The Long Sword

by Christian Cameron

  Contarini laughed. ‘They imagine we are all allies,’ the old man said bitterly.

  ‘As we imagine of them,’ Pisani added.

  With thirty-three warships, Contarini was, if not eager to engage, at least far more willing to seek out the enemy. We cruised up the channel between the great island and the mainland of green Boeotia practicing all of his fleet manoeuvres, most of which consisted of making various half-circle formations of ships and the vital art of backing water. Because the rowing was endless, all of us took part, day after day.

  I confess that I hated it. It was as hot as my image of hell, with burning winds blowing along the Greek coast and the smell of thyme in the air with animal manure and sea salt. I had a touch of something, from Athens, bad food or bad air, and I was as weak as Fiore had been. But rowing every day in the sun made me better, and stronger, and eventually I began to feel something of the strength I had had before the beating.

  We took our ease the third night on the beaches of northern Negroponte. And there our Greeks – and especially Giorgos Angelus – entertained us with stories of the days of greatness in Greece. They told us of a great sea battle fought for four straight days between the fleets of all the Greek cities and the Persians, right there, at the bend in the strait. After dinner we took our cups of wine and climbed the headlands to see the columns and collapsing roof of the temple to the Greek goddess Diana.

  ‘In our tongue, Artemis,’ Syr Giorgos said. ‘And this headland, Artemesium.’

  His companion nodded. ‘It was one of the greatest battles of the ancient world,’ Syr Giannis said.

  ‘Who won?’ Miles asked.

  Syr Giannis shook his head, the wide head shake of the Greek. ‘No one,’ he said. He pointed to the south and west. ‘The King of Sparta died over there, at Thermopylae. When he died, the Greek fleet retreated.’ He smiled. ‘It is a famous place, to Greeks. I wish to go to Thermopylae someday.’

  I had heard of the death of the Spartan king – there was a romance about the Persian Wars making the rounds in Venice. The current fashion for aping the ancient world was just in its infancy then; men like Petrarch and Boccaccio were reading the ancients and even translating them. So I was enthusiastic.

  ‘Perhaps we could arrange a passage of arms!’ I said enthusiastically.

  The idea caught everyone’s imagination, and we drank a toast to the notion.

  But first we had to fight the Turks.

  Dawn brought us a fair wind and the labour of getting our ships off the beach. But as soon as we were underway – and we were moving before the red disk of the sun was free of the eastern horizon – we could see the Turks moving toward us under bare poles. I’m going to guess that the admiral had received scouting reports the night before – why share them with me? – because he seemed unsurprised.

  We stayed with the wind under our quarters while we armed. Most of us had squires by then, but what I remember about that morning, my first sea fight, is Nerio, the proud, buckling the armour for Marc-Antonio, perhaps the humblest squire. We all served each other.

  I had commanded men before, and yet that morning, when we formed in two dense and iron-clad ranks, knights in the front, squires in the back, it made my heart soar with joy.

  I had never seen a sea fight before. I had some idea, from all the order’s drills and the Venetian drills, too, but I hadn’t experienced how different it was from a land fight. Perhaps the most difficult difference – hard to explain, and hard to endure – is the waiting and the interludes. The ships determine the pace of combat, not the knights. A battle is usually a single long grind of action and terror and amidst the terror, most men fight using nothing but their training and their fear. The grind of battle makes men tired; their armour makes them tired, their fear makes them tired, and their fatigue makes them afraid, until they conquer or die.

  At sea, it is different. At sea, battle is episodic. You face an enemy, ship to ship, and when you conquer one, you have time to breathe, to rest – and to be afraid all over again; too much time to think before the next foe. Sea battles can go on for hours, where a land battle would have been resolved at the first encounter.

  Perhaps I can sum it up like this. At sea, you have nowhere to run. And neither, under the pitiless Mediterranean sun, does your foe. There you are, locked together in a close embrace of timber and hemp, and you fight until one side is massacred.

