Altai: A Novel (31 page)

15.

I knocked vigorously until the door opened and I found myself face to face with Ralph Fitch. For once I hadn’t tracked him down to the palace library, but had gone straight up to his room, at the end of one of the corridors on the first floor.

He greeted me, a little surprised by this sudden visit, and ushered me in. We sat down at a little tea table and he asked me if I would like something to drink. When I refused, he understood that something was troubling me and started listening. I knew him as a keen-minded man, and I knew that I could talk to him with the same candor that I expected from him. “I need your expert knowledge about artillery.”

He smiled disarmingly, stroking his red moustache. “I am a merchant, Signor Cardoso. My interest in artillery is merely commercial.”

“Nonetheless, I think you can be useful to me,” I insisted. “In Takiyuddin’s laboratory you said that because of the recoil, heavy cannons can’t be used on ships. I’d like you to explain that idea to me in greater detail.”

Fitch filled a beaker of wine. He sipped it, then set the glass down on the table and then seemed to forget it was there. He said, “That’s easy. You see, normally on a war galley the cannons are on the stern and prow quarterdecks, and they fire when the enemy prepares to ram. Other guns can be placed on hanging decks along the broadsides, above the banks of oarsmen. But space is very tight, and obviously it’s only possible to put little
pedreros
and falconets on them, since the recoil of larger calibers would cause the gun to fall back on the lower deck, and the oarsmen would be crushed.”

I already had my next question lined up.

“So if someone found a way to reduce the recoil of cannons, larger calibers could also be put along the side?”

He raised an eyebrow, mulling over the hypothesis. “I suppose so. But that would require a great deal of very broad and solid hanging decks.” He seemed to meditate on his own words, then added, “No galley of that size exists.”

I leaned on the table.

“Let us imagine for a moment that it does exist. What kind of ship would it be?”

Fitch picked up his glass and sipped from it again. At last he replied, in the voice of someone explaining the obvious, “A massive, overladen ship, very difficult to maneuver.” He paused for a moment, then added, “Have you ever heard of
Great Harry
?
She was a slow behemoth that rarely plowed the waves. I’m sure that vessels like that were never seen in this part of the Mediterranean
.
In any case, if I were to encounter a monster of that ilk, I would stay well away from it. It would be a kind of . . .” He sought the right words. “Floating fortress.”

He must have read the puzzlement on my face, because he quickly asked me if I hadn’t perhaps changed my mind, and whether I didn’t feel the need to drink something.

This time I accepted his offer. I allowed the wine to sweeten my mouth as I tried to stay calm.
Floating fortress
. The same expression used by Sokollu. Except that now it was more than a colorful metaphor.

A whole wing of the Venice Arsenal had been dedicated to refurbishing the galleasses. A whole wing just to patch up the cargo ships that in wartime are used to transport food and ammunition, or to crowd arquebusiers into. Huge three-masters. Extremely heavy and immobile. Apparently harmless. But find a way of filling them with cannons, and you’ve turned an old kettle into a roasting jack.

16.

Night had fallen by the time I reached Nasi’s bedroom, on the other side of the palace. He greeted me with a candelabra in his hand, and the worried expression of someone receiving a visit at an unexpected hour. He was dressed in a shirt and a pair of breeches in the European style. The only other light in the room was a candle on the desk, which illuminated a long goose quill and a sheet of paper. I hadn’t woken him, then. I glanced at the big four-poster bed on the other side of the room, and it seemed to be still made up.

“I’ve got to talk to you.”

He looked exhausted, his face weary, as if he hadn’t slept for days. He beckoned me to follow him to the window and set the candelabra down on the windowsill.

“I’m listening.”

Words seem very slow when thoughts are clambering over each other.

“This war is a big trick. We thought Sokollu was plotting to thwart it, we rejoiced when we managed to unmask him, and yet it was he who ensnared us in his plan.”

