Smith knelt now and lined up his jezail.
Stanley gripped his sword.
La Real was heading straight for the Sultana. What else did they expect from Don John? Commander would clash directly with commander, and on the fate of that single encounter, much depended.
‘Give fire!’ cried Don John. ‘Let battle commence!’ And he waved his jewel-hilted Spanish rapier above his head.
The guns opened up all along the line as they raced towards each other.
The Turkish galleys came on with lateen sails raked back, guns blazing.
‘I thought we reckoned they were light gunned!’ bellowed Smith. He loosed a round from his jezail. ‘What would heavy gunned feel like?’
‘Keep firing, Brother!’ cried Stanley. ‘One day you might just hit something!’
‘Hodge,’ said Nicholas. ‘We will fight together, as always. Yes?’
‘As always. At least till I sicken of the blood and go to aid the surgeon below. If he is still living.’
Nicholas nodded. ‘As you will. And if you see me mortally injured, beyond help . . .’
‘Aye. And you will do the same for me.’
‘I will. I swear it.’
The guns of La Real bellowed out again, and Nicholas could have sworn one of them struck the Sultana a second time, but it was hard to judge damage. Still the Ottoman flagship came on fast, oars churning the water, kettledrums thumping like the heartbeat of some great sea monster.
Then La Real shuddered. She was hit.
It was the wretched oar slaves in the bow who were killed or maimed. Their oars dragged loose in the sea and began to ruin the rhythm.
‘Get those men off the benches!’ cried the boatswain. ‘Pull those oars in! Give me the damage!’
The bow walls were holed but not shattered, and little sea came in. But five or six men had been dismembered or killed. The mariners moved to bundle them overboard.
‘To the surgeon with them, damn ye!’ bellowed the boatswain. ‘Captain’s orders!’
The mariners cursed, every curse under the sun. Risking their lives to save the dirty skins of bloody unbelievers. One of the slaves screamed, his sundered arm on the bench beside him, as a mariner pulled him up by his remaining good arm and heaved him over his shoulder.
‘Shut your wailing or I’ll split your belly, you son of a ’Gyptian whore.’
They lugged or hauled the maimed Mohammedan slaves back to be treated. Before going for’ard again ready to fight and kill more Mohammedans.
‘It’s a merry round dance, is it not!’ rasped one mariner to another.
‘Servants in a madhouse is all we are!’ roared the second.
La Real gave another lurch beneath their bare feet, and then the arrows started thocking into the deck around them.
The lines were barely a hundred yards apart.
‘Arquebusiers, hold! Any man fires, I’ll suck his eyes out!’ cried their sergeant.
La Real managed one last, ferocious blast of her five prow guns in close unison, the sheared-off ram enabling them to fire low and hit the oncoming galleys almost at the waterline, doing great damage. Yet the Turks seemed to be using guns more than expected, and galley after Christian galley was hit and began to sink. Nicholas actually felt the heat in his face as a galley a good hundred yards off, targeted and then struck by a brutally concerted bombardment from three Ottomans, simply blew up as it rowed forward, breaking into two in midair. Timbers and limbs came down in a mingled debris, oil and gore and intestines.
Then one hundred galleys or more drove into each other. A rolling, brutal clubbing sound of timber upon timber, wooden drums thumped by giants, a forest of masts dashed together by the angry hand of God.
The two flagships smashed into each other with single-minded fury, trembling and juddering. Arrows hissed in the air, a mariner fell crying with a bolt in his shoulder. Turkish archers swarmed high above in the rigging, but hopelessly exposed against the blue October sky. La Real’s arquebusiers returned disciplined fire at close range, and archers fell from the rigging like leaves from a shaken tree.
Amid the chaos, Don John’s pet marmoset, from the Americas, scampered up and down the main mast, plucking out arrow shafts and snapping them between his teeth, then throwing them into the sea with a chatter.
Then Muezzinzade showed his veteran skill. He gave a rapid signal, and with astonishing deftness, two more galleys, one on either side, closed in on La Real and isolated her. She was suddenly an island surrounded by three Ottoman ships, each thickly clustered with fighting men, corsairs and Janizaries.
‘Signal for reinforcements!’ yelled Don John. ‘Someone to break through!’
