She paused for a moment to gauge Foscari’s reaction. He hoped he managed to keep his face immobile under her unsettling gaze.
“It is your misfortune to be matched against an invincible leader,” she said, “one given dominion by the Powers of Land, of Sea, and of Air.”
Foscari smiled thinly. The only Power of the Sea that he recognized was the Republic of Venice.
“Powers of Air?” he said. “Does your king intend to fly here?”
Her eyes flashed. “Were you to confront the Powers directly—were you to be so unlucky as to meet Them—you would not mock.”
Foscari allowed skepticism to drift across his face. Chadova watched for a long, intense moment, then returned to her subject.
“We offer you an honorable alternative to a pointless death,” she said. “If you agree to sail your ships through the Corinth Canal to Corfu, we will permit you to leave peacefully.”
Foscari had expected something of this sort. “You wish me to abandon the alliance formally contracted between Rhodes and the Venetian Republic?”
“I offer an alternative to your own extinction,” Chadova said. “Why not take it?”
“Because the choice is not mine. I am a soldier and a servant of the Republic. I can neither create nor abandon policy. That is the function of the Council and its President.”
He touched a finger to the corner of his mustache and caught a surprised look on the face of his marine lieutenant. “My duty requires that I decline your kind offer, Colonel.”
Chadova lifted an eyebrow. “This is your decision? You will die for your ridiculous republic, and sacrifice all those who depend on you?”
“Perhaps I won’t be the one who’s sacrificed,” Foscari said. “Venice has many more ships than those you see here.”
“When we capture your squadron, we will nearly double the size of our fleet.”
Which tells me something of your plans, Foscari thought. Again he touched his mustache, a signal to the marine lieutenant.
“Unless you have a more sensible proposal, Colonel,” he said, “I believe our parley is at an end.”
“You will die,” Chadova said.
“So will you, madame,” he said. “So will everyone.”
The important thing, Foscari thought, was not death, but the life that preceded it, ideally a life in service to an ideal. An ideal such as the Maritime Republic, which guaranteed peace and order and prosperity wherever its ships rode the water, and which provided poor children like young Giustinian Foscari a chance to rise in service to the State, rise at a time when so many others were dying of starvation, of banditry, of war . . .
Colonel Chadova’s last words were for the Afentiko. “The Powers will burn your sad little kingdom to ashes,” she said, and turned to go.
Foscari looked at the marine lieutenant and gave a nod, this time a more explicit instruction. The lieutenant stepped behind Chadova, put his hand on his short saber, half drew it, and hesitated.
He had probably never attacked treacherously before. Very likely he had never had to kill a woman. Possibly he had never killed anyone at all.
The hesitation was the lieutenant’s undoing. Chadova sensed his intention and acted instantly—she took a step rearward, her leg between his, and as she turned banged him with a hip to unbalance him . . . She reached for the lieutenant’s short saber, and snatched it from his hand and drew from the scabbard all in the same motion.
Foscari shoved his chair back and reached for his cutlass as the lieutenant reeled back from a pair of cuts to his head. Everyone else in the room was frozen in surprise—the Afentiko was partly turned away, looking by his chair for a briefcase full of papers and reports, and probably had only the vaguest idea what had just happened.
Chadova’s burning green eyes swung to the Afentiko, and the reddened sword swept upward, poised for another cut as she charged.
“For God’s sake kill them!” Foscari shouted into the surprised room.
Chadova was already arrowing for the Afentiko, who only now turned and realized his danger. Foscari’s heart thundered in his ears. He lunged forward with his cutlass and knocked Chadova’s sword up, but she kept going, ducking under both blades and lashing out with a boot to kick the Afentiko in the face, knocking him back into his chair just as he was trying to stand. The chair swayed, threatened to tip . . .
