Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (48 page)

As the galley raced between the enemy vessels, catapults from both sides sang out . . . a giant steel arrow whistled over Foscari's head . . . but so far as he could tell, nothing struck home.

“Port your helm!” Foscari shouted. “Starboard oars drag water!”

Barbarigo
shuddered as the rudder bit the water, not only turning the galley but acting as a brake. The oarsmen on the right side allowed their oars to drag in the water, slewing the galley around on a new heading.

“Rudder amidships! All oars flank speed!”

Foscari had chosen his target, not the galley he'd passed on his right but the one just beyond—the nearest craft he could leave for the ships behind him. The ship he'd chosen was vivid with gold and vermilion paint, and featured a single rank of oars. Officers on the poop were running in consternation as they stared at the Venetian ship that had just swung around onto their quarter and was bearing down on them. They had only an instant to respond, and that instant had passed.

“Port your helm!” Foscari cried. “Hard over! Now!”

The helm went over and
Barbarigo
slewed to the right just before impact. The galley's prow crashed through the rank of oars—Foscari could see shrieking oarsmen hurled through the air by the looms snapping back with the weight of an entire Venetian galley behind them—and then the great spur over
Barbarigo
's bow buried itself in the enemy gunwale right amidships, punching a bloody path through ranked oarsmen. Foscari staggered as the
Barbarigo
came to a lurching, rending halt.

Catapults on both sides fired, unable to miss at this range, and adding to the barrage were marines firing crossbows and crewmen heaving firebombs and hurling spears. Crossbow bolts whistled past Foscari's head. The air rang with screams and curses and the sound of crossbow bolts striking wood, armor, and flesh. Gazing across the short span of water at the enemy quarterdeck, Foscari saw half the Cypriot officers go down before a volley of crossbow bolts fired from
Barbarigo
's overhead bridge structure.

A firebomb landed on the poop, and flaming gasoline leaped over the planks. A marine, his legs afire, made a frantic dance away.

Foscari glanced at the fire, pointed, commanded, “Sand!”

Marines picked up the sand buckets that stood ready and doused the flames that water could not quench. The burning marine was thrown to the deck and his flaming legs smothered in a cloak.

Foscari raised his speaking trumpet. “
Sifone uno
—shoot!”

A dragon's roar filled the air as flame arced from
Barbarigo
's bows, fired under pressure from one of the two siphons beneath the break in the forecastle. Getting behind the enemy meant they were now firing from upwind, and the
sifoni
had full use of their weapon. The entire enemy crew seemed to shriek as one, and there was a crazed stampede away from the flames, the enemy deck all astir with panicked men.

Foscari clenched his teeth at the screams of the men wreathed in flame. He would rather have just set the enemy galley on fire and left the crew to survive as best they could, but the decks were so packed with oarsmen that there was literally no other target.

“Helm amidships! Back oars!”

The siphon sputtered as it ran dry. The drummer beat three times for attention, than began a slow beat that drew
Barbarigo
's prow from the enemy vessel in a long groan of tortured timber. The Cypriot was truly alight now, liquid flame spilling over the rolling deck, racing along the sail that, hastily secured, still bagged out from the fallen yard.

Foscari snatched off his Unione Venezia cap and waved it. “Goaaaaal!” he screamed. “Go
arancioneroverdi
!” He heard nervous answering laughter from the marines on the poop.

As he heard the clanking of the pump that would refill the siphon's reservoir, Foscari looked for his next target. To starboard, a Cypriot galley had lost its rudder after having been rammed astern by the
Doge Dandolo
, one of the Venetians in his squadron. Greek fire was now beginning to play on the enemy poop, and Foscari decided the
Dandolo
wouldn't need his help.

To port, an enemy trireme was spinning in the water, one set of sweeps backing, in order to set itself for an attack on one of the Afentiko's galleys, which itself was lashed head-to-head to a Cypriot galley and fighting a boarding action.

“Ahead half speed! Starboard your helm!”

Barbarigo
slowed, then began to gain way as it curved slowly across the stern of the flaming Cypriot. Foscari's victim was now completely unmanageable, the panicked crew hurling overboard their oars, gratings, anything that could help them float once they leaped from the flames into the sea.

