The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege by William Napier Page B

Bloodisack, who barely spoke to them but to snarl. There were landsmen, apprentice mariners, and lowest of the low, pages: boys of no more than twelve or so, who emptied out the slop buckets, killed the rats, scrubbed the decks, and worked the bilge pump banded to the mainmast, hour by exhausting hour. They hardly dared speak, but looked at Nicholas and Hodge with fraternal pity.
    There was Vizard, the blasphemous bosun, who sang obscene songs when not shouting, and Pidhook the helmsman, who treated them with a pinch less contempt than the others. He showed them where he stood on the upper deck called the bridge and swung the whipstaff left and right, turning the great rudder hanging from the sternpost likewise. He showed them his half-hour sandglass, which told the time and reckoned the watches in and out, and his dry compass mounted in a gimbel, a cunning device which kept the compass needle flat to the horizon, no matter which way the ship tilted.
    Old crock though she was, the mariners seemed to have a sturdy confidence in the Swan of Avon .
    At the end of the first eight-hour watch around dawn, the mariners took their breakfast. One tossed a slab of hardtack to the boys. ‘Here. Test your pearly teeth on that, young sprat.’
    Nicholas couldn’t even break into it. They laughed. ‘Ye’ll have to soak it a while yet.’
    To their surprise, the master came forward and said a Paternoster and an Ave Maria before his men were allowed to eat.
    ‘Is this not a Protestant ship?’ said Stanley evenly.
    The master said in his gravel voice, and with a distant stare out to sea, ‘For the Bishop of Rome and the Church of Italy I care not. And this newfangled Church of England makes my head ache, since I don’t see how Christ could have founded such a church when he never came ashore on English soil.’
    ‘Ah,’ said Stanley, ‘the pragmatical English mind.’
    ‘And he lived and preached before England was even a kingdom, I heard tell, so how can he have appointed the Queen’s forefathers as head of such a church?’
    ‘A theologian ship’s master,’ said Stanley delightedly. ‘And preaching what sounds like Popery!’
    ‘Popes and Protestants,’ said the master in a flat, bored tone and a wave of his hand. ‘Such tangled arguments belong on land. We’re not on land, we’re at sea, and the law is different here. I decorate my ship and make my prayers as I see fit, and I will pray to God and his Holy Mother under any name I know, if he’ll send us clear weather and plain sailing. When a man’s fifty miles out in the Bay of Biscay, that’s his usual religion.’

10
Istanbul: Winter 1564 – Spring 1565
     
    All that winter Istanbul had been in a ferment, devoted to the coming war.
    From the forests of the Crimea came timber, from the high plains of Anatolia came hemp and flax. Out of the vast Imperial workshops came coils of rope and bales of sailcloth, while in the naval dockyards, they said a new war galley was being built every week. Saltpetre for gunpowder came in from Belgrade, sulphur from Lake Van, copper from the mines of Kastamonu, and church bells throughout the conquered Balkans were melted down, turning the Christian’s own iron and bronze against them.
    Day and night there was the ring of hammer on anvil, the steady tapping of shipwrights and the hot stink of burning pitch poured over the caulking ropes, tamped down into the seams of the wooden hulls to make them watertight. Oxen drew carts bringing vats of tallow straight from the slaughterhouses, steering them carefully down to the dry docks where they would be used to grease the galleys’ hulls, making them slip still faster over the waves of the White Sea.
    Day and night, too, the great forges of the Ottoman arsenals on the Bosphorus glowed red, while within, shovelling charcoal into hungry cast-iron mouths, super-heated by giant bellows, the faces of the slaves dripped with sweat. The bellows roared, oil burned, the winter sky was filled