Foscari kept moving forward and knocked Chadova bodily back, out of range of the Afentiko . . . and then she seemed to turn into a whirlwind of steel, the sword appearing to come at Foscari from everywhere at once. Her emerald eyes were ablaze, seeing straight through Foscari to the Afentiko he protected, and her face appeared to become almost translucent, as if she wore a mask and now her true self was revealed, a feral, unholy being of burning energy that radiated through her translucent skin.
Foscari gave way under Chadova’s attack, barely able to parry the blade that seemed to whip at him from every angle. Chadova’s attacks were strong beyond reason, and Foscari felt every impact all the way to his shoulder. With each strike Foscari’s hand grew more numb from the repeated impacts. Terror tangled in his nerves as he feared that soon his sword would fall from nerveless fingers.
One of the marines saved him, lunging at Chadova from behind with a boarding pike and piercing the polished chain-mail coat. She barely registered the thrust, her snarling expression unchanged, but there was a slight hesitation in her next attack, and Foscari was able to parry it and make a cut on her arm. The cut seemed to do nothing: her riposte was so fast that Foscari had to make a leap backward to avoid being skewered.
His back heel came up against the Afentiko’s chair. He could retreat no farther.
The marine made another thrust with his pike, and this time put more weight behind it, so that Chadova was forced to take a staggering step away from her prey—she might possess unnatural strength and speed, but the marine was heavier than she, and physics still worked. Foscari slashed again with his cutlass, and this time he felt the right ulna crack under the weight of his blade.
Chadova’s sword dropped from her useless right hand, but in a move so fast that Foscari saw only a blur, she snatched the hilt from the air with her left and turned away from Foscari to sweep it in a long arc behind her, catching the marine in the knee. He gave a yelp and fell heavily, and Chadova whirled again to bat Foscari’s next thrust aside.
Foscari tasted blood and fear. More marines charged into the fight, armed with boarding pikes or with cutlasses and target shields. Chadova gave a shriek as she fought them, not a cry of fear but a scream of rage that left the Venetians half stunned. A far-from-human light burned in her eyes.
There was a wild chaos of slashing blades. Foscari’s own attacks flailed empty air. One of the marines staggered back with a wound to the throat that spurted red, another jerked back a hand missing two fingers. But two more pikes drove through the polished chain mail, and Foscari hacked into the melee and felt an impact as he slashed through Chadova’s wrist.
A third pike struck home, and three strong young men put their weight onto the shafts and bore the wildly flailing woman to the floor. A swarm of Venetians surrounded the body and pierced and hacked in a frenzy of inept and desperate butchery. Blood sprayed and filled the air with its coppery scent.
And eventually Chadova’s bloody head turned, and Foscari saw a promise in those green, inhuman eyes—a promise that this was not by any means over—and then the light in her eyes went out.
Foscari leaned on the chair and tried to catch his breath. His marines were standing around the room still half stunned, still trying to understand what had just happened. Chadova’s two companions, unarmed and apparently without supernatural aid, had died quickly. And he’d lost two marines, one of them an officer, with a number of others wounded.
He turned to see the Afentiko in Serafina’s arms—during the fight he had got out of his chair someh
ow, and Serafina had pulled him off into a corner. She was trying to staunch the flow of blood from the nose that had been broken by Chadova’s kick.
Foscari straightened, took a breath, and limped over to the Afentiko. “Are you all right, Contessa?” he asked.
Serafina was still tidying her husband’s face. She looked over her shoulder at Foscari, a ghost of fear still haunting her face.
“Demons,” she said. “I told you.”
“Was this the one you met earlier?”
“No. He was a man with”—she gestured toward her face—“with a red beard. Forked.”
“How many more of them are there?”
She turned back to her work. “God knows.”
The Afentiko took Serafina’s handkerchief and held it to his nose. “You attacked an emissary,” he said.
“Yes,” Foscari said. “And treacherously, at that.”
The Afentiko gestured with his free hand. “Why? Spiridon will find it very hard to forgive.”
Foscari looked at Chadova’s corpse. “Chadova tried, a bit crudely, to drive a wedge between us. I wanted to show everyone in this room—everyone in Rhodes—that I and the Republic are committed to your defense.”