But Muezzinzade, still with greatly superior numbers, had already given the order for any galley going to the aid of La Real to be intercepted and engaged immediately, at any cost.
He was determined to avenge the damage done by those accursed galliasses, and capture the Christian flagship as soon as possible.
A great roar went up from all three ships surrounding them. Hardened mariners trembled.
‘Ready yourselves, all aboard!’ bellowed Smith. ‘Here they come!’
The Turks had it their way. It had already come to hand-to-hand fighting on deck. Their preference every time.
Ropes whistled, grapples clanged. Plank bridges crashed down.
From three different sides the enemy swarmed across, swords gleaming, eyes bright with the joy of battle.
The gallant Merman struggled to come alongside and attack the Turkish galleys from beyond. In the rigging, a woman with long dark hair plastered across her cheeks yelled out wild curses, shrieking at the enemy like some crazed banshee. It was Maria la Bailadora, a squat pistol in her hand. But the next moment, two more Ottoman galleys came along either side of her and the Merman was overrun. Maria la Bailadora fired into the midst of them but she could not reload, and a corsair swarmed up the rigging, dagger at the ready. She screamed and flailed at him, and he managed only to cut her arm rather than her throat.
His comrades screamed up from below, ‘Skewer the bitch!’
It was eerie to see a woman aboard any fighting ship, and bad luck for all. She must be a witch.
The corsair grinned and slashed at the rigging around this wild woman. She lunged at him, unarmed, ready to tear his eyes out. But her arm was weakened by the wound, the rigging ripped, and she lost her hold. He gave her a final kick in the chest and she fell to the deck below, in the thick of the enemy.
‘La Bailadora!’ cried a Spanish soldier. ‘Break through!’
Then there was a ferocious onslaught, swords clashing, pistols and muskets fired into faces at point-blank range. Even half-pikes seemed too long and unwieldy in that bloody close-quarter mêlée. The Turks were finally driven back and there lay La Bailadora, cut with a thousand sword cuts.
The last of the enemy fled from the ship, some throwing themselves overboard. The Merman turned about, ready again to come to the aid of La Real, breathing vengeance. But in the chaos of the fighting, one of the Turks or corsairs had found his way to the powder store in the bows and lit a fuse. Even as she turned, the powder went up and the bow of the ship, where most of the fighting men crowded, went up in fifty-foot flames, a beacon of fire carrying nothing but bad news.
On the right, Andrea Doria and Kara Hodja were playing a desperate game of manoeuvres. The renegade Dominican priest was moving wide and south into open sea, aiming both to avoid the guns of the galliasses, and to outflank the Christian line altogether. Then he could reform, turn and drive into them from the south, prow guns blazing.
But Andrea Doria had the blood of generations of Genoese sea dogs in his veins. He moved out and matched Kara Hodja’s squadron stroke for stroke, though the corsair ships outnumbered his own two to one. It was a damnable frustration for Doria, still barely a gun fired, while to his left the battle was raging. But he knew it was the most important thing he could do: hold off Kara Hodja, and engage only when safe to do so.
On the Christian left, it was desperate. Here, the Turks under the command of Sulik Pasha had driven forward with the fiercest speed and greatest weight of numbers, determined to break through fast.
Among the Christian ships they saw one painted midnight black, as black as a raven in mourning.
‘What ship is that, do we know?’ demanded Sulik Pasha.
‘That is the ship commanded by the sons of Bragadino of Famagusta,’ said a lieutenant.
Sulik Pasha regarded the sinister black ship in silence. Then he simply raised his arm and ordered the whole line forward at battle speed.
Minutes later, all hell was unleashed.
The Christians were outnumbered on every blazing, blood-slathered deck, yet they fought like demons, and not one single Turkish galley could break through the line.
The decks of the Raven were awash with blood, the stern cabins were aflame, and yet even amid the sheets of flame and the coils of black smoke, men hurled fire pots and grenades, and arquebuses banged out of dense clouds where surely no man could see.
Ambrosio Bragadino reeled backwards as a soldier fell into him, head half blown away. He pushed the corpse aside.
‘Guns overheating, sire!’ called the master gunner.
‘Keep firing on them!’ Bragadino bellowed back. ‘Fire till they crack!’
