Swords From the Sea (81 page)

"So will you first make a great name for yourself, Barbarossa," she countered, smiling up at him, "and when you have done so, come and ask me again, please?"

He looked down into her matchless eyes. "Julie," said he, "that's a deal between us."

And when he beached on her island, Barbarossa picked her up like a bouquet of flowers and walked her ashore, sniffing the nice smell of her hair. Before Julie could tell him good-bye, he kissed her gently and jumped back into his shallop. She was surprised as well as mad, because he'd kissed her and run off without a last word from her.

Anyway, she told herself, he was only an island boatman who smelled of swordfish. But her family told her-when they had quieted down a little-how the red fisherman was little better than a pirate and woman snatcher, because he owned his island and a whole fleet, since nobody else seemed to be able to take it away from Barbarossa, and Julie had only the saints to thank that she hadn't lost her innocence and cost them ten thousand Venetian gold ducats in ransom besides.

Julie had not realized how much of a name Barbarossa had made for himself already. Nor did she know then that the ex-heavyweight wrestler had room in his head for only one idea at a time, and that one idea was Julia Gonzaga.

The red fisherman lost little time in making more of a name for himself. He exchanged his best shallop for a Venetian eighteen-oared galley by boarding her, and he picked up two papal royal galleys by lying in their course where they never looked to be engaged by such a small craft.

By the time Julie's family had betrothed her to marry a count, Barbarossa had a task force, and from Gib to the peak of Samothrace he had the name of a pirate. Yet Julie still thought of him as the awkward and kindly fisherman who wanted to do things for her. Just about then she heard from him. A pilgrim, calling at her garden in the Reggio villa near Rome, put a slip of paper into her hand, and the scrawl on the paper said:

My Lady:

I have made little of a great name for myself yet, still I ask you again to be my wife.

Julie tore up the paper, thinking, The very idea. And forgetting to ask the pilgrim where he'd got it, until he was gone. That was a mistake. When Barharossa heard the pilgrim's story, he was sure she'd double-crossed him merely to get a ride in his boat. When he got angry, he stayed that way.

The week before her wedding, Barbarossa called. He and his raiders came in from the shore so fast by night that her servants could only rush Julie out of her bed to the back of an unsaddled horse. Some said she had a nightgown on, some said she had none, but all agreed she was worth seeing. When she got over being scared to her very bloodstream, Julie felt mad, besides being disgraced.

What with getting her wardrobe together after the raiders had finished with the villa, and being married in a cathedral, she was in a state of mind. In those days girls learned the facts of life after the wedding, period. No divorce. And Julie was proud. She had the title of contessa and no children, and what she learned she kept to herself.

Until her next sea voyage, that is. Long after she thought the pirate Barbarossa had forgotten about her, the count, her husband, had to make a business trip to the Knights at Malta, and told Julie to accompany him. She did, and their galley arrived there, under the guns of the Valetta forts, with the rowing slaves fainting, and Barbarossa's fine flagship with the scarlet pennon and gilt stern lanterns sheering off just out of range.

"May Saint Michael the Archangel drown him where the sea is deepest!" Julie cried.

After that no one wanted to embark with the contessa. Isabella d'Este hinted that the lovely but pallid Julie was a femme fatale. When she wintered at the Spanish court the Duke of Alva himself whispered that bathing at the beaches might be dangerous for the bella contessa, and she'd be safer in his hunting lodge. But Julie would have none of that. "If your high excellency desires truly to protect me, why does he not catch the unspeakable Barbarossa?" she asked.

They caught him. Andrea Doria, the great admiral and politician of Genoa the Proud, trapped him caulking and oiling his vessels in the Djerba lagoon, where our air patrols used to watch for Rommel's oil tankers. Djerba, that flat, swampy island.

Doria was a cautious man. And war galleys then were like destroyers now, hard-hitting with their bronzed prows and heavy foredeck cannon, and powered by oar sweeps pulled by galley slaves; dangerous when they closed and loosed a rush of boarders, yet fragile and unhandy in heavy weather. They had to run before the wind in a storm. When Doria finally maneuvered his fleet into the lagoon, the lagoon was empty. Barbarossa had dredged his vessels clear across the island.