And he wanted as well to force commitment from the Venetian Council. There were those at home who opposed Foscari’s policy of expansion, who regretted the expense of the fleet that took ten thousand fit young men from the city for years at a time, and who might have tried to compromise with Spiridon, or even hand Rhodes to him in return for a nonaggression pact. Now an enraged Spiridon would prosecute a war with Venice and give the Republic no chance to back out, even if it wanted to.
Foscari turned back to the Afentiko. “At least she told us the enemy’s plans.”
Kanellis was surprised. “Yes? How so?”
“She said they plan to capture the fleet and add it to their own. That means they intend to take the city quickly, by storm, and take our ships at the same time. Their blockade is here to keep us from escaping to sea.” He shook his head. “It won’t be a siege, my friend. Spiridon plans to come right over your walls, just as he did at Lindos, with creatures like that”—he pointed to Chadova—“in the lead. Do you think your militia can face them?”
The Afentiko turned pale beneath the blood that stained his face. Foscari turned away from the blood on the floor and looked at the medallion, Demos Rodion, on the wall of the chamber.
“If not for the storm,” he said, “they could be here already.”
He turned to the Afentiko. “Thousands of refugees will be coming into the city and to the other old Crusader forts like Kritinia and Monolithos. You should take care that the enemy isn’t among them—I wouldn’t put it past Spiridon to send infiltrators into the city.”
The Afentiko nodded. “I’ll take care. And I’ll warn the militia captains about the . . .” Words failed him, and he nodded at Chadova. “Those.”
“Call them ‘champions,’” Foscari advised. “Words like ‘demon’ or ‘djinn’ might be too unsettling.”
The Afentiko nodded, then winced at sudden pain from his broken nose.
“And the official story,” Foscari said, “should be that Chadova attacked treacherously, not anyone else.”
Again the Afentiko nodded.
“I’ll ready the fleet to sally tomorrow, before dawn,” Foscari said. “If we can hand them a severe enough defeat at sea, Spiridon’s army may try to withdraw before they’re stranded.” He shrugged. “And in any case, we can keep them from landing reinforcements.”
Serafina looked up from her ministrations.
“Go with God,” she said simply.
The other side seems to have the gods, Foscari thought. Little ones, anyway.
But he bowed, and thanked her for her concern, and then turned to see that the bloody mess was cleaned up.
* * *
The heads of Colonel Chadova and her two aides were delivered to the boat that awaited them off the mole. The sailors aboard the boat were horrified, but there was no immediate reaction from the enemy warships, which rowed off just before sunset, presumably so they could find some safe beach somewhere to run the galleys ashore and let the crews get some sleep.
Foscari was aboard Agostino Barbarigo by three in the morning to ready the fleet for war. Slow fires were lit below the tanks of Greek fire to make sure the jellied gasoline liquefied, and turns were taken at the pumps that filled the hydraulic reservoirs that would shoot the flaming gasoline at the enemy. The bows and forecastles of the ships were covered in hides, and the hides drenched in sea water to protect against Greek fire, their own as well as that of the enemy.
Stores and fresh water were carried aboard, and then the pilot Soteria was brought aboard to lead the fleet past the breakwater and into the open sea. The eastern sky was beginning to turn pale as Barbarigo first took the deep-sea rollers, and turned its prow toward the enemy. The other eleven galleys, each following the stern lantern of the ship ahead, trailed in an obedient line. The galley rowed east to clear the land, the lights of the city twinkling off its starboard quarter, and then the squadron arrowed southeast. The sewage-smell of the city was washed away by the rich scent of the sea.
Soteria remained aboard. Her thorough knowledge of the coastline might be useful, and for the occasion she’d equipped herself with a spear, shield, and an old Italian helmet dating from the Second World War.
