The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea (42 page)

In reserve position behind Don John’s centre squadron drew up the veteran Spanish commander Don Álvaro de Bazán, Marqués de Santa Cruz, ready to feed men and ships into any breaks or weakness in the line, and with him was a single, fast galley flying the much-feared Cross of Malta, and captained by one Chevalier Mathurin Romegas.

Out in front of the Christian line, six huge galliasses were towed forward to wait silent and impassive for the fray.

For so many ships to come to order after passing through the narrow channel of Oxia in file was a fantastically difficult and complex manoeuvre. But Don John was served by the finest naval commanders in Christendom, and it was vital they succeed. The moment a Turkish force got among them or behind them – a favoured trick of Kara Hodja’s – they were lost. But the wind and the sea had begun to calm as the sun rose, which was some help.

The near-silent glide of a forest of masts over the blue waters. The faintest creak of oars in the leather-collared rowlocks, the occasional shiver of the rigging. The wind gentler by the hour, as Don John had promised. The banner of the Holy League softly waving overhead, blue damask embroidered with an image of the King of Kings, Judge of All, and a golden chain linking four escutcheons: the lion shield of Venice, the red-and-silver-striped arms of the Papacy, the heraldic castles and lions of Spain, and Don John’s own arms. The warm autumn day, the gentle sea, the proud banners and the gorgeous colours – Nicholas stared around, dazed with the beauty of it, though his guts were tight with fear. How could war be so foul and yet so glorious?

Then he coped with his fear, Hodge and he both in silence, as they had always coped. By keeping busy. They buckled on each other’s breastplates and fitted their helmets, and then along with the mariners and the soldiers aboard, they laid out grappling irons, and greased pikestaffs so that boarders couldn’t grasp them and haul themselves up. In the rear of the ship, as far from the guns as possible, the ship’s surgeon laid out his bandages, his handsaw, his leather flask of alcohol. All glass would shatter.

Friars sprinkled holy water on ships’ prows, and gave absolution for sins. Priests prayed fervently to San Marco and San Stefano, San Giovanni, Santiago. The Christian archers, islanders from Sardinia and the Balearics acknowledged the finest among them, tensioned their bows and filed their arrowheads. Mariners smeared the planks with oil to slip up any boarders, and brought up barrels of sawdust, to strew on the decks as the battle progressed and soak up the blood.

Visibility improved, and the lookouts stared over the blue sea from the tops.

‘Can we see them?’

‘Aye,’ one called down evenly. ‘We can see them. Estimate eight miles off and closing on us steady.’

It was 7.30 in the morning.

‘Hold the line.’

Don John gave the order for the oar slaves to be unchained. Down below, Bernardino the bigamist, Ercole di Benedetto the sodomite and the blind Il Cazzogrosso rubbed their red raw ankles in disbelief.

‘They range out like the horns of a bull!’ called down a lookout. ‘And no reserve!’

‘No reserve? Are you certain?’

‘Quite certain, sire.’

‘They will try a breakthrough in our line,’ said Giustiniani, ‘feeding fresh troops in where needed with small, fast fustas and galliots.’

‘How very confident of them. Overconfident, perhaps. Good for us.’ Don John mused. ‘From overhead, their line would look to a
passing bird like a huge crescent. While ours, a straight line, with Santa Cruz behind, and our galliasses out front – like a huge cross, perhaps?’ He smiled. ‘Everything men think real is a symbol. Only the symbols are real.’

It felt real enough for now, thought Nicholas, knuckles white on the rail.

The two vast fleets approached each other, five miles apart, then three, then two. They slowed and waited, the oar slaves skulling back and forth, holding formation.

It was a battle-front some four or five miles wide. So many hundreds of ships, so many tens of thousands of men. There had been no clash of galleys like this since the days of the ancient world. Since Augustus fought Mark Antony for the Empire of Rome, in these very same waters. Then as now, the whole of history would turn on a single day.

Nicholas leaned from the rail, teeth clenched to stop them chattering. The enemy seemed numberless. And it was only a fraction of the fleet that he could see. Was the Holy League really supposed to destroy it, send it all to the bottom, make Christendom safe again for a generation? It was a madman’s dream.

