by Harold Lamb
Andrea Doria explained the idea to her, with maps—how they could only win the war one way, by everybody ganging up. But Julie understood in a flash what they were after, and said so.
"You call yourselves Christian soldiers, and you gang up against a man who fought you fair," she said.
The marshal of the Holy Roman Empire said a woman couldn't judge very well what was fair in war. The lord admiral—that being Doria—would decide the strategy.
"To use a woman to bait a trap!" said Julia.
The vice-commander of the Knights of Malta stood up and swore by his honor that she would be safe this time on the flagship. Especially, he added—not liking Doria—on the lord admiral's flagship.
"I wasn't thinking of myself," she told the commander.
"Evidently not." The thin face of the marquis flushed dark. "I had thought you hated this renegade pirate, but I am led to believe you love him. Speak up," he insisted, when Julie held her tongue.
The tightness within her gave way at the word. "My lord husband, it is true hatred can turn into love," she spoke up all in a breath, "and love can also become hatred. I know nothing about Barbarossa except one thing. He will never shame me as you have done this minute."
Then she curtsied to Doria. "Will you kindly have a chair put for me on the deck of your ship, admiral? I will go with you gladly on your cruise to meet Barbarossa."
When she did, everyone who saw Julie remarked how she seemed to be enjoying it—the doge himself handing her into the admiral's barge at the quay, and the flagship decked with streamers, while salutes were fired all around. Julie had on her newest blue dress with the gossamer silk scarf at her throat. She couldn't help enjoying it, although she knew it was staged like this so Barbarossa would be certain to hear about her.
She hadn't been to sea for so long. And all the sea was covered with sails, from the gun barges to the five great new galleasses, like castles filled with tiers of guns. Seven fleets she counted with seven flags—the arms of Genoa above her, the lion of St. Mark, the Maltese cross, the shield of Spain, the eagles of the great emperor, the crossed keys of the Papal Curia, and another she didn't know that Doria said was Portuguese.
She almost felt like waving her scarf, until Doria gave her the totals—two hundred ships, two thousand guns, sixty thousand armed men. And more than all that, the five new dreadnoughts.
"And what," asked Julie anxiously, "does Barbarossa have with him? By the way, where is he?"
At Preveza, said Doria, refitting his fleet of perhaps eighty sail. At the landlocked port of Preveza, watched by a screening force of light galleys. This screening force, Doria explained, would withdraw to decoy Barbarossa out to where the five galleasses waited. When Barbarossa had broken his strength against the five dreadnoughts, Doria's main fleet of two hundred galleys would encircle the battle to sink every unit of the pirate's Turkish fleet. It would all happen like that, barring bad weather, which, being an act of God, Doria could not control.
This strategy Julie didn't understand very well. But realization came to her like a blinding flash of lightning. Barbarossa was trapped. If he tried to save his crews by landing, he lost his fleet. If he fled away from the armada and from her, the name of Barbarossa would cease to be a legend in the Mediterranean. If he came out to fight against such power as this, and against her, he was lost. And so, very likely, was she. There was no other possibility.
"I understand," she said quietly in her deck chair, "everything now."
Barbarossa came out to fight.
It happened just as Admiral Doria and Julie had anticipated. Except that Barbarossa's vessels got under way at night, surprising the screening force and scattering it before it could draw him seaward. Yet he came on.
The wind being against him, he had to work out with the oars. His lookouts sighted the forest of masts lying in wait off the island of Santa Maura, yet he kept his course to close his enemy.
After dawn the wind died. The five galleasses, becalmed, lay in his way, their great firepower blasting his galleys back. He sent his galleys in singly to fire their bow guns and draw clear. What with that, and the mighty sea castles fouling each other in the calm, one of them caught in flames. After that the small galleys worked in through the smoke to board the great ships. It was mid-afternoon, and the weather thickening, before the fifth galleass hauled down her colors.
If only Barbarossa had kept all of Suleiman's armada with him, and the heavy mortars and janizaries, he might have had more of a chance. As it was, he had taken too much punishment. When he made signal to close the enemy at Santa Maura, his flotilla had thinned behind him. His own galley limped forward with half its oars gone.
