The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea

by Napier, William

  There was wild butchery for a few moments, and then the greater part of the Turkish soldiery threw down their weapons and hurled themselves into the sea. Some of the slaves were so maddened by bloodlust that they instantly leapt after them, to stab them or drown them in the foaming, reddening water.

  A neighbouring Turkish galley heard the desperate cries, saw their comrades abandoning ship and swimming for the Greek shore – Turkish territory, after all, and safety – and in a mass panic that can so easily take hold among exhausted and frightened men, did likewise.

  ‘Abandon ship!’

  The cry spread like a contagion in crowded streets, and soon the Turks were abandoning their galleys all along the line.

  The guns on all sides were firing less now, some having cracked, some simply too hot to work, and the scene became clearer to the commanding Bragadino brothers.

  ‘To the longboats, all swordsmen, all pikemen!’ they ordered. ‘Press after them hard! Let not one escape!’

  They went after them crying ‘For Famagusta!’ They rowed over them and drowned them, they trapped them in the shallows or on the very shoreline, trampled over them and butchered them where they lay.

  ‘There is not enough sea,’ said one pikeman, ‘to wash this much blood away.’

  But in the centre, the crux of the battle, it was going much worse for the Holy League.

  Every man capable of wielding a sword or a pike held the line around La Real. Don John had given orders for the oar slaves to quit their benches and find arms of any kind, and they fought with the crew and soldiers in gallant comradeship. But with three enemy galleys surrounding her, it was desperate.

  Yet again, Nicholas knew what it was like to be under siege from vastly superior forces.

  The roar of cannon, the crashing and sundering of ships, oars snapping like whipcracks, the hiss and thock of arrows, the ships’ sides bristling like a porcupine. Cries and shouts, grenades and splashes, bombs and fire pots, and everywhere the gritty black billowing smoke. You could drown in another man’s blood, and men’s eyes showed as no more than bloodshot balls in a mask of soot.

  A Spanish arquebusier crawled up on to the roof of the stern cabin to try to give fire over the heads of his comrades, but was immediately struck down by flights of arrows from the Turkish rigging. La Real’s mast was cracked and fallen. From the stores were dragged up makeshift wooden pavisades, covered in fat and oil, and used to build up the sides of the ship.

  Something detonated below. They could not even be sure in the chaos whether they were hit, whether it was a powder keg going up, or what. Perhaps La Real was sinking under their feet even as they fought to the death for her.

  Nicholas felt another arrow sheer off the side of his breastplate, glanced down to check it hadn’t gone into his arm. Safe. A matchcord on the Sultana fizzed white and Smith bellowed,

  ‘Ball coming in!’

  Men ducked, the arquebus banged. A man screamed. A Turkish scream. The arquebusier himself. The gun had exploded, the muzzle flayed out like a flower. He was blinded for life.

  Down below, Hodge worked alongside the surgeon. Then a savage burst of chain-shot from one of the Turkish galleys ripped straight through the window that should have been boarded up earlier, a window of finest stained glass, depicting the Virgin and Child. Rainbows of glass filled the air. Hodge ducked instinctively and was unhurt. But the surgeon clutched his raked belly and collapsed across the legs of the dying man before him. Hodge seized him by the shoulders and pulled him up again. The surgeon gave a last cry to heaven, a glimpse of the stars, sick of the blood-dark timbers, falling, falling . . . He thrust the hacksaw into Hodge’s chest and his head fell forward.

  ‘I cannot,’ cried Hodge, ‘I cannot!’

  He laid the surgeon down, snatched up a wooden crate and wedged it in the shattered cabin window as best he could.

  The whole ship lurched. Timbers groaned and split. The dying man on the table groaned in the semi-darkness. Sweat beaded his marble-white face.

  ‘Take it off, for God’s sake,’ he pleaded softly, waving towards the red pulp that had been his foot.

  Hodge gripped the hacksaw. Oh for alcohol. But there was no more alcohol.

  There were only a last few grenades. Stanley hauled himself as high up the mast as he could and hurled one at the very last moment into the air. It exploded too high, though the defenders aboard the second galley, the Trebizond, ducked down, and shrapnel clanged off a few helmets and shoulderplates.