  At any rate, the Turks came at us. I thought there were too many of them, but I was officer enough by then to mind my tongue.

  I clanked my way back to the command deck. On a galia grossa, the command deck was in the stern, raised three steps above the catwalk over the rowers, and covered by a screen of leather against archery. Even as I mounted the steps, the admiral was ordering the screen cleared away.

  He glanced at me. ‘I’d rather be able to see,’ he said. ‘You know why old men are sent to command fleets?’

  That’s one of those questions you shouldn’t answer.

  Marc-Antonio was arming him. He wore full harness, despite his years, but he winced as the chain haubergeon went over his head.

  ‘Because our bodies hurt so much we don’t care whether we live or die – curse you, boy! I only have six hairs left – no need to pull them out.’ He cuffed Marc-Antonio, but the Chioggian boy seemed to take it in good part.

  His own slave, a Circassian, handed him a spear so beautiful that I still remember it, with the Virgin rendered in carved steel on the head, and a verse of the Bible inlaid in gold. He glanced at me with an eye undimmed and full of humour.

  ‘See that I don’t have to use this, Sir William! I’m not quite the deadly hand I once was.’ He looked grimly under the leather screen and called to the helmsman, ‘Get this fucking thing sheeted away or I’ll have your hide, timoneer!’

  ‘We’ll fight, then?’ I asked.

  The admiral didn’t savage me for my temerity. Instead, he looked under his hand at the Turks, still a league downwind.

  ‘I have every advantage but numbers. Their ships are full of loot and they’ve been at sea too long and I have the wind.’ He raised an eyebrow. His left eye trembled – sheer age – but his right eye was merciless. ‘With the wind, I can swoop on them like a hawk, and they lie there-rowing into the wind’s eye, wasting their men.’ He looked aft, looked at the sun, and looked at the Turks. ‘They have almost twice our numbers, ship for ship. We’ll need to be very careful.’

  I never did learn what he meant by careful, because despite being over eighty, an age at which in most men, daring is dead, and timorousness is its own form of stubborn accomplishment, he swept down on our foes like the falcon he had himself named. A quarter league from the foe, the Venetian ships furled their lateens; the great yards came down on every deck, covering the rowers with canvas as the first Turkish arrows fell.

  I had never faced a barrage of arrows. In the first heartbeats of our combat, I got a taste of what our English archers send to the French, and I confess I did not like it. The Turks mix screaming arrows with their deadlier brethren, and I, the veteran of ten battles, was afraid of the harsh screaming.

  I was struck five times in the first three breaths of the action. Each arrow struck like a punch. None of them touched me, but they brought with them a wave of fear that cancelled much of my exhilaration at entering battle.

  Marc-Antonio took an arrow all the way through his bicep – it went under his spaulder and right through his maille.

  Juan caught him, cut the head, and extracted the arrow. Marc-Antonio’s face was tracked with tears of pain, but he blinked furiously and insisted he was well enough to fight.

  The rowers were protected for a hundred heartbeats by the sails on deck, but even as the oars went in and dipped in response to the oar master’s rhythm, the sailors were clearing the sails off the yards and the yards were rotated amidships and laid along the edges of the catwalk.


  One of our advantages was our three great galleys. The Turks had nothing like them. Even our ordinary galleys were bigger and often longer than the Turks, but our great galleys towered over them.

  Even as the third and fourth volleys of Turkish arrows flashed in the sun, our centre was again gathering speed. I was no sailor then, but even I could see that we had not lost way as we’d coasted during the brief transition from sails to oars, and now the oars were sweeping like wings, or the legs of a mechanical centipede.

  The Turkish centre attempted to back water, but their flanks carried forward, sweeping like arms to surround us. In a few moments, we could see Turks on almost every hand, and the sky was full of arrows.

  My heart almost failed me. On land, to be surrounded is to be defeated.

  I didn’t know much about the sea.

