The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea (17 page)

‘And happy to have you as captain,’ said Stanley.

‘Vice-captain,’ corrected De Andrada. But he looked quite content about it.

‘Then who . . . ?’

Up from below appeared an older man with a long, fine nose, a thin beard, and extraordinary, burning eyes, deep set and circled with dark rings.

All bowed.

The Chevalier Mathurin Romegas. The most brilliant naval commander among all the Knights of St John, the most feared sea-wolf in the Mediterranean.

Nicholas knew all about Romegas. It would be an experience to sail with him.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Romegas. ‘We sail at sundown.’

‘There is a Moor travelling with us. Might he sit below?’

‘A Moor?’ said Romegas. ‘Why?’

‘It will become clear in time, I think.’

On the second day out of Messina, far to the south upon the burning sea, there was a small sun-brown island. Malta.

Malta of the knights.

Nicholas’s heart ached to see her. But they would not step ashore there. Most of those he had loved there were dead. Jean de la Valette in his grand stone catafalque in Valetta’s new cathedral. Bridier and Lanfreducci and Medrano and all the brave knights who were slain. And a young girl called Maddalena, too, lay sleeping in her narrow grave until the Judgement Day.

The handsome young Florentine knight, Luigi Mazzinghi, was standing by him.

‘She is so small a place, our island home. The island that you fought for, you and your comrade Odge.’

‘Hodge,’ said Nicholas. ‘H. H.’

‘
Hodge
,’ said Mazzinghi carefully. He smiled. ‘And while you and he fought, I was bent over my desk in a room in a Florence palazzo, learning my mathematics and my Latin grammar. How old are you now?’

‘Twenty-two.’

Mazzinghi tapped his chest. ‘Nineteen. Thirteen when the guns
of Malta roared all summer long. Yet there were boys of thirteen fighting at the siege?’

Nicholas nodded. ‘Boys of ten, boys of eight. Boy soldiers, slingers, women, entire families fighting near the end.’

‘Everyone thinks Cyprus will be different.’

‘I think both better, and worse.’

‘I pray God,’ said Luigi Mazzinghi softly, crossing himself, ‘I only pray that I am worthy in the battles to come of the heroes of Malta.’

In the squalor and poverty of the last two years, Nicholas had half forgotten about the knights. Not only Europe’s most elite warriors, but monks too. Most devout swordsmen. Now Mazzinghi prayed he would be worthy of the heroes of Malta – such as himself! A whoring, drunken, roving, brawling English vagabond, lost in the world, with neither family nor home, nor country.

He smiled a bitter smile. In whatever firestorm was to come, he prayed he would be worthy of such simple, noble souls as the Chevalier Luigi Mazzinghi.

And the firestorm would surely be upon them soon.

Time was hurrying on. The sun sailed across the sky.

The Turk was coming.

The rugged outline of Crete lay ahead, with Cape Matapan to larboard, backed by the mountains of the Peloponnese. A fresh wind out of the north-east, the
St John
under oar only. The lookout called down. Something approaching.

‘More detail,’ said Romegas.

There was a tense silence while the lookout, a boy of fifteen, strained his eyes. The best lookouts were boys of eleven or twelve.

‘Squadron!’ he called.

Smith moved to the hatchway.

‘Black sails!’

Smith grinned. ‘Time to arm up, ladies.’ And he was gone below for his treasured Persian jezail, an elegant, long-barrelled weapon that those at the Great Siege said was the most accurate musket they had ever seen in battle.

Smith invariably retorted, ‘Depends who fires it.’

Stanley waited a while longer. A
squadron
. Knights disdained to turn and run, and Romegas would attack an entire armada single handed. The Turks feared him as they would a mad dog – but a mad dog with exceptional tactical intelligence. An entire squadron of enemy galleys was quite a challenge, nevertheless. They would need a plan.

‘Gunners to your stations!’ roared Romegas. ‘All guns primed and loaded. Crew at the munitions hatches, ready to serve the guns!’

‘Six!’ called down the lookout boy. ‘Six galleys under slow oar and sail. In a loose file.’

Romegas was squinting down his brass eyeglass, set on a tripod
clamped to the rail. His hands shook badly. It wasn’t fear. Once his galley was capsized by a monstrous sea, and he was trapped underwater for twelve hours with his head in an air pocket. There was nervous damage. Men were supposed to grow more fearful as they grew older, and Romegas was past sixty now. But he still hadn’t learnt the meaning of fear.