I waited in vain for a reaction. “Sokollu knew he couldn’t stop the war,” I went on. “The other viziers wanted redemption for the humiliating defeat of Malta, Selim wanted a military triumph to demonstrate that he was a match for his father. And you wanted a Jewish kingdom. Sokollu understood that the war would be an opportunity to defeat all his adversaries with a single blow. He was the one who said so. The taking of Cyprus has already proven to be half a disaster. If the Ottoman fleet were defeated, the disaster would be complete. Selim’s prudence would be praised to the skies, and we would be ruined.”

“How could he have known . . .”

“That Famagusta would resist for so long? He didn’t, but he fully expected that it would. He knows Venetian pride at least as well as I do. And I know he’s waiting for Muezzinzade Ali to fall into the trap that the Holy League has set for him.”

He leaned against the window, confused. “What are you talking about?”

I collected my thoughts, or tried to keep them from running away.

“When I knew that the Venetians had added galleasses to the Christian fleet, I thought it was a desperate move to make up for their lack of ships. Galleasses are very big, slow galleys, normally used for the transportation of supplies and troops. Then I remembered that the dry docks at the Venice arsenal had been enlarged specifically to accommodate those great beasts. The Venetians don’t spend their money on nothing.” I took a breath before continuing. “A little way off, at the Arsenal foundries, the engineer Varadian works, and for years he has been studying ways to reduce the recoil of cannons. Not siege artillery, but medium-caliber cannons. You understand? These are the cannons that can’t be put on ships. That’s why he left Constantinople for Venice. Venice is funding his experiments, and meanwhile he’s rearming the galleasses. There must be a connection between the two.”

“In what way?” asked Nasi, stroking his beard.

“I think Varadian’s cannons are on those ships, and that the Venetians have developed a big new fighting galley. A kind of floating castle, indestructible and with a level of firepower never seen before.”

I read a sudden attentiveness on Nasi’s face. “You were protecting the secrets of La Serenissima,” he objected. “Don’t you think you would have been informed of such a project?”

“This is a secret that could change the direction of a war. Not the kind of thing that Counselor Nordio would have shared with his underlings.”

He moved toward the desk and sat down, staring at the floor. “That’s only a conjecture on your part.”

“But if I’m right, the risks are huge,” I insisted. “I need a fast ship, Yossef. I need to join the Ottoman fleet and warn them of the danger.”

“If you’re right, it’ll be too late when you get there,” he said.

“But don’t you understand? If I can put Muezzinzade Ali on his guard, we can still avert the worst. An Ottoman victory would blow Sokollu’s plans sky-high. Otherwise it’ll be the end!”

I had been shouting. Along the loggia, I heard a door opening and immediately closing again. I must have woken one of the servants.

Nasi remained silent. I thought he was weighing up my words, but I was wrong. When he spoke again, he seemed to be returning to himself. “My Aunt Gracia said a Jew always has to have his luggage beside the door. We are the wandering people. We must know when the time comes to set off on our travels again.”

“Travels? Where to, Yossef? You’ve already traveled all around Europe.”

He raised his head and stared at me. “I’m Yossef Nasi; I can always start doing it again.”

Inside me, something broke. I wanted to cry, but on no account must I do that. “There’s no time. There’s one more thing to do and I’m going to do it. I need that ship.”

He shook his head. He avoided looking at me, and I understood that I wouldn’t persuade him. I could only try to save him.

“May the Lord protect you, Yossef.”

I left the room, taking with me the image of a man trapped in a circle of candlelight.

In the loggia I found myself face to face with Gomez, standing by the wall, plunged in darkness. The love he felt for Yossef forced him to watch over him until the end.

“Good luck,” he said to me.

He had understood; perhaps he had eavesdropped. It didn’t matter.

We took leave of each other with a handshake.

Each minute was more precious than the last. I collected my few belongings together in a bag, gripped Ismail’s dagger and hid it under my cloak. Nonetheless, the object that would be most useful to me was quite different. I dashed down the stairs and stepped into the library. The volumes were sleeping on the shelves, barely visible. I had spent whole hours, days, shut away in there, with my nose in pages that smelt of flight, of survival, running through ancient knowledge, the knowledge of my people and the peoples they had encountered on their long peregrination. If the New Zion was a utopian dream, the story contained in those books was concrete, made of flesh and blood, of lives lived, of hopes, tireless study and faith. Perhaps I had never been as close to the Kingdom anywhere as I was in there. Suddenly I gave a start: There was no time to lose. I searched everywhere until I touched the cylindrical object. Takiyuddin’s optical tube. I slipped it into my bag and turned to look again at the library of the Palazzo Belvedere.

