The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea (40 page)

The oar slaves stared. Nothing seemed real to them for now but their misery and the huge, heavy oar before them.

‘Good,’ said Don John. ‘I’m glad that cheered you so well.’

It was late afternoon when the boatswain blew his silver whistle. Gradually a wave of whistles sounded across the harbour.

The mighty fifty-foot oars creaked in their leather collars, between four and six men chained to each haft, and slowly, slowly,
La Real
’s gleaming prow eased forward through the sluggish harbour waters and towards the open sea.

Nicholas and Hodge looked at each other with excitement and dread. They were going. No turning back now.

On the harbour mole stood Don Luis de Requesens.

‘Be nothing rash!’ he called in a quavering voice. ‘Remember the wise caution of princes!’

‘Caution,’ Don John called back, waving a white-gloved hand, ‘is the daughter of lechery and the wet nurse of impertinence!’

Don Luis muttered and crossed himself. Beside him stood the
papal nuncio in his crimson robes, arms raised in blessing upon the departing fleet.

‘We need it,’ murmured Stanley. ‘After Preveza, Djerba . . . We’ve lost every major battle at sea with the Turk these past fifty years.’

‘That’s because I wasn’t there,’ said Smith.

Stanley roared with laughter and clapped him on the shoulder. Nicholas wasn’t so sure Smith was joking.

At Brindisi they were joined by the fifty Venetian galleys, as promised. Cannon salutes rang out, and huge cheers echoed across the sea.

As the great flotilla went east, they communicated with each other constantly by signals, and in person in smaller, faster boats. On the third evening, Sebastiano Veniero came over to
La Real
.

Don John questioned him closely.

‘Aye,’ said Veniero, ‘the longer a ship has been at sea, the more its hull is fouled with weed and barnacles, the timbers half eaten with shipworms. And the crew sick and hungry, the pitch and caulking going, the slaves working ever harder daily to pump the bilges clear, and the sea leaking in faster all the same . . .’

‘And the Turks have been at sea all summer, as we know. Many at Cyprus?’

‘Most of ’em, aye.’

‘And our galleys are all clean of hull?’

‘That is true.’

‘Then we go faster than them? And are more manoeuvrable?’

‘In theory. But if the Turks head for home, the autumn winds are with them—’

‘They must not! We must meet them now and finish this.’

Veniero rubbed his beard. ‘I hope for it too. But . . . By October the storms in the Mediterranean are terrible, especially the eastern Mediterranean, the Aegean. The winds—’

‘Then now is our chance.’

‘In truth, it is not the season for fighting sea battles, sire.’

‘Because it is not considered the season,’ said Don John, slow and solemn, ‘. . . it is the season.’

‘If only the Holy League could have sailed earlier, and saved Famagusta,’ said Giustiniani with a sigh.

‘My fellow knights,’ said Don John, ‘my brothers. Let me at last confide in you. I too delayed the League, by multiple evasions and lies.’

They stared at him, astonished. ‘You, My Lord?’

The young prince spread a map on the cabin table and spoke crisply, every inch the most seasoned military commander. ‘Famagusta would have divided our forces. I wanted the Turk in one place: one great armada. Let Famagusta fall, let the Turks garrison it with some two thousand men, let the rest rejoin the fleet to meet us. Then let us fall on them and destroy them altogether. A knockout blow.’

Stanley said dully, ‘You never intended to come to the relief of Famagusta after all?’

‘We had to bring Venice into the war. The Vengeance of Venice.’ Don John looked at him and his eyes had less of the dancing light, more of an older man’s sorrow. ‘Brother Eduardo,’ he said softly, ‘war is never separate from politics. If you know what agonies such delay cost me – what thoughts were mine, as I danced in a golden mask at that
ballo in maschera
in Genoa, knowing that even as I laughed and danced, brave men fought and died for a Cyprus that was already lost . . .’ He tailed off.

Stanley looked away. ‘I would not have to make such decisions as yours for all the world.’

‘The privilege of princes,’ murmured Don John.

Even now they went painfully slowly.

It was those six great lumbering supply ships, the galliasses, that the Venetians had brought down from the basin of St Mark where they had lain up mothballed for months, even years. High sided, wide beamed, round at stem and stern, they took a tow from three oared galleys each to shift at all.

On their broad flat decks, each had a curious round tower with black portholes.