Past the stern of Doria's flagship the galley of Malta rounded and the commander hailed, "Lord admiral, do you not see that the enemy will close us? Bear down, bear down!"
"Back to your station!" shouted Doria. "Obey your orders! We will have every sail of his by sundown! "
"Admiral," cried Julie from her chair, "I find the conversation on my cruise most entertaining! What with so many commanders all running up different signals, and squadrons rushing by in the heavy swell," she added. "And the spectacle is really magnificent."
Then through the circling squadrons the dark wedge of Barbarossa's ships came on, with the roar of the guns like the swift roll of drums. When a flying squadron struck against this wedge there was a vast splintering sound.
With each lift of the swell, the wedge was closer. Like an injured wrestler, it felt for a grip on its enemy. And there happened at Preveza what sometimes happens at sea—the great fleet maneuvering, colliding, and changing course could not break up or check the small fleet bearing in.
Under the darkening sky, Barbarossa's scarlet pennon showed clearer. Julie recognized the gilt stern lanterns bearing down on her. So few oars moved the battered galley toward her. Julie's mind told her, He knows I am waiting here, yet he will not turn away. Nothing now can keep his ship from crashing into mine.
She didn't feel as if she were going to die. She felt excited and tense, as if at her wedding. What was really happening she couldn't understand because of the loud drumbeat and the darkness over her head.
Then lightning glared. In the flash, Andrea Doria's nerves snapped. He cried, "Give way!" And unsteadily he ordered a signal flag bent—all ships to shelter from a storm. So the mighty armada turned and ran from Barbarossa. The long oars churned, the steering sweeps were thrust hard over, and their galley turned from Barbarossa's boat. Their armada followed, running before the wind rising to hurricane force.
Rain squalls swept the deck. The galley, with oars inboard and only a patch of foresail spread, ran north. Braced with the sweep of the rain, seeing an inlet in the coast as night closed in, Julie wondered why they didn't light the stern lanterns that served as guide beacons for the fleet.
She did not know that Barbarossa was following until the other galley drew alongside with its lanterns glowing aft. It hung to windward, accompanying them. No guns could be worked on her galley in that lash of rain. A shaft of lightning showed Barbarossa standing by the steering sweep across from her as the red fisherman had stood at his tiller, and she thought, How much heavier he's grown.
Then she felt warm and protected with Barbarossa between her and the flying spray. She waited for each flashing beacon of the sky to see him again until he drew ahead with beacon lighted, guiding her toward a break in the dark coast.
When her galley reeled and swept into the gut of an inlet, Barbarossa sheered off, heading out toward his scattered fleet. Watching the two lanterns turning away, she remembered and laughed, hurrying to pull the scarf from her throat and wave it.
"Marchesa," said Andrea Doria. He looked aged and sick. "What do you wish for?"
Julie hardly heard him, watching into the darkness. "I almost forgot. I was so very happy."
Barbarossa kept the sea until the last of his ships found shelter. Perhaps because of that, he died soon after. From Gib to Gallipoli lig
ht, his name was a great name. And when Sultan Suleiman came back from Asia he built that tomb close to the water, with the two stern lanterns hung inside it.
When Terence McGowan finished with his identification of Barbarossa, the admiral flipped his cigarette into the water.
"McGowan," he said, "I was a swab this morning."
The admiral squinted shoreward at the Golden Horn with sunset lighting the minarets of the mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent, and at the small tomb dark by the water. He cleared his throat. "H'm-umh. I'll give you five to one in dollars that Barbarossa wanted Suleiman to keep those stern lights going, and Suleiman did it. But after four hundred years, people forget a detail like that. Furthermore, I think I owe these Turks something. It would be a good thing if I went back tomorrow morning with electricians and got those lanterns going again. Will you break out some flowers and et ceteras, and Miss—Miss Mediterranean to attend again?
"You mean Miss Hisarbey?"
"I mean Miss Mediterranean." The admiral looked at his aide. "Do you know any reason why the American Mission for et cetera can't have a good-looking Miss Mediterranean?"
