Swords From the Sea

by Harold Lamb

  Trumpets sounded off ahead as if signaling masses of troops. Before they even sighted Chettus, the leading Huns found Roman cavalry coming hell-bent for them along the road, on a half-troop front. These were Belisarius's three hundred veterans. Behind them charged other horsemen-the five hundred who could stick in the saddle.

  Behind the cavalry, strange vehicles started dust flying. These were circus chariots. Behind the chariot screen the mob on foot flashed silver-plate shields and whacked boards together to simulate great forces in motion.

  The horses from the Hippodrome really did it. Those big racers nearly went mad, what with the racket and the novelty of their race. They came on as if rounding the Spina for the homestretch, and they had been trained to rough any other horses on the track.

  Belisarius and his three hundred and all the rest of the circus poured into the forest road with unbelievable momentum, with dust and uproar following.

  The Huns, who had expected to do their own charging at the village, acted with the instinct of animals sensing a trap. The leading units started to circle away and got tangled in the brush, with the sun in their eyes and things like fishnets and hooks dragging them out of their saddles. Belisarius's flying wedge went deep into the column and kept moving.

  He lost a lot of the three hundred veterans along the way, but with such momentum behind he kept on going and the whole column of Huns started to get out of the trap, as they supposed it to be. They started back. Even a column of Huns could not reverse direction without confusion. Once it started back out of the forest belt, it kept going ...

  Of course the main body of Huns was intact, waiting on the road. But the khan figured it would be silly to storm the triple wall of Constantinople city if the Christians were to rout his advance column in the open. So the khan announced they assemble next at the River Danube, cross it, and go home before the ice went out.

  So Belisarius won his battle, and Theodora watched him do it.

  "What did she do then?" demanded Lailee Baibars, who seemed to have forgotten her own trouble for a while.

  That not being military history, I couldn't tell her much. "I think Theodora went back to her throne. After all, she was a great empress. Did she go out to help Belisarius, or to save the empire for her and Justinian to rule?"

  The slight dark girl took my question literally. "I think she went out to live or to die with Belisarius."

  We weren't alone by then. Aridag's driver had come up to the gallery to wait at the stair, and Lailee said that Mr. Aridag thought she had delayed too long. I flicked on my lighter, to be sure it was the chauffeur behind me in the dimness; then I waited to see what the girl would do, there by the mosaic portrait of Justinian.

  An odd thing happened. Steps sounded quickly on the stone stair. A stocky soldier appeared beside the driver. When he saluted me I recognized the Turkish private who had been sitting below in the church. Going straight to Lailee Baibars, he spoke to her, and her face changed as if she had heard a voice out of the air itself.

  "Why, he has been waiting to give me a message!" she whispered. "When you made a light, he saw me here."

  Yes, it was odd to hear that message from the other side of Asia just then. Karal had told him to wait here for the girl, but he had not known about the gallery. The missing officer had given the man the message when they met behind the enemy lines after the engagement that had inflicted such loss on the first Turkish brigade in Korea. This Karal had told the private how to work his way back to our lines, and had then gone off to look for others of the platoon.

  The message? No more than he was well, but would be delayed getting home.

  It did something to the girl. All the strain went out of her slim face. "He's alive, certainly!" she cried, actually hugging me, and thanking me for telling her what to do.

  It didn't follow at all that he was alive, unreported, behind the Chinese lines all those weeks. "Sure," I said, "sure." But what had I told her?

  Gathering up her handbag, Lailee peered and dabbed at her face like any girl getting ready to step out. Then she called the driver and went down to Aridag and the waiting car.

  I didn't see that car again parked outside the Aya Sufia. Sometimes I turned in from my luncheon walk and went up to the empty gallery with out seeing a sign of Lailee Baibars. Of course, the Turkish soldier never showed up again.

  After a month I'd have bet dollars against piasters that Lailee had married Aridag. She had not come back to wait at the gallery message center. And I was sorry, because the girl in the red hat had been a bright spot, a touch of a dream, in my routine of desk work and meals in a strange city.

