William Napier: Blood Red Sea

Nicholas felt another arrow sheer off the side of his breastplate, glanced down to check it hadn’t gone into his arm. Safe. A matchcord on the Sultana fizzed white and Smith bellowed,

‘Ball coming in!’

Men ducked, the arquebus banged. A man screamed. A Turkish scream. The arquebusier himself. The gun had exploded, the muzzle flayed out like a flower. He was blinded for life.

Down below, Hodge worked alongside the surgeon. Then a savage burst of chain-shot from one of the Turkish galleys ripped straight through the window that should have been boarded up earlier, a window of finest stained glass, depicting the Virgin and Child. Rainbows of glass filled the air. Hodge ducked instinctively and was unhurt. But the surgeon clutched his raked belly and collapsed across the legs of the dying man before him. Hodge seized him by the shoulders and pulled him up again. The surgeon gave a last cry to heaven, a glimpse of the stars, sick of the blood-dark timbers, falling, falling. . He thrust the hacksaw into Hodge’s chest and his head fell forward.

‘I cannot,’ cried Hodge, ‘I cannot!’

He laid the surgeon down, snatched up a wooden crate and wedged it in the shattered cabin window as best he could.

The whole ship lurched. Timbers groaned and split. The dying man on the table groaned in the semi-darkness. Sweat beaded his marble-white face.

‘Take it off, for God’s sake,’ he pleaded softly, waving towards the red pulp that had been his foot.

Hodge gripped the hacksaw. Oh for alcohol. But there was no more alcohol.

There were only a last few grenades. Stanley hauled himself as high up the mast as he could and hurled one at the very last moment into the air. It exploded too high, though the defenders aboard the second galley, the Trebizond , ducked down, and shrapnel clanged off a few helmets and shoulderplates.

‘Make it count, Brother!’ cried Smith.

Stanley grimaced, teeth and lips black with powder where he had torn open so many paper-and-ball cartridges. He ripped off his neckcloth, wrapped up his last grenade, lit it, and hurled the whole bundle like a sling direct at the stern cabin of the Trebizond . The grenade detonated just as it struck the wooden sides and blew out a plank quite cleanly. Moments later a Janizary officer reeled out, clutching his bloody head.

A corsair leapt across the narrow divide between La Real and the Sultana and clung to the pavisade like a monkey, dagger between his teeth. Nicholas leaned out to cut him away but he dropped back with lightning agility. Nicholas hung over the side, one arm gripping the ropes of the pavisade, and slashed again. Again the skinny corsair dodged him. Then he plucked the dagger from his teeth, held it by the point and threw it hard and fast. It flew past Nicholas’s ear and hit someone behind. A cry. Stanley.

Nicholas didn’t even look back. He did what the corsair least expected. He let go his hold on the pavisade and dropped straight down upon him, hurling them both into the channel of water below. An instant later, two arrows thocked into the pavisade where he had just hung.

The water was narrow and choppy, the sides of the ships perilously close together. Any moment a lurch would knock them together again and Nicholas and his enemy would be crushed. Nicholas heaved himself up on the flailing corsair’s shoulders and pushed him down, expelling air from his own lungs as he did so by sheer will, against every instinct. They went under.

At any moment he expected to feel a stab in his side. Corsairs rarely carried just the one blade. But nothing. He held the corsair’s shaven head between his hands, trying to ram it against his knee. A cannonball came fizzing through the water near by and sank away into the darkness. His eyes wept, his lungs burned. The corsair bit his hand. He gouged and fought, and felt his thumbs sink unspeakably into the corsair’s tightened eye-sockets. The corsair thrashed and went limp.

Nicholas rubbed his thumbs clean in revulsion, swam for what he hoped was the stern of La Real . A rope splashed in the water near by; he clutched it with both hands, his bitten hand seeping blood where the villain had bitten him. A strong grasp pulled him up like a drowned puppy. He swiped the water from his salt-reddened eyes as he lay there gasping on deck behind the barricade. An arquebus ball slammed into the timber near by. He stared blearily.

‘Stanley, you still have a knife in your shoulder.’

The knight pulled it free and stowed it under his belt for later use.

‘Are you not wounded?’

Stanley slipped his hand under his breastplate and his fingers came out unbloodied. He patted his bulging torso. ‘Not all muscle, lad. Wadding too. All horsehair and bombast, I am. Now you need to bandage that hand, and get some brandy on it.’

Then the whole boat rocked and boomed, the Sultana alongside rocking even more violently, as Sebastiano Veniero’s heavyweight galley charged into her far side like a mad bull. A whole line of well-drilled arquebusiers stood swiftly and delivered a volley at point-blank range across the decks of the Sultana , laying low at least a dozen men.

Cheers went up, Don John swirled his rapier overhead and cried, ‘Veniero to our aid! Press on!’, and with that near-miraculous renewal of morale that comes to any group of fighting men, no matter how beleaguered and weary, when reinforcements arrive, the soldiers aboard La Real surged over the pavisades and threw themselves at the Sultana .

Nicholas glimpsed Veniero himself, the old sea dog, the old sea lion of Venice, standing at his fighting post, a bloody bandage round his thigh, one arm crooked round the mast, the other holding a stout crossbow it would have taken most men two hands to use. He raised it and fired from the hip, and a Janizary on the Sultana went down in a tumble of white silk.

‘Sire, you need to get below and have that leg freshly bound!’ cried a young musketeer.

‘Time enough when the Turks lie six fathoms down! Find me more bolts, damn you!’

A second later, a huge explosion sent the Trebizond rolling away on her side, and half her men slithering towards the far rails. Then she settled down at a steeper and steeper angle. She was sinking fast.

Someone had made it to her lower decks and sabotaged her with a well-placed keg of powder. . There was no sign of Smith.

‘Make sure they don’t grapple us as they sink and take us down!’ cried Stanley. ‘Cut all ropes!’

There followed vicious hand-to-hand fighting on all sides, as refugees from the sinking Trebizond tried to press aboard La Real in final desperation, and those aboard the Sultana , under assault from two sides themselves now, were steadily pressed back along their decks, flailing and tripping over their own wounded and dead.

At last, crowding back to the stern cabin, they threw up makeshift, unlikely-looking barriers.

Smith reappeared and stared blearily through the smoke, a wheel-lock pistol in each hand. One of his eyes was badly cut about. ‘Mattresses!’ he bellowed. ‘Goose-down mattresses! What do the devils think this is, the Sultan’s seraglio?’

Yet they would make bizarrely effective barriers to their capturing the stern cabin and Ali Pasha within.

And they needed to move fast, seize this momentary advantage. Nicholas yelled out and pointed. Across the water, not a quarter of a mile off, three or four fast galliots were ploughing towards their stricken flagship, densely manned with a fresh hundred or more best Janizaries.

‘Hit those galliots, prow gunners!’ cried Don John. ‘Don’t let them get close! And Smith, Stanley, get men on the roof! Tear the timbers off with your bare hands!’