  ‘Make it count, Brother!’ cried Smith.

  Stanley grimaced, teeth and lips black with powder where he had torn open so many paper-and-ball cartridges. He ripped off his neckcloth, wrapped up his last grenade, lit it, and hurled the whole bundle like a sling direct at the stern cabin of the Trebizond. The grenade detonated just as it struck the wooden sides and blew out a plank quite cleanly. Moments later a Janizary officer reeled out, clutching his bloody head.

  A corsair leapt across the narrow divide between La Real and the Sultana and clung to the pavisade like a monkey, dagger between his teeth. Nicholas leaned out to cut him away but he dropped back with lightning agility. Nicholas hung over the side, one arm gripping the ropes of the pavisade, and slashed again. Again the skinny corsair dodged him. Then he plucked the dagger from his teeth, held it by the point and threw it hard and fast. It flew past Nicholas’s ear and hit someone behind. A cry. Stanley.

  Nicholas didn’t even look back. He did what the corsair least expected. He let go his hold on the pavisade and dropped straight down upon him, hurling them both into the channel of water below. An instant later, two arrows thocked into the pavisade where he had just hung.

  The water was narrow and choppy, the sides of the ships perilously close together. Any moment a lurch would knock them together again and Nicholas and his enemy would be crushed. Nicholas heaved himself up on the flailing corsair’s shoulders and pushed him down, expelling air from his own lungs as he did so by sheer will, against every instinct. They went under.

  At any moment he expected to feel a stab in his side. Corsairs rarely carried just the one blade. But nothing. He held the corsair’s shaven head between his hands, trying to ram it against his knee. A cannonball came fizzing through the water near by and sank away into the darkness. His eyes wept, his lungs burned. The corsair bit his hand. He gouged and fought, and felt his thumbs sink unspeakably into the corsair’s tightened eye-sockets. The corsair thrashed and went limp.

  Nicholas rubbed his thumbs clean in revulsion, swam for what he hoped was the stern of La Real. A rope splashed in the water near by; he clutched it with both hands, his bitten hand seeping blood where the villain had bitten him. A strong grasp pulled him up like a drowned puppy. He swiped the water from his salt-reddened eyes as he lay there gasping on deck behind the barricade. An arquebus ball slammed into the timber near by. He stared blearily.

  ‘Stanley, you still have a knife in your shoulder.’

  The knight pulled it free and stowed it under his belt for later use.

  ‘Are you not wounded?’

  Stanley slipped his hand under his breastplate and his fingers came out unbloodied. He patted his bulging torso. ‘Not all muscle, lad. Wadding too. All horsehair and bombast, I am. Now you need to bandage that hand, and get some brandy on it.’

  Then the whole boat rocked and boomed, the Sultana alongside rocking even more violently, as Sebastiano Veniero’s heavyweight galley charged into her far side like a mad bull. A whole line of well-drilled arquebusiers stood swiftly and delivered a volley at point-blank range across the decks of the Sultana, laying low at least a dozen men.

  Cheers went up, Don John swirled his rapier overhead and cried, ‘Veniero to our aid! Press on!’, and with that near-miraculous renewal of morale that comes to any group of fighting men, no matter how beleaguered and weary, when reinforcements arrive, the soldiers aboard La Real surged over the pavisades and threw themselves at the Sultana.

  Nicholas glimpsed Veniero himself
, the old sea dog, the old sea lion of Venice, standing at his fighting post, a bloody bandage round his thigh, one arm crooked round the mast, the other holding a stout crossbow it would have taken most men two hands to use. He raised it and fired from the hip, and a Janizary on the Sultana went down in a tumble of white silk.

  ‘Sire, you need to get below and have that leg freshly bound!’ cried a young musketeer.

  ‘Time enough when the Turks lie six fathoms down! Find me more bolts, damn you!’

  A second later, a huge explosion sent the Trebizond rolling away on her side, and half her men slithering towards the far rails. Then she settled down at a steeper and steeper angle. She was sinking fast.

  Someone had made it to her lower decks and sabotaged her with a well-placed keg of powder . . . There was no sign of Smith.

