage.
The Afentiko, called away from a meeting inland, arrived a few minutes later, out of breath from his run along the mole. The enemy fleet paraded past the walls, turned neatly in succession, and paraded back the way it had come. Then one ship—the largest, with three banks of oars—turned and made across the gray swells toward the harbor entrance. White flags blossomed from its forecastle.
“A parley,” the Afentiko said, in mild surprise.
There was another surprise when the galley came to a halt just short of Fort St. Nicholas, and a man with a big voice called out from the bow.
“We want a parley with the Venetian commander!”
Foscari looked at the Afentiko and shrugged. “With your permission? We might learn something.”
The Afentiko returned his shrug. “If you like.”
King Spiridon’s envoy was a woman, a rangy, green-eyed creature in her thirties who stalked like a leopard onto the quay, dressed in olive-green suede pantaloons, a chain-mail byrnie so brilliantly polished that she seemed clad in silver, and a steel cap. She carried a curved saber at her waist, and identified herself as Colonel Chadova.
No one wanted to take Chadova through the walled city to inspect the defenses, so she and her two aides were escorted by a double line of Venetian marines to the old town hall, a gray, bunkerlike Brutalist building on the waterfront now used mainly for storage. Foscari had a word with the marine lieutenant beforehand about what was expected, and so the envoy and his two aides were made to surrender their weapons, then thoroughly searched, before being allowed into the presence of Foscari and the Afentiko.
The Afentiko said the room had been used for “press conferences,” whatever those were, but in any case it was well lit by the tall windows overlooking the water, and once stored furniture had been shifted to the side, and a pair of thronelike chairs set up for the allies, there was a clear space for both the marines and the envoys. Serafina stood quietly in the corner, watching with cautious eyes. Behind her was an old carving of an ancient coin, a godlike face crowned with the proud motto Demos Rodion, the People of Rhodes.
Colonel Chadova padded into the room with a dancer’s glide, lithe and purposeful, a performance directed at her audience of two. Her silver chain mail rippled. Her green eyes looked out from beneath dark hair accented by a white streak. She looked first at the Afentiko—Foscari sensed Kanellis’ muscles tense, as if he was under threat—and then the eyes slowly turned to Foscari, and he felt the almost physical impact of that stare, a sense that his entire being was bei
ng read, as if he were the text of an inferior recipe and Chadova a masterful and scornful cook. His heart gave a sudden lurch, and he felt the hairs on his nape rise. He tried to force his body to relax, not to give himself away as had Kanellis.
“You are the Venetian?” she asked in Greek.
With effort, Foscari held her gaze. “I am Ammiraglio Foscari,” he said.
The green gaze shifted again to the Afentiko. “I did not ask Loukas Kanellis to this conference,” she said.
“Anything you can say to me, you can say in front of him.” Foscari ground his teeth at the hash his inexpert Greek made of this complicated idea, but Colonel Chadova seemed to understand him well enough. The emerald eyes turned again to Foscari.
“Perhaps it is news to you that Lindos has fallen,” she said, and Foscari felt the Afentiko stir on his chair.
“The acropolis was taken the morning after our landing,” Chadova continued. “I myself led one of the storming parties.” Satisfaction curled the corners of her mouth. “The defenders were killed to the last, for the crime of defying His Majesty King Spiridon.”
The Afentiko took a moment to recover from the surprise, and when he spoke, his voice had deepened with anger.
“Your king will pay for this atrocity.”
Colonel Chadova didn’t even bother to look at Kanellis. “When His Majesty Spiridon is crowned King of Rhodes in your Grand Master’s Palace,” she said, “you may then repeat that threat.”
Now her green eyes finally turned to the Afentiko, and they glittered with menace. “I can promise that you will still be alive at that point, though perhaps you may not be . . . entirely intact.”
Foscari sensed that Kanellis was about to unleash an angry retort, and saw no point in letting the conference degenerate into a pointless exchange of threats.
“Colonel Chadova,” he said quickly. “I believe you carry a message for me?”
Chadova’s amusement was almost palpable. She turned back to Foscari.
“I beg your pardon, Ammiraglio,” she said. “I intend merely to point out your situation. Lindos has fallen, and as the army of Spiridon is superior to the local militia, the City of Rhodes will fall. Our fleet outnumbers yours, and you have no hope of a victory at sea. If you continue in a futile effort to support the Kanellis regime, you will inevitably fail, and your life will be forfeit.”
Tales of Downfall and Rebirth Page 38