  When I went down, as protocol required, with a Turkish major to be at the sailing of the transport, I thought of her. The crowd around me wasn't doing any waving or weeping on the Haidarpasha landing. The same music of flutes and horns sounded somewhere, and the whistles of all the Bosporus steamers sounded when the moorings were cast off, because the big ship was taking a replacement brigade to Korea.

  I looked around for her red beret-yes, she was a lovely girl-and I wondered, rather fantastically, if she had managed to send an answer by anyone to the message. Then I saw her face, but not in the crowd. She was bending over the rail of the ship above me, with a small group of women in khaki-gray, hugging their kits. She didn't look hungry, only excited and young.

  "A nurse!" I exclaimed.

  My friend, the major, thought I was speaking to him. Conscientiously, he explained that a few volunteer nurses were going this time, as an aid to the morale of the troops.

  I must have looked queer then, remembering how the Empress Theodora had followed her soldier out. Because he added quickly, as if excusing it, that one of them, a young medical graduate, wanted to go to join an officer missing and believed dead in action.

  "She called him a soldier's soldier," said my friend, with the curious reticence of a Turk hiding his pride in something. "We made an exception for her," he added, "because the lieutenant had just rejoined United Nations forces after carrying out his duty under conditions of extreme difficulty. We had only recently had the report. You see, sir," he apologized, "it was an exceptional case."

  "By glory," I said, "it was."

  To his surprise, I yanked off my cap and waved after the transport turning past the old wall of the city at peace, starting its voyage to the frontier that was so much farther than the village of Chettus.

  As soon as the elderly admiral stepped ashore from his launch at Istanbul, the pretty dark girl showed him the tomb. Since he was senior naval officer of the American Mission for Aid to Turkey, she had been chosen to show him the sights on his arrival to become technical renovator of the very small Turkish navy. She did not realize, and Terence McGowan had no chance to warn her, that she was making a mistake in introducing the admiral to anything as old as the gray tomb smack against the blue water of the Bosporus.

  When the dapper and slightly deaf admiral peered obligingly through the window of the tomb, he noticed something unusual, a pair of lanterns of massive wood gilded over, the sort of things that had been stern lights on corsair craft or galleons of Spain long ago. He said so.

  "Sir, they are old as you say," explained the brunette, Miss Mary Hisar- bey, brushing back her shoulder-length bob; "four centuries old. But they are not Spanish. They are the lanterns of the Captain of the Sea."

  Now the admiral had a fetish for exactitude and a chronic dislike for anything out of date-after being present in the engagement of the Coral Sea. Until then, his observation of Istanbul had revealed only old minarets and a coal-burning flagship, a battle cruiser christened Yavuz Sultan Selim, that, in his opinion, might as well have been Noah's ark.

  "Never heard of the rank," he grumbled.

  "It was Barbarossa's," prompted his aide, Lieutenant Commander Terence McGowan, who had been a year at the Istanbul station and had grown very fond of Mary Hisarbey.

  The name sounded familiar. But the admiral, unlike Terence McGowan, had read few boo
ks about the East except the Arabian Nights. Hearing the name mentioned, the crowd behind him craned forward eagerly, as if expecting him to lay a wreath. McGowan had warned him that these Turks had a great deal of pride.

  "Why, he was the pirate!" cried Mary Hisarbey.

  A pirate laid to rest in a tomb under galleon lanterns made no kind of sense to the admiral. Unless-"H'm-unh." He cleared his throat. "Somebody out of the Arabian Nights, eh?"

  The dark girl looked as if she were going to cry, in spite of the flower spray on her shoulder lapel, and the crowd acted as if something they'd been looking for hadn't happened. Hastily, McGowan suggested they proceed up the Bosporus.

  At the end of the afternoon, when the launch was returning down the Bosporus, the name of Barbarossa still bothered the admiral. A name had to be more than a name. It had to have rank and identification.

  "They made him admiral of their first fleet," explained McGowan, who had had a tough day.

  The admiral lighted a cigarette and stared at the ancient fishing ketches, brightly painted with eyes at the hawseholes, to see their way over the sea. So he had been told.

