“Here, let me at him, boy,” said old Barbarigo, who seemed all over the ship in his desperation.
Old Barbarigo shoved his stupefied son out of the way and let his pistols crack. He caught the Turk full in the chest. The little man lost his grip in midair and plunged, dead weight, into the water between the ships, splintering oars on both sides as he went.
Andrea looked down over the rail at the sight as if into the very maw of hell. He felt as if he had lost the only friend he had in the world in that little monkey of a man whose name he didn’t even know.
“By God—”Andrea murmured aloud and crossed himself. Then he stopped. No, not by God. By Allah. “By Allah and His Prophet.”
He tried it at first under his breath. Then he began to halloo it. He joined his voice to the rumble of the oarsmen beneath him, to that of the Turks who were using it as a battle cry to urge one another on.
“I surrender myself into the merciful hands of Allah,” Andrea sang out. “Lead me to Allah and His Messenger.”
Now the Turks had established more stable means of boarding than rope swings: planks and wooden ladders. Scimitars swinging like scythes, they reaped a great swathe on board the Venetian ship. Andrea saw that a corner of the main sail was on fire. As there was no wind, it was a slow burn, languidly uncurling its way up the canvas. It grew like weeds about a wilted scarlet lily, the flag of the Republic on top of the mast. It was, nonetheless, a burn that could not be put out.
“I surrender! I surrender!”
Men about him were joining his cry though, as they pled frantically in Venetian, it did not mean the same as his Turkish “I am a Muslim!”
The Turks didn’t have time to heed every cry, and many who surrendered also died alongside their companions who fought to the end. But Andrea, perhaps because his cries were in Turkish, kept the scimitars and arrows from himself and managed to balance his way across on a makeshift ladder to the other galley. There he laid his suit at the feet of a young commander of the janissaries.
Andrea had not offered more than a few words of explanation before his captor panted out the reply, “Well, if you’re to fight with us, you’d better put on this.”
The janissary tossed him the length of fabric from the head of a dead comrade. With it, Andrea showed the man he already knew how to wrap a turban. This seemed proof of sincerity to the janissary, who laughed, clipped Andrea with camaraderie on the shoulder, and said, “Stick with me, O Muslim!”
But already men about them were lowering their bows, swinging the nervous tension of their sword arms against air, or quickly scrambling back to their own ship, for the Venetian galley was clearly doomed. The whole rigging was in flames now, dropping volatile fragments like flower petals down upon the dead, the wounded, the unspent kegs of powder. Andrea saw his father, still shouting orders, standing on what had been the stern but what was now the highest point of the ship as it tilted dangerously.
The red-haired mistress was with him, yowling like a soaked cat. The woman tried alternately to dowse the flames about her petticoats and to get her man to calm himself. For now as he turned to profile, Andrea saw that his father had received an arrow wound near his right eye which, if it were not to prove fatal, would surely require more care than he was giving it.
That vision of his father, standing amid the flames of his ship with the mistress at his side, and half an eye running down his face, would haunt Andrea for the rest of his life. At the time he could only hope the state of his father’s eye would spare him going down beneath the waves with his last vision that of his own son and heir wearing a Turkish turban.
* * *
To the Christian rolls of the dead, next to that of his father the proveditore, was added the name of “My lord Andrea Barbarigo.”
But Andrea was not dead at all. Venice might have discovered this for herself when her ambassador signed the new peace treaty with the Porte. If he had looked closely under the turban third on the left, just behind Uluj Ali, the new Kapudan Pasha, he would have discovered the face of his old attaché among the Turkish naval command. But the ambassador had other worries on his mind.
The allied Christian fleet had carried the day. But Lepanto, Uluj Ali promised as the treaty was signed, had but trimmed the beard of the Turkish navy. It would grow again, and thicker. Even as he signed, the ambassador knew the Golden Horn was bristling with a whole new fleet built overnight it seemed.
“If we have not enough iron, we Muslims can cast anchors of silver, and our sails shall be of silks and brocades when the canvas is gone.”
It was, indeed, a finer fleet than had been sunk, and built in the space of but one winter.
“But you Venetians, by cutting off your island of Cyprus, we have cut off your right arm. You cannot grow another.”
It was true and the ambassador knew it. The treaty confirmed, in very humble terms, that violent amputation.
All the Cypriot wine he wanted was now promised to the besotted old Sultan for as long as his heart could keep beating. And Venice was quickly being eclipsed by greater powers, both East and West.
PART III: ABDULLAH
X
The operation that makes a man sexless gives him an ancient timelessness as well.
“There is peace in the harem, thanks be to Allah.” Ghazanfer tried to make conversation as he helped me unload my two ladies in the dim shadows before the door to the imperial
