Reign of the Favored Women (8 page)

Andrea waved impatiently against the interruption of Turkish into a flow of Italian that, for some reason he couldn’t quite fathom, was taking all his concentration to follow.

The bravo persisted. “Perhaps it will hasten things along if I mention that that red-booted fellow there made my job easy. He exposed his heart, as nice as can be, by raising his arms for an embrace.”

“Infidel,” Sofia hissed. “Murderer.”

The bravo grinned maniacally. “Seemed the best thing to do, under the circumstances. To run him through.”

Andrea felt as if his heart, too, had been punctured. But no, no, a Barbarigo could shield his heart in a gauntlet of iron.

“Get her into the sedan,” he ordered, dragging the woman none too gently himself, baby or no. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Barbarigo, you don’t understand.”

“I think, madonna, I understand a little too well. What should have happened in Ca’ Foscari seven years ago, I intend to see happens now. I will make you mine. You will be rescued in spite of yourself.”

To Andrea’s surprise, she came more complacently now. A little firmness would manage her. By the time they got to the sedan and he’d opened the door, he couldn’t help but give Sofia a quizzical look.

“Well, what is there left for me here in Turkey?” she snapped at him, as if the logic was all too simple.

The child, Andrea reminded himself. Her son Muhammed.

But Sofia said nothing about any child. “The plot has failed,” she said instead, “now that Khalil is dead.”

“I don’t notice you weeping.”

“But I might. I just might.” This shrill pinnacle of her voice had ugly edges. “Khalil was our only hope for Cyprus.”

“Cyprus?” The consideration that there might be more at stake here than the possession of one woman’s body for one man’s pleasure took Andrea quite off guard. “You mean to tell me you’d corrupted that high-ranking officer?”

“Why are you so surprised?”

“But—how?”

“Andrea,” she cooed. “You need to ask?”

Andrea struggled to ignore a heavy flush. “He was going to stop the invasion of Cyprus? Cause a rebellion, create a diversion, refuse to fight—and spare Cyprus?”

“Barbarigo, why would I want to stop the invasion of Cyprus?”

“Because Venetians would die, of course. Because Cyprus belongs to Venice.”

“What benefit have
I
in that?” The moonlight caught a halo of her hair against the black arch of the sedan’s interior. “Hellborn hair” was the description that came first to mind.

“I’m going to take you back home.”

“Where I’d be one foolish, silly noblewoman among a thousand.”

Andrea closed his eyes against a dizzying wave of guilt. And upon the slate of his eyelids he saw the face of one of the Republic’s other noblewomen, the candlelit features of Melissa Foscari, intent on the sweetness of her madrigal. “Yes!” he shouted.

“No.” Her calm was terrifying. “If Turkey takes Cyprus, my son—my princely son—will soon rule it, along with everything else. And I—I rule him.”

“And—and your friend the janissary?”

“Perhaps you know—”Andrea was keenly aware that Sofia punctuated her sentence by laying her hands on his chest. He could feel their heat through both velvet and linen. “—perhaps you don’t. Sokolli Pasha is doing everything in his power to stop the invasion.”

“I hear he hasn’t much success, not against the besotted will of the Sultan.”

“Yes, Selim is a problem. What I would give the man who’d find a way to murder him.” Sofia had slipped her hands up his chest now and was toying with the lace of his collar. And he had worn it for just this purpose. “However, in the meantime, Joseph Nassey is a good substitute.”

“Joseph Nassey.” Andrea choked on his voice’s thickness.

“The Jew, Selim’s most fervent corrupter. So easily corrupted himself. The Jew, you must know, is my creature.”

“What would you give, Sofia? And for what?” The effects of her touch were going to his head.

“Although so far I’ve only been able to get Nassey to plead for invasion.”

“And what did you expect Khalil to do to Sokolli Pasha?”

“Assassinate him, of course.”

Andrea felt her withdraw from him with the same timing a skillful lover uses just before the enveloping climax. Andrea felt himself drawn helplessly after her, aching for that climax.

And then it came. From the bowels of the sedan behind her, Sofia had retrieved a neat silver and pearl-inlaid pistol. He had no time to consider where she got such a new-styled weapon, nor where she’d learned to use it. Not only did she travel armed, but she traveled with it primed and charged. And she didn’t flinch to level it at his face. Nor to lay the cock to the wheel.

