Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (49 page)

The enemy flagship, he realized, and then the bireme's flank ground against
Barbarigo
, and a storm of missiles rained down from the enemy poop onto the Venetian's waist. A wave of defenders went down, and then there was the resonant thud of a catapult firing, followed in a split second by another.

Foscari growled in frustration as he saw two glass vessels plunge down into
Barbarigo
's main deck and shatter amid the crew. He expected a wave of flame to sheet over the defenders, but instead a ferocious white mist boiled up from the deck, and the crewmen screamed as if they'd been plunged into fire. The lines of crew recoiled from the bulwark.

Acid!
Foscari thought, and he shouted for sand to quench the flesh-eating liquid.

Too late. Even as he gave the order, he saw enemy crew leap down into
Barbarigo
's waist from the poop, led by a figure in golden armor. The attackers all wore thick-soled boots that gleamed with some shiny substance that was presumably intended to repel the acid that had given them a footing on the enemy deck.

Other than the boots, the leader seemed entirely encased in plate, from his greaves to the helmet plumed in the Cypriot colors of gold and green. He glared out at the world through a T-shaped slot in his helmet, and even though Foscari couldn't see his face he felt a sudden shock of recognition.

Yes. Another of Spiridon's champions. Or djinn. Or demons. Whatever they were.

And already he was attacking, charging straight into the disorganized mass of defenders, the point of a wedge of boarders.

Spiridon's champion carried a sword in each hand, a straight sword in the right, a curved scimitar in the left. His group of boarders was also heavily armored, big brawny men who wore plate and mail and plumed helmets, and who carried heavy kite-shaped shields in addition to broad-bladed falchions.

Not expected,
Foscari thought. Not in naval warfare, where heavy armor would restrict the agility necessary to maneuver on a crowded, complicated vessel. Shove any one of those titans overboard, and he'd plummet like an anvil to the bottom before he could get the armor off.

But that didn't alter the fact that these armored giants were on his deck, now, at this very moment, doing a very good job of killing his men.

Foscari ran across the poop and began pulling crossbowmen off the rail facing
Iason
and sending them to the break in the poop. Once he'd got half a dozen, he joined them and pointed at the enemy champion.

“Kill that man,” he ordered.

At the moment that he spoke, the enemy champion turned his head and looked straight at him, as if somehow, in the midst of the shouts and screams and the clang of weapons, he'd heard the order. Foscari's nerves sang a warning as he gazed into the invisible eyes shadowed by the golden helmet, and then the golden figure turned and began slicing his way toward the poop.

There were two ways to climb
Barbarigo
's poop, a steep companionway on either side. So as not to interfere with the rowers, the companionways made a ninety-degree turn to descend to the gangway that ran between the towing benches.

“Shoot him! Shoot him!” Foscari urged.

A crossbowman fired and hit the champion right on his armored chest. The bolt shattered on the armor, and the champion came on, his two swords slashing through Venetian crewmen. Another bolt was intercepted by the kite shield of the champion's supporters, and a third bounced off the golden helmet and struck a Venetian sailor.

Foscari was willing to give his right foot for a large enough rock to crush that golden helmet, but unfortunately his ship didn't carry any rocks. He grabbed marines armed with pikes and shoved them to the poop companionway.

“Just fend that bastard off,” he said.

The armored champion had killed his way to the base of the poop, and he began the steep climb up the port companionway with the marines jabbing down at him with their three-meter spears. He slashed and parried the spear points, took a step upward, paused and slashed again. His butcher's work had stained the golden armor with scarlet.

Foscari looked desperately for help and saw one of the leather buckets of sand that stood by ready to douse an attack by Greek fire. He seized it by its rope handle, ran to the companionway, and hurled it overhand straight for the champion's golden helmet.

He'd hoped for a rock, but this would have to do.

The strike rocked the champion back, and he lost his balance and took a step back before one of his party caught him. A gauntleted hand wiped sand from the T-shaped slot in the helmet. The boarding pikes jabbed down again, and one caught the champion on the left shoulder and punched through the armor. The golden fighter dropped his sword, grabbed the pike's haft, wrenched the point free, reeled, and then came up the companionway again.