A beam of moonlight came in through the window and flowed over the table. Something on it attracted my attention. I stepped over and recognized the bundle that Ismail had had under his arm as he said good-bye. I cautiously opened it. It contained a manuscript. In the end the old man had decided not to consign those pages to the four winds. I couldn’t help being pleased by his choice: He had brought them to the right place.

I closed the bundle again and quickly left the library. My footsteps echoed around the empty drawing room. I passed by the portrait of Gracia Nasi, but I didn’t look up.

“You’re leaving him, aren’t you?”

Reyna’s voice made me jump. I turned round and saw her sitting by the fire in a big armchair, hidden by its high back. That was why I hadn’t noticed her. She got up and took a few steps toward me.

“I want to help him,” I replied.

She came closer, near enough for me to see the pin that fastened her dressing gown: a red coral brooch. “Have you still not understood? No one can. Not even Ismail could. Not even my mother. And I . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence. “That man would make a pact with Satan, just to pursue his obsessions.” She took her eyes off me. “You never got to know him in the end, just to love him. I hope you will be wise enough not to come back here.”

She turned her back on me and went to sit down again, invisible behind the chair.

I picked up my shoulder bag. “Goodbye, Donna Reyna.”

I left without turning round again. I was in a hurry. By dawn I had to find a boat to take me to Bandirma.

17.

I sneezed so violently that I thought I’d broken the veins in my nose. I expected to see blood, and instead the leaves of tobacco expelled from my nostrils opened like strange petals before they fell on the deck.

Tobacco stuffed in the nostrils: that’s the method they use on warships when the stench rising from the oarsmen’s banks becomes unbearable. The crew wash with water and sand, bucketfuls of seawater are thrown amongst the benches to get rid of the feces, but there is nothing else to be done. The nose must be busy smelling strong, dense odors, if you want to survive the stench of a battleship.

The mind must be firm, if it is not to waver in the face of the task at hand, and the heart, too, must be a firm, if slender, vessel.

Mimi Reis passed me another handful of tobacco leaves. I would have liked a remedy as effective for the oscillations in my mind, and a drug as powerful for my thumping heart.

1 Elul 5331, 11 Jumada al-Awwal 979, October 1, 1571. The wind was warm now, as if summer hadn’t ended after all. We had sailed the Sea of Marmara, plowed the northern Aegean, passed along the coast of Euboea, and now we were circumnavigating the Morea, in search of Muezzinzade Ali’s fleet.

“Don’t worry, Cardoso. We’ll find him. These are my seas.”

Mimi Reis opened a pilot’s book and laid it out on a barrel. The outline of the coasts was an intricate arabesque, the names were oriflammes, the sandbanks tiny dots, the outlying rocks little crosses. “The latest information located the fleet in the Adriatic, off Zara, but I’m willing to bet that Muezzinzade Ali is already coming back, to intercept the crusades when they set sail from Messina.” He ran his finger along a route that came down the Adriatic and entered the Ionian Sea until it reached Cephalonia and Corfu. Then he pointed to a route that came out of the Straits of Messina, passed along Calabria and arrived at the same destination as the other one.

I thought again of the mosaic in Palazzo Belvedere. There, it took only a few steps to cross the Mediterranean. I tried to focus my attention on the present again. Mimi Reis’s finger was now pointing to a spot in the Gulf of Corinth, near a cluster of islands.

“Lepanto. If the Sultan’s fleet wants to take on supplies, it will stop there. You understand? That’s where the crusaders are going to pounce.”

“We’ve got to persuade Muezzinzade Ali to avoid the galleasses at all costs.”

I could see the concern on his broad face. “Muezzinzade is no
calascione
,” he said in his Bari dialect. “He’s not the type to shirk a fight.
L’acqua ca non ha fatte in ciele sta
—the water that hasn’t fallen is still in the sky. God will grant victory to the deserving side.”