“Flank speed!” The oarsmen surged back and forth as the sweeps lashed the sea. Someone on the trireme saw them coming, and suddenly the enemy ship spun again in the water, trying to dodge away.

Too late. The trireme's oarsmen were not quite up to the maneuver they were attempting, and the trained Venetian oarsmen outsped them.

Barbarigo
's spur drove into the packed oarsmen on the enemy's port side. They weren't inside the hull but sitting in an outrigger lightly attached to the bulwarks, and
Barbarigo
peeled the outrigger away from the hull, spilling men and dropping part of the outrigger into the water. Suddenly Foscari was shouting and waving his cap.

“No Greek fire! No
sifone
! Don't shoot, you bastards of
squillatoria
, you squirters!”

The Cypriot galley was unmaneuverable and helpless, and could be finished off later. There was no point in wasting Greek fire on them.

The
sifoni
heard him, miraculously, and held their fire. Foscari backed the
Barbarigo
away and looked for another target.

The ocean streamed with smoke from ships burning on the water. The reek of gasoline and burning flesh clung to the back of Foscari's throat. He couldn't see a likely target, so he swung
Barbarigo
to starboard and began to pace along the battle's edges, looking for an enemy.

Whatever ships he could see were locked together in combat. The nearest was the
Carlo Zen,
lying alongside a green-and-white striped Cypriot galley, the crews battling over the decks with pikes and swords. Oars drooped uselessly in the water as their oarsmen battled across the locked decks.

“Starboard your helm! Quarter speed!”

The drummer slowed the beat.
Barbarigo
turned lazily to port, aiming for the Cypriots' unengaged side.

“Helm amidships! Grapnels ready! Sweeps in! Sweeps in!”

The sweeps rose dripping from the water, and then the oarsmen pulled them inboard, getting them out of the way of the collision that was about to come.

“No
sifone
!” Foscari called. A fire on the enemy galley could all too easily spread to the
Carlo Zen.

The clash of weapons from the engaged galleys rang clear in the absence of the crashing drumbeat and the rhythmic sound of the oars. Foscari could hear the sound of water chuckling under
Barbarigo
's counter, the snap of the flags on their staffs.

“Stand by to board! Ready for collision!”

Foscari braced himself against the poop rail, and the galley began in an almost leisurely way to crash through the sweeps hanging unmanned over the side of the Cypriot galley. Since the enemy oarsmen for the most part weren't at their stations, the destruction wasn't as horrific as it might have been, but still Foscari heard sweeps snapping, saw sweep-looms scything across the deck to break knees or hurl crewmen to the ground, saw white splinters flying.

The ship lurched as
Barbarigo
's spur crashed into the enemy side abaft the beam, chopping the bulwarks into kindling, ruining the white stripe atop the sea-green hull.
Barbarigo
came to rest head-to-tail with the other galley, its forecastle laid alongside the enemy poop. Foscari could see the ship's name picked out in Greek characters on the forecastle:
Iason
,
Jason
.

“Grapnels! Grapnels!” Foscari turned to his trumpeter. “Call for boarders!”

He looked in dumb surprise at the trumpeter's body stretched on the planks, the man's eyes starting, his fist curled around the crossbow bolt that had punched through his chest.

No more trumpet calls. Damn.

Foscari snatched off his cap and waved it. “Boarders! Boarders! For God and San Marco! Boaaaarders!”

A massed shout rose from over two hundred throats, a vast sound with an almost physical impact. The marines on the forecastle were already leaping to the enemy poop, and the oarsmen raised the hinged lids of their rowing benches to grab the weapons stored inside. Shields were snatched from the bulwarks where they had protected the rowers from enemy fire.

A raging tide of adrenaline urged Foscari to charge up the gangway to the forecastle and join the boarding party, and he went so far as to put his hand on his sword and take a step toward the poop companion; but then he realized he would have to fight his way through a mob of nearly two hundred of his own crewmen to reach the fight, which might well be over by the time he arrived.

No, he was the
ammiraglio
, his job was to stay above the mundane details of the fight, command his ship, and try to stay in touch with the rest of his fleet.