Foscari looked wildly for another sand bucket, saw it, and ran for it. Crossbow bolts whirred near his head. He snatched the bucket, ran back to the companion, and hurled it. If he could just knock the man down, he thought, the fighter might never be able to rise again, not against the weight of his armor and the trampling of fighters surging back and forth over his body.

But this time Spiridon's champion was ready. He saw the bucket coming and fended it off with an upraised arm. It spilled its sand and fell harmlessly into the crowd on the main deck. And the man in golden armor came on.

“Porco dio!”
Foscari swore. He was going to have to take care of this himself—that or die like a good Communist.

He drew his cutlass, and felt distinctly at a disadvantage in facing the armored colossus. He wore only a cuirass of boiled leather, reinforced with steel plates over the shoulders, and he'd forgotten his helmet in his cabin.

Spiridon's champion rose to the poop like a golden god rising from the sea. The two tails of his braided red beard hung from beneath his helmet, and that marked him as the man—demon—who had frightened Serafina when they met. The pike wound had made his left arm nearly useless, and he was fighting only with the right hand, but he still fought well enough to cut down two of the marines who were trying to stop him.

Foscari stepped toward the golden fighter and casually flipped his Unione Venezia cap in the man's face, blocking the limited vision of the helmet. The champion slashed blindly. Foscari ducked under the strike and his lunge went neatly between the helmet and gorget, with all Foscari's weight behind it. He distinctly felt the release of the cutlass point as it parted the champion's spine.

Goal!
he thought.

The champion fell in a spastic crash of metal, so uncoordinated that the armor seemed to have no bones in it at all. Foscari stepped over the body to slash at the very surprised Cypriot standing just behind his fallen champion. The cutlass caught him in the neck before he could raise his heavy shield, sliced through his chain-mail coif, and sent him reeling back down the companionway, right into his heavily armored companions, who all went down like skittles in a game of
cinque birilli
. Foscari was about to throw himself down the companionway and stab them all before they could rise, but the remaining marines began thrusting down with their long pikes, the steel points driving down in a perfect frenzy, and Foscari decided it was too dangerous to dive into that, and he'd leave the job to the crew.

He bent to retrieve his cap, then looked up as he heard a massed shout. His heart gave a leap as he saw
Doge Dandolo
, which must have finished off the Cypriot galley it had rammed, come crashing alongside
Spiridon
, and a torrent of boarders pour over the side as crossbows and catapults hurled missiles into the defenders.

Spiridon
had lost its champion and was now being boarded from its unengaged side while most of its marines were aboard
Barbarigo
. The result was a massacre.
Spiridon
's crew was so packed together in the waist that they could scarcely wave a sword to defend themselves. Foscari rallied
Barbarigo
's crew to press them from the other side, and the Cypriots died in heaps.

Iason
's crew had by this time succumbed, and the five locked galleys rolled on a sea that grew red with the blood that rained from the scuppers.

The three Venetians recalled their crews to the oars, and cruised as a squadron across the battlefield, looking for enemies to fight and finding none. The allied fleet had won a complete victory.

Six Cypriot galleys had been burned, and three made a successful escape when the battle had decisively turned against them. The remaining seven had either been captured, or they'd been crippled in such a way as to make escape impossible. These last surrendered when offered the chance.

One Venetian and one Rhodian galley had been burned, and one from each allied fleet had been successfully boarded by the enemy—both by crews led by
Spiridon
's parahuman champions—but each of the captures had been abandoned when the battle had turned against the Cypriots. Foscari had killed one of the champions, and another had been burned when his ship had been set on fire.

The allied fleet returned to Rhodes City with their captures under tow, and the enemy crew were taken off the surrendered ships and into captivity. While the city erupted in mad joy, and icons of the Virgin were paraded along the ramparts of the old town, Foscari stayed aboard his flagship and made plans for the next day's sortie.