‘New-fangled rubbish,’ muttered Smith impatiently. ‘Do we really need so many supplies with us? Can we not use Corfu, Crete?’

Don John ordered a jug of wine and gave them each a cup. ‘Let me tell you about our six galliasses,’ he said.

When they were still fighting at Nicosia, Don John visited the Venetian dockyards. He tracked down that genius of a shipwright, Master Franco Bressano, who had the heavily bowed legs of a horseman, beetling grey eyebrows and a permanent scowl.

They talked about ships and guns.

Don John said, ‘If we wanted more guns aboard—’

‘You can’t,’ said Bressano. ‘There’s a pay-off. On
La Real
, you have five forward guns, with a centre-line culverin, no?’

Don John raised an eyebrow. ‘You are well informed, Master Bressano.’

‘There’s nothing about ships I don’t know. I know how many barnacles there are on your hull.’

‘How many?’

‘Same as every other ship on God’s ocean. Too bloody many, that’s how many.’

Don John smiled. A pleasant if rough-hewn wit.

‘But there’s always a pay-off,’ said Bressano. ‘Guns weigh heavy. And every extra pound of bronze and iron has to be rowed by men. Men have to be fed and watered – so more food and water have to be carried. The ship gets bigger and bigger, moves slower and slower . . . Follow? The Turks go lightly gunned so they can stay mobile and fast, and I’m not sure they’re wrong. There’s a limit to how many guns any galley can carry and still move herself, and your
Real
is about at that limit now.’

‘What if,’ said Don John slowly and carefully, ‘forgive a prince as ignorant of ships as of shrimp fishing, for the Lord be praised, I have spent little of my pampered life hammering nails, and . . .
sawing
, and that sort of thing –’

Franco Bressano eyed him dourly. He was a funny one, this bastard royal.

‘But what if you loaded up multiple guns on to a ship that
didn’t have to move
?’

Bressano scowled. ‘Then you’d have a godalmighty big hulk of a
ship laden with ordnance, half sunk in your own harbour. Where’s the bloody point in that?’

‘The biggest ships afloat are Venice’s own merchant galleys, are they not? The
galia grosse
, the galliasses.’

‘Aye. Fat lumbering beasts that move at a snail’s pace, but carry their grain or cloth or whatever cargo there eventually. What use are they to you?’

‘How many in the basin now?’

‘In dry dock, half a dozen or so.’

‘Take them,’ said Don John. ‘Strip them down, remove all the ballast—’

‘They’ll tip over.’

‘Remove all the ballast – and replace it with guns.’

‘Guns sit too high on their decks. They’re merchantmen, not men-o’-war.’

‘Then put them on the lower decks, make portholes through the walls, what do you call them . . .?’

‘Bulwarks.’

‘Bulwarks. Fit the guns down among the rowing benches, even number of guns on each side.’

‘A heavy sea will swamp ’em, a storm sink ’em.’

‘They don’t have to endure for years, not even for a summer. Just three weeks, until we meet the Turk. Then they may sink. Before that, they do not have my permission.’

Bressano made a noise like a bull hawking phlegm.

‘All this done in secrecy, of course. As much as possible. Imagine a galliass stripped of everything, shorn of all fittings, cabins, quarters, stores – no other cargo except guns, cannonball, powder and gun teams, and maybe a squadron of heavily armoured marines to repel boarders.’

‘Hardly needed,’ said Bressano. ‘The sides of a merchant galley are too high for any Turks to come aboard. Like scaling a cliff face.’

‘Well, a few marines, just in case. Then how many guns could you put aboard?’

Bressano rubbed his stubbled cheek. ‘To equal a full cargo of grain, say . . . Well, I suppose you could have as many as forty or fifty thirty-pound culverin . . . ’

‘Is that all?’

‘Thirty pounds is the weight of the shot, not the gun. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Is it?’

‘Aye. Take it from me.’

‘Of course. Well, go on.’

‘Maybe thirty-pounders, even some forty-pounders. Some swivel versos for grapeshot and chain-shot, plus five more guns at the bow.’

‘She’d be quite a ship, wouldn’t she?’

‘She’d be a floating fucking gun tower is what she’d be,’ growled Bressano. ‘’Scusing my language. But she wouldn’t
go
anywhere.’

‘Instead of a flat deck at the front, what do you call it?’

‘The bow.’

‘The bow, that’s it, build there a stout oak round tower housing another six or eight guns, covering every point of the compass.’