Doria passed the word along that Barbarossa hid himself away. And Barbarossa answered that he never sailed without his broad pennon on his masthead by day and his beacon light showing by night.

They fitted out a great fleet to watch for him off Cape Matapan, and he was running down the Balearics instead ferrying D. P. Moors across to Africa. Moors that the most Christian king had purged out of Spain, without any other place to go.

Then Barbarossa stopped the show in Venice. Every year the most illustrious, the doge of the serene republic used to stage a show, putting out to sea with a good-looking girl sitting by him and him throwing a bridal ring into the water. "You can have done," Barbarossa wrote the doge, "with marrying the sea henceforth, because the sea is my girl now, and no one but me shall wed Miss Mediterranean."

People laughed, but that year the doge's wedding of the sea was called off. They said because of weather.

"Stupid," declared Julie's husband. "Afraid of a shadow. What has Barbarossa got but a name?"

And Julie thought, My husband would never carry me away to an island of the sea. I haven't seen an island for years.

Barbarossa was a seaman. Perhaps his forefathers had been Vikings of the long ways of the sea. Certainly as fisher he'd known the feel of the currents and the signs of a storm in the sky. Those who tried to catch him were soldiers and officials, carrying out a mission. There's a difference.

For one thing, he wouldn't have galley slaves on his ships. He said he wanted all hands to be fighting men. For another, he had madness in him. To go after things like Julie, as no levelheaded man would have done. Once when his officers pulled him out of the wreckage of a Portuguese galley they had rammed, he cursed them. He was still alive. "Lubbers," he said, "if God doesn't slay a man, how is anyone else going to do him in?"

They said he had luck. But in all the Mediterranean he had no place of his own to shelter in. Until a place was made for him. At the far end of the sea, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent of the Turks had been keeping himself posted about Barbarossa, and now he sent for the pirate to come on his carpet.

The sultan expected to see a small-time pirate. Instead he saw a giant with eighteen ship captains following, ushering in gifts, including some remarkably fine-looking women.

When Suleiman had accepted the gifts, he asked, as if casually, had his visitor any strategy to defeat the Europeans?

Thinking that over, Barbarossa shook his head and said no, he had no plan except to close with them and fight them.

Suleiman was not one to hesitate. "Do it then."

He gave Barbarossa the rank of Captain of the Sea and a blank check to draw on, with the arsenal to build a new Turkish fleet for the sultan. "Build what you like ... with sails of satin and spars of gold if you want," he specified. "But do not put to sea with less than one hundred and eighty ships. I do not want you taking any more long chances. That's an order."

So the redheaded fisherman had a jeweled sword to wear and all Constantinople to set up shop in. He wondered if Julie might think Captain of the Sea was something of a great name. On the whole, he did not think so, because he had to take orders from another man.

You see, he still visualized her as the proud teenager he'd held, light as flowers, in his arms. It was like a beacon on his course. When he heard her husband had been promoted and Julie was now a marchesa, he sent her a present of the best family table service he could find.

This complete gold service arrived in time for Julie's gala party with royalty present. Only it turned out to be the d'Este gold plate, which had been missing for years, and Isabella made no bones about claiming it. But Julie kept track of the Sardinian wine merchant who'd been released from jail in Istanbul to bring it, and she stopped him outside the crowd to ask if there wasn't a message this time with the gift. Yes, the Sardinian said, there was a message, if she asked for one.

He gave her a fine gossamer scarf, with directions, "If you are unhappy, go anywhere to the sea and wave this, and a fisherman will see it."

Observing her, Catherine de' Medici, who was no prize beauty, told the scuttlebutt it was too bad the lovely Julie had such dealings with the underworld.

Although she looked like a perfect hostess, Julie really felt confused. To go and wave at the empty sea! Like a child! When she wasn't happy. Only the inward part of her that nobody saw knew that. Anyway, what would happen if she did ... or if she didn't?

Anyway, Julie argued with herself, she was only holding on to a memory of her lost youth. She had to argue like that when she caught a glimpse of the far-off blue sea.

