“Mashallah, ustadh,” spoke Ghazanfer, rubbing his thick neck as if he hardly hoped to find it still whole. His voice seemed to curl over the first smile ever to cross the impassive creature’s lips. “You weren’t a moment too soon on that one.”
“I had been at the wall listening for quite some time. Since I heard your lady’s first scream.”
“And you didn’t come to our aid?”
“I couldn’t make up my mind that you wanted me. Or that it would be in my best interest to do so. With your lady, it’s often difficult to tell.”
“Yes,” said the larger eunuch, more thoughtful that his usual omniscient tones. “I suppose that’s true.”
“But she does carry something that belongs to the realm of Islam—an heir.”
“Yes.”
“And after hearing about your young friend the page—”
“You heard that?”
“Yes.”
“Yes. I—I hoped you would. But shouldn’t someone go after that Italian?”
“My ears did hear right? He is the one they call Barbarigo?”
“The same.”
“Leave him. His life, I fear, will find its own level, now that she’s opened the floodgates on him.”
Perhaps Andrea imagined some of this talk. He imagined all sorts of things that night, running through the hostile city, rowing through the black waters dotted with lantern light in confounding constellations as fishermen stalked the late autumn lufer run. This journey he’d planned to take in love’s company he took alone.
IX
“How many ships? How many ships?” the proveditore shouted up to his lookout.
“Hard to say, my lord,” came the answer. “They’re equal us. Maybe more.”
“More? The devil you say.”
“Perhaps, sir.”
Long before dawn on the seventh of October, 1571, the Christian fleet had weighed anchor. It was a Sunday, rather late in the year and risking storms, but the night had remained clear, brilliantly star-studded. All Andrea had seen of the fleet around them was its mimicry of the constellations above on the black water below. Each lead ship dangled a lantern from her masthead moving like God before the Israelites. The others mutely, invisibly followed.
As dawn had come, the allied Christian fleet found itself straddling the ragged entrance of the Gulf of Patrai. Swollen sails and quivering pennants. Christian devices all, had crammed the straits. They hunted revenge for the brutal fall of Cyprus to the Turk.
Priests had moved from ship to ship and man to man, presenting their holy relics and heavy, thumping silver crosses, offering communion. And the men took it, perhaps with more piety than the lot of sailors had ever experienced in their lives. If die they must, they would die shriven. If captured, they’d go with the taste of God on their tongues.
But no man expected that either of these fates would befall him. His neighbor, perhaps, but not him in whose personal consciousness the world had begun and without which it would extinguish. They could feel personal immortality plastering the roofs of their mouths along with the blessed wafer.
Andrea had thought this bitterly as he’d fingered the crusty scab on his face—the gift of a year and a half of whoring—and made his own confession. There wasn’t time to begin to tell it all. Others were waiting. So he didn’t mention a quarter of the sins resting on his account. And he left everything he owned to his mother in a will he doubted the Republic, if all were told, would honor.
Now, several hours of sin later, the sun was brilliant, almost blinding, off the waves stilled to looking-glass polish. Against the port side, the white rocks of Corinth were likewise unrelieved by any pads of green.
A dense, low mist seemed to be hovering over the next inlet, the Gulf of Lepanto. But those in the crows’ nests shouted the news down and soon enough anyone with eyes could see for himself. This was no meteorological fluke—a fog in midday sun—but the Turkish navy itself with sails unfurled, in superior position, ready and waiting to take on all comers.
A leaden silence fell over the Christians. Even the ships’ timbers forgot to creak and men forgot to breathe as simple wonder, unadulterated as yet with fear, overcame them at the sight.
Hasan Pasha was there, intelligence enlightened, the son of Barbarossa himself. Jafer Pasha, the Beglerbeg of Tripoli, and fourteen other beys of the maritime provinces had joined him, each entitled to hoist the banner of Prince of the Sea. Deploying his miles of ships into one great grasping crescent, and claiming the center for himself was the supreme Turkish commander, Muezzinzade Ali Pasha. Andrea’s heart thudded more when he heard that this commander’s ship was named The Sultana. How could he fight against that?
“And Uluj Ah,” the report came.
“Damned renegade,” his father cursed. “I’ll take that man’s balls for myself.”
Andrea knew Uluj Ali as a fearless corsair, the southern Italian turncoat who’d first captured Sofia Baffo and brought her to Constantinople.
And then Andrea learned there was another man known to his love among the enemy. That was Sofia’s master, her lover, Murad, the eldest son of the Sultan, heir to the throne. Father of Sofia’s children. Andrea couldn’t suppress that bitter thought. If she won’t claim me.
Murad was leading his contingent from the sandjak of Magnesia. Andrea almost echoed his father in claiming that man’s privates for himself. But he hesitated, confused. He had given Sofia a choice, he remembered, and she had chosen this Turk.
“Are we at them, my lord?” The men had reached the boiling point, where their individual minds melded into one.
“Yes, by God. Yes, for Cyprus and San Marco. At them!”
Now, although the opposing forces seemed to be unified in their ranks like two solid city walls, Andrea realized this was an illusion. Not only were the two armadas mere flimsy wooden ships upon the sea, susceptible to everything from flaming arrows to hidden shoals, but they were truly far from united in personnel besides. The North African beys actually got along with Constantinople