  The master mariners at the steering oars gave us a slight turn to starboard, the oars frothed the sea in a massive effort, and we shot forward like a gargantuan crossbow bolt. We struck a Turkish galley and trod him down entire – our vast weight pushed his ship down into the water, the near gunwale went under, the lighter galley filled with water instantly and went down, so that as we swept over the wreck we could see men drowning under our feet, and her mast caught in our steering oars for a moment.

  I looked aft, and the admiral was pointing at something aloft, a flag out of place, perhaps.

  We turned again. I saw that the dying enemy had ripped away our starboard steering oar, and that limited our ability to turn. And a small cloud of Turkish galleys came at us.

  Now, every ship carried a ram – not under water, like the ancients, but a spur above the water for breaking oars and fouling the enemy cathead and his rowing benches. Nonetheless, such was my experience that I assumed that the ram was the principle weapon and could sink us.

  Even as I watched, two Turkish galleys turned nimbly out of their crescent formation and charged us. Their archers loosed and loosed, so that there seemed to be a continuous stream of silver-lit shafts in the early morning sun dazzle. But it is very different to shoot up than to shoot a bow down. Our rowers were not directly exposed, and at first we took few losses.

  But we could not steer and I prepared for death.

  The oar-master roared a command I didn’t know, and then all the great oars began to fly inboard. Under my very feet, the big oarsmen were crossing the shafts of their oars, wedging the handles under the opposite bench so that the oars stood proud of the water like cocked wings. This brought the outboard portion of the oars above the ram of the enemy, so that they struck – when they struck – only Dalmatian oak.

  The hull rang, and I was knocked from my feet. I was praying to the Virgin.

  I got to my knees and the second blow knocked me flat – again.

  Practically at the end of my nose, three oarsmen on a bench were grinning like savages as they pulled maille haubergeons over their canvas rowing shirts.

  The nearest one, a gap-toothed giant with a gold earring, grinned as he pulled a wicked axe from under his bench. ‘Eh, messire!’ he shouted to me. ‘Easier to fight on your feet!’

  The benches were emptying.

  I got my feet under me to find the rest of my marines similarly employed. And forward of us, every Turk ever birthed was pouring over the rails from both sides into the waist of our ship.

  Sometimes, when you fight, you are in command of the army that is your body. You parry and snap blows, you deceive and you thrust and you counter as if on the practice field.

  Whatever men say, such encounters are rare.

  The Turks who got aboard didn’t pause to sweep the benches. They came straight up the companionway, aiming to kill the admiral and sweep the helms clear and take the ship.

  I have a memory of the moment before the wave of Turks broke on my line. I had a spear in my hand, held underhand, blade up, as Fiore recommended if one was fighting in line with companions. And I had the man himself on my right and Nerio on my left, and Marc-Antonio pressed so hard at my back that he was pushing me forward.

  I remember a man in plate and maille and a pointed helm, with a sword as long as mine and curved like the Crescent of Islam. He was grinning.

  And then I was panting like the bellows in a forge, and I hurt: my arms would scarce obey my command. The great scimitar was on the deck at my feet, and my spear was shattered, and the end with the sharp point was reversed in my hand like a thick dagger and sticky and red.

  Fiore’s spear was red from iron to point.

  Nerio had a dagger in each hand, one his own, one Miles’s.

  Miles stood with his longsword upright between his hands.

  Juan was on one knee, panting, and he, too, had his sword in his hand.

  We had held.

  I was just letting thoughts filter into my head – really, there was nothing there. Men call it ‘the black’ or ‘the darkness’ but for me it was just an emptiness, a void that was suddenly filled with noise and light.

  The admiral was pounding my backplate with his armoured fist.

  ‘If you’re done resting, take their fucking ship!’ he screamed. ‘Or do I have to do it myself ?’

  The last Turks were scrambling over the side, and their sailors were trying to pole off, but our oarsmen were having none of it. I was lucky to be a marine on a veteran ship: I should have led the boarders, and instead I was perhaps the tenth man on to the enemy deck.