And this was the powerful Ottoman fleet that had defeated the Christians in sixteen sea battles in succession now. He narrowed his eyes against the sun and made out poop decks adorned with silken awnings, exotic oriental hues of indigo, gold and green, and huge stern lanterns topped with silver crescents, glittering and swaying gently in the sun. Across the calm waters he could hear the sound of trumpets, drums and cymbals, the reedy piping of zornas. There the Turks and the Egyptians, the Arabs and Moors, would be listening to a last recital of the Koran, kneeling and kissing the decks beneath their green banners embroidered with the ten thousand names of Allah. As ready as any to die for their God.

‘The beauty of it,’ whispered Miguel de Cervantes. ‘Oh, the beauty of it.’

On the red-hulled flagship of the Ottoman commander, the
Sultana
, Ali Muezzinzade and his captains were full of high confidence, both
wind and sun at their back. Yet as they surveyed the line ahead of them, they felt a slight puzzlement.

Why had the Christians been so careless as to let those great lumbering supply ships of theirs drift out in front of their line?

Idiots. Their commander, this base-born boy of twenty-four years, Don John, was evidently even more of a fool than they had heard.

Yet deep down, Muezzinzade felt some foreboding he could not explain.

‘Give them a blank shot!’ he ordered. ‘By way of invitation.’

The
Sultana’s
centre-line gun gave a crack, a giant’s handclap, and black smoke drifted over the sea.

‘Return fire!’ cried Don John. ‘Live firing!’

‘At this range, sire? It must be . . . twelve hundred yards.’

‘Crank up the barrel or whatever you do. Hit something. ’Tis not far off, and God knows there’s enough targets to choose from. Hit them, that’s an order!’

Utmost aggression with supreme confidence. It had always been the way of the knights. And Don John himself was, among other things, a Knight of St John.

On the deck of
La Real
, every man’s gaze was upon her centre-line gun, now raised at an angle of forty degrees or more, and that first cannonball. Every other ship round about watched for the response. It was ridiculous – yet on that first ball, they felt, depended the mood of the Holy League itself, and the fate of this battle. And on this battle depended the fate of Christendom.

So may it please God, prayed the roughest mariners, chapped and salt-dried lips moving in prayer. Blessed Virgin, let it do its work, and let every ship in the fleet behold it clear.

Never such concentration.

The master gunner stooped and sighted one last time, felt the gentle tip and tilt of the deck under his bare feet, judged the precise timing of the burn. He glanced out at the masts of the enemy fleet, and then put the matchcord to the touch-hole, stood back and blocked his ears. The powder fizzed and spat sparks from the touch-hole, the muzzle lowered and then rose again in the swell, and there was a thunderous detonation and a whine. A perfect trajectory, the
powder generous but not so much as to damage the barrel, the ball arcing high as a rainbow.

The destructive force of an iron ball was reckoned as its weight multiplied by its speed of travel. Like those terrible rocks from heaven that astronomers called meteors, falling so fast through the sky that they burned up, or made giant craters in the earth. This ball came down faster than any swift or falcon in its dive.

Chroniclers afterwards were often disbelieved, but in a wild stroke of luck, that first ball fired from the Christian flagship hit the flagship of the Turks at its stern lantern. The
Sultana
seemed to shiver and roll, followed a moment later by the sound of the impact travelling over the water to
La Real
. They saw the wooden gunwales of her stern explode in a halo of splinters and could even hear screaming. It was a devastating hit.

The effect on morale was tremendous.

Amid the cheering, Don John’s high, carrying voice was heard. ‘God is with us! Attack, all speed ahead!’

Ali Pasha, the muezzin’s son, face bright with anger, had evidently given the same order. The great kettledrums boomed out from the slave decks of three or four hundred galleys, and the two mighty fleets surged towards each other over the mild blue sea.

Gunners readied their guns, palms sweating, arms shaking so badly they wondered how they’d ever manage to fire them. In only a minute or two, these wooden walls around them would be erupting in their faces. Some among them would never hear anything again, not the song of the birds nor the voices of their own wives and children. Strangely, dread steeled them. They’d better goddam win, if that was the price they’d pay.

Arquebusiers crouched with their wheel-locks or more primitive matchlocks, murmuring their rosaries and prayers to the saints. They thought of their women. Hearts raced, blood pulsed, expressions tensed white, ready for the approaching cannonade.

