Swords From the Sea (82 page)

How did she know that the redheaded fisherman who had tried to carry her wouldn't sell anybody out? Women have hunches like that.

But when the emperor came back from Algiers without Algiers and most of his Germans, and Cortes with only a few of his caballeros of Spain, and all of them without the armor they'd ditched to swim better, the marquis said it had been due to an unforeseen storm, and how had Julie got her information in advance?

This time Julie didn't answer him. This thing was bound to break, and probably she sensed how it would break. For one thing, the marquis only told her politely how worried he was by her being pale and noaccount. For her health, so he said, he took her to Venice by coach, assuring her the gondolas and the canals would be perfectly safe. When he took her to see the Ducal palace, he led her straight to the conference room. And there, waiting for her, sat seven of the greatest sea lords, including the doge himself in his red cap of office. They all stood up to compliment her on her looks.

Andrea Doria explained the idea to her, with maps-how they could only win the war one way, by everybody ganging up. But Julie understood in a flash what they were after, and said so.

"You call yourselves Christian soldiers, and you gang up against a man who fought you fair," she said.

The marshal of the Holy Roman Empire said a woman couldn't judge very well what was fair in war. The lord admiral-that being Doria-would decide the strategy.

"To use a woman to bait a trap!" said Julia.

The vice-commander of the Knights of Malta stood up and swore by his honor that she would be safe this time on the flagship. Especially, he added-not liking Doria-on the lord admiral's flagship.

"I wasn't thinking of myself," she told the commander.

"Evidently not." The thin face of the marquis flushed dark. "I had thought you hated this renegade pirate, but I am led to believe you love him. Speak up," he insisted, when Julie held her tongue.

The tightness within her gave way at the word. "My lord husband, it is true hatred can turn into love," she spoke up all in a breath, "and love can also become hatred. I know nothing about Barbarossa except one thing. He will never shame me as you have done this minute."

Then she curtsied to Doria. "Will you kindly have a chair put for me on the deck of your ship, admiral? I will go with you gladly on your cruise to meet Barbarossa."

When she did, everyone who saw Julie remarked how she seemed to be enjoying it-the doge himself handing her into the admiral's barge at the quay, and the flagship decked with streamers, while salutes were fired all around. Julie had on her newest blue dress with the gossamer silk scarf at her throat. She couldn't help enjoying it, although she knew it was staged like this so Barbarossa would be certain to hear about her.

She hadn't been to sea for so long. And all the sea was covered with sails, from the gun barges to the five great new galleasses, like castles filled with tiers of guns. Seven fleets she counted with seven flags-the arms of Genoa above her, the lion of St. Mark, the Maltese cross, the shield of Spain, the eagles of the great emperor, the crossed keys of the Papal Curia, and another she didn't know that Doria said was Portuguese.

She almost felt like waving her scarf, until Doria gave her the totals-two hundred ships, two thousand guns, sixty thousand armed men. And more than all that, the five new dreadnoughts.

"And what," asked Julie anxiously, "does Barbarossa have with him? By the way, where is he?"

At Preveza, said Doria, refitting his fleet of perhaps eighty sail. At the landlocked port of Preveza, watched by a screening force of light galleys. This screening force, Doria explained, would withdraw to decoy Barbarossa out to where the five galleasses waited. When Barbarossa had broken his strength against the five dreadnoughts, Doria's main fleet of two hundred galleys would encircle the battle to sink every unit of the pirate's Turkish fleet. It would all happen like that, barring bad weather, which, being an act of God, Doria could not control.

This strategy Julie didn't understand very well. But realization came to her like a blinding flash of lightning. Barbarossa was trapped. If he tried to save his crews by landing, he lost his fleet. If he fled away from the armada and from her, the name of Barbarossa would cease to be a legend in the Mediterranean. If he came out to fight against such power as this, and against her, he was lost. And so, very likely, was she. There was no other possibility.

"I understand," she said quietly in her deck chair, "everything now."

Barbarossa came out to fight.

It happened just as Admiral Doria and Julie had anticipated. Except that Barbarossa's vessels got under way at night, surprising the screening force and scattering it before it could draw him seaward. Yet he came on.

The wind being against him, he had to work out with the oars. His lookouts sighted the forest of masts lying in wait off the island of Santa Maura, yet he kept his course to close his enemy.

After dawn the wind died. The five galleasses, becalmed, lay in his way, their great firepower blasting his galleys back. He sent his galleys in singly to fire their bow guns and draw clear. What with that, and the mighty sea castles fouling each other in the calm, one of them caught in flames. After that the small galleys worked in through the smoke to board the great ships. It was mid-afternoon, and the weather thickening, before the fifth galleass hauled down her colors.

If only Barbarossa had kept all of Suleiman's armada with him, and the heavy mortars and janizaries, he might have had more of a chance. As it was, he had taken too much punishment. When he made signal to close the enemy at Santa Maura, his flotilla had thinned behind him. His own galley limped forward with half its oars gone.

Past the stern of Doria's flagship the galley of Malta rounded and the commander hailed, "Lord admiral, do you not see that the enemy will close us? Bear down, bear down!"

"Back to your station!" shouted Doria. "Obey your orders! We will have every sail of his by sundown! "

"Admiral," cried Julie from her chair, "I find the conversation on my cruise most entertaining! What with so many commanders all running up different signals, and squadrons rushing by in the heavy swell," she added. "And the spectacle is really magnificent."