And so the relentless rhythm went on: guns primed, priming iron driven down the touch-hole to clear it, shake of powder from the horn, gunner’s mate near by with the slow-match in the fork of his linstock, sputter and sparkle, and then boom, the gun reeling back on its carriage, and woe betide any novice standing behind.
Turks crowded up a ladder hooked over the prow of the Raven, yelling for the Prophet, but then they were burned away like leaves in a forest fire. Bragadino had set up a brazen trump for such an assault, and now it roared like a furnace as huge gouts and sheets of superheated flame blazed from its trumpet mouth, a blaze of fire cleansing the sides of the galley as enemy troops poured over. It burned deep into the wooden walls of his own galley too, but he seemed not to care. Let the Raven go down, if she took a thousand Turks with her.
His brother fought ferociously at the stern as more Turkish soldiers swarmed aboard. He was bleeding copiously from a neck wound, face white with blood loss, but quite oblivious.
Some soldiers donned rope-soled shoes so as not to slip in the blood.
‘Sand here!’ cried a voice. ‘More sawdust and sand, for God’s sake!’
The afternoon was now as dark as dusk with cannon fire and powder smoke. Like an untimely nightfall, thick with ashen clouds and streaked with burning meteors, red-hot lava. Nuggets of Greek fire burning even underwater, dancing tongues of flame devouring sails and rigging above. An infernal scene.
‘Fall back, sir!’ cried a Spanish captain. ‘You’ll be hit!’
‘Better hit than not heard!’ returned Bragadino. ‘Press on ’em, men!’
Any signalling between ships was all but impossible, few there could either hear or see beyond their own little world of ship-bound slaughter. Yet through the dense smoke, even as he fought with a sword chipped along its edge like a woodman’s saw, Antonio Bragadino glimpsed the rocky shore of Scropha Point, barely a hundred yards off to larboard. He shouted desperately to his brother. And Ambrosio, knowing the power of the unexpected, sent word as best he could to all captains and rowers to press north towards the shore.
‘We’ll be ripped open, sire!’ cried the captain.
‘So too the Turk,’ said Bragadino.
The chaos on the left was now indescribable, yet it was chaos in part deliberately created by the brothers Bragadino.
‘The devil love chaos,’ muttered one boatswain, peering into the smoke, trying to see any rocks around them, before taking an arquebus ball straight through his forehead.
And then Ambrosio Bragadino at the prow saw a Turkish standard ahead, arising out of the smoke like a castle turret out of an early morning mist, and he knew that below, in that dense smoke, was the command ship of Sulik Pasha.
‘Straight ahead!’ he cried, even thumping his foot on the boards as if the oar slaves below would hear him.
The Raven drove blindly into the smoke, and moments later struck Sulik’s galley astern and carried its rudder clean off. In the choking smoke, every man there was half blinded as well as gasping for clean air, red of eye like rabid dogs. Yet Bragadino still urged them forward into another fight, vaulting across on to the Ottoman galley. Hanging from the stern, he flailed his battered blade at the great silver lantern there and dashed it into the sea. He would slaughter everything he found on that ship. Commander, mariners, soldiers and slaves.
Fighting almost alone at times, cut with a dozen wounds, Bragadino found in a lower cabin four fine hunting falcons and a single shivering greyhound, Sulik’s personal menagerie.
He slaughtered them all.
Sulik Pasha was captured, bound and made to kneel on the ruined deck of the Raven. Somewhere behind in the smoke, Turkish galleys were foundering on the rocks of the Greek shore. So too were Christian galleys. It was madness.
Sulik Pasha began to ask what ransom the Christians might demand for him.
Ambrosio Bragadino kicked him in the mouth. ‘You know whose ship you are now aboard?’
Sulik spat blood, shook his head to clear it, determined to show no fear. ‘I know it. Your father was Bragadino, Governor of Famagusta.’
‘Well then.’ Bragadino raised his sword.
‘It was no doing of mine. You should understand, you should—’
The words were choked off as Bragadino’s sword drove down into the back of his neck and out of his throat.
‘Sire!’ came a cry. ‘Turkish galleys have broken through! They are behind our lines!’
Lighter in the water and shallow draughted as they were, four or five Turkish galleys had slipped through between the Christian line and Scropha Point.
