William Napier: Blood Red Sea

Paolo threw one over. The Spaniard caught it and lobbed it high in the sky at the Turks, like a grenade.

‘Here,’ said the Turk, ‘lend me one.’

Paolo tossed another to him underhand. The Turk caught it, weighed it up, narrowed his eyes and then hurled it suddenly at the Spaniard.

It skimmed over the deck close to him and then harmlessly away.

‘Hey!’ cried the Spaniard angrily. And then all three, and a dozen more, saw the absurdity of his anger, and there was helpless laughter on all sides.

‘Be careful, we might hurt each other!’ cried Paolo. He and the Spaniard gathered more oranges and lemons from the crate and hurled them over. The Turks began to catch them and throw them back.

Another Christian waded into the deeps where the water rose dark over the deck, pushed aside a corpse floating there face down, and retrieved another armful. Precious ammunition.

‘A hit, a fine hit, enough to take my arm off!’ cried the Turk.

Others cried out ‘Allahu akbar!’ as they threw. The Christians laughed with them. They were like boys throwing snowballs. Men splashed in the water, oranges and lemons flew brightly through the air, some bearing bloody handprints. Amid the floating corpses and the sinking galleys, the mirk of drifting powder smoke, it was like a mad scene from some painting of doomsday.

And then from the bowels of the Turkish galley there came a deep rumble and heave, and it began to go down faster, bubbles erupting from below. The childish game ended and they were back in the real world, grown men again, and dying.

The fight of the oranges and lemons ceased and silence descended once more, along with an obscure shame.

The Christian galley was sinking fast too now, and no sign of a longboat. It was far to shore, a mile or more, and few men aboard, none of the wounded, still had the strength to swim. All were dying slowly as if in a dream.

In the far distance, very far away, it seemed, occasional guns still fired pointlessly on other galleys, men shouted and screamed. But here between these two dying galleys, there was utter silence and stillness.

Facing each other, eyes fixed on each other, each man saw men like himself, fathers and sons. They could see the very earrings in their ears, the wrinkles about their eyes, teeth missing or carious like their own. The water swirled more strongly around their legs, over their knees, sluicing and slurping, rapid whirlpools in hatchways and out of portholes, The man sprawled against the mast went below the water without another word, head bowed. Paolo winced with the sting of his arm, thinking how ridiculous, to wince at a little pain when he was nearly dead. How comical, almost.

One Turk still held an orange, but at last he simply let it drop. The mild waters rose over them and the galleys surrendered with a bubbling sigh, buckled and sank, dragging them all quietly down. Not another word was ever spoken, they went in a kind of solemn and reverent silence. As if in this last instant of their lives, some revelation had been granted, and for all of them there, Christian and Muslim and unbeliever, the revelation was the same.

The galleys gurgled and tipped and raced to the bottom and the men went with them. Some tangled together in the deep, indistinguishable now, arms outstretched towards each other as if they were dancing, or as if they were brothers greeting each other after long years apart. Drawn silently full thirty fathoms down, down to settle upon the soft white sand, among the waving weeds.

Nicholas trembled in every muscle and nerve end with fatigue. There was Stanley beside him, cleaning his sword, head hung low. There was Smith, bloody bandage around his neck, and another about his forehead, half over one eye.

‘You are not blinded?’ said Stanley.

‘Time will tell.’

Nicholas stumbled down the narrow steps, black with blood, and there was Hodge, red to the elbows. The odour of blood in that confined space was sickening.

‘Is it a victory, would you say, Nick?’ said Hodge.

‘I would not call it that.’ He shook his head. ‘No, I would not call it that.’

‘Nor I.’ Hodge reached for a cloth and wiped down his arms. The man on the low table in front of him was dead. He covered his face with the bloody cloth, so he could sleep now. ‘But the Turks will surely not return again after this.’ They looked at each other and then, both shaking, they embraced.

Ali Pasha Muezzinzade was led out on to the deck of the captured Sultana and, on the order of Don John, allowed his final words.

He spoke with fine dignity. ‘I die as I have lived, obedient to Allah and in the service of my Sultan. A fighting man before fighting men. Give me an honourable death.’

Then he was cleanly beheaded, and both his head and the banner of the Holy League run up the mast of the Ottoman flagship.

Though desultory fighting still went on over the wide sea, little islands of warfare in a growing calm, the news spread fast. The Sultana was captured, the Pasha was dead. Allah had spoken, and the day was lost.

Don John allowed Ali Pasha’s head to be displayed for only ten minutes, and then it was lowered again, wrapped in a clean white cloth and cast into the sea. A sea so chocked with timbers and spars and corpses, masts and oars and bobbing casques, there was barely space for it to sink.

They rowed slowly over to the burning hull of the St John of Jerusalem in a captured Turkish longboat.

The timbers flaked black under their feet, the sweet smell of smouldering wood filling their nostrils as they came aboard.

In a cabin below, breathing his last, lay Pietro Giustiniani. Five arrowheads buried in him deep.

‘Care for my slave Ali,’ he whispered.

‘We will,’ said Stanley. ‘What of Romegas?’

‘He fought to the last,’ said Giustiniani. ‘And then he went over the side, two Turks in his grasp.’ He gasped and stretched in pain, and Stanley laid a giant hand on his arm.

Then he said, ‘Do not weep, Brother. I die happy.’

‘We know it,’ said Stanley. ‘I only weep to say farewell.’

‘The day is won, is it not?’

‘Aye. The day is won.’

Giustiniani’s breathing became a deep rattle in his throat, his face sank into the immobility of the dead, and then he breathed no more.

Out on deck, they found the body of Ali, Giustiniani’s faithful slave, his throat cut by Kara Hodja’s men. They wrapped him in a strip of sail and lowered him gently over the side.

Nicholas gently touched a body half burned, legs charred almost away, but head and face miraculously preserved, a handsome face, a fine scar over the forehead. A faint smile on his lips, he thought.

‘Luigi Mazzinghi,’ he whispered. ‘A year younger than I.’

‘A gallant death,’ said Smith. ‘A knight’s deepest wish. He would not have wanted to be old and grey and toothless, and turn ladies’ heads no more.’

‘No,’ said Nicholas, smiling through his tears. ‘No, he would not.’

‘They will be taken back to Malta,’ said Stanley. ‘Giustiniani and Mazzinghi, unique as heroes of both Cyprus and Lepanto. They will be buried in Valletta with the highest honours of the Order.’

It was a sea of fire, burning on into nightfall. The mariners cleared away the bodies and swabbed the decks. The extent of the destruction became clear as they passed down the shattered line, rowing carefully among the burnt-out hulls and half-sunk galleys.

Truly the death of Bragadino had been avenged, and the Vengeance of Venice had wrought an unimaginable destruction.

A single blank shot was fired from La Real , and the Christian galleys saw that she had hoisted the storm signal. And it looked likely. A sharp wind had whipped up suddenly across the Gulf, white horses were dancing.