If he could work out a way to do that.

A crossbow bolt whirred past his nose, fired from
Iason
's forecastle only ten paces away, and Foscari began to pace the poop deck to make a more challenging target. His own crossbowmen on the poop were returning fire, he had to hope they'd keep the enemy suppressed.

The boarding fight was going well. The enemy had already been engaged along their port side, and his men had roared over the starboard poop and hit them in the rear. The poop had been cleared, and the Venetians were now trying to fight their way onto the main deck, but that involved battling along the narrow gangway and over the rowing benches, a challenging task. Fortunately there was steady fire from the bridges built over the waists of the two Venetian galleys, aimed at clearing the enemy decks, and sooner or later that would tell.

Another crossbow bolt whistled past, and Foscari accelerated his pacing. He scanned across the sea, seeing fire, smoke, wreckage in the water. Wreckage dotted the waves, and some of the wreckage had figures clinging to it.

Then, off the port side, the smoke parted to reveal an enemy galley with two banks of oars. The hull was white, striped in gold and green, the colors of the Cypriot flag, and it had clearly been in a fight. Some oars were missing, and the wet hides that covered its bow were scorched, either from its own Greek fire or someone else's. But the forecastle bristled with armor and weapons, and white water curled from the bronze ram just on the waterline. Even over the sounds of fighting, Foscari could hear orders being shouted from the bireme's poop, and the two rows of oars picked up the pace, white water churning on the bireme's flanks . . .

“Sound recall!” The words were on Foscari's before he remembered that the trumpeter had fallen. He ran to the break in the poop and shouted down into the packed mass of crew.

“Enemy to port! Enemy to port! Brace, brace, brace!”

Few heard him. The ram struck
Barbarigo
right amidships, and the entire galley was thrown sideways with such force that half the crew was hurled off their feet and crashed to the deck in a tangle of bodies and clashing weapons. The sideways movement pushed up a steep wall of water that fountained up between
Barbarigoi
and
Iason
and rained down over the decks.

The lightly built midships bridge, full of crossbowmen and catapult crews firing down into the
Iason
, was knocked off its foundations, and it listed heavily to port and then fell, spilling crew onto the decks.

And then—Foscari was struck dumb with astonishment—the enemy bireme bounced off the Venetian galley like a rubber ball hurled at a stone wall.

Barbarigo
had withstood the attack. There was a reason galleys in the middle ages had stopped carrying rams, and that had everything to do with modern shipbuilding techniques invented in the Arsenale of Venice. A modern ship, with the planking stretched around a sturdy frame, was much stronger than a ship built by the older method, where the hull was built first and the frame inserted later. Strong enough, anyway, to repel a strike by an enemy ship powered only by human muscle.

And then a barrage of steel-tipped missiles leaped from the bireme, falling into the tangled mess of the broken midships bridge and the sprawled crewmen, wreaking scarlet havoc.

“Port watch to your stations!” Foscari bellowed down into the chaos, and the port-side oarsmen scrambled to their feet to run to defend their ship.

Foscari clenched his teeth, expecting at any second for Greek fire to spurt from the enemy forecastle, firing straight into the teeth of his crewmen. But the fiery blast never came. Apparently the bireme had exhausted its reservoirs of gasoline.

More shouted orders came from the Cypriots' poop. The two banks of oars thrashed the water, and the helm was put over to bring the enemy ship alongside
Barbarigo
. Grapnels flew through the air.

“Cut those lines!” Foscari drew his sword and slashed at a grapnel that had lodged on the taffrail. A crossbow bolt whistled overhead and he ducked. He rose, hacked at the line again, and it parted.

But slashing at the lines proved useless. The bireme ran alongside
Barbarigo
—not as neatly as Foscari had run alongside
Iason
, but well enough, a little too far forward, the poop overlooking
Barbarigo
's waist, the bireme's waist beneath
Barbarigo
's forecastle. And, beneath the enormous flag and streaming pennants on the enemy's poop, Foscari could see the bireme's name glittering in raised gold leaf on the flat poop,
SPIRIDON RIGAS
, King Spiridon.