Blood Red Sea

6

Smith unslung his Persian jezail. Since its soaking in the sea, he had spent hours cleaning and polishing it, and once in Nicosia he had stripped it completely, oiled every part and reassembled it as lovingly as a Geneva clockmaker.

Now it was time to put it to the test. While cleaning the barrel one last time, wadding it with guncotton and powder and ball and tamping it well, he said to Nicholas, ‘Boy, is it my ageing eyes or do I see a Habsburg banner out there? On the highest hill there, the hill of St Marina, I think.’

Nicholas had already seen that banner: the two-headed eagle of the Habsburgs before one of the largest tents on the plain, with clear ground all around. ‘Is that the tent of Lala Mustafa?’

‘I presume so. And that’s a captured banner, to taunt us. Well, let’s see.’

The air was clear, the wind was light. But the tent of the Pasha might have been half a mile off.

‘Waste of a ball, Brother,’ said Stanley.

Smith ignored him, crouched silently behind the battlements, the long smooth barrel of the musket resting on the stonework. He took his time, sighted, measured his breathing, tightened his finger on the trigger. Moments passed.

The tension was unbearable.

Then he said, ‘Maybe, instead. .’

And he swivelled the barrel just a couple of inches to the right, sighted swiftly once more, breathed out and fired.

It still must have been two or three hundred yards off, an astonishing shot. But a moment after the musket fired, a tall Janizary half out of a trench turned sharply, clutching his upper arm. Then he turned back and howled at the walls of Nicosia: cries, Stanley said, of considerable irritation.

‘Keep ’em on their toes,’ said Smith. ‘We’re not beaten yet.’

In the night, Nicholas and Hodge walked the half-ruined streets of Nicosia, hungry and weary yet unable to sleep. People begged at every corner, nobody was asleep. The night air still hot, wind rustling the palm trees, everything a dream.

‘These mighty Venetian walls that seem so solid,’ said Nicholas, waving the nearly empty flask of vile wine, ‘cities of men, kings and their thrones, everything. . It was all built to fall. All but the dream of God.’

There were old women in black, praying by candlelight in a small but beautiful church, a black-bearded priest intoning the ancient liturgy of Byzantium. The church of the Virgin of Chrysaliniotissa, its walls covered with icons, the air heady with incense. They lurched in half drunk, and the old women glared. They peered into the mystery of the inner sanctum behind the screen, the priest muttering, ‘Franks and barbarians,’ moving over to throw them out. But there was nothing in there but a table and a bottle of oil. God doesn’t wait in some inner room for you. The mystery is not to be seen with such pragmatic eyes.

They finished the wine sitting by a fountain, heads warm and cloudy, stars winking through the acacia tree overhead. So peaceful, in this city about to fall in slaughter to the Turks.

‘We might be in the Orient,’ said Hodge softly.

‘We are nearly,’ said Nicholas. ‘Much closer to Jerusalem than London. Not so far from Damascus, even Baghdad. Listen hard and you can hear the muezzin cry from Rhodes, from Beirut. Soon there’ll be mosques in Nicosia.’

‘You really think it?’

‘Of course. We are finished here, before we even started.’

‘I’m not going back on the galleys in Turkish chains.’

‘Nor me. God knows how.’

Maybe they would die soon. Nicholas drained the bottle.

Hodge shivered, not from cold. ‘The farther I get from England, the more I love her. But you like it here.’

‘We are exiles, old friend. I have not kept you from England. Prisons and galleys and slavery and damned war have kept us.’

‘Aye,’ said Hodge. ‘We must lay our heads on what pillows we find.’

‘But you never give up hope of England, eh, Hodge?’

‘Never.’

‘One day we will go back.’

Hodge regarded him. ‘You would rather wander and drift in and out of danger than come home to it all. The daily round.’

Nicholas said no more, but Hodge knew him well. He had come to love danger, and she would destroy him before long. But it was the daily round he feared.

They weaved down a dark street that had some promising lanterns on hooks over open doorways. There was a young girl on the step. She looked at them boldly and stroked her bare leg as they passed.

They went into a small chamber with an old woman eating pistachio nuts, the floor around her stool strewn with shells, and a plump girl who looked Greek or maybe Bulgarian. The girl on the step was young and fair skinned.

‘What coin have you?’ mumbled the old woman, her mouth full of nuts and no teeth.

