15
I knocked vigorously until the door opened and I found myself face to face with Ralph Fitch. For once I hadn’t tracked him down to the palace library, but had gone straight up to his room, at the end of one of the corridors on the first floor.
He greeted me, a little surprised by this sudden visit, and ushered me in. We sat down at a little tea table and he asked me if I would like something to drink. When I refused, he understood that something was troubling me and started listening. I knew him as a keen-minded man, and I knew that I could talk to him with the same candor that I expected from him. “I need your expert knowledge about artillery.”
He smiled disarmingly, stroking his red moustache. “I am a merchant, Signor Cardoso. My interest in artillery is merely commercial.”
“Nonetheless, I think you can be useful to me,” I insisted. “In Takiyuddin’s laboratory you said that because of the recoil, heavy cannons can’t be used on ships. I’d like you to explain that idea to me in greater detail.”
Fitch filled a beaker of wine. He sipped it, then set the glass down on the table and then seemed to forget it was there. He said, “That’s easy. You see, normally on a war galley the cannons are on the stern and prow quarterdecks, and they fire when the enemy prepares to ram. Other guns can be placed on hanging decks along the broadsides, above the banks of oarsmen. But space is very tight, and obviously it’s only possible to put little pedreros and falconets on them, since the recoil of larger calibers would cause the gun to fall back on the lower deck, and the oarsmen would be crushed.”
I already had my next question lined up.
“So if someone found a way to reduce the recoil of cannons, larger calibers could also be put along the side?”
He raised an eyebrow, mulling over the hypothesis. “I suppose so. But that would require a great deal of very broad and solid hanging decks.” He seemed to meditate on his own words, then added, “No galley of that size exists.”
I leaned on the table.
“Let us imagine for a moment that it does exist. What kind of ship would it be?”
Fitch picked up his glass and sipped from it again. At last he replied, in the voice of someone explaining the obvious, “A massive, overladen ship, very difficult to maneuver.” He paused for a moment, then added, “Have you ever heard of Great Harry? She was a slow behemoth that rarely plowed the waves. I’m sure that vessels like that were never seen in this part of the Mediterranean. In any case, if I were to encounter a monster of that ilk, I would stay well away from it. It would be a kind of. .” He sought the right words. “Floating fortress.”
He must have read the puzzlement on my face, because he quickly asked me if I hadn’t perhaps changed my mind, and whether I didn’t feel the need to drink something.
This time I accepted his offer. I allowed the wine to sweeten my mouth as I tried to stay calm. Floating fortress. The same expression used by Sokollu. Except that now it was more than a colorful metaphor.
A whole wing of the Venice Arsenal had been dedicated to refurbishing the galleasses. A whole wing just to patch up the cargo ships that in wartime are used to transport food and ammunition, or to crowd arquebusiers into. Huge three-masters. Extremely heavy and immobile. Apparently harmless. But find a way of filling them with cannons, and you’ve turned an old kettle into a roasting jack.
16
Night had fallen by the time I reached Nasi’s bedroom, on the other side of the palace. He greeted me with a candelabra in his hand, and the worried expression of someone receiving a visit at an unexpected hour. He was dressed in a shirt and a pair of breeches in the European style. The only other light in the room was a candle on the desk, which illuminated a long goose quill and a sheet of paper. I hadn’t woken him, then. I glanced at the big four-poster bed on the other side of the room, and it seemed to be still made up.
“I’ve got to talk to you.”
He looked exhausted, his face weary, as if he hadn’t slept for days. He beckoned me to follow him to the window and set the candelabra down on the windowsill.
“I’m listening.”
Words seem very slow when thoughts are clambering over each other.
“This war is a big trick. We thought Sokollu was plotting to thwart it, we rejoiced when we managed to unmask him, and yet it was he who ensnared us in his plan.”
I waited in vain for a reaction. “Sokollu knew he couldn’t stop the war,” I went on. “The other viziers wanted redemption for the humiliating defeat of Malta, Selim wanted a military triumph to demonstrate that he was a match for his father. And you wanted a Jewish kingdom. Sokollu understood that the war would be an opportunity to defeat all his adversaries with a single blow. He was the one who said so. The taking of Cyprus has already proven to be half a disaster. If the Ottoman fleet were defeated, the disaster would be complete. Selim’s prudence would be praised to the skies, and we would be ruined.”
“How could he have known. .”
“That Famagusta would resist for so long? He didn’t, but he fully expected that it would. He knows Venetian pride at least as well as I do. And I know he’s waiting for Muezzinzade Ali to fall into the trap that the Holy League has set for him.”
He leaned against the window, confused. “What are you talking about?”
I collected my thoughts, or tried to keep them from running away.
“When I knew that the Venetians had added galleasses to the Christian fleet, I thought it was a desperate move to make up for their lack of ships. Galleasses are very big, slow galleys, normally used for the transportation of supplies and troops. Then I remembered that the dry docks at the Venice arsenal had been enlarged specifically to accommodate those great beasts. The Venetians don’t spend their money on nothing.” I took a breath before continuing. “A little way off, at the Arsenal foundries, the engineer Varadian works, and for years he has been studying ways to reduce the recoil of cannons. Not siege artillery, but medium-caliber cannons. You understand? These are the cannons that can’t be put on ships. That’s why he left Constantinople for Venice. Venice is funding his experiments, and meanwhile he’s rearming the galleasses. There must be a connection between the two.”
“In what way?” asked Nasi, stroking his beard.
“I think Varadian’s cannons are on those ships, and that the Venetians have developed a big new fighting galley. A kind of floating castle, indestructible and with a level of firepower never seen before.”
I read a sudden attentiveness on Nasi’s face. “You were protecting the secrets of La Serenissima,” he objected. “Don’t you think you would have been informed of such a project?”
“This is a secret that could change the direction of a war. Not the kind of thing that Counselor Nordio would have shared with his underlings.”
He moved toward the desk and sat down, staring at the floor. “That’s only a conjecture on your part.”
“But if I’m right, the risks are huge,” I insisted. “I need a fast ship, Yossef. I need to join the Ottoman fleet and warn them of the danger.”
“If you’re right, it’ll be too late when you get there,” he said.
“But don’t you understand? If I can put Muezzinzade Ali on his guard, we can still avert the worst. An Ottoman victory would blow Sokollu’s plans sky-high. Otherwise it’ll be the end!”
I had been shouting. Along the loggia, I heard a door opening and immediately closing again. I must have woken one of the servants.