  And friends, I had to make myself leap.

  Perhaps the beating ruined me as a knight. Or perhaps time, training, and a better life gave me more reason to live. But I hesitated at the rail.

  Bah! Then I leaped over the sea – instant death for a man in harness should he fall in.

  I injured men just by falling among them. I went down, and the Turks piled on me, but they were unarmoured sailors, not armoured marines.

  A steel harness is a cruel weapon.

  A steel gauntlet can do ten times the damage of a fist, and mine had heavy brass studs on every knuckle. The knees and elbows were hardened steel and had sharp ridges and protective flanges that themselves could flay a man’s unguarded flesh. I lost the remnants of my spear and by the time I was on my feet with my dagger in my right fist, the deck around the mainmast was a slaughterhouse and the Venetian oarsmen were killing the survivors with a ruthlessness that would have been a crime on land, even among brigands. Teams of men, bench mates, would grab a Turk, stretch his neck and cut his throat while the third man riffled his body for gold and coins before they all three lobbed him, dead and robbed, over the side.

  They took no prisoners. Neither did the Turks take any.

  I have hear men speak of decks slick with blood, and that is a lie. The decks were sticky with blood. My harness was coated with the stuff, and my sabatons jammed with it.

  And that was one ship.

  We took three.

  By the second ship, I could not really breathe. At some point, I drew the Emperor’s sword. And used it in clearing the third ship. The pretty grip, which even the brigand who stole it hadn’t fouled, became a clotted mass of brown gore in my fist.

  And then we were done.

  But we were not. The Turkish fleet broke, though still two-thirds intact, and ran. But the old admiral knew his business; had known it, indeed, from the moment he looked at the sun. By the wounds of Christ, messires, he was a great knight, the old devil. He fought the Turks with all of us as his weapon. Not for him the void and passion of combat, although his beautiful Virgin spear was red. But he fought more like Miles played chess – with his head and not his heart.

  And he didn’t intend to have a partial victory. I hobbled aft – I had a wound in the sole of my left foot, nothing glorious, I do assure you, but the product of stepping on a Turk’s axe. I remember that my left arm harness had taken so many blows that Marc-Antonio, who’d lost the use of his right arm altog
ether as the fights pressed on and on, had to cut the straps and drop the harness in among the row benches.

  Contarini glanced at me and went back to shouting orders at his helmsman. His voice was thin, but he never lost his force all that long summer’s day.

  He helped me get my bassinet off and his slave gave me water.

  ‘Give you the honour of a noble victory,’ I said.

  He raised an eyebrow. His trembling eye moved so violently I feared it might fall out. His face was red and a great vein beat against his temple.

  ‘Not even a skirmish, yet, Sir William,’ he said. He pointed forward and I followed his hand.

  The Turks were trying to raise their sails as they rowed away from us.

  He turned to the second helmsman, who was finally getting a new oar in the water. ‘Master Foccario, when you have that fixed to your liking, get the banner of the Virgin aloft and dip it thrice to signal ‘General Chase.’ He frowned at me. ‘Now we pay for weeks of soft living,’ he said.

  We ran the Turks into the surf of Thessaly. One of their ships, shallow as she was, staved herself on the rocks, and two more weathered the long headland which was like a stony finger pointing into the sea and were away, flying to safety.

  We came alongside another, and our crossbowmen, who must have been shooting steadily throughout the action, finally came to my notice. They were able to use the rail to aim, and to shoot down into the lower Turkish ship. Our crossbowmen cleared their quarterdeck before we grappled, and we took the fourth Turk entire. Her rowers were mostly slaves, Christians and Jews and Syrian Moslems.

  I could barely walk, I was so tired.

  But we were not done.

  The admiral recalled his boarding party and we were away, the oars beating the sea. The last remnants of the Turks, the ships not lucky enough to have weathered the cape in the strong wind, were running themselves ashore on the beach, not stern first, either, but bow in.