"No, sir," said McGowan promptly.
The Admiral Declares War
IT happened at 2:03 by the elderly admiral’s wrist watch. At that moment of a tranquil, cloudless day he expected his pilots to turn hack. By the map on his knee he calculated that they had reached the far end of the Black Sea, which he had ventured that day to explore by plane, along the Turkish shore. Dead ahead rose a mass of mist-shrouded mountains which could be none other than the Caucasus, hence a soviet of the Soviet Union, over which the admiral had neither the inclination nor the authority to fly.
Just then he was passing over a small gray castle jutting out to sea from a fishing village. Off the village lay a small gray gunboat. During his five hours’ flight east from Istanbul the admiral had sighted many such ancient castles and much magnificent scenery, but not one modern, serviceable port upon the shore of this tideless inland Black Sea, about which he knew only two facts for certain—that the Turks shared it jointly with some units of the Soviet Navy, and that he, Rr. Adm. J. Michael Cater, was to serve as senior naval officer of the American Mission for Aid to Turkey, and, in consequence, as technical renovator of the small, obsolescent Turkish Navy. A tough job, in his opinion.
Being well on in years, the stocky and slightly deaf admiral had a passion for such facts, which he could understand; being accustomed to the open reaches of the Pacific, he felt inhibited upon this basin of water hemmed in by mountains and antiquities dating back to prohibition, if not to the Flood.
Barely had he checked his position upon the map when the sunburned bullethead of Lt. Turgut Nimet, of the Turkish Air Force, shoved into the bomber’s bay beside him.
"Sir,” announced the young copilot, "we are over the port of Kirik. The airstrip is showing emergency distress SOS signal. Can we respond?”
Now the admiral, propped in the glass-encased nose of the T-ll bomber-navigator-trainer plane, had sighted no port, signal or airstrip. Yet habit was stronger than reasoning. Too often he had responded in split seconds to static-strained calls from the enveloping space of the oceans.
"Yes, lieutenant,” he answered before he reflected that young Nimet, who doubled as his interpreter, was also expert at wangling things unexpectedly for himself.
The bulky gray-blue shoulders of Lieutenant Nimet vanished, as he called, "Okay. Sit her down."
Faintly the admiral heard the voice of his own aide, Lt. Comdr. Terence McGowan protesting, "Where is any airstrip, you ginks?” Then for several minutes he was conscious of very little.
The two young Turks had got their wings at Randolph Field, Texas, and were conditioned to handling Spitfires in combat tactics. They handled the heavier T-ll accordingly. Fleetingly from his observation post the admiral glimpsed the iced peak of a mountain, with the thread of a river beneath; he bore down upon the familiar gray shape of the gunboat anchored off the castle. Then he swooped over treetops disgorging startled pigeons, and dived at what seemed to be Kirik’s Main Street, which displayed three letters in white cloth—D-U-R—between lines of excited human beings. His plane collided with the solid earth, executed a smart turn to starboard and skidded into the dust of a cultivated field.
When the dust cleared and Admiral Cater stood, intact and exasperated, amid a gathering of farmers with harrows powered by oxen, he tried to take in the situation, and failed.
Under a burning sun the town of Kirik appeared altogether at ease to the naked eye. Wistaria in bloom tinted the terrace of the ancient castle; a stork flopped back into its nest upon the minaret of the old mosque. There was no indication of fire, flood or earthquake. Why, then, the distress call?
"McGowan,” the admiral rasped at his aide, "what seems to be the trouble here?”
Reluctantly the good-looking and hefty McGowan broke off apostrophizing the two pilots on their manner of landing. "I don’t know, sir. They say 'Dur' means 'Stop,’ and the brake switch didn’t connect up. These Turks never check——”
"Never mind that,” put in the admiral. Members of the American Mission had been cautioned not to use the phrase "these Turks.” And McGowan, an Irishman and natural extrovert, was not fond of the haphazard Nimet, a natural show-off. "Well, lieutenant”—the admiral turned to the younger pilot—"what is the nature of the emergency here?”
"Sir, I am not sure.”