At dawn Foscari raised three flags onto his poop to mark his ship as that of the ammiraglio. The central flag was that of Venice itself, with the winged Lion of St. Mark. The flag to port was Foscari’s personal ensign, the silhouette of a black galley sailing on an indigo sea. And the flag to starboard was the banner of Unione Venezia, with a slightly different version of the winged lion.
The Cypriot fleet was not visible, no silhouettes on the pale eastern horizon, and no shadows skulking against the shoreline. Foscari could only hope they were sleeping late, and that he could trap them drawn up on the shore in some little cove.
Spray crashed over the bows as the Barbarigo knifed into a wave, and Foscari felt moisture on his face as far back as the poop. The sea had moderated since the previous day, but there was still a storm to the southeast that was pushing long lines of rollers straight into the galleys’ teeth. The wind itself had veered southerly, bringing a faint scent of land, and was raising smaller waves that ran across the rollers like swarms of fish darting just below the surface.
That southerly wind could prove crucial, Foscari knew. You could spit Greek fire only downwind, and the enemy fleet would be coming with the wind behind them. If the Venetians used Greek fire against their enemies, it might get blown back in their faces.
The sun rose out of low clouds, and scarlet winked on the foam that flew from the sweeps. Spray crashed along the length of the hull as the squadron took a more southerly course.
And then the lookouts at the bow gave a cry, and Foscari grabbed his binoculars and hurried forward along the gangway to the forecastle. From a position between the two catapults, he leaned forward, binoculars pressed to his eyes, and got a face full of foam for his troubles. He snarled, wiped the lenses of the binoculars, and took a few steps back, out of the spray.
His heart shifted to a faster rhythm as he recognized the Cypriot fleet, not in the single disciplined line they’d adopted when parading past Rhodes Town the previous day, but in a gaggle with their sails set, billowing in every color of the rainbow, their admiral taking advantage of the southerly wind to spare the oarsmen’s labors. They were due south, still ten or twelve kilometers distant.
They might not yet see Foscari’s ships, which lay close to the water and had left their masts and sails at home. Foscari decided to set his course more easterly, to keep the enemy between his ships and the land and give himself more room to maneuver.
He returned to the quarterdeck and ordered the course change, t
hen told the trumpeter to signal the ships into battle formation. The call sang out in the still morning, and was reinforced by a wigwag signal from the ship’s signals officer, standing in plain sight on the poop with his flags flashing in the sun. The signal was passed up the line, and the other galleys, drummers rapping out a faster pattern, began to surge forward to take position on either side of the flag, until they formed a line abreast.
The eight Venetian ships were on the left, with the flagship seventh in line. The four Rhodian ships were on the right, in the place of honor, because the engagement would be fought in their home waters.
Foscari went forward again, with his binoculars, to view the enemy fleet. They continued to sail on for some time, oblivious to the approaching allies until the distance between the ships had been halved—and then there was a sudden change, the colorful sails blooming like great bladders as they spilled wind, the yards dropping on the run, the masts toppling like falling timber into their cradles . . . Surprise was complete.
Foscari ordered the allied fleet to turn directly toward the enemy and increase speed. He’d engage as soon as possible, and hope to keep them on their heels. As the Cypriots straggled into line abreast, Foscari kept his binoculars pressed to eyes, looking for sign that hawsers were being passed between the ships to rope them together.
Apparently not. The enemy response was too frantic to suggest any kind of plan at all.
And the enemy ships, once they straggled into formation, demonstrated poor station-keeping. Which was unsurprising, considering they were all built to different designs.
Foscari returned to the poop. Below him the hundred and forty-four oarsmen surged back and forth in one great mass, like the tide advancing and retreating into a narrow chasm, each surge in answer to the drummer, below Foscari’s feet under the break of the poop, as he beat the sounding boards. The sea-rollers were coming in from right abeam now, throwing spray over the ship, and Barbarigo rolled heavily as the oarsmen hurled her forward. That would make it difficult to aim the catapults properly on the approach, but it would affect the two sides equally, so Foscari decided not to worry about it.
Tales of Downfall and Rebirth Page 39