His eyes strained. He prayed to God to give him better sight. God never answered that prayer. But the eyeglass would do. It confirmed that there were six galleys under oar, they were rounding Cape Matapan westwards and so heading for the Adriatic ports, and they weren’t Venetian. And something – a sailor’s deep, inborn sixth sense – could discern relaxation and relief in their very oar stroke. They were sailing into home waters.

There was more to be deduced. The squadron could see the
St John of Jerusalem
and vice versa. But they were not turning to attack, although so superior in numbers. Was that because they were heavily laden with booty, and only wanted to make landfall back in their pirate lair, Ragusa or Avlona?

‘The standard they fly!’ called Romegas. ‘Tell me it is a black standard with a white crescent!’

‘I cannot see, Captain.’

Romegas stroked his beard. ‘Then we will have to row closer.’ And he gave the order. The boatswain blew his whistle and the mariners got stirring, the helmsman leaning hard on the whipstaff to move the great stern rudder round a few perfectly judged degrees.

Smith came back up through the hatchway carrying his jezail in a roll of finest oilcloth and singing a psalm.

‘
I shall give the heathen for thine inheritance, Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron, thou shalt break them in pieces like a potter’s vessel
.’

‘I’ve heard crows sing sweeter,’ said Stanley. ‘Recite it rather than sing it, Brother, I pray you. You’ll bring Leviathan up from the deep with that caterwauling, and in a foul humour too.’

Smith sang on.

Nicholas and Hodge stood upon the larboard walkway near to where a pair of gunners were rapidly readying the
verso
, a small cannon that swivelled broadly left and right on its pivot and could deliver a hefty fistful of grapeshot at close quarters.

‘Remember our first corsair skirmish, Matthew Hodge?’ murmured Nicholas.

‘Well enough,’ said Hodge. ‘Considerin’ I got a blow to me poll that I never quite came right from again.’

The
St John of Jerusalem
was now rowing fast due north, towards the lead galley of the six, as if to hit it broadside. Which would also leave the
St John
’s own broadside exposed to the following five galleys. Lunacy.

‘Standard flies!’ cried the lookout boy. ‘Black standard with a white crescent.’

‘And on the forward ship,’ Romegas shouted up to him, ‘tell me there is a shaven-headed villain with a topknot, who still wears the tattered robe of a Dominican friar!’

The boy strained his eyes, swaying back and forth in the tiny netted crow’s nest as if that would help, then called back, ‘There’s a fellow in a long black robe, I think, looking our way. Cannot tell the style of his hair.’

Smith gave a strange guttural growl, and Romegas drummed his fists on the rail. ‘That dung-munching, idol-serving Gibraltar baboon!’ Then he plucked the eyeglass from the tripod, stowed it inside his doublet and leapt back to the captain’s lookout position with the eagerness of a man half his age.

Stanley saw Nicholas’s and Hodge’s enquiring expressions.

‘Kara Hodja,’ he said. ‘The Black Priest, and the evillest corsair in all the eastern sea. Shame on him that he was once a Christian. He still wears his Dominican robe in mockery, even as he is beheading Christian captives on the deck of his ship.’ He looked out across the narrowing gap. ‘But Judgement Day is coming.’

‘Six galleys against one,’ said Hodge.

Gil de Andrada joined them. ‘Watch and learn.’

The six galleys had slowed and were hoving to uncertainly.

‘Fire the centre-line!’ called Romegas.

A few moments later the great centre-line gun roared and they heard the rush of the forty-pound iron ball through the air, then saw the geyser of white water where it struck, many yards short of the enemy.

‘Well out of range,’ said Hodge. ‘Waste of good powder and shot.’

Gil de Andrada shook his head. ‘Shows we mean business. Romegas wants them to think we are bent on attacking with all guns blazing, and he reckons on a certain response.’

And he got it. Moments later all six corsair galleys were seen turning sharply to the north. They were fleeing. Now the sharpest eyes on the
St John
, Nicholas and Hodge included, could see their black sails straining and filling as they turned into the nor-easter. Their mariners scurried about the decks and up the rigging. And they could hear the drumbeat sound.

‘Romegas bewitches men’s minds,’ said De Andrada. ‘Makes them see things which are not, makes them do his bidding like whipped slaves.’