One single lazy second drawled across time. Andrea moved through it as though through water, and as if he had nothing but water to breathe.

The ball caught the walleyed bravo in the midst of his leer with no warning whatsoever.

The Pasha’s peacocks set up a terrific pandemonium in reply.

Andrea ignored that difficulty for the moment, focusing on the recoil instead. With the shot’s help, he flung Sofia firmly back into the sedan and fixed the outside latch, flimsy but temporarily sufficient.

The bravo’s death groans had so disconcerted the other two accomplices, however, that they had loosed their grip on Ghazanfer. The monster of a eunuch, backed against a wall and holding them off with fists and boots alone, began to squeal in his obscenely feminine voice, “Murder! Help, for the love of Allah!”

People began to stir behind the neighboring lattices and the night watch couldn’t be too far off. But with Andrea’s inspiration, the bravos renewed their restraint and stifled the eunuch.

“Cut the capon’s throat,” Andrea hissed to the bravo whose dagger was most at the ready. He wasn’t at all certain that three could get the sedan to their shoulders, but there was no time to beg Ghazanfer to come along.

Then blood, black but spangled silver by the moon, spurted. It was not Ghazanfer’s thickly chinned and grossly unnapped throat that gave life out with a sigh, however, but the knife-wielding bravo, from beneath his flimsy mask.

A figure had suddenly dropped behind the fracas as if from the sky. When it freed itself, yet more eunuch’s robes were unfurled and Andrea recognized Sokolli Pasha’s head khadim, the one who called himself Veniero, who must have clambered over the palace walls.

The remaining bravo didn’t even wait to determine this much; he vanished up the alley in the direction of the Hippodrome. A moment later, Andrea was in his wake. Not a moment too soon, for the pistol, reloaded in the sedan, fired again, spraying up dirt at his heels and, in the other direction, he narrowly avoided running head on into the night watch. But he was not so quick that he didn’t overhear the following exchange between the two victorious eunuchs.

“
Mashallah, ustadh
,” spoke Ghazanfer, rubbing his thick neck as if he hardly hoped to find it still whole. His voice seemed to curl over the first smile ever to cross the impassive creature’s lips. “You weren’t a moment too soon on that one.”

“I had been at the wall listening for quite some time. Since I heard your lady’s first scream.”

“And you didn’t come to our aid?”

“I couldn’t make up my mind that you wanted me. Or that it would be in my best interest to do so. With your lady, it’s often difficult to tell.”

“Yes,” said the larger eunuch, more thoughtful that his usual omniscient tones. “I suppose that’s true.”

“But she does carry something that belongs to the realm of Islam—an heir.”

“Yes.”

“And after hearing about your young friend the page—”

“You heard that?”

“Yes.”

“Yes. I—I hoped you would. But shouldn’t someone go after that Italian?”

“My ears did hear right? He is the one they call Barbarigo?”

“The same.”

“Leave him. His life, I fear, will find its own level, now that she’s opened the floodgates on him.”

Perhaps Andrea imagined some of this talk. He imagined all sorts of things that night, running through the hostile city, rowing through the black waters dotted with lantern light in confounding constellations as fishermen stalked the late autumn
lufer
run. This journey he’d planned to take in love’s company he took alone.

“How many ships? How many ships?” the proveditore shouted up to his lookout.

“Hard to say, my lord,” came the answer. “They’re equal us. Maybe more.”

“More? The devil you say.”

“Perhaps, sir.”

Long before dawn on the seventh of October, 1571, the Christian fleet had weighed anchor. It was a Sunday, rather late in the year and risking storms, but the night had remained clear, brilliantly star-studded. All Andrea had seen of the fleet around them was its mimicry of the constellations above on the black water below. Each lead ship dangled a lantern from her masthead moving like God before the Israelites. The others mutely, invisibly followed.

As dawn had come, the allied Christian fleet found itself straddling the ragged entrance of the Gulf of Patrai. Swollen sails and quivering pennants. Christian devices all, had crammed the straits. They hunted revenge for the brutal fall of Cyprus to the Turk.