The Afentiko and Serafina both came out to
Barbarigo
, bearing hampers of food and drink, and loud in their acclamation for the victory. Foscari accepted their embraces and asked for food and wine to be sent to his crew. The Afentiko complied, and also sent drafts of his militia on board to act as marines.

Once the dead and wounded were carried to shore, Foscari had enough crew to fully man five ships, and the Rhodians could send another two under Archiploiarchos Giorgallis, whose flagship had been overrun, but who had miraculously survived despite numerous wounds. Giorgallis refused to leave his ship despite his injuries, and was carried up to his poop and slung in a kind of hammock, so that he could remain in personal command. Foscari sent him a bottle of brandy as a token of his admiration.

The allied fleet cleared the harbor before dawn, and this time Foscari gave his oarsmen a rest by raising masts and sails. The exhausted crew slept on the deck in neat windrows, and covered every square meter of the planking.

The allied fleet located the enemy by midmorning, and found them in the midst of an evacuation. Cypriot ships had taken their army off the shore near Cape Vayla and were heading home. Their sails straggled out nearly to the eastern horizon. The three surviving galleys stood guard, hanging between the fleet and Foscari's advancing ships.

Foscari exulted at the sight. He'd been worried that Spiridon's army would stay on Rhodes and storm the city with or without naval support, but apparently the loss of their fleet and their three champions had convinced them to give up the campaign.

The allied fleet swooped close, lowered masts and sails, and under oars they charged the three enemy galleys. These manned their oars and fled, scattering through the transports.

Foscari let them go. The transports, with Spiridon's army, were by now his real target.

The Cypriot fleet had ships of every size, from pre-Change converted yachts and fishing boats to large, tubby cargo ships. All were crammed with well-armed soldiers—veterans, presumably, of Spiridon's victorious campaigns. The smaller boats would cause few problems, but the big merchant ships towered like castles above the Venetian galleys, and their bulwarks swarmed with soldiers ready to volley arrows, spears, and other missiles down on any galley that threatened to board them.

Barbarigo
approached within hailing distance of one ship, and Foscari's call for surrender was answered with jeers and catcalls. So the Venetian galley swept in under the merchant's counter, and a full tank of burning gasoline was hosed over the decks. The ship was burned to the waterline, and hundreds of soldiers died horribly.

After that convincing demonstration, there was no more resistance. Only a handful of small boats with the greatest head start escaped: the rest were herded together in one bunch, and told to sail for Rhodes Town. Foscari ordered all weapons and armor heaved overside. Foscari watched the steel rain as it splashed into the water alongside the ships, and regretted the waste of good material; but he was determined not to allow the prisoners any chance of regaining the initiative.

The captive ships were ordered to drop anchor off the commercial harbor. The larger ships were told to send down their yards, topmasts, and topgallants, to make it impossible for them to set any amount of sail. While the warships patrolled a short distance away, the prisoners would be taken ashore in small groups by boat, and introduced to captivity.

“There are thousands of them!” said the Afentiko, as he received Foscari in his office. “What am I to do with so many prisoners?”

“I'd execute the officers,” Foscari said. “They'll be the most loyal to Spiridon, and the ones who organized the massacre at Lindos. The rest should be sent to hard labor, repairing fortifications, sowing crops, digging new wells . . . Whatever is needed. Offer freedom to those who earn it.”

“It's slavery,” Kanellis said. “So many things have come back since the Change, but I never thought I'd be the one to bring back slavery.”

“We've seen worse,” Foscari shrugged. “And it's better than killing them all. If Spiridon wants them back, he can ransom them.”

And if there's trouble you may have to kill them all, anyway,
he thought.
Another Black Annunciation
. But that, fortunately, was not Foscari's problem.

Three days later, the Venetian squadron from Corfu arrived off the port, nine galleys. Foscari's dispatch boat had survived the gale, and passed through Corfu on its way to Venice. The commander at Corfu had decided to reinforce Rhodes on his own initiative, and bring one large merchant ship full of Epirote mercenaries.