The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea (2 page)

Sokollu pushed a fruit bowl aside and ordered various maps of that Turkish cartographer of genius, Piri Reis, spread across the table before them.

‘As you know,’ said Sokollu, ‘I have long argued for a continued land assault on Christendom, through Hungary, Austria, the Danube valley. Our Janizaries are the finest infantry in the world. Even the Christians acknowledge it. But it seems fate has offered us another chance of victory in the Mediterranean.

‘Yet we must wait. Three dangers remain on our flanks, as we look west.’ He moved a long, lean forefinger over the maps. ‘To the east, the Persians are and always will be our enemies, until the blessed day when Allah gives us victory over them. But this victory will not come soon. The Shia rebels in the mountains of Yemen also remain in revolt against us – stirred up by Persia, I have no doubt. And to the north, the Grand Duchy of Muscovy grows ever greater in power. Her ruler, Ivan, with ludicrous presumption, even calls himself Caesar, or Czar in his barbarous tongue. There is no Caesar but Selim.

‘We must strangle this new Christian power at birth, or she will grow ever stronger, a constant threat to our northern border. Her potential empire is all of Scythia. We landed forces at Astrakhan,
but . . . the campaign was a difficult one, and we were obliged to change course. Instead our trusted ally, the Khan of the Crimea, is even now riding north with his Tatars, carrying the finest Ottoman muskets, arquebuses and guns. He will raze this upstart city of Muscovy to the ground.

‘Then, having secured our borders to our satisfaction, all our strength may be turned upon the Inland Sea, and the push west. A
Jihad fil-bahr
: a Jihad of the Sea. We will take back Cyprus, then the Adriatic coast. Already our galleys rule that sea, and Venice does not stir. We also possess the vital port of Avlona, ruled over by our dear friend, the Black Priest, Kara Hodja.’

Muezzinzade smiled grimly. The renegade Dominican friar, Kara Hodja: corsair, cut-throat, and now Bey of Avlona. His reputation was so terrible it caused almost as much anxiety to his Ottoman overlords as did the Christians.

‘We will take the squabbling city states of Italy piece by piece. Even Venice, and the Papal States.’

‘And Malta,’ said Muezzinzade. The very name was like a dark stone dropped into water.

Sokollu’s expression was unreadable. ‘Yes. This time we will finish it.’

Muezzinzade shifted in his seat. ‘Grand Vizier, I have heard it said – and I do not wish to believe it – that as we sow discord among our enemies, so they sow discord among us. The work is done especially by agents of the Knights of St John. They seek to harass and weaken us by working in Russia, they have fomented rebellion in the Yemen, they even send secret embassies to the Sultanate of Morocco, encouraging the Moors to view us as enemies.’

‘Rumours fly faster than facts,’ said Sokollu tersely. ‘Because they are light and insubstantial. The Christians do not have that kind of intelligence.’

‘And the Grand Master in Malta,’ persisted Muezzinzade, ‘Jean de la Valette, sold his Order’s lands in Cyprus just before his death. As if he knew of our coming invasion.’

‘Mere chance. His beloved Malta will fall soon. And Morocco is our Muslim brother and ally now. Remember that in ports such as Larache and Rabat, Sultan Abdallah possesses harbours which face not east, but west: out across the Atlantic, where a whole new
world lies. From the Moroccan shore, they hear the cries of their oppressed brethren, the Moriscos, in the lost Berber kingdom of Andalus. And to sharpen the insult, they see an endless stream of Spanish treasure ships returning from the New World. The trade winds carry them from Havana to Cadiz in little more than twenty days, laden with all the silver of the inexhaustible mines of Potosi.

‘Which brings us to the greatest prize of all.’ Sokollu spread his fingers wide over another map. ‘Spain. And her vast new territories in the Americas.’

Here Piri Reis had truly excelled himself, showing the coast of Europe, Africa and the Americas enclosing the mighty Atlantic Ocean. Upon the coast of Brazil there were images in pen and ink of elegant beasts and fowl, and also men with their faces in their chests. Piri Reis himself did not credit such far-fetched travellers’ tales, but they made for amusing illustrations.

‘With this unimaginable wealth,’ said Muezzinzade, his eyes roaming over the Americas as if he could devour them, ‘we will reign over earth and sea.’