Nimet muttered in Turkish to the senior pilot, who spoke no understandable English. Perhaps, the admiral thought, plague had broken out in this isolated hamlet. But the bronzed faces of the peasantry gathering around him seemed healthy and excited. Boys galloped up enthusiastically on the rear ends of vegetable-laden donkeys. The admiral himself appeared to be the center of lively interest.
Then Nimet’s dark eyes glowed, and Terence McGowan gave out a low, wolfish whistle. Through the flocks and herds and dust galloped a team of good-looking horses drawing a carriage with shining brass-work that the admiral identified as a victoria. When the carriage hove to smartly in front of him, out jumped a very youthful and lightweight girl, blond and flushed, tucking a white shirtwaist into her skirt.
"Miss Susullah Baylary, sir,” explained Nimet, grinning, "who teaches English in the secondary school and can explain what the trouble is.”
In musical English the girl cried, "Please will your excellency pardon me for being so late to come?”
A faint suspicion grew to a hunch in the mind of the admiral. Clad in a natty gabardine, hatless and close-cropped, he bore upon him no indication of rank. Yet this child of Kirik had identified him at sight. Obviously she had been briefed by the Lochinvarlike Nimet, whose girl she appeared to be. So the emergency might be that the youthful pilot desired to keep a date with her. Nimet said it would take hours to fix the wiring in the T-ll. These Turks thought nothing of asking favors of a friend; furthermore, they had no regard for time.
"Miss— Miss Susie,” he asked mildly, "what is the emergency here? ”
Shy, but with the assurance of a woman accustomed to admiration in men’s eyes, Miss Susie said, "Emergency? Sir, I do not understand American slang too well because I teach only English.”
"The trouble,” explained Nimet, eying the teenage teacher with pride.
Miss Susie Baylary glanced around with definite hesitation. Then she pointed up at the timbered shoulders of the mountain ridge behind the town. She smoothed back her shoulder-length bob. "There your excellency can see it happening to our herds and flocks.”
In the remote past as a boy at home in Montana, the admiral had watched herds driven. These of Kirik appeared to be active black goats with fleecy Angoras and a sprinkling of horse herds coming down rather rapidly from pasture. That was all.
Miss Susie explained, "Up there they are running from”—again she hesitated—"devils— perilar”—she faltered.
"You mean they are jinxed,” said the pilot, who knew his Texas.
"Hexed,” correcte
d Terence McGowan, who had been observing Miss Susie’s anatomy with pleasure. "A jinx sticks with you all the time, Miss Susie, but a hex is laid on you by somebody, and it hits you hard.”
Gratefully the young lady smiled at him. "I think it’s ghosts.”
Ghosts! In the admiral’s opinion she was the spoiled child of this remote town, accustomed to having males perform like trained seals. Nine hours had elapsed since his breakfast, and dinner was five hours away at Istanbul. He said curtly that he was sorry, he couldn’t attend to any ghosts in Kirik; he wanted Lieutenant Nimet to fix the connection in the T-ll and take off.
The young Turks watched his eyes like puppies at sight of a whip. The pilot’s chin thrust out stubbornly, and he swung away to the plane. These people had pride.
Drawing a long breath, Miss Susie said, "Then, sir, you must come in the carriage that madame sent for you, and she will tell you about the ghosts.”
"Um,” muttered the American officer, who had no intention of wasting more of a day investigating an unidentified something, whether supernatural or otherwise. But when she slid into the carriage seat and made room for him, he could not refuse. Promptly McGowan flanked her on the other side, and the driver wheeled the team away as the crowd waved and shouted.
"What say? ” the admiral demanded.
"They say bism'allah, 'in the name of God,’” the child observed, like a well-trained guide. She was quick to sense his mood. "They are happy because they think that you have started to remedy their trouble. You see, they are old-fashioned.”
Old-fashioned! Rear Admiral Cater felt as if he were riding back into the day of cigar-store Indians and Anna Held. These Turks salvaged anything old; even—for he had seen them—parts of reciprocating engines that would never turn again. He half believed the scuttlebutt that they kept Noah’s Ark mothballed on the peak of Mt. Ararat.