  ‘Make sure they don’t grapple us as they sink and take us down!’ cried Stanley. ‘Cut all ropes!’

  There followed vicious hand-to-hand fighting on all sides, as refugees from the sinking Trebizond tried to press aboard La Real in final desperation, and those aboard the Sultana, under assault from two sides themselves now, were steadily pressed back along their decks, flailing and tripping over their own wounded and dead.

  At last, crowding back to the stern cabin, they threw up makeshift, unlikely-looking barriers.

  Smith reappeared and stared blearily through the smoke, a wheel-lock pistol in each hand. One of his eyes was badly cut about. ‘Mattresses!’ he bellowed. ‘Goose-down mattresses! What do the devils think this is, the Sultan’s seraglio?’

  Yet they would make bizarrely effective barriers to their capturing the stern cabin and Ali Pasha within.

  And they needed to move fast, seize this momentary advantage. Nicholas yelled out and pointed. Across the water, not a quarter of a mile off, three or four fast galliots were ploughing towards their stricken flagship, densely manned with a fresh hundred or more best Janizaries.

  ‘Hit those galliots, prow gunners!’ cried Don John. ‘Don’t let them get close! And Smith, Stanley, get men on the roof! Tear the timbers off with your bare hands!’

  Then a familiar voice bellowed out from beyond, ‘Get your heads down there!’

  Veniero. And without a second warning, he put a matchstock to an ancient petrier he had mounted on his starboard side: a stone thrower.

  An instant later the barrier of mattresses exploded in a storm of feathers, blood and bone. Smith and Stanley and Nicholas, with many a grim-faced Venetian pikeman, fought their way forward in an eerie snowfall of white goose-down, falling gently to the deck and turned red beneath their slithering boots.

  7

  On the right, Andrea Doria did everything he could to shadow Kara Hodja and prevent him from some ruse that would tip the battle his way. Kara Hodja’s flagship even signalled that they were preparing to move off and save themselves, but Doria did not believe it for a moment, and held close to him.

  Yet Doria and Genoa had barely half as many galleys as the enemy, and as they moved further out to sea, shadowing the African squadrons, the brilliant renegade commander switched direction in a trice. Some eighty galleys came about with sails tight, smooth as a skein of geese, and moved fast into the gap that had now opened up between the Christian centre and Doria’s ships.

  There was something else. Behind the Christian centre, flanking the reserve squadron of Santa Cruz, Kara Hodja had glimpsed a certain standard which made his blood burn.

  The accursed white cross on red. The Standard of the Knights of Malta.

  Doria pursued manfully and fired on the enemy even as they closed on Santa Cruz’s reserve, and the single galley of the knights under the Chevalier Romegas. Yet as the massive squadron bore down upon them, Doria saw something that made his heart miss a beat, then swell with mournful pride. He saw the single galley of the Knights, out on the right of the whole reserve, turn steadily and face prow-on the oncoming force of eighty ships. There was no sense or reason in it, but it was magnificent.

  Within minutes, the St John of Jerusalem was surrounded, battered and half overwhelmed, knights lying dead across the deck or hanging over the rails. Yet still a last few fought furiously at the prow and the stern, even as their own awnings and sails blazed fiery above them.

  Below, Pietro Giustiniani lay dying, his left arm almost hacked off. But it was his own Mohammedan slave who had carried him below, and then wadded up the door with clothes and blankets.

  ‘Over the side with you,’ murmured the dying knight. ‘Go.’

  The Mohammedan slave wept, and shook his head, and stayed.

  ‘Kill them all!’ cried Kara Hodja, frustrated even at this delay. ‘Finish them off!’

  For in the time it had taken to destroy the knights – he had expected his squadron simply to mow that single ship down in an instant, but typically the Knights had already held out for twenty minutes now, and were still fighting – Kara Hodja had seen the reserve galleys of Santa Cruz turn about and draw up in a well-ordered line, ready to give fierce fire the moment Kara Hodja’s galleys came within range.

  ‘Yet again,’ muttered the renegade black priest sourly, ‘those gallant Knights have bought precious time for others by their sacrifice.’ He spat at his feet.