Sokollu said, ‘Do you not feel the force of destiny?’

Muezzinzade nodded, slow and solemn. ‘Yet if all the kingdoms of Christendom were to stand together against us – the powers of Spain and Portugal, the superb soldiery of the German princes, French chivalry, the armies of the Papacy, the vast resources of Genoa and Venice—’

‘Perhaps aided by some small contribution,’ Sokollu interrupted sarcastically, ‘by that rain-lashed little island, England, ruled over by a
woman
. . .’

Muezzinzade smiled.

Sokollu waved his hand. ‘Perhaps then the Sublime Porte might have something to fear. But it will not happen. The Christian princes fight amongst each other like scorpions in a sack.

‘The French hate the Habsburgs. The Genoese and Venetians hate and mistrust each other. And that is only the Catholics. Germany and the Netherlands are riven by Protestant rebellion, France massacres its own Protestants, England begins to persecute its Catholics. Christendom is now in a permanent state of low-level war with itself. It would take some man of genius to unite her. Yet’ – he reached out for the fruit bowl – ‘the hour is come, but not
the man. Christendom is a fruit close to rottenness, and overripe for picking.’

He pulled a grape from the stalk and crushed it between his teeth.

The sun burned white in a cloudless sky, and spangles of sunlight danced on the placid sea. Occasionally dolphins broke the surface, their oilskin flanks darkly gleaming, before curving back into the green silence below. Away to the south, on the distant horizon, the sky was a dusty ochre over the burning deserts of Africa.

Tiny fluttering shapes of flying fish skimmed over the small waves, disturbed by a long dark shadow cutting through the water behind them. And the clean sea air suddenly soured with the stench of a Barbary slaver.

It was a low-slung black galley with a single mast, little more than a brigantine. The wind was so light the sail was furled. Fast, light and nimble, made for lightning raids on sleepy villages and lumbering merchantmen. A hawk of the sea.

They said you could smell the stench of a slave galley a mile away, and a downwind gust from this one would surely make any man tighten stomach and craw as he fought the urge to vomit. It was the stench of fifty men chained and rowing under the lash, the bilge water around their rotting feet a stew of salt water, urine and faeces. For slaves like these lived on the rowing bench until they died. But it was also the stench of permanent exhaustion, and despair so deep that death was all they longed for.

The Barbary slaver was some sixty feet in length and carried a single centre-line gun at the bow. Her primary armaments were the crew of twenty or so corsairs who lounged at the stern under the sun-blanched canopy, naked to the waist, flashing teeth and eyes, hooped gold earrings and elaborate henna tattoos. And armed
with every variety of knife and dagger, mace and club, scimitar and half-pike imaginable.

One or two scanned the horizon from east to west, keen eyed and hungry for carrion. The rest diced or dozed, chewed qat or smoked kif. Other than men, the slaver – her name was the
Sweet Rose of Algiers
, without apparent irony – carried nothing more but the ballast of pebbles below, and the captain’s chest, an iron-bound treasury of gold and silver coins of every nation: Spanish escudos, Venetian ducats, Ottoman akçes, as well as a pair of bejewelled crucifixes they had looted from a little chapel on the coast of Sardinia. There was also, in a small velvet pouch, the dainty curio of a sun-dried nose, sliced from the face of a Sicilian nun they had captured onshore a few weeks ago and taken with them for a while. Eventually they had tired of raping her and tumbled her over the side.

The dip of the oars was slow but steady. If any rower faltered, the bull-hide lash of the boatswain would cut his back open. A rower on a slave galley was unlikely to last a year, and was usually grateful if he died before.

Among the Sardinians and Neapolitans, the Sicilians and Spaniards, there were two blue-eyed Northerners. A thickset young fellow with an impassive expression, and another with burning gaze and a pale beard that showed he was fair haired. Thin but strong, his torso showed many scars. Each wore nothing but filthy loincloths and rags on their heads to protect them from the Mediterranean sun. Still the sun blistered ears and cheeks, shoulders and hands. Slave owners commonly tried to keep their slaves in good condition, as they would any other of their possessions, and shielded their rowers with crude canopies. But not these corsairs. They were the dregs even of their low profession.

They were also careless in other ways.