  "I know we make pirates of our admirals, McGowan," he stated, "but I've never heard of it happening the other way around. Exactly how did it happen here?"

  "To be exact, it happened here because a girl was snappy-looking enough to be rated Miss Mediterranean."

  "McGowan," said the admiral, "it still sounds like the Arabian Nights to me. Can you give the identification of this Barbarossa and the girl you call Miss Mediterranean?"

  Taking the girl first (explained Terence McGowan, getting on the side of the admiral's good ear and using verbiage he knew his senior officer would understand) she was Julia Gonzaga. Call her Julie, age sixteen, and a pin-up if there ever was one, from shins to hairline. The Gonzagas? They were tops in the four hundred of the sixteenth century, residing in Rome, Venice, or Capri, along with the d'Estes and the de' Medicis. So Julie had a home environment of Italian villas-and cocktail parties where the drinks were sometimes mixed with poison. She was a lady.

  It started when Julie took a passenger vessel, one of your Venetian galleons, out to a family villa on an island and the ship grounded in the Messina currents. A redheaded fisherman came alongside to sell-so he said-his catch of fresh swordfish to the noble first-class passengers. When he had his first good observation of Julie, the fisherman forgot about selling anything. Instead, he braced her, asking if he couldn't take her anywhere.

  Julie didn't object or try to bargain; she was tired of sitting in the deck chair looking at Stromboli, which wasn't erupting that year. She said certainly he could take her and her cabin luggage and servants and the nuns, too, out to her island in the archipelago. You see, at that age she was accustomed to having everyone roll out red carpets for her.

  The redheaded fisher guy said fine, he knew the island because he came from one near it. He spread a clean carpet for her on the stern of his shallop, and put all Julie's traveling companions for'ard of the mains'l, so he could admire her better while he answered her questions, which she asked freely, since he was much older, about twenty-five, and acted different from anyone she'd known. He told her that he looked like a wrestler, broad in the beam, because he'd been a wrestler, and his name was Red Beard, Barbarossa in her lingo, because his beard was red, and he let it grow to make it hard for another guy to strangle him. Also, he was a Turk because he wanted to be one.

  When Julie had finished with her questions, the red fisherman asked one himself: Would Julie change course and head off the wind to his island, and be his wife?

  That did not surprise Julie. (Terence McGowan got this part from Mary, who understood more about women and Turks. Many grandees had been calling on her family with wedding rings for her already. She did not make the mistake of telling Red Beard-Barbarossa-she would only be a sister to him, because, young as she was, she sensed how he wanted more than that. She said her family thought her too young to marry, and anyway Barbarossa was too poor.

  "So will you first make a great name for yourself, Barbarossa," she countered, smiling up at him, "and when you have done so, come and ask me again, please?"

  He looked down into her matchless eyes. "Julie," said he, "that's a deal between us."

  And when he beached on her island, Barbarossa picked her up like a bouquet of flowers and walked her ashore, sniffing the nice smell of her hair. Before Julie could tell him good-bye, he kissed her gently and jumped back into his shallop. She was surprised as well as mad, because he'd kissed her and run off without a last word from her.

  Anyway, she told herself, he was only an island boatman who smelled of swordfish. But her family told her-when they had quieted down a little-how the red fisherman was little better than a pirate and woman snatcher, because he owned his island and a whole fleet, since nobody else seemed to be able to take it away from Barbarossa, and Julie had only the saints to thank that she hadn't lost her innocence and cost them ten thousand Venetian gold ducats in ransom besides.

  Julie had not realized how much of a name Barbarossa had made for himself already. Nor did she know then that the ex-heavyweight wrestler had room in his head for only one idea at a time, and that one idea was Julia Gonzaga.

  The red fisherman lost little time in making more of a name for himself. He exchanged his best shallop for a Venetian eighteen-oared galley by boarding her, and he picked up two papal royal galleys by lying in their course where they never looked to be engaged by such a small craft.