‘Kill them!’ cried Ambrosio Bragadino. ‘Kill them all!’
6
As soon as the Turkish galleys were behind the Christian line they turned again and bore into the hard-pressed centre, guns ready loaded, gunners exultant. Suddenly the galleys under the command of Don John of Austria, already outnumbered by an enemy that attacked them fore, found themselves fired upon from behind as well. The most unnerving experience for any fighting men, on land or at sea.
‘They have come through! We are surrounded!’
On the battered galley of Sebastiano Veniero, twice holed in her hull but still afloat and mobile, one Spanish pikeman, a lad of no more than eighteen, snatched off his helmet and began to unbuckle his breastplate, ready to throw himself over the side and swim for the Greek shore. This battle was as good as lost.
In a trice, the point of Veniero’s sword was at his throat. The lad felt its startling pressure just under his Adam’s apple. The old Venetian sea dog glowered at him from beneath snowy-white eyebrows.
‘Armour stays on, lad. You stay fighting. Or I will kill you where you stand.’
Grapeshot from a nearby fusta raked over the deck, men ducked, pellets clanged and ricocheted off steel helmets and brass fittings. But Veniero did not move. The whole volcanic force of his will was bent on this one trembling soldier, and this example before his men. The lad rebuckled his breastplate with clumsy fingers, set his helmet back on his head, and took up his pike.
Veniero turned and gave fresh orders to his captain. ‘Make for the centre, at all speed! Master gunner, clear our way! La Real needs us!’
In the reserve squadron, the Marqués de Santa Cruz kept an eagle eye on the progress of the battle at all points. He was aware of the Turkish breakthrough below Scropha Point even before the Bragadino brothers heard of it, and immediately sent six of his strongest galleys to face them. They raced across the rear of their own lines at exhausting ramming speed, the wretched oar slaves lashed by the boatswain and his hated wetted rope-end, yet soon past feeling any pain other than their own arms and hearts
and lungs, burning fit to burst. Such a speed could not be maintained for more than three or four hundred yards. Yet they closed on the rogue Turkish galleys over five hundred yards, six hundred . . . A slave collapsed over the oar, blood pouring from his nose and mouth. Mariners unshackled him and pulled him free, dropped him in the bilge, face up out of kindness. Others groaned and pulled onwards.
They hit the five Turkish galleys from behind, firing at close quarters and very low to ensure they hit only the enemy and not their own. Despite the exhaustion and sickness of the slaves, the marines and pikemen aboard were fresh for the fight, and amid the chaos, Santa Cruz’s six galleys made short work of the Turkish five, sinking all but one of them, raking the other clean of soldiers and gunners at close range and then firing her. They pulled back slowly enough for the Spanish pikemen to lean over the sides and skewer enemy soldiers and sailors where they swam, bewildered and bleeding, through the smoking wreckage of their own galleys.
The Bragadino brothers closed up hard against the rocky shore, even as one, two of their own galleys were grounded on submerged rocks. The Turks too suffered grounding, their galleys suddenly groaning and tilting, the sound of twisted and tormented timbers ripped asunder adding to the general din.
It was only aboard one single Ottoman galley that it happened, yet it was the catalyst for what came next: a galley called the Star of Antioch happened to have a complement of oar slaves made up entirely of Christian captives rather than Muslim criminals. Their boatswain was particularly cruel, even by usual galley standards, and had laughingly sodomized one of their number only two days before the battle, when he discovered he was a novice monk.
‘And so white of skin!’ he roared as he worked, to the cheers of his mariners.
One of the oar slaves, a blacksmith by trade, had managed to break free of his chains. Now in the deafening press of battle, the Star of Antioch closely engaged with a Christian galley and every mariner and fighting man up on deck, the blacksmith hurriedly broke off the shackles of his fellow slaves with a boathook, biceps bulging, veins like pulsating cords. Moments later, led by this redoubtable blacksmith armed with his boathook, the slaves swarmed up from the benches on to the fighting deck. The mariners and soldiers, already holding off an attempted boarding by Spanish pikemen, were aghast to find themselves attacked from behind by a filthy, howling horde of their own slaves, half starved, skeletal thin, infested with lice and covered in sores, yet suddenly given a terrifying new strength by that strongest of instincts in the human heart: revenge.
The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea Page 34