  Moments later there came a massive first volley of cannon from the reserve fleet of the Christians, now moving towards them fast. And the smaller force of Andrea Doria was also approaching steadily from the south.

  Kara Hodja ground his teeth.

  But at last he decided, as many times before, to retreat and save his own skin. They had captured the Standard of Malta, and most of the Knights lay dead. The ship would soon burn itself to a cinder and sink.

  His squadron pulled back, not a ship lost – though more than a hundred men had died trying to take the St John of Jerusalem. Kara Hodja retreated well out of range, almost out of sight, and then waited like a vulture for the verdict on the battle.

  There was no final moment, no trumpet call of retreat or triumph. Skirmishes continued over the wide sea late into the afternoon and even as dusk fell. All along the shoreline of the Gulf of Patras, Turks, Arabs and Moors lay in the salt shallows, panting, flailing: fugitives from the galleys of the Ottoman right, so mercilessly savaged by the galleys of the brothers Bragadino. Spanish and Venetian infantrymen marched among them, kicking up saltwater spray, thrusting long sword blades through chests and backs.

  Across the gulf, men floated on spars and timbers, men lay face up in the water. Shattered galleys flamed and belched black smoke. Occasionally there were desperate cries for help.

  The flagship of Savoy drifted silent and haunted, not a man on board left alive.

  The Naples galley, the Christ over the World, blew itself up in the late afternoon, taking with it the four Turkish galleys still locked in exhausted battle with it.

  In places, the victors were too bewildered, deafened and weary to know they had won.

  Amid the ruinous debris of the left flank, two galleys still faced each other, a Christian and Turkish, after hours of skirmishing. Two exhausted beasts, backs broken, masts tumbled and splintered, knocking gently into each other in the evening swell, soft twilight coming up out of the east over drifts of powder smoke, distant cries.

  Paolo di Mazzarino, a soldier of Sicily, sat clutching the stump of his right arm across his chest, too weak from loss of blood to move. He croaked for water. His arm was gone above the elbow, bone showing. But he felt calm. The rest of him had survived. Two legs and an arm. Maybe he shouldn’t complain. There was more of him left than many men there. Below him on the benches, most of the oar slaves lay dead in their chains. But he might live on yet, if this wound didn’t kill him in the next week or two. He might yet live to see his village and his vineyard and his girl again. He could please her as well with one hand as with two. He smiled faintly, lips cracked, and whispered again for water.

  The galley was slowly sinking. Longboats moved across the water among the wrecks in the setting sun, picking
up survivors. And on the other galley, also sinking, just twenty yards away, flying the crescent of Islam, Turks lay in a similar state, limbless, bandaged, blinded, beyond exhaustion, strangely calm. Some were now up their waists in the gently rising water. Warm Mediterranean water, mild October. It stung their wounds but it was gentle.

  The enemy soldiers regarded each other in silence. The guns were all overheated, the barrels cracked or warped, swords chipped and broken, powder gone.

  Suddenly a voice rang out from the Turks. ‘How can we fight each other now, eh?’

  With their powder-blackened faces, their turbans gone, used for bandages, their standards and pennants ripped or burned, they all looked uncannily alike, thought Paolo. Then he spotted the fellow who had shouted. Half naked, bare headed, grimed and bloody, cropped hair, big moustaches: a hairy barrel-chested Turk if ever he saw one.

  Nearby there floated a casque of oranges and lemons, split open, the fruit floating free and bobbing in the water. Paolo raised his eyes to heaven, reached out and seized an orange, bit into the peel and squeezed the juice from the flesh into his mouth. The taste of Sicily, the taste of heaven.

  A little revived, he took another orange and hefted it, felt the weight, and then threw it across at the Turks. It hit the bulwark and dropped.

  The big Turk grinned. ‘You throw like a girl!’ he called.

  ‘I am sorry for that, my infidel friend! I am used to throwing with my right hand, but alas you shot it off and it is now down in the deeps, fattening the fish. That was the best my left hand could do.’

  A nearby Spaniard, still in one piece, gave a gruff laugh. ‘Here, send one over here.’