Sofia (9 page)

“He is a terror to look at, that black man, yes. Certainly to one of your delicate sensibilities. But he is—forgive me, Madonna—a eunuch and a slave besides.”

Over the couple’s heads, I caught Piero’s eye as he stood testing the foot-ropes along the withdrawn sheeting so as to be ready to unfurl the instant we were allowed. I shot him a look of congratulations: he
had
been playing his part well. Then I shifted the tongs carefully in my hand so they remained behind my back as I continued to work my way around the deck.

The Knight pursued his topic: “You have nothing to fear from him. I trust your captain has had him baptized a proper Christian name and has actually done much to save the poor devil’s soul by bringing him here to these waters.”

Baffo’s daughter could not hide her disappointment that she was not to see Piero, her first disgracer, shot full of the Knight’s lead. But when she had recovered from that, she began at once to seek other satisfaction.

“I’m certain you are right about Captain Veniero,” she said. “You have so much more experience than I in such things, and I trust your judgment implicitly.”

The Knight reeled with flattery; he was ready for the strike.

“And yet, there is his nephew, the young Signor Veniero, the first mate. I just happened to overhear such a curious conversation of his last night.”

“What conversation was that?” the Knight asked.

“Well, he was speaking to Messer Battista, the merchant on board.”

“Yes?”

“Only, instead of calling him Enrico, he called him Husayn.”

“Husayn?”

“Well, it sounded something like that, anyway. It was certainly no name I’d ever heard before. And we all know that Messer Battista’s Christian name is Enrico. Isn’t that strange?”

“Yes, it is,” said the Knight, but without her notes of puzzlement.

“But it wasn’t...”

“Madonna Baffo,” I said. I said it quickly, but with enough force that she could not ignore me. “Don’t say another word, Madonna, or I shall have to do something we may all regret.”

The Knight, the young lady, indeed, everyone on board turned in my direction. They saw me with my live coal only a hair away from our cannon’s fuse, and the cannon was trained dead center on the Knights’ carrack. At that range, the charge would easily split the little ship in two.

The Knights’ captain went for his pistols, but, “Throw them to the ground,” I told him. “And that goes for all your men, too.”

They did so.

“Now,” I continued, “very quietly and calmly, I would like you all to go back to your ship, cast off, and allow us to go peacefully on our way to Corfu.”

My uncle was by my side now. He did not physically try to stop me—I don’t think there was any way he could have done that. But he did speak in that very soft tone of his which could easily have stilled many another mutiny. “Giorgio,” he said. “What do you mean? Putting so many lives—Christian lives—in jeopardy? For what? For a single Turk and his few bolts of cloth?”

I have said, my uncle was the father of my material needs, but Husayn had provided the spirit. “Yes, for Husayn I will do this. But I will also make certain that this accursed daughter of Baffo gets where she belongs—in her father’s care on the island of Corfu. And I hope the peasant she marries has two wooden legs and a hunchback.”

At this Madonna Baffo burst out, “By Jesù, I
will
tell them what I heard last night, and you, Veniero, damn you, you will not stop me.”

“Madonna Baffo, I warned you...”

“They talked about Messer Battista having three or four wives. They talked about Messer Battista’s Turkish language. And then Messer Battista swore by his demon god. ‘By Allah,’ he swore, and the sea seemed to lurch with demons beneath me.”

She stood there on the hatch, her fists clenched and her eyes spitting fire. Her golden curls were spilling unchecked from the confines of her coif and her breast heaved with passion. It never occurred to me that my mere threat was already all the proof the Knights needed. I was too angry to think beyond a lunatic desire to teach that girl a lesson.

Before there was time to think, I touched the ember to the wick. At the same instant, or perhaps a moment earlier, the girl jumped down, picked up one of the Knight’s discarded pistols and, shouting his name like a war-cry, tossed it to him. He shot. My uncle took the bullet meant for me full in the chest and crumpled in agony at my feet.

The cannon went off with a roar. Concerned about my uncle, I took no precautions to cover my ears and the sound splintered my head and left me witless for several seconds. When I came to myself again, water was already rushing into the carrack’s gaping hole.