‘We’ll all be dead in the morning,’ said Nicholas, as the fair-skinned girl took his hand and pulled him towards an inner room.

The old woman scowled and held out her hand. He gave her a ducat.

She peered down at it and then stared at him. ‘A Venetian ducat! Who do you think she is, Helen of Troy?’

Nicholas just shrugged and said again, ‘We’ll all be dead in the morning.’

Once in the inner chamber, drawing the curtains behind them, the girl said, ‘Will the city really fall to the Turks so soon?’

‘Aye. What will you do then?’

‘Be taken captive, no doubt.’

‘Does it not worry you?’

She shrugged off her dress and sat naked on his knee. ‘Whores are survivors. And I’ve lived through worse. Now stop talking and kiss me.’

They got back to their quarters in the early hours, stumbling over the prostrate forms of their comrades. Stanley stirred and looked at them as they collapsed on to their blankets.

‘Happy now?’ he said.

‘Not particularly,’ said Nicholas. ‘But I’ll sleep better. You?’

‘Perfectly well, thank you.’

After a while Nicholas said, ‘I don’t know how you do it. The celibacy.’

‘It’s because it’s so difficult that it’s worth doing. Like anything else. I like the melancholy of celibacy. The spartan melancholy of saying no. No night with a whore is worth the pride of that.’

‘You haven’t met my whore here,’ mumbled Nicholas, already asleep.

Stanley lay back and grinned, despite himself. Whoremonger Ingoldsby. He’d learn.

Nicholas awoke from a sweaty nightmare of falling towers, infants smashing to the ground. He lay panting, and then Stanley kicked him.

‘Up, up, tosspot and whoremonger. It’s a filthy conscience gives you bad dreams.’

‘Go to hell.’

‘Here. Some bread. The mould adds flavour.’

There was a mighty hubbub outside.

Smith came back to say that Governor Dandolo himself was riding out their way. ‘On the finest white charger left in the city uneaten, and a very heavy bodyguard too. I wonder why. Can he not be popular?’

They hurried out, buckling on swords, Nicholas and Hodge still swallowing down mouldy bread and stale water. They found Captain Paolo dal Guasto locked in argument with a stout, impassive fellow in a tall helmet.

‘The Jews?’ Dal Guasto was saying angrily. ‘Why the devil are we to round up the Jews?’

The fellow shrugged. ‘Order from the Governor’s palace. All Jews in the city to be driven to the Famagusta Gate.’

A crowd came surging round the far end of the street, some wailing.

‘There you are,’ said the fellow. ‘There’s your first batch.’

And behind them came a finely dressed gentleman on a white horse fringed with scarlet trappings, and a mounted bodyguard of eight men around him, all with long lances at the ready.

Giustiniani snapped. He hurried up the street, pushing his way through the crowd of Jewish men, women and children, clutching the few pitiful possessions they could carry, and stood four-square before a disdainful-looking Dandolo. Smith, Stanley and Mazzinghi followed close behind, and Nicholas and Hodge hovered near by. On adjacent steps, unnoticed by any, Paolo dal Guasto ordered four of his men to load up their crossbows.

‘Any moment now the Turkish bombardment is going to start up anew!’ roared Giustiniani, so loudly that Dandolo’s horse shied and backed up, colliding with the one behind. ‘Or maybe the Janizaries will just come marching in direct. And we are busy herding the Jews like sheep. What in hell is going on?’

Dandolo was white faced and furious. ‘I understood that I was Governor of this city, not you, sir knight. Now out of our way. Guards! Ready the sally port!’

Suddenly Dandolo and his eight bodyguards found themselves facing not one but four tough-looking Knights Hospitaller, hands on their swords, and those two tatterdemalion English volunteers lurking near by too. Among the Jews, some of the men were beginning to mutter and refuse to be driven any farther. Damn it all.

Dandolo tightened his reins and held still. Composed. Lordly.

‘In Caesar’s Gallic Wars,’ he declared, ‘we have read that at a certain dangerous siege, he drove the townspeople out between him and the besieging enemy.’

Giustiniani was lost for words. Dandolo was no Julius Caesar, and his account was garbled anyway. Did he mean the siege of Alesia?

Dandolo pressed on. ‘There are more than a thousand unchristened Jews still living in this city, eating our food, drinking good clean water. And so we have decided that they shall be driven out before our walls, as a form of protection. That will fox that brute Lala Mustafa!’