On a Barbary slaver it was usual to work your slaves to death, ditch their corpses and then capture more on a further raid. The supply was endless and free, and that was what the slave galleys did: they consumed men. They existed to enslave their rowers, who rowed that they might exist.

And the life itself – the lawless raiding and ravaging – was itself so dark and seductive a pleasure. Erupting out of the night upon
some huddled fishing town, cutting a swathe of bloody terror through its wailing streets, destroying and looting as the fancy took you. A corsair was nothing but a penniless backstreet cut-throat in the shadowy alleyways of Tunis or Algiers or Tripoli, a poor fisherman’s son from some desolate dust-blown village of the Barbary Coast. But on a corsair slaver he was free to follow every desire, to heap up other men’s treasure as his own, to do what he wished with their wives and daughters. None ruled the sea but the gun and the sword alone. And a captain was the king of his ship. Even of so wretched a vessel as the
Sweet Rose of Algiers
.

Each rower pulled a single oar, but one had collapsed and moved no more. Immediately the rhythm was lost, other oars fore and aft clonking into his trailing blade.

The boatswain was upon him in an instant, beating him and howling curses, but he was too far gone. A fisherman’s son, taken from Sardinia only a few weeks ago. The light was gone from his eyes and his heart had already shrivelled and died within him.

The blue-eyed English youth with the fair beard was called Nicholas Ingoldsby. He glanced at his countryman, Hodge, across the narrow gangway. His eyes blazed. More than the single manacle that fixed a galley slave to the rowing bench in front, it was the manacles of the mind which held him enslaved. Few there dreamed of freedom, most dreamed of death. But in Nicholas Ingoldsby’s burning blue eyes there was no despair.

And the manacle round his ankle was loose.

Five days ago the galley had pulled into a narrow bay on a deserted island and the carpenter had gone ashore to find decent timber. The repair took some hours and the rowers rested, aching with longing to see land so close. But the corsairs’ scimitar points were always at their throats.

‘Slaves you are and slaves you will remain!’ bawled the boatswain. ‘Rebel and you will lose your ears, your noses, your eyes – a blind man can row as well as a sighted! I have seen rebellious slaves skinned alive. And then your throats will be cut and you will go down to feed the fish. No flowers on a sailor’s grave. None on a galley slave’s either. Your seed will die out and you will be forgotten for ever. Now do not stir while we work.’

They did not stir. Anger still burned like a red fire in Nicholas’s belly. As long as he still felt that, he might live. Others here would die. Most of them. But not I, he thought. Not I. Nor Hodge either. Soon our time will come.

They had been through worse than this before.

The corsair who doubled as ship’s carpenter replaced a spar, but in a moment of carelessness let a short iron bolt drop beneath the rowing benches, to subside in the foul water. In a trice Nicholas had clenched it between his toes and kept a hold on it, knowing a man’s life might depend on such a trivial thing. He clung to that iron bolt like a sinner to the Cross.

The boatswain raised his whip. The Sardinian fisher boy was about to be beaten to death before their eyes.

Nicholas bowed his head. He could never bear to watch this final scene, this epilogue to so wretched a life, though he had seen and endured many horrors himself in his twenty-two years. There were many scars on his arms, his lean torso, and a lumpy white cicatrice over his left elbow where a musket ball had once smashed into him as he swam desperately across a harbour. Long ago now. Upon the island of Malta . . .

The boy groaned at his trailing oar but could not move himself. The whip cut and cut in pointless cruelty.

For five days now that iron bolt had been passed around, mostly at night, going from one rower to another. It was terrible work, and their punishment had they been caught would have been beyond imagining. Skinning alive would have been the least they suffered.

After five days of agonised filing and wrenching at their manacles, in the snatched seconds when the boatswain was not overseeing them, when they were on rest watch, in moments of darkness when clouds covered the face of the moon and dulled the brilliant Mediterranean stars, they had prayed to God to help them break their single cursed manacles.

And now for three of them, just three, their manacles were broken. Nicholas, Hodge, and the great bearlike Easterner whose language no one else spoke, but who said he came from ‘
Rus, Rus
’. It was scarcely believable. He meant the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, they thought, an almost unknown realm in the heart of snowbound
Scythia. None knew how he had come here. But his expression was one that even the corsairs did not like to consider too long. As if the moment he had the chance, he would rise up and tear each of them limb from limb with his bare hands.