Now the Knights lost no time at all. Quickly they retrieved all their guns and complete control of our ship. They bound my friend Husayn and threw him onto the deck of the sinking carrack. My uncle, because he soon died in my arms, they threw onto the doomed ship, too. Then they cut the car-rack loose and hoisted up our sails to flee the scene with all possible haste.

As for myself, I was bound in chains and thrown in the hold. They meant, I soon learned, to bring me to trial for murder and mutiny at the next Venetian port. Instruments of torture would be more sophisticated on land. But I suffered torture enough in that dark hold from the echo of my dear uncle’s last words.

“Son of my brother,” he said. “What have you done? You will be the last Veniero ever to sail the sea. And this will be the last voyage you ever take.”

In the darkness of the hold, days passed of which I was ignorant, punctuated only by waves of agony threatening to drown me in grief over the loss of my uncle, my only close kin, and our friend Husayn. I could see some light through the boards of the deck and I knew night because the darkness was then as complete as that within my soul.

We ran into a storm of physical dimensions on the second day, however. I cannot say how long we tossed mercilessly about and seawater poured down on me through the holes in the deck I could no longer see. I suppose I should have been grateful the Knights did not set me among the rowers, for those poor men stood it out with only canvas awnings for shelter and few of them had even a change of shirt when they got soaked to the skin.

In the darkness I shared with rats and the stuffy cargo of fabric and glass crates, I got terribly seasick. Usually a brisk walk around the deck, a silent communion with the waves, and a few deep breaths of fresh air were enough to cure me of any symptoms, but I was allowed none of these. The food Piero was given to bring me was lousy, and lying there in my own mess did not help matters.

I might have felt more compassion for the nun and the others who must have been suffering, too, if every thought in that direction did not make me burn with regret over my dead friends and fury over Sofia Baffo’s betrayal. I had been a fool to stop her elopement from the Foscaris’ hall. If I’d kept my mouth shut, she would now be the Barbarigos’ curse instead of the Venieros’. After all those thoughts, I was much too busy feeling sorry for myself, captive and without a friend in the world, and feeling the chafe of iron about my ankles and wrists with every lurch of the vessel to feel sorry for anybody else.

Though I did not know how many days had passed, I knew we had left the Adriatic, turned around the heel of Italy and were now on the open sea. I could tell by the size and sound of the swells even when the calm returned. So we were not to go to Corfu after all.

Piero brought me confirming word: “The Knights have decided not to risk it.”

“Yes. The heroism they profess might too easily be discovered to be the piracy it really is on Corfu.”

“The young signorina—”

“I’ll wager she had something to do with this decision.”

I couldn’t see Piero’s dark head there in the hold but I knew he was nodding.

“If she can’t return to Venice, Malta will do—for a while at least. It is certainly better than Corfu and the match her father has in mind.”

“The young signorina is”—Piero tried to break it gently—”the center of the Knights’ attention.”

“No need to be gentle with me, Piero.”

I did feel my punishment to be harsher—though no less deserved—than the many times that same dutiful slave had been told to take me out and thrash me with a birch cane for some youthful indiscretion. I remembered fondly how I’d plead for mercy, and Piero always gave it. He was incapable of giving it now.

I sighed. “Yes, I’m certain the blushing, lanky captain cannot do enough to show his dotage. More than once I’ve heard the strains of a dance played on the panpipes above. I’ve heard a lady’s light step match paces with the pirate’s boots.”

“And I have heard the Knights’ captain curse heaven,” Piero said slyly, “that he took his holy vows before he met this daughter of Baffo.”

“And so it is to Malta, the Knights’ lair, that we are headed. Malta is their great beachhead against the heathen threat of North Africa.”

Did I mean to comfort Piero with this resort to the plain, hard facts of the case? It certainly didn’t comfort me.

***

After perhaps a week at sea, when we were just recovering the distance lost in the storm, the usual deck activity above suddenly became more animated. “Ship ho! Off the port side!” The lookout’s report was repeated to all corners. In a moment, I heard the oarsmen pushed to double time, and then even faster. We were making a rapid retreat toward the starboard.