In no time at all, Barbarossa was called back on the sultan's carpet. He tried to guess what Suleiman might have on him now; he'd been careful to have one hundred and eighty sail following in line when he headed out for the Gallipoli light, because he knew Suleiman would count them off from the sun garden where he kept the best-looking girls.

On his part, Suleiman noticed the dents in his captain's skull under the gray-red hair.

"Now hear me," said he. "You're doing a fair job as my Captain of the Sea. But you're still using command tactics when you should be planning operations like an admiral. Stop leading with your head; you're going to need it now," barked the sultan, and let the cat out of the bag. "Listen, Barbarossa. I have a terribly big empire to manage. Figuratively speaking, it's a big as one of those superbattleships Andrea Doria is building."

"Galleasses. No better than junks in a calm."

"Be that as it may be," continued Suleiman, who was not accustomed to interruptions, "my empire being so big, I have to leave the European area and go off to Africa and Asia to put down the Mamelukes and give a hand to my cousins the Moguls, out India way. Now, while I'm gone, I don't want any of Iny European enemies to knife me in the back. And would you," said he, passing the wine, "see to that?"

When Barbarossa didn't answer right off, Suleiman hastened to explain, "This isn't an order; I'm only asking. I figure the odds against you to be about seven to one. So take those new heavyweight mortars and ten thousand janizary shock troops-"

"I can't use soldiers on my sea. Keep the marines. No," explained Barbarossa, doing some figuring of his own, "I was only trying to count up your enemies here. Six I know of, but ..."

"The Knights of Malta are the seventh. What do you say, Red?"

Barbarossa didn't say, quick off. Always he and the sultan dealt the cards face up between them; how they played their cards was each man's affair. And Suleiman would sell out nobody; he was a good chief-even his enemies called him "the Magnificent," as well as "the Terrible Turk."

"Chief," answered Barbarossa, "chief. I know you love your wife Roxelana faithfully. But you are taking off on a long business trip and you will be tired, with all these affairs of state-"

"If you happen on a Venetian red-head," said Suleiman, keeping his voice low, "with broad hips and a narrow waist."

"There's a brunette," said Barbarossa, without batting an eye, "the pick of the Mediterranean, and no Venetian babe could open the door to her."

Suleiman piped down even more. "Red, I don't think you'd lie to me. I know you keep most of my hundred and eighty warships for decoys while you work with your own eighteen, but you never said different. Tell me now, is this a fact?"

"Chief, you hold her in your arms, it's fire and silk, and her lips, rose petals."

"Get her."

"Give me the order in writing."

Suleiman did that, but slowly.

"Go your way now," said Barbarossa happily, taking the order. "And think no more of being knifed in the back by any concert of Europe."

"I am going a long way. And I am beginning to think I've ordered you to take the long chance that I just warned you against. Damn your punchdrunk head, I don't want you killed! "

"If God doesn't rub a man out, how is anyone else going to do it?"

Suleiman couldn't answer that.

Julie was sunning herself on the bathing beach at Nice when it began to change along the Mediterranean. So long she had been staring out at the empty sea she was sure Barbarossa had forgotten her. When the fleet wore in against the land breeze she hardly noticed it, thinking it was Doria's or the French Toulon, until Barbarossa's scarlet pennant was sighted. Immediately all the royal set evacuated the Riviera. This time Julie had time to put on her riding dress and take her jewel box, and she looked like a girl again, at the excitement.

Her husband, the marquis, however, told her it was no laughing matter, and she must be more mindful of the good name of his family.

Anyway, the raid on Nice brought in the big shot himself, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, to bring Barbarossa's situation in hand; the emperor calling in his German veterans from his other wars and sending Hernando Cortes, the conquistador, who was killing Mexicans by the millions in the New World.

"This time," announced the marquis, "they will take Barbarossa's base: Algiers." He had the low-down at court. "It is all set up because that old friend of yours is selling out the Turks."

It confused Julie to hear Cortes called a noble conquistador and Barbarossa a pirate. Before she thought, she spoke. "Then they're making a terrible mistake. Barbarossa wouldn't sell out Suleiman."