Meanwhile Romegas stood leaning hungrily forward from his post, dark-circled eyes burning, muttering like an incantation, ‘Give us a shot, God rot your bones! Just one shot.’

Then it came. A vague, half-hearted warning shot from one of the fleeing galleys’ stern guns. The ball fell nearer its source than its target.

But it was enough.

‘Helm about! Battle speed due east, and don’t spare the lash down below there!’

‘Now I am
truly
confused,’ said Nicholas. ‘We are going into battle against, what, thin air? And hurrying due east, with our enemy now rowing away north? Chevalier Gil de Andrada, we need a commentary.’

The
St John
came sharp about, sails tight reefed, and surged into the oncoming waves. They could hear the groaning slaves, the creak of the thole pins down below.

‘Even I cannot always read Romegas’s mind,’ said De Andrada. ‘And he rarely shares his thoughts. But here is my interpretation. We encounter an enemy, far more numerous than us. We feign an attack. They flee. This tells Romegas the enemy has valuable booty, and wants to keep it. They will row fast north, almost into the wind. What else does it tell us? That they judge they can row faster than us. What, laden with booty? Then they must be carrying very few heavy guns. Unlike us. So we outgun them.’

‘Romegas indeed reads men’s minds,’ murmured Stanley.

‘And of course he reads the wind,’ said De Andrada, ‘and knows
every rock, every current, every vagary of the sea. So then he waits until the enemy return fire – as they did, just that one feeble shot – and then feigns to flee east. At battle speed. Not to attack anything, young Ingoldsby, simply because that is the fastest sustainable oar speed there is. Only ramming is faster, but that can be kept up by the slaves below for only a few hundred yards. Meanwhile our guns are all readied and waiting. The enemy are heading north in file. Then there comes a moment . . .’

The
St John
was already a mile east of the vanishing corsair squadron, apparently heading away fast. The squadron finally rounded Cape Matapan and the mad dog Romegas was out of their sight.

‘Head her about . . . NOW!’ Romegas roared. ‘Hard on the starboard oars, face her about to nor’ward! Then give me full sail, master mariner!’

‘We’ll swamp her sides,
Capitán!
And salt all the starboard guns to boot!’

‘Full sail and quick about it!’

‘Galleys must be low sided, low in the water,’ said De Andrada, ‘so the oars can reach the sea, obviously. But that limits how far they can roll. Unlike a high-sided Atlantic galleon, there’s a limit to how much sail they can carry. But Romegas knows every wind around Cape Matapan.’

‘Ship oars!’ called Romegas.

‘To rest the oarsmen,’ said De Andrada. ‘Because battle speed cannot be sustained more than a few minutes either.’

Out of sight of the enemy, the
St John
came hard about to face westwards now, and her two fine sails, foresail and mainsail, billowed forth under the fresh nor’easter.

‘Ah,’ said De Andrada, shaking his head. ‘Masterly. You see? The enemy have gone north, they cannot use a nor’easter so are condemned to oars alone. But we are now coming back westwards, with the wind on our side. They have also gone into the lee of Cape Matapan so there is little wind for them anyway. We are still in full wind so can gain on them with little effort. And they cannot see us coming.’

Now the
St John
surged exultantly forward again with the wind,
the waves running with her. They crowded fore, hair blowing about their faces, breathless with excitement.

A minute . . . two minutes . . . Nicholas squatted and looked over the muscular, filthy backs of the rowing slaves, still sweating and panting from that punishing battle speed. How ironic, how potent – he had thought it many times, when he was chained to the bench himself – that a galley slave faced always backwards. Could not even see where he was going.

The master mariner’s doubts about full sail in such a wind very nearly proved justified. As the
St John
leaned perilously under a stronger gust, the larboard rowers had to raise their oars still higher if they weren’t to get the blades caught in the passing sea, slamming them backwards, badly injured, off their own benches. Men had even been killed that way. Meanwhile, to starboard, the oars would have been unable to reach the water even if they’d tried.

But it was only a gust, and then the wind dropped off markedly.

Cape Matapan.

Romegas knew every wave, every eddy.

‘Hence his risking full sail,’ said De Andrada.

The lessening wind still filled the sails, but the
St John
now moved forward on an almost even keel. From his position Romegas gazed keenly forward.