Mimi Reis had reinvested the money he had earned in the Naxos enterprise by fitting out a galliot, the kind that the Turks call
kalita
. The Sultan’s slender vessels are similar to the ships of the Christians, and they sail better even though they are built worse. They are arched, with bow and stern very high in the water, and more lightly armed. The crew—almost all Greeks and Albanians, a number of renegade Italians, a few Muscovites and Poles—were well fed, and were paid three
aspers
a day. Mimi Reis had chosen every oarsman personally. No slaves: He wanted to be sure that everyone would take up arms in the event of a clash. The wind was fair, the sea calm. The ship sped along the waves, and everything seemed propitious for the voyage, but premonition and concern hovered over our decks like a persistent and impalpable cloud. I slept little and badly, and not because of the usual worries of someone about to sail into the open sea.

No, what kept me tossing were the nightmares, their backdrop a city on the surface of the water, surrounded by breached and partly shattered walls. The scene incorporated all my life, all the faces and voices that belonged to my days. Arianna betrayed me every night, Dana waited for me in the shade of the carob tree and spoke Hebrew. Every night I reached a place that was Ragusa, and Salonika, Constantinople seen from the sea, and Famagusta surrounded by corpses.

That night Tuota wandered along the deck of the
kalita
. Or perhaps it was Ismail. I saw him closing his eyes at the sight of a battle-slain infantryman, and telling off our dog, Holy Ghost, for biting the feet of a corpse. At last he spoke.

The difference between the sleep of the just and the sleep of the idiot is that the idiot doesn’t wake up again.

I woke with a start. It wasn’t yet dawn. I got up, avoided the bodies sleeping in the hold, and began strolling along the deck, wondering whether Tuota wasn’t actually with us on the ship. I spent the rest of the day helping the sailors with their habitual tasks and asking fate to let us accomplish everything in time.

In the bows, I stopped often to look at the bronze cannon, the chief weapon on the
kalita
. There were other, smaller guns, for which Mimi Reis showed a strange predilection.

“This one comes from Flanders,” he said. “The other one from Brescia. They cost me an arm and a leg.”

Metal. Copper and brass to make bronze. Iron. Gold. The fate of my people was bound up with English iron. The gold turned into cannons, and the fire and stone vomited up by these artifacts turned again, sooner or later, into gold.
Solve et coagula
. Mimi Reis’s cannon belonged to a game that stretched across the sea, over the oceans to the south and the west, to the very edges of the world.

The Puglian pirate had asked me only once for news of Ismail. I had had to reply that he had left, that he had gone home. Mimi, clearly, was displeased. When he saw me in Bandirma, and I asked him to join the Sultan’s fleet, he had hoped that the old man would be coming along.

On the morning of 12 Jumada al-Awwal we encountered a Barbary caïque. Drawing up alongside, Mimi Reis asked for news of the fleets and received important confirmation: the Christian fleet had rounded the White Cape and was in sight of Cephalonia. The Turkish fleet, on the other hand, lay at anchor in Lepanto. Mimi Reis gave me a nudge.

“What did I tell you?”

He estimated that we would encounter the Christian fleet between October 17 and 18, in five or six days, near the islands of the Echinades, which the Venetians call Curzolari. Perhaps we would manage to slip past to warn Muezzinzade Ali and the other admirals before they took up the gauntlet.

We were drawing nearer our destiny. In my mind I ran through the speech that I had prepared, seeking the most important terms in Turkish, an appropriate rhetoric to address to those who must listen to and believe this Jew who insisted on interfering with their war. I was worried that they wouldn’t believe me, and the closer we came to the moment of truth, the more desperate our mission seemed to me.

Over the days that followed our meeting with the caïque, I often heard Mimi Reis cursing the ship we were on for its slowness, which was beginning to exasperate us. Then, all of a sudden, his mood improved. I saw him walking to the prow, talking to his beloved cast-iron cannons, stroking their barrels and breeches with the palm of his right hand.