“Good God! Three of them!” I heard a Knight overhead exclaim. “We’re done for now.”

“Pirates! Turks! Pirates!” The cry rang out. “Man the gun for Christ and for Saint John!”

I struggled with my chains and tried to get some view of what was going on, but it was in vain. As far as I could gather, our three pursuers were such small craft that they could not be seen for perhaps ten knots after they had sighted much larger ships such as ours. This characteristic allowed them to slip in and among the islands like serpents, swoop down upon their prey and get away almost before it was known what had struck. Their small size also allowed them to overtake heavier ships in a very short time. So, though our rowers bent to with all their might, standing up on the footrails Venetian fashion for the sprint, the Turks were very soon within firing range.

The Knights sent off the first volley, but for such small ships, the Turks certainly had plenty of guns. By sound alone I distinguished five cannon to our one. Our single gun, too, was only able to defend to the forward, of no use as long as we were fleeing. With three ships able to scud across the water like the wind, the Turks very soon had us surrounded.

The Knights fought long and bravely in spite of such odds, and their fabled courage suffered our galley to take many heavy blows. As each charge made the timbers of our hold quiver like autumn leaves in the wind, I was convinced it was the last we could stand. All the tales I’d ever heard of shipwrecks came flooding into my mind like nightmares. I remembered most the helpless, horrible deaths of men in chains: in the hold like myself or chained to their benches at the oars. Some, rather than drown, hacked off their own limbs to escape the shackles, but such men eventually bled to death among the flotsam of the wreckage or attracted sharks to all their shipmates as well as themselves. Compared to that, drowning was an enviable end.

The hardest thing to bear was my helplessness. Had I had a pistol in my hand, I don’t think I should have minded this fate so much. Even being blown into the sea by a cannonball as I fought would have come easily because my mind and body would have had occupation other than this already black semi-death.

One sound from the deck gave me some measure of consolation, however. Hardhearted as it may seem, it was the shrieks and moaned prayers of the women on board. Unarmed, still they had to be where they could see the carnage in all its gore, and their cries portrayed the horror clearly to me who could not see. At least, I thought to myself as another ball shook our ship, I shall go down with the knowledge that Baffo’s daughter is punished for her willfulness. How she must long for the peaceful sight of Corfu harbor now!

The battle raged throughout the afternoon. Terror and hunger were muddling my wits, but when one blast took away a corner of the hull above my head, I was able to see the sun sinking and, every once in a while, the prow of one of the little attacking ships. Swift and light, its sails bound up for the engagement but with banners fluttering fiercely over the rower’s heads, this bark circled closer and closer, shark-like. The banners proclaimed the attackers’ nationality if I’d had any doubt before: they were the white crescent voraciously champing for a star on the scarlet flag of the Ottomans, the green of Islam.

By nightfall we were boarded and the battle continued hand-to-hand by torchlight. I followed its slow but irresistible progress by sound and smell only now: the surge of battle cries, the screams of the wounded, the gurgle of rowers crushed at their oarbanks, the pound of feet, the swish of blades, all encloaked with the thick brimstone of fired powder.

Then, as he was taking a final stand against the main mast, the Knights’ captain ran out of powder for his silver pistols and, helpless now as a ten-year-old lad, he cried for quarter. The Turks pretended not to understand and cut him down where he stood with their wild Damascus blades.

The stillness that followed the final knowledge of defeat overwhelmed the ship for several moments and seemed about to sink her of its own oppressive weight, sorely battered as she was. I heard the Turks round up their booty—that with legs first, as it was most likely to jump overboard and escape.

Then, endlessly later, the hatch was thrown open so that the nonliving merchandise could be inspected.

A blazing torch was thrust down into the hold and I was blinded by the light. The torchbearer, too, must not have seen clearly, for he called out, “I say, my young friend? Are you in there?”

The words were Venetian, but it was Venetian with an accent, however faint, that I could not fail to recognize.

“Husayn, old man. What the devil are you doing here?”