‘Sire, that is barbarous!’ cried Giustiniani. ‘And pointless besides. A man like Lala Mustafa will have no hesitation in mowing them down with grapeshot, and using the corpses for sandbags.’

‘Then upon his conscience be it. It is a necessary policy and we have made our decision. Open the sally port! Drive them forth!’

Guards drew back the final crossbars and the low entrance gate to the long dark tunnel of the sally port creaked open. Like all sally ports, just wide enough to admit a man at a time.

‘If you drive them out, we go with them,’ said Giustiniani.

Dandolo smiled. ‘Go with the Jews?’

‘Just so.’

‘Well,’ murmured the Governor. It was not a prospect that displeased him. All troublemakers together. . ‘Off you go, then.’

The knights were speechless, even hesitant. Their estimation of Dandolo, which they had thought could sink no lower, had just sunk lower.

But there was a blur on the steps leading up to the walls. It was Nicholas. He had run to retrieve the Standard of Malta.

‘What’s up?’ said a pikeman, looking puzzled.

‘We’re going,’ he gasped. ‘Dandolo’s throwing us out.’

Word flew like a hawk. Even as the first Jewish elders were being poked and prodded into the tunnel, Paolo dal Guasto appeared before Dandolo.

‘Sire, if the knights are driven out of the city too, I cannot be sure of the loyalty of my company of men.’

Dandolo’s expression set frosty again. ‘Do I understand you correctly, Captain? You are threatening mutiny?’

‘Not threatening, sire. Predicting.’

Dandolo’s mouth worked furiously, his lips writhed.

On the stone steps to the right, there were four of Dal Guasto’s men, uncouth common soldiers, and their crossbows were already loaded. Then one of them — Dandolo’s heart missed a beat — one of them actually raised his crossbow, slow and silent, and aimed it directly at him.

For several moments, Dandolo could not speak. Then he said quietly, ‘Close the gate. Let them be.’

The soldier slowly lowered his crossbow. The Jews shuffled backwards out of the tunnel, to the amusement of onlookers.

Dandolo pulled his horse around and trotted swiftly back to the palace.

Nicholas dropped the standard and grinned.

At that very moment, with cruel irony, a huge marble cannonball came in on a neighbouring bastion, an exact hit, shattering into a hail of hot shards as marble was meant to. Two soldiers huddled just below the parapet were hit, one screaming and writhing.

It was the Turks saying good morning.

And then all along the Turkish line, the cannons opened up. The ground trembled, the noise was deafening, enough to make a man shake at the knees, to sink down in a corner and cover his head, ears ringing. Two hundred black mouths belching black smoke and fire, two hundred balls of iron and stone and marble hurtling through the air to rain down with ferocious destructive power upon the nearly broken city. Women and children wailed. A few skin-and-bone mules tore free from their tethers.

‘The very rats in the sewers will be pissing themselves!’ roared Smith.

‘This is the main attack,’ said Stanley. ‘After this, the Janizaries will be coming in.’

‘God damn the Christian kings!’ cried Giustiniani. ‘Boils and plague on ’em! Where is Don John now, where is the fleet of the Holy League? Why is Cyprus abandoned like this?’

But there was no more time for words. They ran to the bastion where the two soldiers lay stricken, others gathering round.

In the street below there was already mass panic. Someone said the Turks were already through the Famagusta Gate, others denied it. Fighting broke out.

Stanley knelt by one of the wounded soldiers. ‘Can you walk, man?’ But it was foolish to ask. ‘Hodge, lad, take him behind the knees there.’

The other soldier pulled himself upright and leaned heavily on Nicholas, bleeding so heavily his own shirt was drenched. He glanced down. The fellow was wounded in the stomach, almost black blood leaking from his midriff.

‘Hold up, friend,’ he said. ‘These are Knights of St John. Famous medics.’

The soldier stared at him for a moment, unfocused, and then coughed a single, violent cough. A hot blob of blood struck Nicholas on the shoulder and then the man slumped. He was dead.

He laid him down.

‘The nearest hospital, for God’s sake!’ Stanley was shouting. Another soldier shrugged. Field hospitals had not even been set up.

‘The city is lost!’ someone cried from the street below. ‘The day is come, the heathen are upon us! Fly for your lives!’