A seabird wheeled overhead and gave a cry.

And in the prow of
La Real
, their crazed commander, Don John of Austria, was seen in full suit of armour, dancing a galliard to the music of pipes and a viol. It was high noon, the zenith of the day’s golden glory, before the slaughter to come and the bloody fall of the sun.

On the Turkish left, Kara Hodja narrowed his sun-wizened eyes and thought he understood what those great, silent galliasses must mean. He gave the order for his huge force of some ninety galleys and galliots to pull to larboard, well wide of them and out into open sea.

‘Their left wing moving out, sire!’ called a lookout.

‘Flanking movement,’ said Giustiniani.

‘Make sure Doria moves out to meet them!’ called Don John.

Meanwhile a low, well-oared fusta was moving off from Kara Hodja’s squadron fast, with an urgent message for Muezzinzade’s central squadron. It was Stanley who spotted it and advised Don John to give the order to hit it.

‘That speck? Why?’

‘A hunch,’ said Stanley. ‘I think Kara Hodja has suspicions of our galliasses.’

‘Damn it, yes, you’re right!’ exclaimed Smith. ‘The Turks will hold back if they get wind of the plan.’

Don John gave the order, and sent the same to the galleys to left and right. The
Merman
, the
Fortune
, the
Santa Ana
, the
Wheel
and the
Serpent
.

‘Hit that fusta travelling from the Turkish left to the centre! Blow it out of the water!’

The sea erupted in white geysers around it; the low boat was soon swamped, yet still it struggled on. Then it was low-raked again, savagely splintered, dancing wildly in troubled sea. It took more than twenty cannon shots to finish it. It rose and came down again no more than a shattered skeleton of its former self, and quickly went under with all hands.

On the
Sultana
, this skirmish was briefly noticed then dismissed. The Christians were practising ranging fire.

Kara Hodja raged. He made a move to send a second fusta, a third. But already the Turkish centre was now approaching the silent galliasses. It was too late.

Francesco Duodo commanded the centre galliass, with Jacopo Guoro to his left.

The mighty Turkish centre split apart to move around them. They were obstacles, nuisances, but no more. A feeble ploy by the Christians to break up their line, but only for a few moments.

The Turkish line was now almost parallel with the galliasses.

Aboard the galleys of the Holy League, forty thousand men held their breath.

Duodo raised his arm.

All along their high sides, portholes fell open and black muzzles appeared.

Kara Hodja stared through his telescope, and his mouth fell
open. Twenty, no, thirty guns a side. No wonder they could hardly be moved.

By the beard of the Prophet.

On the deck of the Turkish galleys passing nearest to these silent supply ships, men’s eyes flared wide. There was a gasp, a wail.

Duodo’s arm dropped, and matchcords were lowered to the touch-holes.

Each galliass fired a volley from its open side so massive that the entire ship rolled sidelong with the recoil. But this had all been reckoned for by master shipbuilder Franco Bressano back in Venice. The guns were safely roped on their carriages, allowed to run back on their wheels and the huge ships well able to roll with the blast.

The effect of the volleys left and right into the Turkish line, effectively an explosion of enfilading fire, was devastating. The galley nearest to Duodo’s ship was momentarily rolled clean out of the water, coming back down in pieces. The one beyond was blown into two halves when its powder stores were ignited. Other balls ripped onwards down the line, and five or six more galleys beyond were badly damaged.

‘Return fire!’ screamed the nearest Turkish captains. ‘Sink those monsters!’

Even as they moved to reply, their oar slaves pulled desperately to move beyond the dreaded ships. Duodo and Guoro then ordered a second volley, for only every alternate gun was fired each time, with an interval for cleaning and cooling. The two galliasses turned a few degrees into the passing fleet, the guns lowered as far as possible. Any height and they might begin hitting their own wings behind.

‘Fire!’ cried Duodo, and again the guns roared.

Hulls splintered open, sails tore from shattered masts, seawater poured in. Chained oar slaves panicked and began to turn their stricken vessels around wildly in the centre of the line, oblivious to the savage beatings from the mariners, and soon became entangled with the neighbouring galleys.