The Long Sword(160)
His own slave, a Circassian, handed him a spear so beautiful that I still remember it, with the Virgin rendered in carved steel on the head, and a verse of the Bible inlaid in gold. He glanced at me with an eye undimmed and full of humour.
‘See that I don’t have to use this, Sir William! I’m not quite the deadly hand I once was.’ He looked grimly under the leather screen and called to the helmsman, ‘Get this fucking thing sheeted away or I’ll have your hide, timoneer!’
‘We’ll fight, then?’ I asked.
The admiral didn’t savage me for my temerity. Instead, he looked under his hand at the Turks, still a league downwind.
‘I have every advantage but numbers. Their ships are full of loot and they’ve been at sea too long and I have the wind.’ He raised an eyebrow. His left eye trembled – sheer age – but his right eye was merciless. ‘With the wind, I can swoop on them like a hawk, and they lie there-rowing into the wind’s eye, wasting their men.’ He looked aft, looked at the sun, and looked at the Turks. ‘They have almost twice our numbers, ship for ship. We’ll need to be very careful.’
I never did learn what he meant by careful, because despite being over eighty, an age at which in most men, daring is dead, and timorousness is its own form of stubborn accomplishment, he swept down on our foes like the falcon he had himself named. A quarter league from the foe, the Venetian ships furled their lateens; the great yards came down on every deck, covering the rowers with canvas as the first Turkish arrows fell.
I had never faced a barrage of arrows. In the first heartbeats of our combat, I got a taste of what our English archers send to the French, and I confess I did not like it. The Turks mix screaming arrows with their deadlier brethren, and I, the veteran of ten battles, was afraid of the harsh screaming.
I was struck five times in the first three breaths of the action. Each arrow struck like a punch. None of them touched me, but they brought with them a wave of fear that cancelled much of my exhilaration at entering battle.
Marc-Antonio took an arrow all the way through his bicep – it went under his spaulder and right through his maille.
Juan caught him, cut the head, and extracted the arrow. Marc-Antonio’s face was tracked with tears of pain, but he blinked furiously and insisted he was well enough to fight.
The rowers were protected for a hundred heartbeats by the sails on deck, but even as the oars went in and dipped in response to the oar master’s rhythm, the sailors were clearing the sails off the yards and the yards were rotated amidships and laid along the edges of the catwalk.
One of our advantages was our three great galleys. The Turks had nothing like them. Even our ordinary galleys were bigger and often longer than the Turks, but our great galleys towered over them.
Even as the third and fourth volleys of Turkish arrows flashed in the sun, our centre was again gathering speed. I was no sailor then, but even I could see that we had not lost way as we’d coasted during the brief transition from sails to oars, and now the oars were sweeping like wings, or the legs of a mechanical centipede.
The Turkish centre attempted to back water, but their flanks carried forward, sweeping like arms to surround us. In a few moments, we could see Turks on almost every hand, and the sky was full of arrows.
My heart almost failed me. On land, to be surrounded is to be defeated.
I didn’t know much about the sea.
The master mariners at the steering oars gave us a slight turn to starboard, the oars frothed the sea in a massive effort, and we shot forward like a gargantuan crossbow bolt. We struck a Turkish galley and trod him down entire – our vast weight pushed his ship down into the water, the near gunwale went under, the lighter galley filled with water instantly and went down, so that as we swept over the wreck we could see men drowning under our feet, and her mast caught in our steering oars for a moment.