‘She’d tend to fire way over any nearby galleys. And demolish her own gunwales when she fired.’

‘Then clear everything in her line of fire. I mean stripped bare. As you say, nothing but a gun platform. Put a sail on her—’

‘Then you’re entirely dependent on the wind.’

‘And if the wind was right, how many rowers—?’

‘But the rowing deck is full of guns.’

‘Rowers between the guns. The bare minimum.’

‘They’d barely move her. Especially in a live sea.’

Don John bit his lip. Patience was required. Bressano was a shipwright of genius, the greatest in Christendom, some said. But by God he was an awkward dog. Must be related to Veniero way back somewhere.

‘Imagine this great – as you put it in your colourful dockyard vernacular – this great
floating fucking gun tower
– then being
towed
– by, say, three lightweight, ungunned, stripped-bare galleys, no more than galliots, say fifty oars in each – one towing her at the bow, the others either side. Would she move?’

‘A hundred and fifty oars? Pff.’ Bressano stared into nothing, picturing it. ‘Yes, she’d move. At the pace of a drunk snail. But she’d move.’

‘And if the wind was at her back?’

‘Then she’d move at the pace of a sober snail.’

‘But she’d move. So, given time, you could get her into position?’

‘Given time, given money, given enough guns – and enough gunners, you’d need no fewer than two hundred trained gunners on every one of ’em—’

‘And then imagine what would happen if one of these
floating fucking gun towers
– I confess, this refulgent phrase of yours is growing on me apace – imagine what would happen if this galliass so armed, towed into position and turned side on so that her flanks gave fire, as well as those in her bristling round tower on deck – all roaring at the same time from her starboard side . . . She could always face into the oncoming sea and keep steady, and
have numbers of guns facing the enemy, whichever direction they came from
. Imagine a flotilla of, I don’t know, as many as twenty light galliots and oared galleys rowing against each galliass, but none returning much fire, or none to speak of – arrows from their marine archers, yes, but nothing to trouble the gunners behind their oak bulwarks imagine the very finest gunnery teams working like demons on the gun deck, faces black with powder, loading, reloading, urinating on the smoking barrels as I believe they do, with all the finesse of French courtiers urinating in the corners of the Elysée Palace – then what would happen? Come, Bressano, picture it! What do you see?’

‘I see – if, if, if, as you say, and it’s one fat If, God alone knows how it would all come together like you say – but if, if, if – then I reckon . . . I reckon your galliasses would blow those incoming galliots into fucking matchwood.’

Don John stood and smiled. ‘Signor Francesco Bressano, give me your hand.’

They shook. When they parted, Bressano found a gold ducat in his palm.

‘It’ll cost you more than that to fit out half a dozen galliasses.’

‘That,’ said Don John, ‘is my next task. Start wrighting, Master Bressano. As of now!’

Then it was money matters, tedious meetings, persuasions, negotiations, the writing of florid and oleaginous letters. One by one the galliasses were commandeered from their plump, suspicious merchant owners, remuneration paid or promised. In the docks there was hammering twenty-four hours a day, riveting, strengthening,
doubtful looks from the quayside, some mocking laughter. But Franco Bressano was now fully committed to the immense project with scowling passion, and roared back at them that people had laughed at Noah once like that. ‘And look what happened to them. The fuckers
drowned
!’

If the cost of refitting the galliasses was huge, the cost of that many guns was eye-watering. But the money came in. Venice opened her immense treasuries, which the Serene Republic had been filling for five long centuries, and slowly but surely, the six colossally gunned beasts of the sea were armed.

Don John set down his cup of wine. ‘So there you are, gentlemen. That is why those galliasses go so slowly. But they will be worth it.’

Stanley breathed out slowly. ‘I pray it is so.’

The prince said, ‘In my youth, I was always one for gambles and wagers. But I have grown out of that now.’

Stanley smiled, a slightly pained smile. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Don John of Austria was gambling everything – the whole fate of Christendom – on a single throw of the dice.

It was a clean, blue September morning when they passed the Malta Channel. Beloved Malta. Nicholas inhaled the sea air. This coming battle would be different, from Malta, from Nicosia and Famagusta. It would see all of Christendom united under a blue Mediterranean sky, and no women or children caught up in the scenes of carnage. Two forces, a clean fight, and all on a single day. And a Christian commander with a ludicrous dress sense but undoubted force and charisma.