  By the time Julie's family had betrothed her to marry a count, Barbarossa had a task force, and from Gib to the peak of Samothrace he had the name of a pirate. Yet Julie still thought of him as the awkward and kindly fisherman who wanted to do things for her. Just about then she heard from him. A pilgrim, calling at her garden in the Reggio villa near Rome, put a slip of paper into her hand, and the scrawl on the paper said:

  My Lady:

  I have made little of a great name for myself yet, still I ask you again to be my wife.

  Julie tore up the paper, thinking, The very idea. And forgetting to ask the pilgrim where he'd got it, until he was gone. That was a mistake. When Barharossa heard the pilgrim's story, he was sure she'd double-crossed him merely to get a ride in his boat. When he got angry, he stayed that way.

  The week before her wedding, Barbarossa called. He and his raiders came in from the shore so fast by night that her servants could only rush Julie out of her bed to the back of an unsaddled horse. Some said she had a nightgown on, some said she had none, but all agreed she was worth seeing. When she got over being scared to her very bloodstream, Julie felt mad, besides being disgraced.

  What with getting her wardrobe together after the raiders had finished with the villa, and being married in a cathedral, she was in a state of mind. In those days girls learned the facts of life after the wedding, period. No divorce. And Julie was proud. She had the title of contessa and no children, and what she learned she kept to herself.

  Until her next sea voyage, that is. Long after she thought the pirate Barbarossa had forgotten about her, the count, her husband, had to make a business trip to the Knights at Malta, and told Julie to accompany him. She did, and their galley arrived there, under the guns of the Valetta forts, with the rowing slaves fainting, and Barbarossa's fine flagship with the scarlet pennon and gilt stern lanterns sheering off just out of range.

  "May Saint Michael the Archangel drown him where the sea is deepest!" Julie cried.

  After that no one wanted to embark with the contessa. Isabella d'Este hinted that the lovely but pallid Julie was a femme fatale. When she wintered at the Spanish court the Duke of Alva himself whispered that bathing at the beaches might be dangerous for the bella contessa, and she'd be safer in his hunting lodge. But Julie would have none of that. "If your high excellency desires truly to protect me, why does he not catch the unspeakable Barbarossa?" she asked.

  They caught him. Andrea Doria, the great admiral and politician of Genoa t
he Proud, trapped him caulking and oiling his vessels in the Djerba lagoon, where our air patrols used to watch for Rommel's oil tankers. Djerba, that flat, swampy island.

  Doria was a cautious man. And war galleys then were like destroyers now, hard-hitting with their bronzed prows and heavy foredeck cannon, and powered by oar sweeps pulled by galley slaves; dangerous when they closed and loosed a rush of boarders, yet fragile and unhandy in heavy weather. They had to run before the wind in a storm. When Doria finally maneuvered his fleet into the lagoon, the lagoon was empty. Barbarossa had dredged his vessels clear across the island.

  Doria passed the word along that Barbarossa hid himself away. And Barbarossa answered that he never sailed without his broad pennon on his masthead by day and his beacon light showing by night.

  They fitted out a great fleet to watch for him off Cape Matapan, and he was running down the Balearics instead ferrying D. P. Moors across to Africa. Moors that the most Christian king had purged out of Spain, without any other place to go.

  Then Barbarossa stopped the show in Venice. Every year the most illustrious, the doge of the serene republic used to stage a show, putting out to sea with a good-looking girl sitting by him and him throwing a bridal ring into the water. "You can have done," Barbarossa wrote the doge, "with marrying the sea henceforth, because the sea is my girl now, and no one but me shall wed Miss Mediterranean."

  People laughed, but that year the doge's wedding of the sea was called off. They said because of weather.

  "Stupid," declared Julie's husband. "Afraid of a shadow. What has Barbarossa got but a name?"

  And Julie thought, My husband would never carry me away to an island of the sea. I haven't seen an island for years.

  Barbarossa was a seaman. Perhaps his forefathers had been Vikings of the long ways of the sea. Certainly as fisher he'd known the feel of the currents and the signs of a storm in the sky. Those who tried to catch him were soldiers and officials, carrying out a mission. There's a difference.