Priests had moved from ship to ship and man to man, presenting their holy relics and heavy, thumping silver crosses, offering communion. And the men took it, perhaps with more piety than the lot of sailors had ever experienced in their lives. If die they must, they would die shriven. If captured, they’d go with the taste of God on their tongues.

But no man expected that either of these fates would befall him. His neighbor, perhaps, but not him in whose personal consciousness the world had begun and without which it would extinguish. They could feel personal immortality plastering the roofs of their mouths along with the blessed wafer.

Andrea had thought this bitterly as he’d fingered the crusty scab on his face—the gift of a year and a half of whoring—and made his own confession. There wasn’t time to begin to tell it all. Others were waiting. So he didn’t mention a quarter of the sins resting on his account. And he left everything he owned to his mother in a will he doubted the Republic, if all were told, would honor.

Now, several hours of sin later, the sun was brilliant, almost blinding, off the waves stilled to looking-glass polish. Against the port side, the white rocks of Corinth were likewise unrelieved by any pads of green.

A dense, low mist seemed to be hovering over the next inlet, the Gulf of Lepanto. But those in the crows’ nests shouted the news down and soon enough anyone with eyes could see for himself. This was no meteorological fluke—a fog in midday sun—but the Turkish navy itself with sails unfurled, in superior position, ready and waiting to take on all comers.

A leaden silence fell over the Christians. Even the ships’ timbers forgot to creak and men forgot to breathe as simple wonder, unadulterated as yet with fear, overcame them at the sight.

Hasan Pasha was there, intelligence enlightened, the son of Barbarossa himself. Jafer Pasha, the Beglerbeg of Tripoli, and fourteen other beys of the maritime provinces had joined him, each entitled to hoist the banner of Prince of the Sea. Deploying his miles of ships into one great grasping crescent, and claiming the center for himself was the supreme Turkish commander, Muezzinzade Ali Pasha. Andrea’s heart thudded more when he heard that this commander’s ship was named
The Sultana
. How could he fight against that?

“And Uluj Ah,” the report came.

“Damned renegade,” his father cursed. “I’ll take that man’s balls for myself.”

Andrea knew Uluj Ali as a fearless corsair, the southern Italian turncoat who’d first captured Sofia Baffo and brought her to Constantinople.

And then Andrea learned there was another man known to his love among the enemy. That was Sofia’s master, her lover, Murad, the eldest son of the Sultan, heir to the throne. Father of Sofia’s children. Andrea couldn’t suppress that bitter thought. If she won’t claim me.

Murad was leading his contingent from the sandjak of Magnesia. Andrea almost echoed his father in claiming that man’s privates for himself. But he hesitated, confused. He had given Sofia a choice, he remembered, and she had chosen this Turk.

“Are we at them, my lord?” The men had reached the boiling point, where their individual minds melded into one.

“Yes, by God. Yes, for Cyprus and San Marco. At them!”

Now, although the opposing forces seemed to be unified in their ranks like two solid city walls, Andrea realized this was an illusion. Not only were the two armadas mere flimsy wooden ships upon the sea, susceptible to everything from flaming arrows to hidden shoals, but they were truly far from united in personnel besides. The North African beys actually got along with Constantinople and each other no better than Spain got on with Venice.

Add to this the fact that the brisk morning’s breeze had now died to nothing, and both forces would have to depend on their rowers. The rowers under the Turkish decks were Christian slaves. And under the Christians, the captives continually called on Allah and His Prophet in spite of the chains about them.

Andrea looked over the backs of his father’s rowers, uniform blue shirts and white caps moving like drops of water in a single swell. Their issued homogeneity disguised a crew at war with one another in their souls. The rowers would like nothing better than to propel their ship into the clutches of the enemy, who would free them from their shackles and return them home. Only full forces of whipmen and drivers kept them from actually doing so.

And the case must be the same across the stretch of green water in the Muslim hulls.

Fleets were divided into individual ships, ships into slaves and freemen, freemen into clans, father divided from son, and even Andrea’s heart was not at peace with itself. He had determined to fight his damnedest, to make his father proud of him once and for all, or die in the attempt. But when, over the drums marking the rhythm of his own ship’s forward motion, he heard the drums and thrilling double-reeded squeals of the janissaries’ martial shawms, he faltered.