Add to this the fact that the brisk morning’s breeze had now died to nothing, and both forces would have to depend on their rowers. The rowers under the Turkish decks were Christian slaves. And under the Christians, the captives continually called on Allah and His Prophet in spite of the chains about them.
Andrea looked over the backs of his father’s rowers, uniform blue shirts and white caps moving like drops of water in a single swell. Their issued homogeneity disguised a crew at war with one another in their souls. The rowers would like nothing better than to propel their ship into the clutches of the enemy, who would free them from their shackles and return them home. Only full forces of whipmen and drivers kept them from actually doing so.
And the case must be the same across the stretch of green water in the Muslim hulls.
Fleets were divided into individual ships, ships into slaves and freemen, freemen into clans, father divided from son, and even Andrea’s heart was not at peace with itself. He had determined to fight his damnedest, to make his father proud of him once and for all, or die in the attempt. But when, over the drums marking the rhythm of his own ship’s forward motion, he heard the drums and thrilling double-reeded squeals of the janissaries’ martial shawms, he faltered.
How familiar was that sound! How like home! He had heard it so often as a division of janissaries changed their station through the streets of Constantinople. How often he had stood and watched such maneuvers with an admiration he could not conceal. They were so proudly martial in their yellow and blue, their white and scarlet. Even the will of Allah in the form of a sneeze was not allowed to disturb their perfect discipline.
The sound of their mustering bands could not help but remind him of times when he’d been the happiest: days when he’d had a meeting with Ghazanfer in the afternoon, and the morning had seemed alive with hope of what news the eunuch might bring of his lady’s doings. Or might bring the lady herself. Those were days he had shaken off his father’s hand and felt certain of his own worth, certain it would someday bring him happiness.
As Andrea stood gripping and ungripping his sword by the rail, his father’s mistress walked by him on her way to her cabin where she would await the outcome of the battle. She was a big, brazen woman with red hair. He’d never liked her and resented her presence there in the place of his adored mother, the plump, mousey little woman who had retreated for consolation into religion.
“Kill a Turk for me, Andrea,” the mistress said, tweaking his ear playfully and then swinging her hips off towards the cabin.
Suddenly Andrea wanted nothing more than to see her raped by a dozen syphillic Turks. He would help them hold her down. He could no longer have any respect for any woman who dared to show herself outside either harem or nunnery.
The first shot was fired—one charged only with powder from the Turkish flagship as a warning. By God, how chivalrous! Andrea thought. Don Juan answered for the Christians—with his heaviest cannon—and it was not blank.
The sixty-three galleys under the proveditore of Venice were deployed along the left flank of the gulf’s headland, which would greatly hamper their movements. What rocks and shoals were hidden under these waters were quite unknown, so Barbarigo warned his sailors to keep well clear of the coast.
Hasan Pasha Barbarossa led the Turks, whose waters these were, on this wing. Being his father’s son, as the brilliant red beard beneath the white turban proved, he’d known every inlet of the Mediterranean like the back of his hand almost before he could toddle on deck.
The Turks’ craft had shallower draft than the Christian vessels. And they proved themselves at once to be fearless of the rocks, knowing to the hair’s breadth how close one could risk. Armed with this fearlessness—which was not foolhardiness, Andrea thought, but knowledge cold and keen as a Damascus blade—they began at once to outmaneuver the Christians, catching them up on two or three sides. Even the monstrous galleasses—planted in front of Barbarigo’s force like towers on a city wall—did not daunt them.
The Turks’ quick little galleys skidded past these floating fortresses as if such things could be encountered every day. As if the galleasses were not the new secret weapon Venice had gone head over heels in debt and desperation to build. As if they were only more familiar coastlines instead of multiple decks bristling with cannon and crack-shot harquebusiers.
Through the heavy smoke the Turks sailed. With the loss of only one of their ships to the three Venetians that were now aflame, the Turks had soon engaged the entire left wing in hand-to-hand combat at which, everyone knows, janissaries are unequaled in the world.
Now, over the constant cannon fire, Andrea could hear the very orders being shouted by Hasan Pasha as his galley pulled close, locked oars, and prepared to board the Venetian flagship. By God, how he loved the sound of that language! Even raised in battle cry, it was music to his ears. The things one can say in Turkish that are impossible to say in Italian! They were all things of glory and chivalry and love.
Andrea gripped his sword to meet his first opponent. Now he saw him, a wiry little man stripped to the waist and climbing in the Turkish rigging like a monkey, preparing to swing across to the Venetian rail just at Andrea’s side.
Salaam. I shall greet him with peace, Andrea thought, and bid him welcome to my father’s humble ship as politely as only Turkish can.
Andrea set a pleasant smile on his face, bizarre in that melee of blood and death. He watched as the little man tested the strength of his rope and put