Then through the circling squadrons the dark wedge of Barbarossa's ships came on, with the roar of the guns like the swift roll of drums. When a flying squadron struck against this wedge there was a vast splintering sound.

With each lift of the swell, the wedge was closer. Like an injured wrestler, it felt for a grip on its enemy. And there happened at Preveza what sometimes happens at sea-the great fleet maneuvering, colliding, and changing course could not break up or check the small fleet bearing in.

Under the darkening sky, Barbarossa's scarlet pennon showed clearer. Julie recognized the gilt stern lanterns bearing down on her. So few oars moved the battered galley toward her. Julie's mind told her, He knows I am waiting here, yet he will not turn away. Nothing now can keep his ship from crashing into mine.

She didn't feel as if she were going to die. She felt excited and tense, as if at her wedding. What was really happening she couldn't understand because of the loud drumbeat and the darkness over her head.

Then lightning glared. In the flash, Andrea Doria's nerves snapped. He cried, "Give way!" And unsteadily he ordered a signal flag bent-all ships to shelter from a storm. So the mighty armada turned and ran from Barbarossa. The long oars churned, the steering sweeps were thrust hard over, and their galley turned from Barbarossa's boat. Their armada followed, running before the wind rising to hurricane force.

Rain squalls swept the deck. The galley, with oars inboard and only a patch of foresail spread, ran north. Braced with the sweep of the rain, seeing an inlet in the coast as night closed in, Julie wondered why they didn't light the stern lanterns that served as guide beacons for the fleet.

She did not know that Barbarossa was following until the other galley drew alongside with its lanterns glowing aft. It hung to windward, accompanying them. No guns could be worked on her galley in that lash of rain. A shaft of lightning showed Barbarossa standing by the steering sweep across from her as the red fisherman had stood at his tiller, and she thought, How much heavier he's grown.

Then she felt warm and protected with Barbarossa between her and the flying spray. She waited for each flashing beacon of the sky to see him again until he drew ahead with beacon lighted, guiding her toward a break in the dark coast.

When her galley reeled and swept into the gut of an inlet, Barbarossa sheered off, heading out toward his scattered fleet. Watching the two lanterns turning away, she remembered and laughed, hurrying to pull the scarf from her throat and wave it.

"Marchesa," said Andrea Doria. He looked aged and sick. "What do you wish for?"

Julie hardly heard him, watching into the darkness. "I almost forgot. I was so very happy."

Barbarossa kept the sea until the last of his ships found shelter. Perhaps because of that, he died soon after. From Gib to Gallipoli light, his name was a great name. And when Sultan Suleiman came back from Asia he built that tomb close to the water, with the two stern lanterns hung inside it.

When Terence McGowan finished with his identification of Barbarossa, the admiral flipped his cigarette into the water.

"McGowan," he said, "I was a swab this morning."

The admiral squinted shoreward at the Golden Horn with sunset lighting the minarets of the mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent, and at the small tomb dark by the water. He cleared his throat. "H'm-umh. I'll give you five to one in dollars that Barbarossa wanted Suleiman to keep those stern lights going, and Suleiman did it. But after four hundred years, people forget a detail like that. Furthermore, I think I owe these Turks something. It would be a good thing if I went back tomorrow morning with electricians and got those lanterns going again. Will you break out some flowers and et ceteras, and Miss-Miss Mediterranean to attend again?

"You mean Miss Hisarbey?"

"I mean Miss Mediterranean." The admiral looked at his aide. "Do you know any reason why the American Mission for et cetera can't have a good-looking Miss Mediterranean?"

"No, sir," said McGowan promptly.

The first of it was Ernst Salza's waking in the morning. Straight to the window opening he went, and saw a sea mist coming in. Then he felt sure that this would be his great day. Mist and a light breeze-they were sheer good luck.

To check his excitement, he smoothed out the blanket on his wall pallet; he cut himself a slice of black bread and spread cheese sparingly upon it with his knife. Drinking a little water, he gave himself the pleasure of eating a few Syrian dates that had come in on his last ship. For Ernst Salza was a careful man.

As he broke his fast there in his sleeping cell, his thin body towering in its black gown, he lifted his eyes to the whip on the wall, the whip that had lashed raw the flesh of his back when he had become an apprentice, forty-eight years before. An apprentice of the Hansa that outsiders called the Hanseatic League, which he now served as agent.

Beside the whip hung the motto he had picked: "Success comes only with the last farthing."

Once Klas Stortebecker had seen that motto and laughed. "Never try for the last farthing, Ernst," he had gibed. "'Tis bad luck, that."

Klas was superstitious. Klas buried the men he killed, and had a Mass said for them, with candle and bell. But Ernst Salza had shed the blood of no man.

But Klas would come as he promised, and the mist would hide his coming.

At the window, Salza could barely make out the masts of his own cogs moored to the bridge that divided his Kontor, or warehouse, from the rest of Bergen-town. He could not see the fishing fleet clustered in the half moon harbor, or the quays of his competitors, the Norwegians and foreign merchants on the opposite side.

He had closed, by virtue of the Power of the League, all the Norwegian coast to those foreigners except the Bergen port of arrival. He had fixed a high duty on the goods they imported, while the Hansa goods came in to the Kontor free. Still the strangers flocked in, to gnaw at his monopoly of the fisheries and the lumber ...